This headline from the Daily Mail is deeply disturbing to anyone who believes that we need to reward and encourage achievement and excellence:

According to the story, Seattle’s “gifted and talented programs will be ended because “black and Hispanic students were underrepresented at the schools.”

According to Seattle Public School data, of the “highly capable students” in the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent were white, 16 percent were Asian and 3 percent were black.

The programs will be phased out over the next four years, in part because of a $100 million funding shortfall.

Hey, we have an idea for Seattle: close down the LOWEST-performing schools, not the highest-performing schools.

One school board president complained that the program does a “masterful job of tokenizing a really small community of color.”

We wonder if the parents of kids in the program are at all insulted that their sons and daughters are being described as “tokens.” When you cut through this academic flim-flam rhetoric, what the school board is saying is that it is somehow racist to reward some high-performing minorities over minorities with lower skills. It’s a threat to democracy or something.

When academic achievement is punished and racial equity is promoted above merit… Seattle, we have a problem.

This isn’t an isolated event. One of the top science and math high schools in the country, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Fairfax County Virginia, is also under attack because a disproportionate percentage of the students are Asians.