You did not address the negative consequences I pointed out once genetically disadvantaged American blacks (ITA) were placed in direct meritocratic competition with genetically advantaged whites, Asian, and Jews (ITA) and told the footrace was now fair with everyone treated equally. Instead you ignored the benefits accruing to both racial groups and American society in general during the period when black businesses, schools, and professional associations were present and successful in actual (vs. today's virtual) black communities across the country, and positions of high social status were routinely attained by individual blacks (vs. today's tokens, DEI hires, and race hustlers).
Additionally, I don't believe you've carefully examined Mr. Roscoe's positions in relation to "closing gaps" (equalizing aggregate black and white performance across any number of metrics). The underlying assumption on which Mr. Roscoe's (and, I suspect, your) prescription (and proscription) rests is one that presupposes both racial group possess substantially equal aggregate capabilities. In other words, group differences in achievement are due to factors other than the native abilities possessed by each group. That, in my opinion, is not a tenable position given the mountainous data produced over many decades due to the intense focus on racial disparities in the USA.
Black leaders and their millions of followers in the USA are telling you point blank that they will NEVER let go of their racial identity, one they consider core to their individual and social existence. Your utopian ideal of everyone everywhere taking only individual characteristics and accomplishments into consideration is therefore doomed—it'll never happen. What do you propose to do about THAT, other than throw your hands up in the air and hurl invective at both whites and blacks who see value in their racial identity and refuse to turn their backs on their families, friends, and history?
Thanks for your comments. There's ample evidence that the skills gap was closing until the late 1980's. Derek Neal at the University of Chicago did a study about this back in 2006. You can access it using this National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) link:
All data sources indicate that black-white skill gaps diminished over most of the 20th century, but black-white skill gaps as measured by test scores among youth and educational attainment among young adults have remained constant or increased in absolute value since the late 1980s. I examine the potential importance of discrimination against skilled black workers, changes in black family structures, changes in black household incomes, black-white differences in parenting norms, and education policy as factors that may contribute to the recent stability of black-white skill gaps. Absent changes in public policy or the economy that facilitate investment in black children, best case scenarios suggest that even approximate black-white skill parity is not possible before 2050, and equally plausible scenarios imply that the black-white skill gap will remain quite significant throughout the 21st century.
Charles Murray documented that the skills gap was closing until the late 1980's in his most recent book, "Facing Reality." There's a graphic on page 34 that suggests the gap would have essentially closed by 2015 if the trends had continued past the late 1980's. You can see an updated version of this graph on page 37 of the notes to the book that you can download by using this link:
Murray acknowledged Neal's work on page 32 of the notes.
Many of us think the gaps can be closed, but the narrative behind the root causes of these gaps has to change first because how you approach the problem is different if you think "bias" is the issue instead of "development." Professor Loury explores these competing narratives in his Manhattan Institute paper about the persistence of racial inequality. Use this link to access it:
Fascinating material. Appreciate the link to Neal's work.
So let us try to separate the forest from the trees.
And let us begin with the misnomer, 'skills gap'.
If I beat you in a race, over and over again, would your coach be talking about your 'skills gap'? That when it came time to see who was faster in the 100m.... would he suggest that your skills, per se, were deficient? Would your serial losses, both severe and consistent, be attributed to a running mechanics issue? That your sprint 'know-how' was not as highly developed as mine? That you need to improve your knee lift, your stride length, the angle at which you hold your arms, etc? And that the only thing that separates our finishes was your honing of these proficiencies?
In fact, yes, there may be something to that analysis (I'm reminded of that scene in Chariots of Fire)....but... that's not really the issue, is it? That's not what we've witnessed for generations...and that's not what's driving the increasingly insane elimination of standards. The issue is not 'skills' that need to be sharpened (because we have the entire Education-Industrial Complex eager to do that sharpening) ; it's flat out performance (especially since that performance for decades had been improving...until that improvement ceased)
The first thing, the very first thing, that any coach would immediately question looking at 60 years plus of poor finishes is EFFORT, effort as measured by practice and the amount of hard work the two runners are investing to improve. When race after race is decided not by 'tenths of seconds' at the tape but entire standard deviations...the problem is not skills, it's sweat, dedication, intensity, and work. The problem is attitude and the desire to translate that attitude into effort.
There is a massive difference between these two understandings.
Skills gaps are relatively easy to bridge. 'Sam Mussabini' can coach 'Harold Abrahams' to 'run on hot bricks' and find another 2 yards when he races Liddell...because Abrahams desperately wants to win and is willing to work to accomplish that goal. But we're not talking about 2 measly yards which separate Gold Medal finishes from Silver or Bronze. We’re talking about not qualifying to be on the same track.
