A crab spider and more

On May 23rd I found a crab spider ensconced in a basket-flower (Plectocephalus americanus) on the Blackland Prairie along the southern fringe of Pflugerville. Whether the smaller arachnid jumble was the shriveled cast-off exoskeleton of the same spider, or the remains of a different one, I don’t know.

 

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When I was in my 20s I bought a cheap used French car, a Simca. It ended up causing me a bunch of problems. Eventually a warning light on the car’s dashboard began coming on. I took the car to a repair shop and, sure enough, after I got it back the dashboard warning light no longer came on. Problem solved? Not quite: I soon discovered that the “mechanic” had put an opaque covering in front of the warning light so I couldn’t see it was still coming on and the car still had a problem. That bit of “lived experience” came to mind recently when I read this passage in Luke Rosiak’s 2022 book Race to the Bottom:

Educrats wanted to eliminate anything that could function as an objective assessment of the scholastic competence of American children—and, therefore, their own job performance. Fringe racial activist consultants offered them a convenient political tool. Superintendents began paying big bucks to racial equity “consultants” to make the argument that basic performance standards and units of measurement were inherently racist. What these entrepreneurial consultants talked about was not diversity, nor how to help minority students excel. It was nihilism: that nothing was real and nothing mattered.

Under the standard preached by these consultants, any “system” that highlights racially unequal results is inherently “systemically racist.” This included grades, rules, test scores, and any other way of objectively assessing accomplishment. Therefore, every indicator of the massive failures of America’s public schools was illegitimate. This was like a doctor claiming he cured your fever by breaking the thermometer.

New York City paid race consultant Glenn Singleton nearly $900,000 and instructed teachers in 2019 that “perfectionism,” “worship of the written word,” “individualism,” and “objectivity” were aspects of “white supremacy culture.” The idea that reading was white supremacist, and therefore undesirable, undercut one of the most basic missions of teachers. But for educrats, it was convenient, since in some minority-heavy schools in the city, only 5 percent of kids were proficient in reading during certain school years.

It’s unconscionable that the bureaucrats in charge of education enforce measures which ensure that the people who most need an education and who can most profit from it will be denied that education.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman