Unchain Our Schools!
By Karl Zinsmeister
As this issue of The American Enterprise is flowing through newsstands, the U.S. Supreme Court will hold oral arguments on two court challenges to racial preferences at the University of Michigan. The Court's decision will come in June, and could be historic.
Michigan uses a point system to decide which students get in. Currently, any applicant who is black, Hispanic, or Native American automatically gets 20 points. Whites, Asians, Arabs, and others get nothing.
That is un-American. It is also unfair. A hundred points will generally get you into Michigan, so those 20 racial points lend a huge advantage. A student who pulls off a perfect SAT score gets only 12 points. Under Michigan's affirmative action rules, 64 percent of black applicants will be admitted with an academic record that would give a white applicant, identical in every way except skin color, only a 1 percent chance of being admitted. (Calculations by social scientists Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai.)
America is thus in the ugly business of sorting people crudely by race. Ask an advocate of preferences how he can possibly defend this method of discriminating and he'll tell you that the ends justify the means: Campuses must be "diverse." And without affirmative action, black people wouldn't be able to go to college.
You will often hear activists say that "there are more African Americans behind bars than in college," with the suggestion that this surely justifies "emergency" measures. That claim is utter disinformation--representing either statistical ignorance or a blatant attempt to mislead. There are presently 1.8 million college-age blacks on campuses; about 200,000 are in prison.
It's a scandalous--and slanderous--misrepresentation to suggest that for blacks the only alternative to the slammer is special preferences. Black Americans are quite capable of making steady progress the old-fashioned way. In 1980, 42 percent of black high school grads went to college; today that's 62 percent, virtually the same as for whites.
After Ward Connerly convinced Californians to ban racial preferences in their state university system a few years ago (you'll find an interview with Mr. Connerly on page 18), agitators insisted that blacks would disappear from our campuses. They were badly mistaken. More than five years after their affirmative action crutches were taken away, young black Californians very much continue to walk the ivy pathways. Minority enrollment on the eight campuses of the University of California system is now 20 percent--up from 18 percent in the last year that preferences were used.
Indeed, if you will follow me on a brief tour of some eyebrow-raising figures, I believe I can show you that black students in California actually ended up in a better position without affirmative action. Consider: In 1997, the number of African Americans accepted at the eight U.C. colleges was 1,556. That was the final year racial preferences were legal. Over the next few classes of students, the black acceptance totals went this way: 1,368, then 1,453, then 1,536, then 1,734. Just four years after preferences were banned, black acceptances were already well above their affirmative-action-induced level.
But what's especially interesting is the way black students progressed academically on the more level playing field. One of the most subtly devastating effects of affirmative action is that it over-promotes minority students--pushing them onto a higher rung of the educational ladder than their prior school record has prepared them for. As a result, they are often in over their heads, fail to prosper in the classroom, and drop out of college at dismayingly high rates.
A recent report by a California academic and a New York professor of statistics notes that in the entire freshman class at the University of California at San Diego, for instance, only one black student achieved a grade point average of 3.5 or above in 1997. (Twenty percent of whites did so.) Meanwhile, 15 percent of blacks had a GPA below 2.0, risking suspension (compared to only 4 percent of whites). Black dropout levels at UCSD were high.
By contrast, in 1998--the first year without preferences--a full 20 percent of black freshmen achieved a GPA of 3.5 or higher; the proportion of blacks with a freshman GPA below 2.0 declined to 6 percent. Black students now fell into the top and bottom GPA groups at approximately the same rates as white students. Black dropout rates tumbled.
What happened? Quite simply, instead of being over-promoted by affirmative action to a step higher than they had earned or could handle, blacks--like whites--were placed on the campus their grades and scores suggested they were equipped for. Yes, that meant there were black kids at U.C. San Diego who the year before might have been pulled up to U.C. Berkeley. But at Berkeley they would have fallen into the bottom group. At UCSD they thrived in a better-matched environment.
Is this not a vastly healthier scenario? Isn't it a truer method of preparing students for the way the real world works? California's rational and humane elimination of preferences ought to be copied immediately by the rest of our colleges.
Putting an end to sorting by color is the only principled course in a nation that aspires to the idea that "all men are created equal." Think what affirmative action does. First, it encourages every applicant, every college administrator, every teacher, every pupil, to view the world, and himself, in racial terms. Then it takes minority kids and plunks them into classrooms they are unprepared for. Many of these students struggle, their confidence teeters, their rancor grows. Meanwhile, other students notice that their minority colleagues seem methodically over-promoted and under-equipped (see John McWhorter's piercing essay). Surprise, surprise--a highly racialized campus dynamic soon follows, with separate "Black Studies" classes and all-minority dorms. In this way, college campuses have become some of the most segregated and racially tense places in America
"Racial identity politics" is what now reigns at almost all colleges. Having been trained to think of people as members of groups rather than individuals, students, professors, and administrators alike have become hyper color sensitive. African Americans and some left-wing white allies pioneered the techniques, which were then picked up by Hispanics, women, Asians, homosexuals, and endless others. Splits and schisms have crackled through student bodies, and campuses have grown fractious and testy.
Stanford University now features (quite typically) separate dorms for black students (Ujamaa House), for "Chicano" students (Casa Zapata), for Native American students (Muwekmatah-ruk), for Asian students (Okada--a reference to Japanese internment settlements during World War II). Such open racialism produces de facto segregation, encourages separatist thinking, undermines human brotherhood, and makes a sham of American unity.
This forced diversity crusade is why racial animosities now rise rather than fall for many students during their college years. It's why six out of ten blacks (and one third of whites) asserted to University of Virginia researchers a few years ago that "People of other races can't really understand the way my race sees things." Sensible people should not want attitudes like that to take root in a multi-ethnic society like our own.
Weak-kneed college administrators have coped with the roiling mess their affirmative action policies have encouraged in two ways: First, almost every campus now employs a "diversity officer"--essentially a racial minority member given administrative authority to stir up race thinking, and then to try to stamp out the resulting alienation and divisions. Second, the vast majority of colleges have decided that in order to keep the lid from blowing off their "identity politics" pressure-cookers they need "speech codes." These codes suppress certain kinds of free expression and student interaction in the hope of preventing inflammatory conflicts. (See brand new evidence on the sorry state of free thought and free speech in academe on page 41.) Affirmative action and the resulting racial politics aren't the only factors that gave rise to political correctness and these new muzzles on students, but they are the major influence.
Race thinking and non-merit-based promotions through affirmative action aren't just bad for political and cultural unity; they also warp education and degrade academic standards. When Stanford's president tried to raise academic standards in 1995, he reinstated D and E grades; abolished the privilege of dropping courses the day before a final exam in order to avoid a bad grade; and implemented other commonsense measures. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, these reforms were resisted by "many black students... as a direct attack on them." Professors will often privately admit that they have felt pressure to loosen their teaching or grading standards in order to placate minority activists. Professor McWhorter delves into this in his article later in these pages; Linda Chavez wrote vividly about it in her recent autobiography, which we excerpted in our October/November 2002 issue.
Affirmative action prickliness is behind the recent invention of entirely new, often bogus, academic disciplines like Black Studies,Women's Studies, and Gay Studies. It can also lead to soft grading. One academic brave enough to complain about this state of affairs is Barry Shain, professor of political science at Colgate University. In a friendly written dialogue with a black female student in the fall of 2001, Shain stated that he was "concerned about the quality of education minority and some female students are likely to receive on this campus because of the willingness of too many faculty to accommodate, in particular, students of color."
He elaborated: "In too many instances this means that students are invited to offer opinions about their 'feelings' rather than advance reasoned opinions derived from careful examination of written materials encountered in class." Shain warned that "too many students of color are seduced into taking exotic courses, outside the mainstream of academia, that make few demands on them, rather than those courses that force them to grow emotionally and intellectually." His conclusion: "It seems to me that if students of color graduate with inferior written and analytical skills to those of their white colleagues, Colgate faculty are certainly not serving their needs."
When Shain's remarks were made public, two reactions followed. Several left-wing faculty members exploded in vituperation, one urging that Shain be met with "force." Seventy students from Colgate's African, Latin American, and Native American Cultural Center held an angry seven-hour sit-in at the college admissions office. Individuals started following Shain around campus, recording his lectures and public comments with the aim of suing or getting him fired for creating a "hostile working environment." He was interrogated for his statement that "the Japanese are short and they eat rice," which took place during a class discussion on the effect of diet on populations. (It happens Shain's wife is of Japanese ancestry.)