Neal concludes his analysis by saying that although....“It is not clear why the process of black-white (performance) convergence appeared to stop around 1990”...it would certainly seem that those black-white performance differences we witness later in life seem to be directly related to differences in “early childhood experiences”. He then moves on to review possible ‘childhood intervention programs’. Why intervention? Because ‘early childhood experience’ is ‘in the home’ experience. ‘In the home’ is not an environment naturally subject to public policy. ‘In the home’ is private. It’s how children are being raised by their parents, outside public purview. It is where we, as a society, build the essential, personal foundation upon which our public education either succeeds or falls.
The reason Neal is discussing public policy intervention to improve ‘early childhood experience’ is because – at a very gross/macro level, child-rearing within the home is and has been failing, a failure that begins with an out-of-wedlock birthrate of +70%.
It's not ‘skills development’ which is deficient; it’s the prototypical Black Family...which is not so much a family as a single Mom, who either aborts her pregnancy (at a rate 3X higher than a normal population demographic would indicate) or brings to term a child who will be raised without a father, inside a culture which – per Neal – would seem to require early public intervention if the aggregate, ‘Fatherless Black Youth’ are to develop in such a way that public education succeeds and the performance gap narrows.
The question, of course: is that Home subject to, open to, public policy intervention in such a way that culture-wide dysfunction (as in the 70%+ out-of-wedlock birthrate) can be corrected?
I don’t know.
As a society we’ve been radically concerned for generations about the social costs of illegal drug use. And yet, despite all that concern, despite all the trillions of dollars spent on anti-drug programs and intervention programs, and ‘Just Say No’ (This is your brain on drugs...a mind is a terrible thing to waste!)...despite all that, death from opioid overdose is rampant.
Certainly there are any number of public policies which have been and can be pursued to address this drug-use issue...just as there are any number of public policies which have been and can be pursued to address the B/W Performance Gap (GPA Gap, SAT Gap, HS Graduation Gap, College Enrollment Gap, College Graduation Gap, Employment Gap, Earnings Gap, etc etc.). But until the individuals that these public policies are trying to rescue actually want to be rescued....until the alcoholic actually wants to stop drinking & be saved....all the well-meaning social engineering efforts in the world cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.
At the very least, though, we can make a public choice to not enable those dysfunctional dependencies. And NOT eliminating or lowering performance standards in a horribly misguided effort to ‘fix’ outcome inequity would be massive step in that right direction.
Thank you for your well-considered writings, your engagement with reader comments, and your always excellent and to-the-point links, Mr. Roscoe. I look forward to more of your contributions.
I'm quite familiar, as you might guess, with the majority of Charles Murray's published works and public appearances over the last 5 decades. I highly recommend his "Real Education" for those, such as yourself, who fool themselves in thinking education reform can and will "close the gap." Murray is something of a hero to me, both for his courageous perseverance in the face of withering social and professional condemnation and isolation as well as the intellectual honesty evidenced in his relentless pursuit of the truth wherever it leads (see "conservative" Murray's "Coming Apart" bookended with "liberal" Robert Putnam's "Our Kids" as an example).
One small quibble. The persistence of achievement gaps suggest that there are limits to what can be accomplished through education reform. The most recent research I've seen says that achievement gaps are evident with children in kindergarten. Here's a link to a report titled "Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Advanced Science and Mathematics Achievement During Elementary School:"
We analyzed a population-based cohort (N = 10,922) to investigate the onset and stability of racial and ethnic disparities in advanced (i.e., above the 90th percentile) science and mathematics achievement during elementary school as well as the antecedent, opportunity, and propensity factors that explained these disparities. About 13% to 16% of White students versus 3% to 4% of Black or Hispanic students displayed advanced science or mathematics achievement during kindergarten. The antecedent factor of family socioeconomic status and the propensity factors of student science, mathematics, and reading achievement by kindergarten consistently explained whether students displayed advanced science or mathematics achievement during first, second, third, fourth, or fifth grade. These and additional factors substantially or fully explained initially observed disparities between Black or Hispanic and White students in advanced science or mathematics achievement during elementary school. Economic and educational policies designed to increase racial and ethnic representation in STEM course taking, degree completion, and workforce participation may need to begin by elementary school.
All the above suggests that an accumulation of things that take place away from school may be more impactful than what happens at school. Derek Neal touched on some of these things in his analysis. I'll readily concede that I'm not aware of anybody who knows how to address these issues at scale. A good first step would be a rigorous, "no holds barred" analysis of why progress stalled out more than 30 years ago.
I suspect Brown vs. Board (school desegregation) had a great deal to do with the phenomenon you, Murray, and Neal point out. Prior to Brown, blacks students were largely educated by black teachers in either de jure or de facto segregated schools. Brown changed everything. More resources (facilities, instructional materials, and more capable teachers) were made available and eventually pushed through to reluctant, even rebellious, school districts specifically to improve the education of black kids. Additionally, the Cold War emphasis on education generally focused the nation on its schools, drawing even more resources and capable people into teaching—my mother was one, giving up her secretarial job to teach English while working toward her Master's degree at night school at Wayne State.
