Canceled: Elite Boston Academic Program Dumped For Not Attracting Enough Approved Minorities

The cancel culture has come for an elite academic program for public school students in Boston.

And in true liberal fashion, the move is not to reward hard work or excellence in academics and encourage others who lag to work harder, but to simply dump the initiative because it didn’t produce the outcome desired by racial bean-counters.

According to the local NPR affiliate in Boston, the school system created an initiative called Advanced Work Classes for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. The kids enrolled get more work than their peers and study subjects in greater depth, according to WGBH.

Eligibility is based on scores students receive as third-graders on a national standardized test called Terra Nova. But that’s only step one.

The second part is that students access the program via a lottery held by the school system’s administrative office.

In other words, you have to be good enough to get in, and then lucky enough to join.

The student population in the Boston school system is almost 80 percent black and Hispanic.

But, as it turned out, those groups were trailing white and Asian-American kids. The school system discovered that more than 70 percent of the Advanced Work Classes program was whites and Asian-Americans.

Faced with this reality, the school district, instead of working to expand the pool of available black and Hispanic kids by finding ways to improve their test scores, punished the participating students by simply killing the program – admittedly for at least a year.

Students now enrolled may stay in, but no newcomers will be allowed.

One school board member, according to WGBH, pronounced herself “very, very disturbed” to learn that at one participating school, roughly 60 percent of the fourth-graders in the advanced program were white or Hispanic, while most of the entire third grade, where new kids would come from, were a majority of blacks and Hispanics. She declared the outcome for the elite program “just not acceptable.”

Superintendent Brenda Cassellius told WGBH, “There’s been a lot of inequities that have been brought to the light in the pandemic that we have to address. There’s a lot of work we have to do in the district to be antiracist and have policies where all of our students have a fair shot at an equitable and excellent education.”

Cassellius, in discussing the need to be “antiracist,” did not explain how the program was “racist” t begin with, or address the fact that it may be racist to at least Asian-American families to cancel the program.  

The school district has commissioned a study the program and will make a recommendation in May on its long-term future. 

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