The byword everywhere these days is “equity.” It is a harmless enough-sounding word. In the business world, it refers to the value of your material contribution to an enterprise or undertaking. In interpersonal relationships, it refers to “the state, quality or ideal of being just, impartial and fair.” Who isn’t for fairness or impartiality?

Unfortunately, as Critical Race Theory continues its march through our institutions, the term “equity” has acquired a sinister and racialist meaning based on falsehoods and blatantly racist presumptions. This is how it is defined on the Ann E. Casey Foundation website, a far-left collection of nutbaggery that is the Baskins Robbins of racism.

Equity vs. Equality

Equity involves trying to understand and give people what they need to enjoy full, healthy lives. Equality, in contrast, aims to ensure that everyone gets the same things in order to enjoy full, healthy lives. Like equity, equality aims to promote fairness and justice, but it can only work if everyone starts from the same place and needs the same things.

Systemic Equity

Systemic equity is a complex combination of interrelated elements consciously designed to create, support and sustain social justice. It is a dynamic process that reinforces and replicates equitable ideas, power, resources, strategies, conditions, habits and outcomes.

Rightly or wrongly, a kid’s high school academic record has a significant impact upon which college they get admitted to. A transcript filled with challenging courses and bolstered by volunteer and extracurricular activities creates a more competitive profile. But what happens when the wrong kind of kids are taking the more challenging courses? This is from The Atlantic: The Race Gap in High School Honors Classes.

About 69 percent of public high schools offer Advanced Placement classes or the International Baccalaureate program, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And 82 percent of schools offer a dual credit program—often a partnership with a local college—that allows students to earn college and high school credit at the same time. It’s also now possible to take a wide range of advanced courses online.

Yet the students who actually take college-prep courses and pass them are disproportionately affluent, white, or Asian. Black and Latino students make up 37 percent of high school students but only 27 percent of students taking an AP class and 18 percent of students passing AP exams, according to the Education Department.

So what does “everyone starts from the same place” and “equitable outcomes” look like in practice? Well, if you’re an “educator” and you can’t ensure the correct number of kids of each race take challenging classes, you can either admit there are variables you can’t control and reveal yourself to be a racist, or you simply restrict the ability of all students to take those classes and micromanage the enrollment. Via Fox News, Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan.

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.

Loudoun County school board member Ian Serotkin posted about the change via Facebook on Tuesday. According to Serotkin, he learned of the change the night prior during a briefing from staff on the Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI).

The Virginia Department of Education’s information page, including the infographic above, is at this link.

Here is a discussion of the program

The video is set up to the key point; the voice is that of a member of the committee named Ian Shenk.

“Let me be totally clear, we are talking about taking Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2 – those three courses that we’ve known and loved … and removing them from our high school mathematics program, replacing them with essential concepts for grade eight, nine, and 10.”

What this does is replace useful and challenging courses that actually produce knowledge in students with fluff “concept courses” that won’t damage the self-esteem of any snowflake or their parents. When Virginia Department of Education spokesweasel Charles Pye was asked about it, this is part of his response.

“Shifting to deeper learning through differentiated instruction, implementation of VMPI will promote student development of critical thinking, authentic application and problem solving skills.

“Offering an inclusive learning environment that engages and challenges students of varied levels of understanding and different interests will be a focus of the common mathematics pathways proposed in grades K-10 … These pathways seek to restructure mathematics education by focusing instruction on reasoning, real world problem solving, communication and connections while shifting away from an emphasis on computation and routine problem practice.”

Hooray for knowledge- and fact-free education.

There are several things at work here. First, it is pretty clear that the school system in Virginia is dominated by a racist clique who are convinced that Black and Hispanic kids can’t master difficult material. Rather than mentor and encourage them to excel, they fall back on the tired old neo-Marxist “equity” trope. Virginia, by the way, carried out a similar assault on their “honors” high school diplomas for much the same reasons.

If you can’t raise everyone up, you have to stomp on the kids who are trying to learn to create “equity.”

The second theme here is that a basic assault is underway on education. Not “education,” the bureaucracy and careerist, but “education,” the imbuing of young minds with knowledge. Here you see a school system throwing away foundational knowledge currently available to everyone because some percentage of students can’t drag themselves away from their phones long enough to be bothered. Even though this is a racist attempt to level enrollment between Black, Hispanic, White, and White-adjacent, sorry, I mean Asian kids (I totally slipped into CRT jargon there for a moment), the real victims are kids of limited financial means regardless of race. Parents with means will enroll their kids in programs like Mathnasium. The differences in outcomes will persist; they will just be beyond the reach of the racists making the rules. The war goes much deeper than just this skirmish over when a kid is introduced to Algebra. As my colleague Joe Cunningham posted earlier in the week, the very idea that students need to be able to defend their position or understand the position of their opponent is now an act of racism (read Why We Need to Acknowledge Our Opponents’ Point of View). Gooberish crap like this is beginning to ferment in academia.

Intelligence is a white man’s mythology. A phantasmal concept. A non-referring term. Syncategorematic.

— Mel Andrews (@bayesianboy) February 24, 2021

We’re already seeing the leading edge of that belief inside the education mafia, where the fixation on equal outcomes forces them to ignore underlying factors and focus on visible ones…like race.

I’d like to say that enough ridicule will change things, but it won’t. My advice to parents is if you value your children at all, vote with your feet and homeschool.