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I have Madison WI in my rear view mirror and am drawn to follow events there. The Superintendent of Madison Public Schools is dealing with a lot of this racial nonsense by capitulating to it. All in the pursuit of a narrowing of the "achievement gap". The trick for the Superintendent, an ambitious woman, is to leave Madison and move on to her next stepping stone before it can be recognized that nothing closes the "achievement gap".

...nothing closes the "achievement gap".

I don't agree with that.

Hard work, strict discipline, willingness to kick out trouble makers, fail poorly performing students, eliminate the bigotry of low expectations, set high standards, expunge all this radical leftist "hate whitey" and other liberal PC bullish!t from the curriculum, stop social promotion, resist mommas showing up and complaining how little La'squisha is treated unfairly, administrations siding with the teachers and having their backs, reduce zero-value administrators by 90%, move control out of Washington to local school districts, stop taking Washington DC money, and a couple dozen other things CAN close the "achievement gap."

Unfortunately, none of that is possible in today's US of A.

All in the pursuit of a narrowing of the "achievement gap".

The "achievement" gap represents the decline in parity between races of "federal lunch qualified" (i.e. students on assistance, representing low-economic demographic) students in the 4th grade, based on standardized tests, and those same cohorts in the 8th grade, at which point black and Hispanic high achievement drops significantly, whereas white and Asian maintain the same rates.

In that black and Hispanic high achievers are lost between 4th and 8th grade, what the "achievement gap" highlights is that the hyper-focus on race, equity and meeting minimal standards is mal-serving those minority students. By further dividing by race, your Superintendent is merely exacerbating the problem.

Now, WHY your Superintendent is even bringing this up is because the "achievement gap" is the latest fad and not becuase it is actually meaningful to the school system (it could be). The reason the school systems constantly bounce from one educational fad to another is because 1) nothing they do works; and 2) whatever they do to change changes nothing of what they are already doing that doesn't work.