Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
O’Sullivan, a Burlington Democrat, didn’t actually call Kilmartin a racist. But what she said came close enough, and Kilmartin, a Newport Republican, had a right to feel offended.
For those old enough – and Kilmartin, born in 1942, is – racism evokes images of dogs snarling at peaceful demonstrators, of American citizens being murdered for trying to vote, of governors blocking access to schoolhouse doors.
The word is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as, “the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.”
If any Vermonters still believe that, they are probably not in the Legislature, and if any of them are, Duncan Kilmartin is surely not among them.
But however clumsily she expressed herself, O’Sullivan had a point when she objected to what Kilmartin said, not because it was racist, but because it was wrong.
Wrong in this case does not mean inaccurate. What Kilmartin said was neither inaccurate nor uncommon. He was making a point frequently made by one political faction in Vermont’s continuing debate over public education.
That faction argues the very high scores Vermont pupils get on standardized tests don’t prove that the schools are doing a good job. It isn’t the schools that deserve credit for the high scores, they say, it’s the kids. They’re easy to teach because almost all of them are white, and white students have high scores all over the country.
Kilmartin had the numbers right. For example, in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests, often called “the nation’s report card,” non-Hispanic white fourth-graders in Texas scored 255 in math, well above the 228 score of Vermont’s fourth-graders.
But that disparity does nothing to disprove that Vermont schools are good. So are Texas schools. Not only do their white kids outscore Vermont’s, their Hispanic pupils get higher NAEP scores than their counterparts in New York or Illinois.
Disaggregating test scores by race is just what enraged Jean O’Sullivan, who told the House members that “conflating academic achievement with race is offensive to me and to everybody.”
It shouldn’t be. Recognizing the lower test scores of minority students is realistic, not racist. If anything, refusing to recognize them – however good-hearted that refusal may be – verges on racism. Here, refusal is denial, the denial of hundreds of years of real racism – diminished but by no means obliterated – and the disaster it wrought.
It wrought a world in which blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians are far more likely to be poor or near-poor, with all the social pathologies of the poor everywhere: alcoholism and drug abuse, teenage single parents, malnutrition and obesity, low education levels, bad jobs or none and the despair that all that breeds.
And – surprise, surprise – kids raised in such an environment get lower test scores.
No matter the color of their skin.
It is money – or, more accurately, the lack thereof – not race that is the key variable in test scores. You want to know why Texas non-Hispanic white kids have higher test scores than Vermonters? Texas non-Hispanic whites are richer than Vermonters. The median income of white, Anglo, Texas households, according to the Texas Politics website of the University of Texas at Austin, is $60,000 a year.
In Vermont? $52,977 in 2012.
That strongly suggests, if it does not conclusively prove, that Texas has fewer low-income non-Hispanic whites than Vermont. Conclusive proof could come from a racial breakdown of the percentage of pupils eligible for free or reduced-price school meals. But Texas does not break out its meal-eligible school population by race.
Like almost every state, Vermont has to deal with a segment of its population that is low-income, poorly educated and therefore vulnerable to all those social pathologies – alcoholism, drug abuse, teen pregnancy and more. For instance, Vermont has one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates in the country. But the Vermont teens who do get pregnant come from poor or low-income families. Health Department statistics show that three-quarters of the Vermont teens who gave birth in 2010 lived below the federal poverty line.
Many more are not quite poor but are low-income, as are the 29 percent of Vermont pupils who are eligible for free meals at school. That’s lower than in most states, but it’s comparable to the other affluent states in the Northeast such as Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts, the states challenging Vermont as the highest scorers on the NAEP.
The difference is that in those states a disproportionate share of the meal-eligible kids are black or Hispanic. In Vermont, they are almost all white. But the kids are just as hard to teach as if they were non-white, and like others raised amid poverty and despair, their test scores are lower. Assuming for the moment that standardized test scores accurately measure the quality of public schools, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that Vermont’s public schools are doing rather a good job.
Because they oppose the school funding system, some people don’t want to acknowledge this. They may be right about the funding system, and no doubt the schools could be better. But dismissing the high test scores as merely the product of Vermont’s whiteness takes them and everyone down a treacherous path.
Nothing is more central to American history and culture than white supremacy. Even in its disgrace, its power lingers, so pervasive that it need not be heard or seen to distort. It’s part of our society’s background hum.
Sort of like assuming that white kids get higher scores. Because … well, because they’re white kids.
Duncan Kilmartin didn’t say that, and wouldn’t have said it. But nobody has to say it. It’s part of the background hum. It isn’t just legislators who should keep that in mind. It’s everybody.
