The Schools Are Failing Black Children and the Teachers’ Unions Know It

In the city of Baltimore, in the year 2023, there were twenty-three schools in which not a single student — not one child in the entire building — tested proficient in mathematics. I want you to hold that sentence in your mind for a moment and resist the impulse to move past it, because the sheer enormity of what it describes tends to slide off the consciousness like water off stone, and the people who run these schools are counting on exactly that. Twenty-three schools. Zero percent proficiency. These are not schools in the sense that any reasonable person understands the word. They are buildings where children are sent for seven hours a day to be warehoused in the presence of adults who are being paid, through their union contracts, salaries and benefits and pensions that many of those children’s parents will never earn, to produce absolutely nothing.

This is not a story about Baltimore alone. It is Baltimore and Detroit and Cleveland and Milwaukee and St. Louis and Gary and Newark and dozens of other American cities where the school system has become, for Black children, a machine that consumes resources and produces failure with an efficiency that would be impressive if it were not catastrophic.

The Numbers That Should End Careers

The National Assessment of Educational Progress — the NAEP, known as the Nation’s Report Card — is the only nationally representative, continuing assessment of American students, and it has been measuring what children know and can do since 1969. The 2022 results, the most recent comprehensive data available, paint a picture of Black educational achievement that is not merely troubling but constitutes, by any honest reckoning, a humanitarian crisis occurring inside the borders of the wealthiest nation in human history.

Nationally, only 15% of Black eighth graders scored proficient or above in reading. Only 11% scored proficient in mathematics. These are not cherry-picked metrics from an outlier year — these numbers have been roughly stable, with modest fluctuations, for two decades. In some urban districts, the numbers are worse. In Detroit, 4% of eighth graders were proficient in math. In Cleveland, 5%. In Milwaukee, 7%.

To be clear about what “not proficient” means: it does not mean the student earned a B instead of an A. It means the student cannot demonstrate competency at the basic level expected for their grade. An eighth grader who is not proficient in reading cannot reliably comprehend a newspaper article. An eighth grader who is not proficient in math cannot perform operations that are prerequisites for any form of higher education or skilled employment. These children are being processed through a system that is issuing them diplomas that certify nothing, preparing them for futures that have been foreclosed before they reach adulthood.

And the adults responsible for this — the administrators, the school boards, the union officials, the politicians who fund the system and receive its political contributions — will retire with full pensions.

The Proof That It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

If the failure of traditional public schools in Black communities were an inevitable consequence of poverty, or of structural racism, or of some immutable condition that no institution could overcome, then we might reasonably throw up our hands and declare the problem unsolvable. But it is not unsolvable. We know it is not unsolvable because there are schools, operating in the same neighborhoods, serving the same children, drawing from the same zip codes, that are producing world-class results. And the existence of these schools is the most damning indictment of the traditional system imaginable, because it eliminates every excuse.

Success Academy, the charter school network founded by Eva Moskowitz in New York City, operates 47 schools serving approximately 20,000 students, the vast majority of whom are Black and Latino, the vast majority of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. In 2023, 85% of Success Academy students passed the state math exam, compared to 38% statewide. In English Language Arts, 68% of Success Academy students were proficient, compared to 47% statewide. These schools do not merely close the achievement gap — they obliterate it. Success Academy students in Harlem outperform students in Scarsdale, one of the wealthiest districts in New York State.

Same children. Same zip codes. Same demographic profile that produces single-digit proficiency rates in the traditional public schools across the street. The variable that changed is the institution — the curriculum, the expectations, the culture of the school, the accountability of the teachers, and the willingness to remove adults who cannot perform.

KIPP — the Knowledge Is Power Program — operates 280 schools serving over 100,000 students nationally, predominantly Black and Latino. A longitudinal study of KIPP alumni found that 45% of students who completed a KIPP middle school earned a four-year college degree within six years of high school graduation, compared to a national average of approximately 34% and a rate of roughly 11% for low-income students nationally. KIPP is not producing miracles. It is producing competence, consistently, at scale, in precisely the communities where the traditional system produces failure.

The Political Machine That Prevents Change

If the solutions exist — and they do, demonstrably, replicably, at scale — then the question is not educational. It is political. Why, in a country that spends more per pupil than nearly any nation on earth, are Black children trapped in schools that produce zero percent proficiency? The answer is money, and the money flows in one direction.

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers are, collectively, among the largest political contributors in the United States. Between 2004 and 2022, the NEA and AFT together contributed over $370 million to political campaigns, with over 94% going to Democratic candidates and committees. They are the backbone of Democratic Party infrastructure in every major city in America. They provide campaign contributions, voter mobilization, and organized political support that no urban Democratic politician can afford to lose.

In exchange, these unions receive something of incalculable value: protection from accountability. Union contracts in most major urban school districts make it functionally impossible to fire an underperforming teacher. In New York City, the process of removing a tenured teacher for incompetence takes an average of three to five years and costs the district hundreds of thousands of dollars per case. In many districts, teachers who have been removed from the classroom for cause continue to receive full pay while sitting in reassignment centers — rubber rooms, in the parlance of the system — because the union contract requires it.

The unions oppose charter schools. They oppose voucher programs. They oppose merit pay. They oppose any mechanism by which the performance of individual teachers might be measured, compared, and used to make employment decisions. They do this not because they believe these reforms would fail — the data on charters, in particular, makes that position intellectually untenable — but because these reforms threaten the monopoly that funds their political operation. Every child who leaves a traditional public school for a charter takes per-pupil funding with them. Every charter school that succeeds is proof that the traditional system’s failure is a choice, not a fate.

The Parents Who Are Denied a Choice

Here is perhaps the cruelest dimension of this entire arrangement: the parents know. Black parents in these communities are not fooled. They are not passively accepting the failure of their children’s schools. They are fighting for alternatives, and the system is denying them.

In New York City alone, more than 50,000 students sit on waiting lists for charter schools. In cities across the country — Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia — the demand for charter school seats vastly exceeds supply. These are parents, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, who have looked at the traditional public school assigned to their child, assessed its track record, and concluded that it is not good enough. They are exercising the same judgment that wealthy parents exercise when they choose private schools or move to districts with better public schools. The only difference is that they cannot afford to buy their way out, and the political system that claims to represent them is blocking the exits.

Eva Moskowitz, the founder of Success Academy, has fought a years-long battle with New York City’s political establishment over the most basic resource a school needs: space. When Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014, he immediately moved to block Success Academy from using public school building space — co-location, the arrangement by which charter schools share buildings with traditional schools. His stated reason was equity. His actual reason was that the United Federation of Teachers, which had spent heavily to elect him, viewed Success Academy as an existential threat, not because it was failing, but precisely because it was succeeding, in buildings where the traditional schools had failed for decades.

The governor at the time, Andrew Cuomo, intervened to protect charter school co-locations through state legislation, but the pattern — union-aligned politicians working to limit the alternatives available to Black parents — repeats in city after city. The parents want choice. The system that claims to serve them denies it. And the children pay.

What Excellence Once Looked Like

Thomas Sowell, in his meticulous historical research, documented a case that demolishes every assumption embedded in the current educational establishment’s excuse-making apparatus: Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. From 1870 to the 1950s, Dunbar was an all-Black, segregated public school that produced graduates who went on to attend Harvard, Amherst, Oberlin, and other elite institutions at rates that most white schools of the era could not match. Its alumni included the first Black general, the first Black federal judge, the first Black cabinet member, and the first Black senator since Reconstruction.

Dunbar achieved these results during legal segregation, with funding that was a fraction of what white schools received, with textbooks that were hand-me-downs from the white schools across town. It did not have diversified revenue streams or trauma-informed pedagogy or culturally responsive curriculum frameworks or any of the other jargon that the modern educational establishment deploys to explain why it cannot teach Black children to read. What it had was a rigorous classical curriculum, teachers who held doctoral degrees and refused to accept excuses, discipline that was strict and consistent, and an institutional culture that communicated, in every interaction, that these Black children were expected to compete with and surpass anyone in the country.

