There was a time, way back in another era, when the goal of the education
system was to educate students. Back in those days, this goal was pursued
through a merit-based approach. Kids were graded and ranked based on their
performance. High performing students were advanced, low performing students
were held back. Well behaved students were rewarded, poorly behaved students
were punished. This was the general idea.

But this strategy has fallen out of favor in recent years. It was too mean,
we were told and racist, too, somehow. Piece by piece, the system of merit-
based education in public schools was dismantled, until finally there was
nothing left. And into that gap came �equity� to replace it.

What does �equity� mean, exactly? That�s a question you�ll never get a real
answer to. But in this case, we know what �equity� means from a practical
perspective. It means spending more money for worse schools. It also means
creating new schools, from the ground-up � because the only way to guarantee
that you�re not perpetuating White Supremacy is to start from scratch.

One of these new, non-racist schools was founded five years ago in Akron,
Ohio, with help from NBA All-Star LeBron James. This was a big deal, we were
assured at the time. NBC Nightly News was on the scene when the school
launched:

https://youtu.be/TAF7zAThTus

NBC News touts this school as a �new approach to fix an old problem.� The
�most important thing,� LeBron James says, isn�t test scores, or grades, or
any objective sense of achievement whatsoever. Instead, the key is giving
students, �the sense that someone cares about them.� But that�s not really an
educational approach at all. It�s simply a cliche � and not a new one either.
But it�s one that taxpayers in Ohio have been compelled to fund. As one local
news report put it, �the district will pay more than half the costs [for the
school] � perhaps around 75 percent.� That total amounts to nearly $10
million a year, charged to taxpayers.

Yet the experiment was well worth the cost, the media reassured us, over and
over. You can go back over the past several years and find many, many media
reports gushing over LeBron�s school and calling for more schools just like
it. Maybe we should even make LeBron James the Secretary of Education, while
we�re at it. Why not? NBC News would certainly be on board with that. Just a
month ago, they were on the scene again to do this glowing follow-up story on
the I Promise School. Watch:

https://youtu.be/WhLnKw66cdQ

To recap: 1,600 students have attended the school; they promised to make
healthy choices; and LeBron James cares about them. Et cetera. It all sounds
pretty good.

But wait a minute, NBC News. How are the students actually performing in the
classroom? That bit of information was left out of the report, which seems a
little odd. Wasn�t the whole point of the school to help these children? Just
a month later, now we know exactly why NBC News overlooked that little
detail. A new piece in the Akron Beacon Journal reports that, �This fall�s
class of eighth graders at the I Promise School hasn�t had a single student
pass the state�s math test since the group was in the third grade.�

To restate: They haven�t had a single student in the eighth grade class pass
the state math test since they started at the school in the third grade, five
years ago. Well, that�s not encouraging. And to be honest, it�s a little
surprising, because not all that long ago, the school claimed in a
documentary that its students do extremely well on mandatory proficiency
tests, including the so-called �MAP� standardized test.

The documentary is titled Every Child Deserves A Chance and it�s from YouTube
Originals. It�s quite long, so watch it when you can and see what impression
you come away with. We can tell you LeBron James says the students
�destroyed� the standardized tests. Later in the film, a thrilled
administrator says that the students were at the 25th percentile and below �
but that now, �91 percent of students� are �meeting their goals.� They�re all
very happy about this.

But if you parse what they�re saying carefully, it sounds like an apples-to-
oranges comparison. The administrator makes it sound like the students went
from 25th percentile in the district to the 91st percentile. But in fact, the
91% number just refers to students who are meeting their �goals,� whatever
that means and however that�s defined.

They�re presenting the data like this in order to suggest � falsely � that
their new method of education was working and specifically, enhancing
standardized test scores. But in fact it was doing the exact opposite. And in
a brief moment at the very end of the documentary, we get some confirmation
of that as an official with the school admits that the district isn�t happy
with students� performance.

