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.
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.