My own teenage daughter read the column and, with evident disgust (which I suppose, could have been induced by hysteria) said of Flanagan: “It’s like she is just saying ‘Who cares what happens to teenage boys!’ She doesn’t bother to find out why these girls reacted this way, or what other factors might have been involved…the only common feature was their craziness!”

“Girls look weak and susceptible,” she added, “Flanagan makes them look like delicate creatures!” Even at 16, provoked by such insults perhaps, she got it. To treat these females’  behaviors as “extreme and bizarre psychological symptoms” you’d have to be (in my daughter’s words), “looking for extreme behaviors only in girls, just refusing to see anything boys did as hysterical or extreme!”

She said it better than I could have and made me realize why a critique of Flanagan’s points belongs in a blog about STEM equity: Because Flanagan so blithely denies that social structures may set girls up to see themselves as less sturdy than boys, promoting such stress reactions.

Moreover, essentialist expectations of female weakness and incapacity like those Flanagan broadcasts might precondition girls to see themselves as innately physically or psychologically vulnerable. Her perhaps sincere sympathy for the suffering girls in fact  perpetuates such disempowering myths, not least by utterly ignoring the social, educational and economic inequities with which so many young women live.

Are some, or even most, teens emotionally vulnerable? Of course. Do conditions of impending adulthood, or poverty, or war, put people (of any age) in a position of psychological unsteadiness? Without question. But the presumption that we should not be surprised when girls or women reveal such vulnerability because it is inherent in their femaleness is to set the cause of women’s rights, and equal participation in social and cultural institutions of all kinds, back by decades.  Read this quote from the column and see if you agree with me that this might have been exactly Flanagan’s intention:

“Hysteria is the most retrograde and non-womyn-empowering condition. It’s not supposed to happen anymore (we have Title IX!), but it won’t seem to go away.”

“Won’t seem to go away”?? With folks like Flanagan treating psychological upset as gender-derived, primarily biological, and devoid of social or political cause,  it’s no wonder.

This message counters old stigmas associated with two-year technical programming, and I think it holds some promise for more inclusive STEM education writ large. Obama is associating community colleges,  at least rhetorically, with the promised science- and tech-based manufacturing resurgence…that is, with technical novelty and innovation. We are meant to leave behind our image of utilitarian “vo-tech” uplift,  and start picturing classrooms full of intellectual energy and achievement.  I could be caught up in the glow myself, of course, but it feels like the President is leveraging our cultural tendency to venerate high-tech in order to bring new respect to its students and teachers, even or especially in what has previously been seen by elite Americans as a second-best educational sphere.

In particular, Obama praised industry/school partnerships in which firms send employees to school for training or retraining in emerging technical fields.  He welcomed as his guest Jackie Bray,  who had found a renewed career through one such program run by Siemens at its Charlotte, NC,  ”Energy Hub,” and although it remained a pretty vague directive, he called on Congress to provide the resources that would support such initiatives across the country.

And, he did all this early in the speech, when the largest audience could be guaranteed to hear it.

We mustn’t forget, of course, that job-focused education is not an unalloyed good, and that the possibility of transfer into bachelor’s programs must be built into the two-year curricula if we are sincerely to pursue educational and job equity in America. Four-year and graduate schools increasingly become options only for the affluent and we must not paper over that trend with feel-good rhetoric; people of limited economic means are turned away from the pursuit of bachelor’s degrees as a matter of course in this country, as this blog often points out.

What is more, industrial clean rooms function on the same managerial premises as assembly lines: modern manufacturing jobs are not necessarily any more secure or lucrative for the rank and file than were jobs in the “old tech” economy.

Nor is high-tech employment a guarantee of satisfying work. Repetitive, heavily mechanized or automated tasks performed by workers using nanolithography or bio-assay instruments can be as mind-numbing as those performed on shopfloors of a century ago. No job should deny those holding it the possibility of intellectual reward and creativity.  The history of manufacturing labor shows few employers making a priority of that concern and without it, STEM-focused education-for-jobs loses much of its sheen.