Following this? There�s all this celebration from LeBron James and all the
taxpayer-funded administrators about how good the school�s test results are.
And then they admit that, despite this success, the school has somehow
received an �F� from the district for student achievement. They don�t
elaborate. They don�t tell you that, in fact, zero of the students in one
class had ever �met their grade-level markers� for math.

That seems like a significant discrepancy � one that the media, and taxpayers
in Akron, would be very interested in, and yet none of the media outlets that
have fluffed this school in the past few years have bothered to cover it.
That documentary has been out for almost two years. NBC News must have missed
it.

The truth is that corporate media didn�t want to look too deep into the data,
because it�s not just bad � it�s terrible. It keeps getting worse the more
you read it. As the Akron Beacon Journal reported, the English scores for the
8th graders weren�t much better than the math numbers: �When the school�s
first class of eighth graders graduated from I Promise, just 11% of them
tested proficient on the state English language arts test.�

The article goes on: �Two of I Promise�s biggest subgroups of students, Black
students and those with disabilities, are now testing in the bottom 5% in the
state, landing the school on the Ohio Department of Education�s list of those
requiring targeted intervention.�

You�ll often hear the counterargument that this is a school for troubled
children, so of course their scores will be low. But that doesn�t explain why
the scores are going backwards. According to the data, �last year�s sixth
graders lost ground. When they were in fifth grade, 7% were proficient on the
reading test. In sixth grade, just 2% were.�

Now, the point isn�t to gloat over the failure of this experiment. In some
ways it was a noble effort. Admittedly, I�m not a fan of LeBron James
personally. He�s a woke virtue signaler to such a degree that he pretends to
read books about Malcom X. You�ve probably seen this clip before, but
honestly it�s too good not to share again. Here it is:

https://youtu.be/VdOtyUPcRxg

That�s the guy who�s going to re-invent our nation�s educational system with
his bold new approach. The guy who is still failing his book reports at the
age of 38. In any event, even if it�s kind of funny to have a school run by a
guy who pretends to read books, and even if, aside from that, LeBron James is
a reckless liar who regularly promotes BLM propaganda and slanders police
officers, I can still respect a rich celebrity athlete at least attempting to
do something productive.

But the reason for the school�s failure is what�s instructive here. According
to the accepted narrative, kids from �marginalized groups� struggle in
school, especially inner city schools, because of systemic racism and a lack
of funding � two issues, we�re told, which are related. So here is a school
founded by a wealthy black man, with an extraordinary amount of funding both
from tax payers and LeBron�s foundation � a school where everyone gets free
lunch, and they have access to all of the state of the art educational tools,
and everyone graduates with a scholarship, and so on � yet still the kids are
failing. When it comes to math, literally all of them are failing.

In fact, they seem to be doing worse than they would in one of those
allegedly �under funded� schools where the vestiges of systemic racism are
still allegedly present. We have data on that. The way I Promise selects
students is via a lottery, in which students who place in the bottom 25% of
test scores in the district are eligible. But if you compare the I Promise
students with kids in the bottom 25% in the district who *did not* attend I
Promise, the kids who didn�t attend are doing better by some metrics.

This tells us a few things � all of them are forbidden truths. The most
important is that all of the funding and inspirational platitudes in the
world can�t make up for broken families and bad culture. Poor black kids come
from both (and the two are obviously related). You will not be able to
measurably improve any aspect of life for these kids � especially their
educational performance � without addressing the fact that the culture they
come from is deeply sick and their families are in absolute disarray. Talk to
any teacher who has experience trying to teach these so-called �marginalized
groups.� Very often their behavior and attitude in class isn�t just bad, it�s
appalling. These are kids who have not received any kind of intellectual or
moral formation at home or in their communities. In many cases their parents
do not care about their education, or about anything else. The culture they
are brought up in encourages them to act in outrageous ways and reject and
disrespect all authority. That�s the fact of the matter. LeBron James can�t
solve this on his own, of course, but he could start by at least
acknowledging it and talking about it. But he won�t even do that.