I hope we as a society remember why intelligence and ability are important before planes start falling out of the sky and things just stop working.
Racial quotas aside, it seems that over the last 20 years or so our country has almost completely given up on meaningful education and can only focus on getting the lowest performing students, many of them with no hope of an academic career, to pass some high school test. Everything is about credentials now, less and less about ability. The fact that this is now taking hold in medical school, law schools, and other similar institutions is scary.
The American ideal of political equality has, in the face of seemingly intractable racial performance gaps, so thoroughly morphed into a religious postulate of actual equality of ability, that I don’t think American society will tolerate truly race-neutral policies right now. The guilt and fear are too great, at least among some.
Can you point to any actual evidence of declining rigor, either among our universities or trade schools or anywhere else in education? Like declining LSAT scores or something? Declining SAT scores? I certainly don't see it. Our universities still seem to be the best in the world. Some times things just feel a certain way but it's not real. Before we let a doomerism idea take hold, let's get some actual evidence.
"I hope we as a society remember why intelligence and ability are important before planes start falling out of the sky and things just stop working."
Interestingly, when two Boeing 737 MAX fell out of the sky in 2019, the reason was not lack of ability of the engineers but corporate greed and Jack-Welch-style management.
Non sequitur. Intelligence alone won’t protect you from greed and malfeasance but you’ll be in a real mess if engineers can’t design reliable heavier-than-air conveyances that have to defy gravity.
“That being said, anti-wokes must be intelligent in which policies they pursue and courts should think carefully about the impacts of their decisions. The history of Supreme Court jurisprudence in this area shows that halfway measures can sometimes lead to unintended consequences and ultimately backfire.”
I agree entirely. When advocating for a policy, it’s important to consider the likely second-order political effects of that policy. Even if the new policy would be, on its face, an improvement, the legal and cultural environment could generate responses that would make things worse than they were before the initial policy was implemented.
Libertarians are particularly prone to shortsighted thinking about this, as they often have a somewhat naïve expectation that no new policies will be implemented when they successfully restrain the government in some way. It’s not enough to say that *you personally* oppose these second-order effects; you have to anticipate them and account for them before you advocate for the initial change.
That’s why I think your recent cheerleading for Republican school voucher policies is shortsighted. I agree that universal vouchers would be preferable in an environment in which private schools had exactly the same, relatively light, restrictions upon their admissions and expulsions policies. But things aren’t likely to stay that way.
The ideas that “Disparate Impact Bad” and “Discrimination Bad” can potentially destroy *any standard whatsoever*, since the maintenance of any standard involves some degree of discrimination and disparate impact. So the Civil Rights regime holds a legal sledgehammer that it can arbitrarily use to crush any particular standard that it chooses to crush.
Private school standards of admissions and conduct are absolutely susceptible to being crushed in this way. They just aren’t, currently, since progressives have focused on universal public schooling. But if voucher policies were to starve public schools of funding and force them to close, the progressives would simply drop the Civil Rights sledgehammer on private schools, turning their admissions offices into the equivalent of Fortune 500 HR departments. Entrance exams would be racist, behavioral standards would be racist, et cetera. It would be trivially easy for them to do this. They just haven’t…yet.
The current school situation is very far from an ideal system, but it may be a delicate local maximum that would be destroyed if voucher policies were implemented while Civil Rights law remained in effect. Private schools would be ruined.
I get increasingly confused by the desire for many on the right to try and turn K-12 into the same system as our higher education - mostly private schools, optional attendance with some state options competing, all underwriten by generous government subsidy - when the right thinks that system is terrible and has been captured institutionally by the left to a degree so severe that it might as well be burned to the ground.
What are you talking about? Public colleges out-enroll private colleges approximately 3-to-1. Additionally, colleges have substantially more leeway in expelling problem students than current public K-12 schools do; creating more private schools very plausibly means more affordable options with fewer problem students. The public school unions are already incredibly left-wing, even more so than the college system; you won't find a single Amy Wax serving as teacher or administrator for some Pennsylvania high school, because there isn't the slightest guarantee of freedom of thought.
Because 1) all else being equal, the contention is (and I’m inclined to agree) the public system is worse, and 2) the private system in higher education is corrupted by public funding (which would presumably not be as big of a factor for k-12. More than privatizing education, the goal is to reduce its reliance on public funds.
I guess is the pitch at that point to just tell poor people they don't get to go to school? That seems like a bad public policy compared to whatever people don't like about public schooling
Poor people go to free schools in Baltimore, Philly, StL., memphis,...how is that helping them? Have you noticed things like student outcomes there? Or the costs there?
I dare you to send your kids to a Baltimore City school.
Those school districts are struggling but what's the actual alternative here? No public funding so those kids don't go to school at all? Instead of being bad at math and reading they literally never learn anything? I'm asking in good faith because I simply don't understand what the alternative is, unless the idea is that a bunch of shitty cheap schools would pop up that probably do a worse job than public schools do *and* cost parents thousands.
1. Those school districts are not struggling, they are thriving. They are bloated with administration, contractors, and general staff - Remember that public schools are now simply public works projects, especially in urban districts where the tax base is not from the district. (see Baltimore City)
2. Who is struggling is any kid in those districts that wants out. They are, for the most part, screwed. (se dan rather's expose of the Detroit school district)
3. There is no evidence that funding relates to student outcomes. (see KC, MO in the 90s and Newark in the 2000s).
Now, the alternative, imo is:
A. Identify talented kids early on (by testing, in part) and then get kids who can and want to learn out of the general student population in these massive urban districts.
B. Teach very few subjects, but teach them well; reading, writing, math, and basic science.
C. Have class sizes with fewer than 20 kids (with the option of kicking disruptive kids out, fast).
D. Understand that these kids likely have crap home lives and support them as best we can, but realize that we are not gods and we cannot save everyone.
We have gotten to this point because urban school districts are environments where learning is near impossible, and if we look at outcomes, that seems to hold true.
For the kids that can't/won't learn - I have no idea, but they need to be apart from the others.
"The ideas that “Disparate Impact Bad” and “Discrimination Bad” can potentially destroy *any standard whatsoever*, since the maintenance of any standard involves some degree of discrimination and disparate impact. So the Civil Rights regime holds a legal sledgehammer that it can arbitrarily use to crush any particular standard that it chooses to crush. "
If you divorce yourself from the inherently racist disparate impact policies, then there is no sledgehammer. You are simply stuck with a non-virtual reality. It also will destroy *almost* any standard whatsoever, except meritocracy.
California shows the way. AA was banned in 1996 and rejected again in 2020. The UCs have been innovating ways around the law this whole time—both at the student and faculty level. Even so, the students are still weighted asian, so it appears the bans somewhat reduce discrimination at the student level.
As a Berkeley grad, I feel qualified to speak to some extent on this. The population is weighted almost exactly how you would expect the most prestigious public university in a very diverse state to be. Heavily Asian, average white and slightly more Latino than other states. Basically every diversity program was much more reasonably focused on improving merit or finding missing talent. Things like academic clubs and tutoring for low income students that made a point to reach out to black students, and admissions programs that had special consideration if you did really well but went to a bad high school (I grew up in a poor white part of the state and went to a tiny underfunded school that barely had college prep stuff, but I got a chance to explain that and got a bump up despite not having AP courses). These are fine programs and even if they are motivated by people who want to go back to racial quotas, they are ultimately the result of schools trying to help struggling borderline students be successful, rather than being a racial quota in disguise.
The underlying issue is that reparations for historical discrimination are a moral imperative (at least on the left) but policies used to implement them run up against the explicit language of the 14th Amendment. We're going to keep having this conversation until proper reparations are instituted that absolve America of its historical sins, and that would require an understanding that while the language of the 14th Amendment says that you can't discriminate, the intent of it was to make the lives of black people better and reparations like affirmative action are consistent with that intent.
Reparations don’t absolve anyone paying them of past sins. Rather, the people receiving them see them as a sign of weakness that emboldens them to demand more at the next round. And there always will be a next round, because the recipients will be poor again in 5 years. Look how quickly lottery winners blow through their windfalls....and how the billions being paid to Canada’s native people never seems to make them better off.
You will be out of your minds if you pay slavery reparations no matter how much agreement there is that they “deserve” it.
Let's say your governments in California and San Francisco and God knows where else does pay hundreds of billions, which it doesn't have, in reparations, raising the money by selling white families into slavery. Each qualifying descendant of African slaves takes his tranche of money and signs a release forever abandoning any further claim against the government or against white people in general. (Surely you would insist on a release, right?)
But there is nothing to stop BLM, the NAACP, the Tuskegee Institute Alumni Association, the Rikers Island Escapees Foundation, or any other ad hoc group constituted for the purpose to agitate that the reparation agreed to by individuals was not enough. We, says BLM, the NAACP, etc. were not a party to the agreement, and why were we left out of the discussions anyway? The money should have been given to us to distribute. So we want more money to be raised, and given to us this time. (That's how Native bands work in Canada with the never-ending trip to the dentist that the residential schools boondoggle is.)
Racial distribution is not a hurdle unless you are a racist. The distribution of college kids should only be based on the distribution of capable students.
But you keep on sending under-able kids to schools with their federal loans and their poor graduation rates - really helping them out, aren't you.
Additionally conservatives forget that the entire Jim Crow edifice was built with a feigned neutrality to bypass the Fourteenth Amendment. The left thinks conservative pretensions of neutrality are consequently full of shit.
Interesting. I would have assumed you would just be in favor of getting rid of disparate impact entirely, but here you seem to want it to be kept in place for university admissions? Perhaps you think the former is way too ambitious for the court? (I'm looking forward to your book.)
Personally I think anti-wokes (and I am one) should spend more time thinking about state institutions over which they have some direct control rather than fighting endlessly against the Ivy League. Simply require the University of Florida to admit based on a standardized subject-based test system like A levels in England, of the French Bac, or whatever. If the Ivy League wants to do something else, so be it.
This wouldn’t be disparate impact. The universities explicitly would be figuring out ways to get diversity, that falls under intentional discrimination. If they pick some random process and it just has a disparate impact, you have to live with it. But they couldn’t try for racial balancing. It can be hard to figure out which is happening in practice but the point is to make their lives harder.
Economic diversity is more than a subterfuge for racial diversity. A plumber’s daughter who scores 1400 on the SAT (old scale) is likely smarter than a doctor’s son who scores 1500. Give the smart, working class kid four years in a supportive learning environment, and she can blossom in a way the slightly duller doctor’s son might not.
How do you know that the plumber’s daughter at 1400 is smarter than the doctor’s son at 1500? What would make you think that, other than an assumption that blue-collar parents don’t want their children to act bright and don’t read to them as little kids, and so being blue-collar counts for over 100 SAT points? You also can’t know off the cuff of your sleeve that the working class student with 1400 would “blossom” over the doc’s kid who is alleged on the basis of nothing to be duller despite a higher SAT.
You are making up a fairy tell to explain something you don’t even know is true.
If the Supreme Court chickens out, I think that itself would warrant some commentary, Richard. Conservatives spent decades plus countless amounts of money and effort to achieve the crown jewel of their movement in the early 21st century, a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. And yet, it still may fall short. That would be rather impressive. It would shore up a bit the notion you’ve criticized that conservatives have in their minds that ‘even when we win, somehow we still lose.’
Because they accept Federal money for all sorts of things. If they want to be racist, then the Federal government should not support them (at a minimum).
