John McWhorter leans on the work of Clifton Casteel.
We get closer to truth in examining what black kids’ attitudes toward school may have to do with the problem. A study in 1997 very neatly got at the issue. It found that among eighth and ninth graders, most white kids said they did schoolwork for their parents while most black kids said they did schoolwork for the teacher.
I know of no study that more elegantly gets across a subtle but determinative difference between how black and white kids tend to process the school thing. For the black kids, school is something “else,” something for “them,” beyond the comfort zone; for the white kids, it is part of the comfort zone. This is not something the kids would consciously be aware of, but being really good at school – and this would include tests – requires that it becomes a part of you. To hold it at half an arm’s remove all but guarantees that you will only ever be so good at it.
Given that blacks are unlikely to do well at school regardless of effort or attitude, isn’t such a relationship towards school perfectly reasonable? Even healthy?
I’ve worked at Asian cram schools where Tiger Parents of less gifted Asian kids try to use effort and attitude to overcome their own kids mediocrity. It’s utterly painful and pointless. Taking these black kids and shoving them into cram schools for another 20 hours a week wouldn’t do much good for anyone.
I predict that trying to “do the heavy lifting” will be more damaging to blacks than mere benign neglect. At least when black kids shoot hoops they enjoyed themselves. Spending that same time doing more worksheets will make their lives a lot worse without making them better at worksheets.
“There are inequities between whites and blacks. The reason is not that blacks are inherently less capable than whites.”
Oops.
BTW, we already tried the “heavy lifting”. It was called “No Child Left Behind”. Rigorous standards deliberately measured and enforced.
It was a total failure and everyone hated it. Along with all the other Ed Reform efforts to close the gap.
McWhorter wants to go back to the 1990s consensus, but the failure of 1990s Ed Reform makes that consensus impossible to go back to. We already know that “heavy lifting” won’t get us anywhere. We just tried it.
Either we admit the truth or we invent reasons why the 1990-2010s heavy lifting failed (systematic racism).
I disagree that nothing will improve the scholastic improvement of Black students in the US. I think that one on one or maybe even one to two tutoring would work. I am not saying that would necessarily be a good use of taxpayer money. But it certainly seems like it would be in the reach of many black families to provide that for their own children if they are struggling at school (or if they want their children to learn more advanced thing outside of school). I don’t know how effective online tutoring is, but if it is effective, it could be very cost effective to hire private tutors from developing countries. And frankly, the difference between income between being able to get through nursing school and not is large enough to justify that kind of investment from families.
There’s some there there, but put more succinctly (as well as examining another subconscious perception that is parallel) most black kids including many of their parents do not see the value added aspect of education, they equate education with externalities that show education. What they see is the ‘going’ to school as the value, not what is derived from school, as though education is something obtained osmotically by being in the building. This is a fundamental basis for so many of the misunderstandings about why ‘they’ kids aren’t performing or advancing, as though it’s the building and the people in the building’s fault for not producing the expected result of being educated. For them, being educated is the piece of paper or the nice photo with the gown and cap of someone like Michael Brown who has a 5th grade reading comprehension level and can’t do algebra.
Being in the building is the getting educated part, not what the child is doing in the building, just so long as the child is in the building long enough to obtain the ‘getting’ of the education part of being in the building which is the signaling totems of the piece of paper and the gown and cap and the photo that shows other people that you got ‘educated’.
‘Blacks’ had been catching up and I believe had actually caught up to ‘White’ grade levels in the 60s (pre-crack). People do fine in school if they put in the effort and are not at the very bottom rungs of intelligence. For most, effort trumps intelligence. As we see in demographics, many immigrant ‘blacks’ do better than the average Americans in school. Now, I put ‘blacks’ in quotes because the definition of what that means is not clear. Obama is considered black but he is half white. Much of what people consider ‘black’ is mixed which lends backing to the fact that culture matters more than genes.
