Disproving Walter Williams Theory of Liberalism Behind Majority-Black Cities Collapse: A Look at Detroit Public Schools

This is a two-part series, a look at a recent column by Walter Williams – white conservatives favorite Black columnist because he writes what so many of them wish they could say – that states Black Democrat mayors are the reason a city like Detroit has collapsed and that crime is the result of the liberal agenda.

This is why Detroit Public Schools (DPS) need metal detectors

That Pittsburgh, controlled by continuous line of Democrat mayors since 1934, isn’t a city overwhelmed with crime completely obliterates Mr. Williams theory; so does the state of Vermont, the most liberal in all of America. That Pittsburgh, considered one of the best places to live in America, is also one of the whitest big cities left in America is just a coincidence right, when Detroit is the most homogeneous big city in all of the US (and, coincidentally, the Blackest)?

Wrong. The reason that Detroit is the way it is, and so many other American cities are on the verge of being Detroit-ed are related to three things: high levels of Black crime, lower levels of collective intelligence (a thriving city requires an abundance of above-average intellects; a dying city requires the reverse, as below-average intellects are incapable of maintaining the infrastructure); and affirmative action policies which replace white bureaucrats in all levels of public office with unqualified Black employees. High levels of crime in poverty-stricken Black neighborhoods do not correlate to the same scenario transpiring in poverty-stricken white neighborhoods, which as Williams correctly pointed:

Crime imposes a hefty tax on law-abiding residents of black neighborhoods. Residents bear costs of having to shop outside of their neighborhoods; criminals have driven many businesses out. Children can’t play safely in front of their homes. Fearing robberies, taxi drivers, including black drivers, often refuse to accept telephone calls for home pickups and frequently pass black customers by on the street. Neighborhood property values are lower as a result of crime. Plus, there’s the insult associated with not being able to receive pizza or other deliveries on the same terms as people in other neighborhoods.

Walter Williams is describing – in succinct detail – the Visible Black Hand of Economics theory, which has constantly been validated wherever Black people become the majority population in America. No greater example of this criminally understudied phenomenon can be found then Detroit, Michigan.

We start this journey to invalidate the beloved Walter Williams theory that liberalism is the cause for Detroit’s collapse by looking directly at the education system in The Motor City, which is responsible the more than 90 percent Black student body there with learning the “three R’s” and understanding the importance of civic virtue so that they will become custodians of the cities bright future.

Sadly, though per-pupil-spending in Detroit is some of the highest in all of the nation ($15,000 per student), most students leave high school only equipped with an education worthy of earning a vocation as a custodial attendant.

It was in 1971 that disgraced former mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanagh, surveyed the scene of fleeing white businesses owners from Detroit and said, that he planned trips to "Detroit's sister cities -- Nagasaki and Pompeii."

Two years later, Coleman Young would be elected mayor Detroit and the conversion of Detroit from an overwhelmingly white metropolis with a Black crime problem to an overwhelmingly Black metropolis with an even bigger Black crime problem was complete.

Cavanagh, like all Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs), knew that Black people were incapable of maintaining the city that whites were leaving behind; he knew that the bulk of Black children in schools would grow up to take jobs as barbers, nurses, security guards, postal clerks or postal service mail sorters, taxi drivers, bus drivers, or parking lot attendants, and that this would be no way to sustain a city in need of entrepreneurs and new business.

Outside investors would be scared off because of the high rates of crime found in the city, leaving Detroit with a shrinking tax-base of largely illiterate Black individuals, more than 30 percent (50 percent of Black children) living under the poverty line.

Cavanagh, aware of the high rates of Black crime, knew that a city destroyed by an atomic bomb and one destroyed by a volcano would be the perfect twosome for a city destroyed by Black people.

It all starts with the children, and in the Detroit Public School system, more than 40 armed police officers and 300 security officers patrol the hallways in a fruitless quest to quell the violence; after seeing more than 800 on-campus assaults since 2009, every high school has high-tech security systems in place that all students must walk through daily to check for concealed weapons; students are required to go through metal detectors, metal wand checks, pat-downs, and random searches because of fears of weapons and drugs;  and all of this so that Detroit Public Schools – the beneficiary of $200 million in stimulus money from 2009 – 2011 – can graduate 21 percent of its students!

What’s the good news out of the TSA-level security at Detroit Public Schools? Violent crime is down!

So, when the more than 90 percent Black DPS school system isn’t staging UFC quality exhibition bouts, what type of learning and, ultimately, test results do we see?:

Detroit Public Schools’ students recently won the award of the worst math scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ 40-year history. Couple the disheartening standardized test scores with the nation’s lowest graduation rate, according to NPR, and you have a public school system that has utterly failed its students. 

Worse, those students who take standardized tests in DPS perform at historic lows for not just the state of Michigan, but the entire nation:

The data released Tuesday also shows no more than 33 percent of students met or exceeded the state’s standards in any given category. Math was the district’s worst category with less than 600 students making passing grades. The best was reading, which 32.6 percent of students passed the test.

