Is “Antiracism” Worsening the K–12 Achievement Gap?
On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first black child ever to enroll in a racially segregated all-white elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana. Federal marshals flanked the first-grader, protecting her from the crowd of segregationist adults who shrieked slurs from the sidewalk as she entered the building. Inside the school, hostility took the form of silence and shunning. Only one teacher, a Boston transplant, was willing to teach Ruby. White parents pulled their children from the school, leaving the small girl to sit alone in her classroom. Somehow, this tiny child found strength enough to endure that first awful year and then another. And another.
What a burden to lay on a little girl’s shoulders. Still, she proved strong enough to carry it. And the country is unequivocally better for it. The schools of the American South desegregated, reluctantly but inevitably, because a six-year-old broke through a wall of belligerent adults. The image of that single moment remains a lasting symbol of immense courage and dignity in the face of irrational hate—a watershed moment for righting a historic wrong, repudiating the injustice of racial segregation, and opening the promise of the American educational system to all.
More than sixty years later, how is it that we’ve returned to a point where segregation by race in education is presented as a value to be embraced? How have we reached a point in which U.S. school districts, such as ones in Minneapolis, Evanston, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland, offer racially segregated elective classes? How have we gotten to a point where we speak about “white” standards and “black” standards in the context of public education? The answer, of course, is that this is simply mainstream “antiracist” thought being put into practice. As a November 2023 article in the Wall Street Journal titled “To Shrink Learning Gap, This District Offers Classes Separated by Race” explains,
“A lot of times within our education system, Black students are expected to conform to a white standard,” said Dena Luna, who leads Black student-achievement initiatives in Minneapolis Public Schools. The district offers middle- and high-school students electives focused on African-American history and social-emotional support, taught by teachers of color. Created in 2015 for Black boys, the format has expanded to Black girls and will soon expand to Latino students.
What the heck is a “white” standard, and what would a “black” standard be? Aren’t all students, whatever their backgrounds, going to need to meet the same basic standards to succeed in the same society, where they will work with and for people of both sexes and every color? And why are we telling black children that they are so fragile, so incapable, that they can only succeed if whites—both students and teachers—are excluded from their classrooms?
This enfeebling dogma is the reverse Ruby Bridges program.
What’s especially bizarre and troubling is that the Wall Street Journal, not known as a progressive media source, never pushed back on the assumption that black kids do less well, on average, because of systemic racism that’s so pervasive, it crushes their spirit whenever a white person is present in the room. Here’s another snippet from the piece:
Equity guides many of the district’s decisions, embodied in a stated board goal: “Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, [Evanston Township High School] will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.”
I agree that black kids can be hamstrung by racism today, but not always or even necessarily the type of racism that “antiracist” educators seem to imagine. Whereas racism might have once kept their grandparents and great-grandparents from achieving what they might have if their abilities had been recognized and nurtured in school, that is not the reality of racism today. Yes, black students, on average, still lag behind their white and Asian peers (though the achievement gap has been closing), and they are disciplined in schools at higher rates, but it’s not apparent that past or present injustices are what is holding back this generation. After all, a great number of immigrant families of color have also experienced racial discrimination, yet poor first-generation American kids of immigrants of color do better in school and in their eventual careers than kids of poor U.S.-born white parents. As a Time article from June 2022 titled “Why the Children of Immigrants Are the Ones Getting Ahead in America” notes, “Children of immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic today are just as likely to move up from their parents’ circumstances as were children of poor Swedes and Finns a hundred years ago.”
What could be keeping black American kids from achieving their potential in schools today is, at least in part, a type of racism that’s sold with the label “antiracism.” This so-called antiracism tells them that because of what happened to their ancestors in the past, their own futures are inescapably bleak. Further, the constant drumbeat about how the hidden biases of others are all around, waiting to trip them up, tells them they will never be treated fairly. The whole game is rigged against them. Never mind that countless institutions have focused on equity and inclusion to the point where they bend their rules to give preferences to those who share the same background as these kids. These kids all too often get the message that it’s pointless to try. Given the bigotry of low expectations inherent to this message, those who still might want to excel will have the misfortune of hearing that they will need special rules made for them because they can’t otherwise compete.
