The Feds Have Been the Main Source of Racial Bigotry in Classrooms

by James Bovard, March 18, 2025

“We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” proclaimed Sheria Smith, the president of American Federation of Government Employees unit representing more than a thousand federal Education Department employees fired by the Trump administration. The New York Times frets that the layoffs could devastate the agency that “tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools.”

But ever since it was created by President Jimmy Carter, the Education Department has done far worse than “pull the wool” over Americans’ eyes. Federal mandates and bureaucratic meddling have helped mentally blight millions of children.

More than 150 years ago, abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” But federal education policymakers have prevented legions of kids from reaching that road to freedom.

No modern American president did more than Barack Obama to canonize bigoted standards in federal education policy. President Obama championed subsidies for public schools so that “the federal government can play a leading role in encouraging the… high standards we need.” But, as part of its convoluted plans to reduce the achievement gap, the Obama administration cajoled most states into setting lower academic goals for blacks and Hispanics. From 2009 onwards, the feds rubber-stamped official plans under which white and Asian students were expected to perform far better than black and Hispanic students. (I bashed the discriminatory policy in USA Today in 2014).

The feds bankrolled the District of Columbia’s plan to boost the percentage of white students who passed reading tests from 88 percent to 94 percent while the percentage of black students who passed rose from 41 percent to 71 percent. At DC’s Wilson High School, the goal was for 67 percent of black students and 95 percent of white students to pass math tests by 2017. Cynical Washingtonians joked that Wilson High had a two-track system, and its graduates went either to Yale or to jail.

The federal Education Department approved Tennessee’s plan to raise the passing rate for English III courses for white students from 45.6 percent to 65.4 percent between 2011 and 2018 while the passing rate for black students leaped from 17.6 percent to 47.6 percent. The feds approved Minnesota’s plan to achieve 82 percent proficiency in 11th grade math for white students, 66 percent for Hispanic students, and 62 percent for black students.

Alabama’s goals for the 2013-14 school year called for 91.5 percent of white third graders and 79 percent of black third graders to pass math. Tim Robinson, the father of two black school children, complained to the Tuscaloosa News: “I think having a low bar means they can just pass them on. I think it’s dumbing our race down and preparing our boys for prison.”

The Virginia NAACP denounced the new scoring regime. State Sen. Mamie Locke, the chair of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, protested: “We believe that education is the ‘great equalizer’ in our society…. The state’s new system of benchmarks for performance is antithetical to this goal.” Further south, the Florida PTA protested: “By setting ethnicity-based goals, the door is open for continued discrimination.”

In some states, the racial double scoring was simply bureaucratic finagling to keep federal cash flowing into state coffers. Elois Zeanah, President of the Alabama Federation of Republican Women, declared that there was,

…no way would these standards, which have racial overtones, be accepted if there had been an opportunity for public debate. Parents have no idea that their elected state education officials, and the state superintendent of education, are forcing different standards on their children based on their family income and race.

As historian Walter Russell Mead warned, “In practical terms, this is setting up a system in which some teachers will think they’ve succeeded as long as the black kids in a class reach a certain low level of proficiency.” University of Michigan education professor Carla O’Connor complained that the tests schools used measure only “basic-level skills and now we’re saying we don’t think certain populations of students can even meet those expectations.”

The Education Department required states to specify exactly how far each racial and ethnic group of students at each school would progress over the following years. The spreadsheet with Washington State’s formal plan for each school contained more than 47,000 separate lines. That was a level of education planning akin to the Soviet central planners who pretended to foretell the yields for every crop on every collective farm in the next Five-Year Plan. In the same way that collective farms submitted grossly exaggerated harvest data to Moscow, many schools were caught falsifying student results to fulfill federal mandates. States missed most of the goals but that didn’t matter because federal funding kept flowing.

If Lester Maddox—one of the most racist governors in the 1960s—had officially announced lower learning goals for blacks in Georgia’s schools, he would have been tarred by every editorial page north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Because Obama was usually portrayed with a halo, his racial profiling in the classroom was largely ignored. But the policies scorned the message of the 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Supreme Court stressed that segregation could “generate a feeling of [black] inferiority…that may affect [children’s] hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.” Maybe none of the Obama administration education policymakers read or remembered that 1954 decision?

Obama’s racial profiling dismally failed. Despite soaring government spending on schools, the racial achievement gap “is now 30 percent larger than it was 35 years ago,” according to Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond. But many Democrats and perhaps many laid-off Education Department bureaucrats still believe that a bigger federal iron fist can solve all problems.

Luckily, millions of parents and some states are done waiting for Uncle Sam to fix schools. “Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022,” the Associated Press reported. The “Mississippi Miracle” is based on a return to phonics—a reading method that succeeded for generations until progressive reformers replaced it with new-fangled methods that guaranteed full-employment for learning disability consultants. Mississippi fourth graders have higher reading scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress than do fourth graders in Minnesota—a liberal state long known for high education standards (and now best known for wacky Governor Tim Walz). Forty-seven percent of Mississippi fourth graders are black while only 13 percent of Minnesota fourth graders are black. But the method of teaching reading mattered more than the race of the students.

America can no longer afford a “no-fault” federal education policy. Torpedoing the Education Department is one of Trump’s most encouraging reforms.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared that the layoffs are only “the first step of eliminating bureaucratic bloat” as part of a “new era of accountability.” Expect endless caterwauling about how the mass firings at the Education Department will doom America’s future. But terminating that department is the best guarantee that the feds will not inflict more idiocy upon hapless kids across the land.