The news from Connecticut’s education front is not good. According to a
piece in CTMirror, SAT results show that “One-third of high school
juniors are not reading and writing well enough to begin taking college courses
or start a career, statewide SAT results released Monday show. Math
results are even more dire – 59 percent failed to meet the college- or
career-ready standard.”
The figures indicate that the yawning “gaps in achievement
between minority students and their white peers” have not improved. Ajit Gopalakrishnan,
Bureau Chief Connecticut State Department of Education Performance Office, said
the scores show slight improvements for minority students but there is still
work to be done.”
The locution “still work to be done” is one of those polite
phrases that hide a multitude of sins. Some colleges have added an “adversity
index” to their SAT exams. High School juniors in Connecticut are
failing to meet “career ready standards” for reasons other than race or ethnic
origin. The failure of African American high school juniors to meet standards
met by “white” students, we may be sure, has nothing to do with the amount of
melanin in their skin; and Hispanic students who have descended from a racial
line that gave the world Cervantes and Jorge Luis Borges needn’t worry that
they cannot meet standard SAT scores because they are Hispanic rather than, say
white – whatever that means – or Asian.
In a day and age in which the slightest reference to race or national origin, when accompanied by a critical remark, is denounced from every secular pulpit in the nation as exhibiting “racism,” whatever that means, one must question why categories of race or national origin figure so mightily in SAT data analysis. We’ve just survived a brutal battle in which it had been asserted that a question concerning whether or not a person counted in a census was an American citizen was, in fact, an invidious form of racism.
And yet here we have, within collected SAT data, often cited information
on race and national origin that appears to show students
who are African American or Hispanic are
somehow more intellectually deprived than “whites” precisely because they are African American or Hispanic.
Why do we not rely on different, more pertinent breakdowns?
How many students who have failed to meet SAT standards -- black, white or
Hispanic -- come from homes in which a father is absent from the family, to
mention only one of many data points more important than race, whatever that
is, or point of national origin? There is a world of data showing a correlation
between intelligence in boys and the continuing presence of a father in the
household.
Chris Powell sometimes mentions such data points in his columns. This writer has written
columns in Connecticut newspapers for nearly four decades, and he can count on
the fingers of one hand the number of editorial writers and columnists in the
state who have prominently mentioned such data when discussing the downturn in
education in Connecticut. In performing such a service, Powell is being far
less racialist
– we should chuck the word “racism” in cases in which we are certain it does
not apply -- than others who present the data collected by SAT interrogators as
obliquely indicating a racial bias.
Long before absurd charges of racism clouded many important
political discussions in the nation, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of
New York, spoke passionately and lucidly of the breakup of the black family and
its inevitable ruinous effect on young black boys. In The Negro Family: The Case For
National Action, Moynihan argued that the collapse of the nuclear
family in the black lower class would preserve the gap between possibilities
for Negroes and other groups, thus favoring other ethnic groups.
Malcolm X – surely not a white, privileged racist of the George
Wallace stripe – made similar points many times before he was assassinated,
with a wink and a nod of approval from black-racist Louis Farrakhan. A strong
family man and the father of a young girl, Malcolm X, on his return from a hajj
in Mecca where, astonishingly, he had seen many Muslims from around the world
with blue eyes, denounced the Honorable
Elijah Muhammad of New York for having preyed upon underage girls. His
denunciation proved to be a death sentence -- because he was executed in a
public place rather than his home, where he kept a pistol at hand to protect
his family from what we would now call white racists, loathsome KKK types who
occasionally bubble up from Hell.
Charles Murray
collects data the way bees collect pollen, later to be turned into honeyed studies
such as Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980, perhaps the clearest exposition of the pernicious
effects of welfare programs on WHITE families. Naturally, an appearance by
Murray at Middlebury
College in Vermont was shut down by protesters alleging racism, while from the margins, progressive politicians, their college praetorian
guards having made any reasonable discussion on race and poverty impossible, continue
to insist we should have a rational discussion on these issues.
Bunch of phonies.
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