African American Education Czar to Reduce “Resegregation”

Keeping with his race-based ideology, President Obama has named the nation’s first African American education czar to focus on improving the academic performance of black students and countering the discrimination that persists in public schools around the country.

The official title is Executive Director of White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans and the task is to reduce “racial isolation and resegregation of elementary and secondary schools.” Despite decades-old desegregation laws, “substantial obstacles” to equal educational opportunities still remain in America’s public school system, according to the president. Therefore the academic performance of black students has for decades lagged behind whites and other ethnic minorities.

So last summer the commander-in-chief issued an executive order to create a special White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans. The goal is to tackle a rampant crisis of perpetually low academic performance and high dropout rates among black students. African Americans lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools and challenging college-preparatory classes and they disproportionately experience school discipline and referrals to special education, according to the executive order.

President Obama also threw this often-cited statistic into his race-based educational excellence executive order: “African American males also experience disparate rates of incarceration.” Presumably, his new initiative will bring the numbers down. The effort includes the creation of a new President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for African Americans and a special “working group” consisting of senior officials from the departments of Justice, Education, Labor and White House Domestic Policy Council.

The idea is to provide the support that will enable African American students to improve their level of educational achievement through rigorous and well-rounded academic and support services that will prepare them for college, a career, and a lifetime of learning.” The new black education czar, David J. Johns, will work to identify evidence-based best practices to improve African American student achievement from cradle to career, according to an announcement issued by the Education Department.

Of interesting note is that the administration is actually paying states to set new academic achievement targets based on race and income, with lower goals for black, Hispanic and poor kids and higher ones for whites and Asians. Washington D.C. became the first American public school system to adapt the new race-based standards last fall. A federal education official explained in a mainstream newspaper that the administration is just “trying to be realistic about what’s achievable.”

A few weeks later Florida adopted the unprecedented race-based achievement targets for all of the 2.6 million students that attend the state’s 3,629 public schools. Like the area surrounding the nation’s capital, the Sunshine State set higher reading and math achievement standards for Asians and white students and lower goals for blacks and Hispanics. This seems to contradict the president’s executive order to improve educational outcomes for African Americans of all ages by, among other things, eliminating “substantial obstacles to equal education” and offering “challenging college-preparatory classes.”