In a gentrifying era when well-educated white people are heading downtown, you hear surprisingly little about America's oldest and most academic big city, Boston.
You would think that Boston would be the Portland of the East, but it's not quite. The ultimate success of gentrification is when the gentrifiers' children can walk to their high scoring neighborhood public schools, but that isn't close to happening in Boston because its public school system was systematically demolished in one of the hardest fought triumphs of the War on Racism.
One weakness with Boston gentrifying is that, legally, it's a geographically tiny 17th Century city surrounded by conveniently close-in suburbs that don't have to bus. So, it's easy for young parents to say, forget it, I'm not bothering to try to fight for a good student body in my kid's Boston school, we'll just move a few miles to, say, Brookline. For example, Judge Arthur Garrity, who ordered the school busing in 1974, lived in nearby Wellesley, which is just as Seven Sistersy as it sounds and was, amazingly enough, immune from Garrity's own busing order.
Now, 38 years later, the mayor of Boston wants to lift the curse of busing from his city. Will he succeed? It's generally a bad idea to bet against well-educated white people conspiring over real estate. But, smart white people are also good at not having children. Perhaps the Hispanic Tidal Wave means it's too late for Boston to recover from its 1970s WASP and lace-curtain Irish v. knock-upside-the-head Irish class war over public schools. From the NYT:
Nearly four decades after this city was convulsed by violence over court-ordered busing to desegregate its public schools, Boston is working to reduce its reliance on busing in a school system that is now made up largely of minority students.
Although court-ordered busing ended more than two decades ago, and only 13 percent of students in the public schools today are white, the school district buses 64 percent of its students in kindergarten through eighth grade to schools outside their immediate neighborhoods. The city tried twice in the last decade to change the system and failed both times.
In January, Mayor Thomas M. Menino asked school officials to come up with “a radically different plan” under which students would be assigned to schools as close to home as possible.
Boston’s 57,000-student school district is divided into three sprawling geographic zones. A racially blind computerized algorithm assigns students to schools anywhere within their zone. Many students go so far that transportation alone costs the city $80.4 million a year — about 9.4 percent of the school system’s operating budget, almost twice the national average.
But expense is not the only concern. Children who live on the same block often go to different schools. In the violence-torn Bowdoin-Geneva neighborhood of Dorchester, school officials said, 1,912 students attend 102 schools out of 128 schools in the entire district. These include high school students, who are not limited by zone. ...
Recent scores show the Boston Public Schools lagging badly behind schools in the rest of the state.
Why would a school district that's 79% NAM lag behind the rest of this highly white high-scoring state? It's a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma. The best minds of the Harvard Graduate School of Education can't solve it, so what hope does anybody have?
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113 comments:
So you admit that busing and other civil rights laws are the tools of the upper class in their war against the white working class, steve?
A girl I dated in high school lived next door to Judge Garrity in Wellesley. His house was regularly picketed by anti-busing protesters who came out from South Boston. It had died down by the late seventies, when I was darkening the family door, but the girl's old man was amusingly sardonic about the whole thing.
'Menino' means 'boy' in portuguese.
Steve,
I wonder if we have hit peak "back to the city" migration. It is definitely true that the most educated people in my generation (I was born in 1984) haved moved in very large numbers to "cool" cities afer graduation such as NYC (Manhattan and Brooklyn), Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. However, the desirable urban neighborhoods have essentially been redeveloped to their zoning capacities. Most new units of housing are having diminishing effects on the affordability of property prices.
Also, it's still true that the vast majority of people move back to the suburbs after having kids. Yes, there are more strollers now in Park Slope and Tribeca but unfortunately, most of the parents have Tokyo level fertility rates. It's just too hard to have large families in urban neighborhoods, which as you mention, depresses fertility rates of our most intelligent. Of course, Edward Glaeser has nothing to say about this. Just pack em' in! Increase GDP!
I'm coming around to the idea that they have to know the main reason why NAMs lag behind. It's just too black-and-white, if you'll pardon the pun, not to be obvious anymore.
That would mean that all the searching for the cause is really a search for another cause. In other words, they're hoping that in addition to the IQ gap, there's some secondary factor -- racism, peer pressure, lack of funding, whatever -- that's also holding back NAM students. (And if they think IQ is malleable, they might even hope this other factor will improve it too.) If they could just find this X factor, they could fight against it -- more funding! -- and they could reduce the gap, making themselves heroes.
The next generation would discover that the gap still hasn't closed entirely, but by then they'll be safely retired and living on the laurels of having closed part of it.
"Why would a school district that's 79% NAM lag behind the rest of this highly white high-scoring state? It's a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma. The best minds of the Harvard Graduate School of Education can't solve it, so what hope does anybody have?"
Its the schools! We must spend more on the schools to make up for spending so much on busing! And the teachers! It must be that education majors at Harvard and MIT are lazy and taught to be racist, so we need to spend more on the teachers, and also hire more diversity! 100% NAM teachers would be a good start! Teach all classes in ebonics and Spanish. Also, we're punishing the black children too much. When black male kids are being given detentions and suspensions at over twice the rate of everyone else, its a clear sign of racism at work. Abolish school punishment for black children. We should also let children choose what they want to study. A child studying what they like is a motivated child. Turn them all into Montessori schools!
Commuting downtown from Brookline is no picnic, Steve. There are huge swaths of should-be-gentrified land that are part of Boston - basically the whole quadrant to the southwest of the city, extending for several miles. It is slowly gentrifying - Section 8 makes it difficult though.
This is why Boston's cost of living is so high - there just aren't enough gentrified areas that are close to the city. The problem is compounded by truly terrible public transit (and the Harbor, of course). And after the criminally-mismanaged Big Dig, there is no appetite whatsoever for major infrastructure projects. We need them, badly.
I just came across an investment threat about real estate in detroit. One of the detroit locals mentioned that there was a planned railway running from 8 Mile to downtown. I wonder if that gets built.
"The ultimate success of gentrification is when the gentrifiers' children can walk to their high scoring neighborhood public schools,"
But they can do that in Brookline - which any newcomer would assume is simply a neighborhood of Boston. After all you can walk to Fenway from Brookline - you can practically walk to the Financial District from Brookline.
Decentralization is what saved Boston. "Busing" was always a farce because it was so easy for whites with kids to just move a few miles west or north (or even just move literally a few blocks if you were moving from Charlestown to Somerville, Brighton to Newton, or Fenway to Brookline) and continue enjoying all the benefits of city life (museums, dense shopping streets, public transportation, nightlife, etc.) but with access to good NAM free public schools. If Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy and Germantown were independent towns rather than legally part of the city of Philadelphia, Philadelphia would probably be doing a lot better right now as well.
Exactly what happened to the white students who stayed behind at the beginning of the integration experiment? Is it really a deterioration in classroom order that eventually drives them away, or rather harassment or assault by NAMs? Have any of Steve's readers personally been through this?
People like me who never went through it just assumed that whites simply hated blacks and fled before the actual integration took place.
