Here we have a news piece (not an op-ed) from a recent Wall Street Journal, reporting that a high school in the Chicago-adjacent town of Evanston, Illinois, is offering voluntarily race-segregated classes as a way to achieve “equity”. These classes, called “affinity classes”, are of course optional, because mandated race-segregated classes are illegal.
The claim is that voluntary racial segregation produces better academic results for minorities (the minority classes are black and Latino, not white or Asian, and the “classes of color” also have race-compatible minority teachers), but the evidence for “reducing disparities” is either thin or nonexistent.
Moreover, there’s a huge irony involved in doing this: segregating classes by race reduces diversity in the classroom, yet advocates for diversity always (again, here the evidence is thin) that greater diversity of groups leads to greater achievement of those groups on average. You can’t have it both ways! (As far as I know, Evanston was also the first city in America to effect reparations for black people, giving them money for mortgages or home improvement. Voluntarily segregated classes, however, are found in other places, including, as the article below notes, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland. There are also classes voluntarily segregated by sex.)
Click to read, or see the article archived here:
An excerpt:
School leaders in this college town just north of Chicago have been battling a sizable academic achievement gap between Black, Latino and white students for decades. So a few years ago, the school district decided to try something new at the high school: classrooms voluntarily separated by race.
Nearly 200 Black and Latino students at Evanston Township High School signed up this year for math classes and a writing seminar intended for students of the same race, taught by a teacher of color. These optional so-called affinity classes are designed to address the achievement gap by making students feel more comfortable in class, district leaders have said, particularly in Advanced Placement courses that historically have enrolled few Black and Latino students.
“Our Black students are, for lack of a better word…at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently,” Monique Parsons, Evanston school board vice president, said at a November board meeting. “It’s not good.”
School districts across the country have sometimes struggled to find ways to boost the performance of Black and Latino students, who, nationwide, tend to enroll in fewer advanced classes and score lower on standardized tests than white students.
. . . Evanston is taking the strategy one step further, offering courses for Black and Latino students in core math classes: algebra 2, precalculus and AP calculus, as well as an English seminar. Evanston’s classes for Black students are known as AXLE, an acronym for Advancing Excellence, Lifting Everyone, and those for Latino students are called GANAS, from a Spanish expression that means “giving it all you’ve got.”
The reason this is done, so it’s said, is that voluntary segregation makes the students more comfortable, and hence facilitates learning. (Quotes from students attest to their comfort level.) There are other rationales that are not as appealing, as “white standards”:
“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. An internal study showed improved attendance for Black boys in the program in 2017 and average GPAs of 2.27, compared with 2.14 for Black males districtwide.
“In our spaces, you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness,” Luna said.
Some quotes:
Student testimonials included in a presentation Evanston teachers gave at a conference last fall described how students feel more accepted in the classes.
“I feel like I represent me and not the whole black race in this AP class,” said a student who took an AXLE class in 2021. “It’s a safe space. In AP classes that are mostly white, I feel like if I answer wrong, I am representing all black kids. I stay quiet in those classes.”
A GANAS student who identified as half-Latina said, “I feel accepted for the first time in a long time.”
Note that the difference in GPAs associated with voluntary segregation is minimal—only .13 points, or about 6%. But there’s another possible reason for that. Suppose that professors grade on the curve, or, on average, minority teachers tend to grade their minority students higher than do teachers that are “race incompatible”. In that case you’d get higher GPAs in the segregated classes than in the integrated classes. No, the only way to really test if voluntary segregation improves performance is to use standardized tests as controls—tests in which everybody has to answer the same question. If this kind of segregation works, we should see higher test scores on minority students if they’ve been in self-segregated classes.
But what if that turns out to be the case? That has potentially upsetting implications for “progressives.” First of all, the mantra is that “increased diversity within groups increases average group performance”. That conclusion is based on very weak evidence (psychology experiments, for one thing), so I’m not confident about it. But if the standardized test data refute it, then there goes the argument for diversity!
