William Flax, Esqr., in his excellent conservative Debate Handbood, (with a very Traditionalist bent,) makes the following observations about this racial I.Q. gap:

“It is incredible that a generation of Americans is growing up, convinced that the American Negro has been held back by White Society—not because the Left has destroyed their incentive, but because of a relatively lower incidence of Negroes in certain professions and at certain levels of the business hierarchy—who are not even aware that 84 years of intelligence and aptitude testing, involving millions of subjects and a great variety of different test media, administered in virtually every social environment that Americans have experienced in that time span, have demonstrated a consistent pattern as to the incidence of necessary aptitudes that closely correlates with the relative incidence of the races in occupational categories requiring those aptitudes. No amount of intellectual dishonesty can explain this consistency away. In short, Negroes are being taught to blame—even hate—Whites, and White youth are being deliberately given a guilt complex, because of conditions that spring not from injustice but from the relative distribution of types and levels of talent within the respective populations.

“Manifestly, the demonization of racial studies begs many questions. More important, it assumes the absurd: That increase in knowledge will promote evil consequences; that knowledge of human differences will somehow promote ignorant behavior and intolerance; that we somehow insult other people by recognizing our differences; or that to study those differences implies acceptance of a value judgment as to an arbitrary hierarchy of human worth. The reality is very different.

“There is no reason, in understanding how people differ, that need ever promote ill will or disrespect. There is no reason, why men and women of good will can not accept the vast array of their differing potentials and proclivities, study to what extent those differences correlate with genetic traits—with familial and racial inheritance—and reoccur in similar and differing patterns through the ages; and respect the unique qualities of every race, and every individual within each race, with a sense of awe and wonder at the infinite variety of God’s Creation. There is no rational basis for such an acceptance or study to lead to antagonism or hatred, or to the denial of anyone’s right to pursue happiness, as his unique nature and nurture inspire and allow him. Indeed, deeper understanding of the special aptitudes of other races should actually alleviate the ignorant stereotyping that often leads to mean spirited treatment.

“Race is not about skin color—probably one of the least significant of all racial characteristics—but about many traits that can effect the happiness of each of us. Respect for others only starts when we try to understand them as they are; not remake them in our own image. Because one recognizes profound differences between Thoroughbred Race Horses and Clydesdales, does not imply a disrespect for either. The very need to reassure anyone on these points, bespeaks a great deal of the shallowness of Twentieth Century American debate.”

Mrs.Charen is a mainstream columnist who wants to keep her day job. If she ever starts uttering truths about racial differences in intelligence she will find herself out of work. I agree with Mr. Auster that it is baffling how someone of her intelligence can keep writing about the subject of race knowing most of what she says is false.

It would be best in her case if she just avoided the subject; and talked about tax cuts. Like many mainstrean conservative columnists, she understands there is a line in the sand concerning race, and if she crosses it, she will be ruined. This is a sad fact of life; but it is obvious she has made her choice.

Yet I do enjoy seeing Mr. Auster remind her of the truth. It is someting I do myself when I see columns such as hers published; if for nothing else than to let them know that some of us out here see behind the curtain.

It is worthwhile for Mona Charen to present arguments for vouchers, a system that would break the back of the public education monopoly, although it would also raise the specter of increased government meddling in the voucher schools. The issue of group differences in IQ can be left for another day - America is not yet ready to hear it. Perhaps down the road, once the public education monopoly is broken, and blacks though showing some improvement continue to underperform, it will be possible to advance the argument. In meantime, the reality of group differences is something everyone knows exists, but nobody wants to mention, as it contravenes the proposition nation ideal of egalitarianism.

Thucydides reminded me of reading last year about an appearance by Michael Levin on Hannity & Colmes for a segment on the voucher debate. It was obvious that the hosts had no idea who he was.

Prof. Levin explained that vouchers were a bad idea, because they could be used to enable the Federal govt. to force high quality private, (read ‘white’) schools to accept low quality black students.

Mr. Hannity was unable to speak through a look of stunned disbelief, and Mr. Colmes began to sputter incoherently.

Prof. Levin of course has not been invited back.

Hannity & Colmes actually had Michael Levin on? That’s incredible! He’s one of the most poltically correct men around! Dr. Levin is absolutely correct — government subsidy will inevitably lead to government control. In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government has a right to control what it subsidizes. He who pays the piper gets to call the tune, right? Lew Rockwell has been pointing out this incovenient fact since at least the late 80s.

To Mr. Hagan, yes, exactly, that’s all we can do. Statements like mine will obviously never be published anywhere even semi respectable. But at least we let the respectables know that not everyone is buying the lie.

On vouchers, I’ve opposed them since someone pointed out that argument to me around 1990. It’s the classic example of big government conservatism.

This is a great thread. Why is it so fun to read things ‘verboten’ in popular culture? I’m really developing an interest in things I’m not supposed to think about. Particularly race.

I read recently (on this website?) that ‘average’ black v. white IQ’s are 85 and 100 respectively. Can anyone confirm this? Assuming this is true a few things jump to mind.

First, the ‘average’ white is no chemical engineer. No disrespect to white people because I too am a member of the ‘race that dare not speak its name’ but I’ve had PLENTY of association with whites and I’m occasionally astonished the midevil forest was ever abandoned.

As a result, where does this put blacks? I suppose any group will rely on its ‘stronger’ members for direction but if the average IQ is really 85 or so this just isn’t good. Of course modern/popular culture will hear nothing of it but maybe it would be prudent to start setting realistic goals for people. Maybe blacks should just be encouraged to “stay off drugs” and “hold down a job” instead of trying to push them through college (nevermind an advanced degree.)

Also, does anyone have any numbers on Jews? Jews obviously excel in verbal/conprehension range. I think they are too often unfairly lumped with ‘whites’. I’ll bet the disparity between the average jewish/white IQ is at least as great as that between the average black/white IQ. Maybe 85/100 and 100/115? Of course I don’t meant to imply that Jews are not ‘white’ or that IQ is the bottom line on intelligence.

I really like Barry’s comment. For one thing, he’s coined a phrase which is right on: “the race that dare not speak its name.” That’s us! I also agree with Barry that the sensible (and humane) thing to do about blacks is to present REALISTIC goals for them. Instead of this madness of thinking blacks have to have the same proportion of people in the intellectual professions as whites, let us go back to the old ways in which people who were evidently not suited to intellectual work were directed into trades. What ever happened to vocational school?

