[BretLudwig]

((36 years is a long time. Think of the great people whose lives impact us
all that never saw 37. But in that length of time, the nonsensical quality
of the falsehoods negatively impacting us today are still as
nonsensical-and each day more destructive. Bret.))


Some Things Don't Change€”The Educational Achievement Gap After 25 (or
36!) Years

By Steve Sailer

"Saturday was the 25th anniversary of the famous "A Nation at Risk"
report issued by the Reagan Administration's Education Department in 1983.
It warned:

"€¦ the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded
by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation
and a people."

Ever since, we've been deluged with news stories about school reform.

And what has been the tangible result of this quarter century of
tumultuous effort and vast expense (including nearly doubling the amount
spent annually per student in constant dollars)?

Uh, not much €¦

I've been following American educational and other social statistics for
more than just 25 years€”since I was 13 in 1972, 36 long years ago. (See
below).

After the turmoil of the 1960s, the last three-dozen years have turned out
to be The Age of Few Surprises. Over that time, the high school dropout
rate has gotten a little worse, the racial gaps haven't changed much, we
still trail affluent East Asian countries (there are just a lot more of
them now), and so forth and so on.

In short, the rising tide of mediocrity hasn't receded; and may well have
kept rising.

Apparently, what the schools do matters less in the big picture than who
the students are. And the quality of students arriving at schools hasn't
improved.

I knew that when I was 13. (Again, see below).

The basic trends and patterns of American society that I first noticed as
a 9th grader are still with us, just magnified by subsequent demographic
change. The future turned out to be foreseeable, for the few who cared to
notice back in the 1970s.

Why did I spend the fall of 1972 reading social science reports? The
national high school debate topic was the financing of public schools.
Most teams argued, when they were on the Affirmative, that the federal
government should take over the schools, and fund them all equally
lavishly.

As a new 9th grader looking for evidence to use in the debates, I read
through the many studies that had been begun during the liberal 1960s on
the value of more spending in narrowing educational disparities.

That was an era when a sure-fire applause line on a talk show was, "If we
can put a man on the moon, we can certainly [fill in massive liberal
social engineering project]."

Yet, as I sat in the high school library during the Nixon-McGovern
campaign, reading up on the research, I discovered that the most
sophisticated studies showed that differences in school performance had
more to do with the quality of students enrolled in the school than with
the money spent on them or other measurable inputs.

The most famous example: Johnson Administration had commissioned
sociologist James S. Coleman to head a huge project to provide statistical
support for the Great Society faith that poor children would be lifted from
poverty by increased spending.

Coleman surveyed the sprawling diversity of school systems in the U.S. and
came up with a conclusion that was so shocking to the conventional wisdom
that the Johnson Administration finally released the report late on the
afternoon of July 3, 1966 in order to minimize media coverage: The Coleman
Report found that family background mattered more than schools.

(And the Johnson ploy didnt work in one momentous respect: years later,
Richard J. Herrnstein told Forbes Peter Brimelow that a television news
item about the Coleman Report was the €œflashbulb moment€� that got him
thinking about the genetic component in IQ, leading ultimately to his
co-authoring The Bell Curve.)

Similar findings kept pouring out, such as Berkeley psychologist Arthur
Jensen's article in the December 1969 Harvard Educational Review that
Great Society programs such as Head Start hadn't narrowed the IQ gap.

In 1972, Northwestern sociologist Christopher Jencks made a splash with
his book Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling
in America. (Jencks is now at Harvard, and has become perhaps the leading
critic of illegal immigration on the academic left.) It reaffirmed most of
Coleman's discoveries, but usefully emphasized the large role of luck,
personality, and other unpredictables in determining success in life.

A review by Leon Todd on Amazon.com summarizes some of Jencks' 1972
findings:

"€¦ it is probably wiser to define a "good" school in terms of student
body characteristics than in terms of its budget or school resources.
According to Jencks, once a good school starts taking in "undesirable"
students (the definition of desirable sometimes pertains to academic,
social, or economic attributes), its academic standing automatically
declines. He concluded that while an elementary schools' social
composition had only a moderate effect on student's cognitive achievement,
secondary or high school social composition had a significant effect on
achievement. €¦ The type of friends students are likely to make, the
values they are exposed to, and satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the
school, are all dependent upon the character of the student body. "

This all made sense to me at age 13. I could see it in my own life.

I was attending a then down-at-the-heels Catholic boys high school. The
tuition was only $600 per year and the school accepted a large majority of
students who took its entrance exam. Still, those two barriers to entry
made the atmosphere much more academic than that of the public school a
block away where I'd attended summer school the two previous years.

I can't say I spread my newfound enthusiasm for statistical meta-analysis
to too many of my high school classmates. And yet€”and believe me when I
tell you that this is important at age 13€”they weren't stuffing my head
in the toilet for talking about it.

In fact, I was reasonably popular. My eccentricities were tolerated and
even mildly encouraged. (I imagine, by the way, that attending a single
sex school made my nerdish obsession with social science more acceptable
than it would have been in the social maelstrom of a coed school. But
thats another article!)

Professor Jencks noted that the data showed that liberalism's key
assumption€”that equal opportunity would lead to equal results€”was
wrong. Therefore, Jencks argued, we must have socialism. (That was a
fairly original argument at the time, as it remains today).

The late Ernest Van Den Haag wrote in the old National Review that

€œUnlike his fellow socialists, Jencks no longer believes that inequality
of results is the product of unequal social opportunity. He realizes that
equal opportunity and advancement according to merit produce unequal
incomes. Wherefore he urges that this most American (and constitutional)
of ideas be abandoned, for he wants equality of results, even if it can be
achieved only by making opportunity unequal. After all, it is luck rather
than merit that determines results, and luck has no moral weight. Beyond
this assertion (which has already been questioned), Jencks makes no
serious attempt to justify morally his brand of equality. He simply
assumes that we are all agreed€¦

€œAs P. T. Bauer has pointed out, €˜income distribution suggests a
fixed stock of income which the government is to distribute and which
(discovered by luck?) is independent of the continuous work of those who
earn it. Indeed Jencks feels that, since chance distributes income
unequally, the government should be €˜€¦responsible€¦for its [more
equal] distribution. However, the government does not produce the
income Jencks wants it to distribute. Nor does chance. The earners do.
There is no stock of income to be distributed; only a flow produced by
those who earn it. That much is certain (economically) even if one doubts
(morally) that the earners deserve to get what they earn.

[The Tortured Search for the Cause of Inequality, (Pay archive) National
Review, February 16, 1973]

My first published bit of writing was a letter-to-the-editor [March 16,
1973, Pay archive] in National Review that winter of 1972-73 responding to
van den Haag's article about Jencks' big study. I wrote:

Having read Ernest van den Haag's article on Christopher Jencks, I am
reminded of an old psychiatry joke: A psychotic (egalitarian, in this
little morality story) says. "All people are equal, and I'll fight anyone
who says I'm wrong." A neurotic (Jencks) says, "People aren't equal, and I
just can't stand it."

STEVEN SAILER
Studio City, Calif.

Now that I think about it, that one paragraph foreshadowed several million
words I've written since.

I guess I've been stuck in an intellectual rut ever since I was 13.

Still, unlike an awful lot of writers, my particular intellectual rut has
resulted in me not being surprised very much."

[Steve Sailer (email him) is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute
and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]


http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080427_education.htm

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