Letter to the Editor: Bucks County School District ‘equity review’ was called for

To the Editor:

I understood the promise of Broad + Liberty to be a platform to advance practical conservative thinking in a tone that could be heard, even in a progressive city and region. But, by playing to base dog-whistle rhetoric in your discussion of Bensalem Township’s hiring of a consultant to look critically at the school district’s handling of race, you have failed to deliver on that promise.

The facts are that Bensalem is a school district in which half the kids are students of color. The school board does not reflect the student population and students of color are performing 23 percent below their white peers. Like its sister districts in the region and across the country, curriculum and pedagogy were never designed to serve a diverse student population. The district — like every single school district in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties — has a very real race problem.

Though thoughtful people can disagree about the causes and remedies, it was your approach — preying on white insecurities and perpetuating untruths about critical race theory — that amounts to race-baiting. Demagoguery is an effective political tool, but I hoped for more from Broad + Liberty.

Sincerely,
Mike Wang