‘Critical’ Ethnic Studies Returns to California

A year after it was sent back to the drawing board, California’s ethnic-studies model curriculum is back. The last version, released in May 2019, was radical and jargon-laced. Even many progressives found it fringy. On August 13, the state Education Department presented a new, toned-down draft to the curriculum commission. Not only does it suffer from the same conceptual problems as before, but during their meeting, commissioners directed the Education Department to resuscitate unpopular parts cut from the 2019 draft.

The curriculum is moving toward adoption in March by the State Board of Education. Legislation is also advancing to make ethnic studies a high-school graduation requirement. The new curriculum won’t serve the educational function that America needs in a time of broad recognition of injustice tied to race. Stanford education professor Thomas Dee, a co-author of a 2016 study finding academic gains for some students who took an ethnic-studies class, said in a radio interview that “high-quality” ethnic-studies curricula “don’t exclusively emphasize victimization.” “Just the opposite,” he said. They stress instead “the considerable cultural assets” of minorities and their capacity to achieve.

Excluded from California’s model curriculum are the white ethnic groups (Italians, Irish, Poles and so forth) studied fruitfully by scholars such as Nathan Glazer, Daniel P. Moynihan and Michael Novak. Also largely excluded are groups like Jews and Armenians who were persecuted abroad and sought refuge in America. The groups that dominate the curriculum are African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and American Indians.

By focusing on these four and treating them solely as victims, the curriculum misses the opportunity to convey to students that groups at the bottom of the social and economic ladder can climb, making use of their cultural assets and the opportunities the country affords them. This curriculum teaches the opposite. It attaches moral opprobrium to success by instructing teachers and students that the Jews and Irish in America have secured white “racial privilege.”

Welcome to “critical ethnic studies,” which boils down to vulgar Marxism, identity politics and victimology. Ideologically blinkered designers of ethnic-studies programs miss out on knowledge and analysis from mainstream social sciences that could enhance what students are taught.

Gary Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics in part for his analysis of discrimination. Becker showed that if business owners hire on a basis other than productivity, they pay an economic penalty. They lose out on some of the most productive employees, and competitors may hire them. But when government policies protect established companies or ensconced workers from competition, that penalty shrinks, making it cheaper to discriminate. In the Jim Crow South, the costs of maintaining an exclusionary economy were unloaded on society. White companies and workers used government to stop blacks from competing.

Such insights can complicate the common view of labor unions as a humanitarian force aiding downtrodden workers. Unions are job trusts determined to dominate labor markets and raise wages by restricting the job opportunities of nonmembers—often blacks, historically. Herbert Hill, the longtime labor director of the NAACP, wrote in a 1965 essay that labor-union exclusion of blacks has had “a cumulative effect in forming the occupational characteristics” of the African-American labor force—to blacks’ disadvantage.

Sociology and social psychology also have much to teach ethnic studies about the role of envy in society. For example, envy of successful Jews and those of Jewish ancestry contributed to the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust. The rulers of Turkey during World War I mobilized envy to carry out the Armenian genocide. The prosperity of Japanese-American farmers on the West Coast encouraged envious neighbors to seek their internment and forced sales of their property during World War II.

In his 1966 book Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, sociologist Helmut Schoeck demonstrates that envy can be found in all societies. The important thing for ethnic studies to teach students is that some societies check and suppress envy in helpful ways, while others exacerbate it with horrific consequences.

The revised model curriculum in California portrays capitalism as oppressive and gives considerable weight to America’s socialist critics. Yet history and political science show that the state can be used readily under socialism for racist purposes. Obvious examples include the Soviet Union’s 1948-49 purge of “rootless cosmopolitans”—that is, Jews—and its 1951-53 Doctors’ Plot attack on Jewish physicians. Under socialism, a bureaucratic elite controls all job assignments, news media, courts and the secret police. When that elite is envious, insecure or looking for a scapegoat, what chance does an ethnic minority have?

The proponents of critical ethnic studies are so insulated by Marxism and identity politics that they miss insights from other fields. The new curriculum doesn’t give a balanced picture of America and, in these racially charged times, it could ignite truly ugly disputes. Perhaps worst of all, it gives short shrift to minority achievement and deprives students of the optimistic view of America. Following this curriculum, students would have no basis on which to understand Frederick Douglass’s defense of the U.S. Constitution as “a glorious liberty document” and his celebration of the potential of a country based on natural and inalienable rights.

