Juxtaposition

It is now leftist orthodoxy that any disparities you can measure between groups are evidence of racism and white supremacy, and that “equity” requires equal outcomes, not equal rights. One reason today’s race-mongers say it is no longer legitimate to treat people as individuals can be grasped by comparing these two news stories from earlier this week involving the educational outcomes of two black teen boys, one in Baltimore, and one in Atlanta.

Let’s start with Baltimore:

City student passes 3 classes in four years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA

A shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where a student who passed three classes in four years, ranks near the top half of his class with a 0.13 grade point average.

Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June. But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over. He’s been moved back to ninth grade.

“He’s stressed and I am too. I told him I’m probably going to start crying. I don’t know what to do for him,” France told Project Baltimore. “Why would he do three more years in school? He didn’t fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that’s the problem here. He didn’t deserve that. He’s a good kid. Where’s the mentors? Where is the help for him? I hate that this is happening to my child,” said an emotional France.

She thought her oldest son was doing well because even though he failed most of his classes, he was being promoted. His transcripts show he failed Spanish I and Algebra I but was promoted to Spanish II and Algebra II. He also failed English II but was passed on to English III. . .

As we dig deeper into her son’s records, we can see in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days. But in those three years, only one teacher requested a parent conference, which France says never happened. No one from the school told France her son was failing and not going to class.

Read through the rest of the full story at the headline link above to take the gobbledegook from the school bureaucrats to explain away their manifest failure, and keep in mind that Baltimore ranks in the top ten school districts in the nation by the level of spending per student—about $16,000.

Needless to say, if we had genuine school choice, Tiffany France would have options for her son. But the corrupt compulsory education monopoly protected by Democrats won’t budge. Instead we’ll be told that Tiffany France’s son (who is never named in the story) is the victim of racism, and hand over more money to the school system now.

Let’s swing to Atlanta:

12-year-old genius on soaring through college: “I just grasp information quickly”

Whip-smart kids apply every year to Georgia Tech. But no one like Caleb Anderson. He’s 12 years old. [See Caleb below.]

“I’m not really smart,” he told correspondent Mark Strassmann. “I just grasp information quickly. So, if I learn quicker, then I get ahead faster.” This elite engineering school fell over itself recruiting him. Caleb saw the labs, and met the school’s president, Ángel Cabrera.

Strassmann asked Caleb’s parents, Claire and Kobi Anderson, “What’s it like to be touring a college when your kid is 12?”

“I don’t think anything Caleb has done has been normal for us,” said Claire.

Caleb knew sign language by nine months. At age one, he was reading. At age two, he knew how to do fractions. . .

His mother Claire added that their hopes for Caleb go far beyond grades, “to make sure that when he is an adult, he’ll make a great husband, a great father, a great friend one day.”

Caleb Anderson

Some observations: Quite obviously Caleb is a very gifted child, with a bright future ahead of him. Note also that he has two parents involved in his life, who it appears understand the importance of transmitting what we used to call “virtue.” The story doesn’t say whether he attended a private school, but with his kind of innate intelligence and caring parents, he would probably thrive at an average public school. There is a mountain of social science data, all ignored or attacked by the race-grievance industry, that converge on the conclusion that having an intact family with both a father and mother in the household has significant results in the outcomes of all children, regardless of race.

Finally, for more than 25 years Charles Murray has been attacked by everyone who doesn’t actually read his books for pointing out that the differences within groups on things like standardized tests are more important than differences between groups. We see this clearly here in the examples of Tiffany France’s son and Caleb Anderson. And we see also why it has become necessary for the race-grievance industry to suppress the traditional principle of treating people as individuals—and holding government accountable for its catastrophic failures like urban public schools.

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