Woke school boards feeling heat

It looks like some woke school boards’ misshapen ideas of “equity” is getting blowback here and there.

Just a couple of weeks ago, three members of the San Francisco school board were recalled and lost their jobs for incompetence. One of their grotesque ideas was getting rid of entrance exams for the city elite high school.

In Philadelphia, I wrote recently, the School District’s new policy of using a lottery — rather than high grades and an exam — for admission to elite schools was under attack. And not just from me, although I accurately described the new policy as an Asian Removal Process.

Why that term? Because Asian students are “overrepresented” in the elite schools, and Blacks and Hispanics are “underrepresented.” I noted that Blacks are “underrepresented” in the NHL and whites are “underrepresented” in the NBA.

Elite athletes are selected on the basis of merit. So are elite scholars.

Merit is almost the antithesis of “equity,” which is roughly defined as “fairness,” which is subjective. 

Just last week, a federal district court in Alexandria, Va., handed down a summary judgment in favor of parents who had brought suit against the Fairfax County School Board to oppose recent changes in the admission policy to the Thomas Jefferson High School,  an elite school that emphasizes math and science.

Here, too, the “problem” seemed to be — you guessed it — Asian-American students.

In his opinion, Judge Claude M. Hilton wrote of the school board’s “desire to remake TJ admissions because they were dissatisfied with the racial composition of the school. A means to accomplish their goal of achieving racial balance was the decrease of the only racial group ‘overrrepresented’ at TJ — Asian-Americans.”

(Harvard University is currently being sued for bias against Asians.) 

The school board’s policy was racially motivated, and by definition, that is “racist.”

Never mind the imagined good intentions. Handing out preferences,or disqualifications, on the basis of race is racism. There is no other name for it.