
“Black, Hispanic kids are learning less at charters that dropped ‘no excuses'” rules against misbehavior in the name of “anti-racism,” notes education writer Joanne Jacobs. Charter schools that relaxed discipline rules in the name of “anti-racism” saw student achievement fall sharply, reports Vince Bielski of Real Clear Investigations.
KIPP, the biggest charter network in the country with 275 schools, “buckled under the pressure from progressive staffers, alums, and advocates to drop their No Excuses practices,” reports Bielski. In 2020, co-founder David Levin issued apologized in a public letter for discipline practices that supposedly “perpetuated white supremacy and anti-Blackness.” KIPP dropped its longtime slogan — “Work Hard, Be Nice” — because critics said it bolstered “a myth that hard work leads to success even in the face of racism.”
The consequences were bad, notes Jacobs. “KIPP DC had been an ‘academic powerhouse,’ outperforming district-run schools in math and English.” But “last year, KIPP DC trailed far behind the district, with only 13% proficiency in math and 18% in English.”
Achievement First, a network of 41 schools in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, had previously “outperformed the public schools in their three states by double-digit margins” back in 2019, writes Bielski. “But then the network adopted an anti-racist agenda, and decided test scores would be a lower priority than social and emotional learning. Scores plunged,” notes Jacobs:
Network leaders replaced the discipline system with “restorative justice” practices, a former senior leader said. “Students can basically do whatever they want, and nothing really happens to them,” said the source, who resigned because he opposed the changes. “The less experienced teachers have seen their classrooms descend into chaos.”
As Bielski discovered, “Achievement First schools are no longer envied for their performance, with test scores in Connecticut and Rhode Island plunging below the state public school averages. In Rhode Island, for instance, the charters in 2019 topped the state in English and math proficiency by 17 and 23 percentage points, respectively. In 2023, under an anti-racism program, the charters lagged behind by three and four percentage points”
California’s progressive legislature recently banned suspensions for “willful defiance”, in all public schools, including charter schools.
But it turns out that curbing suspensions of willfully defiant students harms innocent African-Americans by reducing their ability to learn and be safe. After all, much violence is black-on-black, and when a black student constantly disrupts class, that harms black classmates’ ability to learn. After suspensions were curbed in New York City, the Manhattan Institute’s Max Eden found that “schools where more than 90% of students were minorities experienced the worst” effects on school climate and safety. Indeed, the harm from curbing suspensions had “a disparate impact by race and socioeconomic status.” Eden noted in the New York Post that another “study by a University of Georgia professor found that efforts to decrease the racial-suspension gap actually increase the racial achievement gap.” Joshua Kinsler found that “in public schools with discipline problems, it hurts those innocent African American children academically to keep disruptive students in the classroom,” and “cutting out-of-school suspensions in those schools widens the black-white academic achievement gap.”
Many “anti-racist” policies designed to shrink the role of school discipline or law enforcement end up backfiring against blacks — like policies that make it harder to remove dangerous drivers from the roads. Such policies increase deaths among blacks.
After George Floyd’s death, some states passed laws limiting police stops of motorists for things like odor of alcohol or odor of marijuana or broken tail-lights, and a reduction in police manpower further reduced police stops. As a result, the rate of alcohol-related traffic deaths rose by one-third, even as arrests for drunk driving fell by 20%. Traffic deaths rose in the U.S. even as they fell in most of the world. In the U.S., the motor vehicle fatality rate went up 7.1% in 2020, and another 10.5% in 2021. There were 3,230 fatalities in 2021, compared to only 2,967 fatalities in 2010. Road deaths have increased both as an absolute number and as a fraction of America’s population since 2019, and — to a lesser extent — since 2010. Black road deaths increased most, with “motor vehicle fatalities among blacks” jumping “36 percent in June–December 2020 versus the same period in 2019, compared with a 9 percent increase among the rest of the population.” In the first full month that followed George Floyd’s death (June 2020), 743 black people were killed in traffic fatalities, up from 478 in June 2019, a year earlier.
Police manpower was shrinking even before 2020, notes Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, even though a “robust body of research has thoroughly illustrated that more police means less crime….There is also reason to believe that — in part because of the anti-police sentiments that characterized [2020’s] protests — the cops we have left became less proactive.”