(FWIW my socal high school had plenty of Mexicans, but they were tracked so separately that you didn't even know they were there.)
"I wonder if we have hit peak "back to the city" migration."
Could be.
I mean, I bought a condo on the Chicago lakefront in 1988. I was living 21 floors up in 1982. Heck, I was living on the 14th floor in Houston of all places in 1976. So, this trend isn't terribly new.
"I mean, I bought a condo on the Chicago lakefront in 1988."
I never understood the appeal of the Chicago lakefront. It looks like Normandy Beach after the allies attacked, with huge chunks of rebar laced concrete and other rubble piled along the water's edge. With the exception of the occasional double rainbow after a violent thunderstorm, the view is kinda hazy, grey, and sickening.
There's only one white ethnicity that I would put money on to actually beat blacks at their own game (ie systematic, low level, unforgiving, nasty, pervasive violence), and that is the Irish, the real Irish that is.
Forget your Germans, your English, your Russians, your Serbs and all your other supposed eastern bloc hardmen, suppose if you will we lived in an American dsystopia where all law enforcemnet ceased and there was a town which was half black and half any other European ethnicity.
Over the course of time, I would put money on the blacks driving out the whites from that town and taking posession of it, but with one proviso, if the white ethnicity was Irish, I'd guarantee you the blacks would have been driven out.
JustAClown said...
So you admit that busing and other civil rights laws are the tools of the upper class in their war against the white working class, steve?
Perhaps you should read more and talk less. This is a major Steve theme, not something he is "admitting."
@ just a clown
that's one of steve's own ideas, what do you mean "admit"
also, by upper class whites you meant to say scots-irish
"The problem is compounded by truly terrible public transit..."
Really?!? Let me introduce you to the rest of America. By U.S. standards, the MBTA is pretty great.
I knew a guy who grew up in Brookline in the 1980s and 1990s. (One parent actually taught at the Harvard GSE. Never asked them about desegregation though.) He took the T everywhere. In fact, he still doesn't have a drivers license.
Another friend grew up in the southwestern suburbs. Since Boston's suburbs date from the 19th century, this meant she could take the commuter rail into Boston, to and from the highly walkable downtown area of her suburb. Very easy.
I've taken the T to the airport, to Harvard, to Gloucester...
If you think that Boston has terrible transit, you must be from Japan or something. I know it's an axiom that everyone, everywhere complains about transit systems -- even those in New York and London -- but Boston's is objectively pretty good.
I went to Harvard as a public-school kid from the West. I remember meeting many upper-middle-class students from high-achieving Boston suburbs. These were the most typical undergrad student. (The truly wealthy prep-school kids seemed to exist in their separate little world.) The only Boston Public School grads I met were children of immigrants -- Soros Fellowship types.
http://www.pdsoros.org/current_fellows/
The Andover/Exeter, Newton/Brookline, and Boston Latin students all seemed to be equally capable. But (surprise surprise) blacks and Latinos seemed to be underrepresented at the top of the class (except for white Argentinian-type "Latinos").
1950s: separate but equal is the reason for disparities! Result: ongoing disparities
1960s: lack of civil rights is the reason for disparities! Result: ongoing disparities
1970s: lack of bussing is the reason for the disparities! result: ongoing disparities
1980s: negative media images is the reason for the disparities! result: ongoing disparities
1990s: lack of black politicians is the cause of the disparities! result: ongoing disparities
2000s: lack of diversity is the reason for the disparities! result: ongoing disparities
2010s: lack of student prep exams is the reason for the disparities!
buston
"Exactly what happened to the white students who stayed behind at the beginning of the integration experiment?"
My mother was from a poor Irish family in Dorchester; she graduated just before busing was rammed through, but some of her experience is probably similar to that of the post-busing cohort. She spent a couple years around junior high in a school at which there were only about six white kids- two or three of whom were her siblings. A big part of her school experience was sneaking out of the building undetected at the end of the day to avoid fights with thin-skinned classmates. My aunt also reported aggressive harassment to one of her Nice White Lady teachers, who casually informed my aunt that "You don't know what they've been through as a people"- a response my aunt knew was a cop-out even at that young age.
When high school came around, my grandparents hit upon the idea of listing my mother's address as that of her aunt, who lived in a different neighborhood of Boston. I don't know the exact ethnic ratio, but judging from my recollection of her yearbook photos, it was probably 70% white and 30% black. Other than some occasional pot-smoking out back, the school was pretty orderly, and remained so at least during the first few years of busing, when my other aunt was there. I suspect the culture degenerated pretty quickly after the last of the pre-busing students graduated in 1978, but that's a guess.
Today, I am told by local residents that the school is mostly NAMs, and conditions there are pretty bad- I talked to an Irish cop from the neighborhood who shelled out a fortune to keep his kids in private school. I don't know, personally, so I have to take his word for it.
"Boston’s 57,000-student school district is divided into three sprawling geographic zones. A racially blind computerized algorithm assigns students to schools anywhere within their zone. Many students go so far that transportation alone costs the city $80.4 million a year — about 9.4 percent of the school system’s operating budget, almost twice the national average"
This Boston busing policy has to be one of the greatest living legacies of the golden age of technocracy. While massive concrete public housing projects are torn down and public apologies are issued for the forced residential schooling of Native children, the Boston busing project rolls on.
I don't think we're ever going to understand how we got where we are today until we learn about the Boston school busing program and the hundreds of similar schemes of the technocrats to atomize, uproot and alienate the rest of us. The infamous Frankfurt School is just the tip of an iceberg.
it seems to me that the only way for America to move forward is for white men to be eliminated
so much hate and racism
Boston still has quite a few white areas, I think the city is still 50%+ white, but there are no public schools in the white neighborhoods. A few years ago there was a proposal for a school to serve the North End, Beacon Hill, and the Back Bay, but it died. Those areas are all rich and send their kids to private schools.
The 1970s was probably the worst decade of post-WWII USA, with the 2000s giving run for its money.
Bill said...
JustAClown said...
So you admit that busing and other civil rights laws are the tools of the upper class in their war against the white working class, steve?
Perhaps you should read more and talk less. This is a major Steve theme, not something he is "admitting."
There is a difference between reading and understanding. The paleocon theme you refer to that steve repeats is that the war is between upper class LIBERALS and the rest of white people (who he sees as conservatives).
But MY theme is that the upper class created civil rights laws to dominate the white working class majority by fragmenting their unity.
Paleocons and other conservatives see the war as between liberals and conservatives (same as the liberals see the war). I say the war is being waged by the upper class against working class whites.
A subtle but important distinction, and one missed by you, unsurprisingly.
jeanne,
I was one of the many who "stayed behind" in my mid-sized, hard-luck Texas city (an anagram of Tuba Omen). In the late '80s I was bused cross-town to a majority-black school (I am white) for grades 4 and 5, while my best friend who lived across the street went to a neighborhood school. In the 6th grade, I could walk to my middle school and it was my friend's turn to hop on the bus.
All this nonsense was set up by a dubious lottery, each kid drawing a ping-pong ball from a box to determine his track. There were tears.
