Social-justice pedagogy is driven by one overwhelming reality: the seemingly intractable achievement gap between whites and Asians on the one hand, and blacks and Hispanics on the other. Radical feminism, as well as gay and now trans advocacy, are also deeply intertwined with social-justice thinking on campus and off, as we have just seen. But race is the main impetus. Liberal whites are terrified that the achievement and behavior gaps will never close. So they have crafted a totalizing narrative about the racism that allegedly holds back black achievement.
Starting from a premise that racial gaps are due entirely to white oppression, the social justice movement is deforming higher education. Even if it is true that white oppression is the root cause of the racial achievement gap, that gap is not going to be closed at the college level by social justice methods. Colleges cannot manufacture successful graduates out of unprepared students, where successful means learning according to standards of excellence and preparation means a combination of ability, conscientiousness, and knowledge.
If Harvard takes minority students who are not prepared for Harvard (in addition to those minority students who are sufficiently prepare), but who might be prepared for the University of Michigan, then Michigan has to take minority students who are not prepared for Michigan but might be prepared for Nebraska, etc. The result is racial gaps everywhere, and a perpetual-motion machine of social justice complaints.
If we are counting down the states:
https://vtdigger.org/2019/05/05/college-enrollment-crisis-hitting-vermont-especially-hard/
“The long-simmering crisis in higher education as college enrollment rates decline – which has been plaguing the Northeast and Midwest most acutely – is now hitting Vermont exceptionally hard. In the first quarter of 2019 alone, three private colleges have announced they will close. A fourth is on probation with its accreditor.”
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We are going to need a lot more social justice filtering to increase enrollment in Burlington, a town of 100,000 which constitutes the bulk of Vermont.
Burlington, where Bernie Sanders got his political start as mayor, has a population of 40,000. One quarter of that number are students.
I dislike the idea of “we need to start earlier” to close the gap. It just pushes the insanity down to ever younger ages. Your plea that colleges should be left alone but Pre-K through Grade 12 should remain a total mess is not helping. And besides, what exactly do you expect. That students freshly arriving at Harvard after being taught nonsense their entire lives are going to turn into free thinkers.
We get posts on this constantly and the same old rehash again and again.
Until regular people can flatly state that the cause of black underperformance is genetics. Until they can state it in work, in public, in PTA meetings, etc without fear of penalty, it will be IMPOSSIBLE to stop social justice from working itself out to its natural conclusion of totalitarian enforced lies and failure.
Let’s say that we reach the point of progress you are arguing for: it is granted that most people are born with the ability to learn and that ability cannot be “taught”.
What then? What does school look like for an IQ 80 kid? 100? 120?
One thing seems obvious: you stratify the school population into different pools based on expected academic outcomes.
“you stratify the school population into different pools based on expected academic outcomes”
Tracking works. The older one gets, the more tracked you get tracked.
120 college track
100 vo-tech track
80 basically daycare
My mom opened a business years ago with a Dutch woman. The latter sang the praises of America, where, she claimed, you can direct your own destiny. Unlike in Europe she said, where people are tracked and pigeonholed.
The notion of genetics as destiny is deeply un-American. Conservative yes, but also subversive.
“The notion of genetics as destiny is deeply un-American. Conservative yes, but also subversive..”
The absolutist, extreme form of “genetics as destiny” is a strawman.
The moderate and reasonable form in which genetics has strong influence and imposes hard limitations on important human features and capabilities and creates a lot of variance and disparity between individuals and groups is certainly true and neither ‘un-American’ nor ‘subversive’ in the least.
There are over a dozen weight classes in boxing and similar sports, not to mention separation of the sexes. In any well-organized big race, runners are split up and strategically positioned into many groups of similar ability.
To make the fast run slower than they can is boring and wasteful, and to make the slow run faster than they can is asking for totally unnecessary trouble and heartache.
It is noble to help young people develop their strengths and overcome their weaknesses and for wise, experienced, mature adults to honestly evaluate their gifts and coach, counsel, mentor, and steer them into those areas where they are most likely to enjoy life success and contribute to society. “You are good at basketball, but I think you have what it takes to be really great at soccer, why don’t you try that instead?”
