Affirmative Action for Italian-Americans

From the New York Times, by Lisa W. Foderaro:

Of all the universities and colleges that offer protections for minorities, CUNY [City University of New York] appears to be the only one that has declared Italian-Americans an official affirmative action category in employment, promising special efforts to recruit, hire and promote them, according to national higher-education groups.

The declaration, made in 1976 and reaffirmed in later years, came after pressure from Italian-American legislators in Albany responding to complaints of bias from the faculty and staff. The lawmakers also created a research institute at the university to counsel students of Italian heritage and study “the Italian-American experience.”

Yet ever since, a group of Italian-American professors and staff members at the institute and at CUNY have been making the case that the university has failed them.

They have produced a paper mountain of manifestos, research studies and lawsuits, and exposed a deep vein of grievance in an ethnic group that has risen to prominence in fields like politics, law and medicine. Some of the dissidents have lamented that Italian-Americans are still stereotyped in popular culture as mobsters or muscle-bound buffoons; others have described an unsympathetic Italian-American administrator as an “Uncle Tony” — the equivalent of an Uncle Tom. 

What could be more surprising than to find out that giving out affirmative action preferences only generates more demands for more affirmative action preferences?

Back in 2003, I wrote:

If the government started giving out goodies to people born on Wednesdays, within a year we'd see pressure groups with names like The Children of Woe lobbying for continuation of Wednesdayians' privileges. PBS would be running Wednesday Pride documentaries during Wednesday History Month about famous Wednesdaytarians like Jimmy Carter, Bruce Lee, and Rosie O'Donnell. 

In illustration of my point, Foderaro continues:

Though CUNY vigorously denies the allegations, the critics have met with some success: Outside arbiters have largely upheld claims that Italian-Americans are underrepresented in university jobs. In a written opinion, the civil rights lawyer and federal judge Constance Baker Motley, who oversaw a settlement in 1994, called the group’s lack of progress “unconscionable given the existence of an affirmative action commitment.”

Still, for some who work in higher education, the notion of protections for Italian-Americans — at a university where 70 percent of the 262,000 full-time students are black, Latino or Asian — has prompted some head-scratching.

“In the diversity of the community that is New York City, it seems particularly unusual that Italian-Americans would be considered disadvantaged,” said Ada Meloy, general counsel of the American Council on Education. “After all, in New York we had an Italian-American governor, and we may have another one coming up.”

Having a black President, however, well, that's different! 

Joseph V. Scelsa, who was one of the institute’s first directors and led the legal fight that resulted in the settlement, said Italian-Americans had succeeded in many spheres and seemed to be well represented on the staffs of other New York-area colleges, but had long been mistreated at CUNY. 

I wonder why ... 

“There have been so many cases of discrimination that I personally know of — from not getting hired to not getting promoted to not getting tenure,” said Dr. Scelsa, who is now president of the Italian American Museum in Manhattan. “It’s so clear that there’s been no serious attempt to increase our numbers.”

The latest skirmish centers on a lawsuit filed in July in United States District Court by Vincenzo Milione, a researcher at the institute, now known as the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, in memory of the state senator who first held hearings on Italian-Americans at CUNY.

The suit says CUNY and the institute’s current director, Anthony J. Tamburri, retaliated against Dr. Milione, cutting his staff and rescinding a prestigious job title, after Dr. Milione, in 2006, made a presentation to Italian-American state lawmakers. In the presentation, Dr. Milione argued that Italian-American representation on the faculty and the staff had remained flat — between 5 percent and 6 percent — over three decades, while that of groups like blacks, Latinos and Asians had climbed.

“Did affirmative action work at CUNY?” he asked in a recent interview. “Yes. But it did not work for Italian-Americans.” The New York office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that his suit had merit.

CUNY officials said that Dr. Tamburri would not comment, but they defended the university’s record. As of last fall, they said, Italian-Americans represented about 7 percent of the full-time instructional staff of 11,000, up from 5.8 percent in 1981. While the increase was modest, it occurred while the proportion of white employees fell sharply, to 54 percent from 74 percent, as the university strove to hire blacks and Latinos.

“Were CUNY not proactively engaging in affirmative action for Italian-Americans, one would expect to see Italian-American representation in CUNY fall at the same rate as that of whites,” Jennifer S. Rubain, university dean for recruitment and diversity, said in a statement. “That has not happened.”

Like other research universities that receive federal money, CUNY must extend affirmative action hiring protections to a variety of government-designated groups, including blacks and Latinos. University officials say the Department of Labor reviews its progress periodically, but not its efforts for Italian-Americans, because those are voluntary.

The government does not allow hiring quotas for the groups it designates. But as a benchmark, employers must develop estimates of the groups’ availability in the labor pool.

Yet even agreeing on how many Italian-Americans are in that pool has proved hard for the university and its critics. Indeed, the 1994 settlement called for the appointment of an expert panel to help sort out the matter. One thorny issue was whether to include people who report Italian ancestry secondarily on the long form of the census — for example, a woman who lists herself first as Irish, then Italian.

The expert panel finally determined in 2006 that half of them should be counted.

A Solomonic decision well worth the 12 years it took to emerge.

Today, CUNY says, Italian-Americans make up 8.4 percent of the qualified candidates in the available labor pool; Dr. Milione has called that estimate low. ...

Others see the tortured history of Italian-Americans at the university as a case study in an old bit of wisdom: No good deed goes unpunished.

“The best of intentions are quickly mired in the potential for litigation and additional charges of discrimination,” said Andy Brantley, president of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. “

Indeed.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Obama and anticolonialism

Dinesh D'Souza has written a cover story for Forbes, "How Obama Thinks," that argues that "anticolonialism" is an important part of Obama's intellectual make-up.

D'Souza's article has just about everybody howling with rage. It's not a terribly well-done article -- D'Souza's attempts to draw straight lines between Obama's intellectual heritage and various current Obama Administration policies are often silly. Yet, the outraged response to D'Souza's piece just shows how few people out of the millions who have bought the President's memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance have actually read the book, and how many fewer have read it with the care it deserves.

Anticolonialism, especially anti-neocolonialism, is merely a subtheme in Dreams from My Father (the main theme is, not surprisingly, "race and inheritance"), but it's a totally obvious one, although everything is filtered through Obama's self-absorption. Here, for example, are some excerpts from Chapter 15 of Dreams from My Father, the first chapter about Obama's trip to Kenya in 1988:

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I FLEW OUT OF HEATHROW Airport under stormy skies. .. a pale, gangly youth, still troubled with acne-took the seat beside me. 