Consider this excerpt from a so-called antiracist children’s book that was presented to children from pre-kindergarten through third grade at a school assembly in Washington, D.C.: “. . . if a black person says something mean to a white person, he has no power over him. It’s as if white people walk around with an invisible force field because they hold all the power in America” [emphasis in the original]. On another page, the book tells kids that if they’re black, it’s like running a race with a 100-pound weight chained to their ankles. They’re bound to lose.
Imagine a five-year-old being told that his destiny is to always lose, no matter how hard he tries, and to be forever oppressed. Imagine how such a message would have affected you if you had been told that as a child. Language like this tells kids to internalize racism against themselves as well as feel it against others. Tell anyone, from the time they’re five years old onward that failure is inevitable, and they are likely to grow into the incarnation of that indoctrination.
And this is exactly what well-meaning progressive educators are telling young black kids when they teach that being black is like running a race with a giant weight chained to their ankles. Sadly, it is not just educators communicating this message. Even President Joe Biden, in a recent address to graduates of Morehouse, the historically black men’s college in Atlanta, conveyed this exact same damaging message: “What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?” Unlike young adults who have their own life experiences to draw on, however, young kids will inevitably feel that weight as if it were real—even when it’s fully imaginary. Such a lesson also risks creating the belief among impressionable classmates that black kids are somehow not their equals.
Following the reading of that purported “antiracist” book to kids aged four to eight, one anonymous parent posted a note on a message board called DC Urban Moms and Dads, asking, “Anyone else’s Kindergarten kid freaked out by an anti-racism assembly today? My kid needed to sleep with a light on and the door open tonight. Anyone know what specifically was talked about? My kid couldn’t relay much except that she was scared.” Notably, the parent doesn’t identify the race of their child, but really, does it matter?
The classroom experience for all will be for the worse either way.
I’d like to zero in on one “expert” who was quoted in the above-mentioned Wall Street Journal article: Glenn Singleton, who is identified as the “racial-equity consultant who has worked with Evanston’s high school for more than a decade.” The authors of the article didn’t appear to have any curiosity about why, after more than a decade, Singleton’s methods haven’t seemed to narrow the racial achievement gap. Having previously looked into Singleton’s methods and success rate, I’d be rather surprised if his methods hadn’t widened Evanston’s racial achievement gap.
Singleton first came to my attention when parents filed a lawsuit in Albemarle County, Virginia, against the school district, Superintendent Matt Haas, and Assistant Superintendent Bernard Hairston for introducing an “antiracist” curriculum based on Singleton’s Courageous Conversation About Race training program, which is marketed to schools, companies, and institutions “as the essential strategy for systems and organizations to address racial disparities through safe, authentic and effective cross-racial dialogue.” In the case of schools, it’s used to train administrators and administrators in antiracist beliefs and practices based on critical race theory (CRT); in turn, administrators integrate these ideas into their policies and programs, and teachers introduce them in the classroom. There are a number of professional equity development providers operating throughout the United States, but Singleton is by far the most successful. His Courageous Conversation program, offered through his Pacific Education Group, is used by about half of the country’s largest school districts, according to a USA Today survey.
The Albemarle County complaint was filed by a diverse group of parents who objected to their kids’ curriculum being infused with “antiracist” teachings that “violated students’ civil rights by treating them differently based on race.” (A separate suit was filed against the Albemarle County School Board by Emily Mais, a former assistance principal, who resigned because, as her complaint alleges, the district’s antiracism policy and training created a '“racially hostile and divisive environment.”) One of those parents, Melissa Riley, a single mom, has a Native American and white background. Her son, identified as “LR,” has a black father, making him a mix of three races. Melissa had always been proud of their diverse heritage and raised LR to be proud, too. But his school in the Albemarle County school district had different views. They were going to give the kids “antiracist” lessons based in large part on Singleton’s training. That didn’t sound bad in theory, until Melissa reviewed the curriculum. The message throughout was that whites were privileged oppressors and “dominant”; blacks were the perennially oppressed and “subordinate.”
Melissa Riley was appalled. LR was one of only a few students of color in his eighth-grade class. She didn’t want him singled out as different. That would not only make her son uncomfortable; it would also plant an ideology in his mind that she sees as false. Her son is neither part of a subordinate culture nor is his racial heritage negative. How could the school district imagine that racial stereotyping could be good for any child? Her child had never experienced racial discrimination before and now he was going to be taught that he should view himself and everyone around him through the lens of race.
That wasn’t how his family had raised him.
