Under the guise of closing the “achievement gap” between students of European ancestry and those of African and Latino heritage, victims of a government school in Illinois are being put into classes segregated by race. Yes, really. Apparently, “education” officials believe eliminating all white students from class will help non-whites perform better, or so they say.
The explosive scandal, first exposed by the Wall Street Journal over the weekend under the headline “To Shrink Learning Gap, This District Offers Classes Separated by Race,” involves the Evanston Township Highschool in Evanston, Illinois. Lawyers for the district north of Chicago claim that because the white-free classes are optional, laws forbidding segregation and racial discrimination do not apply.
According to the Journal, almost 200 black and latino students have already signed up for the so-called “affinity” classes this year, with no whites allowed. White teachers are also barred from teaching the classes, with school district leaders claiming the non-white students feel “more comfortable” without having to be in the presence of students lacking sufficient melanin.
“Our Black students are, for lack of a better word…at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently,” Evanston School Board Vice President Monique Parsons said at a November board meeting cited in media reports. “It’s not good.” White students are a minority in the district representing around 44 percent of the student population.
Separately, District Superintendent Marcus Cambell told the high school student newspaper The Evanstonian that the goal was to provide “a different, more familiar setting to kids who feel really anxious about being in AP classes.” Proponents point to a silly “study” in Oakland that found black students in “affinity classes” were “slightly less likely to drop out of school,” the Journal reported.
The classes being offered to only black students in Evanston are called AXLE, which is supposed to represent “Advancing Excellence, Lifting Everyone.” The classes for only latino students are dubbed GANAS, which means desire or motivation in Spanish. White-free classes include algebra 2, precalculus, AP calculus, and an English seminar.
The school board falsely claims “racism” is the “most devastating factor contributing to diminished achievement of students.” In reality, government schools have deliberately dumbed down students for generations. Among other tactics, quack methods to teach “reading” debunked in the 1840s produce devastating handicaps, as this writer and Dr. Sam Blumenfeld document in Crimes of the Educators.
Echoing the Journal’s reporting, another article on the segregated classes in Evanston by “NewsNation” published by WFLA said similar segregation programs have been tried by government schools in Minnesota, California, and Washington State. The far-left outlet also quoted “civil rights attorney” Robert Patillo who praised the segregation programs, apparently seriously, for “bringing more children together.”
Incredibly, under the guise of covering “both sides,” the fake “journalist,” Emily Finn, painted this as a debate between those who believe racial segregation is “healthy and enriching” versus those who believe such policies are a “short-term solution” to “larger inequities in the community.” Nobody who believes segregating students by race is wrong was quoted or even mentioned in Finn’s piece.
Still, critics highlighted the outlandish racism inherent in this tax-funded program. “To merely exist as a white person today is to hold black people and Latino people down,” wrote Laura Wellington at The Western Journal. “That is what the liberals and progressives want everyone to believe as they blame ‘whiteness’ as the primary cause for the educational inequality in our nation.”
District officials declined repeated requests for comment and even threatened to shut down a public meeting when a Journal reporter showed up. They have provided no data or analysis showeing the racial segregation schemes, which began in 2019, have improved outcomes for students of any skin tone. The most recent data available shows black and latino students continue to do much worse than whites.
Of course, it is true that the “progressive” architects of America’s public education system were steeped in racism and pseudo-scientific eugenics. But the primary reason students of African heritage perform worse in government schools today has nothing to do with racism. Instead, it is the fact that the vast majority of black children grow up without a father, which all data show is catastrophic.
What students need is not racial segregation, more teachers, more tax money, or more afterschool programs. Instead, they need genuine education, starting with phonics to teach reading so they can educate themselves, strong families, and biblical understanding to form good character.
If parents needed more reasons to exit the imploding indoctrination system, this flagrant institutional racism fueling hatred and division among the next generation offers yet another good one. It is time for the whole cancerous “education” system to be uprooted and replaced before it destroys what is left of America.