“Nairobi’s a beautiful place, I hear. Wouldn’t mind stopping off there one of these days. Going to Johannesburg, I am.” ... “But then the rest of Africa’s falling apart now, isn’t it? Least from what I can tell. The blacks in South Africa aren’t starving to death like they do in some of these Godforsaken countries. Don’t envy them, mind you, but compared to some poor bugger in Ethiopia-” ...

I pulled out a book from my carry-on bag and tried to read. It was a portrait of several African countries written by a Western journalist [most likely The Africans by David Lamb of the Los Angeles Times] who’d spent a decade in Africa; an old Africa hand, he would be called, someone who apparently prided himself on the balanced assessment. The book’s first few chapters discussed the history of colonialism at some length: the manipulation of tribal hatreds and the caprice of colonial boundaries, the displacements, the detentions, the indignities large and small. The early heroism of independence figures like Kenyatta and Nkrumah was duly noted, their later drift toward despotism attributed at least in part to various Cold War machinations.

But by the book’s third chapter, images from the present had begun to outstrip the past. Famine, disease, the coups and countercoups led by illiterate young men wielding AK-47s like shepherd sticks-if Africa had a history, the writer seemed to say, the scale of current suffering had rendered such history meaningless.

Poor buggers. Godforsaken countries.

I set the book down, feeling a familiar anger flush through me, an anger all the more maddening for its lack of a clear target. Beside me the young Brit was snoring softly now, his glasses askew on his fin-shaped nose. Was I angry at him? I wondered. Was it his fault that, for all my education, all the theories in my possession, I had had no ready answers to the questions he’d posed? How much could I blame him for wanting to better his lot? Maybe I was just angry because of his easy familiarity with me, his assumption that I, as an American, even a black American, might naturally share in his dim view of Africa; an assumption that in his world at least marked a progress of sorts, but that for me only underscored my own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers.

I’d been feeling this way all through my stay in Europe-edgy, defensive, hesitant with strangers. I hadn’t planned it that way. I had thought of the layover there as nothing more than a whimsical detour, an opportunity to visit places I had never been before. For three weeks I had traveled alone, down one side of the continent and up the other, by bus and by train mostly, a guidebook in hand. I took tea by the Thames and watched children chase each other through the chestnut groves of Luxembourg Garden. I crossed the Plaza Mejor at high noon, with its De Chirico shadows and sparrows swirling across cobalt skies; and watched night fall over the Palatine, waiting for the first stars to appear, listening to the wind and its whispers of mortality. And by the end of the first week or so, I realized that I’d made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. ...

We [Obama and his half-sister Auma] wandered into the old marketplace [in Nairobi], ...  And all of this while a steady procession of black faces passed before your eyes, the round faces of babies and the chipped, worn faces of the old; beautiful faces that made me understand the transformation that Asante and other black Americans claimed to have undergone after their first visit to Africa. For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. ... Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal. ...

We turned onto Kimathi Street, named after one of the leaders of the Mau-Mau rebellion. I had read a book about Kimathi before leaving Chicago and remembered a photograph of him: one in a group of dreadlocked men who lived in the forest and spread secret oaths among the native population-the prototype guerrilla fighter. It was a clever costume he had chosen for himself (Kimathi and the other Mau-Mau leaders had served in British regiments in their previous lives), an image that played on all the fears of the colonial West, the same sort of fear that Nat Turner had once evoked in the antebellum South and coke-crazed muggers now evoked in the minds of whites in Chicago.

Of course, the Mau-Mau lay in Kenya’s past. Kimathi had been captured and executed. Kenyatta had been released from prison and inaugurated Kenya’s first president. He had immediately assured whites who were busy packing their bags that businesses would not be nationalized, that landholdings would be kept intact, so long as the black man controlled the apparatus of government. Kenya became the West’s most stalwart pupil in Africa, a model of stability, a useful contrast to the chaos of Uganda, the failed socialism of Tanzania. Former freedom fighters returned to their villages or joined the civil service or ran for a seat in Parliament. Kimathi became a name on a street sign, thoroughly tamed for the tourists.

I took the opportunity to study these tourists as Auma and I sat down for lunch in the outdoor cafe of the New Stanley Hotel. They were everywhere-Germans, Japanese, British, Americans-taking pictures, hailing taxis, fending off street peddlers, many of them dressed in safari suits like extras on a movie set. In Hawaii, when we were still kids, my friends and I had laughed at tourists like these, with their sunburns and their pale, skinny legs, basking in the glow of our obvious superiority. Here in Africa, though, the tourists didn’t seem so funny. I felt them as an encroachment, somehow; I found their innocence vaguely insulting. It occurred to me that in their utter lack of self-consciousness, they were expressing a freedom that neither Auma nor I could ever experience, a bedrock confidence in their own parochialism, a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.

Just then I noticed an American family sit down a few tables away from us. Two of the African waiters immediately sprang into action, both of them smiling from one ear to the other. Since Auma and I hadn’t yet been served, I began to wave at the two waiters who remained standing by the kitchen, thinking they must have somehow failed to see us. For some time they managed to avoid my glance, but eventually an older man with sleepy eyes relented and brought us over two menus. His manner was resentful, though, and after several more minutes he showed no signs of ever coming back. Auma’s face began to pinch with anger, and again I waved to our waiter, who continued in his silence as he wrote down our orders. At this point, the Americans had already received their food and we still had no place settings. I overheard a young girl with a blond ponytail complain that there wasn’t any ketchup. Auma stood up. “Let’s go.”

She started heading for the exit, then suddenly turned and walked back to the waiter, who was watching us with an impassive stare. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Auma said to him, her voice shaking. “You should be ashamed.”

The waiter replied brusquely in Swahili.

“I don’t care how many mouths you have to feed, you cannot treat your own people like dogs. Here…” Auma snapped open her purse and took out a crumpled hundred-shilling note. “You see!” she shouted. “I can pay for my own damn food.” She threw the note to the ground, then marched out onto the street. For several minutes we wandered without apparent direction, until I finally suggested we sit down on a bench beside the central post office.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She nodded. “That was stupid, throwing away money like that.” She set down her purse beside her and we watched the traffic pass. “You know, I can’t go to a club in any of these hotels if I’m with another African woman,” she said eventually. “The askaris will turn us away, thinking we are prostitutes. The same in any of these big office buildings. If you don’t work there, and you are African, they will stop you until you tell them your business. But if you’re with a German friend, then they’re all smiles. ‘Good evening, miss,’ they’ll say. ‘How are you tonight?’” Auma shook her head. “That’s why Kenya, no matter what its GNP, no matter how many things you can buy here, the rest of Africa laughs. It’s the whore of Africa, Barack. It opens its legs to anyone who can pay.”

