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March 18, 2024

Remember the United Negro College Fund ads? 

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“A mind is a terrible thing to  waste”? 

These ads presumed our kids were being educated well enough to go to college; that graduates were not merely literate, but better than literate. Curious. Excited about learning. Educated broadly enough to have identified a line of work they wanted to pursue, such as chemistry or medicine or business or the arts or any one of a thousand paths any high school graduate might choose.

The latest news about educational attainment in two of Barack Obama’s hometowns, Washington D.C. and Chicago, is alarming.

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From The Federalist:

…Large urban school districts are failing in ways that should be a national emergency. Washington, D.C., high schools have a 60 percent chronic absenteeism and a 47 percent truancy rate. (You read that correctly.) In 53 Illinois schools, not one student can do math at grade level, and there are reportedly 30 where no one can read at grade level. If Democrats cared about kids, they would be moving heaven and earth right now to fix these schools. They don’t care about educating kids, but Democrats and their union funders will fight a national political battle to make sure your kids can access pornography in schools.

“Not one.” NO ONE??? This, in an environment where it is safe to assume everything imaginable was done to lower the “pass” threshold, cook the books, skew the results, because that’s what unchecked, unchallenged, well-funded institutions with monolithic power do, and that’s what these teachers’s unions have in these two cities.

The United Negro College Fund has been in running these ads for over forty years but the United Negro College Fund might need a brother organization by now: the United Negro K-12 Literacy Fund. Hmmm… Brother… “Brother”? You know who has, quite literally, a “brother” organization? Barack Obama! My Brother’s Keeper, a non-profit which has done… what exactly? We’ll get back to that, but back to the breakdown in urban education.

It wasn’t always like this. The always wonderful Thomas Sowell, who regularly reminds us that the black family survived Democrat-run slavery but could not survive Democrats’ Great Society, tells us:

Back in 1899, in Washington, D. C., there were four academic public high schools– one black and three white.  In standardized tests given that year, students in the black high school averaged higher test scores than students in two of the three white high schools.