How Oh-so Liberal Boston Does Divide-and-Rule
It does it, of course, in the name of Equity
Read the above article in full here and you will learn how the oh-so-liberal City of Boston implements divide-and-rule in the name of equity.
It works like this.
Step 1. Create just three high schools, out of a total of 37, that are specially designed to be academically more challenging than the others and to have, as a result, a much higher college admissions rate for their graduates than the others.
Step 2. Limit enrollment in these special “exam” schools to students who “pass muster” according to an algorithm that is based on numerous factors such as their score on an admissions exam, their race (in the past, at least), their previous school grades, teacher recommendations, personal socio-economic status, socio-economic status of the student’s neighborhood, etc. etc.
Step 3. Every few years, change the algorithm to make some factors more important and others less important than before, to great controversy of course, since one version of the algorithm favors certain categories of student getting admitted and other versions different categories. And make all of these changes in the name of “equity” or “anti-racism” or “fairness,” or whatever is the buzzword of the year. As the above news article goes on to point out,
Superintendent Mary Skipper announced that after seeing the previous policy in action, it became apparent that a 10-point boost was creating a mathematical bottleneck, preventing some top-scoring students from having a fair shot at their first-choice school, according to details obtained by the Boston Herald.
In other words, the current algorithm was letting “too many” students from high-poverty schools get into the exam schools, and so the algorithm will be changed to let fewer high-poverty-school students and more non-high-poverty-school students in.
Step 4. DO NOT, ABSOLUTELY DO NOT, MOST ASSUREDLY DO NOT create enough academically challenging high schools for all of the students in the city who want to attend such a school to do so. Oh no! Doing this would be a TERRIBLE mistake. Sure, it would be quite easy to do, and it wouldn’t cost the city any more to do it, but—Oh My God!—think of the horrible consequences!
There would no longer be bitter divisiveness between, on the one hand, the students and parents in the category of students that happens to be favored by the current algorithm, versus, on the other hand, the parents and students in the category now unfavored by the current algorithm. Nor would it be possible to foment this divisiveness and anger and discord even more by proposing a change in the algorithm to reverse whom it favored and whom it disfavored.
The have-nots (and almost all the people with children in the Boston public schools are have-nots) would be more united and focused on working together to make the schools be good schools for all the students. Parents like Jean Powers (read about her here) would be stronger because of greater unity with all of the other parents.
No! No! This unity must never be allowed to happen. The billionaire ruling class cannot remain long in power if the have-nots aren’t kept constantly pitted against each other.