Education should be the ultimate meritocracy. Those who work hardest to learn the most and who can apply what they’ve learned should advance in the educational system. This rule if you want to put it like that should apply to everyone no matter what their skin colour or race or creed. A meritocratic education system is also a guarantee of equality of opportunity as everyone has a chance to climb aboard the learning train and move forward.

It could be argued and this would apply to both the USA and the United Kingdom that merit and equality are not as practised as they should be in education institutions. In academia for example like all too often hires like and this is why so many university departments, especially in the humanities are dominated by leftists. These hires have not been made because of academic achievement or for great and original thinking by the person who has been employed, but because the hire thinks in a similar way politically to the person who is doing the recruitment. To hire on the grounds of political bias is to disregard both merit and equality of opportunity.

These problems of like hiring like and thereby entrenching a political view in an academic institution or a profession such as that of education have been going on for years. In the USA this has resulted in the education profession leaning almost entirely to the Left. One study I saw from the free market think tank the Pacific Research Institute claimed that in English teachers there were 97 Democrat supporters to every three Republicans. Now of course not every one of these Democrat teachers and education staff will be of the far Left persuasion. But in my view having such a lack of viewpoint and intellectual diversity in a profession gives the far Left a large sea to swim in and a trade union power-base which allows them to wield a large amount of political influence, far more than their support outside of their profession in terms of electoral would justify.

The result of creating what looks all too much like a mono-thought clique in the education sector and removing the restraining influence of contrary views that are and should be treated and accepted as equally valid as their own, has created a Left that has become what it once deplored. In some cases the Left has become a political movement making decisions based not on a person’s merit as an individual or because of their achievements, but on a person’s race. I’m old enough to remember the British manifestation of the old anti-racist Left and they were people who I respected, people who truly believed that we were all G-d’s creatures and who wanted the world of MLK’s dream to be made flesh. But the Left now and especially the American Left? I can’t respect what those who claim to be anti-racist in some parts of today’s Left have become. How could I? After all in some cases, as the subject of this From Elsewhere piece that is linked below says, ‘individuals now find that their skin colour ends up being more important than their hard work.’

The ‘From Elsewhere’ article which is from Unherd magazine and written by Asra Q. Nomani tells a horrible story of how Asian-Americans are being discriminated against and ‘scapegoated’ by Leftist educators because their children’s hard work has seen them progress in greater numbers than members of some other groups. In some US states educators have attempted to impose racial quotas on high achieving schools in order to dilute the number of Asian Americans who attend them. This has, according to Ms Nomani, resulted in a rise in drop outs from these schools by pupils who, admitted to these advanced schools by means of being part of a quota, were ill prepared for the workload and advanced subject matter taught by the school.

Ms Nomani said that following the death of George Floyd some parts of the Left engaged on a orgy of virtue signalling which was connected to the subject of school admissions. Racial activists claimed that Black and Hispanic children were not getting their ‘fair share’ of places at high achieving and academically advanced schools, the inference being that there was an element of racial discrimination in deciding who got to go to which school. Leftist activists then claimed that Asian-Americans whose children were attending one particular school were ‘white adjacent’ and ‘needed to check their privileges’ and were ‘resource hoarders’.

The Leftist activists who attacked the Asian-American parents could not understand and would not understand that these Asian-American kids got into these good schools because of how hard they worked both to get there and to stay there. Like in many American Jewish communities, Asian Americans see education as a way out of the poverty that many immigrant groups in the USA had to deal with when they were first generation migrants. Education is a way to advance in a society to have a better life than your parents had and both Asian-Americans and Jews as far as I can make out, respect, seek out and work hard at learning. In the case of the schools that Ms Nomani discusses the Asian-American children got into this sought after school on merit, that should be quite plain to see. But there are elements on the Left who believe that they are being racially preferred even though such a belief is absolute bollocks.

It’s disturbing to see the return of racial quotas in US education. It’s disturbing because it has happened before. Many US universities had either publicly stated policies that limited the number of Jews allowed to attend or had, like Harvard from the mid 1920’s geographical admissions policies that favoured students from outside of areas where there were many Jews. The ‘problem’ as university governors had at the time was that the Jews were doing too well in education. Because of the fact that there is an inherent respect for education in Jewish communities and education was seen as a way of escaping the ghettoes that sprung up in places like New York a lot of the students who were admitted on merit were Jewish and this was not acceptable at a time when open hatred of Jews was both more often expressed and socially approved of than it is in many Western countries today.

It appears that currently the Asian-Americans, whose heritage can be from anywhere from the Middle East to Japan, are being considered as ‘doing too well’ at education and are being treated as a ‘problem’ for educators in a similar way to how Jews were considered a century ago. The difference today is that it is not cultural and religiously inspired anti-Semites that are trying to control the numbers of Jews in their universities. Instead it’s Marxism inspired self-described and often self appointed ‘anti-racists’ targeting another demographic group with similar quotas and similar opprobrium aimed at a different minority group, this time the Asian-Americans that doing well with regards to education. It’s not ‘racism’ for there to be an overwhelming number of Asian-Americans or Jews in the higher echelons of the education system, this is a product of cultures that are profoundly pro-education both as an end in itself and as a means of escaping poverty, discrimination or to improve both an individual and a family’s life chances.

It’s not racism that has caused high achieving schools to be in the present time in some parts of the USA dominated by Asian-Americans just as Jews were overrepresented in higher and more advanced education in the past. There are two reasons for this being the case as I see it. The first is that education is valued by Asian-Americans to a greater degree than members of some other groups and secondly the parental support that Asian-American kids get makes up to a large degree for the deficiencies in the US state provided school system.