On the other hand, it is wasteful to have smart kids tethered to mediocrity, and it is absolutely cruel to set slower kids up for humiliating failure and torture them with frustrating content they can’t master or grasp, and, by making certain hard classes a universal, minimum requirement for mere graduation, to send the message to those kids that their struggles identify them as a low status stupid loser for life.
One of the things about the unique labor market and income and wealth distribution of the late 70’s (which many Baby Boomers nostalgically remember) was the phenomenon behind the “Dr. Plumber” joke, in which skilled tradesman and GM factory workers had sufficient wages to afford a quality of life such that even someone with just a high school degree (or even less), could still expect to “make it” in life, at some level of social status that felt like enough respectability and dignity to rise above the ‘loser’ level.
That seems long-gone now, but not tracking and requiring too-hard classes for lots of slower students is premature application of salt in the wound.
I don’t consider “genetics as destiny” to be a conservative principle. The conservative principle is to make it possible for each individual to achieve what his is capable of, given his particular genetic inheritance, willingness to apply it, etc., But when thinking about public policy, it’s necessary to think about people in the aggregate rather than as individuals. If policy A would throw money at head-start programs (which have been shown to have no long-run benefits) and policy B would allow taxpayers to keep the money so that they could (among other things) invest in businesses and thus create jobs for willing workers, I would always choose policy B.
There was plenty of tracking in the past, so the easy answer without reinventing our whole approach to education (which should be done) is to just go back to that system. The military training system is still ok (it was once much better) at breaking down topics into different levels of skills and mastery and sorting and gradually advancing people into the level of job that fits their capacities, and using a lot of “learning by doing” / supervised, on-the-job training which resemble apprenticeships.
That being said, apparently, we can’t even punish or weed out genuinely dangerous kids these days, so going back to explicit ‘tracking’ without some kind of cover story scheme that provides an excuse for the same effect is likely out of the question. Many people hate politics, but unfortunately, a big political split has formed that impacts these core bread-and-butter issues, and so people’s feel they can’t opt-out in the manner of “you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you”.
If the schools can’t discriminate on the merits – behavior and ability – then parents will just rely on the rough proxy of the pecuniary discrimination of catchment areas. That’s one reason why the NIMBY and affordable housing debates never go anywhere, because there’s an interest in keeping nice neighborhoods with ‘good schools’ the way they are, without getting involved in politicized losing battles. These are effectively “reasonable investment-based expectations” as a de facto property interest, and any proposals likely to change those expectations are like uncompensated regulatory takings – which, duh, people are going to fight, even if they’re not allowed to openly articulate their legitimate reasons why.
Many advocates commit intellectual malpractice because their analysis leaves out these unmentionable Pareto Harms – knowing their critics have to bite their tongues or become pariahs – which make those proposals look efficient, when they really aren’t.
I like this answer: like the military, schools could slot you at first based on testing. Then your performance “on the job” as an apprentice/student will move you up or down in “challenge level”, depending on the actual performance.
What SHOULD school look like for an 80 IQ person or a 100 IQ person. Certainly not what it should look like for a 120 IQ person. Right now, the conventional wisdom is that everyone should go to college and everyone can go to college and so everyone should take a college prep curriculum. But that condemns many students to failure and bores many of the rest. And it doesn’t leave them with much they can use in their life after school.
A humane education system would seriously consider what various young people can do and what would help them, not the ridiculous one-size-fits-all we have now.
If social justice types recognized that direct discrimination isn’t the cause of the gaps, but that it’s more ‘ethereal’ causes, whatever terms they use to describe them, it shouldn’t just change the ‘when’ of the ideal intervention, but the ‘how.’ It would suggest functional rather than political intervention. Basically, a progressive who thinks performance gaps exist because college admissions offices, professors, and white students are racist against black students may favor ‘reverse’ discrimination and politicization of universities. But a progressive who rejects that explanation may instead blame the gap on insufficient access to preschools or whatever among black people, and will instead promote programs to get more black kids into preschools, or early childhood educational interventions (not teaching preschoolers about privilege, etc. which clearly wouldn’t help).
The argument would be, I expect, that the latter kind of intervention is less harmful than the former. It may not work, and may turn out to be a waste of money, but at least wouldn’t wreak havoc on the credibility educational institutions. IOW, it would be better if progressives focused on improving education in math and verbal skills among black children than focusing on waging ideological crusades on campuses. The former efforts may be futile if the gap is genetic, but the latter is worse than futile either way.
What you are describing is the educational reforms of the 90s and 00’s, which ended in failure, caused massive disruption to k-12 as well as property markets, and ended with things like the nyc chancellor declaring that objective merit is equivalent to white suprmecy.
There is no way to “contain” an untruth. It eats everything in time.
Won’t the more intelligent of the SJW types just cite studies purporting to show that things like childhood stress (ACEs), lead, air pollution, etc., all lower IQ and all disproportionately affect blacks?
And we can show them a photo of the air in Beijing and ask how the hell all that air pollution doesn’t dent their IQ.
I have no doubt they will cite these “studies”, and whatever new ones they can invent. The question is if they could hold up to scrutiny. They can’t. Fear and threats are the only thing holding them up. Get rid of the fear and threats and they can rant and rave all they want while being ignored.
I have taught STEM classes at the college level for over a decade. My students have the intelligence and the work ethic to succeed. What many lack (not just minorities) is adequate preparation. I really believe that instead of training in diversity my students would benefit more from remedial classes in algebra. Training in basic wood and metal working would be helpful as well.
The greatest trick the government education cartel ever played was to convince students and parents that what they teach, content and depth, in government schools is what is needed to be successful in life. If you are an “A” student at a low-expectation school, you’ll be unprepared for college STEM studies.
In addition, as Paul Graham wrote in a December 2019 essay, ‘The Lesson to Unlearn,’ the emphasis throughout school is to get good grades. Getting good grades is very different from and interferes with real learning about a topic. It shows up in STEM earlier as prior math or hard science instruction is the foundation needed for future concepts but students are passed based on hackable test grades not understanding.
I think we can start earlier. We don’t necessarily know how to do everything we aspire to do. Some reforms might not work–the Null Hypothesis in Education seems to be a real tendency. The “racial achievement gap” might not ever be eliminated. We expect a sort of equality in the USA in 2020 that doesn’t seem to exist in the historical records of multi-ethnic and multi-racial empires we have data on, including the big countries that exist currently (Russia, Brazil, Nigeria, India, etc–even France, Italy, and the UK!).
= – = – = – =
I do suspect we can improve things at the margin.
Some ideas are presented in the book _The dream hoarders_. Those ideas probably are at least as good as anything I might type here off the top of my head.
I would reduce “high stakes testing” but continue to test on a regular basis, and I would reform primary and secondary education to make it more content rich, as E.D. Hirsch has been arguing for decades.
Have our fabulous commenters here read _Dream Hoarders_? It’s worth careful study.
I understand where Heather MacDonald but:
1) All her writing comes across as White Man Burden stuff.
2) Of course, I believe this IQ race stuff is shrinking (especially Hispanic-Americans where more families are speaking English) and birth rates are shrinking. (So more families can enforce education on children.)
3) I suspect the next generation of failures are not urban minority working classes but semi-rural working classes who mostly white. (Some minority.)
Let me propose something totally insane: Race shouldn’t matter in education.
There are bright white and Asian kids, sure. There are dumb black and Hispanic kids. Also there are dumb white kids and smart black kids. And there are kids of all kinds with autism and stress disorders and attention deficit and other issues who may indeed be bright but don’t do well in typical classrooms. We should avoid typecasting. All deserve to get an adequate education, and a society that wishes to do the best it can for individual children — and for the nation as a whole — ought to give them an education that makes the most of their abilities without regard for race or income or family circumstances.
Why do conservatives find such ideas so hideous?
“All deserve to get an adequate education”
What the hell is “adequate”?
“and a society that wishes to do the best it can for individual children — and for the nation as a whole”
These are in conflict. What would be best for each individual child would be for infinite resources to be spent educating them and for the entire educational system to be morphed to meet their particular needs. This is in conflict both with what is better for every single other child, and with the interests of the nation.
What makes sense for the nation is tailored educational programs that make the most of individual talents while keeping in mind the ROI of such programs. In the case of the particularly dumb, the ROI on most of the hot educational programs of the last several decades is abysmal. Those that advocated them made the world a worse place.
“We should avoid typecasting?”
No, we should typecast. Because it’s efficient and leads to better outcomes. Just like Stanford typecasts who will be a successful Stanford grad in its admissions process. Because its superior to assigning admissions by lottery.
“Why do conservatives find such ideas so hideous?”
Because they are hideous! With a capitol H. Mismatching people by ability versus curriculum is FUCKING HIDEOUS. Spending money in dumb ways with terrible societal ROI is FUCKING HIDEOUS. You are a BAD PERSON for advocating for such things.
Okay, “adequate” is handwaving. We ought to take kids who seem capable of doing okay in college and want to attend college and try to make that possible intellectually and (in a perfect world) financially. Kids who can’t hack college ought to get as much education as we can reasonably pour into them. “Reasonably” is also handwaving, since education is expensive and social resources are limited. Does that sound better?
The point is, there are bright black kids who ought to get much the same education as bright white kids, and dumb white kids who ought to get education similar to that we give dumb black kids. It’s an awful idea to decide that only skin color matters, so the black kids with 120 IQs and those with 80 IQs get schooled together in low quality schools while dumb and smart kids get schooled together as if they’re all Harvard-bound. And I see conservatives consistently arguing against this, talking about “one overwhelming reality: the seemingly intractable achievement gap” as if all white kids have normal to high IQs and all black kids are morons. And they slap themselves on the back and applaud their “realism.” This is NOT clever thinking.
I’m completely unaware of a conservative program to reintroduce segregated schools, which is what it would take to introduce the criteria you mention.
120 IQ black kids end up in middle class suburbs and attend mostly white/Asian middle class schools. 80 IQ white kids tend to end up in white trash schools, often with many blacks but not particularly good even when they aren’t around.
If anything blacks get a huge break because private schools fall over themselves to find 120 IQ blacks and give them full scholarships. Whereas 120 IQ white kids are nothing special and if their parents don’t have money they usually go to a mediocre public school. The kind of schools that are supposed to give poor white/Asian kids with high IQs a good education and constantly under attack because they can’t find enough high IQ black kids to meet arbitrary quotas.
(120 IQ black kids represent slightly less then 1% of the entire black population, and that still isn’t smart enough to get into Harvard on merit)
We already send every single black kid capabale of a college education to college, and many who aren’t capable, usually on a full ride simply for being black. So that’s more then adequate, in fact it’s well past adequate into unfair.
We also spend several multiples of what we used to spend on education per pupil, including in “poor black achools” that usually receive more funding then white schools, so we are well past providing “reasonable” resources and into wasteful territory.
Kids who can’t hack college ought to get as much education as we can reasonably pour into them.
1) Education cannot be poured.
2) Just what do you mean by “education”? If you mean the college prep courses that make up most of today’s high school curriculum, it is unreasonable to try to “pour” that into “kids who can’t hack college”. Teach them things that will be useful to them.
Anyone who doesn’t think that there are 120 IQ kids of all colors and 80 IQ kids of all colors is out of touch with reality. Each kid should get the education that is useful to him or her–and that would mean very different things for a 120 IQ kid and an 80 IQ kid.
And right now, bright black kids are getting a good education.
BTW, I posted a response that had links to my blog in it, which is probably why it’s in moderation. But it’s a great response, I promise!
You have it backwards. The US education system isn’t segregated, race doesn’t determine what school you go to. The problem is, even when race doesn’t matter, there are gaps between racial groups in outcome. Many on the left want corrective policies that specifically take race into account, I.e., that make race matter. It’s progressives – not conservatives – who one sees defending race conscious admissions policies at Harvard or at elite NYC schools.
If you believe that for the world to be in balance, average outcomes must be equal, fine, say that, but don’t pretend you just want race to ‘not matter.’ I’d like for race to not matter, for all institutions to be ‘color blind,’ and just let the chips fall where they may. But they probably won’t fall the way you want them to, with all ethnic groups or genders proportionally represented in all fields, schools, income brackets, etc.
If Harvard takes minority students who are not prepared for Harvard (in addition to those minority students who are sufficiently prepare), but who might be prepared for the University of Michigan, then Michigan has to take minority students who are not prepared for Michigan…
LOL. Harvard is already chock full of white students who aren’t ready for Harvard judging by it’s normal admissions standards:
My understanding is that the legacies have test scores pretty close to the Harvard average, so it’s probably more a case of choosing people amongst an overstocked pool of candidates with similar credentials. Harvard rejects the vast majority of candidates, and could fill its ranks with nothing but 1600 sat scores if it choose (even 1600 for all whites), but chooses not too. Once past a certain threshold of intelligence they seem to care about other attributes. This would be true even without legacies. To change it you would have to change Harvard’s mission, which is not public benefit or test based meritocracy.
You can be Caltech and be better at academics, but be less wealthy and powerful. It’s clear which Harvard is choosing as its mission.
Finally, you should understand that the knowledge that Harvard legacies, who are extremely liberal, favor AA, and hate 99% of whites, give themselves AA when competing for the white slots against non-elite whites isn’t going to make non-elite whites support affirmative action. It’s going to make them want to destroy Harvard.
P.S. Harvard is only 25% or so non-Jewish white, it’s hard to see how it can get lower.
My understanding is that the legacies have test scores pretty close to the Harvard average
Most probably do — but so do a vast number of other applicants (and non-applicants) who are not admitted. How many applicants do you think are rejected who have better academic qualifications than the median admitted ALDC student? Harvard admits (and can admit) only a very small fraction of students who could succeed at Harvard. Which is fine — there’s no reason to grow the Ivies, since students of that quality do just as well if they go elsewhere. Interestingly, the only exception to this that Dale and Krueger found was for underrepresented minorities. Unlike White and Asian students, they actually do show a measurable benefit from having a Harvard sheepskin (which is contrary to the claimed ‘mismatch’ effect).
If legacy admissions are just about picking particular people amongst equally qualified people, then while there may be a fairness issue there is no issue with being “unqualified”.
I don’t believe in mismatch myself. Not because I don’t think they are mismatched, but because I expect benefits of affirmative action to continue benefiting from it in the corporate world once they graduate. It’s a lifelong sinecure track paid for by you and me.
If legacy admissions are just about picking particular people amongst equally qualified people
I’m not saying they’re equally qualified — they’re not. I’m saying that they (and countless thousands of others) are more than qualified enough to graduate from Harvard once admitted.
Colleges are destroying the value of their diploma without any help from social justice sorts. It wasn’t social justice progressives that demanded Cal State universities abandon even the effort of remediation and accept all students regardless of their abilities (over the protests of the faculty).
Social justice warriors are simply pushing colleges even further. But they were going that direction anyway, because again, long before the SJW insanity, colleges are reluctant to say that not everyone can achieve at the same level.
And before you blame colleges, remember that for 13 years the federal law of the land was that by 2014, all k-12 students would be above average. Schools that couldn’t demonstrate this would be financially penalized. After that, the federal government shoved much more difficult standards onto states by denying them federal funds if they didn’t agree to them, and probably as a result, the gap has gotten worse in k-12 tests (NAEP) all because no one could say “look, these standards are too difficult for all but the strongest students.
Two presidents in a row stuffed this nonsense on the states with bipartisan support. I loath social justice warriors but, as usual, Heather Macdonald just rants and raves without any real understanding of the issues.
For anyone interested, I’m writing a history of the rise (and, happily, fall!) of the Bush Obama years.
Mr. Realist,
Thanks for writing the history – my school was a victim of the “outcome-based-education” fad in the 90’s.
What do you make of Handle’s proposal for tracking as written above?
It’s unworkable, particularly this comment you made.
” schools could slot you at first based on testing.”
Most people who push tracking have no idea how much school for advanced kids has changed. We aren’t doing a good job of educating our brightest kids, the vast majority of whom are in suburban schools taking advanced courses.
Most of the problems with high school will only be fixed by fixing college admissions.
Discipline is another tough issue that isn’t helped by people who don’t understand why the laws restricting discipline came about, which long predate the Obama memo.
Most people would say the fact that “our brightest kids” are “taking advanced courses” means we are “doing a good job of educating [them]”.
Yet you are saying the opposite. Why?
Because our advanced courses are just “shove a bunch of information into kids who are desperate to get an A”. There’s very little thinking and learning going on.
You could fully challenge advanced kids with algebra 2 through high school, if you wanted to.
And that’ s in math. It’s much worse in English and history, where they aren’t even doing the reading most of the time.
My understanding is that the research shows that “early calculus” students do worse than those with more focus on the fundamentals.
Unfortunately it seems like the political focus of schools is on IEP/raising the lowest groups. Our society would probably benefit much more from focusing on high IQ students, because of the nonlinear returns of innovation and technology.
Because our advanced courses are just “shove a bunch of information into kids who are desperate to get an A”. There’s very little thinking and learning going on.
At the risk of sounding overly cynical, isn’t that what most 9-12 (and college!) courses are?
There’s a very, very, very, very basic problem here. There are only three sets of explanations for “the gap”.
1) Historically the way to bet is white racism, Jim Crow, etc.
2) The Urban League began as an organization to teach rural blacks coming up from the South what they would need to survive and thrive in Northern cities. This was part of a tradition which assumed that blacks had “agency” and could eventually do what was necessary to succeed. The other side of the coin is that lack of success might well be “your own fault” or the fault of other black people.
3) On average, black people may be inherently less intelligent or conscientious or able to defer gratification (or something else that correlates with success).
People like Tom Sowell push for the second explanation but it has become increasingly unfashionable. William Ryan assured himself immortality by calling it “blaming the victim”–as if victims can’t also be victimizers. Many consider it “punching down” and punching down is a bad thing.
So it is generally rejected (though some times it comes in through the back door as “black people have been denied resources or knowledge”). If you also reject 3, you are inevitably left with 1. Which means that even as overt racism goes down, you have to believe that it is really still there, just as powerful as ever. More complicated explanations like white privilege and structure racism have to be developed. This society MUST be seen as awful and oppressive. Social justice people are making a very logical choice; if it isn’t door number 2 and it isn’t door number 3, it HAS TO BE door number 1.
Why did you leave out explanation #4 — culture? Isn’t that really the most likely of them all?
“Culture” is part of explanation 2. Tom Sowell is perhaps the most prominent exponent of the cultural explanation today. It is frowned upon by respectable people because it seems to say, “black people are the problem”, which is of course horribly impolite. It is “punching down”, etc., etc.
I suspect one of the reasons Charles Murray wrote Coming Apart was to get out the idea that culture is important, that cultural explanations aren’t racist because they can be used to explain why so many whites aren’t doing well. Many social justice people are willing to entertain stories of how unsuccessful white people deserve it because their culture is bad. Then, it’s only a small step … (well, small logically but probably not emotionally).
Murray sort of proposes that the UMC should shame the bottom 1/3rd more (especially the men). That might help, but on its own isn’t enough.
I suspect that what might really be necessary is things like shaming promiscuity, drug/alcohol use, and a host of other habits. Basically the kind of stuff you get the principal in the movie “Lean on Me” talking about.
And the UMC really doesn’t want to do it because its “puritanical”, and because they like indulging in that stuff themselves in more moderate doses.
Beyond that, its good to shame promiscuity but a positive view of relationships and a path to forming and maintaining them is necessary. Even the UMC is failing at this (but instead of showing up in divorce statistics it shows up in lower marriage and fertility stats).
1 and 2 could perhaps be restated as:
1. “The gap” is caused by white people keeping black people down.
2. “The gap” is caused by black people keeping black people down.
The single biggest issue is IQ. But the second biggest is family.
Kids from sub-optimal homes do … sub-optimally.
The optimal home structure is well known – boring, faithful husband with faithful wife, mother & father of their own children.
Loving their kids enough to be faithful to their lovers, to whom they’re married.
The failure of US black culture to promote husband-wife families is also a solvable problem, where average IQ differences aren’t.
The idea of a welfare check as a substitute father is ludicrous, altho it does avoid serious hunger, unless very irresponsibly misspent.
All kids deserve both parents, and also deserve the chance to get a good education. One of the main issues with education in K-12 is being with peers who are disruptive. Disruptive kids destroy the learning opportunity for all the kids.
“Good” school districts have so few disruptive kids that it’s not such a big problem. Bad schools are usually bad because of too many disruptive kids.
Since a higher percentage of the disruptive kids are black, that race-mongers claim it’s racism that is to blame, rather than individual child behavior. This is a form of tribalism which is quite bad for learning, or creating a better future.
I don’t see it changing until we can talk about these issues more honestly, including with more data. Even if the data, like reality, is racist, or has “disparate impact”.
Finally, the culture of starting a small business is also one which should be given more support, especially relative to the support for those going to college. This should be both for blacks and non-blacks, but it should especially reward those willing to work hard to start a business and keep it going. Usually initial capital is a huge issue — I’d advocate “Tax Loans” to start a business as a gov’t loan in the amount of previously paid taxes, up to a limit of the prior year’s median wage (about $63k).