Thanks. Follow up question. If Harvard would discriminate not because of race but in terms of socio-economic background, would that violate the constitution?
socio-economic background, AFAIK, is not a protected class according to Federal law. Not being able to discriminate against the middle class pisses-off the neo-Bolsheviks among us, which is why they work to eliminate it. (See USSR and San Francisco)
If you think that the Ivies or any other status-seeking org (e.g. NGOs) aren't desperate to fill their classes and cubicles with low-income or minority superstars, you are very wrong. In fact, what is happening is they are taking sub-par people simply to "look right" because they cannot find adequate people in many cases.
I know of one person who is on a school board that hired a head of school (private) who was the "best minority candidate." 9- months later they hired two more people to do the head's job and three years into the 'experiment' they had to 'let him go.'
This isn't an isolated incident.
As long as the left treats minorities like pets and status symbols to affix to their lapels, like fancy broaches, or class rings, we will see minorities that will fail in their jobs, which simply reinforces stereotypes.
But go on pretending treating people with lower expectations and expect them to rise-up - lolol. Please show me where and when in the history of mankind that ever worked.
PS: I know no one actually thinks it will work, beyond destabilizing society, which is the real goal of all of this foolishness.
There is a lot in what you say ... to pick one topic you bring up: destabilizing society. I'd be interested in making a list of what the main factors are that are destabilizing society right now. To make a start, on number one, I have rising income and wealth inequality.
And it looks like AI will be up there in a short while. With the arrival of GPT-4, AI has already transformed the way many software engineers are working, in just the last few weeks. Productivity of those who know how to use this tool has exploded. Given that our current economic system operates on already extreme information asymmetry (which, roughly, is aligned with income and wealth asymmetry) and assuming that AI will increase these asymmetries, we are in for a rough ride in the coming years, I would expect.
Apparently the income/wealth gap (are they the same or parallel??) was stable for 10 years from 2011-2021 (US census data). But over that time, we saw significant deterioration of the nation's social fabric (I call it the obamanation).
Also, we have endured periods of increased wealth gap where the destabilization was not nearly as profound, from 2001-2009 or 1993-2000, for example.
Face it, obama created the funding linkages and NGO linkages to mobilize small and large groups of whiny-assed bitches for whenever there was a molehill crisis (or none at all) that could be amplified into a mountainous crisis. That is what destabilizes the social fabric.
If you want to assure that everyone has equal wealth and income, there is one way to do that, by force. And, once you do that, a significant portion of people will lose their wealth very rapidly, by no external effort in most cases, simply by shear ineptitude. Am I saying that there will always be poor and rich people? I think I am and i think history proves that.
In my opinion, analyzing the rich and the poor is missing the point, as well as overlooking where the destabilization via obamanation hits hardest - the middle class. If you destroy the middle class, which is what the left always does, just look at any place they have run for any period of time, Detroit, Baltimore, SF, etc., there is no path up from poverty (except for lotto/lawsuit/athletes/crime). The left in these areas will not create an environment where people are willing to invest, in fact they do the opposite. This creates poverty and blight.
When the economy was doing great a few years ago, it was the middle class that was growing...until covid, which destroyed 10s of 1000s of small businesses and decent paying jobs. Like Soviets/Bolsheviks showed that the middle class was their enemy, then went after the poorer segments of the middle/working class, appears the left here is doing the same. Soros's DA's want to assure that no one will invest in cities (except maybe government, which never creates long-term stabilizing effect).
You want less income/wealth "inequality?" You have one choice, allow the middle class to grow. The left does the opposite, which is the destabilizing effect.
Isn't it funny how the tides have turned? Yesterday's conservatives wanted private organizations to have the right to discriminate. Today's conservatives want the government to take away the rights of a private organization to discriminate or not. Organizations should have free speech unless they say things we don't like. Then the government should use it's power against them.
Does anyone think we'd have any where near the level of racial strife if either of the two concerns were not present?
1) The black-white IQ gap, whether it's nature or nurture or both. If black men and women were able to intellectually compete with whites without artificial interventions (i.e. affirmative action), we would not have such disparities in income, educational attainment or criminality. Much of the racial strife is due to blacks' insecurity at being intellectually noncompetitive and then being susceptible to race mongers like Al Sharpton or Eric Michael Dyson displacing their anger to non-blacks and scapegoating non-blacks (especially whites).
2) The reality that black women don't date or marry out much. This might be due to their own preferences. However there is a great deal of evidence non-black men (and rising number of black men) don't want to date or marry them:
a) The rise of the 'passport bros' within the black male community. These are basically black American men (often higher IQ and higher income black men) who are so fed up with trying to date and marry black American women that they are leaving the country to seek social opportunities (i.e. long or short term) outside America, like the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia and other part of Latin America.
b) The reality that non-black American men don't date or marry black American women much- despite there being signs of massive interest in non-black men by black women:
In the United States, there has been a historical disparity between Black female and Black male exogamy ratios: according to the United States Census Bureau, there were 354,000 White female/Black male and 196,000 Black female/White male marriages in March 2009, representing a ratio of 181:100.[40] This traditional disparity has seen a rapid decline over the last two decades, contrasted with its peak in 1981 when the ratio was still 371:100.[41] In 2007, 4.6% of all married Blacks in the United States were wed to a White partner, and 0.4% of all Whites were married to a Black partner.[42]
-I won't link any sources right now, but there is a major deficit in black female porn stars. If racism is the only reason for this, why are some non-white or some Hapa female porn stars so highly desired? Such as Tara Patrick or Asia Akira?
Basically if black men and women did not have the disparities in income, educational attainment or crime rates and/or if black women did not have the disparities in dating and marriage, it is highly likely they'd feel more invested in preserving American society and continuing the American legacy.
