One Man’s Education

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One Man’s Education

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Barbarians inside the Gates. pp. 166 - 168

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One Man’s Education

OF ALL THE THINGS I HAVE WRITTEN, what gave me the most immediate personal satisfaction were a couple of little-noticed and long-forgotten articles in the early 1970s on black schools with high academic standards. Since everyone seemed to be writing about the academic problems of black students, I thought someone should try to find out which educational approaches had actually worked with such students.

It was quite an emotional experience to see ghetto youngsters, many from families on welfare, performing at a high academic level, speaking in complete sentences with correct English and reasoning with logic and insight. Nor were these just some hand-picked individuals being shown off to me. In one particularly outstanding school in a Brooklyn ghetto, I walked down the halls with the principal and arbitrarily picked which classrooms I wanted to go into. Moreover, I did this on every floor in the building.

The test scores backed up what I had seen with my own eyes. This school's scores were far above those of similar schools in the same district and were comparable to what was found in much higher-income neighborhoods.

At the end of the day, when I waved goodbye to the kids in the school yard, I was on the verge of tears. Why couldn't this be done in other ghetto schools across the country? At the very least, I hoped that my report on all this would provide some clues to those trying to improve education for minority students.

Nothing could have been further from the reality. Not only were my articles widely ignored, where they did attract any attention from educators or civil rights activists, the first order of business seemed to be to try to discredit what I found. The children I studied were declared to be "middle class" and their experience therefore inapplicable to other black youngsters.

No one who dismissed these students as "middle class" offered a speck of evidence that they were. When I thought back to the run-down neighborhoods in which some of these schools were located, the ancient and battered buildings in which such high achievements took place, the comments of the critics seemed like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

This was one of the first of many painful lessons about educational issues and racial issues. To me the issue was simply how we might get better education for kids who needed it. But others in politics, in the civil rights movement, and in the educational establishment had completely different agendas. My articles were absolutely useless for those agendas.

What I found and wrote about would not justify any new government spending, any political crusades, or the aggrandizement of any racial "leaders." Neither money nor power could be gotten from what I said. Fundamentally, no one really cared whether it was true. It was a nuisance to be gotten rid of.

Another early and painful lesson I learned, in the late 1960s, came from working as a consultant to the Urban Coalition, developing a plan to provide scholarships and loans to enable low-income students to go to college. After months of work, travel, and conferring with people in academic, business and civic organizations, I drafted a plan which would have put money directly into the hands of the students. There was nothing in it for any educational institution, social movement, or politicians.

Although I was able to get business executives from Lytton Industries and A.T.& T. to fly to Washington for a conference on this plan at the Urban Coalition headquarters, the head of the Washington chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. wouldn't even walk down the street to attend the meeting. It didn't advance their agenda, even though it could advance the people for whom they claimed to speak.

In later years, as I began to get into more controversial issues, I discovered similar attitudes and agendas. When discussing affirmative action, the first question I would ask those who favored it was: "What hard evidence do you have that this has actually made minority working people better off, on net balance?"

Many seemed to think that this was some kind of trick question. But my research, first in the United States and then in other countries with similar programs, led me to conclude that affirmative action helps primarily those who are already more fortunate. Poorer members of the groups supposedly being helped have actually fallen further behind under these policies in some countries, including the United States.

None of this matters to those favoring such programs. Affirmative action is symbolic, it is a political trophy of victory, a demonstration of clout for minority "leaders" and it "makes a statement" for the whole countercultural left. Who cares whether it works?

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13 June 2024