As for the IQ difference, that is right, the white-black difference is about 15 points, and the average IQ among Jews is between 113 and 115. Barry could see my article “My views on race and intelligence,” http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/001132.html which is also under “From VFR’s Archives” on the main page. Also, he could browse for articles on race and IQ at American Renaissance, amren.com.

Also, in response to my letter to Charen, I got the following e-mail from a well-known paleoconservatve with whom I’ve maintained friendly relations:

“Why do you have to push the envelope? Don’t you understand what the neocons are doing, trying to line up black votes for their side, while making W value their mediating services in reaching out to minorities?”

I replied:

“That’s me, an inveterate envelope pusher. :-) In fact, Nathan Glazer in a recent article in The New Republic said essentially the same thing I said. The only difference was he said it indirectly, and I said it directly. So he gets published in The New Republic, and my article get read by a couple of hundred people!

“But I speak directly because I CANNOT STAND the lies about race.”

The one-grade-level improvement in reading and math scores for black children cited by Mona Charen was from a study of kindergarten through fourth grade students who received vouchers. There is a 4-grade-level disparity in reading skills between whites and blacks in the 12th grade. There could hardly be a 4-grade gap among 4th graders. The gap opens very early, but it widens over time. Closing the gap by 1 grade level at such an early age is far more significant than 1 grade level at age 18.

I have read extensively on education and education reform; it is truly one of my passions. I just completed Diane Ravitch’s “Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.” I recommend it to anyone interested in how education has deteriorated in this country over the last 100 years. To summarize concisely, there have been many different currents within the stream of “progressive” education reform. While many of them contradict each other, the common denominator turned out to be hostility towards the traditional highly academic curriculum. Thus, the “child-centered” reformers opposed teaching the classics, foreign languages, etc., because children would not choose such things for themselves, and they should not be directed in an “authoritarian” manner by their elders. The “life adjustment” reformers thought that the point of school was not academic in the first place. The corporate philanthropists were worried that if we “overeducated” those who were destined to be mere factory workers, they would become discontented labor organizers and agitators. The IQ testing pioneers thought it was pointless to try to educate the bottom 75% or so as if they were at the same level as the top 25% or so, because they thought inherent lack of ability was decisive. The vocational education movement was pushed by the corporate philanthropists, for reasons stated above, and supported by educrats who thought traditional academics were not “relevant to the lives” of common men. Etc., etc. The one thing they all agreed on: Dumb down the academic curriculum, and see if you can educate students to be happy with their eventual station in life. The result is the curriculum we see today, which is hopelessly dumbed down at ALL LEVELS. Today’s “honors student” is not receiving the education of a student in a good academic high school from 1900. These kind of trends affect everyone; “a receding tide lowers all boats”, if I can coin a phrase. You can be sure that large numbers of whites and Hispanics will fall into the influence of any such trend in education.

My reaction to proposals to accept the mental inferiority of blacks and just educate most of them vocationally, etc., should not need to be stated explicitly in light of what I have written.
I will refer the interested reader to my previous postings of a few months ago that argued in favor of a focus on welfare reform and eventual welfare state elimination, which I believe will be inhibited by a focus on IQ scores.

Lets suppose (for the sake of argument) that there exists somewhere in the phase space of all of human possibility a technological-bureacratic means to close the (thus far persistent despite all efforts) IQ gaps between the various races. That is, suppose there exists a technological-bureacratic means to achieve approximate racial intellectual equality. Why is it a moral imperative to find and implement such a thing, if one insists upon believing in it? And what sacrifices of the particular differences between races and peoples must (in the sense of moral compulsion) be made in order to achieve it?

It seems to me that the insistence that racial intellectual equality is possible is based in the moral conviction that it *must* be pursued, and because it *must* be pursued it *must* be possible.

I don’t buy the assertion that it is possible, or even the assertion that if it is definitely possible that it must be pursued (whether through libertarian-style liberation or through modern liberal-style bureacracy - both are sides of the same futile and self-destructive coin). Rather, people must learn to live with particular differences without pursuing immanent equality and breeding the sort of resentment that comes with the inevitable failure to achieve immanent equality.

Good point by Mr. Coleman about my discussing the raising of black scores by one grade level in the K-4 group in terms of the four-grade-level racial difference that exists in high school. We’ll have to see how the pupils who experienced this improvement in grade school do in high school, however. Since, as Mr. Coleman said, “The gap opens very early, but it widens over time,” it may be that the children who experience the one-grade-level improvement in Fourth Grade will still end up three grade levels below whites by the time they are in Twelfth Grade. That would fit the pattern of other studies, in which impressive skill improvements experienced by black children as a result of participation in Head Start had largely disappeared by the time the children got to later grades. Even more significantly, in the Scarr-Weinberg cross-racial adoption study, in which black children were adopted in infancy by middle-class white couples, the children showed significantly higher IQ than the black average in their childhood years, but by their later teens their IQ had reverted to the black average.

On the subject of vocational school, I was not saying, “Put all blacks in vocational school.” I was saying “Put students who are manifestly not qualified for or interested in an academic course of study into vocational school.” I don’t see anything “progressive” or “dumbing down” in that. Does Mr. Coleman think that tracking is progressive and dumbing down?

Mr. Coleman wrote:
“There could hardly be a 4-grade gap among 4th graders.”

Actually, it isn’t true that there can’t be a 4-grade gap between fourth graders. (Disclaimer: this is not an area of expertise for me, and my interest is generally limited to that of an active parent.) It is commonly the case - or at least it has been in the range of schools I’ve explored for my own kids - that a given classroom of elementary children spans several grades of reading level. My son is not yet in the fourth grade, but he reads five grade levels above some of the kids in his class. The notion that children must all start at the same “blank slate” and then diverge is simply false.

Also it is worth pointing out that there is a fallacy in thinking that kids learn to read along some linear path, increasing gradually in their abilities from kindergarten to high school. Quite the opposite. Reading happens suddenly and dramatically. Kids go from reading nothing at all, just knowing the ABC’s, to reading densely printed stories hundreds of pages long in a matter of a few months. Teenagers or adults who learn to read late have a far more difficult time of it. I’d be surprised if 90% of a person’s ability to read hasn’t been established by the fourth grade; but again my expertise is limited to that of actual parenthood.

Let me address some misconceptions that have arisen from my latest posting. First, Matt’s posting of 11:39 AM pointed out that reading ability does not progress on some steady linear path throughout one’s school years. I agree, and I would be happy to have anyone point out where I said anything to the contrary. My point is simply that, when a student falls behind in reading in the early years, that has a compounding negative effect throughout the schooling years. Subjects that depend on reading (history, literature, etc.) will be learned less well than they would have been learned with better reading ability. The student will choose a lower level of books to read for pleasure, decreasing vocabulary growth over time, or will think of himself as not a good reader and choose to do less outside reading, with similar effect. Thus, it is likely that if we do a poor job teaching one group of kids to read in elementary school as compared to a control group, then there will be widespread disparities in their achievement across many subject areas in later years. Note that this does not mean that there will not be any other factors in their relative achievement; the two groups might not have the same IQ, or the same home environment, etc.

This brings me to Mr. Auster’s posting of 11:17 AM. If we close the black-white reading gap by a full grade level at the 4th grade age, then the 12th grade gap could still be 1, 2, 3, or 4 grade levels. We don’t know for sure without doing the experiment, so to speak. I was just pointing out that we cannot assume that it will be 3 grade levels, and there is at least reason to hope that it might be less than 3, although it would be wishful thinking to suppose that it will be zero. I do not suppose that.

Regarding tracking, this is sensible when done in a private school setting in which dumbing down of the curriculum is not as pervasive (note that I am not saying that dumbing down does not happen in private schools; I am saying “in those private schools in which dumbing down is not pervasive”, because it has penetrated many private schools). In a school with a low view of academics (this includes 99% of government schools, in my opinion, and the reader is referred again to Ravitch’s “Left Back” for documentation), combined with a tendency at that school to write off many students as a lost cause (e.g. witness the excuses made in government schools for failure to teach the bottom 30-40% of students, which always amount to blaming the students and their home environments), I think that tracking will be part of a program to teach a few students well and babysit the rest. The solution is not to get rid of tracking.

The point is that we have to understand the school environment before we recommend reforms, and know which reforms must come first and which must follow later. Until the anti-academic, anti-intellectual, dumbed-down curriculum, “most kids aren’t smart enough to succeed in a rigorous academic curriculum anyway” ethos is almost completely destroyed and rebuilt, it will be destructive to openly advocate mass consciousness of racial IQ gaps. Government schools are already in a state of constantly looking for excuses for poor performance by students. Ignoring that fact, and claiming that a PRIMARY, IMMEDIATE goal of traditionalist conservatives should be raising awareness of IQ gaps, is liking pouring gasoline onto a fire and blaming the fire (which, after all, was initially caused by someone else) for the consequences. Put out the fire first, then the pouring of the gasoline becomes a qualitatively different act.

Regarding Matt’s posting of 11:29 AM, I was not speaking of hypotheticals, but of reality, pure and simple. More than 50% of students begin their first week of kindergarten not able to read a book. Thus, the median reading level of kindergarteners at the beginning of the school year is “non-reader”. My own kids were readers before kindergarten, but we are speaking of statistical averages here, not of anecdotes. Thus, there can only be a 4-grade-level reading gap between black and white kids at the 4th grade level if (A) we have defined terms such as “4th grade reading level” incorrectly, and the average white kid is reading above the 4th grade level in 4th grade (this contradicts the NAEP data on white kids, by the way), and/or (B) the median black 4th grader is reading at a kindergarten level (i.e. is 4 years behind). As we can establish that the median white child in America is not reading books in the first week of kindergarten, there can only be a 4-grade-level gap by the 4th grade if the median black 4th grader cannot read a beginning level book in the first week of 4th grade. When I said that this could hardly be the case, I was not saying that it is impossible for it to be the case; if we were to sequester all black children in a government camp and refuse to allow them to even see the letters of the alphabet before this age, then it would be not only possible but probable. In reality, the median black 4th grader reads like a 2nd grader should read, which is pretty bad, obviously. I was merely saying that it strains our credulity to believe that the gap could be 4 years by 4th grade, and my statement is factually correct and verifiable through the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) data.

Sorry for the length of this posting; my replies will be shorter if others can refrain from reading nonsense into what I have written.

Mr. Coleman writes:

“Until the anti-academic, anti-intellectual, dumbed-down curriculum, ‘most kids aren’t smart enough to succeed in a rigorous academic curriculum anyway’ ethos is almost completely destroyed and rebuilt, it will be destructive to openly advocate mass consciousness of racial IQ gaps.”

Mr. Coleman is saying that as long as the dumbed down education is in place, for us to point out the racial IQ gap would only push the schools to dumb down education even more, at least for blacks. It’s an interesting argument. My first reaction is to say that dumbed down education was not caused by a belief in racial IQ differences. If anything, the opposite was the case. The dumbed down education was a result of denying intelligence differences and wanting to get equal results: If standards are low for everyone, if everyone is ignorant and dumb, then the difference between the less intelligent and more intelligent is reduced. Given the fact that the older, higher standards co-existed with a belief in intrinsic differences of intellectual potential, why should the assertion of racial IQ differences prevent a restoration of academic standards now?

So I’m not persuaded that having an accurate and true understanding of people’s intellectual potential would PREVENT schools from restoring real standards. I appreciate Mr. Coleman’s concern that a conviction of lower black IQ would lead schools not to try to teach blacks at all. But schools today are not teaching the blacks, even given the orthodox liberal belief that all students have the same academic potential. I don’t see anything positive coming from the continued, enforced belief in a vast lie, which is what Mr. Coleman says is necessary.

As I indicated in my previous postings, there were many currents within the mainstream of educators in the first half of the century that led to dumbing down education. One of the top half dozen was the IQ testing movement of the early part of this century. That makes it only one of several influences, but it is there.

The various currents were all prompted by a confluence of several factors:

(1) The old system of providing basic literacy and numeracy (the “grammar school” education for just a few years) for the majority of students, and providing classical education via a “high school” or preparatory academy to the minority who were college bound got replaced with a universal K-12 education over a short period of time. This was largely prompted by labor unions fearing wage competition from teenagers and pushing through the early child labor laws. If they aren’t allowed to work full time, then we have to keep them in school, right?