But let’s focus for now on Obama’s ongoing effort to cast community colleges as sites of exciting, immersive student experiences in technical fields. This is a significant rebranding that helps more than simply those individuals who may find jobs directly through programs like Siemans’.  It also moves us away from a stubborn habit we have in America of seeing two-year colleges and technical curricula as the preserve of those unable to “make the grade.”  This could recast the credentials offered by two-year schools,  and thus the opportunities of community college graduates as they move out across the nation’s higher-ed and employment spheres.  New labels are not enough, but they can help.

This was partly because I think Baratunde Thurston did a fine job in a CNN column puncturing Marks’ naïve and pompous “advice”…advice which basically could have come from the mouth of an industrialist talking to an office boy in a bad 19^th century novel: “Work hard and keep your pen nibs sharpened, lad, and you’ll go far!”

But there is something so manipulative about Marks’ subsequent response to Thurston, so mistaken in its invocations of technology,  that I want to weigh in.

In his response, Marks repeats his original bullet points, each more reductive than the last, each denying the fact that kids in weak school systems can never achieve these goals simply by sheer force of will.

Here’s Marks’ advice, each “tip” followed by my thoughts:

• “1. Study hard and get good grades.”  […In which Marks ignores the challenges faced by kids attending underfunded schools operating with huge classes and poor instructional materials, or living with overworked parents who need the kids' help after school to care for siblings…]
• “2. Use technology to help you get good grades.” [Ignoring the fact that many school systems can afford neither cutting edge technology nor the staff hours to maintain it and (this is crucial) to instruct students in its effective use; access is NOT inclusion, as Virginia Eubank’s book, Digital Dead End helps us see. Undergraduates need guidance in using Google Scholar; how would a middle- or high-schooler figure it out on her own as Marks' original column suggests she do? That column shows the depth of his ignorance about how pupils learn to think critically and vet resources.]
• “3. Apply to the best schools you can.” [Because to Marks, just believing in yourself apparently makes up for the challenges I just listed under “1” and “2”]
• “4. Get help from a school’s guidance counselor.” [Because, as in the corporate world Marks inhabits, it is not what you know but who you know…? Does he really think the kids are actively avoiding services that are being offered to them?]

The brevity of each point is itself insulting, a gesture that condescends by simplifying.  So it is not surprising when we then read that Marks feels the kids’ pain:

• “5. Learn a good skill. This is what I said in my blog. I said this wasn’t easy. It’s brutally hard. “

“Brutally hard”, Mr. Marks? Maybe that’s a clue that this is not about the kids’ lack of  discipline and fortitude.

As I’ve written before  in this blog, analyses like Marks’ put tremendous faith in existing systems of education and employment, with technology privileged as a cure-all.  Alongside such conservative logic,  his compassion rings false, to the last note of the response:

“Will any of these kids read what I wrote in Forbes? Probably not. I’m hoping that educators, bloggers and most importantly parents do. Because it will be very tough for any kid to do it alone.”

“Tough,” it certainly is, for many kids of color or low socioeconomic standing striving to find equitable educational opportunities in the United States.  Too bad Marks displays no historical or political perspective on what makes it so; he could start by looking at his own thinking on the problem,  I’m afraid.

First, the chairs understand that familiar notions of merit in STEM fields work as a gatekeeping tool that limits diversity:

Specifically, the chairs say being discouraged from a STEM career is still an issue today for both female and underrepresented minority (URM) STEM undergraduate students (59 percent) and that traditional rigorous introductory instructional approaches that “weed out” students early on from STEM studies are generally harmful and more so to URM (56 percent) and female (27 percent) students compared to majority students (i.e. Caucasian and Asian males).

–Bayer U.S. News, Dec. 7, 2011

Second…well, same again:

Yet, a majority (57 percent) of the chairs do not see a need to significantly change their introductory instructional methods in order to retain more STEM students, including women and URMs.

How can these prominent and accomplished educators not see the connection between regrettable social patterns in their fields and the content of their practice? As I tried to convey in my book, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering,  the stubborn character of standards of rigor, the unassailability that STEM disciplines ascribe to those standards, is at the very heart of STEM exclusion.

In summarizing the survey results, Bayer cites Freeman Hrabowski, who warns that we need “a culture change.” Rigor is attainable along with inclusion, Hrabowski says, if we choose to provide support to students who may need it and to faculty who might enact such reforms.  Teaching methods can change without undermining the rigor and functionality of the knowledge conveyed.  That Bayer actually quotes Hrabowski, putting such an outlook on the table, gave me hope for a moment that this survey might make a difference. But one last point from the survey’s findings pretty much burst that balloon:

Most institutions don’t have a STEM diversity plan: Only one-third (33 percent) report their colleges have in place a comprehensive STEM diversity plan with recruitment and retention goals.

33%? In 2011? Is this possible? (Slap forehead in despair, here.) What kind of serious audience is there for Bayer’s findings if only one in three American research universities has even gotten to the point of systematizing STEM diversity?

Clearly, many of the department heads surveyed by Bayer are not happy with existing inequities and believe that some sort of change is needed. But how can even the best intentioned department chairs make a practical priority of an issue that their employers have declared to be unimportant? More broadly:  How many dozens or hundreds of reports, from government, philanthropic and corporate sources, have laid out these same STEM diversity issues over the last 40 years? How many more will do so before something new happens at the university or department level?

Here’s an idea: If Bayer, a hugely influential and wealthy entity, has the wherewithal to conduct such surveys, could we not ask them to act on the results? Not merely to articulate the problem, but act to solve it? For example, what if Bayer campaigned for the creation of a nationwide accreditation or ranking system, encompassing academic STEM departments of all disciplines, that names and shames those institutions that fail to take meaningful action on diversity issues? Perhaps making universities responsive to calls for STEM diversity programming?

Sure that’s a pipedream, likely to be derailed by all kinds of arguments about….rigor!  And that’s exactly why we need powerful voices like those of private industry, understood to be disinterested seekers of new STEM talent pools, to take bold steps like this. If corporations genuinely seek racial, gender, and other kinds of diversity in their scientific and technical labor forces (and, yes, that’s a big “if, but for the moment let’s accept that Bayer’s science education surveys show at least a kind of commitment to inclusion), why not try to change the metrics of prestige for universities, in a way that might encourage that diversity?

That sort of effort by Bayer would make this not just another poll of STEM diversity, but one that might actually change the results of future surveys.

The show followed 8 African American tech innovators seeking investors, gathered for 9 weeks in a ranch house in Mountain View, California, and filmed throughout by CNN. The group of aspiring start-up founders enlisted for this “New Media Accelerator” were provided with guidance from established investors and corporate representatives. We watch the 8 founders energetically prepare for a “Demo Day” to be staged at the end of the 9 weeks: the opportunity to pitch their various ideas to a room full of venture capitalists. Stress builds, narrator Soledad O’Brien tells us, as the clock counts down (wait, did I accidentally switch to the Food Channel??).  The terms “winners” and “losers” are never used, perhaps because they would be too distastefully suggestive of a pagent or talent show, but the program builds to the final “reveal” that 2 of the 8 projects have received funding to date.

This is of course a documentary only in the sense that any other competition-based reality show is. With dramatic music, quick edits, ominous voice-over narration, and the false suspense that reality shows cultivate to keep us watching, intriguing features of participants’ technical aims or market outlooks were barely discussed. Instead, nearly every minute of the film defaulted to a tidy, scripted take-away: Individual talent, fortitude, and market savvy are what determine success and failure in America. During the hour, race was intermittently depicted as a burden for black Americans. Statistics about low African American representation in high-tech industries were quoted, and one participant was revealed to have been stopped by Mountain View police one night for “walking while black.”   A number of the participants also reflected on the rarity of minority presence in America’s tech sector, and some mentioned economic or other adversity they have faced in their lives.  But precisely because those highly personal narratives predominated, as is the norm in any heavily edited reality show (one entrepreneur was identified repeatedly as a single mother of 3; another as hoping to buy a house for his mother), by far the loudest message of the show is that the sorting mechanisms of innate talent and fortitude overwhelm any structural impediments to economic or intellectual fulfillment in America.