Further, if segregated classes improve performance of minorities, wouldn’t voluntarily segregated schools do that as well? That, of course, is the second great irony of this issue: minorities fought for years to end segregation in schools, and finally got it, both in secondary schools and colleges. But then they claim that, well, integrated classes are inimical to minority achievement. You can’t have it both ways. If the result above proves to be true (and I have no idea whether it is), the argument for integration goes down the tubes. Further, one might argue that if this holds on the college level—and the “comfort” argument should also apply there—colleges shouldn’t be trying to get around the ban on affirmative action but should instead be urging minority students to go, for instance, to historically black colleges.
One possible counterargument to the above is to claim that = students do mix racially outside of class. But I’m not sure that is the case. I’ve often heard that in both colleges and secondary schools (and witnessed this when I was young, though racism was more prevalent then) students self-segregate outside the class, also for “comfort” reasons. We all know that minority students tend to eat lunch together in secondary schools, and colleges are even pushing for “affinity dorms”, in which students can voluntarily choose to live with others from their same ethnic group.
My question, then, is this. If you want integration, but claim that integration is bad for minority achievement, then aren’t you being a hypocrite?
My own view is that the differences in achievement due to voluntary segregation are small, and may be due to factors other than “comfort.” The proper tests have not yet been done. But even if they show some boos in achievement boost due to segregation, there are other advantages to integration beyond possible boosts in achievement, which I would imagine at any rate to be small. Those advantages include learning to get along with different types of people, which is a personal and societal good. If you always segregate yourself voluntarily, or are given the opportunity to do so, then America once again becomes divided into racial groups with little mixing. So much for E Pluribus Unum!
Now perhaps this whole problem will disappear as minorities increase in achievement. But that isn’t going to happen any time soon.
I have no dog in this fight except to say that I favor integration because of its social benefits, not necessarily academic ones. But if liberals encourage self-segregation as a way to boost achievement, and it does, then they will have to structure schools and curricula on that basis. And that will lead them back to how schools were in the 1950s.
This is potentially a huge boon to the teachers union. If you need to have affinity classes for blacks, hispanics, asians, and who knows who else, in addition to classes for white people, just think of all the new teachers you’ll need. Even if this were a good idea, high school would probably be too late in the process to do this.
There is already a shortage of teachers.
There’s a typo that affects the meaning of the sentence.
“there are other advantages to segregation beyond possible boosts in achievement”
I think you meant to write “integration”.
It’ll be interesting to see if anyone does a good analysis of the data.
I’ll fix it, thanks. That’s a bad error!
I became a better person when I entered the workplace at Rush Medical Center and had to work alongside scientists from all parts of the world (different religions/no religions, different levels of prosperity/lack of, different cultures and habits, and whatever). Until then, all I saw were differences. After getting to know them I began seeing what we had in common – pets, children, movies, food, hiking, etc. PLEASE let’s not revisit segregation regardless of whether it’s voluntary or not.
But you were working with a highly selected group of smart, motivated scientists who had stuck it out to excel and wanted to thrive by working with you, just as you did with them. This is not the unselected incoming high-school class with its raft of people who won’t even graduate and wear on their sleeves their home-taught grievances against you and everything you represent. A bright high-school student might be happier if the disruptive disengaged and hostile black and Latino students that Sastra had to endure all self-segregated themselves out of her classes and learned math their way.
Don’t interrupt your enemy while he’s in the middle of making a mistake. If I were a white (-adjacent) parent in Evanston who couldn’t afford to move to a better neighbourhood, I don’t think I’d be fighting this move to voluntary segregation, even if I wasn’t allowed to sign my own kid up for voluntary segregation.
You know what I always refer to :
This is the dialectic in action.
The synthetic product is not racism (according to the dialectic (Hegel)) because negative thinking (Marcuse) has removed the bad parts.
It’s the revolution – and the revolution doesn’t care who gets used, chewed up, and spit out.
“And so the dialectic progresses.”
-from Critical Race Theory – an Introduction, 3rd ed., Delgado and Stefancic, 2017, NYU Press
““A lot of times within our education system, Black students are expected to conform to a white standard,” said Dena Luna,”. Even more harmfully, in Math classes students are expected to conform to mathematical standards. Perhaps the next step will be to establish separate math classes for students who are not good at math, separate English classes for students who are refractory to reading and writing, and so on. Wasn’t this system once termed “streaming”?
Remedial?
