The Last Refuge of Pure Meritocracy

Racial consideration for college admissions hearkens back to Grutter v. Bollinger, the landmark decision by the Supreme Court in 2003. It held that affirmative action programs can pass muster as long as they are “narrowly tailored” in order to achieve the “compelling interest” of promoting diversity on college campuses.

Colleges across the country have since repeatedly cited the ruling as the basis for their use of “holistic” admissions. But the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division isn’t buying that claim from Yale, saying they let skin color play an inordinate role in admissions.

It charges that Yale, Harvard, and others are really using holistic admissions as a guise to circumvent the high court’s guidelines. To do nothing in light of the available data, therefore, is to “permit our institutions to foster stereotypes, bitterness, and division,” said Eric Dreiband, an assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division.

The latest lawsuit against Yale, coupled with the defeat of Prop 16 in California, which would have repealed the state’s 24-year-old ban on affirmative action in public colleges and universities, signals that the battle over race and college admissions is destined for the Supreme Court. The court’s new conservative composition will likely make race irrelevant in college admissions in the years ahead, said Edward Blum, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and president of Students for Fair Admission.

If so, what would higher education in this country look like? We already have the answer at the California Institute of Technology.

All that matters at Cal Tech is a proven record of aptitude to handle rigorous academic work. As a result, racial diversity is noticeably absent.

Despite intense pressure to bring the school in line, Cal Tech has refused to bend its standards. That means no preference is given to athletes, legacies, development cases, or racial minorities. Being rich, famous, or well-connected counts for naught. All that matters is enrolling the most academically advanced and accomplished students with a passion for science. Although all four factors are highly controversial in today’s cutthroat competition for admission at elite colleges, it’s race that is the most incendiary.

Cal Tech is indifferent to what other colleges do in this regard. It’s not that it hasn’t tried to recruit underrepresented minorities. On the contrary. However, it won’t alter its commitment to admitting only those students whose academic credentials it alone deems worthy. As a result, Asians constitute more than 40 percent of its undergraduate student body. That would be unthinkable at any other college.

Its refusal to grant legacy preferences or development cases as virtually all other colleges do has resulted in relatively low alumni giving, compared to the Ivies and other marquee-name schools. But generous governmental, corporate, and individual funding has propelled Cal Tech ahead of the Ivies in its general, per-student financial resource picture.

That’s another reason why Cal Tech doesn’t recruit athletes: It doesn’t need to. Although it knows that competitive sports, particularly football and basketball, can be cash cows, they have also compromised academics at even the nation’s most elite institutions. That’s a price Cal Tech won’t pay.

Cal Tech can afford to march to its own drum because it has produced world-class scientists and researchers, positioning itself among the top half-dozen universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. When 17 of its alumni and 14 of its faculty have been awarded Nobel Prizes, and six of its alumni have won the Turing Award in computer science, it is evidence that Cal Tech has made the right decision.

The larger question today, when race is dividing the nation, is whether Cal Tech can serve as a model for other colleges.

Its small size and sole focus on training young scientists mean it faces an uphill battle against other large institutions with a broader mission. Yet the U.S. clearly needs more schools like Cal Tech if we expect to be able to compete with other nations in the knowledge economy. They serve as a reality check that people are not equal in intellect and ability. Some are naturally brighter and willing to work harder than others. What’s wrong with rewarding them above others without taking race into consideration, notwithstanding the argument about the putative value of holistic admissions?

What about the effect on black and Hispanic students? Despite what reformers claim, abolishing racial factors does not at all mean they will be at a disadvantage.

Equally heartening, the number of black students graduating with STEM degrees nearly doubled 10 years after the first post-209 cohort was admitted.

Consider what happened in California after the passage of Proposition 209, which barred the use of race in admission to the state’s public colleges. Although enrollment initially fell in 1998, the total number of black and Hispanic students receiving bachelor’s degrees was quite encouraging. Black enrollment at the University of California more than doubled since the year before Prop. 209 went into effect. Hispanic admission increased nearly five times.

Equally heartening, the number of black students graduating with STEM degrees nearly doubled 10 years after the first post-209 cohort was admitted. For Hispanics, it was up more than 125 percent, according to Richard Sander, a UCLA economist and law professor. In short, black and Hispanic students are not a monolith. Those who possess the wherewithal for success will be admitted and can clearly perform as well as white and Asian students.

It’s this last point that can serve as a viable model for public colleges that are less selective than Cal Tech.

