Look, let’s talk about this without the usual sugarcoating.
From coast to coast, in city after city run by Democrats for decades—Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, D.C.—the public schools that serve mostly Black kids are failing them hard. Not “underperforming a little.” Failing. Kids are walking across stages with diplomas while a shocking number still can’t read at grade level, write a coherent paragraph, or do basic math. That’s not an opinion. It’s what the test scores and the gaps between graduation rates and actual skills keep showing.
NAEP scores and district numbers paint the same picture year after year. In too many of these systems, Black students’ proficiency in reading and math is stuck in the teens or lower. Baltimore and Detroit have become the poster children: schools where large percentages of kids score at the bottom, yet the system keeps pushing them through. Graduation rates get inflated; the actual ability to function as literate adults does not. Employers and colleges notice. So do the young people stuck with the consequences.
Meanwhile, the curriculum priorities have shifted in ways that leave a lot of Black parents and community voices cold. Time and energy that could go toward rigorous reading, writing, history that includes the full story of Black Americans—slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, Black excellence in science, business, military service, and culture—gets crowded by LGBTQ-focused lessons, gender ideology, and social-emotional programming that often feels like it comes from outside the community. Critics point out that some districts have expanded pride-month materials, preferred-pronoun policies, and identity units while traditional Black history units get shortened, watered down, or reframed through a narrower political lens. When the classroom spends more time on gender theory than on Frederick Douglass, the Harlem Renaissance, or practical literacy, something is off.
A big part of the teaching force in these cities is white women. That’s just the demographic reality of the profession. Many are dedicated. But when the values being taught lean heavily into progressive politics—identity first, systemic everything, skepticism of traditional achievement metrics—it can create a mismatch. Black kids don’t need another set of adults projecting their own cultural or ideological priorities onto them. They need adults focused on the basics that actually open doors: reading fluently, writing clearly, calculating accurately, and understanding real history without the latest activist overlay. Add the chronic problem of uncertified or under-qualified teachers filling vacancies in hard-to-staff urban schools, and the quality problem compounds. Shortages are real; lowering the bar on who stands in front of the class is not a solution.
Then there’s the union leadership. The heads of the big teachers’ unions and the higher-ups have spent years pushing progressive causes—defending certain curriculum frameworks, resisting accountability measures that would expose the failure, and prioritizing political fights over the core job of making sure kids can read. Teachers on the ground who just want to teach phonics, grammar, and history without the extra ideology often feel sold out. The union apparatus has become a political machine that protects the status quo in Democrat-run systems more than it protects the kids those systems are supposed to serve. When outcomes stay terrible for decades under the same political control and the same institutional players, “more money” and “trust the experts” stop sounding like answers.
Black communities have every right to be furious about this. The pattern isn’t subtle: long-term one-party control of the cities, weak results for Black students, curriculum that drifts away from core skills and classical Black history toward fashionable identity lessons, a teaching force that doesn’t always share the community’s priorities, and union leadership that treats radical politics as more important than literacy. The kids pay the price in lost potential. Fixing it starts with telling the truth about what’s actually happening in the buildings, measuring real skills instead of inflated diplomas, putting reading and writing first, restoring serious history, and demanding that the adults in charge—politicians, administrators, and union bosses—stop treating Black children’s education as a political prop.