Let’s be clear: the ostensible good fortune of receiving CNN’s deus-ex-machina-like attention plays no small part in this hour-long drama of adversity and attainment.  The oft-repeated nickname for the 9-week project, “NewMe,”  is not CNN’s invention but if positioning this program as a  make-over opportunity for marginalized or under-achieving aspirants is what the producers had in mind, that title certainly doesn’t hurt. (It isn’t  clear how  Angela Benton,  who is both a participating entrepreneur and a founder of the NewMe program, came to be the subject of CNN’s film, but the music alone confirms the network’s dramatic intentions in featuring her undertaking as representative of racialized experiences in Silicon Valley.)

We can certainly agree with one of the participating inventors that this unprecedented media exposure for black entrepreneurs  may inspire  minority youngsters otherwise unaware of such role models.  And it seems petty to complain that the show has gotten a huge amount of build-up yet primarily replays the interpersonal conflicts and emotional ups and downs of every other example of the reality genre.   After all: did we really think CNN, a mainstay of bland social commentary,  would instead engage in incisive social critique?

Yet  the whole experience of watching was nonetheless unsettling. I found the show not only superficial, but creepily irresponsible.  Only one mentor, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, explicitly critiqued racism.  Two of the experts enlisted to comment on or advise the 8 start-up projects blamed black Americans for their underrepresentation in high-tech industries. Michael Arrington’s confused remarks about the negligible role of race in the “meritocracy” of Silicon Valley and the importance of schooling and family background in explaining why there are “no black entrepreneurs” have gotten a lot of coverage already (see my last post). Another mentor, Vivek Wadwha, a Duke University researcher and tech entrepreneur of South Asian background (who elsewhere has corroborated the discriminatory habits of the field), disturbingly is heard telling the group that blacks in America unfortunately “have a sense of entitlement” because their forbearers “were slaves,” while “his people” have a different approach that has led them to success.

Soledad O’Brien’s script doesn’t stop to comment on that troubling remark.  As a whole, in fact, I’d say that this gloss on race in Silicon Valley imparts no sense that things need to change, but offers only a conversion of real and complex social experience to formulaic prime-time filler.

But I’m a little worried. Advance screenings and media commentary on the film have generated a great deal of conversation, among bloggers and mainstream media alike.  Yesterday the New York Times reflected on the buzz itself, in “CNN Documentary Sets Off Debate on Race and Technology” by Brian Stelter and Jenna Wortham.  And much of that buzz has been about the ways in which individuals depicted in the film, such as Michael Arrington, do or don’t recognize structural inequities; that is, about the talking heads themselves. Their views provide interesting evidence but we need to go from thinking about those individuals  to a broader view.  Hank Williams lays out some of these larger issues for CNN as the network builds hype for the documentary; for example, pervasive economic impediments to the scale-up of minority-led projects. If CNN proves willing to keep that conversation going, bucking a mainstream media tradition of downplaying the race, class and gender inequities still going strong in 21st Century America, then we may have something to thank them for.

“Evil”? Really?  I’d love a list of the professors Mr. Ellsberg has heard, first-hand, actually making such claims.   The New York Times published Ellsberg’s latest op-ed about the shortcomings of  U.S.  higher education on Sunday under the title, “Will Dropouts Save America?” and I do have to thank the paper for framing it as a question.  But I have no patience with the crude and self-serving picture Ellsberg  paints of the American university in his answer.

The folks he mentions are in some ways grand role models, sure…. ingenious, self-motivated and energetic as can be.  But the idea that we can characterize the entirety of post-secondary learning and teaching in U.S  as an impediment to such vision and creativity is below contempt. This is the same higher ed system that has  for generations carried countless children of farmers and factory workers into science and technology and business careers;  that has –hellllooo!?—brought us the highly educated thinkers that design and build the devices conceived by a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates,  and  the massively complex data-handling  systems that enable a global-scale social network like Mark Zuckerberg’s.

