Lately, I’ve been talking a lot about the need to focus on developing human potential if we want to solve the problem of racial inequality.
Please find three instances where this theme has come up on The Glenn Show below.
The first is one of my patented rants that I went on in conversation with John McWhorter.
The other two is from conversations with expert researchers—Nobel prize winning economist James Heckman and professor of economics Robert Cherry—where they relay what studies have shown and give specific policy recommendations.
Loury: When I see a school gap—you look at the national assessment of educational progress, which measures 4th, 8th and 12th grade kids' reading and math proficiency, and the fraction of black kids who are at below basic proficiency in their performance on these exams is stunning and vastly higher than the fraction of white kids.
To say that that's just systemic racism?
What it is is black kids are not being developed to their full human potential.
Now, we can begin to have a conversation about why, but the home life is going to have a lot to do with that! Parenting is going to have a lot to do with that! Values. What they hold up as an ideal for a good way of life.
People are making choices. Take those choices away from them, you reduce them to chits on a board.
They're making choices. And when you have such disparities, as profoundly large and persistent as what I'm talking about, there are a lot of black people making the wrong choices!
McWhorter: And not because racism is making them do it, you're saying.
Yes, I am saying that.
And to imagine that anyone would say that—"racism is making them make the wrong choices"—I mean, imagine the rabbit hole of self-loathing you just went down.
"Racism is making me do the wrong choices." In other words, there is no me. All there is is the forces that are acting on me, making me do the wrong choices.
You can't stand up? You can't stand up straight because racism—you know, come on. That's despicable. That's disgusting.
Heckman: In Western China, in one of the poorest areas, we can see how the interactions between the parent and the child are leading to the growth of skills on the part of the child.
Loury: Tell me a little bit more about this project. Sounds fascinating.
It is.
There's an area called Gansu, one of the poorest areas [in China].
And so we're learning about people who engage the child in an emotionally supportive way and just teach the child. What are they doing?
The China study is patterned after something that was tried in Jamaica, it was called the "Reach Up and Learn." It went into those neighborhoods, and it essentially taught the parents how to interact with the child.
And that sounds strange. But if you think about it, it turns out, in the United States, in Jamaica, and in China, a lot of parents don't really know how to parent. And what do I mean by that?
They don't have a clear idea of what a normal growth trajectory is for a child, what a child can do, and they often don't understand how powerful they are in shaping the life of the child.
So you give them that kind of information. Nobody's being forced to do anything. Just empower people.
Almost every caretaker of a young child really wants that child to succeed. (Of course, there are some abusive parents.) But if you empower parents with that information, you will see huge gains.
Flavio Cunha, who is at Rice, did some studies with a group in Philadelphia, and now he's doing it with a group of people in Houston. And what they find is that these interventions have a powerful role in teaching parents what to expect of their children and what they can do with their children.
So it's something very basic. You remember doctor—what was his name?—Skinner, the behavioral psychologist.
B.F. Skinner, with the box?
The Skinner Box. That was about the most atrocious child development strategy you could imagine.
You want an anti-Skinner box. You want the mother or that carer working closely with the child.
Because what's happening is the kid is like a sponge. The child is picking up these ideas, picking up the language, and imitating the parent. The parent plays a powerful, powerful role. And it's just been neglected.
Most policy discussions in the U.S. talk about inequality. There's a lot of talk about schools, but there's not so much talk about parents.
I know, and it actually scares me a lot. To me, the whole evil of this process has been schools and education and teachers’ unions that want to create the idea of the school as an activity in and of itself, detached from society. A separate social agency that is in charge of building children. And they don’t realize how powerful the parallel support for the child in school is.
Kids spend the majority of their day at home, or at least around their parents and neighborhood. And literally, here in Chicago now, in some of the school districts—like in Inglewood and other really poor areas—what you’re finding is that parents aren't even allowed in the school. They're afraid that they're going to bring in guns, or they have to go through metal detectors. The teachers don't want them around, because they may be drug addicts or have weapons and so forth. And so the parent is kind of screened out. To me, that's the missing link. And the missing link also with job training.
What people don't understand is how powerful mentoring is. Programs that take adolescent kids, and give them advice—again, I would use the word scaffold, but now they're older, scaffolding is a different activity. But giving people advice, giving people mentoring shows huge effects.
I just got sent a study from Germany a few days ago. It shows very powerful effects on German teenagers. Adolescent interventions precisely of this type of mentoring, fostering children, following them into the work pool.
So you're not worried about violating privacy and autonomy?
You say information. Okay. You can give people information, and then they can act on it as they choose.
More robust interventions into households might raise some questions of privacy.
Oh, for sure.
You know, when Nixon was president, Mondale came up with a bill. Remember, at that time it was a Republican president and a Democratic House and Senate. And Mondale came up with an early childhood program, a precursor expanding Headstart with more of a national and well-supported level.
Nixon vetoed it for precisely the reason you gave: that you were intervening, that the early years of the child were the province of the family.
And I agree with that. To me, the most important piece of child development is the family. You've got to get the family on board.
So I think of these interventions as empowering. You give them information, you give them options. You don't sit around telling people, "This is what you must do." But most parents, when they find out how important it is to read to the kid, even if they can't read that well, they will actually do this.
And that's true in Jamaica, it's true in rural China, it's true in every place we tried this kind of intervention.
There is a whole literature emerging about the emotional basis of learning. You know the image of the military academy, where the kids walk in and salute, they're beaten at night, and so forth and so on. That is not the model for successful child development. You want the parent to be in the life of the child
You know, as I do, how controversial talking about family is when you get into the area of race and racial disparities.
I know. When I talk about my work, I always get attacked for blaming the victim. And this is by people who are really quite educated—usually African-American, but not all. A lot of people saying, “you're getting into personal lives,” like you were saying, and saying that I'm telling people the Moynihan Report was balanced. Well, I think it was. Sorry. I think it's very important. And I think it was stated very badly, and the scientific basis was much weaker than what we have now. But family life is really important.
Look at the whole discussion today of poverty. People are sitting around and talking about the growth of inequality. And they want to say, "Oh, it's because Zuckerberg has billions."
Well, you know where most of the poverty is coming from. It's at the bottom, obviously, and the inequality is at the bottom. Who are those people? Those are families. Single-parent families with kids where the mother is stretched to the end. She has to work. She has very few resources. She doesn't have time to spend with her child. So there was a whole issue that the family is crumbling in some areas, and that should be part of any valid anti-poverty policy.
But I agree with you. It's off the table.
If anybody doesn't know the Moynihan Report—1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action—chronicling the rise of out-of-wedlock births amongst African-Americans to about 25-30% by the mid-sixties, and worrying that this would frustrate the goal of the Civil Rights Movement of incorporating African-Americans into society.
Basically, Moynihan was saying that this was a potential game changer and worrying very much about it. And that was 25%. And what is it, 70% [for African-Americans] now? What is it, 30% for the country as a whole?
Depends on the area. It's closer to 40%.
So what do you propose to do about this? Can you put the genie back in the bottle on family structure issues?
I think Bush was talking about shotgun weddings. We're not talking about that.
I think what we need to do is think comprehensively, to recognize that raising a kid is an extraordinarily important task. It's societally very important. There's been a lot of thinking that housekeeping and mothering are things that any old mediocre person can do, and they aren’t all that important.
To me, it's really bizarre that, despite Wesley Clair Mitchell's appeal for this a hundred years ago, really, we don't have a good measure of the value of a good mother for the life of a child. We have the value of teachers now, but the mother is playing an enormous role.
People are saying, “What's the value of Perry Preschool?” A mother is far more valuable than anything Perry Preschool can do. And the reason is that's that interaction. It's the guidance, it's shaping the values of the child and staying with the child.
But it's not saying the child must do this, or that the parent must do that, or that there's a preferred lifestyle. Maybe the parents don't want the child to grow up to be one thing or another. I don't think anything we know says that everybody should be doing the same thing anyway. But I do think we really want to recognize that role of the mother. And I think that role has been depreciated a lot.
In the public eye, the view is, if the mother doesn't earn any money, then she's not doing anything. I get deeply irritated by that, because we know it's probably the most important task in society. It produces all of us. We are all products of our mothers. It's not just physically being born. It's being shaped by the mother and the father and the environment you're in. And I just think we don't recognize the power and importance of that in our politics.
Loury: Here's what I've been thinking lately. I did read your piece and I learned from it. The psychological dimension, this dimension of how you interpret the opportunities that are at hand—this identity dimension to the problem, kind of self-imposed limitations...
You know, Ta-Nehisi Coates preaches the same kind of thing, doesn't he? And his outlook that the American dream is a hoax, it's an empty shell... Nikole Hannah-Jones preaches this too, doesn't she? I'm sorry, if I continue in this vein, I'll become political. And I don't want to be political, I want to talk about these communities and these people.
But what I've been saying lately is, if we don't focus on the developmental imperative of enhancing the capacities of disadvantaged people of color—or, if I can get away from that trendy language, the poor black people in the ghettos of this country—if we don't concentrate on developing their capacities to work, to be productive citizens, to comport themselves in a way that is not of threat to their neighbors, to fulfill their human potential, to have the kind of—not college degrees, but cognitive functioning beyond a basic level is surely a desirable thing—to acquire skills, to be settled in their lives, to stabilize their home environment—if we don't focus on the developmental imperative, we're never going to solve the racial inequality problem.
It's not a problem of something abstract called "white supremacy" or "systemic racism." It's a problem etched in the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people, of a failure to develop their human potential.
We have to be realistic about the fact that that their potential has not been developed. That people are failing to realize their full human possibilities. And we have to be aggressive at addressing ourselves directly to the institutions, the sites, the social locations, where that development is supposed to take place.
Okay. I've spoken long enough in that vein. That sounds at least vaguely consonant with your own view, Robert.
Cherry: Yes, it is. And one of the things that is very troubling is that, to get at understanding how to change dynamics is off limits. In particular, the black family formation and its impact; the school system, and ways that we can learn from charter schools and why they consistently, almost universally, have provided an environment in which success can take place compared to the public schools. To talk about these things is pretty much off limits.
Be more explicit. What things can't be talked about? And how do the charter schools deal with these things more effectively than public schools?
I think that it's the issue of the family. Charter schools have found a way to engage the family, to get them to be the kinds of parents that they ideally want to be.
So, it’s not that they have found a way to locate those parents who already are what they ideally want to be, and then they cherry picked them?
No. No, they haven't.
Ok.
But I give the example of people deciding they want to do exercise to improve their health. They're well-meaning, but often, unless they have a coach, unless they go to a gym where somebody is coaching them, they don't fulfill their goal. This gets in the way, that gets in the way.
Yeah.
And I think that's true about a lot of these single parents. They genuinely have constructive ideas for their kids' education and how they can help, but they’ve got complicated lives. They need a coach. They need somebody who prods them. And that's what the charter schools do.
So maybe the charter schools take parents who have a little bit more of an inclination to want that. It isn't like they just have parents who are tiger moms. They have parents who have aspirations, and the charters help them fulfill those aspirations.
And the problem is the public schools can't do that because that would be “paternalism.” That's telling parents, "This is what you should do." And you know, the typical reaction is "How dare the government tell people how to be better parents? It's the school's responsibility to do what they do and not get into our lives.” I think that is a real difference.
