Steve Sailer writes: My old friend Raymond Wolters, a professor of history at the U. of Delaware for 50 years, has come back from five months in the hospital waiting for his lung transplant to write the first narrative account to make sense of the fads and fashions that have roiled K–12 public schools since the failure of forced busing to prove a panacea for racial disparities in school achievement: The Long Crusade: Profiles in Education Reform, 1967–2014.
I’m biased in favor of The Long Crusade, in part because I didn’t have much hope that Professor Wolters would live through his health woes to write it, in part because I am quoted a few dozen times in it.
(By the way, seeing myself quoted alongside more respectable figures, I have to admit that I really do come across as a sarcastic bastard. The author has to occasionally apologize for my deplorable tone, but in the second half of the book, as he focuses on 21st-century ed reform, he repeatedly uses quotes from me as his cleanup hitter to explain in clear language what really is going on.)
Despite my obvious prejudices, trust me, The Long Crusade is really good.
Wolters’ new book is a sequel to his 2009 critical history of the post–Brown v. Board of Education era, Race and Education, 1954–2007, a rare history of integration in the public schools written from a skeptical perspective (including the normally forgotten voices of white children burdened with attending newly desegregated schools).
In The Long Crusade, Wolters recounts the careers of nine education-reform stars, along with three critics (two from the racial-realist camp).
Liberals control the telling of the past, using each anniversary to recycle their myths and further distort what really happened. So Wolters’ careful chronicles are extremely valuable in providing an alternative history that accords far better with how I remember what went on than the conventional wisdom about the past typically extruded by young, historically illiterate journalists. “Because we’re not supposed to think honestly about the The Gap, nothing much ever gets accomplished to make schooling better for everybody.”
I’ve been following education statistics since 1972 when the highest performers were Orientals, followed by Caucasians, then Chicanos, and finally Afro-Americans. So not much has changed other than the labels, despite the confident promises of countless reformers to fix The Gap real soon now.
The book shows how the dominant obsession of the past half century has been The Gap. Every few years a new prophet arises proclaiming that this time we’ll get blacks and Hispanics to learn as much as whites and Asians. Because we’re not supposed to think honestly about the The Gap, nothing much ever gets accomplished to make schooling better for everybody.