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A Strategy to Restore the Liberal Education

The term “liberal education” is very commonly thrown around in American political discourse pertaining to higher education. But what does it really mean?

The University of Mississippi notes that a liberal education is “about nurturing human freedom by helping people discover and develop their talents.”

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics defines liberalism as “the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice.”

A host of different political factions have adopted the label “liberal” over the years – each with differing views on economics and society. But liberalism – broadly conceived – always signified the welcoming of debate and an open society. It encouraged seeing all sides of the issue.

In higher education institutions, liberalism meant that students would be taught how to think, not what to think. What has emerged in recent years is hardly a liberal education. It is pure indoctrination.

What can those seeking to advance a genuine liberal education do?

Rage and frustration alone do not suffice in the effort to restore the liberal education. This indignation must be translated into tangible pressure put on the American higher education bureaucracy.

There are at least three ways in which pressure can surmount the higher education thought police:

1.  Drying up money resources: The old cliché “money talks” never seems to fall short. The higher education bureaucracy consists of many people who couldn’t be categorized as leftists. Generally, these are centrist Republicans at best, and moderate Democrats at worst. Some decision makers may be on the far left, but these people generally don’t represent the majority.

On the other hand, far leftists are very vocal and can – to some extent – push around moderate and fair-minded administrators. At the end of the day, higher education administrators are required to raise funds for their university or college. Sometimes, this goes against the demands of leftist students and professors. But other times, raising money may well fall in line with certain “what to think” agendas. It’s easy to see how a mandatory anti-racism course can funnel in more money to a university.

Many wealthy conservatives also become big donors to universities. They are often blind to seeing that their contributions fund the efforts of leftist professors.

Thankfully, some efforts have been made to reach out to such people. DivestU, a project of Turning Point USA, focuses on drying up the donor money stream to universities. Imagine if millions of dollars of donations all of a sudden disappeared. Administrators would have to change something.

Donors alone would not suffice. Fans who attend football games must be willing to forgo buying tickets. They must be willing to see that the same people who sell them overpriced tickets also imply the broader community – which includes fans – is “racist.”

Paradoxically, fans may even lose their mascots and the names of their favorite football stadiums if they keep giving universities money.

2. Embarrass higher education administrators: Too often, Americans get absorbed in abstract notions that the roles of policymakers and administrators encompass “uniting” the interests of everyone. More often than not, this means compromising something, or favoring one group over another. It is unwise to heckle policymakers, so the argument goes.

But this is precisely the way to take back the university. When administrators clearly bend the knee to small, vocal mobs of leftists, they need to be called out – in one form or another. Frustrated students should write to their local papers, try to appear on media outlets, and file complaints to their universities. Negative attention is a very tangible form of pressure on administrators.

One poll cites that Republican college students are three times more likely to self-censor than Democratic students. To bring back the liberal education, this epidemic of indifference must be reversed.

3. Troll the heck out of administrators: If all else fails, and students are forced to participate in mandatory “diversity” trainings, they may best be suited by trolling administrators – giving them a taste of their own medicine, so to speak.

For example, if students are told by staff that they are “inherently oppressive” and have “implicit biases” against LGBTQIA+ people, they may want to respond with something along these lines: “Why aren’t you voicing your concern for the rights of aromantic people? Why is this minority never represented? Therefore, why are you perpetuating hate and exclusivity?”

All in all, it doesn’t matter if a student uses this line, or a different one. The point is to completely delegitimize the efforts of leftists trying to indoctrinate students by arguing within their framework. Say things that are just as ridiculous as what they say.

The Future of Higher Education

There is a lesson to be learned from all of this: All it takes to sway and push around a diffident majority is a small, vocal, and vigilant mob. And this is how the academy was taken over.

Luckily, independent institutions have slowly been proliferating around the country, holding true to the promise of a liberal education. The Mises Institute – a free market economics educational organization in Auburn, Alabama – for example, recently launched a new graduate program, led by carefully selected professors from around the country.

This new decentralized approach to learning may pave the future of a free society. If the liberal education can’t be restored in universities, it will be restored elsewhere. No consolidation of power can stop the spread of powerful ideas.

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Behind the Curtain of Elite College Admissions

The final ‘shaping’ of an incoming class shows the process at its most arbitrary and ambiguous, when traditional standards give way to other factors.

Last year,when highschool seniors applied to college, they never could have imagined the mess that a global pandemic would create for their first semester. But for students at the nation’s best-known and most selective institutions, they also will never know just how close they may have come to not getting in at all.

The admissions process at such schools is shrouded in secrecy and surrounded by confusion. From the outside, how topranked schools rate applicants seems precise enough to land someone on the moon. When you’re a high-school senior (or the parent of one), it feels like another 10 points on the SAT or one extra AP course can tip the scales. What I found, however, by spending the 2018-19 academic year embedded in the admissions offices at Davidson College, Emory University and the University of Washington, and by interviewing dozens of admissions officers at other schools, is that everything is much more ambiguous.

The lack of simple standards was most pronounced when I watched admissions officers complete their “shaping” of the class, the last sorting of applicants before final decisions are sent out in the spring. Shaping is a step at the very end of the process that most teenagers and their parents are unaware of. It’s where selective admissions is the most unfair-the point at which a decision based on traditional criteria such as grades and test scores gives way to one based partly on other factors, such as money, race, gender and major.

The year I was inside Emory University’s admissions office, the school received a record 30,000 applications for fewer than 1,400 spots in its incoming class. In early March, just weeks before official notices were scheduled to go out, the statistical models used by Emory to predict enrollment indicated that too many applicants had been chosen to receive acceptances. In the span of days, teams of admissions officers covering five geographical areas had to shift 1,000 applications from the thin “admit” stack to the much larger “deny” or “wait list” piles.

Emory is located in Atlanta, and the committee for the Southeast region had to cut the most applicants, 242. The admissions officers didn’t spend much time talking about any one student. Their goal wasn’t to readjudicate an applicant’s entire file but to see the potential admit through the wider lens of a nearly finished class. They moved one young man to “deny” after looking at his senior-year grades-lots of Bs-noting that they had already rejected four other academically stronger students from his high school. They switched a legacy applicant-meaning that a parent had earned a degree from Emory-to “deny” because of his light extracurricular involvement. The original readers gave him a score of 2 out of 5 in that category, observing that he wanted to major in pre-med “but we don’t see activities to support that,” one of the admissions officers said.

Partway through the meeting, the group landed on a file that had multiple “tags.” The applicant was both a legacy and a child of an Emory employee. Because Emory employees receive tuition benefits for their children, moving an applicant from “accept” to “deny” would have come at a steep cost for a family with a child so close to getting admitted. The applicant had strong grades with a rigorous curriculum, but the overall file was described as “lackluster” by the original reader, with ratings of 2 out of 5 for both recommendations and a catchall category called intellectual curiosity. “I’m sure there is plenty of goodness in the file,” said Will Segura, the admissions officer who oversaw the regional committee, “but in terms of natural sciences and what we’re looking at, I don’t believe this is that student.”

Someone else in the room pulled up the applicant’s midyear grades. They were all As. But while the student listed neuroscience as a major, “there is no example of neuro in the file” in terms of activities or in the essays, the admissions officer said. She suggested that they move the applicant to the wait list, which would be “a softer landing” than an outright denial. The applicant was from a high school that sent many students to Emory, but on a ranked list of applicants from the school that filled a page and a half, this applicant was near the bottom of the first page.

A vote was called, a rare occurrence on a day when the committee agreed on most applications. Mr. Segura wanted to shift the student from “accept” to “deny,” while another admissions officer preferred the wait list. Their third colleague hedged. The committee was reminded that the application would come back around for another review the following week because of the multiple tags. “From the perspective we’re supposed to be coming at now,” the wavering staff member said, “it’s a deny.”

Emory University received 33,142 applications in 2018-19, more than twice as many as a decade earlier. 16% of the applicants were admitted.

The three admissions officers had debated the file for 12 minutes. It would be their longest deliberation about any applicant that morning. The following week, the student landed back in the admit pile after a review of hundreds of files with special tags, and the week after that, he received an official acceptance to Emory University. The high-school senior never knew how close he had come to a rejection and how much the college’s priorities-in this case, for children of employees rather than for any particular aspect of his academic or personal life-played a role in getting him over the finish line.