“Tracking”. Criticized for exacerbating inequity, brought back to improve equity, all while the real causes of inequity get ignored: broken families and dismissive cultural attitudes, primarily.
So what do the Critical Theorists do? Try as hard as possible to destroy families and to elevate (“center”) those very same cultural attitudes.
In my country, there is a physics teacher who organizes free summer advanced classes, and his students achieve fantastic results. He says that the key to high-quality education is segregation because having uninterested and disruptive students in the classroom wastes the abilities of good students. He didn’t mean racial segregation but I don’t think that disruptive students should be allowed to ruin the education of others just because they belong disporportionately to certain ethnic groups.
It seems to me that granting one racial group a classroom and denying it to others is de facto unconstitutional.
Ironically, while no white parent would dare sue the school demanding a whites-only classroom, if progressives are successful enough at championing segregation as the next great educational panacea, now they won’t have to.
I can’t say I’d expect to see ultralibs and the Klan arm in arm, but it’s been that kind o’ year.
I don’t want to be disrespectful of teenagers, but their opinions are still very informed by what their peers are saying and the current ideas floating around. So whatever they say about segregated classrooms doesn’t hold water as proof of the value of the practice. It sounds as if every generation of students are educated in a series of poorly-executed experiments based on unproven hypotheses by educational theorists. They wait until they see significant failure to enact change.
No to segregation in public schools. This is a huge backward step, based on the idea that white racism is so entrenched and immovable that equality of opportunity is impossible. I realize that is not how it is presented, nor do all the people enacting these policies realize this, but that is the underlying belief.
There’s another uncomfortable consequence of “affinity” classes. How will graduates from these programs, who purportedly did better in same-race classes/schools because they felt more comfortable there, perform in an integrated world and workplace? Won’t they be worse off and less comfortable (their claim) now being forced to integrate or will they simply underperform the job relative to their peers? Maybe each person will seek out same-race jobs to feel more comfortable but the workplace is not stratified by race and to do so would be illegal. Further, the best jobs are likely to be where the best jobs are in the country at any point in time, not necessarily where minorities are found in high numbers (statistically). So in addition to having statistically negligible benefits to students of color and no efficacy, these classes might end up making students of color less effective after they graduate. What then liberals?
“What then liberals?”
Classical Liberals : “Let’s look at it in detail, independently, and empirically ascertain what is true.”
The Left : “The dialectic it is.”
>So in addition to having statistically negligible benefits to students of color and no efficacy, these classes might end up making students of color less effective after they graduate.
I can see a benefit in that if graduates of black colour are hired on DEI grounds — this is how the workplace can in fact be legally stratified by race — and do indeed underperform, that will increase pressure to do away with DEI in the private sector, relegating graduates of black colour to jobs they can actually succeed at.
I graduated from Evanston Township High School in ‘74 and back then the notable divide between the black and white students definitely seemed to be cultural. My freshman hopes of having friends of all races were for the most part dashed as time and the grades progressed. Though my black locker partner and I were initially delighted with each other in September, by the end of the school year she and her friends were routinely throwing my coat and books on the floor so black students could share what was declared a “black locker.” I moved. Lunch tables were segregated; black students in Honors courses dropped out.
My own impression (and the general consensus among other white students) was that this was almost entirely driven by the black students. Integration was a liberal white value, and Evanston was a pretty liberal suburb. When the color line was crossed, either academically or socially, any overt pushback thus came from people of color, policing boundaries as a matter of protecting a black cultural identity. There was some white racism, certainly, but it was uncool to express it or be seen to act on it.
If those conditions still prevail, then my guess is that the ETHS administration is trying to remove the stigma against doing well in school.
I am curious how many of Northwestern’s faculty and professional staff have children attending Evanston Township High. Do the black and Latino faculty encourage their children to voluntary attend the segregated classrooms? Might the white and Asian faculty have reasons other than “comfort” for minorities for wanting lower-performing students out of their children’s classrooms?
It all reminds me of something that I was told by a man, now long deceased, who spent his life in the heart of Dixie. I have omitted most of the now unprintable word that was common in that man’s day and place, but as a northerner, it wasn’t that word that stunned me, because I expected to hear it. It was the word “kind.” Here’s what he said: “I don’t have a problem with the n_____s, but they need to keep with their own kind. And we need to keep with our own kind. It’s just better for everybody that way.”
