For decades, progressives have attributed black students’ low academic skills to school underfunding. Attend any graduate education program or sit in on any legislative hearing, and you will hear that stingy white taxpayers deny majority-black schools the financial resources necessary to close the academic achievement gap. Americans are to imagine cash-starved inner-city classrooms that would make a prairie schoolhouse look luxurious—teachers forced to ration textbooks, students lacking pencils and paper, harried principals drowning in administrative duties due to the lack of staff.
A recently announced initiative from the Los Angeles Unified School District, the public school system in Los Angeles County, is a good place to test the underfunding theory. February 5, 2024, will mark the start of a district-wide “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.” (Previous LAUSD “weeks of action” have included a week in October 2023 organized around “National Coming Out Day.”) The district has distributed a teacher “toolkit” of suggestions for conducting the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, compiled, as the toolkit notes, by the district’s “SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE.”
Here is our first clue for assessing the underfunding theory: any bureaucracy that slaps acronyms on its component parts is not a bare-bones organization. The names of its innumerable departmental byways must be abbreviated, lest they take up too much space in print or in speech.
“SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE” stand for the district’s School Mental Health bureaucracy, its Black Student Achievement Plan bureaucracy, and its Human Rights, Diversity and Equity bureaucracy. The HRDE bureaucracy is itself part of the Student Health and Human Services bureaucracy. Possessors of these sinecures are hidden from sight, far from the classroom. Funding such offices requires princely sums; the BSAP just received an additional $26 million in 2023, on top of its existing budget. The BSAP bankrolls counselors, climate advocates, and psychiatric social workers to work with black students in “high priority” schools. It doles out “Innovation Capacity-Building” grants of up to $100,000 to entities that promise to improve black achievement.