Because Black People Are Stupid

Racism is nothing new - including the belief in the inferiority of the black "race" - but decades of your "liberal media" (hi Andrew Sullivan! Hi New Republic! Hi Will Saletan! Hi Slate!) pushing books and articles about "scientific racism" (or "racial realism") have made racists think they're on pretty solid ground in thinking that black kids just can't be helped, that it isn't worth spending any money to bother to educate them. Best to save it for the prisons they'll be sent to (conveniently located in rural communities) later.

But in a town hall meeting last week, Eichelberger reportedly made a comment about urban public education with particularly alarming overtones. According to a report in a local newspaper, the senator thinks too many dollars are wasted trying to get minority kids into college -- when what a lot of them need is vocational training.
Here's how his remarks were reported in the Cumberland County-based Sentinel newspaper:
He then moved into a critique of Pennsylvania’s “inner city” education programs, positing that money was being misspent on pushing minority students from high school into college instead of into vocational programs.
“They’re pushing them toward college and they’re dropping out,” Eichelberger said. “They fall back and don’t succeed, whereas if there was a less intensive track, they would.”

Pennsylvania systematically and deliberately underfunds schools in areas with people of color, and a lot of the money in Philadelphia gets siphoned off, according to state law, to for profit charter grifters (not all charters are bad, of course, but the charter law is designed for grifters).