Melissa brought her concerns about these racist lessons to his teacher. The “solution” the school offered was even worse. They suggested that they sequester LR and other students of color in a “safe space” while the white students received their “antiracism” lessons. Talk about making him feel separate and different! Now, they planned to actually segregate him from his classmates?
Everyone she turned to in the school gave her the same answers: teaching kids about racism was necessary. Of course that was true. But this wasn’t teaching them about racism. It was teaching them to be racist. How could they not see that?
Her fears were soon realized as her son absorbed the lessons he was learning in school. Now, when anything negative happened, he immediately assumed, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” He’d never said anything like that before.
In her declaration to the court, Melissa said that she worries that the values she’s tried to instill in LR, to treat all people as equals, have been damaged. She also said that she worries LR might even distance himself from white members of his family—including her, his own mother. Worst of all, from a mom’s perspective, she said she fears he might internalize the message that he can’t achieve what he wants in life because of his “subordinate” status.
Four other families expressed similar concerns in their declarations to the court. These Albemarle County parents knew, despite what Ibram X. Kendi and other self-styled “antiracists” have claimed, that the solution to past racial discrimination is not and cannot be future discrimination. Perpetuating racism but changing its target solves nothing.
Articulate and impassioned, numerous other parents spoke up at school board meetings, attempting to help the school board and administrators see that their good intentions were acting as pavers on the proverbial road to hell:
You may not realize, but CRT is a branch of post-modernism that rejects objectivity and liberalism—small “l” liberalism—defined by rational thinking, empirical inquiry and individual rights and freedoms. . . . I ask you to read more broadly, seek different viewpoints, and recommit to our classical liberal values. Remove critical theory from our schools. (Marsh P.)
I believe [Albemarle’s plan] will produce the exact opposite of what they purport to combat, with the added outcome of incubating a culture rooted in grievance, discord, and victimhood. (Nikki L.)
My husband and I moved to Albemarle County for one primary reason, highly rated public schools. . . . The [Courageous Conversations About Race] program being instituted at Henley Middle School certainly gives us second thoughts about whether or not we made the right decision. I think that most of us support separation of church and state. Our tax dollar should not be funding the promotion of one religion over another, or any religion at all. (Christy G.)
From grade school through college, I attended classes with students of different backgrounds, different skin colors, different ethnicities. We recognized each other as friends, as classmates. . . . We saw each other as Americans of equal worth. . . . This critical race program that is being implemented in Albemarle County schools would have our children look at themselves and each other through the prism of race, not equality. (Donnie L.)
Their pleas were ignored—actually, worse than ignored. After Hairston, the district’s assistant superintendent, was informed of the parents’ concerns, he reportedly told Albemarle school staff that “his ancestors were slaves owned by a wealthy Virginia family” and that “he received the parents’ comments as if they were slave owners who had raped his mother and sister, beaten him, and were now telling him not to talk about it.” According to the lawsuit brought by Mais, he wasn’t interested in anything they had to say. For him, the implementation of the district’s antiracist policy, including the Courageous Conversation training, was “nonnegotiable.”
You might be thinking that, despite the misgivings of certain parents, “antiracism” programs could be the way to go if we want to close the racial achievement gap in K–12 schools.
But could there be any explanation for the racial achievement gap in Albemarle County schools and other highly progressive districts throughout the country other than the racism of the people who worked there, and the white students who studied there? What’s the evidence that kids would do better if only their educators and fellow students weren’t unconsciously directing racism toward them?
There is none.
But there’s ample evidence that certain teaching methods, such as the “whole word” method that Albemarle County schools had been using to teach reading, have been abysmal failures.
Substantial research shows that when children are taught to read with the phonics method, they’re more successful. Phonics trains children to sound out words by learning what sounds each letter makes. When these letter sounds are strung together, the sound of the word becomes apparent. Phonics was the dominant method of teaching reading for more than a century until it was abandoned when educators began following the whole word method—having children to memorize each word individually without giving them any clues as to why words were spelled as they were.
Some schools returned to phonics after reading scores plummeted in the mid-twentieth century, but most others clung to the deeply flawed whole word method. That might not have impeded children whose homes are filled with books, and whose parents and others had time to read to them. But that’s not the reality in many homes, especially those where parents are just scraping by.
Researchers also have found that there is a “word” gap between children from lower- and higher-income homes. Those from poorer households might hear millions fewer words by the time they’re four years old than those from higher-income households. If a child hears fewer words, will a child be able to relate as quickly and easily to the “whole word” method that’s typically used?