Blacks’ had been catching up and I believe had actually caught up to ‘White’ grade levels in the 60s (pre-crack).
As I recall, the first part of that statement is true but the second part is very much not true. Instead, “the gap” was large then and has stayed just about the same since then. That fact is one of the major reasons for the frustrations of today.
Smart people do fine if they put in the effort. But for lots of people, it not just that effort won’t make them good at calculus, it won’t make them good at fractions.
Let me operationalize that statement. For about half of high school seniors, if you drill them in fractions and then give them a test that is the same as what you have drilled, many of them will pass. But if you make the problems different, or if you test a month later, they will fail.
I thought that scholastic achievement gaps between Whites and Blacks in the US were narrowing from the 1960’s until the 1980’s or 90’s and then stalled.
Gotta love McWhorter’s style.
By coincidence Joanne Jacobs has a piece today citing a survey saying that various racial and ethnic identity sects are more likely to prefer continuing with online education than returning to the classroom. “lack, Hispanic and Asian parents are more likely than their white peers to say they prefer online learning,” writes Toppo. An April survey survey found 60 percent of White parents wanted their children back in school, compared to 25 percent of Black and Hispanic parents.”
https://www.joannejacobs.com/2021/05/some-like-it-remote/
This of course is attributed to attitudes about vaccines and covid safety, yet one wonders if it doesn’t have a lot more to do with not returning children to the urban public school hell holes. Not that The Wire was a documentary, but one can get the idea that urban public school classrooms are perhaps are not the most well managed and disciplined conducive to a learning environment. Going back many decades to my grad school days, one of my part time jobs was driving St Louis school bus routes. I had two: an early one bussing inner city Blacks out to the county special ed school and next a South Side route taking white kids to a neighborhood school. Major discipline problems daily on the first, none one the second.
Rather than fix the problem, The Elect have decided that teachers who discipline Blacks are the problem. And this is also the animus behind Biden’s campaign to degrade nice suburban schools into anarchic hell holes: if Blacks can’t have nice schools then nobody should.
In the long run, I suspect that families that keep their children out of public schools will perform better than those that return. This will create new disparities and the teachers unions will demand and get compulsory classroom attendance taught remotely, because that is just how screwed up this country is.
Good comment.
I’d say McWhorter is not on the right track. This might be too broad of a topic.
I know lots of successful adults of all races (black/white/asian/hispanic). Most of them know very little math and academics.
Most white people I know, never liked school, did the bare minimum to graduate with high school or an undergrad and get in the work force. Many have reasonably nice lives. Apparently, I didn’t grow up around the underclass whites who are unemployed and addicted to serious drugs.
I know black adults who also have nice upper middle class lives. One black man in my extended family works as a medical professional, he makes great money, lives a nice life, but he didn’t do particularly well in school when he was young.
I know women who’ve had 10+ children with different men, and never had or seriously pursued a career. That seems like a train wreck.
Maybe McWhorter deserves a ding on his FIT scores for using the disparaging label “The Elect” all the time, which seems to me to have a similar tone to “free-market fundamentalist”.
At any rate, it is telling that McWhorter is citing research from over 20 years ago, since he sounds exactly like the National Review “Wishful Thinking Conservatives” did 20 years ago. It’s the culture, it’s the poverty, it’s the crime, it’s the broken families, it’s the historical legacy, it’s the attitudes, it’s the schools, it’s lead contamination (from two generations ago), it’s … every remotely plausible – or implausible but rhetorically attractive – thing, except for the null hypothesis of natural differences.
Here’s an example from seventeen years ago of Ward Connerly on Bill Cosby (back when he was respectable).
It was all said before, over and over, to no avail. That should be sobering for those who are putting forward ludicrous suggestions of this phenomenon burning itself out and becoming tamed and domesticated by corporate adoption. It has obviously only gotten worse and more fanatical.
