Chicago: The Equality of Misery

Johnson’s board of education assured Chicagoans that the reforms it is pursuing won’t shutter the city’s selective schools. Rather, the plan is designed to dismantle the “stratification and inequity in Chicago Public Schools,” the board’s CEO said. The advantages enjoyed by high-achieving students in facilities with discriminating admissions policies amount to “educational apartheid,” read a statement from the Chicago Teachers Union welcoming the reforms. This charged and evocative language emphasizes the noble intentions of the reformers over the effects of their reforms, the foremost of which is to steal from Chicago’s more accomplished students the opportunity for educational advancement.

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The dirty secret of the equity agenda is most readily apparent in its educational reforms. It is far easier for governments to handicap the proficient than it is to better the circumstances of people who, for whatever reason, struggle through life. The demands of equity as a societal organizing principle do not allow policy-makers to carefully evaluate whether their interventions into the minutiae of public life would help more than they would hurt. Policy-makers must act for action’s sake. Inaction is tantamount to acceptance of or even tacit complicity with a wholly oppressive status quo. So, they act, often with reckless disregard for the unintended consequences of their initiatives.

[Are we so sure this is “unintended”? — Ed]

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