By establishing a school under their aegis that is specifically designed for students with special interests and abilities, public colleges could have it both ways. They could continue to follow their traditional paradigm focused on learning while offering an innovative way to appeal to students who wish to distinguish themselves from their peers. The military is an example: Minority draftees and enlistees have long demonstrated their enthusiasm for elite training. UCLA showed that black and Hispanic student applications rose after racial preferences were eliminated. The same desire to prove their ability to be successful in rigorous programs on their own could transfer here.

Nevertheless, we persist in assuming black and Hispanic students need a leg up. It’s a policy that indelibly marks them as incapable of competing with students from other races.

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/11/the-last-refuge-of-pure-meritocracy/

Britain’s teaching unions are a disgrace

Shutting down schools will do untold damage to working-class kids' life chances.

Are there more shameless creatures than the leaders of Britain’s teaching unions? Not content with having kept children out of the classroom throughout the spring and summer, they are now leaping on the second lockdown to demand schools shut once more. In the blink of an eye, they went from crying over Dickensian fantasies of starving children to insisting these very same youngsters are barred from school and prevented from learning. In a matter of days, they went from arguing that parents are incapable of feeding their children to arguing these same parents must take time off work, lose income and become home tutors.

On Saturday, even before Lockdown 2 was officially announced, the heads of the teaching unions called for schools and universities to close. The National Education Union, never slow to come up with reasons why teachers should not be in the classroom, launched a petition calling for schools and colleges to be locked down: it currently has over 150,000 signatures. Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham joined in, calling for schools to close for a fortnight at the end of November.

Whatever their qualifications, I wouldn’t let one of these union leaders or any of their acolytes teach my children. Their calls to shut schools are completely irrational. At the start of this year there was much we did not know about this novel coronavirus. Now we do. We know that it poses virtually no risk to young children and very minimal risk to older teenagers and young adults. We know that children are extremely unlikely to transmit coronavirus. In countries all around the world, schools have reopened without becoming hotspots for transmission.

We also know the devastating educational impact closing schools has on children. A new study published this weekend shows that pupils in Year 7 are an incredible 22 months behind what is expected of children their age. Not only did children not make progress during lockdown but it seems they may have gone backwards, forgetting knowledge and skills they had previously learnt.

We know that this educational disadvantage does not impact all children equally. Private-school pupils were far more likely to have a full timetable of interactive online lessons while some of their state-school peers had to make do with a few photocopied worksheets or emailed-home instructions. Children in overcrowded houses, without laptops and wifi, without a parent on hand to answer questions, suffered most of all.

If schools close for a second time, it will be children from these poorest families that are hit hardest. Everyone, from Andy Burnham to the education union leaders, all their cheerleaders on the left, and every single one of those who rushed to sign the NEU petition knows this. They know that their children will be just fine, but other people’s children will not be. And yet still they continue with their petitions and their media appearances and their Twitter hashtags, determined not to give up until schools are shut or, at very least, time in the classroom is rationed on some bizarre rota system.

Suddenly, the campaign for children to have free lunches during the school holidays rings hollow. It is the lockdown left who are the true Dickensians here with their insistence that working-class children must know their place. By all means throw the urchins a few sandwiches. But teach them? Allow them access to knowledge that could transform their lives? Let them study for qualifications that could lead to a decent job and future income? Not on your life.

In the eyes of all those who last week campaigned for free school meals, and this week demanded that schools be shut down, working-class children are just a political football. They are presented as an undifferentiated blob, consisting of innocent starving waifs or vicious vectors of disease, depending on which story its tellers predict will strike a bigger blow against the Tories. And education is an easily dispensable, meaningless activity. The message from the #PutSchoolsInTheLockdown philistines is that schools should be shut and exams cancelled: that way no one will ever be held to account for how much children have been failed. Give all the little waifs a certificate and everyone will be happy. This is a degraded view of education and a disgraceful way to treat children.

The next time anyone from a teaching union bleats about children living in poverty we need to remind them that their shameful demand to close schools would keep parents from working and providing for their children and deny disadvantaged children the education that could transform their lives. Fortunately, there are many hard-working teachers who do want schools to remain open and have worked hard to ensure classrooms are a safe environment for children and adults. Their voices need to come to the fore. They show it can be done. It is vital schools remain open.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/02/britains-teaching-unions-are-a-disgrace/

UK: What’s really behind the school-meals row?

Marcus Rashford’s campaign for schools to provide free meals during the holidays has raised important questions on what role schools should play in society.

The main purpose of schools is to pass on the knowledge and wisdom of previous generations to the young. Contained within that, schools are expected to socialise children in society’s values and beliefs.

Although welfare provision doesn’t fall directly into that remit, it is generally accepted that schools should provide welfare support for the hidden costs of free education, such as money required for lunches and travel costs. The issue of school uniforms is also about sensitivity towards the reality of child poverty. While school uniforms teach children the importance of formality, and to focus on learning over fashion labels, they are also meant to hide differences of parental income among schoolchildren. The demand that schools provide free meals for children when they are not on school premises, however, is something new. It raises questions about how far state schools should venture into income support. And what happens when an additional role is added to an already over-stretched sector?

During the Covid-19 recession, free meals during the holidays might appear a sensible stop-gap measure. But there is also the danger that schools start to lose sight of their main function of teaching and learning. During the pandemic, a number of educationalists seem to have lost sight of schools’ primary function. For instance, there have been calls for all GCSE exams to be scrapped permanently so that school can focus more on ‘combating child poverty’.

These sentiments are a continuation of practices that have been in place since the 2000s. The existence of breakfast clubs and homework clubs, the extra cash available for extended services, are all designed to keep children on school premises for longer and longer. The implication here is that the longer children are away from their useless and incapable parents, the more they will develop and prosper as individuals. This is another problem with extending free school meals – it adds to the continued narrative that low-income families are lacking in basic agency.

The apparently well-meaning policies introduced in schools shouldn’t blind us to the broader social-engineering project of reforming the poor which is at play here. Since the defeat of the labour movement and trade unions, this has become the overriding policy outlook of all sections of the Labour Party. Although poverty is correctly presented as a problem for individuals, scratch the surface and campaigners are often more interested in the lifestyle choices of the less well-off than their lack of income. In other words, they want to encourage poorer people to embrace middle-class values and norms – but without having middle-class levels of income and wealth.

At a radical left conference I spoke at a decade ago, opponents of spiked in the audience argued that we tended to ‘celebrate’ the less salubrious aspects of working-class life. For instance, the 2007 smoking ban in pubs – which spiked opposes – was presented as a ‘victory for the labour movement’ by another panellist. But neither I nor other spiked contributors are cheerleaders for anti-social behaviour, such as hooliganism or petty criminality. Instead, we argue against the demonisation of innocuous consumption choices, such as reading tabloid newspapers or eating burgers. The bar for what the opinion-forming middle classes deem to be acceptable and unacceptable norms for the masses gets higher and higher.

Central to all of this for welfarist radicals is a banal preoccupation with healthy food and nutrition. For them, healthy eating is a key marker of what makes a ‘proper’ person. And it’s something they want children from poorer backgrounds to embrace with enthusiasm. There has been far more effort devoted to this than in trying to cultivate a love of learning. This is why school lunches have been a focal issue within primary and secondary education for over 15 years or so. Campaigns have resulted in bans on fizzy drinks and chocolate in school vending machines to the scrapping of turkey twizzlers and the introduction of salad choices. Educationalists are keen for all children to conform to middle-class food fads. What children eat is often considered more important than what they learn.

There’s no doubting Rashford’s sincerity in his school-meals campaign. And as a consequence of the lockdown recession, some parents will certainly require financial support. But the latest discussion around ‘child poverty’ has become yet another pretext for reforming the poor’s ‘awful’ eating habits and lifestyle choices. After all, food poverty can be addressed with informal networks (such as food banks), food vouchers or increasing means-tested child benefits. These measures are less appealing for Labour activists because it would mean leaving poorer parents to their own devices. For campaigners, it would be far better if schools could bypass parents altogether and serve up couscous and broccoli. Indeed, one common objection raised about food banks is that users end up eating ‘too much processed food’.

The demand for the state to feed poor kids is a continuation of an existing culture war against the ‘great unwashed’. This is not about eradicating poverty and inequality, but erasing certain attitudes and lifestyle choices. Writing in The Times, James Kirkup explicitly calls on the state to protect children from their ‘parents’ constraints’ with a ‘national programme of parenting classes’ to follow. What began as a seemingly benign campaign to end ‘child hunger’ predictably ends up reviving notions of extensive state intervention into family life.

Nevertheless, amid all these eager plans for ‘helping children’, one crucial area of a child’s life that doesn’t get mentioned is the quality of teaching and learning in schools. If we really want to help the next generation prosper, schools should focus more on their key role of transmitting knowledge and developing the minds of young people.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/02/whats-really-behind-the-school-meals-row/

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