You ask what happened to us. Well, we made a decent fist of things. As Derb would put it, we were not "turbulent." Southern parents of that generation, white and black, were well-behaved and petrified of rocking the boat (the wealthier folks could opt for Catholic schools). I have no recollection of any trouble with black classmates.
At any rate, the city has come full circle and the consensus now is that neighborhood schools are the way forward. That's fine by me because I am opposed on principle to forced integration.
A girl I dated in high school lived next door to Judge Garrity in Wellesley. His house was regularly picketed by anti-busing protesters who came out from South Boston. It had died down by the late seventies, when I was darkening the family door, but the girl's old man was amusingly sardonic about the whole thing.
Howie Carr said that Whitey Bulger of the Boston Irish Mob was very angry with Garrity for what he (Garrity) had done to South Boston. Makes you think wistfully upon what might have been.
'"I wonder if we have hit peak "back to the city" migration."
Could be.
I mean, I bought a condo on the Chicago lakefront in 1988. I was living 21 floors up in 1982. Heck, I was living on the 14th floor in Houston of all places in 1976. So, this trend isn't terribly new.'
Yeah, but no one wants to live in those places now. It's all about4 story walkups.
OT, a story (on NPR, of course) about immigrant exodus from silicon valley. http://www.npr.org/2012/10/05/162297444/preventing-silicon-valleys-immigrant-exodus
The terribly tragic example that they use... a guy who made facebook apps.
Not exactly Andrew Carnegie.
http://delcotimes.com/articles/2012/10/04/news/doc506d08928d44a602562329.txt
Mayor Meninno, if you are reading this, I have the key. Carbon livability.
School buses, end even our beloved trams, all according to the new laws of physics produce that accursed CO2. Actually teachers and other education workers do too but that is beside the point because you can't get rid of them.
At the same time the lives Boston's children are unlivable due to lack of bicycles and walking.
So instituting a carbon livability criteria for all schools will require the use of non carbon producing technologies, currently limited to walking and bicycling. Thankfully walking and bicycling meet all livability criteria also. This of course means that no student can be asked to travel more than about 5 mi to get to school. Sadly busing will have to be stopped until a carbon livable technology is available.
There's only one white ethnicity that I would put money on to actually beat blacks at their own game (ie systematic, low level, unforgiving, nasty, pervasive violence), and that is the Irish, the real Irish that is.
Forget your Germans, your English, your Russians, your Serbs and all your other supposed eastern bloc hardmen, suppose if you will we lived in an American dsystopia where all law enforcemnet ceased and there was a town which was half black and half any other European ethnicity.
Over the course of time, I would put money on the blacks driving out the whites from that town and taking posession of it, but with one proviso, if the white ethnicity was Irish, I'd guarantee you the blacks would have been driven out.
Irish gangs from Bridgeport and Back of the Yards were the white "shock troops" of the 1919 Chicago race riot. But Irish-Americans today are just white Americans, plain and simple. And the Irish in Ireland are even more p-fied-except maybe in Ulster.
re: "Over the course of time, I would put money on the blacks driving out the whites from that town and taking posession of it, but with one proviso, if the white ethnicity was Irish, I'd guarantee you the blacks would have been driven out." ANON 10/5/12 6:08 AM
The battle has already been fought twice and the WINNER both times was the Italians! Yes, Italians in the Bronx kept the Blacks at bay and Italians did the same in South Philadelphia.
My wife, a red headed Irish American, showed me areas in NYC where the Blacks and Puerto Ricans took over her family's ancestral Irish neighborhoods as her family and most of the rest of the Irish decamped to Long Island, New York North of White Plains, Connecticut and North Eastern Pennsylvania without a fight.
My sister, who went to medical school in Philadelphia in the 1970s, told me the story of Italians maintaining their ancestral South Philadelphia enclave in spite of the encroaching Black tide in Philadelphia. She also told me about how the Uber Liberal University of Pennsylvania has been increasingly under siege by the rising tide of Black dysfunction in West Philadelphia as the surrounding neighborhoods of the U of P have become more and more Black and thus dangerous and less and less gentrified and therefore less a place for university students and facility to live.
Dan Kurt
"Why would a school district that's 79% NAM lag behind the rest of this highly white high-scoring state? It's a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma. The best minds of the Harvard Graduate School of Education can't solve it, so what hope does anybody have?"
They know damn well. Just do not ask and do not tell.
"Why would a school district that's 79% NAM lag behind the rest of this highly white high-scoring state? It's a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma. The best minds of the Harvard Graduate School of Education can't solve it, so what hope does anybody have?"
Same problem here in Chicago. The best minds simply cannot figure it out. Even the Harvard graduate Secretary of Education Duncan, cannot figure it out, even though he was the previous CPS chief. It looks as if the demographics are a bit better in Boston as Chicago only has 8.8% whites but who knows what that really means?
I was one of the white people left in Philadelphia public schools. I lived in Roxborough, a 90% white neighborhood, but went to a school that was maybe 15% white. To be honest there weren't a whole lot of assaults against the white kids. For the most part we had our places and they had their's. Some of us even hung out on the periphery of things. But there was clearly separation and the school was horrible with little to no learning going on.
"I'm coming around to the idea that they have to know the main reason why NAMs lag behind. It's just too black-and-white, if you'll pardon the pun, not to be obvious anymore."
No. Denial is a very powerful psychological mechanism. I think you are underestimating it.
If you are taught literally from infancy that all people are the same(remember those articles a few years ago in which SWPL parents worried--no, agonized--that their toddlers might be racist?), it's extremely difficult to relinquish that belief, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Even if you or a loved one are the victim of a typical black on white crime, you don't call it "typical black on white crime", you call it a "random act of violence". And that' when people's lives are at stake.
Sure, some cynical liberals know the reality of the "achievement gap". But many, if not most, literally cannot conceive that such a thing could exist. They remind me of Scotty in Vertigo, who kept saying about his lover's supposed delusion, "If I could just find the key...." when in reality,
she wasn't deluded at all, it was Scotty who couldn't see anything but what he wanted to see. So for libs, it couldn't be a genetically based gap in IQ, it just couldn't be. It has to be something else: nutrition or stereotype threat or geographical location or white teachers' inability to understand black culture or lack of funding, etc., etc., etc.
Er, how well did South Boston schools do, relatively speaking, when they were full of Irish (real Irish)
It was the Supreme Court, Garrity decided nothing.
"So you admit that busing and other civil rights laws are the tools of the upper class in their war against the white working class, steve?"
Garrity was from a middle-class or at most upper-middle class Irish Catholic family. He was not "upper class", nor were the vast majority of those agitating for civil rights laws or engaging in judicial activism.
While no doubt cryptic and not-so-cryptic ethnic conflict and status competition underlie much leftism, there are also, to a greater or lesser degree, true believers who are simply morally retarded, lacking the ability to appreciate groupishness or tradition. Garrity may have been one of these. Garrity's father was a member of the NAACP, and "Those close to Garrity insist that the judge had intended to mandate a metropolitan plan [busing to the suburbs] for Boston but pulled back after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against a similar plan in Detroit."