What happened to Dunbar? Sowell documents the decline with characteristic precision. In the 1950s, under the influence of progressive educational theory, the school’s strict academic standards were relaxed. Tracking was eliminated. Discipline was loosened. The expectation of excellence was replaced by the expectation of inclusion, and within a generation, Dunbar went from a nationally recognized academic institution to just another failing urban school. The building remained. The neighborhood remained. The children remained. What changed was the culture of expectation — and with it, everything.

The Real Question

The question that this evidence forces us to confront is not whether Black children can learn at the highest levels. That question has been answered, definitively, by Dunbar and Success Academy and KIPP and dozens of other institutions that have produced excellence from the same communities where the traditional system produces illiteracy. The question is why we tolerate a system that fails, not occasionally or partially, but comprehensively and continuously, to educate Black children — and why the political coalition that claims to fight for Black advancement is the same coalition that protects the institutions most responsible for Black educational failure.

This is the question that no one in the Democratic Party establishment wants to answer, because the answer indicts its most important constituency. The teachers’ unions provide money, organization, and votes. Black families provide votes. When the interests of those two constituencies conflict — and on education, they conflict fundamentally — the party chooses the unions, every time, in every city, without exception. And the cost is borne by Black children who cannot read.

There is a phrase in education policy circles: “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It was coined by a speechwriter and adopted by a president, and like many political phrases, it has been repeated so often that its meaning has been sanded down to nothing. But the original insight was correct, and it is more relevant now than when it was first articulated. The traditional public school system in America’s Black communities has institutionalized low expectations. It has built a bureaucratic infrastructure around the assumption that these children cannot achieve, that poverty is destiny, that the best we can do is manage the decline. And the unions have made that infrastructure permanent, because permanence is profitable.

The Sentence

There is a body of research, now extensive and essentially uncontested, that identifies third-grade reading proficiency as the single most important inflection point in a child’s educational trajectory. A child who cannot read at grade level by the end of third grade is four times more likely to drop out of high school. For Black and Latino children who are not reading proficiently by third grade, the dropout rate approaches 50%. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has tracked this data for decades, describes third-grade reading as the point at which children transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” — and those who do not make that transition are functionally locked out of academic progress from that point forward.

Every child who reaches fourth grade unable to read has been sentenced — not by a judge, not by a jury, but by a system that took custody of their education and produced nothing. Sentenced to a life of diminished possibility, of narrowed options, of economic marginality that will compound across generations. And the adults who administered that sentence — the teachers who could not teach, the administrators who could not manage, the union officials who protected incompetence, the politicians who funded the failure and received the contributions — those adults will face no consequences at all.

I said at the beginning that this is not merely a failure of education. It is a failure of politics. But it is more than that. It is a failure of love. Because a community that loved its children — that loved them with the ferocity and the clarity that love requires — would not permit a single one of them to sit in a classroom for seven years and emerge unable to read. It would not permit a political party to trade their futures for union support. It would not permit a system that has produced decades of documented failure to continue operating without fundamental change. It would burn the system down and build something that works, because there are schools that work, and their existence proves that every child sitting in a school that does not work is there by political choice, not educational necessity.

Every child who cannot read by third grade has been sentenced to a life of diminished possibility, and the adults who permitted it — who funded it, who protected it, who elected it — bear a responsibility that no amount of progressive rhetoric can absolve. The schools exist that prove Black children can learn anything. The data exists that proves the traditional system is failing them. The only thing that does not exist is the political will to choose children over coalitions. And until that will emerges — until Black communities demand it with a force that no campaign contribution can outweigh — the sentencing will continue, one child at a time, one classroom at a time, one year at a time, in buildings that we call schools but that function, for the children trapped inside them, as the most efficient engines of inequality that American ingenuity has ever produced.