School performances

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School performances

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Ever wonder why? pp. 326 - 337.

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Part 1

It has been said that, when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, someone told him that admitting students to the University of California on individual performance alone could mean that all the students at Berkeley might be Asian Americans.

"So what?" was the Gipper's response.

Like many other Reagan remarks, it cut through mountains of nonsense and knocked over numerous houses of cards that keep the intelligentsia wringing their hands. A classic example is a recent New York Times story that said: "Asians gain when affirmative action ends. Other minorities don't. What's fair?"

Let's go back to square one. Why do universities exist in the first place? Is it to parcel out benefits to different racial or ethnic groups? If so, why not just give them money? Do universities exist to be fair—whatever that means? If fair means equal chances or proportional representation, then why not make admissions a lottery?

All too many people in college admissions offices talk and act as if their job is to hand out goodies to those who seem most deserving, in terms of how well they used whatever particular opportunities they happen to have had.

In other words, if student A went to a top-notch high school and scored 1500 on the SATs, while student B went to a mediocre high school and scored 1300, then student B may be admitted and student A denied admission if the little tin gods in the admissions office decide that B made better use of his limited opportunities.

You couldn't make up anything as silly as this. Educational institutions do not exist to reward people for their past but to prepare them for the future. The taxpayers and donors who are supporting these institutions with their hard-earned money are doing so to benefit the society that these graduates will be serving, not to allow bureaucrats to hand out pork barrel benefits to individuals or groups.

In all the swirl of words around the issue of affirmative action in college and university admissions—including the endlessly repeated mantra of "diversity"—there is seldom a single word about serving the public by admitting those who have the academic skills to put the educational resources to the best use.

If a disproportionate number of those who can master the skills that educational institutions provide are Asian Americans, then as the Gipper said, "So what?"

Do you want to fly in planes flown by the best qualified pilots available or in planes flown by quota pilots or by pilots whose life stories were most appealing to those on admissions committees? If you are going to have heart surgery, do you want the best surgeon you can get or do you want a surgeon who had to overcome a lot of handicaps just to make it through medical school?

Would you be offended to have your life saved by someone who had easily become the best surgeon around because he was born in the lap of privilege and always had the finest education available, regardless of how much it cost? Would it bother you if he was Asian American or even—heaven help us—a WASP?

Institutions and occupations exist for a purpose—and that purpose is not to provide a statistical picture that is pleasing for those people who are preoccupied with statistical pictures. Food and shelter, housing and health, life and death, are among the many things that depend on how well institutions function and how well people do their jobs.

These things are too important to sacrifice so that busybodies can feel important directing other people's lives. Indeed, the freedom of those other people is too important to be sacrificed for the sake of third parties' vanity.

Anyone who is serious about wanting to help minority young people must know that the place to start is at precisely the other end of the educational process. That means beginning in the earliest grades teaching reading, math and other mental skills on which their future depends. But that would mean clashing with the teachers' unions and their own busybody agenda of propaganda and psychological manipulation in the classrooms.

The path of least resistance is to give minority youngsters a lousy education and then admit them to college by quotas. With a decent education, they wouldn't need the quotas.

Part 2

Everyone knows that black students in general do not perform as well in school as white students, much less Asian American students. But few realize how painfully large the gap is. Even fewer know that there are particular black schools, even in low-income neighborhoods, where students perform above the national average.

Discussing racial gaps in education is taboo in some quarters. But this subject is discussed deeply and thoroughly in a new book titled No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning by Abigail Thernstrom of the Manhattan Institute and Stephan Thernstrom of Harvard. They are also the authors of the best book on race relations — America in Black and White — so there are high expectations for this new book.

No Excuses lives up to those expectations. If you read just one book about American education all year, this should be the book. It not only goes into the causes and cures of racial disparities in education, in the process it punctures many of the fads, dogmas, and pious hypocrisies of the education establishment.

First, the existing gap: Black high school students graduate an average of four years behind white students in academic skills. In other words, the high school diplomas they receive are given—not earned—for a junior high school education.