Parents who have the time and budget to intercede when their children have problems could buy them books such as Hooked on Phonics or hire tutors. For example, a colleague of mine believed her son had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) because, by the third grade, he still couldn’t read. And he was miserable in school, as a result. Worried that he’d never catch up, she and her husband took the boy to a psychologist, who put him through reams of tests. Afterward, though the psychologist said it was possible the boy had ADHD, the mental health professional didn’t think the boy’s reading problem was related. His school taught reading via the whole word method, and it made no sense to him. He needed a tutor. His parents hired a retired teacher who took this essentially illiterate little boy and, using the phonics method, turned him into an avid reader during twice-weekly tutoring sessions.
But what about parents who can’t afford tutors or who never discover that the problem isn’t with the child but with the teaching method?
Those children who don’t get that extra help, but need it, might find themselves still struggling in fourth, fifth, sixth grade and beyond. And when a child can’t read at grade level, he also can’t work out math problems that are presented in text. He falls behind in anything that requires reading.
“Antiracist” advocates, including those who chose the curriculum in Albemarle County, apparently never considered this might be one place to look for a solution to the racial achievement gap—and instead brought in “experts” trained to see only one disease: racism. Racism could be the only possible cause. No other variable was seriously considered, not even economic class, even though it’s well established that children from economically disadvantaged families of all ethnicities lag behind those from wealthier ones.
Instead, by labeling some adults and children oppressors and others as members of a subordinate culture, they degraded and harmed everyone. Like medieval doctors who attributed every illness to “bad vapors,” “antiracist” consultants like Glenn Singleton only ever offer one diagnosis and confidently prescribe cures that have no chance of success—but every chance of making the outcome worse.
In the second edition of Singleton’s book, Courageous Conversations on Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools, he writes that
the racial achievement gap exists and persists because fundamentally schools are not designed to educate students of color and indigenous students, and educators continue to lack the will, skill, knowledge, and capacity to affirm racial diversity. Consequently, educators need to begin a deep and thorough examination of their beliefs and practices in order to “re-create” schools so that they become places where all students do succeed.
But Asian-American kids are also often subjected to racism. How is it that they perform in school better than blacks, whites, or Latinos? If you accept that racism must be the reason for any achievement gap, it can only mean that teachers belong to a special breed of racists, those who are bigoted toward all non-whites except Asians.
Singleton doesn’t write very much about the before and after evidence for his training. The one success story he points to is in the Chapel Hill, North Carolina school district, which adopted his Courageous Conversation training after they determined that black students weren’t scoring as well as whites. According to Singleton, due to the district’s embarking on his “rigorous equity program,” the “racial achievement gaps among all groups [in Chapel Hill] are closing rapidly.”
But what does that specifically mean? Usually, when someone points to a success, that person will give you statistics, or some other way to judge what they’ve achieved. As far as I can tell, Singleton hasn’t shared this information publicly.
So, I contacted Singleton’s company Pacific Education to ask for some evidence of this or any success in closing the gap. I never received an answer. That meant I had to look for other ways to determine whether, thanks to his “rigorous” Courageous Conversation training, he’d helped Chapel Hill make great progress toward eliminating its racial achievement gap.
Here’s what I found: For the 2015–16 school year, black students in the Chapel Hill–Carrboro City School district were, on average, more than four grades behind white students. According to a separate report, in 2018, the racial achievement gap in highly progressive Chapel Hill–Carrboro was the second worst in the country. Evanston, Illinois, another of Singleton’s long-time clients according to the Wall Street Journal article, had the fourth worst racial achievement gap in the country according to that same 2018 report.
How on earth is Singleton still America’s top racial-equity consultant for K–12 schools?
I’m reminded of a passage in John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism about the sorts of things you’re not supposed to notice when you embrace woke ideology:
You are to turn a blind eye to the fact that social history is complex, and instead pretend that those who tell you that all racial discrepancies are a result of racism are evidencing brilliance.
You are to turn a blind eye to innocent children taught to think in these ways practically before they can hold a pencil.
Singleton is far from the only “expert” who assumes that ongoing hidden racism is the sole culprit, ever lurking in the background while putting forth an innocent face. If that’s true, researchers should be able to find some evidence of it. And they have indeed gone looking—often in creative ways. For example, in a 2023 paper published in Educational Researcher, academics analyzed the disciplinary notes that K–12 teachers wrote on students’ records. The paper’s abstract claims that the teachers’ comments demonstrated hidden animosity toward black kids.
