The deep internal contradictions of liberal race dogma have reached their logical, horrifying conclusion at the hands of the Florida State Board of Education. CBS Tampa reports:

The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.

On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.

The message sent to young people is clear:  blacks, Hispanics, and whites simply cannot be expected to perform at the level of Asians. There is a racial hierarchy of acceptable achievement proclaimed an official government body. Not since the days of segregation has a state officially proclaimed such a pernicious racial doctrine.

Predictably and justifiably, the insult is being taken for what it is:

"To expect less from one demographic and more from another is just a little off-base," Juan Lopez, magnet coordinator at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Riviera Beach, told the Palm Beach Post.

JFK Middle has a black student population of about 88 percent.

"Our kids, although they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they still have the ability to learn," Lopez said. "To dumb down the expectations for one group, that seems a little unfair."

It is more than a little unfair, it is a gross outrage, and it will harm the children, the schools, and society at large, if this sort of action spreads.

The forces at work here are clear.

On the one hand, we have liberal multicultural dogma that assert all cultures are intrinsically equal, and that there is no reason for one group to adopt the values and habits of another group which achieves at higher levels. If too many blacks cannot pass a firefighters test, then that test itself must be racist.

On the other hand, we have the bureaucratic necessity of measuring teachers' and students' performance. Teachers argue that they cannot be held responsible for correcting the problems that some children show up with in their classrooms, that students who come from chaotic home environments, who have never been exposed to books or who are unsupervised, cannot be brought up to minimal standards such as reading at or above grade level.

Because teachers will be evaluated based on how many students meet the standards, the teachers see their careers on the line, if they happen to work at a school where many students come from dysfunctional home environments. Their self-interest demands they seek relief from being held accountable for solving a problem they believe they did not create and cannot overcome.

So when a major liberal interest groups like teachers (and their unions) run up against the fallacious multicultural doctrine of cultural equivalency, self interest wins out. And the children lose. That is the leitmotif of public education for the last half century.

Until public education is able to distinguish habits and values from ethnicity, and proclaim that certain values (which happen to be more widely embraced in certain ethnicities than others) lead to success, and ought to be emulated by all, and that failure to embrace values and habits of study leads to consequences more serious than social promotion to the next grade, this mess will continue its devolution into outright racism.

Clear standards, uniformly applied, offer the only way for people who wish to overcome their parents' failures to better themselves. This means telling students that they must reject habits and attitudes that lead to failure. Even if they can point to some alleged "legacy of racism" as some justification for the attitudes and habits that do not serve them.

Hat tip: Richard Baehr