The Pacific Northwest is both very white and very leftist.
When these white leftists get elected and start designing education policies that will supposedly help disadvantaged minorities, the results are inevitably worse results for those students and even more advantageous for whites.
Seattle resident Nicholas Kerr, a tech marketer and plaintiff in a lawsuit against the city’s income tax, sounds the alarm in National Review about the ironic results of Washington state’s new laws on education.
The New Zealand native, whose passion for America’s freedoms was shaped by his homeland’s repressions, blasts elected Democrats for breaking a 2017 agreement with their Republican counterparts on school funding.
The compromise, which was driven by a mandate by the state Supreme Court, held local school taxes flat while raising state property taxes. The intent was to end the highly unequal distribution of taxes toward wealthy white areas and away from poor nonwhite areas.
By breaking that agreement this session and allowing localities to raise another $2.8 million in taxes, “we’re returning to the status quo ante,” Kerr writes: “[L]ocal levies are all but certain to be raised across the state, resulting in the same inequities the court previously identified.”
In a more direct attack on minorities, Democrats blocked charter schools from participating in any increases in local school funding. The enrollment rate of black kids in these schools is multitudes higher than the local population of black families.
“Minority parents know all too well how traditional public schools have failed their children, and they are lining up to get their kids in: Almost all have waiting lists,” Kerr says.
Even the Legislature’s recent imposition of affirmative action in college admissions is likely to harm black and Hispanic students, he explains, citing research from California after it outlawed affirmative action:
[B]lack and Hispanic enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley did fall, but the decline was mostly offset by increased enrollment at other schools. In addition, black and Hispanic graduation rates rose, especially in difficult STEM fields, where it’s more important for students not to be mismatched with their peers. Prior to the ban, talented minorities were being pulled into institutions by administrators more interested in diversity than graduation rates. Students ended up dropping out because they weren’t being matched with the right academic institutions.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone from the Pacific Northwest. White leftists care more about looking racially sensitive than actually helping the lives of their nonwhite peers.
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter
Add to the Discussion