Through natural language processing techniques, we examined over 3.5 million office discipline records from national samples of more than 4,000 schools for whether teachers’ linguistic patterns differed when describing incidents depending on the race/ethnicity and gender of the students. Results of such analyses consistently showed that teachers wrote longer descriptions and included more negative emotion when disciplining Black compared to White students, especially for Black girls.
Well, that settles it then, right? You can ignore everything else I’ve written in this essay because research proves that I got it all wrong.
Or maybe not.
What if the abstract, which is the publicly available summary of the researchers’ findings, omitted important facts that render the purported results meaningless? That’s exactly what you’ll discover if you read the full study, “Taking Note of Our Biases: How Language Patterns Reveal Bias Underlying the Use of Office Discipline Referrals in Exclusionary Discipline.”
Funny thing: aside from the fact that the methods used to discover racism are flawed to the point of absurdity, the findings (if they can be called that) suggest that teachers are more racially biased toward both black and white students, and showed less animosity toward Latino and Asian kids.
The techniques the researchers used in their analyses boggle the mind. One involved counting verbs. I kid you not. The more verbs a teacher used in a disciplinary report, according to these researchers, the more hidden bias it indicated. It didn’t matter what the content of the report said. More verbs equal more bias, even if one student’s bad behavior merited more explanation than another’s.
One major finding of the paper’s hidden bias analysis was rampant sexism (this finding is conveniently omitted from the abstract). Teachers used more words, expressed more negative emotion, and used more impersonal pronouns when discussing boys’ bad behavior, all of which, readers are told, are indicative of hidden bias.
So, are America’s teachers a bunch of closet sexists? Or does common sense tell us it’s more likely that boys, on average, misbehave more often and more seriously than girls?
The researchers ignored the possibility that, rather than teachers’ comments revealing secret bigotry, those notes might be documenting exactly how kids were behaving in their classrooms.
Lastly, if teachers’ racism is ruining the chance for non-white kids to get a good education, and if racism against Asians exists, the following should not be one of the paper’s statistically significant findings— and yet it is: “Asian girls were described with the fewest number of words and the least amount of negative affect.”
When you’re sure that hidden systemic racism is your villain, you’ll always find “evidence” that you’re right, whether it’s there or not.
There’s a more credible 2020 study titled “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All” that does give strong hints about why black kids are falling behind. Its authors say that while their study “shines a bright light on a striking correlation, it makes no claim to causation.” Fair enough. But something is going on.
Brightbeam, the sponsor of the study, looked at the average racial achievement gaps in math, reading, and high school graduation rates among public school students in the twelve most progressive cities in the United States. They compared these to the gaps in the twelve most conservative cities. In San Francisco, rated the most progressive city overall based on the criteria used by the study, 70 percent of white students were proficient at math versus only 12 percent of black students—a staggeringly high 58-point difference. In Washington, D.C., the second most progressive city, 83 percent of white students were proficient in reading versus only 23 percent of black kids—a 60-point difference.
In Mesa, Arizona, meanwhile, the most conservative city in the country according to the study, there were still large gaps—31 points in reading and 34 points in math—but the gaps were about half those of the schools in the most progressive cities. But notably, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, rated the third most conservative city, the gap was virtually nonexistent. There was just one point difference in reading and three points difference in math between white and black students.
It’s beyond the scope of this essay to investigate why black kids in conservative Virginia Beach have apparently had no problem keeping up with their white peers, while in uber-progressive San Francisco, black students have fallen far behind their white peers in terms of math and reading proficiency. But just speaking from common sense, if I were in charge of closing the achievement gap? The first thing I’d do is to ensure all new students learned to read by phonics. The second thing I’d do is fire all the racial-equity consultants. The third thing I’d do is take the money saved from not having to pay Glenn Singleton and other purveyors of snake oil, hop a flight to Virginia Beach, and spend time watching how the teachers there teach, so I could learn what they’ve been doing right.
Anita Bartholomew is a former longtime contributing editor and contributor to Reader’s Digest and the author of Siege: An American Tragedy, a detailed account of the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, that has been hailed by Midwest Book Review as “essential reading for future generations.” Her current book project, tentatively titled Sacrificial Lambs, examines how children are indoctrinated into ideological ideas about sex and gender and is under contract with Pitchstone.