I told Auma she was being too hard on the Kenyan, that the same sort of thing happened in Djakarta or Mexico City, just an unfortunate matter of economics. But as we started back toward the apartment, I knew my words had done nothing to soothe her bitterness. I suspected that she was right: not all the tourists in Nairobi had come for the wildlife. Some came because Kenya, without shame, offered to re-create an age when the lives of whites in foreign lands rested comfortably on the backs of the darker races; an age of innocence before Kimathi and other angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta started to lash out in street crime and revolution. In Kenya, a white man could still walk through Isak Dinesen’s home and imagine romance with a mysterious young baroness, or sip gin under the ceiling fans of the Lord Delamare Hotel and admire portraits of Hemingway smiling after a successful hunt, surrounded by grim-faced coolies. He could be served by a black man without fear or guilt, marvel at the exchange rate, and leave a generous tip; and if he felt a touch of indigestion at the sight of leprous beggars outside the hotel, he could always administer a ready tonic. Black rule has come, after all. This is their country. We’re only visitors.

Did our waiter know that black rule had come? Did it mean anything to him? Maybe once, I thought to myself. He would be old enough to remember independence, the shouts of “Uhuru!” and the raising of new flags. But such memories may seem almost fantastic to him now, distant and naive. He’s learned that the same people who controlled the land before independence still control the same land, that he still cannot eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels that the white man has built. He sees the money of the city swirling above his head, and the technology that spits out goods from its robot mouth. If he’s ambitious he will do his best to learn the white man’s language and use the white man’s machines, trying to make ends meet the same way the computer repairman in Newark or the bus driver back in Chicago does, with alternating spurts of enthusiasm or frustration but mostly with resignation. And if you say to him that he’s serving the interests of neocolonialism or some other such thing, he will reply that yes, he will serve if that is what’s required. It is the lucky ones who serve; the unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs; many will drown.

Then again, maybe that’s not all that the waiter is feeling. Maybe a part of him still clings to the stories of Mau-Mau, the same part of him that remembers the hush of a village night or the sound of his mother grinding corn under a stone pallet. Something in him still says that the white man’s ways are not his ways, that the objects he may use every day are not of his making. He remembers a time, a way of imagining himself, that he leaves only at his peril. He can’t escape the grip of his memories. And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever game staves off the bottomless poverty, careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition. A voice says to him yes, changes have come, the old ways lie broken, and you must find a way as fast as you can to feed your belly and stop the white man from laughing at you.

A voice says no, you will sooner burn the earth to the ground.

... The travel agency was owned by Asians; most small businesses in Nairobi were owned by Asians. Right away, Auma had tensed up.

“You see how arrogant they are?” she had whispered as we watched a young Indian woman order her black clerks to and fro. “They call themselves Kenyans, but they want nothing to do with us. As soon as they make their money, they send it off to London or Bombay.”

Her attitude had touched a nerve. “How can you blame Asians for sending their money out of the country,” I had asked her, “after what happened in Uganda?” I had gone on to tell her about the close Indian and Pakistani friends I had back in the States, friends who had supported black causes, friends who had lent me money when I was tight and taken me into their homes when I’d had no place to stay. Auma had been unmoved.

“Ah, Barack,” she had said. “Sometimes you’re so naive.”

I looked at Auma now, her face turned toward the window. What had I expected my little lecture to accomplish? My simple formulas for Third World solidarity had little application in Kenya. Here, persons of Indian extraction were like the Chinese in Indonesia, the Koreans in the South Side of Chicago, outsiders who knew how to trade and kept to themselves, working the margins of a racial caste system, more visible and so more vulnerable to resentment. It was nobody’s fault necessarily. It was just a matter of history, an unfortunate fact of life.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Machete"

From my new review in Taki's Magazine:

After the Euro-ennui of The American last week, Robert Rodriguez’s Machete sounded pretty entertaining: heroic illegal immigrants driving bouncing lowrider cars slaughter the evil white Americans holed up in a modern Alamo. Well, anything had to be better than waiting around for George Clooney to furrow his brow some more.

And Rodriguez, the junior varsity Quentin Tarantino, has a long list of sort-of-good movies to his name, such as Spy Kids and Sin City. Plus, Machete got even better reviews than The American did (72 percent thumbs up) and an enthusiastic 7.8 out of 10 rating from the fanboy raters at Internet Movie Database.

Because The American was, deservedly, the worst graded movie of the year (D-) in CinemaScore’s audience exit polls, there was much anticipatory schadenfreude among people who follow box office results that The American’s second weekend revenue would plummet. And, it did. Yet, Machete’s haul fell even faster, down 63 percent to only $4.2 million.

What happened? It’s an interesting question during a slow movie season because everybody recognizes that the gradual Mexicanization of America is a big deal statistically (there are 31 million people of Mexican origin in America). Yet few in America’s popular culture elite know much about Mexican-Americans, who may be even less common now in Hollywood than in the days of Anthony Quinn. Although there are three celebrated Mexican art house directors who moved to Hollywood after finding success in Mexico, the “Three Amigos,” the only big name filmmaker of representative Mexican-American background is Robert Rodriguez. (He’s from a San Antonio family of ten siblings.)

Rodriguez teamed up with Tarantino to make the 2007 double feature Grindhouse, an homage to bad 1970s exploitation films. Machete started out as a fake trailer in Grindhouse about a cutlass-brandishing Mexican federale who leads illegal aliens in race war against Texas whites. Neither auteur has shown much skill at directing action, but Tarantino can frame compositions and write dialogue. Rodriguez’s most notable talent is concocting ideas that build pre-release buzz among the Internet nerds who are the most vocal film fans these days.

Rodriguez put his second cousin, Danny Trejo, a 66-year-old ex-con and longtime character actor, in the title role. Trejo, who does project a certain gravitas, looks like Charles Bronson in one of his American Indian roles, if Bronson had been saddled with Edward James Olmos’s dermatologist. Why hasn’t anybody before Rodriguez been enough of a genius to dream up making an ultra-violent action movie starring a spear-carrier older than Bronson was in Death Wish IV? I mean, other than that Old Penitentiary Face Trejo can’t move around so good anymore and never could actually act much.