A much more thoughtful reaction came from Colgate professor Philip Richards, who published a long reflection on the Shain tempest in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Richards, who is black, describes the incident as a "breach of the university's racial etiquette." He suggests Shain's main infraction was to be brutally frank where most campus residents are evasive. Richards accepts much of Shain's critique, and then elaborates with a powerful frankness of his own:
The black students whom I encounter tend to arrive less well prepared than their classmates, and only a few go on to perform at the level of the best white and Asian students. Although the black students have ranked highly in their secondary-school classes, they now must measure themselves against students from the top 10 percent of the nation's most competitive schools.With the exception of a few high performers--often women from the West Indies or Africa--most black students do not achieve academic distinction. That experience is clearly not unusual. The U.S. Department of Education recently released a report documenting that black students arrive on campuses with less preparation for college-level work than other groups, and that almost half of black undergraduates get C's or lower.
Richards extends Shain's observation that faculty tend to indulge, rather than challenge, minority students. "Over the years, colleagues have often told me that they have acquired a different set of academic expectations, whatever their formal evaluations, for disadvantaged minority students." This, he writes, has "slackened demands for minority-student achievement." Tragically, "the double standard leaves its mark on black students long after graduation.... I notice the dearth of black students who announce their entrance into high-level positions in law, medicine, finance, corporate life, advertising, education, and publishing." Richards rightly complains that universities seem more interested in getting chocolately faces into their promotional brochures than in helping black students thrive on an equal footing. He suggests that "colleges like Colgate should no longer recruit black students without alerting them to the nature of life in an academically competitive environment." Alas, on almost every college campus, "public discussion focuses on multiculturalism and diversity--not the problem of inadequate black intellectual achievement."
The ill effects of preferences are visible. They are measurable. They're deeply troubling. For these reasons Americans should jettison affirmative action and all racial preferences. Am I suggesting blacks simply be left to sink or swim? As some teenagers like to say today: Not hardly. There is a reason that in this TAE issue about affirmative action, four of the six feature articles related to the cover theme are about schooling at the elementary, junior-high, and high school level. We've linked the abolition of affirmative action to the reform of public schools for a reason: School reform has a chance to actually achieve the good things that affirmative action promises without delivering.
I am someone who thinks middle-class Americans are much too complacent about the quality of the so-called better public schools that anchor our suburbs. After studying and visiting scores of these "better" schools, and putting my own children through several, I have to say that many of them are profoundly mediocre. They may not churn out dropouts, but neither do they stretch many children to find their upper intellectual limits.
That said, let's acknowledge that the real scandal in U.S. education is our big urban schools. The public schooling in our major cities is often a living illustration of the word "malpractice." For a glimpse of just how numbingly dysfunctional these inner-city government schools can be, see the tale by a former teacher on page 50.
These urban schools with the awful teaching bureaucracies are also where most minority students are concentrated. Of the top 57 school districts in the U.S., 46 have a majority of black and Hispanic students. Many of these children are not doing well. More than 40 percent of all students who go through the Chicago public schools drop out. When Education Week investigated 74 urban school districts it found that only a minority of the freshmen who started high school managed to graduate four years later.
That's not just bad for individual students; it's bad for all Americans. The mayor of Washington, D.C. (which has some of America's rottenest public schools) lamented at his inauguration this January that almost 37 percent of the adults in his mostly black city can only read at the third-grade level. That's our country's capital! Nationwide, blacks and Hispanics now make up 35 percent of all schoolchildren--up from 25 percent 20 years ago. If those kids are getting crummy public schooling, there will eventually be penalties for all of us.
The real risk today is not that our public school reforms will be too radical, but that they won't be radical enough. If the feel good, phony progress of affirmative action is going to be replaced by genuinely improved mobility among black Americans, we need some shock therapy.
First of all, blacks themselves need some shocks. Our second feature article, by Jane Mack-Cozzo, is the story of how one school district was recently given a high-voltage jolt of reality concerning black schooling. The community not only survived but seems to have absorbed some important hard lessons.