Most pertinent: Many of those enabling technologies, not to mention hugely profitable pharmaceutical, biotech, and material innovations of recent decades, were born in start-ups run by university faculty members, themselves holders of college degrees…all apparently in spite of the “creativity stifling” character of our university classrooms detected by Mr. Ellsberg.

With his strong message that American college-goers are being duped, I can’t help but think Ellsberg starts out not simply from an excited appreciation of human inventiveness, but also from a sense of distaste for the people who teach in universities.  Such as myself. But here’s why I’m bothering to write about him… A few days ago, the Chicago Tribune published an article by Jesse Washington titled, “What’s behind the declining numbers of blacks in science, tech, engineering and math fields?” The article documents woeful statistics:

In 2009 African-Americans received 1 percent of degrees in science technologies, and 4 percent of degrees in math and statistics…

As many others have found, Washington reports that the reasons for such low minority representation in STEM fields are complex: students’ self-doubt, a lack of role models and mentors, pressure to earn money quickly, and discouraging academic environments rife with racial stereotyping.  But if the causes are complex, the results are clear:

The percentage of African-Americans earning STEM degree has fallen during the last decade.

Horatio Alger stories like the one Ellsberg disseminates, that find the sources of American technical innovation primarily in the efforts of self-taught individual geniuses, do not merely mislead about the origins of most new technologies. Such stories also deny the role played by class, race, gender, national origin and a host of other identities in bringing about both the presence of some entrepreneurs and the absence of other Americans in the world of technical innovation.

Surely Ellsberg’s selective logic  would do little for the folks at Boeing, GE and Xerox, cited by Washington as worried about the nation’s scientific talent pool and dedicated to raising black STEM participation.  Those companies aren’t merely worried about their own hiring needs;  they know a nation without a thriving tech sector won’t support markets for their own products.  These corporations are as eager for innovation and as savvy about its wider effects as anyone in the country. Hard to imagine they  would find Ellsberg’s derisive approach to formal education, to the social and intellectual empowerment provided by the college classroom and lab,  any more constructive than I do.  We need far more opportunities for such empowerment in America, not fewer.

Until last night, I hadn’t put a great deal of thought into STEAM. In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that I had a previous career in the fine arts.  Analyzing the claims (both persuasive and not) that educators and curators have historically made for the cultural, societal and intellectual benefits of exposure to the arts felt like something I’d already done a lot of.  Not to mention: my brain has been taxed  just by trying to understand how STEM education is playing out in America; I didn’t feel I could take on STEAM.

But last night, I heard a lecture by an artist committed to STEAM activities that has prompted me to think and blog about this trend. Rebecca Kamen is a sculptor who, among other projects, has been helping high school science students integrate art into their research.   Her career has been spent drawing on science as inspiration for her artwork, often with the support of scientific institutions (as a fellowship recipient or visitor).  She spoke last night at the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science (PACHS) about her career, and most recent work with collections of the American Philosophical Society and Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.  She was enthusiastic and clearly deeply moved by her encounters with scientific discovery and its depiction. She genuinely seems to wish the same awe-filled and energizing experience for her audiences.  And I left the talk worried about STEAM.

First, let me say that I really like a lot of Kamen’s sculptures. She looks at scientific inscriptions from all eras (say, an ancient Chinese astronomical text or the familiar Periodic Table of the Elements) and renders the forms she sees there as looser, almost organic,  hand-hewn three-dimensional shapes.  With rough surfaces and cartoon-like contours, these quirky objects felt to me, when I first saw them, like the scientific products of a very non-scientific civilization; they are both mysterious and funny, aspiring to credibility in their imitation of meticulous scientific illustrations, and comic in their soft, smeared versions of those formal conventions…. Above all, her sculptures seemed to pastiche all scientific projects throughout  history with equal humor and tenderness, perhaps reminding us that one era’s cutting-edge science is another’s antiquity. Had I not heard her talk, I would have presumed that Kamen’s work was meant to shake up our veneration of science… to remind us that even the most esoteric  and exalted products of human imagination can, in a certain light, assume the naivete of the kindergartener’s  scribble or the expressive urgency of the first cave painting.