However, increasing black social dysfunction (think 1960s riots and 1970s school busing) drove whites (parents, kids, and teachers) from city schools to the suburbs. Chaos in the classrooms increased and learning cratered. Real estate values crashed as whites fled, significantly eroding the tax base to fund the schools. Looting of education budgets by cronies of the new political regime along with revolving-door superintendents begat decaying facilities, substandard teaching materials, and severely reduced extra-curricular clubs, field trips, and other educational and socialization activities. Eventually, the level of actual education hit rock bottom but the schools still produced "graduates", though ones largely unable to read, write, perform math, understand history and geography and all the other hallmarks of present day inner-city schools we all know so well in the USA.
I lived through this era and saw first-hand the destruction of our neighborhood elementary/middle school in Detroit in the 1960s. As "the line" of black expansion moved ever closer to our westside neighborhood, the number of black kids in our hitherto almost exclusively white school began to increase. Once the block-busting began in earnest and white flight hit its stride, the school went from less than 10% to 40% black in just two years in the late 1960s. The school grounds, hallways, and classrooms became a war zone with ritual humiliations, loud disruptive arguments, and dangerous fights between whites and blacks almost every day. I strongly resisted the predation of the black gangs (most whites gave up and gave in) and was suspended for fighting (back) multiple times in my final year there. When the principal showed my mother his collection of confiscated weapons (knives, sharpened screwdrivers, etc.) taken from students of both colors in recent months, my parents began planning our own family's escape from this nightmare. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late for me. A minor argument broke into a vicious fight between me and a black troublemaker. I disarmed him and left him bleeding and vowing revenge. The next day, he arranged for some black friends from a nearby high school to come to our school to settle things with me once and for all. By sheer luck, I saw them coming and hid in the school library which had a stout lockable door. The 2nd grade class there and the librarian were shocked, but I managed to ride things out until police arrived and school was cancelled for the afternoon. I never went back. I was whisked away to Florida to stay with my grandparents, and when the summer was over and I finally returned to Detroit, I found that our family had moved across the Detroit River to Windsor Ontario in Canada. After my searing experience in the Detroit school system over the last few years, being among the friendly Canadian kids (of all colors and origins) and experiencing the excellent education and extracurricular opportunities I received there was like I had died and gone to heaven.
The two .pdfs were very interesting. My eyes glazed over reading Neal's formulas, but he explained them well.
I was hampered by Neal and Murray saying further research could, or needed to, be done. And I didn't catch the significance Murray was pointing to of the tests getting easier. But that confirmed what I assumed. It'd be ridiculous to try to compare test scores with the one's I took. And it would appear another example of younger folks getting accommodated. TY again.
"Black leaders and their millions of followers in the USA are telling you point blank that they will NEVER let go of their racial identity, one they consider core to their individual and social existence."
Invective, my friend, does not mean what you seem to think it means. I am not shouting, nor am I angry, nor am I hurling rude or hateful remarks at either Whites or Blacks. Rather I am saying, quite simply, that 'hateful, and destructive racist nonsense must end.' How you read that as invective is baffling since it is essentially calling for an end to racist invective.
As for your continued assertions of the importance of aggregate performance averages, again, as I said, "Aggregate performance measures are meaningless, save in the abstract, as a point of interest." There is no reason to address meaningless group averages when what matters is individual performance. We don't hire aggregates, we hire individuals.
As for what will never happen.... I dunno. I think it can. I know, in fact, it does every day at the micro-level upon which all decisions are ultimately made: who is hired, who wins a race, who qualified for med school, who graduated at the top of the class, who becomes the rocket scientist, who the cardiologist, who the truck driver, etc. We make these decisions; we recognize these successes on an individual level always.
Let us return to Loury and the point he made in his 2019 essay in Inequality. He said: "The struggle for equal rights for black people, from abolition through the civil rights movement, has always been thought of as a “freedom struggle.” But with freedom, rightly understood, comes responsibility. It is past time for all of us to start performing without a net. Rather than lamenting the lack of black billionaires, an outcome ascribed to some invisible force called “racism,” one can admit that you will never become a billionaire unless you build a billion-dollar business—which begins by starting a business. One will never win a Nobel Prize in physics unless one learns calculus at the age of 12. What black parents are insisting that their 12-year-old kids learn calculus—those few kids capable of doing so? White people are not responsible for the fact that black people are, or are not, doing this." He's absolutely right. And he's as right about the Black people who are or are not choosing to behave responsibly as he is about the White people.
You want to build a successful life then go build one. And don't tell me (or yourself) that you can't do it because the aggregate measures for your population demographic say it's improbable. Aggregates don't study calculus; individuals do.
And if some choose to remain irresponsible....to not take accountability for their own life choices....to look at a disparate outcomes and cry racism when no racist discrimination is present..... to keep waiting, hand outstretched for someone who has earned dollars to give them dollars because Black....well then they will live with those consequences....and their lives will be, inevitably, short, nasty, and brutish.