Read  the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Ducks on the pond

Virginia Heffernan pointed out that the in-thing among bloggers is to "show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody ... setting off excerpts so they play as parody..." 

Yes, but it's getting to be like shooting fish in a barrel.

So, without further ado:

Racial Disparity in School Suspensions

by Sam Dillon
New York Times

In many of the nation’s middle schools, black boys were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white boys, according to a new study, which also found that black girls were suspended at four times the rate of white girls.

School authorities also suspended Hispanic and American Indian middle school students at higher rates than white students, though not at such disproportionate rates as for black children, the study found. Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites.

The study analyzed four decades of federal Department of Education data on suspensions, with a special focus on figures from 2002 and 2006, that were drawn from 9,220 of the nation’s 16,000 public middle schools.

The study, “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization.

The co-authors, Daniel J. Losen, a senior associate at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Russell Skiba, a professor at Indiana University, said they focused on suspensions from middle schools because recent research had shown that students’ middle school experience was crucial for determining future academic success.

One recent study of 400 incarcerated high school freshmen in Baltimore found that two-thirds had been suspended at least once in middle school. 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Bill James's guilty conscience

For a few years, I've been pointing out that baseball's most sainted statistical analyst, Bill James, was completely AWOL while obvious steroid-users were piling up statistically ridiculous numbers. He'd immediately change the subject from steroids to, say, Barry Bonds using a maple bat instead of an ash one.

Now that the evidence of steroid use by most of the setters of anomalous statistics is overwhelming, he's changed tunes and is praising the cheaters in a Slate article:

Life, Liberty, and Breaking the Rules
In defense of Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, jaywalkers, and all the other scofflaws that make America great.

First of all, I have absolutely no doubt that, had steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs existed during Babe Ruth's career, Babe Ruth would not only have used them, he would have used more of them than Barry Bonds.

Let me propose a more relevant counterfactual. If Mr. James had been intellectually honest and had spoken out about steroids, as, say, Tom Boswell of the Washington Post did as early as 1988, then Mr. James would not have been hired as a senior executive of the Boston Red Sox in 2003 and capped his career by helping them win their first World Series since Babe Ruth's time in 2004. Why not? Because the Red Sox's two biggest hitters, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, were juicers.

Should intellectuals who are dishonest about the biggest issue of their time in their field because of obvious conflicts of interest be subjected to penalty of law? 

No. 

But they should be publicly shamed.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?"

Here's the opening of my new VDARE.com column:

For decades, American economic sages, such as Larry Summers, Tom Friedman, and Alan Greenspan, have implied that manufacturing stuff was more or less obsolete—that the building blocks of the economy of the future would be cheap labor and  expensive finance. The Chinese will make everything, while Americans will get rich selling each other ever more sophisticated financial instruments.

You might ask: What about the 98 percent of Americans who aren’t cut out for working for Goldman Sachs?

Well, you see, all we have to do is fix the schools. Then everybody will work for Goldman!

The Germans, however, never got the memo. All those speeches at Davos and articles in The Economist about how expensive skilled labor is the road to ruin worried them, but didn’t convince them. Thomas Geoghegan’s entertaining new book about the triumph of the German economy, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life, explains why the Germans have kept their files to the grindstone and how it's paid off for them. Germany exports more each year than America, despite having only 27 percent as many people. German machinery is more than competitive on the world market, even with Germany’s high wages, six-week vacations, strong unions, and workers getting half the seats on many corporate boards.

Despite having to bail out the profligate Greeks, the German economy in 2010 is expanding and unemployment dropping. Germany runs a trade surplus. And, as illustrated by the blockbuster sales in Germany of Germany Abolishes Itself [VDARE.COM note: review coming soon!], Thilo Sarrazin’s new book criticizing immigration, the self-respect of the German nation is finally coming out of the closet.

The Anglo-American mantra of low wages being “good for the economy” has provided the intellectual keystone for pro-immigration pundits in the U.S. Although Geoghegan avoids mention of immigration in America, his analysis of why the German economic dynamo keeps humming subverts by analogy the case for immigration.

Geoghegan (whose Irish Catholic surname rhymes with “Reagan”) is a political anomaly in 21st Century America: he’s a 1940s-type pro-union Democrat. Geoghegan has scratched out a career defending in court (he’s a labor union lawyer) and in print (his first book was Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back), the interests of the least fashionable people in America: beefy, middle-aged, working class white guys in windbreakers.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Invite / Invade

Leon Wieseltier writes in The New Republic about America and Islam:

So: Cordoba House in New York and a Predator war in Pakistan—graciousness here and viciousness there—this should be our position.

Makes sense to me! What kind of moron would worry that anything could possibly go wrong with such a prudent, intellectually sophisticated grand strategy?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Non-cootie-covered ways to make an effort?

I'm totally out of touch on this subject, so let me ask commenters for ways for young men to come up with "interests" to put in personal ads beyond Tom Clancy and Van Halen, interests that might incline young women to think they might have something to talk about with you if you were to get together. My guess is that my median unmarried male reader is not a Roissy-style silver-tongued devil who can improvise brilliantly on every woman's favorite subject (Let's Talk About Me!), but instead prefers something slightly impersonal to discuss when first getting acquainted.

I'll give you two possibilities to get started:

1. For example, develop some level of expertise in the architectural history of where you live. Architecture is aesthetic, yet manly. Not that many girls know much about architecture relative to their other aesthetic interests, but they are naggingly aware that they should know more. (Obviously, if you live in Chicago, you will have more to talk about than if you live in Palmdale, so your mileage may vary.) For example, the recent indie romantic-drama hit, 500 Days of Summer, uses architectural fandom, with LA's rather spotty downtown carefully framed to look like downtown Chicago, as the basis for a rather nerdy young man's appeal to Zoey Deschanel.

An interest in architecture also provides a high-minded excuse to talk about what every 20 or 30 something is actually fascinated by: real estate. What neighborhoods will go up in value, which ones down? Architecture appreciation provides an excuse to stroll around gentrifying but still slightly edgy neighborhoods on cheap dates. 

2. Read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (or at least watch one of the 3 movie/TV adaptions of the last two decades). It's really witty, it's increasingly influential (it's the touchstone for popularizations of evolutionary psychology, among much else), and it will teach you a lot about the feminine mind. Plus, girls like it!

Now, what's the worst that could happen? These two suggestions might totally fail to help you with the ladies, but you will still have learned something of the architecture of your town and you will have read one of the great books in the English language.