That article is but one flesh-and-blood illustration of a much broader problem. I have just read a brand-new multi-year study by John Ogbu, a black U. Cal. Berkeley anthropologist, which identifies the underlying dilemma: the widespread disconnect of black America from schooling today. Since this is such an important subject--yet generally taboo as a topic for frank discussion--I'd like to give you some extended extracts from this new book, which is entitled Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement.
Because the research and writing in this book are highly academic, I have done my own simple paraphrase of its most important new revelations. I am of course highlighting only selected findings; it is, after all, a 320-page work. But I have been very careful in the summary that follows to adhere to the author's own conclusions. Like many good academics who choose to bury their contentious results in a thick syrup of on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand, Professor Ogbu may not like my pulling his most controversial findings starkly to the surface. But here is what ought to interest us in his research:
Current policies on racial academic gaps focus almost entirely on "system" factors, blaming schools and society. Our research suggests the beliefs and behaviors that minority students bring to school should also be examined so that other factors which contribute to the problem can be discovered. Since the late 1980s,We have been studying community influences on education in cities across California. In 1997 there came an opportunity to study the community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, where a group of local blacks invited us to investigate.
Shaker Heights is a wealthy, thoroughly integrated suburb of Cleveland where many upper-middle-class black families live with similar white residents. The school system is one of the best in the nation. Still, there is a problem: a wide gap in academic achievement exists between white and black students. We studied why even black children from well-to-do, educated families are often academically disengaged, and our results have broad relevance to a problem that is nationwide.
Our findings: Many black students are not working hard, or to their full capacity. Some readers will not accept this, because it runs counter to current political fashion. But it became clear to our research team that "low-effort syndrome" is a significant part of black academic disengagement. Black students are generally represented today as victims. Schools are held almost entirely responsible for their failures, and for the lack of involvement by their parents. By simply letting students, school personnel, and parents speak for themselves, we found otherwise.
We interviewed hundreds of students and school personnel of both races. All groups agreed that black students did not work as hard as white students. Black students often voluntarily compared their own academic efforts with those of white students, saying they did not work as dutifully. Middle and high school students were emphatic in stating that black students preferred easier classes, while white students took honors classes because they were more willing to work.
In group discussions as well as individual interviews, most black middle school students described their own academic effort as "just enough to get by." They said they could work more diligently but did not. These included students in honors classes.
High school students had the most to say about low-effort syndrome. One male stated that while black students blame teachers for their poor academic performance, the reason for their poor grades was typically that the students do not usually complete their assignments. Other students agreed with him.
In our direct observations as well, most black students were not highly engaged in their schoolwork. The amount of time and effort they invested in academic pursuits was not impressive. We can confidently say that most black students could make better grades than their records show.
In our study, black academic effort decreased markedly from elementary to high school. At least half of the black students we encountered at the elementary level were enthusiastic about their schoolwork, and some wanted to make good grades. As we moved up in age, however, this enthusiasm faded.
One student pointed out that most of his classmates were content with being average. Another said people always talked to him about the value of doing well in school, but that it didn't mean anything to him. A third stated that teachers often lectured students about the importance of doing well in class, but most students didn't care. One said that his classmates would rather have "freedom" than "calculus."
Students reported they didn't study or do homework because they spent too much time watching TV. Others said they habitually put off homework because of distractions from friends and talking on the phone.
Students were often reminded of the need to prioritize, to set academics above sports, to budget their time, and give up some present desires for academic pursuits. Students were advised on the importance of taking notes in class and studying after school. Yet little of this was taken to heart.
One student described how she understood the problems on a test yet failed, because she was talking during the exam. Lack of concentration was evident to us during tutoring sessions. Students often did not focus on assignments or follow through to complete a task. On one occasion,12 students were each given a packet of materials to read before the next session. When the students arrived on that day, only three had done the readings: nine reported they had lost them!
We often saw pupils arriving late to class, coming without proper supplies, talking during the lesson, not paying attention, and barely doing class work. This was true at different school levels, and in different types of classes: regular, remedial, enrichment, college prep, and honors.
A kind of norm of minimum effort appears to exist among black students, especially among males. One student with whom we established good rapport said he was contemplating attending college in Florida or California. He considered himself a good student. When we asked him about his grade point average he said it was "about 1.9 right now." He said he could work harder to get higher grades but didn't, because he believed he could be admitted to college to play football. Another student boasted that he would "do homework on occasion just to make sure...I maintain a 3.0, but I won't do anything over that."