Ultimately I guess I don't really care about "equalizing aggregate performance metrics". I think it's a fool's errand... made more foolish by a multi-generational history that tells us that pouring trillions of dollars into 'assistance programs' does nothing other than send those aggregate measures in the wrong direction.
Aggregate performance metrics will equalize when aggregates, acting as individuals, make equalizing choices about how they wish to live. As much as we might want all the aggregate alcoholics to stop drinking, until they, as individuals, CHOOSE to actually stop, there's not a whole lot we can do to 'fix' the aggregate drunks.
Your views are now clearly at odds with those of Mr. Clifton Roscoe and the vast majority of "race men" who focus on disproportionate representation of blacks, IN THE AGGREGATE (ITA), in both desirable positions (too few Nobel Prize winners) and socially destructive ones (too many criminals, school dropouts, and single mothers). The very concept of an "achievement gap" both acknowledges and implicitly demands action to equalize aggregate metrics by forcing proportional representation.
When the great equalizer, education, is shown to fail utterly in its mission to "close the "gap," other more slippery methods are used. These include lowering admission and examination standards and lessening academic rigor so black high school and university graduation rates show improvement. Alas, those lowered standards apply to everyone, so the children of high-achieving racial groups and cultures must seek effective education elsewhere, an increasingly difficult task. Meanwhile, newly-minted black "college graduates" in meaningless majors from such diploma mills are then placed as tokens in professional positions where few demands for real work output are placed on them. And everyone is happy. Individuals gain monetary success and social status (for producing no real value), proportional representation goes up, Mr. Roscoe and you see "progress," and a new round of official obfuscation and social censorship ensues lest the emperors new clothes be revealed for what they truly are.
You simply cannot have it both ways. Either individuals are tested against assessment standards and those passing move on to positions of real authority and efficacy while those who fail are denied sinecures and must find other, less prominent and remunerative paths to follow. This will result in disproportionate representation of blacks (ITA) in desirable professional, business, and scientific pursuits. While this may suit you just fine, it is NOT acceptable to Mr. Roscoe, Glenn Loury, American liberals, and the United States government.
Let me add a small quibble... I would never "see progress' if the only thing that changes is cosmetic (e.g. meaningless college majors being plugged into worthless positions in organizations large enough to absorb this idiot practice without suffering overly much). And I would agree entirely that real standards must be applied to all populations, regardless of race, creed, color, sex, or shoe size. Always.
You highlight, exactly, the problem with aggregate measures and aggregate 'solutions': they drive, most typically, only superficial, cosmetically-pleasing, non-solutions. When we look at a population (any population) and say, "My goodness fat kids never win any of the foot races," clearly we have identified an 'aggregate performance problem. The real solution, obviously, is to work, diligently, with every fat kid to get them to eat less, lose weight, and improve their athletic performance. These are all VERY difficult tasks, made more difficult if the kid doesn't care and prefers eating pizza for every meal.
On the other hand you can get a lot of fat kids to win races if you give them a different starting line....move the finish line closer....and make the faster runners carry a 20# weight. Tah Dah! Look at the diversity & equity we've achieved!
The solution, as a society, that we seem to have adopted is to sidestep those very difficult tasks (particularly since the population whose performance metrics we'd like to improve doesn't seem especially motivated)....and -- to your point -- eliminate standards. This is disgusting and worse than disgusting; it is dangerous.
If you're not qualified to get into college then you're not qualified. Period. If you're not qualified to become a doctor then you can't become a doctor. To move goalposts, lower hurdles, eliminate testing, and substitute personal essays on ME for GPA's is just insane. But -- such cosmetic 'solutions' do indeed change those aggregate performance measures.
When that happens we can only say, "Welcome to the Idiocracy!"
Just taking a break from reading Professor Loury's *fine* article. TY. What You "say" is pretty much true, but it's a partial truth.
The lessening of standards, like You point out, lessens them for everybody. And majority of people who are getting diplomas with little value and HR, DEI jobs, and other sinecures are whites, right?
Numbers of them being white women, to be frank. But that's a different story.
Also, I'm not so certain that blacks don't have as good a chance at entrepreneurship as whites do. ICBW. Thing is, too, IQ isn't really a limiting factor in a lotta jobs. And these things, mostly, depend on how well the individual reaches his *full* potential, than what IQ they *start* with, right?
You did not address the negative consequences I pointed out once genetically disadvantaged American blacks (ITA) were placed in direct meritocratic competition with genetically advantaged whites, Asian, and Jews (ITA) and told the footrace was now fair with everyone treated equally. Instead you ignored the benefits accruing to both racial groups and American society in general during the period when black businesses, schools, and professional associations were present and successful in actual (vs. today's virtual) black communities across the country, and positions of high social status were routinely attained by individual blacks (vs. today's tokens, DEI hires, and race hustlers).
Additionally, I don't believe you've carefully examined Mr. Roscoe's positions in relation to "closing gaps" (equalizing aggregate black and white performance across any number of metrics). The underlying assumption on which Mr. Roscoe's (and, I suspect, your) prescription (and proscription) rests is one that presupposes both racial group possess substantially equal aggregate capabilities. In other words, group differences in achievement are due to factors other than the native abilities possessed by each group. That, in my opinion, is not a tenable position given the mountainous data produced over many decades due to the intense focus on racial disparities in the USA.
Black leaders and their millions of followers in the USA are telling you point blank that they will NEVER let go of their racial identity, one they consider core to their individual and social existence. Your utopian ideal of everyone everywhere taking only individual characteristics and accomplishments into consideration is therefore doomed—it'll never happen. What do you propose to do about THAT, other than throw your hands up in the air and hurl invective at both whites and blacks who see value in their racial identity and refuse to turn their backs on their families, friends, and history?
Thanks for your comments. There's ample evidence that the skills gap was closing until the late 1980's. Derek Neal at the University of Chicago did a study about this back in 2006. You can access it using this National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) link:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w11090
Here's the Abstract:
All data sources indicate that black-white skill gaps diminished over most of the 20th century, but black-white skill gaps as measured by test scores among youth and educational attainment among young adults have remained constant or increased in absolute value since the late 1980s. I examine the potential importance of discrimination against skilled black workers, changes in black family structures, changes in black household incomes, black-white differences in parenting norms, and education policy as factors that may contribute to the recent stability of black-white skill gaps. Absent changes in public policy or the economy that facilitate investment in black children, best case scenarios suggest that even approximate black-white skill parity is not possible before 2050, and equally plausible scenarios imply that the black-white skill gap will remain quite significant throughout the 21st century.
Charles Murray documented that the skills gap was closing until the late 1980's in his most recent book, "Facing Reality." There's a graphic on page 34 that suggests the gap would have essentially closed by 2015 if the trends had continued past the late 1980's. You can see an updated version of this graph on page 37 of the notes to the book that you can download by using this link:
https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/facing-reality/
Murray acknowledged Neal's work on page 32 of the notes.
Many of us think the gaps can be closed, but the narrative behind the root causes of these gaps has to change first because how you approach the problem is different if you think "bias" is the issue instead of "development." Professor Loury explores these competing narratives in his Manhattan Institute paper about the persistence of racial inequality. Use this link to access it:
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/why-does-racial-inequality-persist
Fascinating material. Appreciate the link to Neal's work.
So let us try to separate the forest from the trees.
And let us begin with the misnomer, 'skills gap'.
If I beat you in a race, over and over again, would your coach be talking about your 'skills gap'? That when it came time to see who was faster in the 100m.... would he suggest that your skills, per se, were deficient? Would your serial losses, both severe and consistent, be attributed to a running mechanics issue? That your sprint 'know-how' was not as highly developed as mine? That you need to improve your knee lift, your stride length, the angle at which you hold your arms, etc? And that the only thing that separates our finishes was your honing of these proficiencies?
In fact, yes, there may be something to that analysis (I'm reminded of that scene in Chariots of Fire)....but... that's not really the issue, is it? That's not what we've witnessed for generations...and that's not what's driving the increasingly insane elimination of standards. The issue is not 'skills' that need to be sharpened (because we have the entire Education-Industrial Complex eager to do that sharpening) ; it's flat out performance (especially since that performance for decades had been improving...until that improvement ceased)
The first thing, the very first thing, that any coach would immediately question looking at 60 years plus of poor finishes is EFFORT, effort as measured by practice and the amount of hard work the two runners are investing to improve. When race after race is decided not by 'tenths of seconds' at the tape but entire standard deviations...the problem is not skills, it's sweat, dedication, intensity, and work. The problem is attitude and the desire to translate that attitude into effort.
There is a massive difference between these two understandings.
Skills gaps are relatively easy to bridge. 'Sam Mussabini' can coach 'Harold Abrahams' to 'run on hot bricks' and find another 2 yards when he races Liddell...because Abrahams desperately wants to win and is willing to work to accomplish that goal. But we're not talking about 2 measly yards which separate Gold Medal finishes from Silver or Bronze. We’re talking about not qualifying to be on the same track.
Neal concludes his analysis by saying that although....“It is not clear why the process of black-white (performance) convergence appeared to stop around 1990”...it would certainly seem that those black-white performance differences we witness later in life seem to be directly related to differences in “early childhood experiences”. He then moves on to review possible ‘childhood intervention programs’. Why intervention? Because ‘early childhood experience’ is ‘in the home’ experience. ‘In the home’ is not an environment naturally subject to public policy. ‘In the home’ is private. It’s how children are being raised by their parents, outside public purview. It is where we, as a society, build the essential, personal foundation upon which our public education either succeeds or falls.
The reason Neal is discussing public policy intervention to improve ‘early childhood experience’ is because – at a very gross/macro level, child-rearing within the home is and has been failing, a failure that begins with an out-of-wedlock birthrate of +70%.
It's not ‘skills development’ which is deficient; it’s the prototypical Black Family...which is not so much a family as a single Mom, who either aborts her pregnancy (at a rate 3X higher than a normal population demographic would indicate) or brings to term a child who will be raised without a father, inside a culture which – per Neal – would seem to require early public intervention if the aggregate, ‘Fatherless Black Youth’ are to develop in such a way that public education succeeds and the performance gap narrows.
The question, of course: is that Home subject to, open to, public policy intervention in such a way that culture-wide dysfunction (as in the 70%+ out-of-wedlock birthrate) can be corrected?
I don’t know.
As a society we’ve been radically concerned for generations about the social costs of illegal drug use. And yet, despite all that concern, despite all the trillions of dollars spent on anti-drug programs and intervention programs, and ‘Just Say No’ (This is your brain on drugs...a mind is a terrible thing to waste!)...despite all that, death from opioid overdose is rampant.
Certainly there are any number of public policies which have been and can be pursued to address this drug-use issue...just as there are any number of public policies which have been and can be pursued to address the B/W Performance Gap (GPA Gap, SAT Gap, HS Graduation Gap, College Enrollment Gap, College Graduation Gap, Employment Gap, Earnings Gap, etc etc.). But until the individuals that these public policies are trying to rescue actually want to be rescued....until the alcoholic actually wants to stop drinking & be saved....all the well-meaning social engineering efforts in the world cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.
At the very least, though, we can make a public choice to not enable those dysfunctional dependencies. And NOT eliminating or lowering performance standards in a horribly misguided effort to ‘fix’ outcome inequity would be massive step in that right direction.
TY, M BDavi. Hard truths, well-expressed.
Thank you for your well-considered writings, your engagement with reader comments, and your always excellent and to-the-point links, Mr. Roscoe. I look forward to more of your contributions.
I'm quite familiar, as you might guess, with the majority of Charles Murray's published works and public appearances over the last 5 decades. I highly recommend his "Real Education" for those, such as yourself, who fool themselves in thinking education reform can and will "close the gap." Murray is something of a hero to me, both for his courageous perseverance in the face of withering social and professional condemnation and isolation as well as the intellectual honesty evidenced in his relentless pursuit of the truth wherever it leads (see "conservative" Murray's "Coming Apart" bookended with "liberal" Robert Putnam's "Our Kids" as an example).
Thanks for your comments.
One small quibble. The persistence of achievement gaps suggest that there are limits to what can be accomplished through education reform. The most recent research I've seen says that achievement gaps are evident with children in kindergarten. Here's a link to a report titled "Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Advanced Science and Mathematics Achievement During Elementary School:"
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00169862221128299?af=R&ai=1gvoi&mi=3ricys
Here's the Abstract:
Abstract
We analyzed a population-based cohort (N = 10,922) to investigate the onset and stability of racial and ethnic disparities in advanced (i.e., above the 90th percentile) science and mathematics achievement during elementary school as well as the antecedent, opportunity, and propensity factors that explained these disparities. About 13% to 16% of White students versus 3% to 4% of Black or Hispanic students displayed advanced science or mathematics achievement during kindergarten. The antecedent factor of family socioeconomic status and the propensity factors of student science, mathematics, and reading achievement by kindergarten consistently explained whether students displayed advanced science or mathematics achievement during first, second, third, fourth, or fifth grade. These and additional factors substantially or fully explained initially observed disparities between Black or Hispanic and White students in advanced science or mathematics achievement during elementary school. Economic and educational policies designed to increase racial and ethnic representation in STEM course taking, degree completion, and workforce participation may need to begin by elementary school.
All the above suggests that an accumulation of things that take place away from school may be more impactful than what happens at school. Derek Neal touched on some of these things in his analysis. I'll readily concede that I'm not aware of anybody who knows how to address these issues at scale. A good first step would be a rigorous, "no holds barred" analysis of why progress stalled out more than 30 years ago.
I suspect Brown vs. Board (school desegregation) had a great deal to do with the phenomenon you, Murray, and Neal point out. Prior to Brown, blacks students were largely educated by black teachers in either de jure or de facto segregated schools. Brown changed everything. More resources (facilities, instructional materials, and more capable teachers) were made available and eventually pushed through to reluctant, even rebellious, school districts specifically to improve the education of black kids. Additionally, the Cold War emphasis on education generally focused the nation on its schools, drawing even more resources and capable people into teaching—my mother was one, giving up her secretarial job to teach English while working toward her Master's degree at night school at Wayne State.
