THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 71that looked like the city. I had also seen meritocracy
separate out and demoralize children based on their
work in fourth grade. “If you fail middle school,” our
daughter said, “you fail life.” It was too soon for chil-
dren’s fates to be decided by an institution that was
supposed to serve the public good.
I wanted the plan to succeed, but I had serious
doubts. It came festooned with all the authoritarian
excess of the new progressivism. It called for the cre-
ation of a new diversity bureaucracy, and its relentless
jargon squashed my hope that the authors knew how
to achieve an excellent education for all. Instead of
teaching civics that faced the complex truths of Ameri-
can democracy, “the curriculum will highlight the vast
historical contributions of non-white groups & seek to
dispel the many non-truths/lies related to American
& World History.”
“Excellence” was barely an afterthought in the
plan. Of its 64 action items, only one even men-
tioned what was likely to be the hardest problem:
“Provide support for [district] educa-
tors in adopting best practices for aca-
demically, racially & socio economically
mixed classrooms.” How to make sure
that children of greatly diff erent abilities
would succeed, in schools that had long
been academically tracked? How to do
it without giving up on rigor altogether—
without losing the fastest learners?
We had faced this problem with our
daughter, who was reading far ahead of
her grade in kindergarten and begged her
teacher for math problems to solve. When
the school declined to accom modate
her, and our applications to other pub-
lic schools were unsuccessful, we trans-
ferred her to a new, STEM-focused private
school rather than risk years of boredom.
We regretted leaving the public- school
system, and we were still wary of the com-
petitive excesses of meritocracy, but we
weren’t willing to abandon it altogether.
The Department of Education didn’t
seem to be thinking about meritocracy
at all. Its entire focus was on achieving
diversity, and on rooting out the racism
that stood in the way of that.
Late in the summer of 2018, a pub-
lic meeting was called in our district to
discuss the integration plan. It was the
height of vacation season, but several
hundred parents, including me, showed
up. Many had just heard about the new
plan, which buried the results of an inter-
nal poll showing that a majority of parents
wanted to keep the old system. We were
presented with a slideshow that included
a photo of white adults snarling at black
schoolchildren in the South in the 1960s—
as if only vicious racism could motivate
parents to oppose eliminating an admis-
sions system that met superior work with
a more challenging placement. Even if the placement was the fruit of a large
historical injustice, parents are compromised; a policy that tells them to set
aside their children’s needs until that injustice has been remedied is asking
for failure. Just in case the implication of racism wasn’t enough to intimi-
date dissenters, when the presentation ended, and dozens of hands shot up,
one of the speakers, a progressive city-council member, announced that he
would take no questions. He waved off the uproar that ensued. It was just like
the opt-out “education session” my wife had attended: The deal was done.
There was only one truth.
De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics
of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let
them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-
bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million.
One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Per-
fectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written
Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the
name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.
The legacy of racism, together with a false meritocracy in America
today that keeps children trapped where they are, is the root cause of the
in equalities in the city’s schools. But calling out racism and getting rid of
objective standards won’t create real equality or close the achievement gap,
and might have the perverse eff ect of making it worse by driving out families
of all races who cling to an idea of education based on real merit. If integra-
tion is a necessary condition for equality, it isn’t suffi cient. Equality is too
important to be left to an ideology that rejects universal values.IN MIDDLE SCHOOL our son immediately made friends with the
same kind of kids who had been his friends in elementary school—outsiders—
including Latino boys from the district’s poorest neighborhood. One day he
told us about the “N-word passes” that were being exchanged among other
boys he knew—a system in which a black kid, bartering for some item, would
allow a white kid to use the word. We couldn’t believe such a thing existed, but
it did. When one white boy kept using his pass all day long, our son grabbed
the imaginary piece of paper and ripped it to shreds. He and his friends heard
the offi cial language of moral instruction so often that it became a source of
irony and teasing: “Hey, dude, you really need to check your privilege.” When
his teacher assigned students to write about how they felt about their identity,
letting the class know that whiteness was a source of guilt for her, our son told
her that he couldn’t do it. The assignment was too personal, and it didn’t leave
enough space for him to describe all that made him who he was.
“Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one
day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?” He was respond-
ing as kids do when adults keep telling them what to think. He had what my
wife called unpoliticized empathy.
Watching your children grow up gives you a startlingly vivid image of
the world you’re going to leave them. I can’t say I’m sanguine. Some days
the image fi lls me with dread. That pragmatic genius for which Americans
used to be known and admired, which included a talent for educating our
young—how did it desert us? Now we’re stewing in anxiety and anger, fever-
ish with bad ideas, too absorbed in our own failures to spare our children. But
one day the fever will break, and by then they’ll be grown, and they will have
to discover for themselves how to live together in a country that gives every
child an equal chance.George Packer is an Atlantic staff writer. His most recent books are
Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century
and The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.