But more to the point, all these alternative theories have been around long enough to have been debunked back when it was still possible to publish the debunking without risking one’s chances of future employment. A common observation was that all the proposed casual factors were correlated, but that whatever causal factor one picked still varied greatly from place to place, region to region, and even country to country.
And yet observations of psychometric factors stay within a narrow range of around one standard deviation in all of these different contexts, which is what one would expect with a strongly heritable factor not strongly influenced by any of those more hopeful speculations.
The only remaining plausible explanations are either natural differences or else exactly a kind of mysterious, ubiquitous, and pervasive form of “structural racism” that throttles up or down in intensity to always maintain the difference at the same level.
It’s “Quantum Racism” since the gap is always the same size. The only way such a theory could be sustained would be to posit the existence of a kind of social psychological mechanism of “Status Gap Homeostasis”. There would have to be something mentally special about picking up on environmental cues of an average difference between salient social groups being around one standard deviation, and subconsciously adjusting behaviors to maintain it.
If the gap is bigger than 1SD, then one relaxes the negative treatment and acts more nice and respectful. If the gap shrinks below 1SD, then one feels ineffably more irritated and negative towards the other group, experiences unconscious bias, and treats them with disdain, deploying more microaggressions of humiliating disrespect and subtle insults until their self-esteem, optimism, and cooperative attitudes towards social institutions collapses, they give up, and their performance drops to the necessary level to make oneself feel better as belonging to a group that is safely-better-enough than the lower group.
As absurd as this thesis is, something like it is the only thing that would salvage the structural racism thesis by explaining why the gap is more-or-less the same in all normal times and places but in a blameworthy, man-made way, without relying on natural causes. But even though this theory is kind of crazy, if one excludes the Null Hypothesis of natural causes as beyond the pale, then the status homeostasis theory is still significantly more plausible and less crazy than all these alternative proposals that keep getting recycled decade after decade.
don’t know why you think status homeostasis is absurd – seems perfectly plausible if people want to be able to feel clearly superior, but don’t want to humiliate the low status group to such an extent that the backlash gets out of hand
how would that explain the relatively high murder rate in all black countries in africa?
To clarify, I don’t think “status gap homeostasis” is prima facie absurd by itself, as a potential subconscious psychological mechanism, based in perceptions of relative social status, and driving behaviors of interaction that tend to exert subtle influences on others.
Indeed I came up with it specifically to try to be as minimally absurd as it would be possible for an explanatory mechanism to be which excludes the possibility of the null hypothesis of innocent natural differences.
I don’t know whether it qualifies as ‘steelmanning’, but I asked myself if I were the lawyer for ‘the case for structural racism’, what mechanism would provide me with the strongest argument that comes closest to matching our observations and could address the biggest defect with all the other “wishful thinking” proposals, which are easily falsified by showing that outcomes are stubbornly unaffected by major changes in levels of those factors.
That being said, the theory is still a little absurd as it is easy to poke lots of holes in it. It’s just less absurd that all the other ‘artificial’ theories.
Robin Hanson recently went through the same exercise for UFO’s. If UFO’s really were aliens, what would be the most plausible explanation for how that could be possible, based on what we know about physics, evolution, and social phenomena. His explanation is a lot more plausible and less absurd than any of the other alien-based explanations out there, but I think a reasonable impression is that, even so, it is still pretty wildly implausible and slightly absurd.
Since this best case has lower plausibility / likelihood than the other proposed explanations, it’s probably not aliens. (If aliens are out there, when their expansion volume hits us – probably a long, long time from now – they will probably roll right over us.)
Likewise, since “Status Gap Homeostasis” has pretty low likelihood of explaining all our observations, the explanation is probably not ‘artificial / structural’ but ‘natural / innocent’.
It is not absurd, but it should really stretch your credulity considering that it would have to hold across a wide range of different social and cultural norms. That is to say, why do Californians, New Yorkers, Floridians, Texans, Kentuckians, Nebraskites, Ohionnes, Maineutes etc. all converge on that 1 standard deviation, and over time? That would be really surprising given the obvious cultural differences, not just between areas but between times.