(2) If all these kids are in high school, but high school has always been for the college bound, and most of these kids are not going to be college bound, then high school will have to change.

(3) Various sources worried about overeducating the non-college-bound students, or about not educating people “realistically” for their eventual station in life. The nascent mental testing movement in certain academic circles circa 1920 played some role in convincing educators to dismiss the feasibility of an academic curriculum for almost all students.

The labor union/child labor law movement is the greatest primary source of the impetus for so many education reform movements springing up in the early 20th century. The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.

I’m not sure I’m following Mr. Coleman’s drift. Earlier, he seemed to object to tracking (at least in dumbed down schools) or anything else that he thought might result in the relegation of blacks and others to a non-education. But now he seems to regret the loss of the 19th century system in which most children’s formal education stopped at 8th grade.

I’m not following Mr. Coleman at all. He cites a “’most kids aren’t smart enough to succeed in a rigorous academic curriculum anyway’ ethos” that needs to be destroyed, and then asserts that “Government schools are already in a state of constantly looking for excuses for poor performance by students.”

Then he writes, “Ignoring that fact, and claiming that a PRIMARY, IMMEDIATE goal of traditionalist conservatives should be raising awareness of IQ gaps, is liking pouring gasoline onto a fire and blaming the fire…”

Ignoring what fact? That govt. schools are searching for excuses for failure? But part of the reason for this can be traced directly to I.Q. disparities in the integrated classroom. So Mr. Coleman is in effect suggesting that wittholding an important reason for this failure is necessary in order for concern about the failure to first diminish. The ‘ethos’ to which he refers is simply an equalitarian cop-out, which seeks to impugn a generalized sense of failure on everyone without reference to specific groups — again to avoid a central and underlying cause of I.Q. differences.

I think Mr. Coleman’s concern that an awareness of I.Q. differences would dumb-down education for black children is misplaced. Black children have needs that need to be addressed differently than whites. It’s ignoring this fact that results in an across-the-board lowering of standards, harms the education of blacks, and restrains the education of whites.

Mr. Coleman is convinced that a central factor has to be ignored to downplay the consequent reaction, as if that is what should determine the dissemination of facts. The analogy of “Put out the fire first, then the pouring of the gasoline becomes a qualitatively different act” is absurd. That can of gasoline, ignited by an equalitarian idealism, is what started this fire. It happened after some Myrdalite put the label W-A-T-E-R on the front of it.

Why does Mr. Coleman stubbornly maintain that we mustn’t work toward increasing awareness of this key fact, when all the cop-out pseudo-explanations are calculated to side-step it and spuriously blame anything and everything else? What series of events must transpire before the TRUE underlying and unyielding causal factor of so much of this is finally acknowledged? — the first step toward acting upon it! How many failed alternatives must we wait to see attempted? And how many generations lost?

Regarding Mr. Auster’s posting of 2:13 p.m. on January 6: I am not regretting the loss of the rather minimal education system of the 19th century and earlier. Rather, I was pointing out that many educators (and others) could not see the point in maintaining the old academic curriculum after everyone starting receiving a compulsory schooling up through the high school ages.

I, however, do see a point in educating up through that age, even though I oppose compulsory schooling laws and government schools (see www.sepschool.org for more on that). I believe that, in a country with universal suffrage, we need to educate each individual as well as we can, up to the point at which that individual can be a functioning citizen and voter. Logic, mathematical and scientific thinking, basic economics, a good understanding of our political system and history, are among the things that a good education for citizens should include. Proper education for citizenship lost out as a rationale for K-12 education in this country in the early part of the 20th century, for whatever reasons. Most of these educational elements are not even present in our current government schools. I fear that they would never be attempted for many students if we take a low view of students’ abilities. Yet, however poorly we educate a student, he ends up with the right to vote. We cannot even have a literacy test in this country, let alone a test covering how our government works, because of the racial history of literacy tests in the South.

Now, perhaps some will want to reopen the issue of whether it is wise to have universal suffrage. I personally have expressed opposition to women’s suffrage, as most of them have not demonstrated that they will vote on any basis other than superficial concerns such as who looks handsome, whose voice sounds good, whether it was really neat that Al Gore kissed Tipper on stage at the Democratic Convention, etc. But, I think that changes to our suffrage system are a pipe dream and far less feasible than my dream of abolishing the welfare state.

Regarding Mr. LeFevre’s posting of January 6 at 4:40 p.m., let me first say that we have a very simple disagreement over what is going on in the American education system. I am talking primarily about the fact that American children are not receiving a very good education in general, from the college-prep honors classes on down to the remedial classes, and he seems to be addressing a different fact, namely that when black students achieve less than white students, there is a tendency to claim that the only explanation is some sort of racial discrimination that has been institutionalized. I join him in rejecting that claim, but I don’t see it as being all that important. I don’t see the whining of “black leaders” changing much that goes on in education.

Having read 20 or more books over 20 years about various aspects (mostly failings) of American education, I can say with 100% assurance that a mistaken belief that all races are of equal ability has had a near-ZERO effect on our educational woes. It has had a significant effect on what gets said, who whines about what, which politicians make sympathetic noises to get the black vote, etc., but the goals, methods, curricular content, discipline policies, teacher union politics, adminstrative bloat, and low expectations of students have been primarily unaffected by egalitarianism. A portion of administrative bloat has come from satisfying federal reporting requirements about racial achievement (as one anonymous administrator in Dallas, Texas, put it, “Making sure we document that all races are getting the same crummy education, then ignoring it when we report that they are not.”). In the rather lengthy list of things wrong with our schools, that is pretty minor, an extra burden on our taxes and of little effect on the children directly.

There is a lot of public bitching about racial gaps in various test scores, but you should not mistake all the sound and fury as truly signifying something. Inside the walls of the school, the kids are still taught according to educational fads that don’t work, academic expectations are low, the best elements of a classical education (logic, rhetoric, debate, written expression, etc.) are almost nonexistent, and when we compare poorly to other countries on test scores, the response is to (1) blame the kids, their parents, the TV, divorce, etc., and (2) attack the tests themselves.

Getting rid of the expectation that black kids will do as well as white kids will do ZERO to address any of these failings in American education. It would only change what gets said publicly after the results of a poor education are examined. I guess I am setting my sights higher than that. Also, I will let you in on a dirty little secret in American education: The teachers and administrators don’t believe that their black students are as educable as their white students. Thus, you need no convince them of this, as they already believe it.

If anyone cares to disagree, I would appreciate some details on exactly how the formation of curriculum, graduation requirements, academic expectations, etc., have been adversely affected by thinking that black kids are capable of more than they really are capable of doing. Having spent a lot of time on the subject of education in my lifetime, I am growing a little impatient with nebulous claims that have nothing to do with what goes on inside the walls of the school, and everything to do with newspaper headlines about “Black Leaders Decry Test Scores” and the like.

Simple common sense would indicate that, if everyone really believed that black kids could do as well at any subject as white and Asian kids, then there would have been less impetus towards dumbing down the curriculum, creating lots of lower academic tracks, etc., throughout the last 100 years. If people really believed that black kids could handle it, they would have been content to teach them Greek and Latin, logic and rhetoric, etc. In fact, there was one strain of educational reformers who believed something like that: the big corporate philanthropists, like Rockefeller and Carnegie, who worried that overeducated lower classes would become labor agitators, etc. Their picture was of having about 100 articulate Jesse Jackson types talking to other workers in their factories and “not knowing their station in life”. Every other strain of educational reformer expressed doubt that all these blacks, immigrant kids, etc., could handle a real academic curriculum, and these reformers accomplished the dumbing down of our schools. I can cite numerous primary sources to that effect, if we all have the time, space, and energy for it. If you can cite primary sources in which members of the education establishment believed in a falsely high level of ability of black students, and it somehow led them (counter-intuitively) to dumb down the curriculum, please do so.

Having conversed by email with Mr. Auster about this thread, I will qualify my statements as follows: Throughout the years from about 1870 to 1980, the problems in the achievement levels in our schools were primarily caused by educational fads and trends that included dumbing down the schools. There were also trends towards more lax discipline (sometimes driven by lawsuits), centralization of school districts and a corresponding increase in school sizes, etc. Eliminating racial gaps in test scores was not a significant motivation in these years.

During the 1980s and 1990s, however, “conservative” reformers, partly motivated by the “A Nation At Risk” report of the nation’s governors’ conference and similar calls to alarm, have tried to improve schools through mandatory high-stakes testing of various kinds, tied to minimum standards of academic competency. When this kind of legislation is crafted, the leftist contribution has tended to include demands that all races achieve some minimum performance, or even that the gap between races be no more than a certain amount. (Perhaps big-government conservatives will eventually learn their lesson about what happens when they try to solve the nation’s problems from Washington, but probably not.)

Achieving a reduction in the racial gaps can certainly tempt the schools to dumb down the whites and Asians. Mr. Auster says this has been happening in the New York state schools, and I have no reason to doubt him. This would be an exception to my summary statement that racial egalitarianism has not been significant in the decline of public schools.

However, it is important to note that:

1) A century of dumbing down the schools preceded this recent trend, and there were no such thing as standardized tests taken by all students of all races nationwide for most of that century, so the explanation for what happened in that century needs to focus elsewhere.

2) The effects of that century of educational “reforms” are the dominant story of why your local school is the way it is today.

3) I do not believe that most states that have instituted high-stakes testing have gone the route that New York state has gone. Many, like my state of Virginia, simply have a series of tests and a percentage of students who must pass them within each school, with no mention of race. A few have a minimum percentage of each race that must pass, in addition to a minimum overall percentage; there is no advantage under such a system to reducing white scores, as it does not raise the black scores and might threaten the overall percentage who pass.

In fact, one criticism of recent high-stakes testing has been the exact opposite. Suppose that 80% of your students must pass a certain test in order for your school to be accredited. You give the test, and (easy as it is) only 70% pass. You have 2-3 years to get above 80%. The smart thing to do is to dismiss the bottom 15% as hopeless and concentrate on the next 15%, hoping to get most of them to pass. This is in fact happening all over the country, according to many who are inside the system. Ironically, the name of the federal law mandating this testing was the “No Child Left Behind Act”.

An interesting anecdote from my own county in Virginia: Most schools were not achieving passing grades on our state tests in high school, hence many students were not going to receive a diploma at all under the new standards, which take effect in 2006. Each school district around the state was scrambling to increase the scores yearly, so that there would be hope of hitting the target by 2006. One local high school made a sudden jump that put it above the bar that had been set, and blacks made a bigger leap in that school than whites, although they still trailed whites in overall scores. The other high schools wanted to know how they did it, and the answer was simple: After interviewing numerous teachers, the response they had received was that the curriculum was just not rigorous enough to prepare students for any kind of rigorous, high-stakes testing. The high school (Monticello High School, Albemarle County, Virginia) had four tracks for students, called something like vocational, standard, academic, and high academic (or honors or whatever). The conclusion of the teachers was that the bottom two tracks would never prepare students to pass the tests. Rather than redesign the curriculum within each track, the teachers claimed that the easiest thing to do was take the upper half of students in each lower track and bump them up to the next track, in addition to offering summer tutoring for students who failed the state tests.

When bumped up into a more challenging track, many more students passed the tests. There was a 2-3 year lag to see the really significant results, i.e. after being bumped up to the next track in 10th grade, you saw big improvements by 12th grade. Blacks were disproportionately benefited, because they were disproportionately assigned to the lower tracks in the first place. Again, they did not catch up to white scores entirely, they just got above the bar to get a diploma.

Prior to the instituting of the Virginia Standards of Learning, no doubt the schools thought each student COULD NOT be assigned to a higher track than their current track. They were proven wrong. That is a systemic problem, no doubt repeated all over America. Does anyone in this discussion besides me see why I don’t think that problems like that will be helped by trying to convince everyone about inherent IQ gaps?

As in previous threads, I commend Mr. Coleman for calling attention to a number of problems that have beset our educational system over the past decades. I reiterate that I agree with many of his observations. I hope Mr. Coleman doesn’t believe that the focus on I.Q. difference is the exclusive approach Traditionalists would take on the problem of decline in education.