Let me just make an observation. I want you to go on, I really do, because what to do about the development problem is the issue. But I just wanted to pause for an historical moment, because I know, in your intellectual ambition, you have written about a lot of different things—about social life amongst immigrant groups going back to the early part of the 20th century and stuff like that. And it wasn't always so, was it, that public institutions felt restrained from being able to tell people how to live and show them how to live? It wasn't like that in the tenements on the Lower East Side and all of that coming up in New York city in the 1930s and the 1940s.
Well, there was the Americanization process.
Which was paternalistic.
Yeah, and it had some bad aspects to it.
Oh, okay, okay.
You know, what the white elite want is not necessarily always, fully what should be done. But I'm simply saying charter schools have found a way to be effective in this regard.
So it's not simply that they so-called cherry pick the parents. Obviously, they get parents who are more receptive to something like this...
Bob, I just want to say, I'm saying:
Work hard. Keep your nose clean. Take care of your kids. Get your homework done. Value excellence. Keep your nose to the grindstone. There's nothing specifically “white” about that advice, is there?
To my mind, that's just the formula for being successful in America. Sadly, too many people – most of them intellectuals with initials behind their names – would say that to give such advice is to impose the values of “white society” on Blacks. But in fact, it’s a pretty good recipe for getting out of the fix that they're in.
It certainly works for Nigerian immigrants, and many others. But I also think that you have to get into the family earlier.
While you don't have as much teen pregnancy as you had a decade or two ago, you still have a large share of black women having their first child before they're 25, and many of them have low levels of education, and they don't come from a two-parent family.
So, what do you want to do besides coach them? I mean, one of the things you were saying with respect to the kids and education is, at charter schools, they could coach; do you also want to send nurses home from the hospital with the new mother and baby? Or, do you want universal pre-K? Or both?
They have these visiting nursing programs that go up to three years old, where they are incredibly effective at helping these young women to do what's not only good for their kids, but, indirectly, for themselves.
Mayor de Blasio, before this pandemic, was going to broadly expand visiting nursing programs that are primarily done now by a lot of nonprofits. Those are the things that are going to be helpful, where you get into the family.
Universal pre-K is the exact opposite. It says we can be substitutes for the family. We can take care of this, educational that...
"Give us the kid for six hours a day, we'll fix it."
That's right. And we won't get into the family.
I mean, again, there's a downside, there are risks, there's paternalism. But that's the kind of effective programming that will make a difference.
And you know, these mothers, by and large, are very positive. They're getting services, they're getting information, they're getting networks where you're told, if you have this problem, you go to this group, you go here. They aren't saying "How dare you come into my house?" They don’t have a problem with “paternalism” if it can help them raise their kids.
It is being effective, and there should be more of it. For five and six and seven year olds, there are equivalent kinds of programs—in Baltimore, there's something called "the Thread program” that does tutoring—but again, comes into the house and engages the parent, or parents, in the process.
I think fatherhood programs and interpersonal programs can also be effective in creating a healthier and more stable environment for kids.
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My apologies if this is the wrong place to post this. Let me recommend the latest The Real Time with Bill Maher especially his discussion with Peter Hamby and Kmele Foster. It speaks directly to some of your points about racial inequality. I am continuing to enjoy your podcast!
Mr. Loury, thank you for your amazing podcast with John Mcwhorter and now this really cool Substack page!
I've always been a liberal. My dad was a kindergarten teacher in public schools before he passed away. My mom also was an elementary school teacher before she quit working to raise my brothers and sisters, so with my own son, a 12 year old now, I definitely spent time with him, reading and things like that but I've been telling him a lot of what you talk about as well. I'm trying to get him to buy into the personal responsibility angle a bit more in his life. I believe I heard you say you have an adult son, plus I know you're a professor, so I'm sure you have an idea of what I'm talking about when I say how hard it can be to get a young kid, who of course thinks they know it all, to become more motivated in things like turning in work on time and putting more effort into his assignments. I know you're a busy man, but if you have any ideas on how parents can help motivate a kid in that direction I would love hearing the advice! Thank you and I hope you and your family are staying healthy and happy!