Rebecca Kamen, Hive, 2008

But in the course of her talk, it became clear that for Kamen,  there is no historical perspective, no irony, no relativism. She told of her “awe and wonder” at the visual representations that have accompanied science through time, and spoke repeatedly of being moved to tears by the “beauty” and “magic” of scientific discovery.  Let’s put aside for today the gap between my initial impressions of the work and the artist’s intentions; it’s her messages about art in the realm of science that I want to examine.

Rebecca Kamen, Across the Way, 2004

In that unabashed adoration for her sources of inspiration (and by extension, for her patrons), I heard something that bodes ill for STEAM. I fear the injection of arts into STEM teaching may be a way of shutting down criticality about science and technology, and discouraging reflexivity among scientific practitioners (whether students or professionals),  instead bringing the high-culture cache of fine arts to a realm already steeped in privilege and self-congratulation.

A colleague at the talk, Darin Hayton,  was troubled by Kamen’s historical errors, such as the mischaracterization of the scientific illustrations she celebrated.  (You can read his own blog post about it here.) A number of these  errors were obvious to the historians of science in the room with knowledge of the periods and practices to which Kamen referred. For Hayton, those errors point to Kamen’s elision of the  literary strategies and political conditions that have historically brought science into its authoritative cultural position. Another colleague, by contrast, felt that this artist simply, “Makes her own context.”  True enough, but I think that is exactly what worries me about Kamen’s program.  I think in putting historical and cultural specificity out of sight, Kamen discourages us from questioning how science deploys beauty for its own ends, or how our very notions of beauty (or  ”genius” or “creativity”) arise from contingent cultural conditions…conditions with important social ramifications.

For over 200 years in America,  we’ve heard arguments for the automatically humanizing, not to say democratizing,  effects of bringing artists into scientific and technological realms.  But more often than not,  this “collaboration” has served to flatter and elevate science and technology.  In its more critical forms, art has rarely been welcomed into  the science museum, corporate headquarters,  or (I suspect) STEM curriculum.  One major exception, well worth revisiting online,  was the 2008 “Molecules that Matter” show, curated at Skidmore  College in partnership  with (and displayed at), the Chemical Heritage Foundation, a setting which has often shown far less provocative art-about-science.

In that show, the uncertain and even disturbing social features of science were displayed alongside the lovely and enticing. Many more wonderfully challenging art works about science and technology, sometimes created in collaboration with non-artists, are readily found in art studios, galleries and museums. If STEM is really to open its constituent disciplines  to more equitable, more self-critical practices, awestruck adoration of science and technology  is the last thing we need.  That’s what science too often provides for itself. Instead we should be asking: For whom is science beautiful, and why, in a culture? Who gets to say what beauty is? Whose voices go unheard? In short: We need the disruptive, transgressive,  or at least, open inquiry that art can bring to its subjects, not its flattery.

Things have improved in recent years, but the gap persists, according to CBP. Troubling patterns  remain:  Some African American students in the middle- and high schools of Lower Merion School District (LMSD) are finding themselves tracked into special education classes when they don’t need those interventions,  while too few black students are being enrolled in the advanced classes that would serve them well.  Disproportionately low percentages of black students in LMSD attend college.   Among those black LMSD students who do pursue post-secondary education, disproportionately high numbers head towards community colleges rather than four-year programs.  CBP also points out in a recent statement that:

…African Americans graduate from Lower Merion (too many through social promotions and special education) and go onto college only to face the prerequisite condition that they pass remediation courses for which they do not accumulate college credit.
* African American students also have a huge SAT score gap and a Grade Point Average gap, which stunts their acceptance to the schools their peers gain admission to.
* African American girls are outperforming African American boys. Ask why!