From what I can gather reading around, the US state school system leaves a lot to be desired. It has inadequately prepared some children especially from some minority groups such as Black Americans and Latino Americans for higher learning and without parental support to counteract the poor quality of teaching and learning that occurs in state schools, it’s very difficult from children from these groups in particular to access those schools that recruit on academic merit. The answer as I see it to the perceived imbalance in groups attending more advanced schools, is not to be found in socially engineering schools to reflect some racial balance artificially decided upon by leftist teachers. At least one part of the answer is to be found by improving the quality of education that American children, no matter what their race or creed, receive in schools from Early Years onwards. What might also help is the mentoring of children by ‘success story’ individuals who have achieved their life goals by means of education in order to inculcate a better respect for what education can provide for an individual. Encouraging parental support is a bit more difficult especially when you have communities where single parenthood is the norm in particular where that single parent may be working two or more jobs in order to survive. Knackered and drained women who have to be both mother and father to their children are obviously not going to have the time or energy to do all the things that parental support of a child’s education demands.

On the subject of race based rather than merit based school admission systems Ms Nomani said:

This process doesn’t just harm Asian American students. Despite increasing the enrolment of black and Hispanic students, schools like TJ put little effort into preparing them for their advanced academic classes. In school district enrolment figures made public for the first time, eight freshmen students, admitted through the new race-based admissions process, dropped out of TJ over just five months, between September 2021 and January 2022 (in the entire school year before, just one student dropped out). Changing admissions processes of outstanding schools does nothing to address the systemic failure of the education system to ensure these students are ready for rigorous training in Maths and Science. It also insults and demeans the achievements of black and Hispanic students who get into schools like Lowell and TJ through sacrifice and achievement. The message is clear: stop trying so hard. (The school district claims its new admissions process is “race neutral.”)

I must admit that it says a lot about the US state school system that the kids imposed on the school in order to achieve a particular racial and communal balance have to have remedial classes to prepare them for more advanced work. The children that have been placed in this school by dint of skin colour rather than academic achievement must have been given a significant negative psychological impact by being told that they were of an ability to attend this particular school when plainly they were not. This leftist social engineering experiment seems to have been a disaster not just for the children who were put there when they were not able to cope but also for the Asian Americans who lost out on places that they and their children had worked hard for because those places had been reallocated on a racial basis by school and education authorities. It is certainly as Ms Nomani says an admissions policy that insults those from Black and Latino households whose kids have worked hard to get into a particular school.

So far this tale looks like too many others when it comes to the educational system. It could be the usual tale of arrogant teaching staff and educationalists imposing radically left wing policies on an area’s schools with the parents and children who object being told to put up and shut up lest they be smeared as ‘racists’. But in this case the parents organised and fought back using the legal measures that they had available to them and scored a massive win against the left dominated education profession. Parents, many of them first generation or second generation immigrants to the USA from places like India, managed to force a recall election for the local education authority. This resulted in the defeat of those School Board members who had not only pushed for racially biased admissions policies but who also refused to reopen schools during the pandemic even though by the time that parents were demanding that schools be reopened fully Covid was starting to come under control.

Hopefully this win for parents on the West Coast of America will inspire others who are fighting similar battles against racially biased admissions systems right across the USA, often imposed by far Left Democrats, which are attacking the very roots of a merit based education system. Leftist educationalists are using race, along with strained and biased classifications of Asian-Americans as not being ‘people of colour’ even if a fair proportion of them are Brown Indians, as a means of reducing the number of Asian-Americans in good schools and therefore the good universities that attendance at a high achieving school gives access to.

What has happened regarding the plight of Asian-American parents who have seen merit replaced by other admission criteria is clearly in my mind racism. The Left are treating Asian parents and their children as if they are in possession of some unearned privilege when the reality is that these parents and their children have worked hard to earn their places. I’m both shocked and disgusted at the naked racialism expressed by the Left and Leftist educational practitioners that Ms Nomani has exposed in her piece. I’m also of a similar view with regards to the destruction of something that provides genuine equality of opportunity to every child and to every family regardless of skin colour, religion or starting position in life which is school admission based on merit.

I’m horrified at such naked racism towards Asian-Americans from the Left. However I’m not surprised as I’ve seen the Left or at least parts of it, sadly the most influential parts, increasingly embrace various forms of racialism. This includes assigning hero or villain status to different groups according to skin colour or some other reason unrelated to the conduct, attitudes or achievements of the individual members of said group. Today the far leftists who seem to be in complete control of some US educational authorities, are attacking Asian-Americans and their children in order to force reality to comply with dogma. But tomorrow it may be another group under attack, another group being unjustly accused of having ‘privilege’ merely because they and their children worked hard and tried to succeed on merit. If you destroy merit in education you remove the one ladder that bright children have available to escape poverty and otherwise poor life chances. That there are avowed leftists who wish to destroy merit based education systems and use far worse criteria to make school and college admission choices should enrage even the most reasonable and pacific of person. Admitting or not admitting a person to a school or a university on the grounds of their race or religion is something that I had hoped that America had left in its past and indeed it appeared to have done so. Unfortunately it appears that the far Left whose influence in education services appears to be unbounded, are bringing back the sort of racial considerations for education admission that were once thought to be long and thankfully dead. In America the so called anti-racists of the Left are behaving little differently from the racists that they claim at a high volume, to oppose.