If you can read this, you probably aren’t a young Black person in Oakland, where, according to ABC News, only one in three Oakland students can read at grade level. Studies find that African-American students read at the lowest level, (20.9%) of proficient or advanced, while Whites are at the the highest level (68%).
That doesn’t bode well for the future. The U.S. Dept. of Education determined that “2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare.” Moreover, “85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate” and “More than 60 percent of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate.”
When the California Department of Education released data for the 2024-25 school year and found that only 33.7 percent of Oakland students met reading standards for their respective grade level, the Oakland Unified School District, embarrassed yet again, announced a new plan for “rising literacy rates.” OUSD’s Language and Literacy Framework for kindergarten through grade 5 stresses that “it must be our collective call as Oakland educators to guarantee the basic right of literacy for every student, especially Black, Brown, English Language Learner (ELL) students…”. It calls for “critical equity practices that should be infused through all literacy instruction to ensure culturally sustaining, empowering experiences for all students, including our most marginalized communities.”
Think about that. The ideal outcome for a literacy program in Oakland is not getting children to read. No, it’s more of the dreary “equity” stuff that emphasizes “culturally sustaining, empowering experiences” for young students of color. Remember ebonics? The fools behind that also claimed to want “equity” in education, but it didn’t work out too well for anyone.
Perhaps the most telltale phrase in OUSD’s Language and Literacy Framework is its goal to“interrupt deficit thinking,” which the district defines as “self work to understand our biases and how we participate in systems of oppression.” This “work” is aimed, not at the students themselves but at their “oppressors,” the racial majority that, according to progressives, forces its structural racism on children of color. The Oakland Unified School District remains mired in a 1970s-era Black Panther ideology, long since discredited, that claims that the enemy of Black youth is White racism. Not the fact that too many Black parents (usually single moms) are raising kids devoid of the values that truly empower children to be successful adults. As one commenter on Reddit noted, “When you have parents who don’t really know how to read or don’t value it or denigrate kids who are interested in school, the kids pick up on those values and are uninterested or hostile to what teachers are teaching.” This is why the Oakland NAACP issued a scathing indictment of the Oakland Unified School District: “Our students are not receiving the free and appropriate education they need to successfully navigate college, careers, societal institutions, or opportunities to be of service to the Oakland community…Without the ability to read, they are denied learning and denied the opportunity to identify, cultivate, and leverage their talents in whichever way they choose. The failure of OUSD to educate our students has resulted in reduced earning potential, racialized health disparities and communities vulnerable to gentrification.”
And yet the literacy gap between Black students, on the one hand, and White and Asian students, on the other, is consistently derided by progressives at OUSD as fake, or caused by racism, or due to insufficient funding to schools. As a Black blogger puts it, “If you listen to some voices in education policy, especially those who claim to be the closest allies of Black and Brown communities, we shouldn’t pay attention to these gaps. Measuring, even mentioning, these gaps just reinforces inequality, these ‘allies’ claim. [But] observing this fact and finding it unacceptable is not racist. Indeed, to excuse it away with some virtue-signaling waving of hands is racist.”
I’ll close with a comment someone made on a YouTube video on OUSD’s failure to educate children: “Maybe ‘DEI’ and ‘Social Justice’ and ‘Critical Theory’ and ‘Wokeism’ and affirmative action and restorative justice and BLM are the problem? Just wondering?” I think a lot of us wonder the same thing.
Steve Heimoff