Opinion | Affirmative action can’t fix racial disparities in education. This can.

The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, show that pandemic lockdowns wiped out nearly two decades of progress in reading and more than three decades of progress in math. And since the lockdowns, schools are failing to make up for those learning losses. Black and Hispanic students in schools with high poverty rates suffered learning losses far worse than their White peers, because high-poverty schools stayed closed longer than schools in more affluent communities.

Two Black columnists discuss college after affirmative action

One study by Curriculum Associates found that schools serving majority Black and Latino students reported “almost double the amount of unfinished learning” in third-grade reading and math in 2021 than did schools where the majority of students were White. According to McKinsey, the cumulative learning losses during the pandemic could reduce students’ lifetime earnings by as much as $61,000 — with poor and minority students the worst affected.

The state of education for poor minority students in the United States is a disgrace. An analysis of 2021-22 data by Fox News’s Project Baltimore found that 93 percent of students in Baltimore public schools could not do math at grade level, including 23 schools where not a single student could do so. In Illinois, data showed 53 schools — most of them in Chicago — where not a single student could do math at grade level, and 30 where not a single student can read at grade level. In Minnesota, there were 19 schools where not one student could do math at grade level — half of them in Minneapolis-St. Paul — while half of all students in the public school system could not read at grade level. There is simply no excuse for keeping kids trapped in schools like these.

Affirmative action in college admissions did not help these kids. As Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper recently wrote in the New York Times, many elite colleges and universities “boost diversity statistics on the cheap by accepting minority students who can pay full freight.” David Leonhardt of the New York Times reports less than 15 percent of recent undergraduates at public universities including the University of Virginia, Auburn, Georgia Tech and William & Mary as well as elite private colleges such as Bates, Brown, Georgetown, Oberlin, Tulane and Wake Forest come from families with incomes low enough to qualify for Pell Grants. Affirmative action, Leonhardt writes, “often succeeded at producing racial diversity without producing as much economic diversity.” In other words, these colleges and universities tend to admit wealthy minorities from educated households who do not need help rather than the kids from poor families who do.

Blame for this debacle lies in large part with teachers’ unions, which lobbied for remote schooling — and continue to fight to deny parents the right to take their kids out of failing schools.

Instead of trying to help kids at the end of the process by lowering admissions standards, we should be helping them at the start of the process by giving them access to better schools so they can get the education they need not just to get into college, but to succeed there — and in life.

Right now, affluent White parents can just pull their kids out of the failing schools and send them to schools that are focused on fundamentals like reading and math. But poor Black and Hispanic parents can’t do the same. If you’re concerned about systematic discrimination, you should find it unacceptable that White parents have choices for their kids while Black and Brown parents don’t. Giving them that choice is the civil rights struggle of our time.

Fortunately, conservatives have not just been fighting against affirmative action, but taking affirmative action of their own to help these kids — passing school choice laws across the country that address the systematic discrimination in our public schools. In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine (R) just signed a budget including universal school choice. Ohio is now the eighth state to pass universal school choice in just two years, alongside Arizona, Iowa, West Virginia, Utah, Arkansas, Florida and Oklahoma.

Eight states is a start, but that leaves 42 in which poor Black and Hispanic parents don’t have the same choices as affluent parents. So, if you are a conservative, celebrate the Supreme Court’s historic decision. But tomorrow, the fight for school choice begins anew.