June 29, The Detroit News: The news also is grim for other predominantly poor districts in Metro Detroit, including Ecorse, River Rouge, Inkster and Pontiac, where two-thirds to 90 percent of the students are eligible for free and reduced lunches.
In all of those districts, students who took the MME this spring were well below state averages in math, reading, social studies, writing and science. In Ecorse, just one of the district's 81 juniors was considered proficient in writing and math.

Also, despite a district-wide academic plan adopted last year for ACT scores, DPS scored dropped to 15 from 15.5 last year.

An average of a 15 on the ACT (out of 36)? And you expect these students to be prepared for college, let alone run a once mighty city – and sustain an economy there - that was called the “Arsenal of Democracy?”

In 2009, the sons and daughters of America’s first Black metropolis produced results in a national standardized test that confirm the bleak prediction of Cavanagh from way back in 1971:

Most Detroit Public Schools’ fourth- and eighth-graders were unable to score at a basic math level on a national test this year — marking the lowest performance in the history of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Taken by about 1,900 fourth- and eighth-graders, Detroit’s fourth-graders scored 200 against the national average 239 on a scale of 500. Just 18 urban districts participated in the NAEP.

While the test scores hit a historic low in the nation, the test also indicates the movement toward reform. More than a year ago, DPS voluntarily decided to take part in the NAEP in order to see how its progress compared to other districts nationally. Reform efforts underway will include an emphasis on reading, preschool and new technology in classrooms districtwide.

Even the conservative wet-dream alternative to public schools (the only way to end the racial gap in learning!), charter schools, show embarrassingly low results in Detroit, further proof that the collapse of Detroit goes far beyond liberalism and might fall squarely on the problem of one-party rule in the city. That being the party of Black-rule, courtesy of men and women whose sons and daughters produce the lowest NAEP test scores in American history.

130 schools in Detroit have closed since 2005; mostly because of the low test scores compiled by the students in the schools. These scholars will be tasked with helping save Detroit and ushering in an era of prosperity rivaling that of Henry Ford’s 1920s Detroit, when the city boasted the tallest selection of skyscrapers in the entire world.

But hey, the graduation rate is trending upwards (really has nowhere else to go), while the drop-out rate seems on the decline too!

But what percent of these graduates are college ready upon completion of their studies in DPS?:

A quick perusal of the database that the Detroit Free Press provides shows some heartbreaking figures. 

In Detroit, the numbers were downright abysmal. Only Renaissance High, the district's top high school, broke even that 10 percent threshold. Of course, Renaissance's graduation rate in 2010 was an impressive 95.5 percent. At Cass Tech, which also graduated 95.5 percent of its students last year, only 4.4 percent of this year's expected grads are prepared for the next level academically.

Meanwhile, at every other Detroit public high school, the portion of students deemed college ready was less than 1 percent.

The local charter schools, hailed by many as a key component to Detroit's educational turnaround, also reflected pathetic numbers. At Winans Academy High School, for instance, the 2010 graduation rate was 88 percent. The percent of student deemed college-prepared? Zero. Same for Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences, which boasted a 92 percent graduation rate last year.

Oh well; at least most of the Black male students received the proper training in how to go through security, since the odds are most will wind up in prison at some point in their life. If they go into public service in Detroit, the odds are even higher they’ll face jail time.

Don’t cry for the students in Detroit, though, as every one of them receives a free lunch courtesy of the tax-payer.

 So, Mr. Williams, these are the individuals whose parents are tasked with running Detroit. This is what happens when you affirmative action an entire city, driving white people to the suburbs, and installing a one-party (Black-rule, not Democrat) system of government into city hall.

Lower levels of intelligence, when compared to the rest of the state, pace Black-run Detroit, with the children of these leaders showing the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.


And what of those who attend college at Wayne State University in Detroit?:

Wayne State is located in America’s largest black-majority city, yet is one of the nation’s worst at getting degrees into the hands of African Americans. Only one in 10 black students who enroll at Wayne State earn a degree within six years -- a startling rate that is less than one-fourth the national average for African Americans and one-fourth Wayne’s own graduation rate for white students.

Wayne’s black-white graduation gap is the widest among all public universities in United States, but many other Michigan schools aren’t far behind. The state’s public and private universities have the sixth-highest racial graduation gap in the country in 2010, according to Education Trust.

More than half of white students get a degree within six years at Michigan’s public universities, compared to a third of African-American students. 

Tomorrow, Mr. Williams, we shall look at crime in Detroit and understand that the data reported in the Kerner Report (issued in 1968) haven’t changed at all. The lessons derived from the date were wrong then; and they have only been exacerbated since then.

Detroit collapsed because of its Black population, Mr. Williams. 

Jerome Cavanagh, who was elected mayor of Detroit because of promises to the city's Black population (only 26 percent of the population in the early 1960s, yet responsible for 65 percent of the violent crime) that he'd implement affirmative action polices in hiring, foresaw that Black-rule translated to an atomic blast over the city or a spontaneous volcanic eruption. 

And that has occurred. Just take a look at the "Ruin Porn" coming from Detroit, that rivals the actual porn coming from Los Angeles.