As far as I can tell, the story spun by E. Michael Jones of "elite WASPs" ethnically cleansing ethnic Catholics via mid-20th-century urban planning is entirely baseless.
Nor have I ever seen evidence that members of the American upper class (when it still existed) as a group ever favored non-whites over lower class whites. Keep in mind that to the extent one draws a distinction between upper class (which to me implies exclusivity of birth -- at minimum wealth/status passing down through multiple generations) and merely rich or powerful, few of today's elites are "upper class". Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, and Harvard Law faculty are, I suspect, relatively indistinguishable in childhood SES from readers of this blog (or, correcting for IQ, from Americans in general). "Upper class whites" vs. "lower class whites" is not a useful lens for viewing what has happened in America over the past century. More useful models, in order of importance: (1) ethnic conflict (2) status striving / short-sighted greed / intra-group competition, relatively little of which involved anyone who could be called upper class.
"if the white ethnicity was Irish, I'd guarantee you the blacks would have been driven out."
Did this happen in South Boston?
"I never understood the appeal of the Chicago lakefront. It looks like Normandy Beach after the allies attacked, with huge chunks of rebar laced concrete and other rubble piled along the water's edge. With the exception of the occasional double rainbow after a violent thunderstorm, the view is kinda hazy, grey, and sickening.
I had that impression before I actually moved to Chicago. The reality is that the city is often sunny and bright, and the view is one of parks and beaches, and simply breathtaking - here's a pic, though doesn't do it justice:
http://www.twip.org/photo/2008/photo-05-02-09-12-12-45.jpg
In a 2nd Obama term his ideas about Regionalism will start to rear their ugly head.
Even inner suburbs like Brookline will be asked to pay more into regional tax buckets for their right to have separate school systems. Far suburbs will be pressured to add all sorts of regulation that discourages development there.
Some believe demographic outcomes are determined predominantly by nurture factors. Those types pursue their belief through government policies and programs of redistribution.
Others believe demographic outcomes are determined largely by nature (in addition to nurture). The productive path for this viewpoint is genetic science & engineering.
Why not pursue the productive path of your viewpoint rather than gripe and moan about the other camp?
Growing up in Boston and seeing the absurdity of bussing is what made me conservative.if u were trying t destroy a cohesive community bussing would be a great place to start.and none of the phonies who were for it had their kids in the meatgrinder.one oldtimer I knew said it had as much to do with police overtime and bus contracts as it did the normal liberal Utopian at other peoples loss bullshit.if anyone can point to one positive outcome I'd love to hear it.
Anonymous,
If there was no law enforcement any Euro ethnicity would end up driving out the blacks. You think Russians aren't tough? You have no idea what you are talking about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yWo0_EWg1w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68XMYqQ1SLU&feature=fvwrel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68XMYqQ1SLU&feature=player_detailpage#t=6062s
and here's a good part where a movie is inspired by first person shooter games:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68XMYqQ1SLU&feature=fvwrel
"busing and other civirights laws are the tools of the upper class in their war against the white working class"
This has been a one-sided and perhaps the most catastrophic civil war in Western history. In all seriousness, the efforts of everyone on the Right and renegade Left ought to be directed toward effecting a truce and finally peace with the upper class.
Appeal to their self-interest and their fears.
Education in America is a major petri dish of Liberal insanity. There is no end to the mistakes that have been made, the irrational lunacy of the education system at every level, the massive graft and corruption, the "advances" in pedagogy that are literally insane.
Of course, the SWPLs that do everything they can to have their children escape the education cesspool are the same ones that created it in the first place, and continue to battle furiously to stop any sort of rational reform.
If you're ever in the mood to read something totally bat-shit crazy, go to any education publication to find deep, stinking piles of lunatic ravings.
There are many things about America I've given up on ever seeing fixed, and none more so than education.
PLEASE READ THIS STEVE IF IT'S THE LAST THING YO DO!
The end is near! Please, Steve, pick up the Bible and turn to Chapter 2 of the Book of Revelations, the message to the angel of the church of Ephesus.
Is that not you? "Seven Golden Candlesticks" = Golden Gate Bridge.
The Nicolatians are the neocons, Steve. Please read verse 9 to see what Jesus thought of the "Jews". They aren't real Jews, Steve.
I know because it all came to me last month, from God I believe. The earthquakes, the Middle East, the food speculation, the impending famine all point to the beginning of the apocalypse.
The Collapse of Christian Civilization was all carefully engineered by a Luciferian conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. Please research this Steve. It has nothing to do with ethnic interest, it is an all out rebellion against God.
Notice that the edge of the cliff for black enrollment coincides with sudden acceleration of Hispanic enrollment. Now let me see, what happened in 2000? Oh, I know, it was the beginning of the Housing Bubble which allowed insolvent blacks to escape the inner city by buying homes they couldn't afford in the suburbs, which were built by Hispanics who back filled inner city areas left by blacks. The world according to Steve?
No doubt Latino gangs helped speed up the local genocide.
I think you need to write more essays on education.
In the Human Biodiversity struggle you and a couple other have finally beaten into the collective consciousness the elementary fact that people with recent African ancestry are superior in a foot race. So that's evidence that it can be done.
That wasn't true a couple decades ago. You couldn't talk about black athletic success unless you attributed it to blacks trying harder and practicing more. I remember reading a sports analysis of Oscar Robertson that ascribed his success to his long hours in the gym. By implication whites were failures because they were lazy.
Today most men would admit that blacks have some natural advantages in basketball. That's progress.
Yet we still have a media that assumes that if a child can't read or cipher he must have been betrayed by some teacher. This is a truly wacky notion. If I as a fifth grade teacher gets a kid in my classroom who flunked the fourth grade - I'm too blame if he likewise flunks the fifth?
I'd like an analysis of the effects of integration. If I take a white class that averages a 'B'. And I mix them with a black class that averages a 'D'. Do I get a 'C' class? Does the mere presence of whites in the classroom raise the black scores or do blacks in the classroom lower the scores of the whites?
That seems like a simple enough question but I don't remember it ever being presented this way.
Albertosaurus
Some believe demographic outcomes are determined predominantly by nurture factors. Those types pursue their belief through government policies and programs of redistribution.
Others believe demographic outcomes are determined largely by nature (in addition to nurture). The productive path for this viewpoint is genetic science & engineering.
Why not pursue the productive path of your viewpoint rather than gripe and moan about the other camp?
Perhaps you should read more and talk less. This is a major Steve theme, not something he is "admitting."
Yeah, that one was pretty funny. I can hear Sam Kinnison as the college professor in 'Back To School', "Say it! Say it! SAY IT!!!" :-)
"FWIW my socal high school had plenty of Mexicans, but they were tracked so separately that you didn't even know they were there."
I went to public schools in the South where the intra-school segregation was almost comical in retrospect. I spent four years in that system without ever really knowing a black student--and that was not a conscious decision by any means.