However, increasing black social dysfunction (think 1960s riots and 1970s school busing) drove whites (parents, kids, and teachers) from city schools to the suburbs. Chaos in the classrooms increased and learning cratered. Real estate values crashed as whites fled, significantly eroding the tax base to fund the schools. Looting of education budgets by cronies of the new political regime along with revolving-door superintendents begat decaying facilities, substandard teaching materials, and severely reduced extra-curricular clubs, field trips, and other educational and socialization activities. Eventually, the level of actual education hit rock bottom but the schools still produced "graduates", though ones largely unable to read, write, perform math, understand history and geography and all the other hallmarks of present day inner-city schools we all know so well in the USA.
I lived through this era and saw first-hand the destruction of our neighborhood elementary/middle school in Detroit in the 1960s. As "the line" of black expansion moved ever closer to our westside neighborhood, the number of black kids in our hitherto almost exclusively white school began to increase. Once the block-busting began in earnest and white flight hit its stride, the school went from less than 10% to 40% black in just two years in the late 1960s. The school grounds, hallways, and classrooms became a war zone with ritual humiliations, loud disruptive arguments, and dangerous fights between whites and blacks almost every day. I strongly resisted the predation of the black gangs (most whites gave up and gave in) and was suspended for fighting (back) multiple times in my final year there. When the principal showed my mother his collection of confiscated weapons (knives, sharpened screwdrivers, etc.) taken from students of both colors in recent months, my parents began planning our own family's escape from this nightmare. Unfortunately, it was too little, too late for me. A minor argument broke into a vicious fight between me and a black troublemaker. I disarmed him and left him bleeding and vowing revenge. The next day, he arranged for some black friends from a nearby high school to come to our school to settle things with me once and for all. By sheer luck, I saw them coming and hid in the school library which had a stout lockable door. The 2nd grade class there and the librarian were shocked, but I managed to ride things out until police arrived and school was cancelled for the afternoon. I never went back. I was whisked away to Florida to stay with my grandparents, and when the summer was over and I finally returned to Detroit, I found that our family had moved across the Detroit River to Windsor Ontario in Canada. After my searing experience in the Detroit school system over the last few years, being among the friendly Canadian kids (of all colors and origins) and experiencing the excellent education and extracurricular opportunities I received there was like I had died and gone to heaven.
TY, Sir Clifton. TYTY a *lot.*
The two .pdfs were very interesting. My eyes glazed over reading Neal's formulas, but he explained them well.
I was hampered by Neal and Murray saying further research could, or needed to, be done. And I didn't catch the significance Murray was pointing to of the tests getting easier. But that confirmed what I assumed. It'd be ridiculous to try to compare test scores with the one's I took. And it would appear another example of younger folks getting accommodated. TY again.
"Black leaders and their millions of followers in the USA are telling you point blank that they will NEVER let go of their racial identity, one they consider core to their individual and social existence."
Whites, and apparently You, say the same. That's not necessarily gonna be the end result. Hard to say anything certain about the future. No crystal ball. But seems doubtful: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/myth-majority-minority-america/619190/
Those "who see value in their racial identity and refuse to turn their backs on their families, friends, and history?"
They may find that they can ADD friends without turning their BACK on existing families, friends and history. If they wanna.
Invective, my friend, does not mean what you seem to think it means. I am not shouting, nor am I angry, nor am I hurling rude or hateful remarks at either Whites or Blacks. Rather I am saying, quite simply, that 'hateful, and destructive racist nonsense must end.' How you read that as invective is baffling since it is essentially calling for an end to racist invective.
As for your continued assertions of the importance of aggregate performance averages, again, as I said, "Aggregate performance measures are meaningless, save in the abstract, as a point of interest." There is no reason to address meaningless group averages when what matters is individual performance. We don't hire aggregates, we hire individuals.
As for what will never happen.... I dunno. I think it can. I know, in fact, it does every day at the micro-level upon which all decisions are ultimately made: who is hired, who wins a race, who qualified for med school, who graduated at the top of the class, who becomes the rocket scientist, who the cardiologist, who the truck driver, etc. We make these decisions; we recognize these successes on an individual level always.
Let us return to Loury and the point he made in his 2019 essay in Inequality. He said: "The struggle for equal rights for black people, from abolition through the civil rights movement, has always been thought of as a “freedom struggle.” But with freedom, rightly understood, comes responsibility. It is past time for all of us to start performing without a net. Rather than lamenting the lack of black billionaires, an outcome ascribed to some invisible force called “racism,” one can admit that you will never become a billionaire unless you build a billion-dollar business—which begins by starting a business. One will never win a Nobel Prize in physics unless one learns calculus at the age of 12. What black parents are insisting that their 12-year-old kids learn calculus—those few kids capable of doing so? White people are not responsible for the fact that black people are, or are not, doing this." He's absolutely right. And he's as right about the Black people who are or are not choosing to behave responsibly as he is about the White people.
You want to build a successful life then go build one. And don't tell me (or yourself) that you can't do it because the aggregate measures for your population demographic say it's improbable. Aggregates don't study calculus; individuals do.
And if some choose to remain irresponsible....to not take accountability for their own life choices....to look at a disparate outcomes and cry racism when no racist discrimination is present..... to keep waiting, hand outstretched for someone who has earned dollars to give them dollars because Black....well then they will live with those consequences....and their lives will be, inevitably, short, nasty, and brutish.
Ultimately I guess I don't really care about "equalizing aggregate performance metrics". I think it's a fool's errand... made more foolish by a multi-generational history that tells us that pouring trillions of dollars into 'assistance programs' does nothing other than send those aggregate measures in the wrong direction.
Aggregate performance metrics will equalize when aggregates, acting as individuals, make equalizing choices about how they wish to live. As much as we might want all the aggregate alcoholics to stop drinking, until they, as individuals, CHOOSE to actually stop, there's not a whole lot we can do to 'fix' the aggregate drunks.
Good comment. Points taken with one to be made.
Your views are now clearly at odds with those of Mr. Clifton Roscoe and the vast majority of "race men" who focus on disproportionate representation of blacks, IN THE AGGREGATE (ITA), in both desirable positions (too few Nobel Prize winners) and socially destructive ones (too many criminals, school dropouts, and single mothers). The very concept of an "achievement gap" both acknowledges and implicitly demands action to equalize aggregate metrics by forcing proportional representation.
When the great equalizer, education, is shown to fail utterly in its mission to "close the "gap," other more slippery methods are used. These include lowering admission and examination standards and lessening academic rigor so black high school and university graduation rates show improvement. Alas, those lowered standards apply to everyone, so the children of high-achieving racial groups and cultures must seek effective education elsewhere, an increasingly difficult task. Meanwhile, newly-minted black "college graduates" in meaningless majors from such diploma mills are then placed as tokens in professional positions where few demands for real work output are placed on them. And everyone is happy. Individuals gain monetary success and social status (for producing no real value), proportional representation goes up, Mr. Roscoe and you see "progress," and a new round of official obfuscation and social censorship ensues lest the emperors new clothes be revealed for what they truly are.
You simply cannot have it both ways. Either individuals are tested against assessment standards and those passing move on to positions of real authority and efficacy while those who fail are denied sinecures and must find other, less prominent and remunerative paths to follow. This will result in disproportionate representation of blacks (ITA) in desirable professional, business, and scientific pursuits. While this may suit you just fine, it is NOT acceptable to Mr. Roscoe, Glenn Loury, American liberals, and the United States government.
Thanks for the discussion.
Always a pleasure -- these back & forths.
Let me add a small quibble... I would never "see progress' if the only thing that changes is cosmetic (e.g. meaningless college majors being plugged into worthless positions in organizations large enough to absorb this idiot practice without suffering overly much). And I would agree entirely that real standards must be applied to all populations, regardless of race, creed, color, sex, or shoe size. Always.
You highlight, exactly, the problem with aggregate measures and aggregate 'solutions': they drive, most typically, only superficial, cosmetically-pleasing, non-solutions. When we look at a population (any population) and say, "My goodness fat kids never win any of the foot races," clearly we have identified an 'aggregate performance problem. The real solution, obviously, is to work, diligently, with every fat kid to get them to eat less, lose weight, and improve their athletic performance. These are all VERY difficult tasks, made more difficult if the kid doesn't care and prefers eating pizza for every meal.
On the other hand you can get a lot of fat kids to win races if you give them a different starting line....move the finish line closer....and make the faster runners carry a 20# weight. Tah Dah! Look at the diversity & equity we've achieved!
The solution, as a society, that we seem to have adopted is to sidestep those very difficult tasks (particularly since the population whose performance metrics we'd like to improve doesn't seem especially motivated)....and -- to your point -- eliminate standards. This is disgusting and worse than disgusting; it is dangerous.
If you're not qualified to get into college then you're not qualified. Period. If you're not qualified to become a doctor then you can't become a doctor. To move goalposts, lower hurdles, eliminate testing, and substitute personal essays on ME for GPA's is just insane. But -- such cosmetic 'solutions' do indeed change those aggregate performance measures.
When that happens we can only say, "Welcome to the Idiocracy!"
Just taking a break from reading Professor Loury's *fine* article. TY. What You "say" is pretty much true, but it's a partial truth.
The lessening of standards, like You point out, lessens them for everybody. And majority of people who are getting diplomas with little value and HR, DEI jobs, and other sinecures are whites, right?
Numbers of them being white women, to be frank. But that's a different story.
Also, I'm not so certain that blacks don't have as good a chance at entrepreneurship as whites do. ICBW. Thing is, too, IQ isn't really a limiting factor in a lotta jobs. And these things, mostly, depend on how well the individual reaches his *full* potential, than what IQ they *start* with, right?
Exactly right!
(Not sure about the 'majority of people' (if we measure majority as a % of the available population....but your point is accurate, regardless)
Well done, M BDavi. Really!