Another thought on parental involvement, this one relating to abortion and its influence on culture. Black women have an abortion rate four times greater that of white women. The ideology of abortion is basically that it is unthinkable that a woman have to carry to delivery. But the same ideology carries over into parenting: if it is unthinkable that a woman not have a choice in whether to carry to term, isn’t similarly unthinkable that a woman be compelled to participate meaningfully in parenting? This attitude could also be augmented by urban Blacks modeling rich urban white behavior. The rich urban white woman passes off child care responsibilities to nannies and day care providers and can be back at work a week after dropping. The Black mother models this but dependent upon government programs and without access to the higher quality care providers employed by whites.
In the grand scheme of things this is much less about Racial Identity Sects and more to do with the increasing eu-socialization of the species as we evolve into caste defined hive dwellers. Many object to the notion that humans could evolve into a eusocial species, because after all humans are different and have personalities and such, yet, entomologists have long observed that individual hive insects like bees each have unique, identifiable mannerisms. Incubator farms with artificially conceived embryos will be here if the current intra-glacial period respite doesn’t end and finish us off for good.
Let’s not forget that Black women have done much better than Black men in recent decades (vs. their 1970s starting point). This suggests that the greater degree of agreeableness and lower aggressiveness of women vs. men has contributed to female Black’s relative success.
I should add that the work by Altonji at Yale on private vs. public schools shows that the difference between the two is usually selection quality and money EXCEPT for Catholic schools. Not only do Catholic schools (on average but not always) do better than public schools at teaching but the effect tends to be strongest for Blacks and Hispanics at the lower end of the income distribution. They are not better at raising IQs, but it is likely that they are better at inculcating good habits and discipline, as well as discouraging teen pregancy and delinquency. Those factors alone would improve outcomes for African Americans even if they learned nothing more than they do now.
Catholic schools are usually the only affordable private school option for most people. You can find Catholic K-8 education that costs $10k or less per year (high school is harder). Not all private school is 40k prep schools.
My understanding is that James Coleman (of “The Coleman Report”) concluded that Catholic schools did a better job of establishing an ethos in which the school was perceived as a “moral community.”
He seemed to think the school being a “moral community” was an important factor. Based on my casual reading, he did not think selection bias was the sole mechanism by which Catholic schools got impressive results, especially relative to their modest expenditure on inputs.
It would be awfully hard to tease out all the statistical variables, but Coleman’s team worked hard to do what they could. I’ve never read the report. Wikipedia has a brief summary.
If I recall correctly, Coleman was excoriated by the sociological rank and file for not concluding that instructional expenditure was the biggest explanatory factor.
As I mentioned above, the work by J. Altonji at Yale was the hardcore econometric version that went over the Coleman thesis and showed it to a high standard of rigor with more details and nuance in the finding.
Thanks!
I don’t know how well the Coleman Report has held up to careful scrutiny.
If you are talking to someone interested in educational policy and they have never heard of it, and are not aware of its counter-intuitive findings, it tells you something about the person that you are talking to. It could be a case where the Dunning-Krueger Effect holds sway, so that your interlocutor is ignorant but cannot recognize the fact.
What is counter intuitive about Catholics being good at education? Haven’t they been founding and running educational institutions for around 800 years? And even longer than that if you count monasteries as educational institutions?
Good point. It’s obvious to some people–but not everyone thinks that way.
I think the issue is partly this. Many people believe the hypothesis immediately below:
“Hypothesis: The superior result from Catholic k-12 education comes solely from the ability to “cream off” the best students from public schools, and to expel high-cost low-success students.” So, to simplify, it’s basically just selection bias.
You have to reject the above hypothesis before you tend to look at the “moral community ” argument. It could be (1) moral community, it could be (2) more time-on-task, it could be (3) better training and student internalization of diligence and self control, it could be (4) better feedback.
Or (5) something else not mentioned above