IN THE 17th century accusations of witchcraft could be made on flimsy evidence: warts and buoyancy would do. In the 21st century accusations of racism can be made with no evidence at all, or even with evidence pointing in the opposite direction.

A report recently published by the London Development Agency (LDA) claims to have discovered the cause of black boys’ academic underachievement, summed up neatly by the Guardian headline: Black Boys Betrayed by Racist School System.

According to the report: “Low teacher expectations play a major part in the underachievement of African-Caribbean pupils.” The “care experienced by African-Caribbean pupils from their teachers . . . was less positive than for boys from other groups”.

The LDA claims three sources of evidence for these accusations: focus groups, interviews and a pupil questionnaire. The findings of the focus groups and interviews may be discounted. The number of participants was too small for statistical significance. And focus group findings are notoriously prone to “confirmation bias”, because the facilitator knows what he is looking for and leads his witnesses.

Only the questionnaire, completed by 464 pupils, could provide serious evidence of teacher racism. Five questions were relevant. Pupils were asked how strongly they agree with the following statements, from 5 “strongly agree” to 1 “strongly disagree”:

Q14. My teachers expect me to do well at school. Q15. My teachers expect me to do my homework. Q16. My teachers care about my progress. Q17. Teachers listen to what I say. Q18. I am often in conflict with teachers.

The average answers of black and white pupils were the same: exactly the same for questions 14 and 15 and so close for the others that the difference is statistically insignificant.

These results suggest that teachers do not have lower expectations of black students than white, that they do not show lower levels of care. When this was the only serious data available, how could anyone draw the opposite conclusion? It requires a scandalous degree of either stupidity or mendacity.

The victims of this fraud are not only the teachers falsely accused of racism, or the ratepayers of London, whose money has been wasted on this bogus research. It is anyone who genuinely wants to know why black boys are failing at school.

Jamie Whyte is the author of Bad Thoughts