Among their peers, explained some black males, "it is not cool to be successful." Students who were smart chose not to put forth effort.
It was not uncommon for students to blame teachers. "They tryin' to fail us 'cause we black," mumbled another student. There was a complaint that teachers "go back to stuff that you have already done, and throw that in on the test." Suggestions made by students for performing better included taking a practice test or peeking at the tests.
We came across only a few students who were determined to excel in order to go to college.
Blacks tend to interpret school as a white imposition. Some black students believe their roots are in the ghetto, where the lifestyle does not include school engagement. Successful black students and professionals are accused of abandoning their racial identity. Black language and unacademic behavior are presented as rejections of "white ways." Unfortunately, many of the attitudes and behaviors labeled "white" are those that enhance school success.
School authorities and black students agreed that white peers tend to study together, but black friends do not do schoolwork together. Some black students did not succumb to these negative peer pressures. One strategy involved befriending other black students who were good students, or white classmates. A second protective factor was family support: Involved parents got their children to work, take hard classes, and complete homework.
But this requires supervision, which is often lacking. We investigated what black parents did or did not do to support their children's education, in school and at home. From school records, interviews with students, discussions with parents, and our own observations, we can report that black parents do not participate actively in school organizations and events. Very few black parents attended Parent Teacher Organization meetings. Their participation in academic programs organized by the school district was dismal. We recorded attendance at three workshops intended to show black parents how to help their children pass state proficiency tests. Participation was very low.
The absence of black parents during school open houses was another indicator of the discrepancy between educational expectations and what black parents are actually doing to make sure their expectations are met. Involvement was low even among well-educated middle-class black parents.
Many parents seemed to expect the school to do everything that's necessary for their children to succeed. They rarely met with teachers or visited the school building. Nor did parents do much to aid education outside of school. In group discussions and interviews, students reported that many black parents did not supervise or check homework closely or often.
Students even complained that their parents did not sufficiently monitor the amount and kinds of television programs they watched. Students told us they not only spent too much time watching, but also absorbed messages from specific programs that were detrimental to school interest and personal striving. Neither does it appear that many black parents adequately scrutinize their children's friendships.
Many black students felt their parents were not doing enough to encourage them to do well in school. As students got older, punishments for poor grades usually lost their effectiveness. Many parents discussed their children's schoolwork with them only when report cards arrived.
One of our recommendations is that black Americans must assume a more active role to increase the academic effort of their children. Although good teaching and changes in the educational process are important, the academic achievement gap is not likely to be closed solely by eliminating all that ails our schools.
There are limits to what local schools and U.S. society at large can do for black students. At least as important is what the black community can change within itself.
There is much evidence in other studies confirming Ogbu's work. A 1998 study in The Black-White Test Score Gap showed that among children entering school with similar socioeconomic backgrounds and initial test scores, black children learned less than white children by the time they graduated from high school. It's important to note that these children were attending the same schools.
For black students who do study and learn today, the sky is the limit. A 2001 study shows that minority students who do graduate from high school with strong academic skills are every bit as likely to attend good colleges as top white students. And black students who have developed the same academic skills as white students in tenth grade are just as likely to graduate with a college diploma. As a brand new report from a distinguished panel of educators assembled by Stanford's Hoover Institution puts it, "Well-prepared minority students are sought by colleges, and they do well, both in college and later." Our problem today is minority students who are not well-prepared.
Professor Ogbu tells me that he is anxious to avoid putting all the blame for black school failure on black students and families. I agree--which is why this issue criticizes, at length, the ways that uncompetitive public schools sometimes numb minority schoolchildren into mediocrity. But it's also clear that black disengagement from learning (about which John McWhorter wrote a whole book, excerpted in our December 2000 issue) is poisonous to black progress. Finding an antidote to that is more urgent than even school reform, and will ultimately be more consequential than a century of affirmative action.
Speeding up black progress will require effort on many fronts. Black families need to set higher standards and hold their own children accountable. Schools need to become much more responsive. White liberals need to stop falsely promising stress-free solutions through racial preferences. More honesty, more perspiration, more boldness, and full-blown competition in schools could, in combination, produce real breakthroughs against America's unacceptable racial gap.