The excuses for this range across the spectrum from poverty to racism and even innate lack of ability. Yet none of these excuses stands up to the facts.

As the Thernstroms show, there are some schools where the students are equally poor and equally black, where test scores are outstanding. Moreover, such schools seldom get any more money than the schools that are failing.

Some of the most heavily financed schools are doing miserably. Even spending $17,000 per pupil, Cambridge, Massachusetts, was still left with a huge gap between the test scores of its black and white students. In fact, black students in Cambridge scored lower than other black students in nearby communities with less than half as much spending per pupil.

Those who believe that money is the answer are not going to be stopped by anything so mundane as facts. To many in politics and in the media—and to everyone in the teachers' unions—"improving" the schools means spending more money on them. But what is called "investing" in better education could more accurately be called pouring money down a bottomless pit.

Don't suburban schools with high levels of spending do better than other schools with lower levels of spending? Usually, yes. But olympic-sized swimming pools and tennis courts do not make you any smarter. Nor do generous-sized parking lots for affluent students with fancy cars.

No Excuses does not limit its comparisons to blacks and whites. In some cases, the educational performance of Asian American students exceeds that of whites by more than the performance of whites exceeds that of blacks.

There is nothing mysterious about any of these differences. Asian students put more time into study and homework and watch less television. They behave themselves in class. Their parents don't tolerate low grades—or even medium grades.

In those rare black schools where the students follow a pattern similar to that of Asian Americans, they get educational results similar to those of Asian Americans. What about the role of the schools in all this?

American schools waste an incredible amount of time on fads, fun and propaganda for political correctness. Those students who come from homes with highly educated parents, or parents whose values stress education, get a lot of what they need outside of school, as well as making the most of what they get within the school.

It is those children who do not come from these kinds of homes whose futures are forfeited when class time is frittered away. Low-income black students are the biggest losers when educators fail to educate and when courts create so many legal obstacles to enforcing school discipline that a handful of classroom clowns or hoodlums can prevent everyone else from getting a decent education.

More money won't cure any of this.

Part 3

My son learned fractions and decimals when he was in the first grade. He learned them from me as I drove him to school on the Los Angeles freeways, where he became curious about the signs that said things like "Wilshire Boulevard 2 1/4 miles."

At the private school he attended, he never went near a math class because that was optional and he found the math they taught too boring. Yet, if test scores for that school were collected, his would have helped the school look impressive in math and some might conclude that they did a great job of teaching the subject.

It is a completely different ball game for some kid in the ghetto attending a public school. If his teachers don't do a decent job of teaching math, chances are that he won't know much math.

Among the many misleading statistics on education are test scores comparing results from affluent suburban schools and poorer schools in the inner city. The results may well be valid in the sense that there really is a huge difference in educational achievement. But they may be very misleading as to why.

Schools in both places may be wasting vast amounts of time on non-academic fads and activities. But the children from homes with educated and affluent parents will learn a lot before going to school and outside of school. That will show up on the tests.

The schools in poorer neighborhoods may not be that much worse, in themselves, but they are the only places where many poor children with poorly educated parents have any opportunity to get an education. When these particular schools waste time, they are dooming most of their students to a life of poverty.

Homes matter—and they matter especially when the schools are not doing their job of educating the children.

Too many suburban parents may be too easily satisfied that their schools are doing a good job because the students there score in the top 10 or 20 percent on standardized tests. Suburban schools may look good compared to inner city schools, but both look bad compared to their counterparts in other countries.

The fact that schools in high-income areas get better results than schools in low-income areas has allowed the education establishment to escape responsibility for their own failings by saying that it all depends on the economic and educational levels of the home. It does not.

With all the abysmal results in ghetto schools in general, there are nevertheless particular schools serving low-income minority students with test results well above the national average. What is the difference?

The biggest difference is that successful schools teach in ways that are directly the opposite from what is fashionable in the public schools in general. Successful schools spend their time on the three R's, they teach reading with phonics, they memorize multiplication tables, and—above all—they have discipline, so that a few disruptive students are not able to prevent all the others from being educated.

Despite the self-serving claim from the teachers' unions that successful schools for minorities skim the cream from the public schools, often these successful charter schools or other private schools admit students on the basis of a lottery, so that those they take in are no better than those they don't.

The students they admit are just a lot better after they have been educated where education is the top priority.

One of the schools I researched years ago that impressed me the most—in fact, moved me to the verge of tears—was a ghetto school in a run-down building, located in a neighborhood that caused a friend to say that I was "brave"—he probably meant foolhardy—to park a car on the street there.

The children in that school scored above the national average on tests. In their classrooms, they spoke the king's English, behaved like little ladies and gentlemen, and made thoughtful answers to the questions they were asked. Yet these kids came from poor homes, often broken homes, and many were on welfare.

You can't buy that quality of education for any amount of money. It has to be created by people who have their priorities straight. Don't tell me it can't be done when I have seen it done with my own eyes.

Part 4

Many of the pronouncements coming from those who run our public schools range from fallacies to frauds. The new book No Excuses by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom exposes a number of these self-serving lies.

You may have heard how hard it is to find enough teachers—and therefore how necessary it is to raise salaries, in order to attract more people into this field. One example can demonstrate what is wrong with this picture, though there are innumerable other examples.

A young man who graduated summa cum laude from elite Williams College decided that he wanted to be a teacher. He sent letters and résumés to eight different school districts. Not one gave him even the courtesy of a reply.

Does that sound like there is a teacher shortage? Moreover, any number of other highly qualified people have had the same experience.

The joker in the deal is that, no matter how highly qualified you are, your desire to become a teacher is not likely to get off the ground unless you have jumped through the bureaucratic hoops that keep people out of this field—thereby protecting the jobs of unionized incompetents who are already in our schools.

The most important of these hoops is taking unbelievably dreary and stupid courses in education. Using these costly and time-consuming courses as a barrier, those in the education establishment "maintain low standards and high barriers at the same time," as Secretary of Education Rod Paige has aptly put it.

Factual studies show no correlation between taking these courses and successful teaching. Private schools are able to get good teachers by hiring people who never took any such courses. That is where our Williams graduate finally found a job.

The very people in the education establishment who maintain barriers to keep out teachers are the ones constantly telling us what a shortage of teachers there is—and how more money is needed. This is a scam that has worked for years and will probably work for more years to come.

Then there are the "studies prove" scams. According to the education establishment, studies prove that Head Start helps poor children's educational performance, small classes lead to higher test scores, and busing black children to white schools produces educational benefits due to "diversity."

The quality of many of these studies is as unbelievably bad as the quality of courses in education.

Here is a common pattern: If you do 20 studies comparing the effect that A has on B, you may find that in 18 of those studies there is no correlation between A and B. In one of the other two, you may find that more A is followed by more B. And in the other, more A is followed by less B. Overall, still no correlation.

Depending on what the education establishment wants, they can seize upon the one study out of 20 that showed more A leading to more B and burst into the media with it. If the conclusion of that one study fits in with the media vision of the world, then it may be trumpeted across the land as "proof."

The Head Start program is a classic example. Anyone who expresses any skepticism about claims that Head Start is a great success will be denounced as someone who doesn't "care" about the low-income and minority children that this program supposedly helps. One of the great propaganda tricks is to change questions of fact into questions of motives.

The Thernstroms show what feeble facts there are behind the Head Start program that has cost billions of dollars. Look for them to be denounced for being heartless, if not racist. But don't expect advocates of Head Start to engage in a serious discussion of facts.

It is much the same story when it comes to claims that "studies prove" that small classes lead to better education. The Thernstroms show cases where class sizes as small as 12 led to no better results when the students were tested.

Ordering students bussed from their own neighborhoods for the sake of racial balance has similarly failed to produce the much-trumpeted educational benefits.

The time is long overdue to start looking at facts instead of listening to rhetoric. Reading No Excuses is a good place to start.

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24 May 2024