I probably have a different take on this, as I teach at a well-known international school in Beijing with over 40 different nationalities. I've also taught at "international" schools where the student body was 96% host-country. There really is a difference in the feel of the schools and the interaction of the students, and certainly in how they relate to you as a "foreign" educator, when you're simply one of many different nationalities and skin tones. I tend to agree that diversity doesn't have an impact on learning FACTS, but we all know school, at least K-12, has so much more learning going on than just facts. (I'd argue teaching my subject content is the least of what I do.) Within that context, diversity does matter. The diversity in skin tone comes with cultural diversity and a variety of perspectives that is integral to many class discussions. Students--and teachers--cultural assumptions and biases are challenged on a somewhat regular basis. Of course, international education comes with its own white/western biases and that has really hit the fan as it were the past year, but that's a different discussion. So, while a diverse student body may not impact the learning of Physical Laws themselves, it probably could challenge say the importance of their place in the curriculum and the purpose for their study.
The irony is that in some or perhaps many cases it's Asian Americans that end up bearing the brunt of the affirmative action burden, despite the narrative being framed as that of whites on the one hand versus Blacks and Hispanics on the other. I haven't actually read Thomas Espenshade's book from back in the day, but I did seem to recall that his conclusion was that sans affirmative action, for the schools and time period that he examined, the numbers of Blacks and Hispanics admitted would increase significantly, the number of Asians admitted would decrease significantly, while the number of white students admitted would roughly remain the same, although the composition of admitted white students would shift towards those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum and from more rural areas. In other words, Asian Americans were the ones primarily bearing the burden of creating affirmative action spots for Black and Hispanic students.
In other circumstances I'm sure whites are impacted by affirmative action more so than what Espenshade uncovered, but I'd wager that as a general rule of thumb, affirmative action in this country in many contexts disproportionately burdens Asian Americans compared to whites. I guess it's a pretty slick sleight of hand that white progressives are able to virtue signal about the importance of diversity while passing on most of the costs onto another minority group. But alas I digress...
This is a good question. I’ve often thought that one additional reason college admissions staff and hiring managers and recruiters prefer to simply privilege skin color is because it’s much less work. Race is a great sorter and then if someone tells a story in an essay that presents of picture of familial challenges, etc. it’s further helpful information to consider, perhaps taken with little vetting, from within a much smaller pool.
One thing (as I liberal) I think many liberals too often disregard are the incentives created by certain policy prescriptions. If the advantages of claiming certain circumstances are great enough, one also has to consider the means by which applicants and their families might seek to mislead or disguise information. Relying on too limited a number of variables could magnify these problems. When zip code was being discussed a few months ago as a possible proxy for disadvantage in prioritizing vaccine distribution, it was obvious - just thinking of various places I’d lived - how many people within a zip code don’t fit that assumption and render it both over and under-inclusive as a proxy for what one is trying to capture.
Anyway, it would be fun to construct a list of factors to consider and validity and measurement problems with each.
Do we have any information on how heavy the thumb of affirmative action is? E.g., as measured in standard deviations, or points on SAT scores. Anything at all?
I don’t know how universally easy that data is to find in terms of each specific school or as an average in aggregate. In the case of Harvard, I believe it was forced into public view with the administration kicking and screaming trying to hide it. The average differences are in multiple hundreds of points. They’re enormous.
So much for an "exception" to the crap generally published by The _Nation_ magazine. Never mind. Save your money, readers. The _Nation_: (Garbage-in, garbage-out). Or, _do_ read this for an example of what the educational system produces in people who were born within a year of my own graduation from university--and who went on to further mis-education at Harvard University. You see, Harvard University is no safe-guard against blunt cultural idiocy.
Probably worth reading--given the article's title--but it's behind a pay-wall and I refuse to give what the magazine which now passes for the once-venerable _Nation_ a penny in subscription's fees. For those who can and do pay for that disgusting rag's "journalism", I propose they turn to and try this (perhaps exceptional in a good way) article by Elie Mystal:
I think that it's interesting that much of the criticism here by those who still object to J McW's points have ignored, missed or misstated those points.
He specifically says and means that _"racial"_ "diversity" (which comes down to a thoroughly discredited biological essentialism) adds nothing either important or valuable to a learning environment. But he himself predicted that his key points would not get through to his stubborn critics despite their being as clearly presented as anyone could do.
McWhorter is, himself, a case-study and example of the validity of his thesis; proof that education does make a decisive difference through which race/skin-color simply "washes out" as a useful or predictive factor.
That is, a person's _skin-color_, not income, not family-home circumstances, not parental employment history, not K-12 educational career details, _skin-color_ is still being defended and routinely taken and abused by bureaucracies generally--used as their key, prime, if not sole discriminating "factor" -- when it is no longer any reliable indicator (certainly in the U.S. and much of the so-called advanced industrial world (Europe, the Americas and Asia included) of a person's need of redress for undue and unfair life-disadvantages suffered from birth to college-age. The reasons for this are both simple and obvious: racial profiling is a simple/(lazy) means by which to pander to a baseless but persistent racial prejudice which now favors dark-skinned people over light-skinned people--and this is regarded by a self-serving elite as morally enlightened when it is rather the antithesis of that.
Specifically "_racial_" "affirmative action" (for non-Whites) no longer does any genuine and redeeming good in "exchange" for the genuine social harms it does by way of a no-longer-excusable bias.
While it doesn't apply specifically to racial diversity, the book "Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches US About Creativity" by Andreas Wagner points out that just as 'diversity' is important to biological evolution, it is also important in education, business, scientific research, etc. He states: "Diversity pays: "I don't just mean the diversity of skills in one person's head (that too), but also the diversity of a team whose members have different backgrounds." He comments on standardized tests in education, "An education driven by standardized testing has the opposite effect: not only does it make students run up a hill at maximum speed, it also makes them all run up the SAME HILL." He recommends that childhood education should "cultiate diversity and enable autonomy."
Does this mean heavily teaching to ubiquitous, frequently imposed standardized during K-12? Or is it also referring to things like standardized tests as one major tool and criterion used in admissions or in hiring, as in civil service test? If it refers to the latter as well, what are the alternatives? Surely there are also major advantages in terms of more objective and fairer common application of measurement criteria.
I hate to tell you but ... there are some ways in which diversity does indeed make physics and other hard sciences better, for a very simple reason.
It acts as a brake against groupthink and the tendency for people to value their nice, cozy sense of bonding with their peers over asking hard questions that might rudely invalidate a colleague's theory.
It's not uncommon for the biggest advances in science and technology to have come about as a result of loners outside of the establishment who felt no need to toe the line that had been drawn by others in the faculty or company. From solving the longitude problem to deciphering Linear B to newtonian mechanics, heliocentrism, helical DNA, spontaneous gene-splicing, and special relativity, high-functioning loners or misfits who either resented, could never get, or found no value in the cozy like-minded bonding common in a lot of these areas ended up blowing apart the ossification that had held things back up to that time.
And to be honest, women and minorities are less susceptible to that because they will never be "just one of the boys" anyhow, so they are less likely or tempted to toe the line and let things slide that should be queried rigorously as a means of getting in with the guys.
It's just a basic psychology. Whistleblowers also tend to be outsiders over and above their proportions in the corporate world as well. They aren't going to be "one of the guys," so they don't really give a shit about upsetting their status in the golf club or the cocktail hour -- because they have no golf and cocktail status to lose anyhow.
It's not that math or language works differently for different people. It's that outsiders, people who don't want or value the political currency that flows between members of the club, are more likely to say shit like:
1. Linear B actually is related to ancient Greek, despite the fact that "everybody knew" it wasn't.
2. Genes appear to "jump" back and forth between chromosomes during meiosis despite the fact that "everyone knew" that couldn't happen.
3. Larger and larger particle colliders are extremely unlikely to find anything that's going to invalidate the standard model, so we should stop blowing giant wads of cash on the stupid things, despite the fact that "everyone knows" that supersymmetry is perpetually just around the corner.
Anyhow, yeah. Diversity shakes up the cozy clubhouse mentality that can often keep science stagnant way past the point where a major adjustment is warranted.
I agree with you strongly that groupthink is and has always been a major problem in science - as is politics (in the sense of personal ambition within an organization as well as broader societal politics: what makes you look good; what’s most likely to secure or preserve funding). Institutional inertia and ego are also huge problems. But I don’t see how it’s a given at all that someone with a less common skin color or sex is representative of innovative or productively disruptive thinking in the scientific sense. My understanding is that a lot of the grad students entering advanced and prestigious programs already are “diverse”, in the sense of often being international students either here for a set period, or who are in the process of becoming permanent residents if not citizens. Do we know that a student from an elite background in Pakistan or one from a very humble background in India is going disrupt groupthink in beneficial ways? How do we know a black student from a prep school - or from a working class background is necessarily going to be an innovative thinker or one who disrupts groupthink in scientifically productive ways? How do we know a woman is not going to perhaps be mostly a personally ambitious careerist, just like so many men? If the status quo was all white men from upper middle class or elite backgrounds and no life experience beyond that, I could absolutely see how there’d likely be a lack of perspective, perhaps a narrowly similar type of training, or even a real lack of empathy or awareness of questions, problems and challenges both in life and as research questions. (Of course I think limiting opportunity to such a cohort would be wrong in its own right.) I can see some cases in which someone from a different background might have more knowledge and motivation to study and prioritize problems which impact populations previously underrepresented in scientific or medical study. That could be hugely important. So genuine representation can itself be important. But I think this comes back to what we mean by diversity. A white man could be a classic oddball and dissenter who challenges convention. A Asian woman could be a highly competent conformist. I’ve seen claims by Peta that women and racial minorities (I assume they mean Black and Latina and Asian Americans - not perhaps international students?) are more interested in pursuing research using more human-relevant models rather than methods imposed on other species of animals, arguably an institutionally lazy default which is not only extremely cruel but is very often not translatable or useful for helping people. I’ve seen claims that women and racial minorities tend to be more interested in studying problems which have perhaps been overlooked and which pertain to arguably more marginalized populations. On the other hand, a very large proportion of the researchers notorious for imposing bizarre, seemingly sadistic experiments, endlessly subjecting countless monkeys or birds or rodents to obvious protracted agony and terror (“curiosity experiments”) with no plausible let alone demonstrated benefit to people seem to be women. Again, a disruptor in researching public health could be a white man from a tiny town in West Virginia who has insights into the challenges of geographic isolation and rural poverty - and an elitist conformist could be a Black woman who grew up surrounded by other wealthy people and who went to Yale. Women or racial minorities in the sciences could be top-rank thinkers and innovators. Or they could be nasty infighters who mostly care about their own ambitions and deploying identify to get ahead. Just as white men could be smugly-complacent clubby upper-crust conformists - or brilliant nonconformists who fearlessly challenge conventional wisdom. I don’t understand the assertion that race or sex is necessarily going to result in the right kind of disruption, if it results in any at all.
I don't like the idea of thinking Ivy school admission should be a required goal post for anyone. Innovation happens at other tiers of universities as well. What the Ivies do is create a safe space (intentional use of that term) for super-thinkers. There needs to be a place for highly intellectual people to play on their own field. They will publish papers that anyone can read. What we need is collaboration among universities, and I think this does occur do some extent. Scholars need to be generous with their knowledge. And we, as a society, need to stop disrespecting people who spend their lives doing other things besides going to universities. I had a young high school student who once said to me "I flip burgers in MacDonald's -- would you actually come and buy a burger when I'm there?" I am certain he got the idea that white teachers don't eat at MacDonald's (ummmm, wrong!). Well, I am really tired of the saying "You'd better study or you will end up flipping burgers for a living." We have a values problem in the this country. There are people who need to flip burgers for a living for any number of reasons. Or have had to take jobs as janitors, or trash collectors (who earn more than teachers), or caring for the elderly. We need to respect all jobs, make sure all people have health care and proper retirement benefits, and make sure the water has no lead in it so children who are meant to be intellectuals can actually achieve their goals. There should not be food deserts or rotting public school buildings. Everyone should be able to further their education no matter where they've grown up. A goal of diversity is nice and I suspect that when we see diversity in our institutions, it will be a sign that we are doing all the other things correctly. That the national conversation has come to this is a sign that we are not doing many other things that need doing. But more important than configured diversity would be reports from people that they are thriving and mentally healthy. Do Black people want to go to Harvard because they want to be around White people? I doubt it. They want to graduate from a school that gives them various currencies -- because our society has placed a higher value on such schools. The academic standards should not budge, but we should still use diversity as a marker for progress. If we start seeing diversity in places where it has not historically occurred, that means we've done all the other things right -- the things that matter. There are sooooo many people who do not have their basic needs met through no fault of their own. That people have to claw their way up the mountain to reach an education at an Ivy is unfortunate. When the mountain consists of obstacles other than studying hard and aptitude, obstacles like poverty, lack of health care, unsafe living conditions -- it seems strange that we are hyper-focused on Ivy admissions as a primary indicator of social progress. Its like saying racism is over because Obama was president. So, yes, I like to see diversity because it tells me people may be doing a bit better in other areas of their lives. When I don't see diversity, I suspect there are other problems being ignored.
The man can certainly write! I can't tell you how much pleasure it gives me to encounter a sentence like the following in what could have been a dry-as-dust essay: "When the Harvard case comes up, we will watch endless people in business clothes talking about the value of diversity, with the word hitting our brain in the same way with the same narcotic warmth as blueberry muffin, love, and Hill Street Blues."
The ultimate irony of affirmative action or racial preferences it that it harms the very people it's intended to benefit. The book "Mismatch" carefully analyzed those students that received preferences and shows they cluster at the bottom of class rankings, they drop out of STEM fields, and fail to graduate at much higher rates. This is logical as they begin their University education at a different level from all their classmates. It requires magical thinking to believe students that receive preferences would do as well as their more highly educated peers.
Our focus should be on the K-12 schools and making sure more minorities are qualified to attend University, not on matriculating unqualified minority students into schools where they don't qualify.
John- you sounded down on the latest podcast with Dr. Loury. Please don’t give up. You are a patriot!
And this essay about diversity is so true. It is magnificent.
One thing that would be helpful to me is if you more clearly articulated what you mean by the term “systemic racism”. How do you define it, and can you please give multiple specific examples. I struggle with this term, but have so much respect for you, and am open to your interpretation.
As usual, I agree with much if not all that Professor McWhorter says. But there's one key factor in discussions of educational inequality that nearly always gets overlooked, and we're not going to "fix" the situation until we start paying attention to it. To wit: standard American teaching methods basically only work for kids who are already privileged--primarily in the sense that their parents are more highly educated, but that tends to be highly correlated with socioeconomic status and yes, still, to a large extent with race. Teachers are trained to believe that it's best for kids to learn as much as possible through "discovery" and "inquiry," with the teacher acting as facilitator and trying to avoid explicitly teaching anything. When students are starting out with little knowledge of the topic--or little academic knowledge and vocabulary in general--that approach doesn't work, and the system ends up privileging those who are already privileged. (If you're familiar with the writings of E.D. Hirsch, this argument may sound familiar -- but things have only gotten a lot worse since he first raised it in 1987, in his book Cultural Literacy.)
School can't entirely level the playing field, but it can do a lot more than it's doing now. Unless we start building academic knowledge for all children, beginning in kindergarten, we'll never reduce the need for "affirmative action" to compensate for the ineffectiveness of K-12 education, whether it's done on the ground of race or (as would make more sense) socioeconomic status.
From my recent experience judging 300 Mensa scholarship essays, I agree. The people from lower economic backgrounds and rural schools had poorer writing and idea-organizing abilities. I believe that how much reading there is at home is a factor that extends across the cultures of any heritage.
One question is how public school teachers could improve reading skills in the early grades and then make writing a priority, which I suspect would require a lot of teacher time reading, marking, sending back, and reading again. (So smaller classes.) And then all students would need computers, since penmanship is apparently a thing of the past and I don’t think you could write an essay with your thumbs.
You're absolutely right -- writing instruction is one huge area where schools have failed many students, mostly those from less educated families (but also many others as well). The reasons are complex, and I'm not blaming teachers -- it's a whole system that's at fault. There's a lot more that schools could do, and it wouldn't necessarily require smaller classes. (As for penmanship--schools do need to teach handwriting, which has benefits beyond making writing legible.)
The two main things that need to be done -- at ANY grade level -- are: (1) ground writing instruction in the content of the core curriculum, and (2) begin instruction at the sentence level, if that's what kids need (no matter their grade level). There's only one method I know of that combines those two things, and it's called The Writing Revolution. The book describing it is here: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Revolution-Advancing-Thinking-Subjects/dp/1119364914
Full disclosure: I'm the co-author of the book (the other author is a veteran educator who came up with the method over many years of teaching). So I'm not totally objective. On the other hand, I'm not the only one who thinks it works. The book currently has 992 ratings on Amazon, with an average of 5 stars.
Just so. That's why we find that students' reading and writing abilities are generally dismal. American students' command of their native tongue compares terribly poorly with that of Scandinavian peers who speak and write English with a skill and fluency which few U.S./U.K. peers can even approach. A typical secondary-school graduate from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands has a command of spoken and written English--and a knowledge of its history--which should properly shame his British and U.S. American peers.
British and American students from grades of kindergarten to year 12 (or its equivalent) should be far better off being tutored and schooled in English by native graduates, of whatever skin-color, from secondary-schools of København or Stockholms stad than they should from Cleveland--whether that's in Ohio or in Yorkshire--or from Southampton--whether that's in Massachusetts or in Hampshire, England.
Frederick Douglass, a freed 19th-century slave of African descent, read, wrote and spoke an English the quality of which should shame most U.S. or British _post_-university graduates today, whether their degrees come from Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Oxford or Cambridge Universities.
..."standard American teaching methods basically only work for kids who are already privileged-" ...
I suppose you think that including the qualifier "basically" in this flat and unsubstantiated assertion gives you all the "cover" you need to assert nonsense. You didn't bother to inform us of just in what , in your opinion, if not "in fact" (which you may lack), this set of practices you refer to as "standard American teaching methods" consists.
You'd have to describe my family's circumstances in the 1950s to 1970s as having been "already privileged." Unless that means, in effect, "any family so fortunate as to not be living on some inner-city's slum dilapidated housing project" you'd face quite a challenge marshaling actual facts to support your claim--and that's because there was nothing particularly outwardly atypical about me or my family's material circumstances.
And yet, "standard" or not, the American teaching methods, produced and delivered by regularly trained and hired school-teachers working in ordinary public schools in ordinary middle-class neighborhoods, worked--though I tried to do my part to help it "work".
I was told--and I believed implicitly, even as a youngster--that "education", in theory and practice, was important and that it ought to matter to anyone. When, later, I learned that not all my (usually "higher") education experiences were worthy of my own and my fellow students' best-efforts, I could and I did resent that fact --and I took it on as my personal obligation to do remedial work--ever since university graduation--to get a genuine and meaningful education in all the ways that both most mattered and had been deficient in my school career.
Of course education is important and ought to matter to anyone. I'm not quite getting what your argument is here, but there's a lot that has been written, by me and others, about the deficiencies of "progressive" or "constructivist" pedagogy, so there's plenty to back up my assertion in addition to the description that I did in fact provide in my original comment.
If you're saying that you didn't consider yourself privileged and that standard American teaching practices worked for you, then that's great, and I'm happy for you. And I'm sure there are others like you. But I would point out (a) that your experience in public school occurred decades ago, and many things have changed since then; and (b) scores on national and international tests (the NAEP, PISA, etc.) show that our schools are failing many students, and those who are being failed by them come disproportionately from the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
There's a lot more that could be said on this topic, obviously, but I would again invite you to read my book, or at least the article I linked to, if you're interested in exploring it further.
..."show that our schools are failing many students, and those who are being failed by them come disproportionately from the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum."
My university (B.A.) came from a university which is touted as one of the "public 'Ivies'", LOL! I knew from before the moment that I received it that it's true value as a measure of my actual knowledge was, both in fact and in my personal opinion, a very bad joke on me--and many of my fellow graduates. Conversely, my early education was much better done and has always served me well.
Of course: as educational standards fall everywhere in Britain and the U.S. (and, to some lesser extent, in Western Europe generally), the best of the poorly-educated still get what are seen conventionally as the prime employment spots in professional post-graduate schools of law, medicine, business, engineering, the top consulting firms, etc. (indeed, engineering students now typically write better English than do college graduates of programs in English departments.
If these are the unstated measures of "success" in English language and literature education then we should look forward one day to chefs of Michelin-starred restaurants serving what today we think of as MacDonald's "Happy Meals".
I love the chemo analogy. Hadn't thought of it quite that way but it's a perfect fit. An extreme measure designed to fix a problem, but one you don't want to use too long because it has a lot of negative consequences.
As the Supremes take up yet another racial preference case, some will try to convince us that any position opposing set-asides is "racist". I suppose they can't help themselves - the Temptations are just too great. They would be wise to look to the founding principles of our Constiution - you know, the Originals. We can hope for a sane, well-reasoned ruling. Miracles do happen. Of course, once the court has reached its decision, the Spinners will take over and try to sway public opinion.
I probably have a different take on this, as I teach at a well-known international school in Beijing with over 40 different nationalities. I've also taught at "international" schools where the student body was 96% host-country. There really is a difference in the feel of the schools and the interaction of the students, and certainly in how they relate to you as a "foreign" educator, when you're simply one of many different nationalities and skin tones. I tend to agree that diversity doesn't have an impact on learning FACTS, but we all know school, at least K-12, has so much more learning going on than just facts. (I'd argue teaching my subject content is the least of what I do.) Within that context, diversity does matter. The diversity in skin tone comes with cultural diversity and a variety of perspectives that is integral to many class discussions. Students--and teachers--cultural assumptions and biases are challenged on a somewhat regular basis. Of course, international education comes with its own white/western biases and that has really hit the fan as it were the past year, but that's a different discussion. So, while a diverse student body may not impact the learning of Physical Laws themselves, it probably could challenge say the importance of their place in the curriculum and the purpose for their study.
The irony is that in some or perhaps many cases it's Asian Americans that end up bearing the brunt of the affirmative action burden, despite the narrative being framed as that of whites on the one hand versus Blacks and Hispanics on the other. I haven't actually read Thomas Espenshade's book from back in the day, but I did seem to recall that his conclusion was that sans affirmative action, for the schools and time period that he examined, the numbers of Blacks and Hispanics admitted would increase significantly, the number of Asians admitted would decrease significantly, while the number of white students admitted would roughly remain the same, although the composition of admitted white students would shift towards those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum and from more rural areas. In other words, Asian Americans were the ones primarily bearing the burden of creating affirmative action spots for Black and Hispanic students.
In other circumstances I'm sure whites are impacted by affirmative action more so than what Espenshade uncovered, but I'd wager that as a general rule of thumb, affirmative action in this country in many contexts disproportionately burdens Asian Americans compared to whites. I guess it's a pretty slick sleight of hand that white progressives are able to virtue signal about the importance of diversity while passing on most of the costs onto another minority group. But alas I digress...
If we do Affirmative Action based on socioeconomic status, what would the standards look like?
This is a good question. I’ve often thought that one additional reason college admissions staff and hiring managers and recruiters prefer to simply privilege skin color is because it’s much less work. Race is a great sorter and then if someone tells a story in an essay that presents of picture of familial challenges, etc. it’s further helpful information to consider, perhaps taken with little vetting, from within a much smaller pool.
One thing (as I liberal) I think many liberals too often disregard are the incentives created by certain policy prescriptions. If the advantages of claiming certain circumstances are great enough, one also has to consider the means by which applicants and their families might seek to mislead or disguise information. Relying on too limited a number of variables could magnify these problems. When zip code was being discussed a few months ago as a possible proxy for disadvantage in prioritizing vaccine distribution, it was obvious - just thinking of various places I’d lived - how many people within a zip code don’t fit that assumption and render it both over and under-inclusive as a proxy for what one is trying to capture.
Anyway, it would be fun to construct a list of factors to consider and validity and measurement problems with each.
Do we have any information on how heavy the thumb of affirmative action is? E.g., as measured in standard deviations, or points on SAT scores. Anything at all?
I don’t know how universally easy that data is to find in terms of each specific school or as an average in aggregate. In the case of Harvard, I believe it was forced into public view with the administration kicking and screaming trying to hide it. The average differences are in multiple hundreds of points. They’re enormous.
That's astounding --
So much for an "exception" to the crap generally published by The _Nation_ magazine. Never mind. Save your money, readers. The _Nation_: (Garbage-in, garbage-out). Or, _do_ read this for an example of what the educational system produces in people who were born within a year of my own graduation from university--and who went on to further mis-education at Harvard University. You see, Harvard University is no safe-guard against blunt cultural idiocy.
Probably worth reading--given the article's title--but it's behind a pay-wall and I refuse to give what the magazine which now passes for the once-venerable _Nation_ a penny in subscription's fees. For those who can and do pay for that disgusting rag's "journalism", I propose they turn to and try this (perhaps exceptional in a good way) article by Elie Mystal:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/critical-race-theory-white/
(June 3, 2021)
"The Miseducation of White Children"
I think that it's interesting that much of the criticism here by those who still object to J McW's points have ignored, missed or misstated those points.
He specifically says and means that _"racial"_ "diversity" (which comes down to a thoroughly discredited biological essentialism) adds nothing either important or valuable to a learning environment. But he himself predicted that his key points would not get through to his stubborn critics despite their being as clearly presented as anyone could do.
McWhorter is, himself, a case-study and example of the validity of his thesis; proof that education does make a decisive difference through which race/skin-color simply "washes out" as a useful or predictive factor.
That is, a person's _skin-color_, not income, not family-home circumstances, not parental employment history, not K-12 educational career details, _skin-color_ is still being defended and routinely taken and abused by bureaucracies generally--used as their key, prime, if not sole discriminating "factor" -- when it is no longer any reliable indicator (certainly in the U.S. and much of the so-called advanced industrial world (Europe, the Americas and Asia included) of a person's need of redress for undue and unfair life-disadvantages suffered from birth to college-age. The reasons for this are both simple and obvious: racial profiling is a simple/(lazy) means by which to pander to a baseless but persistent racial prejudice which now favors dark-skinned people over light-skinned people--and this is regarded by a self-serving elite as morally enlightened when it is rather the antithesis of that.
Specifically "_racial_" "affirmative action" (for non-Whites) no longer does any genuine and redeeming good in "exchange" for the genuine social harms it does by way of a no-longer-excusable bias.
While it doesn't apply specifically to racial diversity, the book "Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches US About Creativity" by Andreas Wagner points out that just as 'diversity' is important to biological evolution, it is also important in education, business, scientific research, etc. He states: "Diversity pays: "I don't just mean the diversity of skills in one person's head (that too), but also the diversity of a team whose members have different backgrounds." He comments on standardized tests in education, "An education driven by standardized testing has the opposite effect: not only does it make students run up a hill at maximum speed, it also makes them all run up the SAME HILL." He recommends that childhood education should "cultiate diversity and enable autonomy."
Does this mean heavily teaching to ubiquitous, frequently imposed standardized during K-12? Or is it also referring to things like standardized tests as one major tool and criterion used in admissions or in hiring, as in civil service test? If it refers to the latter as well, what are the alternatives? Surely there are also major advantages in terms of more objective and fairer common application of measurement criteria.
I hate to tell you but ... there are some ways in which diversity does indeed make physics and other hard sciences better, for a very simple reason.
It acts as a brake against groupthink and the tendency for people to value their nice, cozy sense of bonding with their peers over asking hard questions that might rudely invalidate a colleague's theory.
It's not uncommon for the biggest advances in science and technology to have come about as a result of loners outside of the establishment who felt no need to toe the line that had been drawn by others in the faculty or company. From solving the longitude problem to deciphering Linear B to newtonian mechanics, heliocentrism, helical DNA, spontaneous gene-splicing, and special relativity, high-functioning loners or misfits who either resented, could never get, or found no value in the cozy like-minded bonding common in a lot of these areas ended up blowing apart the ossification that had held things back up to that time.
And to be honest, women and minorities are less susceptible to that because they will never be "just one of the boys" anyhow, so they are less likely or tempted to toe the line and let things slide that should be queried rigorously as a means of getting in with the guys.
It's just a basic psychology. Whistleblowers also tend to be outsiders over and above their proportions in the corporate world as well. They aren't going to be "one of the guys," so they don't really give a shit about upsetting their status in the golf club or the cocktail hour -- because they have no golf and cocktail status to lose anyhow.
It's not that math or language works differently for different people. It's that outsiders, people who don't want or value the political currency that flows between members of the club, are more likely to say shit like:
1. Linear B actually is related to ancient Greek, despite the fact that "everybody knew" it wasn't.
2. Genes appear to "jump" back and forth between chromosomes during meiosis despite the fact that "everyone knew" that couldn't happen.
3. Larger and larger particle colliders are extremely unlikely to find anything that's going to invalidate the standard model, so we should stop blowing giant wads of cash on the stupid things, despite the fact that "everyone knows" that supersymmetry is perpetually just around the corner.
Anyhow, yeah. Diversity shakes up the cozy clubhouse mentality that can often keep science stagnant way past the point where a major adjustment is warranted.
I agree with you strongly that groupthink is and has always been a major problem in science - as is politics (in the sense of personal ambition within an organization as well as broader societal politics: what makes you look good; what’s most likely to secure or preserve funding). Institutional inertia and ego are also huge problems. But I don’t see how it’s a given at all that someone with a less common skin color or sex is representative of innovative or productively disruptive thinking in the scientific sense. My understanding is that a lot of the grad students entering advanced and prestigious programs already are “diverse”, in the sense of often being international students either here for a set period, or who are in the process of becoming permanent residents if not citizens. Do we know that a student from an elite background in Pakistan or one from a very humble background in India is going disrupt groupthink in beneficial ways? How do we know a black student from a prep school - or from a working class background is necessarily going to be an innovative thinker or one who disrupts groupthink in scientifically productive ways? How do we know a woman is not going to perhaps be mostly a personally ambitious careerist, just like so many men? If the status quo was all white men from upper middle class or elite backgrounds and no life experience beyond that, I could absolutely see how there’d likely be a lack of perspective, perhaps a narrowly similar type of training, or even a real lack of empathy or awareness of questions, problems and challenges both in life and as research questions. (Of course I think limiting opportunity to such a cohort would be wrong in its own right.) I can see some cases in which someone from a different background might have more knowledge and motivation to study and prioritize problems which impact populations previously underrepresented in scientific or medical study. That could be hugely important. So genuine representation can itself be important. But I think this comes back to what we mean by diversity. A white man could be a classic oddball and dissenter who challenges convention. A Asian woman could be a highly competent conformist. I’ve seen claims by Peta that women and racial minorities (I assume they mean Black and Latina and Asian Americans - not perhaps international students?) are more interested in pursuing research using more human-relevant models rather than methods imposed on other species of animals, arguably an institutionally lazy default which is not only extremely cruel but is very often not translatable or useful for helping people. I’ve seen claims that women and racial minorities tend to be more interested in studying problems which have perhaps been overlooked and which pertain to arguably more marginalized populations. On the other hand, a very large proportion of the researchers notorious for imposing bizarre, seemingly sadistic experiments, endlessly subjecting countless monkeys or birds or rodents to obvious protracted agony and terror (“curiosity experiments”) with no plausible let alone demonstrated benefit to people seem to be women. Again, a disruptor in researching public health could be a white man from a tiny town in West Virginia who has insights into the challenges of geographic isolation and rural poverty - and an elitist conformist could be a Black woman who grew up surrounded by other wealthy people and who went to Yale. Women or racial minorities in the sciences could be top-rank thinkers and innovators. Or they could be nasty infighters who mostly care about their own ambitions and deploying identify to get ahead. Just as white men could be smugly-complacent clubby upper-crust conformists - or brilliant nonconformists who fearlessly challenge conventional wisdom. I don’t understand the assertion that race or sex is necessarily going to result in the right kind of disruption, if it results in any at all.
I don't like the idea of thinking Ivy school admission should be a required goal post for anyone. Innovation happens at other tiers of universities as well. What the Ivies do is create a safe space (intentional use of that term) for super-thinkers. There needs to be a place for highly intellectual people to play on their own field. They will publish papers that anyone can read. What we need is collaboration among universities, and I think this does occur do some extent. Scholars need to be generous with their knowledge. And we, as a society, need to stop disrespecting people who spend their lives doing other things besides going to universities. I had a young high school student who once said to me "I flip burgers in MacDonald's -- would you actually come and buy a burger when I'm there?" I am certain he got the idea that white teachers don't eat at MacDonald's (ummmm, wrong!). Well, I am really tired of the saying "You'd better study or you will end up flipping burgers for a living." We have a values problem in the this country. There are people who need to flip burgers for a living for any number of reasons. Or have had to take jobs as janitors, or trash collectors (who earn more than teachers), or caring for the elderly. We need to respect all jobs, make sure all people have health care and proper retirement benefits, and make sure the water has no lead in it so children who are meant to be intellectuals can actually achieve their goals. There should not be food deserts or rotting public school buildings. Everyone should be able to further their education no matter where they've grown up. A goal of diversity is nice and I suspect that when we see diversity in our institutions, it will be a sign that we are doing all the other things correctly. That the national conversation has come to this is a sign that we are not doing many other things that need doing. But more important than configured diversity would be reports from people that they are thriving and mentally healthy. Do Black people want to go to Harvard because they want to be around White people? I doubt it. They want to graduate from a school that gives them various currencies -- because our society has placed a higher value on such schools. The academic standards should not budge, but we should still use diversity as a marker for progress. If we start seeing diversity in places where it has not historically occurred, that means we've done all the other things right -- the things that matter. There are sooooo many people who do not have their basic needs met through no fault of their own. That people have to claw their way up the mountain to reach an education at an Ivy is unfortunate. When the mountain consists of obstacles other than studying hard and aptitude, obstacles like poverty, lack of health care, unsafe living conditions -- it seems strange that we are hyper-focused on Ivy admissions as a primary indicator of social progress. Its like saying racism is over because Obama was president. So, yes, I like to see diversity because it tells me people may be doing a bit better in other areas of their lives. When I don't see diversity, I suspect there are other problems being ignored.
The man can certainly write! I can't tell you how much pleasure it gives me to encounter a sentence like the following in what could have been a dry-as-dust essay: "When the Harvard case comes up, we will watch endless people in business clothes talking about the value of diversity, with the word hitting our brain in the same way with the same narcotic warmth as blueberry muffin, love, and Hill Street Blues."
The ultimate irony of affirmative action or racial preferences it that it harms the very people it's intended to benefit. The book "Mismatch" carefully analyzed those students that received preferences and shows they cluster at the bottom of class rankings, they drop out of STEM fields, and fail to graduate at much higher rates. This is logical as they begin their University education at a different level from all their classmates. It requires magical thinking to believe students that receive preferences would do as well as their more highly educated peers.
Our focus should be on the K-12 schools and making sure more minorities are qualified to attend University, not on matriculating unqualified minority students into schools where they don't qualify.
John- you sounded down on the latest podcast with Dr. Loury. Please don’t give up. You are a patriot!
And this essay about diversity is so true. It is magnificent.
One thing that would be helpful to me is if you more clearly articulated what you mean by the term “systemic racism”. How do you define it, and can you please give multiple specific examples. I struggle with this term, but have so much respect for you, and am open to your interpretation.
As usual, I agree with much if not all that Professor McWhorter says. But there's one key factor in discussions of educational inequality that nearly always gets overlooked, and we're not going to "fix" the situation until we start paying attention to it. To wit: standard American teaching methods basically only work for kids who are already privileged--primarily in the sense that their parents are more highly educated, but that tends to be highly correlated with socioeconomic status and yes, still, to a large extent with race. Teachers are trained to believe that it's best for kids to learn as much as possible through "discovery" and "inquiry," with the teacher acting as facilitator and trying to avoid explicitly teaching anything. When students are starting out with little knowledge of the topic--or little academic knowledge and vocabulary in general--that approach doesn't work, and the system ends up privileging those who are already privileged. (If you're familiar with the writings of E.D. Hirsch, this argument may sound familiar -- but things have only gotten a lot worse since he first raised it in 1987, in his book Cultural Literacy.)
School can't entirely level the playing field, but it can do a lot more than it's doing now. Unless we start building academic knowledge for all children, beginning in kindergarten, we'll never reduce the need for "affirmative action" to compensate for the ineffectiveness of K-12 education, whether it's done on the ground of race or (as would make more sense) socioeconomic status.
For a more fleshed out argument, see this piece I wrote for Forbes a while ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2018/12/27/to-attack-inequality-we-need-a-different-kind-of-education/?sh=5fe755d01829. Or for a REALLY fleshed-out argument, see my book The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America's Broken Education System--And How to Fix It (https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Gap-Americas-education-system/dp/0735213550/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=).
From my recent experience judging 300 Mensa scholarship essays, I agree. The people from lower economic backgrounds and rural schools had poorer writing and idea-organizing abilities. I believe that how much reading there is at home is a factor that extends across the cultures of any heritage.
One question is how public school teachers could improve reading skills in the early grades and then make writing a priority, which I suspect would require a lot of teacher time reading, marking, sending back, and reading again. (So smaller classes.) And then all students would need computers, since penmanship is apparently a thing of the past and I don’t think you could write an essay with your thumbs.
You're absolutely right -- writing instruction is one huge area where schools have failed many students, mostly those from less educated families (but also many others as well). The reasons are complex, and I'm not blaming teachers -- it's a whole system that's at fault. There's a lot more that schools could do, and it wouldn't necessarily require smaller classes. (As for penmanship--schools do need to teach handwriting, which has benefits beyond making writing legible.)
The two main things that need to be done -- at ANY grade level -- are: (1) ground writing instruction in the content of the core curriculum, and (2) begin instruction at the sentence level, if that's what kids need (no matter their grade level). There's only one method I know of that combines those two things, and it's called The Writing Revolution. The book describing it is here: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Revolution-Advancing-Thinking-Subjects/dp/1119364914
Full disclosure: I'm the co-author of the book (the other author is a veteran educator who came up with the method over many years of teaching). So I'm not totally objective. On the other hand, I'm not the only one who thinks it works. The book currently has 992 ratings on Amazon, with an average of 5 stars.
... "it's a whole system that's at fault." ...
Just so. That's why we find that students' reading and writing abilities are generally dismal. American students' command of their native tongue compares terribly poorly with that of Scandinavian peers who speak and write English with a skill and fluency which few U.S./U.K. peers can even approach. A typical secondary-school graduate from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands has a command of spoken and written English--and a knowledge of its history--which should properly shame his British and U.S. American peers.
British and American students from grades of kindergarten to year 12 (or its equivalent) should be far better off being tutored and schooled in English by native graduates, of whatever skin-color, from secondary-schools of København or Stockholms stad than they should from Cleveland--whether that's in Ohio or in Yorkshire--or from Southampton--whether that's in Massachusetts or in Hampshire, England.
Frederick Douglass, a freed 19th-century slave of African descent, read, wrote and spoke an English the quality of which should shame most U.S. or British _post_-university graduates today, whether their degrees come from Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Oxford or Cambridge Universities.
..."standard American teaching methods basically only work for kids who are already privileged-" ...
I suppose you think that including the qualifier "basically" in this flat and unsubstantiated assertion gives you all the "cover" you need to assert nonsense. You didn't bother to inform us of just in what , in your opinion, if not "in fact" (which you may lack), this set of practices you refer to as "standard American teaching methods" consists.
You'd have to describe my family's circumstances in the 1950s to 1970s as having been "already privileged." Unless that means, in effect, "any family so fortunate as to not be living on some inner-city's slum dilapidated housing project" you'd face quite a challenge marshaling actual facts to support your claim--and that's because there was nothing particularly outwardly atypical about me or my family's material circumstances.
And yet, "standard" or not, the American teaching methods, produced and delivered by regularly trained and hired school-teachers working in ordinary public schools in ordinary middle-class neighborhoods, worked--though I tried to do my part to help it "work".
I was told--and I believed implicitly, even as a youngster--that "education", in theory and practice, was important and that it ought to matter to anyone. When, later, I learned that not all my (usually "higher") education experiences were worthy of my own and my fellow students' best-efforts, I could and I did resent that fact --and I took it on as my personal obligation to do remedial work--ever since university graduation--to get a genuine and meaningful education in all the ways that both most mattered and had been deficient in my school career.
Of course education is important and ought to matter to anyone. I'm not quite getting what your argument is here, but there's a lot that has been written, by me and others, about the deficiencies of "progressive" or "constructivist" pedagogy, so there's plenty to back up my assertion in addition to the description that I did in fact provide in my original comment.
If you're saying that you didn't consider yourself privileged and that standard American teaching practices worked for you, then that's great, and I'm happy for you. And I'm sure there are others like you. But I would point out (a) that your experience in public school occurred decades ago, and many things have changed since then; and (b) scores on national and international tests (the NAEP, PISA, etc.) show that our schools are failing many students, and those who are being failed by them come disproportionately from the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
There's a lot more that could be said on this topic, obviously, but I would again invite you to read my book, or at least the article I linked to, if you're interested in exploring it further.
..."show that our schools are failing many students, and those who are being failed by them come disproportionately from the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum."
My university (B.A.) came from a university which is touted as one of the "public 'Ivies'", LOL! I knew from before the moment that I received it that it's true value as a measure of my actual knowledge was, both in fact and in my personal opinion, a very bad joke on me--and many of my fellow graduates. Conversely, my early education was much better done and has always served me well.
Of course: as educational standards fall everywhere in Britain and the U.S. (and, to some lesser extent, in Western Europe generally), the best of the poorly-educated still get what are seen conventionally as the prime employment spots in professional post-graduate schools of law, medicine, business, engineering, the top consulting firms, etc. (indeed, engineering students now typically write better English than do college graduates of programs in English departments.
If these are the unstated measures of "success" in English language and literature education then we should look forward one day to chefs of Michelin-starred restaurants serving what today we think of as MacDonald's "Happy Meals".
Unfortunate that Purdy’s book is no longer in circulation... maybe this reference will bring it back.
You can sign up for a free trial and read it here: https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journals/getting-under-the-skin-of-diversity-searching-for-the-color-blind-45NyQ0XK5C It appears to be more of a paper than a book at only 10 pages.
I love the chemo analogy. Hadn't thought of it quite that way but it's a perfect fit. An extreme measure designed to fix a problem, but one you don't want to use too long because it has a lot of negative consequences.
As the Supremes take up yet another racial preference case, some will try to convince us that any position opposing set-asides is "racist". I suppose they can't help themselves - the Temptations are just too great. They would be wise to look to the founding principles of our Constiution - you know, the Originals. We can hope for a sane, well-reasoned ruling. Miracles do happen. Of course, once the court has reached its decision, the Spinners will take over and try to sway public opinion.