The shaping process, like competitive admissions overall, is particularly tough on qualified women. Men represent less than 45% of students at American colleges, and schools pay attention to gender balance. Among the tentative admits changed by the committee for the Northeast region was a girl with an A average and 1500 on the SAT who wanted to major in prelaw. She ran track in middle school and made the varsity soccer team as a sophomore. One admissions officer found the recommendations lacking because they focused on her personal qualities instead of what happened in the classroom. “I like her, if we have room,” someone said. “Well, we don’t,” said another.

The shaping process Emory employed while I was there is replicated in slightly different ways at other selective colleges each spring. Think of it as finalizing the invite list for a wedding: Guests are moved on and off the list based on whether you think they’ll show up, or whether the groom’s family has too many invites compared with the bride’s. Admissions officers ask questions about their invite lists, too. Do we have enough Black students or Latino students? Enough students who can pay the bulk of the tuition bill? Too many women in the class? Too many students from the Southwest or Northeast? Enough humanities majors?

By this stage, the applicant pool has been reduced to students who could flourish at the school or, for that matter, at many others. These final decisions depend on what the class looks like and how much it will cost to admit the students in the “accepted” bin. This is also the moment when an applicant’s background can help to push them over the line to an acceptance. Legacies, children of faculty and staff, and applicants under the watchful eye of a college’s president or fundraising office usually receive their biggest boost at this point.

The way that admissions officers initially review applications differs by college, and so does the shaping process. Public universities with huge applicant pools and large numbers of incoming students typically use an ax, while smaller private colleges use a scalpel. The University of Washington employs a team of readers to individually review 45,000 applications for fewer than 7,000 spots, and like other selective institutions, its shaping process is less personal and more mechanistic. Applicants are separated into clusters according to the scores they were assigned by admissions readers. Each cluster has hundreds of applicants with the same set of scores.

The most significant decision the university’s admissions director makes each year is where to draw the line among those clusters. The cutoff depends on a variety of factors, but it’s primarily determined by the number of applications and the strength of the overall pool. The point is also different for Washington residents, out-of-state applicants and international students. Majors are also taken into account for applicants in computer science and engineering, where seats are limited.

At Davidson College in North Carolina, with an incoming class of just over 500, the full 16-person admissions committee comes together for a week in early March to evaluate applicants flagged by the admissions dean, Chris Gruber. Each day, the committee focuses on a different batch of applicants: artists and musicians, deferrals from early decision, legacies and children of faculty. This is where racial and ethnic diversity comes into play. Throughout the process, Mr. Gruber has a sense of the geographic diversity of the applicant pool, because admissions officers review by region, but he gets the clearest picture of how acceptances break down by race, ethnicity and gender at this point. Mr. Gruber uses the shaping process to “self-correct” and ensure that enrollments for various demographic groups are at least on par with previous years.

With a tsunami of applicants who are qualified on the surface, what matters at this point are the elements that differentiate students and the chances that they will ultimately choose -what admissions officers call LTE, likelihood to enroll. The more these admissions officers dissect an applicant’s intentions now, the better Davidson will fare in April, when students have to decide among the many schools that accept them. It’s another way that a college’s agenda-in this case, boosting its yield rate, the share of admitted students who choose to enroll-shapes admissions decisions.

When an application came up from a high school that hadn’t had a student apply to Davidson in four years, an admissions officer asked what was motivating this particular applicant. The committee often turns to the “Why Davidson?” essay to look for clues. In this case, the essay was boilerplate language about Davidson that can be found in any guidebook. The senior was already in the deny pile. He remained there. So did two applicants whose parents worked at other universities and never visited Davidson, on the assumption that they’d probably attend college where their parents worked. Another denial was a senior who wrote about his aspiration to attend the same school as Steph Curry, the NBA superstar who played for Davidson. “It leaves something to be desired,” someone said.

Davidson and Emory are among a few dozen schools with big endowments that don’t consider an applicant’s finances in making decisions, and that promise to give students the money they need to enroll. But the vast majority of colleges take an applicant’s finances into account at some point, either by accepting them and then shorting them on aid-offering them less than expected according to a federal formula-or simply by denying them admission.

Lafayette College in Pennsylvania was one of the few schools willing to show me how they make financial aid trade-offs in shaping a class. “We have to craft a class with talent and diversity,” Matt Hyde, Lafayette’s dean of admissions, told me, “but I also need to deliver a solvent one.”

In the middle of February, a student’s ability to pay begins to enter the admissions equation. From that moment until decisions are delivered near the end of March, Lafayette takes a much closer look at students with high financial need, a line that is recalibrated every year. In 2019, the line was drawn at $35,000, around half of the total cost of attending Lafayette for a year. To give you a sense of the task facing Lafayette’s admissions officers, consider this: Of Lafayette’s 8,500 U.S. applicants in 2018-19, about 2,200 needed more than $35,000 a year in financial aid. That was roughly the level of need for a family with two children and an annual income of up to $175,000.

As he eliminates students from the admit pool, Mr. Hyde is careful to choose applicants with varying levels of financial need. His models tell him that students who get huge financial-aid packages end up enrolling more often than those with smaller awards or no aid at all. It’s a balancing act in meeting enrollment and budget targets.

Among those who didn’t make it into Lafayette that year was an applicant from Pennsylvania who ranked fifth in his high school class of more than 600, with a 3.96 GPA and 1450 on the SAT. His financial need to attend Lafayette: $66,810 for his freshman year. Another student kept out of the admit pool was a girl from the West Coast with nine AP classes on her transcript and a 1430 on the SAT. Her financial need: $57,000. In the end, Lafayette rejected 200 students whom the admissions staff had tentatively accepted but then decided the school couldn’t afford.

The days and weeks that selective colleges spend shaping their class are tense and hectic, as applicants on either side of the line are pushed and pulled between “admit” and “deny.” There’s not one decision but many. “Students see admissions as a report card on their life until now,” Mr. Gruber at Davidson told me, “but there are so many attributes that we’re looking at in the end to build a community.”

The odds of being admitted from the wait list are low. At Davidson, 1,503 applicants were on the list in 2018-19, but in the end only 24 were offered admission.

But let’s not kid ourselves about the level of precision in crafting a class at an elite college. In reality, the schools aren’t choosing a class as much as they are sending out invitations to join a class. At many selective colleges, only a third of applicants accept an offer-and despite sophisticated models, admissions deans don’t know which third it will be. Every year, some 350 students even turn down an acceptance from Harvard.

In the end, it’s unclear if an incoming class would be much different if admissions officers worried less about shaping it. The simple fact is that the freshman class at any top-ranked college is eerily similar to those at other highly selective schools. Most applicants will never know how close they came to either the admit or the deny pile. At some point, many qualified students were probably in both.

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Australia: Don’t expel school accountability

This year’s abandonment of National High school exams could inflict an enduring blow to school accountability. The literacy and numeracy tests — normally conducted in mid-May — were scrapped amid the pandemic uncertainty.

But now, Queensland’s education unions have urged teachers against preparing pupils for next year’s exams — unilaterally declaring the tests are over for good. This is just the latest in a series of attempts in recent years to hijack the testing regime.

If governments cave in to these threats they will do so at the expense of students, parents, taxpayers, and even teachers.

Strengthening, not whittling away, accountability is key to arresting the decline in Australia’s education outcomes.

Policymakers must accept that the decision to halt this year’s testing has needlessly strengthened the hand of those who have long opposed standardised assessment and resisted the accountability that comes with it.

What’s telling is that so much effort was exerted to cancel the tests, rather than into making them happen, rescheduling them, or coming up with viable alternatives.

Standardised assessments are needed because they offer objective and comparable tools for monitoring students’ progress, informing teaching practice, and measuring performance of teachers and schools. It’s needed more than ever given the educational disruption wrought by the pandemic.

It’s true that NAPLAN can be improved. The task for policymakers mustn’t be to quit the test, but to upgrade it so it becomes a more effective tool for educators, students, parents, and decision-makers.

It could be held at a more appropriate time of the school year (and potentially in different year groups), it could be a more rigorous assessment and one varied according to students’ capabilities, its content could be better aligned with curriculum, and it could be online (especially because test results are far more timely).

NAPLAN will again to be on the agenda for the Education Council — constituted of Australia’s education ministers — due to meet next Friday.

Reviving Australia’s educational outcomes will depend upon commitment to rigorous national assessment, not more of the same anti-test and anti-performance mentality that threatens to steer the education system yet further astray.

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