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Berkeley Solves Racial Achievement Gap!

The Berkeley High School Governance Council is considering, with ?virtually unanimous? agreement, an ingenious (or perhaps ungenius) proposal to close its ?dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.? (HatTip to a reader from Berkeley.)

The solution is both obvious and simple: ?eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.?

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

Once the principle underlying this proposal is accepted, the possibilities become virtually endless. True, as in any war there will be collateral damage ? in this case, the minority students who will be casualties along with the whites. For example, Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School's science department, told the Governance Council that ?there are twelve African-American males in her AP classes and that her four environmental science classes are 17.5 percent African American and 13.9 percent Latino.?

Well, war is hell, and one can easily understand why the Berkeley High School Governance Council would conclude that depriving a few minority students of science labs and advanced placement courses is a small price to pay for the advantage of depriving a larger number of whites and Asians (who presumably are not a minority) of those classes.

But wait. Why stop with high school science? The last times I looked (here and here), blacks made up only 4% of the entering class at that other large school in Berkeley, the University of California. If it were closed, think how many resources the state could ?free up ... to help struggling students? at community colleges, city colleges, and the less white (or Asian) state colleges and universities.

Full post as published by Discriminations on December 26, 2009 (boomark / email).