I don't remember much racial tension, probably for that reason. Blacks had always lived in that county so the natural social segregation ran deep (churches, neighborhoods, etc.) I wasn't around when the schools integrated but by the time I went there it was just a natural separation of whites and blacks (honors classes). Blacks ate together, socialized together outside of school, got into fights with each other, and there was very little interaction with the white population. Besides football and basketball the extracurricular activities were segregated: soccer, theater, key club, etc. were all white and step team was all black.
As far as I know white kids never felt "intimidated" by the troublemaking black kids. I wonder if there's an inflection point where white kids feel crowded out. I couldn't find demographics for my high school but I'm guessing it was around 1/4-1/3 black (one of the small towns feeding into it is 26% black and of course the private schools were all white). Also note that this was a small town in the South so there were no race hustling politicians and very little bureaucracy to screw up.
Steve,
It's really all about restrictive covenants, though they will never, ever come back.
Instead, we get this ruling from the 1992 Supreme Court Case Freeman v. Pitts, where Justice Kennedy said:
"Where resegregation is a product not of state action, but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications. It is beyond the authority and beyond the practical ability of the federal courts to try to counteract these kinds of continuous and massive demographic shifts. To attempt such results would require ongoing and never-ending supervision by the courts of school districts simply because they were once de jure segregated."
R. Covenants are the only way to make school districts in cities like Chicago (less than 8 percent white enrollment) and Atlanta (less than 8 percent white) whiter. But, Kennedy's wording in the Freeman basically means that whites will continue to flee until they are living on converted oil rigs in the oceans.
Marginally OT, but in case you're wondering what the scions of Silicon Valley are being taught, here's an upcoming "program" at an exclusive Atherton school:
During the week of October 22, the Service Learning team will conduct the third annual Justice Teach-In providing daily opportunities for students to grapple with complex topics related to “Race, Justice and Hip-Hop.” One of our featured speakers will be Kevin Powell (www.kevinpowell.net). Mr. Powell is a writer and activist who has contributed to a wide range of publications and has authored eleven books on pop culture and politics. He will also speak to the parents on Thursday at 7pm in the Campbell Center. Jeff Chang, (http://diversityarts.stanford.edu/staff/jeff-chang) the Executive Director of the Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts, will offer a workshop for the boys on male identity and hip-hop. Gena Castro Rodriguez, (http://www.castrorodriguez.com/Home_Page.html) Executive Director of the Youth Justice Institute, will provide a workshop for the girls on identity, hip-hop and their relationships with one another as young women. The week promises to be an exciting opportunity for students to explore the connections between race, hip-hop culture and justice. Most of the events are optional and will take place during lunch and student life periods.
I'd like to know if anyone has any experience with Mr. Powell.
The Collapse of Christian Civilization was all carefully engineered by a Luciferian conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. Please research this Steve. It has nothing to do with ethnic interest, it is an all out rebellion against God.
Does Steve let these comments through occasionally just to let us know the kind of goofy stuff he gets? Or what?
The Catholics were always the weak sisters in the fight against busing. The "Good" Catholics sent their kids to Catholic and therefore didn't give a damn about the public schools. The Secular Catholics had a large percentage of dimwitted liberals and losers. And most WASP's wouldn't even THINK of sending their kids to AA schools - some white catholics however are jake with it.
The scores to MAs standardized tests, called the MCAS, are available here: http://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/results.html
They are broken down by race, with the predictable results.
Clay asks why we don't pursue genetic engineering to remediate whatever aspect of low test scores may be caused by genes. Here's where the gene localization project is at right now:
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/09/23/0956797611435528
There may be hundreds of genes with tiny effects. And even if we knew where they were, gene therapy is mostly stalled out. So your suggestion is about as helpful as saying "why don't we build fusion-powered personal helicopters to solve our transportation and energy needs?" But thanks...
Here you can see the MA state test result rankings broken down by individual school: http://www.boston.com/news/special/education/mcas/scores11/10th_top_schools.htm
Look what schools sit at the very bottom.
Perhaps the point of busing in Boston is now lost. When all the whites have gone, where's the fun in it?
hey, Jersey Guy, well, heck everybody -
"I wonder if we have hit peak "back to the city" migration."
they're just getting started - EVERYBODY should look into what they call 'pack and stack' housing - for safety and convenience, because people allowed to drive whereever they want to go is just unsustainable.
it's an international thing, in order to save the planet, environment...gotta be sustainable, ya know
~Obamynous911
actually, peace comes from defeating the upper class via propaganda
Exactly what happened to the white students who stayed behind at the beginning of the integration experiment? Is it really a deterioration in classroom order that eventually drives them away, or rather harassment or assault by NAMs? Have any of Steve's readers personally been through this?
"People like me who never went through it just assumed that whites simply hated blacks and fled before the actual integration took place.
(FWIW my socal high school had plenty of Mexicans, but they were tracked so separately that you didn't even know they were there.)"
From numerous relatives and older coworkers:
Violence directed at whites drove them out. Going to one of these schools was like a never ending flash mob with daily ten on one beatings of white students, black gangs with knives and guns robbing whites, white girls being constantly groped, harassed and threatened with rape.
The 1970s was probably the worst decade of post-WWII USA, with the 2000s giving run for its money.
The 1970's are what I call "The Golden Era of Sh*tty American Craftsmanship".
Everything sucked then. Everything was cheaply made, the constant refrain about nearly everything, from houses to appliances to clothing to musical instruments was "they don't make them like they used to".
The politics were nuts - detente abroad, socialism/egalitarianism at home. Our armed forces were drug addled and riven with racial tensions and incompetence.
The list goes on and on. Some would comment that the drugs and sex were good, and that may be true. Whether this was causative of the mess or an escape from the horror of it all is an open question.
I loved this direct quote in the New York Times op-ed article on trying to figure out why affirmative action has not yet equalized outcomes:
"We need more research into the impact of factors like diet and nutrition, the amount of time parents talk and read with their kids, exposure to electronic screen time, sleep routines and the way stress outside the home affects family life."
But we need absoluted no research on genetic explanations -- even looking it to that as possibility would be "pseudoscience".
"I wonder if there's an inflection point where white kids feel crowded out."
I'm suspecting that there is a critical mass where blacks are emboldened to harass whites more, from insecurity if nothing else..esp among the girls, esp now that so much civility has been lost. I'm not surprised that it may have been a more peaceful process in the 1980s.
I lived in DFW in the 80s, and it was very peaceful then, but a parent with any resources at all had the kids in private school and would not consider public at all. But they didn't talk ugly about it.
That's a scary graph. So if one moves to Boston with kids, shelling out for private school is an absolute must. I did not realize that! In comparison to the whitopia Miswest city where I am now, they sure don't pay proportionally more in Boston to compensate for that.
"The battle has already been fought twice and the WINNER both times was the Italians! Yes, Italians in the Bronx kept the Blacks at bay and Italians did the same in South Philadelphia."
Dunno about Philly but I do know the Bronx. It is now 53% Hispanic, please look it up on Wikipedia. There are very few Italians left. The only solidly white area is Riverdale.
Well all the liberals I have known or met or worked with (a lot, in politics and professional sociology circles) say that the primary reason for the achievement gap is income inequality.
So they would agree that bussing, civil rights, more money for teachers, test prep, lower suspension rates, etc etc, are all partial stop-gap measures. The core item that has yet to be addressed in a macro way is income and wealth equality.
For example, is it not true in general that wealthy suburban districts spend more per student than poorer darker districts? OK, Washington DC spends a lot, but so do Westchester and Fairfield and Montgomery and Fairfax counties.
"Growing up in Boston and seeing the absurdity of bussing is what made me conservative"
Liberal types are always whining that conservatives hate hate hate big government, but, as far as I know, have never even cared to think about what the root causes might be. Because, those conservatives, all racists, or something.
Next time Yglesias whines about the suburbs, someone should tattoo the word "BUSING" backwards on this forehead.
From Boston baked beans to Boston jumping beans.
Liberal education can be awful stupid... but
cons would have a better case if they'd care less about bogus issues like prayer in school, pledge of allegiance, and teaching creationism/ID in classrooms.
"suppose if you will we lived in an American dsystopia where all law enforcemnet ceased and there was a town which was half black and half any other European ethnicity." - All law enforcement? Look at what happened in Algier point during Katrina. The breakdown of BRA will not be kind to blacks, only the current system of Anarcho-Tyranny serves their interests.
"Why would a school district that's 79% NAM lag behind the rest of this highly white high-scoring state? It's a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma. The best minds of the Harvard Graduate School of Education can't solve it, so what hope does anybody have?" - The absolute last thing that they'd want to ever admit is that they were wrong, or worse, that a bunch of country bumpkins could have been right.
The battle has already been fought twice and the WINNER both times was the Italians! Yes, Italians in the Bronx kept the Blacks at bay and Italians did the same in South Philadelphia.
Nah.
According to the 2010 Census, 53.5% of Bronx's population was of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin (they may be of any race); 30.1% non-Hispanic Black or African American, 10.9% of the population was non-Hispanic White, 3.4% non-Hispanic Asian, 0.6% from some other race (non-Hispanic) and 1.2% of two or more races (non-Hispanic). The U.S. Census considers the Bronx to be the most diverse area in the country. There is an 89.7 percent chance that any two residents, chosen at random, would be of different race or ethnicity.[63] The borough's formerly most populous ethnic group, white, declined from 98.3% in 1940 to 35.7% by 1990.
The Bronx is the only New York City borough with a Hispanic majority, many of whom are Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. In 2000, The Bronx had some of the nation's highest percentages of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans with 24.0% and 10.0%, respectively.
According to the 2009 American Community Survey, White Americans of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic origin represented over one-fifth (22.9%) of The Bronx's population. However, non-Hispanic whites formed under one-eighth (12.1%) of the population, down from 34.4% in 1980.[64] Out of all five boroughs, The Bronx has the lowest number and percentage of white residents. 320,640 whites called the Bronx home, of which 168,570 were non-Hispanic whites. The majority of the non-Hispanic European American population is of Italian and Irish descent. People of Italian descent numbered over 55,000 individuals and made up 3.9% of the population. People of Irish descent numbered over 43,500 individuals and made up 3.1% of the population. German Americans and Polish Americans made up 1.4% and 0.8% of the population respectively.
Regarding the statement that minus LE blacks would wipe the floor with whites - could not be more wrong. One of the big inpediments of whites defending themselves in non-flyover country is LE. Zimmerman, Goetz ring a bell with you. LE and the establishment (MSM, courts, etc.) defend black thugs from those evil white men.
No LE and blacks would last a month or two around real white men, which are mainly only found in flyover country anymore.
MDR
RE: Kevin Powell he was on the first season of MTV's "Real World". His big moment was verbally abusing a white girl from Connecticut for not being sufficiently anti white
"No. Denial is a very powerful psychological mechanism. I think you are underestimating it." -- Kylie
That's true, and I'm probably overstating how much they get it. But every once in a while, something HBDish slips into the liberal mainstream, like Saletan's article on race and IQ in Slate a couple years ago. So whether they believe it or not, they're clearly aware of it, but they carefully avoid bringing it into any practical conversations. And sometimes the solutions they don't suggest sure make it seem like they're afraid it's true.
I was growing up in Dorchester during these years. Luckily, my parents were Irish immigrants and hated public education, so I attended parochial grammar and a Jesuit high school. My commute to my jebbie high school brought me in direct contact with this leftist experiment in social engineering. The true goal of the social elites was to forcibly integrate housing. This was not possible due to the stubbornness of the human material and the obstacle of what was left of the Constitution. They had to settle for desegregation of the public schools. The kulaks (aka the white working classes)refused to play. They moved out of Boston or abandoned the public school system.
The busing crisis in Boston prevented me from ever experiencing youthful liberalism. I despised the Left and all it's works from age 12. The despicable face of self righteous arrogance and complete idiocy of the Left made such a lasting impression, akin to the experience of someone who saw the Soviet Union for what it was in the 1930s, Malcolm Muggeridge comes to mind.
"Our armed forces were drug addled and riven with racial tensions and incompetence."
"Racial tension" being a euphemism for blacks attacking whites and whites resenting blacks for attacking them and being incompetent at their jobs.
Busing is high on the list of reasons the white Catholic vote shifted from Democrats to Republicans.
Not that the Republicans ever cared much about the matter either way.
"Does Steve let these comments through occasionally just to let us know the kind of goofy stuff he gets? Or what?"
A few years ago, Stormfront banned Nazi-fetishists and people advocating violence. The result was it was overrun with monomaniacal conspiracy freaks like this guy. People who are obsessed with ONE thing they think if exposed, will bring every other malign force in the world down with it. That kind of thinking is a form of obsessive disorder. You can't argue with people like that because they are mentally ill.
I believe people like this are a big reason why the "far right" in America has been such a failure. These people are crazy and should be shunned and silenced. Any movement that lets crazies run wild will not be able to attract normal people. They don't seem to have as many people like this in Europe.
I believe people like this are a big reason why the "far right" in America has been such a failure. These people are crazy and should be shunned and silenced. Any movement that lets crazies run wild will not be able to attract normal people. They don't seem to have as many people like this in Europe.
In democracies success for political movements is measured by success in electing public officials. By definition, anything
"far" or "extreme" is not going to be successful in a plurality voting system such as the one that exists in the US. Today we see racial segregation as extreme,but when segregationist public officials were elected in the South that was because, at that time and place,that position was conventional wisdom aka mainstream public opinion.
Simple stuff that a lot of people can't seem to get.
I believe people like this are a big reason why the "far right" in America has been such a failure. These people are crazy and should be shunned and silenced.
Uh huh. I guess it somehow escaped your notice that people this crazy are quite common on the left, but they are not shunned and silenced.
"In democracies success for political movements is measured by success in electing public officials. By definition, anything
"far" or "extreme" is not going to be successful in a plurality voting system such as the one that exists in the US. Today we see racial segregation as extreme,but when segregationist public officials were elected in the South that was because, at that time and place,that position was conventional wisdom aka mainstream public opinion.
Simple stuff that a lot of people can't seem to get."
Opposition to illegal immigration is mainstream, yet damn near 100% of the establishment loves illegal immigration. How does your theory explain that?
The "far right" in Europe gets up to 20% of the vote in some countries. How is that possible in your world?
Violence directed at whites drove them out. Going to one of these schools was like a never ending flash mob with daily ten on one beatings of white students, black gangs with knives and guns robbing whites, white girls being constantly groped, harassed and threatened with rape.
There's a lot more to it than black violence. I know a town on the west bank of the Hudson which in the 1980's was Irish and and Italian and Jewish. The Hispanic tidal wave rolled over it and the whites all left. Not because of violence, but because the schools are crap, the property taxes are sky high, and the town is exceptionally corrupt even by New Jersey standards.
Perhaps the Hispanic Tidal Wave means it's too late for Boston to recover from its 1970s WASP and lace-curtain Irish v. knock-upside-the-head Irish class war over public schools
Wouldn't most of the Irish Catholic kids have gone to Catholic schools? Here in NYC, Irish Catholics have generally avoided public schools like the plague that they are. I imagine it would have been the same in Boston.
"During the week of October 22, the Service Learning team will conduct the third annual Justice Teach-In providing daily opportunities for students to grapple with complex topics related to “Race, Justice and Hip-Hop.”
- These people could save themselves some time, effort and expense by playing a few rounds with the progressive truth generator:
http://thepeoplescube.com/peoples-tools/progressive-truth-generator-t297.html
I lived for a few years in a Southern city with busing. The upper middle class neighorhood I lived in, though, was heavily Jewish. Somehow they had managed to turn the local high school into an honors school, so pretty much none of the kids had to leave the neighborhood to go to high school, and they didn't have to sit in classrooms with a lot of blacks.
I had a neighbor whose kid got kicked out of the honors program for not keeping up his grades. He managed to finagle him into the the neighboring suburban school, which was >90% white. He was liberal, Jewish, and an avowed ACLU member. But he didn't want to send his kid to school with a bunch of blacks. I called him a hypocrite to his face.
"Going to one of these schools was like a never ending flash mob with daily ten on one beatings of white students, black gangs with knives and guns robbing whites"
That was not my experience going to a middle and high school that were majority poor and black. Remember that the drop out rate is very high among blacks, so violence prone individuals usually drop out. And many blacks also took athletics serious and feared missing games because of disciplinary issues.
Certainly the blacks posed more problems and were more likely to be bullies, but this is extreme overstatement.
"people this crazy are quite common on the left, but they are not shunned and silenced."
Of course they are shunned. 9/11 truthers are common "on the ground" but never allowed into high office or on TV. Likewise with the "AIDS is a white conspiracy" meme. The CIA imports crack meme has some partial truth to it, but is still limited to 3 or 4 marginal congressmen.
"Busing is high on the list of reasons the white Catholic vote shifted from Democrats to Republicans."
Absolutely.
"Not that the Republicans ever cared much about the matter either way."
Actually, Republican now want to take it several steps further by (1) mandating that kids in "failing schools" be allowed to transfer anywhere within in the district (2) give out vouchers that can be used to ruin private schools, or be used to enroll and pay tuition to public school districts outside of their home.
Republicans also are blocking efforts to treat scam for-profit colleges differantly than real colleges, with the eventual result being higher interest rates and less availability of loans and aid for student able to get into real schools.
So there's several more reasons for realists to vote for Obama.
"Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, and Harvard Law faculty are, I suspect, relatively indistinguishable in childhood SES from readers of this blog "
Absolutely wrong! Here is an short and specific statistic on the issue: 24% of Harvard Law School students do not borrow any money at all to attend. Tuition over 3 years is about $145,000, plus books and living expenses.
Do you really think a quarter of isteve readers come from families that could plop down 200K on graduate school tuition? And those are the students!
The faculty of such schools are even more likely to be from very high SES backgrounds, in part because among those who are smart and dedicated enough to become elite law professors, the ones from low-SES backgrounds will instead choose to make millions in corporate law rather than bide their time in low-paying post-docs and judicial clerkships.
"Anonymous" said genetic engineering is too hard and too remote to be considered:
Sure, it's hard. This isn't a project that will be slam dunked in a few years.
It will probably take several decades to identify the right combination of genetic factors that cause intelligence, future time preference, empathy, and other desirable behaviors and work them into (optional) mass market therapies.
IMO, that's worth it. I'm personally taking university classes on a biotech track and I think more people who feel the way I do should give the long term engineering route more serious thought.
It's not 'goofy stuff' - this is the way *most* educated white American men spoke and thought prior to the 1960s.
Just listen to some of Richard Nixon's choice comments on the Watergate tapes for instance.
Just a clown, why do you leave two blank lines between paragraphs when everyone else leaves one? It makes you come across as self-absorbed, monomaniacal, narcissistic... Even if you do believe that what you have to say is especially important.
"Others believe demographic outcomes are determined largely by nature (in addition to nurture). The productive path for this viewpoint is genetic science & engineering.
Why not pursue the productive path of your viewpoint rather than gripe and moan about the other camp?"
Didn't you get the email? Blacks and Mexicans are not particularly interested in being genetically engineered by white folks. They figure they are just fine the way they are. Don't you?
The solution is not how to magically engineer human beings to be identical and interchangeable, but how to get folks to accept human diversity--human difference. I celebrate racial and ethnic diversity, I don't want to eliminate it.
The "far right" in Europe gets up to 20% of the vote in some countries. How is that possible in your world?
Those countries-with the exception of France-have PR voting systems at the national level. National elections in France are two-round runoffs that are far more friendly to small parties than Anglo-Saxon plurality. Regional and municipal elections in France are mostly PR. Wikipedia says that FN has 118 seats on French regional councils.
Republicans also are blocking efforts to treat scam for-profit colleges differantly than real colleges, with the eventual result being higher interest rates and less availability of loans and aid for student able to get into real schools.
Must be because Republicans are the spawn of Satan. Most ardent political partisans in the US are demented religious fanatics.
How Irish Catholic was Boston back then? Some of us can remember the day when, if you were from Southie or Dot, you identified yourself by parish.
White flight created some problems for the area Catholic schools. A good percentage of the new kids from the city schools were just not up to the competition in an environment where two failing grades in a school year meant expulsion. My yearly tuition at a Catholic high school in Braintree (1976 grad) went from $125 to $750 in 4 years, prompting my dad to curse Judge Garrity from afar.
"Going to one of these schools was like a never ending flash mob with daily ten on one beatings of white students, black gangs with knives and guns robbing whites..."
... Certainly the blacks posed more problems and were more likely to be bullies, but this is extreme overstatement"
LOL, overstatement? I thought it was a late night movie on Showtime!
"Actually, Republican now want to take it several steps further by (1) mandating that kids in "failing schools" be allowed to transfer anywhere within in the district "
Just to keep this straight, I want to make sure people understand how this is implemented.
In order to transfer to any other school for any program, students in the Houston school district must have almost perfect conduct. Students who have been sent to the office with a disciplinary referral in the past like, 3 years are never eligible for transfers. Also, a transfer student can always be sent back to his zoned school if he does cause any trouble.
Vouchers should only be used for stuff like charter schools that are run by private entities. Houston has Harmony Public schools company. Those schools attract better students because parents have to call and fill out forms and all that rigamarole, so there is a barrier to entry because the lazy and stupid can't clear even that low hurdle.
Vouchers for real private schools should not be allowed.
"24% of Harvard Law School students do not borrow any money at all to attend"
Explain where you came up with this number. According to the official website: In 2011–12 approximately 82% of J.D. students received some form of assistance through Student Financial Services in order to meet their education expenses. All of our institutional grant assistance is need-based and awarded solely on the basis of family financial strength.
This does not mean the other 18% are white American students whose parents are paying cash. HLS students include non-whites, foreigners, and adults with established careers, and there are also grandparents, informal loans, and probably at least a few parents who end up taking out mortgages on their houses.
"Do you really think a quarter of isteve readers come from families that could plop down 200K on graduate school tuition?"
The 82nd percentile of household wealth in the US in 2007 was $520,000. The 95th percentile was 1.7 million. And blacks/hispanics have relatively insignificant wealth compared to whites, so the percent of white households reaching those levels will be even higher.
My impression is most isteve readers are in the top 10 percent of IQ. IQ is less than perfectly heritable, and correlations between IQ and wealth are also imperfect, but I would be surprised if something at least approaching 18% of isteve readers in the relevant age bracket do not come from families that could come up with $200,000 over three years to send a child to HLS.
HLS students are even more highly selected on IQ than isteve readers (median LSAT score around 99th percentile of LSAT takers), so they'd be expected to come from somewhat higher net worth households on that basis alone. But my point is the difference is probably not large and even most of the HLS students from rich families will have no particular connection to the old American upper class.
"The faculty of such schools are even more likely to be from very high SES backgrounds"
Certainly after correcting for IQ and ethnicity, I doubt it.
"the ones from low-SES backgrounds will instead choose to make millions in corporate law rather than bide their time in low-paying post-docs and judicial clerkships."
Unfortunately, your "logic" leads you to conclusions that are close to the opposite of reality. Traditionally, corporate law is exactly the specialty where upper class / multigenerational upper-middle class "WASPs" were most highly represented. And, even today, I believe Jews a few generations removed from Eastern Europe are overrepresented to a greater degree on the faculties of elite law schools than among the partners of large law firms.
Kylie, I always look forward to your comments, so help me out. Why can't the explanation go something like this:
education necessarily means civilizing myself;
civilizing myself means means dissipating my aggression and anger;
dissipating my aggression and anger means losing my best weapon to get what I want from whites, i.e. activating white guilt.
"That was not my experience going to a middle and high school that were majority poor and black. Remember that the drop out rate is very high among blacks, so violence prone individuals usually drop out. And many blacks also took athletics serious and feared missing games because of disciplinary issues.
Certainly the blacks posed more problems and were more likely to be bullies, but this is extreme overstatement."
I have many relatives and friends who attended newly integrated high schools schools in Boston, Newark, Pittsburgh, Wilmington Delaware and New York City in the late 1960's and 1970's and that's what they told me happened in their schools. In one school, there was a huge racial brawl after which almost all whites left. I was told that white students couldn't use the bathrooms or walk down certain hallways without being attacked. I'm sure these stories were not made up and I have uncovered many contemporary newspaper articles from all around the country where these things are discussed openly.
Remember, this was the height of the black power era where every black street criminal believed he was a soldier in the race war. Many of these schools effectively went from 95% to 0% white within five years of busing. They weren't stable black majority schools.
Most of the black guys in the early '70s looked more like Lamont Sanford or Rerun from What's Happening than Kevin Durant, so they weren't anything a good sized white guy couldn't handle
Yup, I remember that era well myself. That was before they all started taking steroids.
"I believe people like this are a big reason why the "far right" in America has been such a failure. These people are crazy and should be shunned and silenced. Any movement that lets crazies run wild will not be able to attract normal people. They don't seem to have as many people like this in Europe."
ROTFLAMAO...but of course far left crazies get all sorts of honors and even their own TV shows on MSNBC.
Gee ... I wonder why.
Sir ... I implore you ... please remove your head from out of your butt before you embarass yourself further.
"HLS students are even more highly selected on IQ than isteve readers (median LSAT score around 99th percentile of LSAT takers.."
Speak for yourself.
"Too bad integration didn't work, most of us had high hopes for it."
Wow ... you sound really sad ... too bad whole towns, neighborhoods, ways of life, and even lives had to be destroyed to see that your experiment in do gooderism failed.
Spoken like a true reformed Maoist after the Cultural Revolution turned out to be a bust.
..."Hey you know the Cultural Revolution didn't go so well we ended up killing 50 million of our own citizens from starvation and other causes ...because we got these crazy idea that we just had to implement because it seemed so groovy..."
Save the tears you clown.
"Most of the black guys in the early '70s looked more like Lamont Sanford or Rerun from What's Happening than Kevin Durant, so they weren't anything a good sized white guy couldn't handle"
OF all of the black men out there, you pickKevin Durant as your icon of black masculinity?
"Black and white girls never had any interests in common that I can recall. They lived separate lives."
Women don't have common interests.
Think about it.
"Didn't you get the email? Blacks and Mexicans are not particularly interested in being genetically engineered by white folks. They figure they are just fine the way they are. Don't you?"
I personally know individuals of many ethnic groups including african americans who would love to tweak a gene or two in their children for various desirable effects (physical health/intelligence/more personable/etc). Ethnicity would not be the selling point. People generally want to preserve their ethnic identities, but still would love to change specific pieces.
Also, most normal people (non-engineers) don't want to consider technology that is on the distant horizon.
"The solution is not how to magically engineer human beings to be identical and interchangeable, but how to get folks to accept human diversity--human difference."
Hypothetically, what if there were certain completely natural genetic traits that coded undesirable behaviors such as irresponsibility, dishonesty, unproductiveness, high crime, and careless breeding?
Today, society doesn't want to accept this as diversity, we want to develop social institutions to mitigate the problems, and that often isn't successful. In the future, if we develop a more precise and exact understanding of the specific natural causes, biological treatments would be more appropriate and widely accepted.
"Ex Submarine Officer said...
The 1970's are what I call "The Golden Era of Sh*tty American Craftsmanship"."
They were subsequently replaced with the era of excellent german and japanese craftsmanship. Which has since been replaced by the era of sh*tty mexican and chinese craftsmanship. That's progress.
Movies and books were better in the 70s. They weren't all created for 13 year-old boys and thirty year-old women.
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