Time to pack it in!

        A recent national op-ed column by Dr. Thomas Sowell shows just how sophistic even brilliant persons can be when it comes to misreading cause and effect. Dr. Sowell laments the decline of Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, from the prep school it was created to be, (by the white Presbyterian Church in 1870) servicing black elites and their children, to the public school it has become. Fair enough, but in a staggering leap of illogic, he then proceeds to blame this decline in academic standing on , of all things,  the 1954 USSC decision in  Brown vs Board of Education.

        Along the way he omits a lot of factors unrelated to race. Start with the fact that Dunbar then and Dunbar now  are almost identical, racially. Originally an all black school, today it is still 98% African American. Today, however, 46% of students are on the free or reduced price lunch program. Today,  Dunbar serves the community in which it is located, vice a hand- picked Black elite, many of whose government employee families now live in suburbs of  DC and attend race neutral private prep schools.

       Blaming Brown v Board for this change and lamenting it, makes little or no sense. In fact, Sowell himself, by any standard brilliant but now, at 86, a rigid doctrinarian, had to move to Harlem at age 9 just to find a decent school which he was able to attend.  Living in Frederick Md, a scant 40 miles from DC, in 1958, 4 years after Brown,  I  played various sports with several Black friends who were forced to attend segregated Lincoln High school. Lincoln got everything related to academics after it was no longer used by the (still, in 1958)  all white Frederick High school. This included texts, lab equipment and even desks. Lincoln got about 60% per student of the funding at our white school. This was the reality of public schools "pre-Brown."  For a person of color in America to blame the Brown decision for simple demographic shifts is ludicrous and lamentable. 

       Dr. Sowell, like some current entertainers, embarrasses himself because he doesn't  know when to quit.