Where Is Corporate America Going To Find All Those New Minority Hires?

Last summer, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and of the resurgence of “black lives matter” movement, Corporate America came forth with a massive wave of pledges to hire more black employees, especially for leadership positions. If you, as a major corporation, had fewer than 13% black employees in any category of job titles, the obvious inference would that your efforts at “diversity, equity and inclusion” had thus far been deficient, and indeed you were likely engaged in “systemic racism,” if not “white supremacy.” Time to redouble your efforts at affirmative action.

For just a small sample of the large companies stepping forward with pledges to increase black and other minority employment, here is a roundup from Reuters last August. Reuters called the new hiring efforts a “watershed moment.” Excerpt:

Among the biggest companies, Adidas promised in June that 30% of all new positions would be filled with Black and Latino workers over the next five years. . . . Alphabet’s Google said 30% of leadership positions would be filled with employees from underrepresented groups by 2025. . . . Last week, a group of executives from 27 banks, tech companies and consulting firms - including Amazon, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase - vowed to hire 100,000 people from low-income Black, Latino and Asian communities by 2030. . . .

And that’s just a small sample. But then, where are all these well-meaning institutions going to get the hundreds of thousands to millions of new employees “of color” to lead them into the future?

Perhaps someone should go down into the “community” and look at the pipeline that is supposedly going to produce this great upwelling of talent. That pipeline consists largely of disastrous unionized public schools where the teachers are only out for themselves and nobody lifts a finger to try to help the kids. And our media, for the most part, could not be less interested in exposing the situation. But suddenly into this mess has stepped a Fox television affiliate called WBFF in Baltimore, which has embarked on something they call “Project Baltimore.” Among other pieces of the project, they are actually investing some resources to look into what is happening in the Baltimore public schools. It is not a pretty picture.

For starters, WBFF has found the Census data on per student spending of the 100 largest school districts in the country. Of the 100, Baltimore ranks number 5 at $15,793 per student per year.

OK, Baltimore is amateurs in this game compared to us pros in New York City, where we spend $26,588. But Baltimore is still well up there among the competition. What do they get for the money?

On Monday, WBFF’s Project Baltimore came out with a lengthy report focused on a student at a Baltimore public high school called Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts. Although the student’s name is not disclosed, his mother, by the name of Tiffany France, is interviewed extensively; and since she is black, we shall assume that he is too. It appears that the student, who supposedly thought he was about to graduate from the school, has just been told that he needs to go back and repeat the first three years. In his three and a half years of high school to date, the student has passed just three courses, and has failed 22. He has earned just 2.5 credits in that time. His GPA is given as 0.13. Oh, and he was late or absent for some 272 days in the first three years. Since a typical academic year has about 180 days of classes, that would mean that this student failed to show up for the majority, or close to a majority, of his classes in high school. Meanwhile, in all this time only one teacher so much as requested a conference with the parents.

So far this could just be the tragic story of one kid who fell between the cracks. But then we find out that this student has a class rank at this school of 62 out of 120. In other words, he is right about at the middle of the class. About half the students have even worse records. At this school, this is the norm.

A follow-up article on March 5 has more detail on the “norms” at Augusta Fells:

The school’s attendance rate is 61%, 27 points below the district average. At 48%, fewer than half the students graduate in four years. And of the 434 students enrolled in 2019, two tested proficient in math and two in English. All this in a school that gets $5.3 million a year from taxpayers.

The mother, who, as noted, is interviewed extensively in the March 1 piece, expresses outrage about the situation:

“I feel like they never gave my son an opportunity, like if there was an issue with him, not advancing or not progressing, that they should have contacted me first, three years ago,” said France. . . . “He's a good kid. He didn't deserve that. Where's the mentors? Where is the help for him? I hate that this is happening to my child.”

She certainly seems to have a point. If the school had any competence at all, shouldn’t it have been all over the student and his parents to get him to show up? And, did he ever turn in a single homework assignment? If he turned in even a few, that should have been enough to get him at least some passing grades. Was nobody following up, even a little?

But even though the mother has a point about the school, her own performance is even worse. What kind of mother lets her kid fail to show up for school fully half the time? Did she ever sit down with him once in four years to see how he was doing in, say, math or English, and to offer some help? The article indicates that the mother holds three jobs, but it does not state how many hours she works. Could she really never even have a minute to check how her kids are doing in school? And dare we ask about the father? Is this just completely none of his responsibility?

In short, the picture is one of both schools and families totally abdicating responsibility for raising and educating the kids. But then, supposedly, these kids are going to go on to college and then get hired for senior executive positions with companies like Amazon or JP Morgan? Needless to say, it’s not going to happen. When it doesn’t happen, the blame will somehow not fall on these schools or parents, but rather on you and me because we are supposedly “systemic racists” or “white supremacists.”

Could things get any worse? Yes. Another WBFF piece, this one from January 20, reports that the shift to virtual learning brought about by the pandemic has caused the course failure rate in the Baltimore City Schools to nearly double:

A course failure rate of 60% is almost beyond comprehension. A teacher interviewed for this January 20 piece indicates that his daily attendance rate for the virtual courses is “40 to 50 percent.” In other words, more than half the students don’t show up at all. But of course, when asked about going back to in person attendance, the teacher flatly refuses:

“[If we reopen schools] the cases will increase. This is basic science. It’s a numbers game,” said Butts. “We know the contagious rate will increase and that will lead to death. Somebody statistically is going to die if we re-open schools . . . .”

Like everybody else involved in raising and educating these kids, he accepts no responsibility of any kind. So Amazon, Google, JP Morgan, et al., good luck with your efforts to find all the minority candidates to fill your newly-proclaimed quotas. Without someone taking responsibility for actually educating the young people, these new rounds of affirmative action have no hope of being any more successful than prior rounds.