I think BLM and SJWism is what happens when such a group (and especially black women) feels largely cut off from the greater American society and is now seeking some mechanisms like reparations and cancel culture to redistribute resources and power.
This is self-defeating anyway. If you don't admit based on merit, you will lower quality. Today people want to go to Harvard and pay $60K a year because of the prestige. But professors already came out indicating they had to lower standards in class. So, it will in the end only result in less quality coming out of these institutions. Corporations will notice and start recruiting somewhere else. And if not earlier, then students will notice too and also just go somewhere else.
Of course, it will take time, as these institutions can live on their past reputations for quite some time, I suspect. Also woke corporations will continue hire 'Ivy Leage' nitwits for departments like HR and marketing that don't matter anyway. But core work where skills = money, will be based on merit. Hard Benjamins will win.
It will be interesting to see what the institutions then will do. I suspect they'll double down on recruiting foreign students, to keep the money flowing. There the reputation probably last longer. But either way, you cannot expect to keep rising prices and lower quality.
They've been using affirmative action for more than a generation. How long is it supposed to take for businesses to not want to hire from them? What's the better school out there for them to choose from? Where's the evidence that the quality of the education they give students has declined?
Well it is either the other. Either they are admitting the same quality or not. We cannot say they are admitting less white/asian, and admitting blacks/latino despite lower skills, and then also claim quality doesn't go down. If students are less smart, professors will need to lower quality. And there is plenty of evidence that is happening. Countless stories of professors claiming so for instance.
But it hasn't really been a decade. The current push is just about 5 years. And it will self-destruct unless they can admit more foreigners.
Where do the students go? Well, just the colleges just below 'elite'. There are hundreds of schools spread across the US. Perhaps it is because I'm a European immigrant, but the reputation of Yale/Hardvard being so so super far above the rest is nonsense anyway. Top universities in Europe are the same level. Plus after 4 years of work, those 4 years of college starting to dim anyway in terms of effect. People in the greatly overvalue the quality of college and even more like to spread the myth of the great Yale/Hardvard/etc. They are, or at least were good but also not that unique.
Last, in terms of hiring, many companies already do. At least in science and tech, they look all over the world. Some unknown university in Asia, South America will be evaluated just as much as Harvard/etc. I've hired myself plenty of unknown applicants and now I think of it only twice had an 'elite' university applicant. The last time I only realized after we hired him, the university was considered 'elite'. As an immigrant I just didn't know the name and never cared.
It is tougher if you work in HR, administration or marketing or so as many of these professions are softer anyway. As I indicated it will take longer there. After all these are not moneymakers of a business and can afford to hire based on politics. But then again, why would you want to be in such department after racking up 200-300K in debt? Just go to a "lower" tier college and get a good internship and even if they pay less the first 3 years or so, you'll be having the same or more spendable income because of lower debt.
College may seem as a big deal when you are 18, but when 28, it is already old history and you are worrying about other things.
I don't know what you mean by "the current push"? Harvard started it's affirmative action plan in1968 and has consistently had a higher share of black students than any other Ivy League school. In all the time since then it has retained it's position as one of the most exclusive schools in the country and the Ivy League schools are still considered some of the best in the world. My point here is that you are claiming some pretty catastrophic consequences for the future based on something that they've been doing for over 50 years. If it's true then I would expect there to be lots of evidence to show that these policies produce worse outcomes. Do schools with higher percentages of black students perform worse on LSATs or other statistical measures of achievement? Is the Harvard post-graduation unemployment rate higher now than 50 years ago? I sincerely doubt it. In reality, the best black students in the country perform about the same as the best white students and a whole lot of people who are not admitted to Harvard would have performed just great if they had been admitted.
> For too long, institutions have been allowed to operate contrary to the text of the Civil Rights Act
This perspective seems to be in tension with your more famous position that wokeness is the Civil Rights Act and therefore stopping it means repealing the Act.
If American race policy contravenes the Civil Rights Act rather than complying with it, why do we think the Act is the problem?
Is there evidence that any of the justices see things this way, or are likely to do this? I have a suspicion Gorsuch is slightly woke, given his ruling in Bostock.
If Harvard and other elites reduce standards so as to have more black students even when they can’t admit that’s what they’re doing, would an employer or a grad school apply the diversity discount only against black graduates? Would it be credible for a white or Asian grad to say, “Look, we know Harvard has gone downhill but that only applies to the blacks they let in. People like us got in, and graduated, on merit like we always did. So we’re good bets to hire!” (Or on legacy but let’s not go there today.)
> Imagine that there was a Southern municipality with a history of discriminating against black people. It is taken to court, at which point a judge decrees that while the city cannot simply refuse to hire blacks, it’s fine for it to only recruit from white areas in hopes of achieving a certain demographic composition of its workforce.
What if the end result was that its workforce was racially balanced? If these schools, for example, still don't have Asians being underrepresented vs their share of the population, they could more believably say that they're not just trying to keep out Asians. Recall also that it wasn't top-down government force that ended quotas against Jews in the Ivy League, it was school admins deciding to embrace meritocracy by themselves.
I hope we as a society remember why intelligence and ability are important before planes start falling out of the sky and things just stop working.
Racial quotas aside, it seems that over the last 20 years or so our country has almost completely given up on meaningful education and can only focus on getting the lowest performing students, many of them with no hope of an academic career, to pass some high school test. Everything is about credentials now, less and less about ability. The fact that this is now taking hold in medical school, law schools, and other similar institutions is scary.
The American ideal of political equality has, in the face of seemingly intractable racial performance gaps, so thoroughly morphed into a religious postulate of actual equality of ability, that I don’t think American society will tolerate truly race-neutral policies right now. The guilt and fear are too great, at least among some.
Can you point to any actual evidence of declining rigor, either among our universities or trade schools or anywhere else in education? Like declining LSAT scores or something? Declining SAT scores? I certainly don't see it. Our universities still seem to be the best in the world. Some times things just feel a certain way but it's not real. Before we let a doomerism idea take hold, let's get some actual evidence.
Sure, lets ignore common sense and wait for studies that are likely garbage. Lots of schools are abandoning SATs.
"Harvard College will allow students to apply for admission without requiring SAT or ACT scores for the upcoming Harvard College Classes of ‘27, ‘28, ‘29, and ’30." https://college.harvard.edu/about/news-announcements/admissions-update-2023-2026-application-cycles
"I hope we as a society remember why intelligence and ability are important before planes start falling out of the sky and things just stop working."
Interestingly, when two Boeing 737 MAX fell out of the sky in 2019, the reason was not lack of ability of the engineers but corporate greed and Jack-Welch-style management.
Non sequitur. Intelligence alone won’t protect you from greed and malfeasance but you’ll be in a real mess if engineers can’t design reliable heavier-than-air conveyances that have to defy gravity.
Not sure what your point is. Mine was that the engineers are ok, but management is not.
“That being said, anti-wokes must be intelligent in which policies they pursue and courts should think carefully about the impacts of their decisions. The history of Supreme Court jurisprudence in this area shows that halfway measures can sometimes lead to unintended consequences and ultimately backfire.”
I agree entirely. When advocating for a policy, it’s important to consider the likely second-order political effects of that policy. Even if the new policy would be, on its face, an improvement, the legal and cultural environment could generate responses that would make things worse than they were before the initial policy was implemented.
Libertarians are particularly prone to shortsighted thinking about this, as they often have a somewhat naïve expectation that no new policies will be implemented when they successfully restrain the government in some way. It’s not enough to say that *you personally* oppose these second-order effects; you have to anticipate them and account for them before you advocate for the initial change.
That’s why I think your recent cheerleading for Republican school voucher policies is shortsighted. I agree that universal vouchers would be preferable in an environment in which private schools had exactly the same, relatively light, restrictions upon their admissions and expulsions policies. But things aren’t likely to stay that way.
The ideas that “Disparate Impact Bad” and “Discrimination Bad” can potentially destroy *any standard whatsoever*, since the maintenance of any standard involves some degree of discrimination and disparate impact. So the Civil Rights regime holds a legal sledgehammer that it can arbitrarily use to crush any particular standard that it chooses to crush.
Private school standards of admissions and conduct are absolutely susceptible to being crushed in this way. They just aren’t, currently, since progressives have focused on universal public schooling. But if voucher policies were to starve public schools of funding and force them to close, the progressives would simply drop the Civil Rights sledgehammer on private schools, turning their admissions offices into the equivalent of Fortune 500 HR departments. Entrance exams would be racist, behavioral standards would be racist, et cetera. It would be trivially easy for them to do this. They just haven’t…yet.
The current school situation is very far from an ideal system, but it may be a delicate local maximum that would be destroyed if voucher policies were implemented while Civil Rights law remained in effect. Private schools would be ruined.
I get increasingly confused by the desire for many on the right to try and turn K-12 into the same system as our higher education - mostly private schools, optional attendance with some state options competing, all underwriten by generous government subsidy - when the right thinks that system is terrible and has been captured institutionally by the left to a degree so severe that it might as well be burned to the ground.
What are you talking about? Public colleges out-enroll private colleges approximately 3-to-1. Additionally, colleges have substantially more leeway in expelling problem students than current public K-12 schools do; creating more private schools very plausibly means more affordable options with fewer problem students. The public school unions are already incredibly left-wing, even more so than the college system; you won't find a single Amy Wax serving as teacher or administrator for some Pennsylvania high school, because there isn't the slightest guarantee of freedom of thought.
Because 1) all else being equal, the contention is (and I’m inclined to agree) the public system is worse, and 2) the private system in higher education is corrupted by public funding (which would presumably not be as big of a factor for k-12. More than privatizing education, the goal is to reduce its reliance on public funds.
I guess is the pitch at that point to just tell poor people they don't get to go to school? That seems like a bad public policy compared to whatever people don't like about public schooling
Poor people go to free schools in Baltimore, Philly, StL., memphis,...how is that helping them? Have you noticed things like student outcomes there? Or the costs there?
I dare you to send your kids to a Baltimore City school.
Those school districts are struggling but what's the actual alternative here? No public funding so those kids don't go to school at all? Instead of being bad at math and reading they literally never learn anything? I'm asking in good faith because I simply don't understand what the alternative is, unless the idea is that a bunch of shitty cheap schools would pop up that probably do a worse job than public schools do *and* cost parents thousands.
Let's break that down a bit.
1. Those school districts are not struggling, they are thriving. They are bloated with administration, contractors, and general staff - Remember that public schools are now simply public works projects, especially in urban districts where the tax base is not from the district. (see Baltimore City)
2. Who is struggling is any kid in those districts that wants out. They are, for the most part, screwed. (se dan rather's expose of the Detroit school district)
3. There is no evidence that funding relates to student outcomes. (see KC, MO in the 90s and Newark in the 2000s).
Now, the alternative, imo is:
A. Identify talented kids early on (by testing, in part) and then get kids who can and want to learn out of the general student population in these massive urban districts.
B. Teach very few subjects, but teach them well; reading, writing, math, and basic science.
C. Have class sizes with fewer than 20 kids (with the option of kicking disruptive kids out, fast).
D. Understand that these kids likely have crap home lives and support them as best we can, but realize that we are not gods and we cannot save everyone.
We have gotten to this point because urban school districts are environments where learning is near impossible, and if we look at outcomes, that seems to hold true.
For the kids that can't/won't learn - I have no idea, but they need to be apart from the others.
"The ideas that “Disparate Impact Bad” and “Discrimination Bad” can potentially destroy *any standard whatsoever*, since the maintenance of any standard involves some degree of discrimination and disparate impact. So the Civil Rights regime holds a legal sledgehammer that it can arbitrarily use to crush any particular standard that it chooses to crush. "
If you divorce yourself from the inherently racist disparate impact policies, then there is no sledgehammer. You are simply stuck with a non-virtual reality. It also will destroy *almost* any standard whatsoever, except meritocracy.
California shows the way. AA was banned in 1996 and rejected again in 2020. The UCs have been innovating ways around the law this whole time—both at the student and faculty level. Even so, the students are still weighted asian, so it appears the bans somewhat reduce discrimination at the student level.
As a Berkeley grad, I feel qualified to speak to some extent on this. The population is weighted almost exactly how you would expect the most prestigious public university in a very diverse state to be. Heavily Asian, average white and slightly more Latino than other states. Basically every diversity program was much more reasonably focused on improving merit or finding missing talent. Things like academic clubs and tutoring for low income students that made a point to reach out to black students, and admissions programs that had special consideration if you did really well but went to a bad high school (I grew up in a poor white part of the state and went to a tiny underfunded school that barely had college prep stuff, but I got a chance to explain that and got a bump up despite not having AP courses). These are fine programs and even if they are motivated by people who want to go back to racial quotas, they are ultimately the result of schools trying to help struggling borderline students be successful, rather than being a racial quota in disguise.
Where are the programs for poor or lower income White kids?
The underlying issue is that reparations for historical discrimination are a moral imperative (at least on the left) but policies used to implement them run up against the explicit language of the 14th Amendment. We're going to keep having this conversation until proper reparations are instituted that absolve America of its historical sins, and that would require an understanding that while the language of the 14th Amendment says that you can't discriminate, the intent of it was to make the lives of black people better and reparations like affirmative action are consistent with that intent.
Reparations don’t absolve anyone paying them of past sins. Rather, the people receiving them see them as a sign of weakness that emboldens them to demand more at the next round. And there always will be a next round, because the recipients will be poor again in 5 years. Look how quickly lottery winners blow through their windfalls....and how the billions being paid to Canada’s native people never seems to make them better off.
You will be out of your minds if you pay slavery reparations no matter how much agreement there is that they “deserve” it.
And, replying to my own comment, there's more:
Let's say your governments in California and San Francisco and God knows where else does pay hundreds of billions, which it doesn't have, in reparations, raising the money by selling white families into slavery. Each qualifying descendant of African slaves takes his tranche of money and signs a release forever abandoning any further claim against the government or against white people in general. (Surely you would insist on a release, right?)
But there is nothing to stop BLM, the NAACP, the Tuskegee Institute Alumni Association, the Rikers Island Escapees Foundation, or any other ad hoc group constituted for the purpose to agitate that the reparation agreed to by individuals was not enough. We, says BLM, the NAACP, etc. were not a party to the agreement, and why were we left out of the discussions anyway? The money should have been given to us to distribute. So we want more money to be raised, and given to us this time. (That's how Native bands work in Canada with the never-ending trip to the dentist that the residential schools boondoggle is.)
You're 100% right. That's the genius of Affirmative Action, it overcomes the distribution hurdles.
Racial distribution is not a hurdle unless you are a racist. The distribution of college kids should only be based on the distribution of capable students.
But you keep on sending under-able kids to schools with their federal loans and their poor graduation rates - really helping them out, aren't you.
There is ZERO moral imperative to pay reparations that will not repair things.
Please describe what "proper reparations" are.
Additionally conservatives forget that the entire Jim Crow edifice was built with a feigned neutrality to bypass the Fourteenth Amendment. The left thinks conservative pretensions of neutrality are consequently full of shit.
I’m still waiting for someone to sue the NBA for systemic discrimination against Asian and White players.
...lol...and against people who can’t shoot, dribble, or rebound.
Interesting. I would have assumed you would just be in favor of getting rid of disparate impact entirely, but here you seem to want it to be kept in place for university admissions? Perhaps you think the former is way too ambitious for the court? (I'm looking forward to your book.)
Personally I think anti-wokes (and I am one) should spend more time thinking about state institutions over which they have some direct control rather than fighting endlessly against the Ivy League. Simply require the University of Florida to admit based on a standardized subject-based test system like A levels in England, of the French Bac, or whatever. If the Ivy League wants to do something else, so be it.
This wouldn’t be disparate impact. The universities explicitly would be figuring out ways to get diversity, that falls under intentional discrimination. If they pick some random process and it just has a disparate impact, you have to live with it. But they couldn’t try for racial balancing. It can be hard to figure out which is happening in practice but the point is to make their lives harder.
Economic diversity is more than a subterfuge for racial diversity. A plumber’s daughter who scores 1400 on the SAT (old scale) is likely smarter than a doctor’s son who scores 1500. Give the smart, working class kid four years in a supportive learning environment, and she can blossom in a way the slightly duller doctor’s son might not.
How do you know that the plumber’s daughter at 1400 is smarter than the doctor’s son at 1500? What would make you think that, other than an assumption that blue-collar parents don’t want their children to act bright and don’t read to them as little kids, and so being blue-collar counts for over 100 SAT points? You also can’t know off the cuff of your sleeve that the working class student with 1400 would “blossom” over the doc’s kid who is alleged on the basis of nothing to be duller despite a higher SAT.
You are making up a fairy tell to explain something you don’t even know is true.
If the Supreme Court chickens out, I think that itself would warrant some commentary, Richard. Conservatives spent decades plus countless amounts of money and effort to achieve the crown jewel of their movement in the early 21st century, a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. And yet, it still may fall short. That would be rather impressive. It would shore up a bit the notion you’ve criticized that conservatives have in their minds that ‘even when we win, somehow we still lose.’
Universities like Harvard are private institutions. If they consider it their mission to increase diversity, why shouldnt they be allowed to do this?
Because they accept Federal money for all sorts of things. If they want to be racist, then the Federal government should not support them (at a minimum).
Thanks. Follow up question. If Harvard would discriminate not because of race but in terms of socio-economic background, would that violate the constitution?
socio-economic background, AFAIK, is not a protected class according to Federal law. Not being able to discriminate against the middle class pisses-off the neo-Bolsheviks among us, which is why they work to eliminate it. (See USSR and San Francisco)
If you think that the Ivies or any other status-seeking org (e.g. NGOs) aren't desperate to fill their classes and cubicles with low-income or minority superstars, you are very wrong. In fact, what is happening is they are taking sub-par people simply to "look right" because they cannot find adequate people in many cases.
I know of one person who is on a school board that hired a head of school (private) who was the "best minority candidate." 9- months later they hired two more people to do the head's job and three years into the 'experiment' they had to 'let him go.'
This isn't an isolated incident.
As long as the left treats minorities like pets and status symbols to affix to their lapels, like fancy broaches, or class rings, we will see minorities that will fail in their jobs, which simply reinforces stereotypes.
But go on pretending treating people with lower expectations and expect them to rise-up - lolol. Please show me where and when in the history of mankind that ever worked.
PS: I know no one actually thinks it will work, beyond destabilizing society, which is the real goal of all of this foolishness.
There is a lot in what you say ... to pick one topic you bring up: destabilizing society. I'd be interested in making a list of what the main factors are that are destabilizing society right now. To make a start, on number one, I have rising income and wealth inequality.
And it looks like AI will be up there in a short while. With the arrival of GPT-4, AI has already transformed the way many software engineers are working, in just the last few weeks. Productivity of those who know how to use this tool has exploded. Given that our current economic system operates on already extreme information asymmetry (which, roughly, is aligned with income and wealth asymmetry) and assuming that AI will increase these asymmetries, we are in for a rough ride in the coming years, I would expect.
Would be interested in your opinion.
Apparently the income/wealth gap (are they the same or parallel??) was stable for 10 years from 2011-2021 (US census data). But over that time, we saw significant deterioration of the nation's social fabric (I call it the obamanation).
Also, we have endured periods of increased wealth gap where the destabilization was not nearly as profound, from 2001-2009 or 1993-2000, for example.
Face it, obama created the funding linkages and NGO linkages to mobilize small and large groups of whiny-assed bitches for whenever there was a molehill crisis (or none at all) that could be amplified into a mountainous crisis. That is what destabilizes the social fabric.
If you want to assure that everyone has equal wealth and income, there is one way to do that, by force. And, once you do that, a significant portion of people will lose their wealth very rapidly, by no external effort in most cases, simply by shear ineptitude. Am I saying that there will always be poor and rich people? I think I am and i think history proves that.
In my opinion, analyzing the rich and the poor is missing the point, as well as overlooking where the destabilization via obamanation hits hardest - the middle class. If you destroy the middle class, which is what the left always does, just look at any place they have run for any period of time, Detroit, Baltimore, SF, etc., there is no path up from poverty (except for lotto/lawsuit/athletes/crime). The left in these areas will not create an environment where people are willing to invest, in fact they do the opposite. This creates poverty and blight.
When the economy was doing great a few years ago, it was the middle class that was growing...until covid, which destroyed 10s of 1000s of small businesses and decent paying jobs. Like Soviets/Bolsheviks showed that the middle class was their enemy, then went after the poorer segments of the middle/working class, appears the left here is doing the same. Soros's DA's want to assure that no one will invest in cities (except maybe government, which never creates long-term stabilizing effect).
You want less income/wealth "inequality?" You have one choice, allow the middle class to grow. The left does the opposite, which is the destabilizing effect.
Isn't it funny how the tides have turned? Yesterday's conservatives wanted private organizations to have the right to discriminate. Today's conservatives want the government to take away the rights of a private organization to discriminate or not. Organizations should have free speech unless they say things we don't like. Then the government should use it's power against them.
Does anyone think we'd have any where near the level of racial strife if either of the two concerns were not present?
1) The black-white IQ gap, whether it's nature or nurture or both. If black men and women were able to intellectually compete with whites without artificial interventions (i.e. affirmative action), we would not have such disparities in income, educational attainment or criminality. Much of the racial strife is due to blacks' insecurity at being intellectually noncompetitive and then being susceptible to race mongers like Al Sharpton or Eric Michael Dyson displacing their anger to non-blacks and scapegoating non-blacks (especially whites).
2) The reality that black women don't date or marry out much. This might be due to their own preferences. However there is a great deal of evidence non-black men (and rising number of black men) don't want to date or marry them:
a) The rise of the 'passport bros' within the black male community. These are basically black American men (often higher IQ and higher income black men) who are so fed up with trying to date and marry black American women that they are leaving the country to seek social opportunities (i.e. long or short term) outside America, like the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia and other part of Latin America.
https://www.google.com/search?q=passport+bro&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS992US992&oq=passport+bro&aqs=chrome..69i57j46i10i433i512j0i10i131i433i512j0i10i512j0i3j0i10i512l4.3259j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:c0bb8f35,vid:WVp3eEGUpjs
b) The reality that non-black American men don't date or marry black American women much- despite there being signs of massive interest in non-black men by black women:
https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/raceandattraction20092014.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#Black_and_White
From wikipedia article:
In the United States, there has been a historical disparity between Black female and Black male exogamy ratios: according to the United States Census Bureau, there were 354,000 White female/Black male and 196,000 Black female/White male marriages in March 2009, representing a ratio of 181:100.[40] This traditional disparity has seen a rapid decline over the last two decades, contrasted with its peak in 1981 when the ratio was still 371:100.[41] In 2007, 4.6% of all married Blacks in the United States were wed to a White partner, and 0.4% of all Whites were married to a Black partner.[42]
-I won't link any sources right now, but there is a major deficit in black female porn stars. If racism is the only reason for this, why are some non-white or some Hapa female porn stars so highly desired? Such as Tara Patrick or Asia Akira?
Basically if black men and women did not have the disparities in income, educational attainment or crime rates and/or if black women did not have the disparities in dating and marriage, it is highly likely they'd feel more invested in preserving American society and continuing the American legacy.
I think BLM and SJWism is what happens when such a group (and especially black women) feels largely cut off from the greater American society and is now seeking some mechanisms like reparations and cancel culture to redistribute resources and power.
This is self-defeating anyway. If you don't admit based on merit, you will lower quality. Today people want to go to Harvard and pay $60K a year because of the prestige. But professors already came out indicating they had to lower standards in class. So, it will in the end only result in less quality coming out of these institutions. Corporations will notice and start recruiting somewhere else. And if not earlier, then students will notice too and also just go somewhere else.
Of course, it will take time, as these institutions can live on their past reputations for quite some time, I suspect. Also woke corporations will continue hire 'Ivy Leage' nitwits for departments like HR and marketing that don't matter anyway. But core work where skills = money, will be based on merit. Hard Benjamins will win.
It will be interesting to see what the institutions then will do. I suspect they'll double down on recruiting foreign students, to keep the money flowing. There the reputation probably last longer. But either way, you cannot expect to keep rising prices and lower quality.
They've been using affirmative action for more than a generation. How long is it supposed to take for businesses to not want to hire from them? What's the better school out there for them to choose from? Where's the evidence that the quality of the education they give students has declined?
Well it is either the other. Either they are admitting the same quality or not. We cannot say they are admitting less white/asian, and admitting blacks/latino despite lower skills, and then also claim quality doesn't go down. If students are less smart, professors will need to lower quality. And there is plenty of evidence that is happening. Countless stories of professors claiming so for instance.
But it hasn't really been a decade. The current push is just about 5 years. And it will self-destruct unless they can admit more foreigners.
Where do the students go? Well, just the colleges just below 'elite'. There are hundreds of schools spread across the US. Perhaps it is because I'm a European immigrant, but the reputation of Yale/Hardvard being so so super far above the rest is nonsense anyway. Top universities in Europe are the same level. Plus after 4 years of work, those 4 years of college starting to dim anyway in terms of effect. People in the greatly overvalue the quality of college and even more like to spread the myth of the great Yale/Hardvard/etc. They are, or at least were good but also not that unique.
Last, in terms of hiring, many companies already do. At least in science and tech, they look all over the world. Some unknown university in Asia, South America will be evaluated just as much as Harvard/etc. I've hired myself plenty of unknown applicants and now I think of it only twice had an 'elite' university applicant. The last time I only realized after we hired him, the university was considered 'elite'. As an immigrant I just didn't know the name and never cared.
It is tougher if you work in HR, administration or marketing or so as many of these professions are softer anyway. As I indicated it will take longer there. After all these are not moneymakers of a business and can afford to hire based on politics. But then again, why would you want to be in such department after racking up 200-300K in debt? Just go to a "lower" tier college and get a good internship and even if they pay less the first 3 years or so, you'll be having the same or more spendable income because of lower debt.
College may seem as a big deal when you are 18, but when 28, it is already old history and you are worrying about other things.
I don't know what you mean by "the current push"? Harvard started it's affirmative action plan in1968 and has consistently had a higher share of black students than any other Ivy League school. In all the time since then it has retained it's position as one of the most exclusive schools in the country and the Ivy League schools are still considered some of the best in the world. My point here is that you are claiming some pretty catastrophic consequences for the future based on something that they've been doing for over 50 years. If it's true then I would expect there to be lots of evidence to show that these policies produce worse outcomes. Do schools with higher percentages of black students perform worse on LSATs or other statistical measures of achievement? Is the Harvard post-graduation unemployment rate higher now than 50 years ago? I sincerely doubt it. In reality, the best black students in the country perform about the same as the best white students and a whole lot of people who are not admitted to Harvard would have performed just great if they had been admitted.
> For too long, institutions have been allowed to operate contrary to the text of the Civil Rights Act
This perspective seems to be in tension with your more famous position that wokeness is the Civil Rights Act and therefore stopping it means repealing the Act.
If American race policy contravenes the Civil Rights Act rather than complying with it, why do we think the Act is the problem?
Is there evidence that any of the justices see things this way, or are likely to do this? I have a suspicion Gorsuch is slightly woke, given his ruling in Bostock.
If Harvard and other elites reduce standards so as to have more black students even when they can’t admit that’s what they’re doing, would an employer or a grad school apply the diversity discount only against black graduates? Would it be credible for a white or Asian grad to say, “Look, we know Harvard has gone downhill but that only applies to the blacks they let in. People like us got in, and graduated, on merit like we always did. So we’re good bets to hire!” (Or on legacy but let’s not go there today.)
They've been using affirmative action for decades, do you think companies don't want to hire Ivy League grads today?
> Imagine that there was a Southern municipality with a history of discriminating against black people. It is taken to court, at which point a judge decrees that while the city cannot simply refuse to hire blacks, it’s fine for it to only recruit from white areas in hopes of achieving a certain demographic composition of its workforce.
What if the end result was that its workforce was racially balanced? If these schools, for example, still don't have Asians being underrepresented vs their share of the population, they could more believably say that they're not just trying to keep out Asians. Recall also that it wasn't top-down government force that ended quotas against Jews in the Ivy League, it was school admins deciding to embrace meritocracy by themselves.
>One judicial decision will not uproot this entire system.
Abolish public education. One decision.