–Concerned Black Parents, Sept. 6,2011

Folks on both sides of the debate agree that a number of tireless and inventive LMSD teachers and administrators have worked hard to redress racial and other forms of discrimination in the district. Nearly everyone acknowledges welcome results of that work. Yet, those who support the discrimination lawsuit see a public school system that nonetheless regularly consigns minority students to “substandard education.”  Meanwhile, some other people in our township detect no such pattern. That group sees the lawsuit as unfounded and as a burden on taxpayers.   The term “resegregation” has empirical value for the first contingent, but in the eyes of the second it is uncalled for and inflammatory.  I have seen defenders of LMSD policies recoil from that word at more than one neighborhood gathering on the issue.

The legal complexities of this case are many and I am in no way qualified to parse those. But as a historian of race in American education, I want to talk about the multiple meanings that “equity” has lately assumed in our township. Mapping these meanings has helped me see why CBP pursues its suit, and why lawsuits around matters of race are still needed in our country.

Clearly,  those who defend the district don’t aim to promote racial discrimination. Yet,  I’m not sure we should assume that everyone involved in the dispute really does have the same endpoint in mind. I want to suggest that for some who speak for LMSD, some basic features of the system are working just fine;  they would say those aspects of the status quo require no reform.

Here’s what I’m thinking of:

Representatives of the district, not surprisingly, routinely offer counterarguments to the charges of discrimination.  Last week, as counsel for the plaintiffs made new documents available for public viewing, Doug Young,  Lower Merion School District’s  Information  Director, spoke to media outlets about the case.  Speaking to NBC Philadelphia, as reported by David Chang, Mr. Young suggested first that there is no systemic phenomenon to discuss:

The plaintiffs’ claims relate to specific, individual special education disputes from years ago. The assertion that they are somehow connected to biased treatment on the basis of race is totally without merit.

To bolster that point, Mr. Young added that the district “utilize[s] multiple criteria and methods to eliminate any potential for cultural biases.”  But we could ask: If discrepancies still exist in African American achievement within LMSD schools (which nobody involved in the matter denies), by what measure has the district determined these “criteria and methods” to be working? [My STS colleagues will now be nodding and saying to themselves: "The experimenter's regress!"]

Next Mr. Young says:

Additionally, the suit completely ignores and even diminishes the success of African American students in Lower Merion School District.

That claim proceeds from a deeply flawed premise: That critiques of  current racial discrimination constitute a denigration of  previous minority attainments. But in what way is a search for justice a denigration of others’ attainments? How are the purported “cause” and “effect” here even connected? One might just as easily say that the CBP parents’ lawsuit adds lustre to the attainments of successful African American students because it emphasizes the inequitable conditions those kids have overcome. (Though that too would be a facile and misleading claim.)

With that last quote, Mr. Young characterizes the motives of CBP and he does so with selective logic. In turn, he characterizes LMSD, also using selective logic. He indicates that test scores for black students in the district have risen in recent years, along with enrollment by African American students in the district’s AP and Honors classes.  Those are very welcome changes. But we learn, too, that “LMSD African American graduates are attending college at nearly twice the national rate (83% in 2011).”  I would ask: Why even measure the district’s inclusivity relative to national standards?  Why not against the goal of complete parity between minority and majority students in our district? Is our goal to end discrimination, or to deflect criticism?

Remember, too, that CBP specifies that among students who constitute that 83% we have black students attending community colleges in far higher proportions than do white college-going LMSD graduates. Perhaps Mr. Young wishes to highlight progress made by the district towards racial inclusion. But he sounds a self-congratulatory note in his assertion that, “the District should be receiving awards for these efforts, not lawsuits.”

The impression given by Mr. Young here is that the district has understood the problem, and done enough to address discrimination…in fact, done MORE than enough,  to the point where awards are deserved.  I can see how such apparent self-assurance could undermine CBP’s  faith in the district’s commitment to eliminating further educational inequities.  Can the district’s leaders and spokespeople instead persuade us that  they see the lingering achievement gap as entirely unacceptable, every last vestige of it?  Then we may be more confident that lawsuits are not needed because educational equity, not merely a relative lack of inequity,  is LMSD’s goal.