Long story short, "Institutional Racism" means any factor, real or imaginary, that can be used to excuse the underachievement of some minority students.

My daughter is a teacher at one of the financially poorest Catholic schools in the Seattle Archdiocese. 53% of the students are from somewhere else -- "newly arrived" through "sopping wet" (her terms). Average time at the school for children to learn to speak and write English well enough to integrate into regular class is one year to 18 months. (Only English is allowed to be spoken on campus).
There is a catch, however, my daughter (and many of the other teachers at the school) regularly work six-day weeks during the school year. For my daughter this is a real sacrifice because she needs to work a second job to suppliment her income from teaching.
She told me once that the toughtest students to teach are not the non-English speaking newly arrived, but students who transfer from the public schools. She said that their attitudes and poor study habits picked up in the public schools make them very difficult to main stream into the (at least one year ahead) private schools.
The Catholic Bishop made the schools take the WASL this year. All the students taking the test at her school passed -- except for a newly arrived former public school student. Several of the classes received 100% passing.
Having this insight into a successful school, I have to shake my head whenever I hear from the government school leadership about bogus problems of "institutional racism" and the like. It is such BS...

While I agree that the Seattle School Board has in no way justified spending time or money on this issue, I also believe that any article or letter to be fisked should be posted (or linked to) in it's entirety. Please post a link to Brita Butler-Wall's entire letter. Merely posting "The essence of her reply" leaves you open to criticism of quoting her out of context.

Tony, fair enough. I added the rest of Brita Butler-Wall's remarks to the post.

I had originally edited out a small portion of her email only to save space, I don't believe that the meaning of her comments would have been altered by the deletion of those few lines.

Note well: Every rationalization for educational race-mongering always begins by defining "race" as privelege plus power. It seems nicely formulaic, while allowing the assumptions of the race-baiter to simply inject his ideological assumptions into the meaning of "privelege." It is, put simply, tautological to the core. This makes the argument irrefutable, without helping it acquire coherence or even sense. Reject their definition of "racism" (which is purposely constructed to eliminate, by definition, the very possibility of a non-white racist or even of a white victim thereof) and their entire argument collapses in a puff of circularity.

See the "Affirmativer Action FAQ" page of any large public university for more of the same (my former school, IUPUI, is a clasic in the genre).

Yikes. Mangled syntax and spelling all over that comment. Sorry.

The efforts of the Seattle School Board will have one certain outcome, to hasten the exodus of more Seattlites with school age children to the burbs and private schools. Why should parents risk the future of their children on more experimental social policies?

I'm convinced the Seattle elites are steering their community to third-world status.

Which will, in turn, be viewed (as per Sage's comment) as proof of the fundamentally racist nature of the parents of Seatllites.

Only by sticking w/ a downward spiraling school system, while supporting every experimental (and even failed) effort that comes along can folks show that they are not, in fact, racist to the core.

Actual education of children, of course, is optional.

when we visited seattle 3 summers ago, my wife described it as 'a sane san francisco.' i've started to wonder about the 'sane' part.

I work at a university in the Midwest, whose chancellor has ties to the EST human potential movement. The whole campus has been pressured to undergo this training.

The reason this is relevant, is because the same methodology is used.

Legitimate questions are viewed as an attack that must be defended against.

The motivation of the questioners is addressed, rather than the substance of their questions.

Large sums of money are spent, without regard to defined measurements of success.

I can only urge you to NOT GIVE UP asking questions and bringing this to light in a public forum. You are certainly not alone in your quest for accountability by educational entities, including the appropriate use of public funds.

If your local paper is at all willing to address this issue, contact them. Contact "alternative" media, also (which will put pressure on traditional media).

I hope you can educate other local parents as to the seriousness of this issue.

"The Superintendent is adding a position of Director of Equity and Race Relations ...."

is the answer. School systems are loyal to their employees, not their customers.

Where is the Soros or Bill Gates who will pick a school system and cure it? "Hello, (insert city name here), I'll pay your school budget, in full, for 5 years. But I DECIDE WHO WORKS THERE."

The politicians would approve, all that money free to spend on new patronage...

Top 10 % scoring class teachers get a $5,000 bonus every year. Bottom 10% get a pink slip.

Watch that system's scores shoot through the roof.

American schools assimilated 3 generations of illiterate, innumerate, foreign language speakers into citizenship, without a single diversity coordinator, sensitivity training, or bilingual class track. The word "self esteem" was as yet unborn.

But now, it's all better.

Roger Clegg at NRO's 'The Corner' writes:

"When asked to rank the relative priorities of “raising academic standards and achievement” versus “achieving more diversity and integration,” white parents favored the former over the latter by 87 to 6 percent (and black parents voted 82 to 8 percent the same way).

"Likewise, 78 percent of Americans (including 58 percent of nonwhites) say, “Letting students go to the local school in their community is better even if it means that most of the students would be of the same race,” with only 19 percent (36 percent of nonwhites) saying, “Transferring students to other schools to create more integration is better, even if it means that some students would have to travel out of their communities to go to school.”

Now that we know what the parents want (the putative customers, along w/ their kids of the educational system), I wonder what a poll of the teachers/administrators would show, in terms of what they think are their goals, and what they think the customers (the parents) want.

Whatever the results, it should be interesting....

Good post. All I have to say is...

Politics politics politics.

I think we make a mistake when we say institutional racism doesn't exist. We also make a mistake when we call it an "excuse for the underachievement of some minority students". The biggest and most dangerous mistake we make is misappropriation of the word. That's what's left a bitter taste in peoples' mouths.

I think I left similar commentary on Joanne Jacobs' blog, but it bares repetition. The Seattle School District (SSD) is in need of an overhaul. A Director of Equity and Race Relations? Please. What a front and excuse to waste money. Dealing with some of the inconsistencies in schooling across racial borders is not going to take more money or a cushy position filled by someone intent on being ineffective.

Seattle is notorious for throwing dollars at everything. Meanwhile, a good percentage of SSD teachers don't and can't teach. Many of them don't even teach subjects in which they're experts. These are the same people who attempted to go on strike a few years back for more pay. I'm the daughter of a teacher so I understand the struggle. But I have zero respect or sympathy for people who don't do their job. Teacher’s unions are generally if not always, opportunistic groups intent on evil.

Some of my proposals: Fire these ineffectively political principals; hire some administrators who have a spine and won't let unruly teenagers run over them; get some teachers who give a care; fire the ones who don’t; promote based on performance; get rid of “special education”; stop teaching this "feel good about yourself even if you can't read" curriculum; buy books and computers instead of stadiums and cheerleader uniforms; start blowing the whistle on school officials having sex with students. These are all issue the SSD has failed to address, and doing so would not take more money. Just work. Something most people are not accustomed to doing.