None of us here would deny that the influence of leftists teachers’ unions, one educational fad or another, the Federal involvement generally, and I would especially add the setting aside of the old-fashioned, time-honored hickory stick, have all contributed to scholastic decline. These, along with the other points he has raised, all need to be addressed, and a Traditionalist approach would certainly address them. But these are also addressed frequently by other parties; I think offhand of Mrs. Schlafly, but there are many others — but almost none who will touch the matter of I.Q. difference due to PC concerns. The emphasis placed on the subject here is largely due to the fact that it’s not addressed elsewhere; it is intended to correct an imbalance — and because, as I maintain, it is a crucial part of the whole picture.

Look at it in this fashion: Where black children are up to 4 grades behind white students — or we’ll say 3 in courtesy to Ms. Charen — let’s put this in real terms. Say you have a 12th grade class, where a 12th grade-level curriculum is (hopefully) being taught, BUT a certain percentage of this class is composed of 9th graders, AND there is a politically and emotionally charged expectation that these 9th graders are supposed to perform and test nearly as well as the 12th graders, does Mr. Coleman not recognize that this would seriously disrupt the teaching and learning process?

Of course it would — and does. And all of the points Mr. Coleman raises together do not adequately address this. He appears to touch on it in the example of Monticello High School, where, if I’m reading him correctly, black students were retained in a lower track. THAT is exactly what would be needed for a majority of black children.

I do not propose a return to Segregation, but simply to address the needs of children according to their abilities. The problem is that to do so would result in a generally de facto segregation. Black (and Mestizo) children would be overreprented in remedial-type classes and in being held back a grade; whites and Asians would be more likely to be in advanced placement classes or skip a grade. But this is not how things typcially work, because the resulting outcry would be great, with false charges of teachers neglecting black students et.al. being tossed around. There would be no other way to defend this and counteract the false accusations that would inevitably ensue against ‘the system’ but to explain that this is the result of innate differences in intellectual faculties that cannot be closed and for which no other approach is adequate.

Mr. Coleman refers to the ‘dirty little secret’ that teachers already know, by simple experience, that black children are not equal in innate abilities to whites, but what good is that knowledge if it can’t be recognized and acted upon — even for the good of the black students? Instead, we try to put blinders on and keep up the appearance that everyone’s on the same level and that race is meaningless.

I think Mr. Coleman’s assertion is misguided that a belief in racial equality would have weighed against dumbing down the system. This is not how the liberal mind works. When blacks don’t do well on tests, they often insist that the tests themselves are ‘racist,’ ‘culturally biased,’ or in some vague way ‘discriminatory’ — and the courts have often agreed. The results must be crafted to match the ideology when the the hard truth otherwise stares one in the face. The grading curves that are performed in some of our schools, including colleges, make the grades themselves almost meaningless.

Even courses like calculus haven’t escaped. As one teacher, P. Argentiero explains, “Everywhere I teach I fight against this relentless dumbing down and everywhere I lose. Ever heard of ’ reformed calculus’? Idea is to make calculus “accessible” to a more diverse group of students ( read blacks & Hispanics). Modify textbooks. Take out all those difficult and obscure proofs that nobody cares about and put in more pictures, and while you are at it put in more pictures and stories about black and Hispanic mathematicians in order to encourage minorities to go into mathematics.”

Simply put, because of I.Q. differences blacks have specific needs and whites and Asians have different needs. These need to be addressed differently, and we must have the courage to admit this. The proposals Mr. Coleman has previously made are all well-taken and would undoubtedly in themselves increase the performance of both blacks and whites, but the disparities would remain, and ignoring this will still leave festering problems for which there is only one realistic solution — tell the truth and act accordingly.

Mr. Coleman seems more concerned about the reaction that would ensue if I.Q. differences were more openly discussed and then acted upon. This is NOT the criteria that should determine our actions! I argue that the results of forced integration have in fact increased black anger, as the differences in achievement have become more starkly noticeable. Previously they could plausibly blame Jim Crow and Segregation, but with both receding further into the past, an increasing shrill and baseless charge of ‘racism’ becomes the scapegoat. But it’s not racism. Articulating the real reason probably would cause anger at first and be very painful, but continuing to keep these blinders on I believe will prove even worse in the long run.

Mr. Coleman proposes that we try to fix everything else that’s broken first, then we’ll somehow be in a position where we can address the reasons for the remaining problem — as if it will somehow hurt less when there’s nothing else to blame. It won’t work that way. The blame will ever be on ‘racism.’ We must not be afraid of telling the truth. I refer Mr. Coleman to the statement quoting Mr. Flax in the first post above.

Rather than engage in a lengthy reply to Mr. LeFevre’s intelligent and polite posting of 6:30 p.m. on January 8, I would like to simply request that someone document the situation he described, in which white 12th graders of true 12th-grade abilities are in the same classroom with blacks who currently lag four grades behind, because tracking has been abandoned due to fears of racial disparities in track assignment.

There have been protests of tracking over the years by “black leaders”, but in the few cases where authorities tried to abandon it that I know of, the abandonment was so unpopular, and threatened so much white flight, that it was abandoned. My belief is that (1) tracking in high schools and junior high schools is VERY common, present in virtually all government schools today nationwide, and (2) virtually every such tracking system at every such government school will show racial disparities between the tracks, and this is accepted by the education establishment.

I would be glad to be shown otherwise, for my own educational insight, but until it is demonstrated to me, I am afraid that we are having a discussion based on false conjectures about what is actually happening in schools.

Thanks to Mr. Coleman for his kind reply. I don’t have the statistics he requests, but that 9th/12th statement I made was intended only as a hypothetical example in the sense that, as I maintain, the racial mix has in fact lowered the standards such that a 12th grade curriculum is not generally being taught to 12th graders where integration has predominated. It is the burden of keeping students of significantly different ability in the same classrooms, solely to satisfy a false, liberal equalitarian ideology, to which I generally refer, for which the only solution I can see is to simply tell the truth.

I recommend Mr. Coleman read the article “Integration … Disintegration” from American Renaissance, July 1993 (2nd article): http://www.amren.com/937issue/937issue.html for further background on this aspect of the problem.