Evanston. The new Montgomery by the lakeside. Voluntarily so.
How nice that the far Left and the far Right have found something to agree on: that U.S. schools were better in 1950.
Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students…
That’s a fairly big assumption!
We are told that there was a small improvement in outcomes, but no before/after figures are provided in support of this claim – have they ruled out the Pygmalion Effect, or the possibility that the teachers of coloured maths classes were slightly better (hello, Jaime Escalante) than other maths teachers or increased parental engagement with education in response to the segregated classes.
If the maths teachers of colour are better than the pallid maths teachers, then every colour-only maths class limits Asian and white students’ access to superior teachers. That would make an interesting court case.
The comparison with the rest of the school district is meaningless by itself, unless it can be shown that this particular school’s population is identical in every other relevant aspect to the district population as a whole. It doesn’t take much of a tail o skew an average.
The sordid implications, and there are many, of this development are depressing.
I had read that article and remembered this intriguing passage from it:
“Leaders in Evanston’s high-school district, board members and teachers declined or ignored repeated requests to comment on the courses over several months. When a Wall Street Journal reporter arrived at a public meeting for parents of Black students, a district spokeswoman said she would cancel the meeting if the reporter didn’t leave.”
So many things in the last decade (like this) would have been some kind of sick joke until recently. How can MOST people look at the over-woke nonsense – across all domains – and not think: “WTF? This is INSANE!”
D.A.
NYC
Now that “liberals” (in USspeak) have re-discovered the virtues of racial segregation in school, and (in Canada) have re-established blasphemy laws, the ideological horseshoe
shape is complete. But something more basic than ideological posturing is also going on. I think Emily (comment #7) summed it up perfectly: “every generation of students are educated in a series of poorly-executed experiments based on unproven hypotheses by educational theorists.”
“But something more basic than ideological posturing is also going on. I think Emily (comment #7) summed it up perfectly: “every generation of students are educated in a series of poorly-executed experiments based on unproven hypotheses by educational theorists.” ”
That might be true but Marxists problematize anything they can to get control before anyone else – e.g. for education in the U.S., Gloria Ladson-Billings, to name one figure.
Thomas Sowell claims in his recent book “Charter Schools” that there are no data showing that integrating Black students with White students produced superior outcomes (Arter, 2013; Sowell, 1986). Since race doesn’t exist anyway, even if skin color were separated by class in some weird experiment, psychological studies still show that the academic outcomes of the whites and blacks would still correlate highly with IQ, values, student and home characteristics more than teacher and school characteristics, and a focus on traditional subjects such as English and Math over peripheral topics like multiculturalism.
So them southern white bubbahs in the hoods had it right the first time? When they were blocking those black kids and yelling at them to go back to their own schools, 60+ years the crazy far left agrees with them? LOL! What’s old is young again.
It wasn’t just the South. Bussing kids across town for racial balance in schools was bitterly contentious in Boston. There were riots. Not just over black kids attending mostly white schools. It was white kids having to be bussed into really bad Boston neighbourhoods. It fell more heavily on working-class whites — “Southie Micks” they were called in news accounts — as the wealthier white families lived in suburbs outside the school districts marked out for correcting de facto segregation.
I find the bussing policy horrible. Innocent poor children were reduced to tools for the advancement of other children.
So diversity produces better outcomes, except in education, where segregation does. Got it.
This sounds like the comprehensive school I attended, except the classes were divided into six streams by ability rather than by race. We were split into streams for math, sciences, languages, and humanities, whilst sports, arts and crafts were unstreamed. The streamed subjects were individually divided, so that one might be in the top stream for humanities yet still be in the bottom for math, for example. It was a disaster, with the lower streams resentful of the higher streams and they delighted in taking every chance to show it, usually with actual, rather than verbal, violence. I imagine that the staff room had a similar kind of apartheid, with the teachers responsible for the lower streams hating on those teaching the top streams.
The impression I’m in danger of coming away with is that streaming by race is an admission that ability varies by race, and I don’t think they mean to give that impression.