Skin-colored idols in education

Many Americans became rightly concerned with racial reconciliation after the brutal death of George Floyd. Even inside some Christian circles, white people were asked to listen, understand, and advance views based on privileging non-white skin color. Scripture tells us to treat all people equally because we are all valuable as made in the image of God. When we get away from Scripture and focus on our own preferences and ideals, we wind up with skin-colored preferences, as Minneapolis is finding out.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers and Minneapolis Public Schools have decided the way to improve schools is consciously to hire, fire, and lay off people based on skin color. It is not only a deviation from God’s plan for us to see each other not primarily as ethnicities or races but as children of God, but it also deviates from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision that we be judged based on the content of our character, not our color. It is also arguably against federal law.

The union and the school system have agreed on language in a new hiring agreement that states, “if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the district shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population.” “Excessing a teacher” means a teacher’s position is cut due to declining student populations or other economic factors.

Based on the language and the composition of the school system’s teaching population, the phrase “member of a population underreported” means non-white teachers and “not a member of an underrepresented population” means a white teacher. Hiding behind bureaucratic language does little to mask the racism in the policies. Teachers will not be hired or fired based on skills or competence but based on the color of their skin. They claim the new policy is intended to address past discrimination.

The teachers’ union has argued that children in public schools need to be surrounded, not by the best teachers, but with teachers that look like them. In addition, they have argued students will do better if their teachers reflect their own race. According to reports, Minneapolis’s student population is 37 percent white, but the Minneapolis Public Schools staff is 66.75 percent white. Last year, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that “half of Minneapolis Public School students can’t read at grade level.”

According to testing data in the school system, roughly 80 percent of white students read at their grade level or higher, while only 20-30 percent of non-white students do. The Star Tribune quoted Eric Moore, the equity officer for the school system, saying that “if there was a magic bullet to quickly close that gap, all [districts] would be doing it.”

Now, it seems the district and teachers’ union want to hide their failures behind race and promote racial discrimination as a magic bullet to solve educational failures. But doing so is, in itself, a failure. By teaching children they can only learn from people of the same skin color, they are locking children out of growth and diversity while locking them into racial constructs formed with racist motives. They are essentially locking children into systemic racism while claiming to overcome systemic racism. Instead of focusing on teaching skills, they are focusing on skin color and ethnicity.

This approach is anathema to a Christian worldview that grounds our existence in a common humanity, giving no favor based on irrelevant characteristics. It is a call for equality before God because all of us are made in his image. God sees past our ethnicity, race, and sex, so we should too.

The growing influence of postmodern ideologues in and out of our public schools have returned some of those systems to a very ancient caste order. They would structure our world through categories of intersectionality, dividing us into classes based on our outwardly manifested attributes. That failed in ancient societies. It will fail again. A public school system obsessed with race, that hires and fires based on race, is not a school system that can raise a child to confront a diverse world.

Minneapolis has failed its children. Call it what you will, this new policy is yet another way of failing.