The article is a review by Thomas Jackson of the book “The Burden of Brown” by Prof. Raymond Wolters of the U. of Del. I note that Prof. Wolters is scheduled to speak at next month’s AmRen Conference on “50 Years Since Brown v. Board of Education.” — http://www.amren.com/conf2004_info.htm

I also recommend to Mr. Coleman, Jared Taylor’s “Paved With Good Intentions,” and reiterate my offer to send him one of my extra copies if he is interested.

The article cited by Mr. LeFevre is a look at the history of desegregation and forced integration. That is very interesting, but our subject was whether the dumbing down of the schools was primarily because of racial factors, or (as I claim) primarily because of various educational fads over a century’s time.

If you know the history of our schools, you know how bad things had gotten even before Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. For example, one of the primary evidences for the harm done in abandoning phonics instruction was the steep drop in literacy rates as documented by the basic mental competency tests given by the armed forces. The very steep decline was measured between World War II and the Korean War, and reflected in that short time the fact that “whole-word” instruction really took off in the late 1920s and early 1930s, too late to produce 18-year-old illiterate draftees for World War II, but just in time to do so for the Korean War. If you know something about educational fads and trends, you will also know that the “teacher as facilitator” and “values clarification” and so on, mentioned in the portion of the article that dealt with New Castle County, Delaware, in the late 1970s, were part of “progressive” education fads within the colleges of education that made NO reference to the race of students when they were developed. In fact, both of those were outgrowths of the Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology movement spearheaded by Carl Rogers and picked up on by “progressive” educators because they shared the same Rousseauian world view as Rogers.

If you have not studied all of this, then you will believe what the ignorami at American Renaissance believe: That American schools were having some sort of Golden Age up until blacks ruined them. Forced integration made a lot of things worse and increased conflicts between the races, as they note, but this was not even our discussion.

Our discussion was whether heightened awareness of racial IQ gaps would lead to a more realistic academic tracking scheme in schools, which would keep education from getting dumbed down for the whites, as opposed to pretending that all students of all races are equal, hence they should be placed proportionately in the tracks (or all put in one track) and then the schools must dumb down the whites to make the test scores come out more even.

Yet, we all know the test scores are not even, as is well documented, and my claim continues to be that everyone in public schooling knows that students cover a wide range of abilities, hence the schools do have several tracks nationwide, and these tracks are not engineered to be racially balanced, and the protests of self-appointed “black leaders” on this matter are ineffectual. Furthermore, I claim that 90+ per cent of all dumbing down has had no reference to race and most of it occurred from the post-Civil War era to 1954, anyway. So far, these claims have not been challenged one iota, except by assertion. Perhaps that is because I am the only one here who appears to have studied the two century history of public education in some detail.

Unless you think there is a realistic political hope of legal resegregation, we are all in agreement that the racial composition of our current schools will be about what it currently is. Given that there is academic (tracking) segregation within those schools, heightened awareness of IQ gaps will not change the tracking or curriculum. As I noted, such awareness would lessen the force of the recriminations over test scores, but the current educational system is little affected by such recriminations in the first place. They make headlines, but they have little effect on policy.

My father in the 60s taught remedial reading to students who had been badly harmed by the ‘whole word’ ‘sight recognition’ fad that set aside phonetic instruction. I heard the horror stories that this nonsense resulted in from a firsthand source.

Mr. Coleman again makes a number of points that I either agree with outright, or would give him the benefit of the doubt on, as he has done some serious homework. But I have to seriously question his statement that I.Q. gaps, or more specifically the ‘recriminations’ that result over the testing disparities which result from them, “have little effect on policy.”

Take a look at this article (and others linked therefrom) on the Kansas City situation: http://kansascity.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/2003/08/11/daily28.html and then tell me that it has had NO EFFECT on policy! When the Federal courts take control of an entire school district, and one of the leading concerns is the racial disparity in test scores, I would say that this has quite an effect. I have to conclude that Mr. Coleman underestimates not only the effect of having students of significantly different abilities in the same class, but also the very real political ramifications and their effect on the school system. ‘Affirmative Action’ itself is an example of a policy — now constitutionally enshrined by a rogue Court — that stems from the fact of racial I.Q. differences.

Perhaps citing ‘policy’ is misleading; the courts aren’t supposed to make policy, but that’s what ends up happening nonetheless.

I have to ask Mr. Coleman this question: Is the decline in education over the past 2 centuries a straight line downward? What I mean is, is there not an even steeper decline that can be traced directly to integration? (The AmRen article I linked to was more than just the history of desegregation; it also mentioned steep and rapid academic decline — not documented in the review, but in Prof. Wolters’s book.)

I am still unclear from Mr. Coleman’s posts — which again contain observations I would not dispute — whether he recognizes the seriousness of the problem of mixing students in the same classroom with a sizeable disparity in ability. (Whether we look at it from a scholastic or political standpoint isn’t entirely the point.)

One thing I would note is that the education my father received he reported was actually quite good. (He was born in 1940.) However this long-standing decline is viewed, I have been under the impression for quite some time, even before I thought of I.Q. differences, that the decline of American education over the past 50 years, even compared to the decades prior, has been very steep!

Mr. LeFevre’s point about affirmative action is well taken; that is clearly a case of demanding equality of outcomes, not equality under the law. (As an aside, would it not be best for conservatives to try to educate as many as possible about that distinction, as it will be central to myriad issues and policies, and that education will be more readily received than an education from us about iQ gaps?)

The Kansas City court decisions have been a travesty for 20 years now. But this fits the pattern I mentioned earlier, in which the situation deteriorated for about 100 years up through the end of the 1970’s with the only significant racial influence being the forced busing of black students from about 1969 onward. Once that error backfired and made things worse, then equality of outcomes began to be pursued in racially conscious ways in the 1980s and 1990s. Affirmative action in colleges is a prime example, but at the K-12 level, you can hardly come up with a second example that compares to Kansas City anywhere in the country.

It would be interesting to get into the statistics in Kansas City and see what racial gap has closed somewhat. The article does not provide the data. Have the white scores declined, closing the gap in negative fashion? Or have black scores improved? Or both? It matters a great deal to this discussion. There is no doubt that a great deal of money was wasted by the judge, who ordered trax increases and exorbitant expenditures on educational fads and facilities (e.g. a “model United Nations, where students play the roles of diplomats”, etc.,) as I recall. You won’t find me defending what happened there, of course.

