RALEIGH – As elected officials, activists, and ordinary citizens across North Carolina grapple with such difficult issues as forced busing and the persistent racial-performance gap in our public schools, there will always be the potential for reasoned disagreement to devolve into ugly invective and name-calling.
That’s already happened in Wake County. Here’s hoping the same thing won’t happen this week in New Hanover County, where the school board is considering changes to its student-assignment policies. The Wilmington Star-News unfortunately has helped to fan a minor spat into a full-fledged provocation.
On Monday night, school board member Don Hayes forwarded this syndicated column by Walter Williams to his fellow board members. Apparently, a couple of the board members took offense either at the argument Williams made about the causes of the performance gap, the language Williams used to make his argument, or both.
Anyone who has served on a board or study commission on which there are significant differences of opinion will have seen all this before. If you understand and accept the rules of the game, it’s no harm, no foul. Forwarding a relevant document to your fellow board members does not necessarily mean you endorse everything in it, or the way the information is conveyed. It simply means that you think the document may be useful in understanding the issue before the panel.
In Hayes’ case, he may well agree with the general sentiment expressed in Williams’ column – that persistent racial performance gaps have more to do with cultural and educational practices than with a lack of tax dollars – without subscribing to any of the columnist’s exact words.
In any event, it’s the kind of conversation that thoughtful people ought be able to sustain without jumping to conclusions or misrepresenting what’s being said.
Didn’t happen. Instead, up popped the familiar charge of racism, the phony version that sounds an awful lot like a little boy crying “wolf.”
If you read Williams regularly, you know that he is very concerned about the fate of black children in the public schools. I know the George Mason University professor just a little, and I know enough about him to say without fear of contradiction that if any of the New Hanover politicians actually met him and heard him speak passionately about the need for fundamental, market-based school reform, just about the last thing they’d do is accuse him of racism.
As to the column in question, Williams said little about the effects of educational malpractice and parental authority on black student achievement that haven’t been said numerous times by reformers and educators of all colors who are serious about shrinking the performance gap.
The passage that appears to have rankled some readers the most was this one: “Black people have accepted hare-brained ideas that have made large percentages of black youngsters virtually useless in an increasingly technological economy.” But if you read the previous paragraph, in which Williams discusses the poor performance of school districts with black leaders in communities with black leaders, you can see the claim in context:
Standard psychobabble asserts a positive relationship between the race of teachers and administrators and student performance. That’s nonsense. Black academic performance is the worst in the very cities where large percentages of teachers and administrators are black, and often the school superintendent is black, the mayor is black, most of the city council is black and very often the chief of police is black.
He wasn’t arguing, then, that all black people have “accepted hare-brained ideas,” but that black educators are just as likely as others to have done so. I agree that Williams could have phrased the argument better, but that doesn’t mean his argument should be willfully misrepresented.
Similarly, when he writes that, “Many black students are alien and hostile to the education process,” that’s simply a statement of fact that is evident in the data on performance, discipline, and graduation rates. That doesn’t mean Williams believes these students can’t be helped. He thinks the main way to help them is to change their perceptions and behavior, not to assume that more money or smaller class sizes will make much of a difference.
By all means, argue with Walter Williams or other people with whom you may disagree. But do so knowingly.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation