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...
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?
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."
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.
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.
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?
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?
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."
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.
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=).
Unfortunate that Purdy’s book is no longer in circulation... maybe this reference will bring it back.
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.