Let me just caution that the changes in schools are sometimes VERY hard to analyze as to their causes. For example, what are the relative importance of the following four factors in regards to declining discipline in schools: (1) Permissive parenting philosophies taking hold in the culture, (2) increase in fatherless homes, (3) lawsuits by ACLU-types against the use of corporal punishment, permanent expulsion, etc., and (4) charges that the discipline system is unfair because statistics show that more blacks are being suspended, given corporal punishment, etc.

You know which factor the racialists at American Renaissance (and apparently on this board) will focus on. The point, to me, is that just because it is true that many people in this society will refuse to focus on the racial influence, that the racial influence must be the biggest one. Racialists serve a contrarian purpose in our society that is intellectually valuable as a counterweight to other perspectives, but they rarely try to present a balanced view. They talk about the racial factors almost exclusively, and it is up to the rest of us to decide relative priorities and significances. Otherwise, we fall into the trap of reading what they write and saying, “Yes, the whole story here (or the bulk of the story here) is the racial angle.”

Finally, as to the second to last paragraph from the 12:43 AM posting, it is not that I don’t “recognize the seriousness of the problem of mixing students in the same classroom with a sizeable disparity in ability.” It is that I don’t think that this is done very much, and no one has yet documented that it IS being done, at least not for racial reasons. I know of one way in which such mixing is occurring, but it is not racial in nature, and my post is long enough as it is. Please document where the mixing is being done. Do you not realize that even in Kansas City, there are different academic tracks, and the races are not equally spread throughout them? Do you not realize that there is nothing in the article you linked to that would contradict that fact, and that you are reading “individual classroom mixing” into an article that is written at the level of an entire school district?

Mr. Coleman writes:

“You know which factor the racialists at American Renaissance (and apparently on this board) will focus on.”

With respect for Mr. Coleman, I must say I’m starting to get a little tired of his unceasing hectoring of us on an issue that was not even the subject of the original blog entry. I was not addressing The Decline of American Education from the Mid Nineteenth Century to the Present. I was addressing the specific issue—which is an issue of central, obsessive concern for contempory educationists and opinion-makers, both liberals and “conservatives”—of how and whether blacks’ academic achievement can be raised to equal that of whites. I was pointing out the enormous resouces and efforts they keep placing in the utopian hope of equalizing the races’ abilities, and the staggering lies they keep telling themselves and others in pursuit of that dream. That’s all I was addressing. For the nth and last time, I was not disagreeing with the conventional conservative understandings of all the other proferred causes of education decline over the last century, because that was not the subject of this thread.

The upshot is that Mr. Coleman has been directing his harangues at a non-existent opponent, i.e., at racialists who think the belief in black equality is the sole or primary cause of the decline of education. Instead of arguing with us, why doesn’t he go argue with some liberals, who actually believe in the progressive education that Mr. Coleman (along with Mr. LeFevre and myself) sees as a disaster for American education?

Mr. Coleman wrote: “you can hardly come up with a second example that compares to Kansas City anywhere in the country.”

Charlotte-Mecklenburg compares: http://www.edweek.org/ew/newstory.cfm?slug=01charlotte.h21
“Under the [Superintendent] Smith administration, the school system has turned its attention to [racial] inequities,” acknowledged Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, a professor of sociology at the university and the study’s author. “However, the deep structure of segregation remains. So as long as second-generation segregation in the form of ability grouping and tracking exists, it will be nearly impossible to reduce the race gap in course placement, achievement, and test scores.”

If I’m reading this correctly, it sounds like the grouping of students according to ability is being _complained_ about, as it causes a “race gap in course placement, achievement, and test scores.” What am I to gather from that?

I am somewhat baffled by Mr. Coleman’s request for documentation that black students and white students of the same age, (and therefore of invariably differing abilities) are included in the same classrooms, as this is what integration itself entails and demands. Perhaps he could simply clarify whether he, in principle, would accept such a situation as desirable or rather as cause for concern.

I also must question his reference to “the ignorami at American Renaissance.” Does he believe that Profs. Rushton, Levin, Murray, et.al. are less informed on the educational situation in America than he?

I think it is probably time to end my involvement in this thread, which Mr. Auster points out has wandered from the original point of Mona Charen’s article and his response.

I can only shake my head in bewilderment when I claim, several times, that black leaders are complaining about racially disproportionate academic tracking but their complaints are being ignored and the tracking is being continued, perhaps with some lip service to pacify the left; then I ask for documentation that the complaints are actually leading to the elimination of tracking, which I suspect is not the case; and finally, Mr. LeFevre responds with an example …. of racially disproportionate tracking in Charlotte, NC, which is being complained about but which is apparently not being eliminated as a result! If Mr. LeFevre cannot see that this is an example of what I was talking about, and is NOT an example of what he was claiming, then there is apparently no hope for productive dialogue on the issue.

As for Mr. Auster’s reply, his problem throughout this thread has been that I have primarily been responding to the very different things that he, Matt, and Mr. LeFevre have said, and he is replying “That is not what I said.” Perhaps Mr. Auster did not claim that blacks, integration, etc., were the primary cause of American education’s decline, but Mr. LeFevre posted a link to an American Renaissance article that said exactly that. Reviewing this thread in its entirety, I think it is clear that Mr. Auster and Mr. LeFevre have been making very different arguments about the primacy of racial egalitarianism in the decline of our education.
See his 4:40 p.m. post from January 6 for more examples.

Finally, I will abstain from the “appeal to authority” fallacy evident in many of my postings on this issue (i.e. “I have read umpteen books about this”) in future discussion of the issue.

What is even more interesting to me than the education issues specifically are the broader issues of “How can traditionalist conservatives succeed politically?” I have been indicating that I don’t think that putting a significant focus on racial IQ differences will be productive, but I hope that Mr. Auster can begin a thread where we can discuss the broader aspects of positive strategy. The comments by Thucydides in a current immigration thread touched on the same question, and I think it would be great to involve all of the regualr posters and readers of this board in a strategy discussion so that we do not all give in to the temptation to stand on the sidelines and criticize Bush, neocons, et al., as if we were just a permanently out-of-power minority within American political life.

As per Mr. Coleman’s suggestion, I will open up a new thread later this week for a discussion of positive strategies on education.