Equality in Misery

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 15, 2023

 

Nothing illustrates the perversity of the “equity” agenda and its hostility toward the exceptional and exemplary quite like progressive officials’ efforts to cut overachievers down to size for the imagined benefit of everyone else. Chicago’s chief social engineer, Mayor Brandon Johnson, is only the latest to join that crusade.

 

In his pursuit of a more equitable status quo, Johnson plans to dismantle his city’s selective-enrollment schools, thereby reducing the prospects for competition among students and rendering all of Chicago’s schoolkids equal insofar as they would all be shackled to the same underperforming system.

 

Johnson’s board of education assured Chicagoans that the reforms it is pursuing won’t shutter the city’s selective schools. Rather, the plan is designed to dismantle the “stratification and inequity in Chicago Public Schools,” the board’s CEO said. The advantages enjoyed by high-achieving students in facilities with discriminating admissions policies amount to “educational apartheid,” read a statement from the Chicago Teachers Union welcoming the reforms. This charged and evocative language emphasizes the noble intentions of the reformers over the effects of their reforms, the foremost of which is to steal from Chicago’s more accomplished students the opportunity for educational advancement.

 

The dirty secret of the equity agenda is most readily apparent in its educational reforms. It is far easier for governments to handicap the proficient than it is to better the circumstances of people who, for whatever reason, struggle through life. The demands of equity as a societal organizing principle do not allow policy-makers to carefully evaluate whether their interventions into the minutiae of public life would help more than they would hurt. Policy-makers must act for action’s sake. Inaction is tantamount to acceptance of or even tacit complicity with a wholly oppressive status quo. So, they act, often with reckless disregard for the unintended consequences of their initiatives.

 

Johnson and his school board are, however, traipsing lightly into a political minefield. Toward the end of former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure, his administration’s attempt to do away with the city’s advanced-placement programs activated previously languid voting blocs in opposition to this progressive initiative. De Blasio’s stubborn commitment to this aspect of the equity agenda contributed mightily to Eric Adams’s victory in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary despite the hostility toward his candidacy from the progressive activist class.

 

When it comes to crime prevention, illegal immigration, and a half dozen other hot-button issues, Chicago’s voters have proven themselves pigheadedly committed to a set of near-suicidal public policies. But the city is now drafting those voters’ kids into a grand experiment that is more likely than not to imperil their prospects for future success. Will the city simply absorb this latest assault on the social compact, all in the name of equity? We will soon find out.