That about exhausts my list of suggestions. What are yours?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Challenge

 Inductivist notes a striking change from General Social Survey data:

To some extent, this reflects a real change: recent Mexican immigrants tend to be more Indian (darker and relatively shorter) than Mexican immigrants of generations past, who tended to come from northern Mexico. But, mostly, it reflects a change in incentives and prestige in American society. 

In turn, I think this partly explains the remarkable lack of high individual accomplishment by Mexican Americans over the last couple of decades. Consider the country club sports, tennis and golf, in which three Mexican-American all-time greats emerged in the 1940s through 1970s, Pancho Gonzales, Lee Trevino, and Nancy Lopez, but none since then despite vast increases in numbers.

It would appear that contrary to contemporary thinking, Mexican-Americans performed better relative to their numbers when they felt challenged to prove themselves than in recent decades when society has bent over backwards to make all young minorities feel "comfortable" about themselves. In general, and in particular for Mexican Americans, a lack of challenge leads to complacency.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

British journalist: French schools don't nurture chavism enough

After sending his daughters to school in Paris, British journalist Peter Gumbel has written a book complaining that French schools are run by intelligent adults proud of being intelligent adults, who refuse to nurture inflated senses of accomplishment in their charges. From The Observer:

"These studies show that, while French children score quite highly in European studies on their ability and performance, when asked they rate themselves below countries with low levels of literacy," he said. "So even when they have the ability, their self-esteem has been knocked out of them."

Gumbel's book praises British schools, which may surprise UK parents accustomed to having them compared unfavourably with those across the channel. He told the Observer: "Although the French with their national curriculum have maintained standards and avoided being dumbed down, their system focuses on the transmission of knowledge and doesn't even remotely address the child or their wellbeing.

"There is more to school than getting good marks, and in Britain schools are not just about your brain but about sport and arts and finding lots of different ways of excelling. The British system may focus less on results, but it nurtures self-esteem, personality and character, which is something totally missing from the French system and this is tragic."

Here's my review of the French movie The Class, which is the opposite of all the Nice White Lady movies made in the U.S. The Class illustrates the typical French teacher's opinion of his students: they're surly morons.

 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The PC-Libertarian Conventional Wisdom Nexus, II

Unlike Austan Goolsbee (see next post), who has gone from being an NYT columnist to being Chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, Peter Orszag has gone from being Chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers to being an NYT columnist. Orszag writes in the NYT:

The most important book I’ve read over the past six months is Matthew Syed’s “Bounce.” Teddy Roosevelt once said that “in this life we get nothing save by effort.” Syed shows how trenchant Roosevelt was.

Syed is a two-time Olympian in table tennis. His book is impressive for two reasons. First, he takes empirical evidence on the science of success seriously (and in the areas where I know the literature to some degree, his depiction is quite accurate). Second, he shows how that evidence shatters widespread myths about what leads to better performance in any complex undertaking (including, for example, chess, tennis and math).

Basically, we’ve bought into several misconceptions about excellence, which are not only wrong but affirmatively counterproductive.

Let me focus today on the core one. Too many of us believe in the “talent” myth — that top performers are born, rather than built. But Syed shows that in almost every arena in which tasks are complex, top performers excel not because of innate ability but because of dedicated practice. ...

Success in most arenas of life is thus not a reflection of innate skill but rather devoted effort. And Syed demonstrates why it is not just effort, but purposeful effort that is key — if you’re going to get better at chunking, you can’t just go through the motions and punch time on the clock. You need to put your heart into it. 

Is it really too much to ask that people at the top of the pyramid in the U.S. talk to the rest of us like we are adults? Isn't it obvious that the answer to the question of what does it take to get to the top, nature or nurture, is: both?

P.S. Orszag is back in the NYT with more Gladwellian conventional wisdom, having been roughed up pretty badly by commenters the first time:

"Or to phrase it differently, it seems plausible that many more people than commonly believed (but perhaps not all people!) have sufficient innate skill to perform at world-class levels in complex fields with sufficient practice; the problem is that they do not undertake the necessary practice. Indeed, the examples we have of individuals who put in 10,000 or more hours of dedicated practice and fail to achieve stunning levels of performance is quite limited — because most people are not willing to put in that time and effort."

I guess Orszag has never heard the term "career minor leaguer." Think of Kevin Costner's character in Bull Durham.

Or how about future Hall of Fame manager Tommy Lasorda's failure to make it as major leaguer despite an excellent minor league record? Lasorda pitched only 58 innings with a terrible 6.48 ERA in the Show during a playing career lasting from 1945-1960. I guess he just didn't bleed Dodger Blue enough or he would have made it in the big leagues. His failure to make it in the big leagues couldn't have had anything to do with his lack of innate physical talent.

The trick these people play is in their term of art "dedicated practice," which is used to make their argument unfalsifiable. Sure, from age 5 to 33, Tommy Lasorda spent tens of thousands of hours practicing baseball, but, by definition, he wasn't practicing baseball the right way or he wouldn't have failed.

In summary, the point is not that Orszag shows a Malcolm Gladwell-level ability to perform reality checks on his favorite ideas. Orszag isn't particularly important in and of himself, other than that he represents roughly the political median of elite opinion in 21st Century America. He shows that there exist such systematic impediments to clear thought among elites today that somebody as smart and well connected as Orszag can make a fool of himself in his first week as a NYT columnist because he doesn't know any better.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The PC-Libertarian Worldview

From the New York Times:

President Obama on Friday will promote a longtime economic adviser, Austan D. Goolsbee, to chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, signaling continuity even as a high unemployment rate has left much of the public dissatisfied with administration policies. ... Mr. Obama’s decision to elevate Mr. Goolsbee, a left-of-center economist, to succeed Christina D. Romer, who returned this month to the University of California, Berkeley, is part of a broader flux within the White House economic team, as architects of the government’s response to the worst recession in 80 years begin moving up and out and their roles shift.

Goolsbee was Barack Obama's chief economic adviser in 2007, the first year of his Presidential run. Here are excerpts from Goolsbee's March 29, 2007 column in the New York Times, where he demonstrated his economic prescience by defending subprime mortgages because they increase homeownership among minorities:

‘Irresponsible’ Mortgages Have Opened Doors to Many of the Excluded
By AUSTAN GOOLSBEE

... Almost every new form of mortgage lending — from adjustable-rate mortgages to home equity lines of credit to no-money-down mortgages — has tended to expand the pool of people who qualify but has also been greeted by a large number of people saying that it harms consumers and will fool people into thinking they can afford homes that they cannot.

Congress is contemplating a serious tightening of regulations to make the new forms of lending more difficult. New research from some of the leading housing economists in the country, however, examines the long history of mortgage market innovations and suggests that regulators should be mindful of the potential downside in tightening too much. ...

Lost in the current discussion about borrowers’ income levels in the subprime market is the fact that someone with a low income now but who stands to earn much more in the future would, in a perfect market, be able to borrow from a bank to buy a house. That is how economists view the efficiency of a capital market: people’s decisions unrestricted by the amount of money they have right now.

And this study shows that measured this way, the mortgage market has become more perfect, not more irresponsible. People tend to make good decisions about their own economic prospects. ...

Of course, basing loans on future earnings expectations is riskier than lending money to prime borrowers at 30-year fixed interest rates. That is why interest rates are higher for subprime borrowers and for big mortgages that require little money down. Sometimes the risks flop. Sometimes people even have to sell their properties because they cannot make the numbers work.

The traditional causes of foreclosure, even before there was subprime lending, were job loss, divorce and major medical expenses. And the national foreclosure data seem to suggest that these issues remain paramount. ...

Also, the historical evidence suggests that cracking down on new mortgages may hit exactly the wrong people. As Professor Rosen explains, “The main thing that innovations in the mortgage market have done over the past 30 years is to let in the excluded: the young, the discriminated against, the people without a lot of money in the bank to use for a down payment.” It has allowed them access to mortgages whereas lenders would have once just turned them away.

The Center for Responsible Lending estimated that in 2005, a majority of home loans to African-Americans and 40 percent of home loans to Hispanics were subprime loans. The existence and spread of subprime lending helps explain the drastic growth of homeownership for these same groups. Since 1995, for example, the number of African-American households has risen by about 20 percent, but the number of African-American homeowners has risen almost twice that rate, by about 35 percent. For Hispanics, the number of households is up about 45 percent and the number of homeowning households is up by almost 70 percent.

And do not forget that the vast majority of even subprime borrowers have been making their payments. Indeed, fewer than 15 percent of borrowers in this most risky group have even been delinquent on a payment, much less defaulted.

When contemplating ways to prevent excessive mortgages for the 13 percent of subprime borrowers whose loans go sour, regulators must be careful that they do not wreck the ability of the other 87 percent to obtain mortgages.

For be it ever so humble, there really is no place like home, even if it does come with a balloon payment mortgage.

Tyler Cowen posted the paragraphs about minorities benefiting from subprime loans on Marginal Revolution under the approving title "Austan Goolsbee Is Not a Credit Snob." I commented on March 29, 2007:

"There was a huge push by the government over the last 12-14 years to get banks to make more home loans to minorities. As Malcolm X would have said if he was an economist, today, the chickens are coming home to roost."

Do you think anybody will dare bring up Goolsbee's column to his face?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Bill Gates calls for higher IQ toilets

Rich Karlgaard of Forbes writes:

At an August 6, 2010 conference in Lake Tahoe, the richest and smartest guy in the room, Bill Gates, offered his opinion on the next big thing.

Ready?

Toilets. All kinds of toilets. Broadband biffies that email PSA counts to your doctor. Do-gooder dumpers that save water in the third world.

“[Toilets are] one of the greatest under investments,” Gates effused. “Not much money goes into that. You end up with the low IQ guys on the toilets.” 

I think what Bill is saying here is that low IQ guys go into the toilet industry.

If you know Gates — I once spent 5 days on the road with him — you’ll know he uses the term, IQ, a lot. Gates has always loved IQ. He loves it like a football coach loves 40-yard-dash speed. It never seems to occur to Gates that IQ has become a politically incorrect subject for many. 

Which raises the question of who is actually running the Gates Foundation, which has devoted billions to educations fads, such "small learning communities" and to bullying school boards into requiring passing Algebra II to graduate from high schoo. It's just another example of today's lack of intellectual integration between private life and public policy discourse.

(To its credit, the Gates did, however, give $15 million to adding iodine to salt in Third World countries, which helps reduce cretinism.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Making an effort

Gizmodo has an article analyzing 526,000 profiles on the dating site OKcupid in terms of most racially distinctive common phrases (not the most common phrases, but the most different). The white guy list starts off, in order of distinctiveness by race:

tom clancy, van halen, golfing, harley davidson, ghostbusters, phish, the big lebowski, soundgarden, brew, boating, nofx, groundhog day, hockey, jeep, blazing saddles, the red sox, the dropkick murphys, megadeth, grilling, ccr, robert heinlein, boats, skiing, zappa, nascar

White women start off:

the red sox, jodi picoult, boating, nascar

Guys, do you notice something here? Girls are at least pretending to like stuff you might like, such as the Red Sox and Nascar. They're making an effort. 

Not all guys are this stubborn. For example, here's the top of the Latino male list:

merengue, bachata, colombian, hispanic, latino, dominican, stationed, peruvian, reggaeton, familia, cuban, musica, salsa, soccer, amigos, peru, boxing, automotive, baseball, hola, marines, mma, hip hop, ufc *

The first two on the lists are dances. Latino guys know that Latina girls like to dance, so they claim to like to dance, too.

It's really not that complicated, but an awful lot of white guys treat making any sort of effort to be able to fake an interest in anything girls might want to talk about as a sure way to get cooties.

* By the way, it's interesting that "Mexican" doesn't show up on the Latino list. Is that because "Mexican food" shows up on other people's profiles, so "Mexican" is not racially distinctive enough. Or is "Mexican" kind of the unimpressive default for Latinos, and everybody who can claim to be something else wants to specify they aren't Mexican?

 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Critical Thinking

In the comments to my recent post on the Golden Age of Test Creation, Mitch points me to Linda Darling-Hammond, the prominent Ed Schooler from the Stanford Ed School, explaining how better tests would make American students smarter:

Whereas students in most parts of the United States are typically asked simply to recognize a single fact they have memorized from a list of answers, students in high-achieving countries are asked to apply their knowledge in the ways that writers, mathematicians, historians and scientists do.

In the United States, a typical item on the 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, asks students which two elements from a multiple choice list are found in the Earth's atmosphere. An item from the Victoria, Australia, high school biology test (which resembles those in Hong Kong and Singapore) describes how a particular virus works, asks students to design a drug to kill the virus and explain how the drug operates (complete with diagrams), and then to design and describe an experiment to test the drug - asking students to think and act like scientists. 

This kind of testing would clearly pay for itself just from the patent rights to the anti-viral drugs designed by the high school test-takers. They must be worth billions!

 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The American"

From my review in Taki's Magazine:

Why has The American, in which superstar George Clooney plays an international hitman hiding out from Swedish assassins in Italy, been released in early September, the Idiocracy season of the Hollywood calendar?

Directed by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, it has received mostly positive reviews from American critics. They hasten to point out that The American is not an action thriller as its trailer promises. Instead, it’s a very European art film, full of abstraction, and if you find it boring, then you are a mouth-breathing American who doesn’t deserve to enjoy it.

Audiences have been less enthusiastic. Ten minutes into Clooney’s plodding, morose, obtuse performance as a depressed contract killer, coughs started ricocheting around the theatre. After twelve minutes, my son politely asked, “Dad, is it okay if I go sneak into Machete now?” When the credits rolled, half the audience sprinted out, snorting in disgust, while the other half sat rooted, sure that there had to be a post-credits stinger scene in which something cool, or at least interesting, would finally happen. ...

The American is a lowbrow art film. ... The script’s handful of truthy details are largely mistakes that anybody with access to Wikipedia could have fixed in ten minutes. The Day of the Jackal it’s not. For instance, Clooney proudly announces that his sniper rifle shoots bullets at 365 miles per hour. What is it? A paintball gun? The M14’s muzzle velocity of 850 meters per second is five times faster. And when is muzzle velocity denoted in miles per hour? With equal verisimilitude, George could have described the speed as “a million furlongs per fortnight.”

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below. 

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Whatever Happened to the Democrats' Youth / Minority Voter Juggernaut?

In my new VDARE.com column, I review the numbers on the likely sizable decline from 2008 to 2010 in young and minority and, especially young minority voters. We've been told over and over that the Arizona law will lead to a tidal wave of minorities voting Democratic, but current polling shows minorities bored with politics and not thinking about the November elections. I review various reasons and focus on one seldom articulated:

Appealing to white interests does not automatically alienate Hispanic and Asian voters.

When you think about common human psychology, this shouldn’t be surprising. For example, the press’s notion that Latino voters would respond to Republican criticism of legal and illegal immigration with relentless resentment, with endless spite, is just another example of projection by the media elite.

The reality is that most nonwhites can’t be bothered to feel as much racial hatred as the MSM demands they feel. They’ve got a life.

Instead, human beings generally try to associate themselves with what is being praised by society and disassociate themselves from what is being criticized. Being callow, young people are particularly impressionable. Despite all the romantic piffle about young rebels, the fact is that young people (especially the kind who are likely to vote) tend to be conformists. Hispanic and Asian youths are perhaps even more conformist than white and black youths.

When viewed from this perspective, the rise and fall of young Hispanic and Asian excitement over Obama’s party in 2008 to 2010 makes sense. Voting for a black candidate for President was not an act of youthful rebellion for Hispanics and Asians, but of conformity to the endlessly spelled-out wishes of the respectable institutions of society: the media, the schools, and even, so far anybody could tell, the Republican nominee.

Similarly, if the President of the United States praises illegal immigrants (as George W. Bush did, saying “You're going to come here if you're worth your salt, if you want to put food on the table for your families”), well, Viva La Raza!

But on the other hand, if white people continue to become ever so slightly less intimidated about publicly defending their own interests, well, Hispanic and Asian young people have more fun things to do with their time than worry about elections.

This implies a simple, effective strategy for the Republican Party—the opposite of that pursued by Bush, Rove, and McCain: Instead of appeasing professional minority activists and thus making them more powerful by letting them claim to be able to deliver goodies, stand up to them.

The GOP remains, overwhelmingly, a party whose most enthusiastic supporters are mature white men. Stop being ashamed of that fact. Show some self-respect. Stand up for the interests of your voters. Don’t let ethnic hustlers bully your constituents so much.

Read the whole thing at VDARE.com and comment upon it here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Golden Age of Standardized Test Creation

Psychometrics is a relatively mature field of science, and a politically unpopular one. So you might think there isn't much money to be made in making up brand new standardized tests. Yet, there is.

From the NYT:

U.S. Asks Educators to Reinvent Student Tests, and How They Are Given

By SAM DILLON

Standardized exams — the multiple-choice, bubble tests in math and reading that have played a growing role in American public education in recent years — are being overhauled.

Over the next four years, two groups of states, 44 in all, will get $330 million to work with hundreds of university professors and testing experts to design a series of new assessments that officials say will look very different from those in use today.

The new tests, which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described in a speech in Virginia on Thursday, are to be ready for the 2014-15 school year.

They will be computer-based, Mr. Duncan said, and will measure higher-order skills ignored by the multiple-choice exams used in nearly every state, including students’ ability to read complex texts, synthesize information and do research projects.

“The use of smarter technology in assessments,” Mr. Duncan said, “makes it possible to assess students by asking them to design products of experiments, to manipulate parameters, run tests and record data.”

I don't know what the phrase "design products of experiments" even means, so I suspect that the schoolchildren of 2014-15 won't be doing much of it.

Okay, I looked up Duncan's speech, "Beyond the Bubble Tests," and what he actually said was "design products or experiments," which almost makes sense, until you stop and think about it. Who is going to assess the products the students design? George Foreman? Donald Trump? (The Donald would be good at grading these tests: tough, but fair. Here's a video of Ali G pitching the product he designed -- the "ice cream glove" -- to Trump.

Because the new tests will be computerized and will be administered several times throughout the school year, they are expected to provide faster feedback to teachers than the current tests about what students are learning and what might need to be retaught.

Both groups will produce tests that rely heavily on technology in their classroom administration and in their scoring, she noted.

Both will provide not only end-of-year tests similar to those in use now but also formative tests that teachers will administer several times a year to help guide instruction, she said.

And both groups’ tests will include so-called performance-based tasks, designed to mirror complex, real-world situations.

In performance-based tasks, which are increasingly common in tests administered by the military and in other fields, students are given a problem — they could be told, for example, to pretend they are a mayor who needs to reduce a city’s pollution — and must sift through a portfolio of tools and write analytically about how they would use them to solve the problem.

Oh, boy ...

There is some good stuff here -- adaptive tests are a good idea (both the military's AFQT and the GRE have gone over to them). But there's obvious trouble, too.

Okay, so these new tests are going to be much more complex, much more subjective, and get graded much faster than fill-in-the-bubble tests? They'll be a dessert topping and a floor wax!

These sound a lot like the Advanced Placement tests offered to high school students, which usually include lengthy essays. But AP tests take two months to grade, and are only offered once per year (in May, with scores coming back in July), because they use high school teachers on their summer vacations to grade them.

There's no good reason why fill-in-the-bubble tests can't be scored quickly. A lot of public school bubble tests are graded slothfully, but they don't have to be. My son took the ERB's Independent School Entrance Exam on a Saturday morning and his score arrived at our house in the U.S. Mail the following Friday, six days later.

The only legitimate reason for slow grading is if there are also essays to be read, but in my experience, essay results tend to be dubious at least below the level of Advanced Placement tests, where there is specific subject matter in common. The Writing test that was added to the SAT around 2003 has largely been a bust, with many colleges refusing to use it in the admissions process.

One often overlooked problem with any kind of writing test, for example, is that graders have a hard time reading kids' handwriting. You can't demand that kids type because millions of them can't. Indeed, writing test results tend to correlate with number of words written, which is often more of a test of handwriting speed than of anything else. Multiple choice tests have obvious weaknesses, but at least they minimize the variance introduced by small motor skills.

And the reference to "performance-based tasks" in which people are supposed to "write analytically" is naive. I suspect that Duncan and the NYT man are confused by all the talk during the Ricci case about the wonders of "assessment centers" in which candidates for promotion are supposed to sort through an in-basket and talk out loud about how they would handle problems. In other words, those are hugely expensive oral tests. The city of New Haven brought in 30 senior fire department officials from out of state to be the judges on the oral part of the test.

And the main point of spending all this money on an oral test is that an oral test can't be blindgraded. In New Haven, 19 of the 30 oral test judges were minorities, which isn't something that happens by randomly recruiting senior fire department officials from across the country.

But nobody can afford to rig the testing of 35,000,000 students annually.
 
Here are some excerpts from Duncan's speech:

President Obama called on the nation's governors and state education chiefs "to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity."

You know your chain is being yanked when you hear that schoolteachers are supposed to teach "21st century skills" like "entrepreneurship." So, schoolteachers are going to teach kids how to be Steve Jobs?

Look, there are a lot of good things to say about teachers, but, generally speaking, people who strive for union jobs with lifetime tenure and summers off are not the world's leading role models on entrepreneurship.

Further, whenever you hear teachers talk about how they teach "critical thinking," you can more or less translate that into "I hate drilling brats on their times tables. It's so boring." On the whole, teachers aren't very good critical thinkers. If they were, Ed School would drive them batty. (Here is an essay about Ed School by one teacher who is a good critical thinker.)

And last but not least, for the first time, the new assessments will better measure the higher-order thinking skills so vital to success in the global economy of the 21st century and the future of American prosperity. To be on track today for college and careers, students need to show that they can analyze and solve complex problems, communicate clearly, synthesize information, apply knowledge, and generalize learning to other settings. ...

Over the past 19 months, I have visited 42 states to talk to teachers, parents, students, school leaders, and lawmakers about our nation's public schools. Almost everywhere I went, I heard people express concern that the curriculum had narrowed as more educators "taught to the test," especially in schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students.

Two words: Disparate Impact.

The higher the intellectual skills that are tested, the larger the gaps between the races will turn out to be. Consider the AP Physics C exam, the harder of the two AP physics tests: In 2008, 5,705 white males earned 5s (the top score) versus six black females.

In contrast, tests of rote memorization, such as having third graders chant the multiplication tables, will have smaller disparate impact than tests of whether students "can analyze and solve complex problems, communicate clearly, synthesize information, apply knowledge, and generalize learning to other settings." That's a pretty decent description of what IQ tests measure.

Duncan says that the new tests could replace existing high school exit exams that students must pass to graduate.

Many educators have lamented for years the persistent disconnect between what high schools expect from their students and the skills that colleges expect from incoming freshman. Yet both of the state consortia that won awards in the Race to the Top assessment competition pursued and got a remarkable level of buy-in from colleges and universities.

... In those MOUs, 188 public colleges and universities and 16 private ones agreed that they would work with the consortium to define what it means to be college-ready on the new high school assessments.

The fact that you can currently graduate from high school without being smart enough for college is not a bug, it's a feature. Look, this isn't Lake Wobegon. Half the people in America are below average in intelligence. They aren't really college material. But they shouldn't all have to go through life branded as a high school dropout instead of high school graduate because they weren't lucky enough in the genetic lottery to be college material.

The Gates Foundation and the U. of California ganged up on the LA public schools to get the school board to pass a rule that nobody will be allowed to graduate who hasn't passed three years of math, including Algebra II. That's great for UC, not so great for an 85 IQ kid who just wants a high school diploma so employers won't treat him like (uh oh) a high school dropout. But, nobody gets that.

Another benefit of Duncan's new high stakes tests will be Smaller Sample Sizes of Questions:

With the benefit of technology, assessment questions can incorporate audio and video. Problems can be situated in real-world environments, where students perform tasks or include multi-stage scenarios and extended essays.

By way of example, the NAEP has experimented with asking eighth-graders to use a hot-air balloon simulation to design and conduct an experiment to determine the relationship between payload mass and balloon altitude. As the balloon rises in the flight box, the student notes the changes in altitude, balloon volume, and time to final altitude. Unlike filling in the bubble on a score sheet, this complex simulation task takes 60 minutes to complete.

So, the NAEP has experimented with this kind of question. How did the experiment work out?

You'll notice that the problem with using up 60 minutes of valuable testing time on a single multipart problem instead of, say, 60 separate problems is that it radically reduces the sample size. A lot of kids will get off track right away and get a zero for the whole one hour segment. Other kids will have seen a hot air balloon problem the week before and nail the whole thing and get a perfect score for the hour.

That kind of thing is fine for the low stakes NAEP where results are only reported by groups with huge sample sizes (for example, the NAEP reports scores for whites, blacks, and Hispanics, but not for Asians). But for high stakes testing of individual students and of their teachers, it's too random. AP tests have large problems on them, but they are only given to the top quarter or so of high school students in the country, not the bottom half of grade school students.

It's absurd to think that it's all that crucial that all American schoolchildren must be able to "analyze and solve complex problems, communicate clearly, synthesize information, apply knowledge, and generalize learning to other settings." You can be a success in life without being able to do any of that terribly well.

Look, for example, at the Secretary of Education. Arne Duncan has spent 19 months traveling to 42 states, talking about testing with teachers, parents, school leaders, and lawmakers. Yet, has he been able to synthesize information about testing terribly well at all? Has his failure to apply knowledge and generalize learning about testing gotten him fired from the Cabinet?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer