It should work better on a national scale, because the pool of applicants will be more diverse if top schools are not filtering out applicants based on race. It's very hard to predict, though, especially since we don't really know what schools were doing before this new case — surely, not simply obediently adhering to the prior caselaw — and what they will do now. It wasn't permissible before to attempt to achieve racial balance — the superficial look of a class, with the different races meeting target percentages. But to the extent that was done, affluent, privileged minority applicants were used to meet the school's goals. Those students would not get a high "adversity score" in the U.C. Davis approach... unless "taking into account their life circumstances" ends up taking account of their race.
And why wouldn't it? Those on the inside of the admissions process are outraged by the new decision and adamantly believe it's wrongly decided and actively evil. Now, they will be trusted to apply the new rules, whatever they are (and they are vague enough to manipulate). Some years down the road, we'll have the next round of litigation, and who knows who will be on the Court when that happens? It's an ongoing experiment, and it's never going to end.
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100 comments:
can We ALL Agree, that we DON'T want a Doctor (like Doctor K), that is Competent..
We WANT a doctor that has life circumstances! like family income! and parental education!
WHO THE HELL CARES! if your doctor can treat you? WHO THE HELL CARES? If their incompetence KILLS YOU?
NO ONE CARES! ALL WE CARE ABOUT is life circumstances! like family income! and parental education!
Seriously,
do you want a surgeon that knows what side your liver is on? Or a surgeon that is Diverse?
The Bakke decision originated at UC Davis. Go figure.
I would rather
- That colleges were much cheaper.
- That colleges concentrated on excellence.
The diversity scam has gutted education. Civilization will collapse if no one knows how to maintain it.
"And why wouldn't it?"
Of course. It's gonna be a behind-the-scenes insurrection.
The diversity racket was always an exercise in dishonesty. It will get worse. Thanks, CJ!
"The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country"
Just like deep-sea diversity engineering, you're going to want to start checking your doctor's curriculum vitae, alma mater, and race if you want to live. A few years ago you could've brushed such a consideration off as very much tongue-in-cheek. Not anymore. Deadly serious now. How long you might live could be directly tied to whether or not your physician went to "one of the most diverse medical schools in the country".
The best primary-care physician I ever had--and I had him for almost 30 years--was a child of privilege who'd grown up on the Upper East Side of NYC and gone to the best schools. Everything about his background screamed "elite," but unless you carefully studied the array of diplomas on his wall and got to know him well enough, you'd have thought he was the Marcus Welby of your imagination.
He was a genius diagnostician and cared far more--demonstrably more--about his patients' well-being than the automaton young woman, programmed by AI, I had to begin seeing at one of the UCLA Health satellites after Obamacare went into effect. There's no question in my mind that she'd been awarded med school-admission points based on biographical criteria having zero to do with aptitude or innate ability.
Heaven help us if she increasingly represents the future, especially as the biz model of healthcare continues apace toward physicians becoming employees and not owners. It is not a surprise that our life-expectancy is trending down, down, down.
UC Davis is the medical school that rejected Bakke and admitted a black applicant in his place who was later convicted of second degree murder in a botched plastic surgery case.
Ranking students by the adversity they ave faced.
Hey, ChatBot....
Find a progressive that would not say ALL AA's have faced horrifying advesity via unnamed, undefined systemic racism.
One senses a new grift-industry in systems to find that "adversity".
So no sons of white doctors get into UC Davis? I assume Obama's kids are auto-rejects?
- UC Davis (not med) Grad
Above all don't use scores that were designed to predict performance.
Med Schools manipulate the algorithm to achieve desired results. Here's how it works:
One of the, if not the, largest medical school applications websites is WebAdmit. Students apply to various schools using that website, which captures all sorts of demographic data along with the usual merit based data used by schools to figure out who gets in. This includes race, of course, as reported by the student.
The schools then create their own algorithm, or rubric, to determine who gets in the class and spits out the demographics (or any other part of the matrix they want). The school then performs "what if" analysis, available on the website's software, to change the rubric and spin out the class that would emanate from those changes. Once the school is satisfied with the results, it then locks everything in and starts sending out the admit notices.
How do I know. IT knows everything, baby, particularly when we're the ones who help build all this stuff.
I thought it was common knowledge that the UC system was only a hair's breadth and an indulgent and uninquisitive court system away from being illegal itself.
I’d like to see a serious study of the relative quality of the education provided by the various schools. So much of the problem is driven by status—the extreme desire to get into “the best” school and the opportunities that come from nothing more than having that name on your CV. That’s a group identity as pernicious as the tribalism that drives programs like affirmative action.
Even if we do away with AA, we are still not judging people as individuals on their own merits. We are still using shortcuts; grouping people and making judgments about them based on their group. Stop giving so much prominence to this handful of elite schools and much of the problem goes away on its own.
It should work better on a national scale, because the pool of applicants will be more diverse if top schools are not filtering out applicants based on race.
“If” is doing all the work in that supposition. Why would admissions officers suddenly start acting honorably and telling the truth? That’s against their mission as stated before during and after the ruling.
Woke liberals have gotta be woke liberals..
So they will find a way to continue their racist ways.
We're making self pity into an Olympic competition.
I want the best orthopedist and the best internist possible. The extent of their past disadvantage is not going to help me get good medical care.
Let them admit who they please. Eventually, universities that admit and cater to intelligent and capable applicants will become the new gold standard. Our current "elite" ivy league system is ripe for replacement with something better. All this nonsense is just accelerating the process.
and it's never going to end.
Racism now, racism tomorrow, racism forever!
This problem is too big to fix because the only fix with any chance of working is to fix the primary education system, and that is not going to happen. By the time a student is old enough for Harvard, either he has the work habits, or he doesn't, the foundation, or he doesn't. That's why rich people pay huge money to send their kids to prep schools.
The disparate impact tool should be about to be turned on the universities and colleges with this new ruling. A few billion dollar class action lawsuits being won and affirmed would get the college presidents' attention much more than this SCOTUS decision will.
Can anyone post the demographics of UC Davis' med school students from the article?
The Question is: Do you want a live patient? Or a Diverse Doctor?
Those universities that plan to evade the Court's ruling by throwing measurable aptitude on the bonfire of the vanities are only going to succeed at demoting their institutions into high-priced community colleges. And it will happen very quickly because many professional associations are inhabited by the same long-marchers who seek to replace excellence with incompetence in the name of something objectively self-contradictory. Minorly ill patients will wake up with healthy and vital tissues excised by sub-par practitioners with sub-normal IQs. Litigants and innocent defendants will forfeit fortunes and decades of freedom as corrupted law school grads become attorneys on the strength of passing a dumbed-down bar exam, while bridges and viaducts collapse into rubble under the supervision of innumerate engineers.
Meanwhile, the few ethical institutions will be overwhelmed by gifted applicants hoping for real education, and corporations will import more and more Chinese and Koreans purely out of the economic imperatives.
This problem will never be solved. People will never even be able to understand it, let alone figure out what should and could be done and implement it.
Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill.
"This problem will never be solved. People will never even be able to understand it, let alone figure out what should and could be done and implement it. Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill."
So let's all get mad at each other. That's always an out. Oh, the outrage! Let's all write "fuck you" on the faces of the justices that didn't do what we wanted. That's always an option.
This will be just like Dobbs. The right side pf the political spectrum will high-five each other and do nothing and the left will mobilize to raise money to destroy SCOTUS and counter-legislate. Think about the Kavanaugh confirmation: the righties celebrated and the lefties took back control of the House four weeks later.
Here is a pro tip: when you get your adversaries down, be sure you kill them.
"...and it's never going to end."
Famous last words.
The white left look down on blacks, segregate blacks, and at the same time, demand blacks adhere to the white left power structure that keeps blacks disadvantaged. This included the white left's covert destruction of real black progress. Proof - the left do nothing to aid blacks escaping failing pubic schools.
One of Obama's (D-white leftist) first moves was to kill off the DC voucher program that aided disadvantaged black families and their children.
The white left support corrupt money-grub teacher's unions first, second and last.
"This problem will never be solved."
This is true. Applies to many problems.
"People will never even be able to understand it, let alone figure out what should and could be done and implement it."
That's part of it. But understanding it makes it more unsolvable.
"Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill."
Don't mean to read more into this than intended, but this seems to imply that that insuffiency is the prime cause of the "problem." It is not. Even at K, racial disparities in cognitive skills, in distributions across large groups, are already large. They persist and have been obvious for a century. See Murray, Facing Reality.
@Ann: This problem will never be solved. People will never even be able to understand it, let alone figure out what should and could be done and implement it.
Here's a suggestion: Eliminate all identifying information except for social security number. Use AI to scrape gender/race terms from personal essays. Admissions boards will be forced to rely only upon standardized testing, high school transcripts, etc.
Continuing to use racial identifiers would be prima facie evidence of evading the Constitution's insistence on a color blind society.
Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill.
Most of the insufficiencies of K-12 education are due to the inability to acknowledge that Black students in general have lower IQS and come from a toxic culture that devalues education.
Thank God my primary is a 40ish year old white guy who got into med school legitimately. He will outlast me, if he doesn't burn out. He works his butt off.
So let's all get mad at each other. That's always an out. Oh, the outrage!
I’m cool with that! I’m pretty sure all the guys who routinely survive barroom brawls and all the women who can ring steel at 1000 yards are on my side.
Let's all write "fuck you" on the faces of the justices that didn't do what we wanted.
Let’s not. Contemplating coitus with Justices Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor may give me a bad case of ED that a whole bottle of Viagra couldn’t cure.
Zero to 99 means they're using a program that starts with zero-based arrays. FORTRAN would use 1 to 100.
There is no reason why medical schools should seek out the best and the brightest. Right?
Most diverse, okay. Now tell me how the graduates of UC Davis med school stack up against national averages in terms of being targeted in malpractice suits. It would be interesting to see whether my intuition (which matches most of the previous commentators upthread) matches the cold, hard, unbiased, data from the real world.
It's actually very simple. Choose a pool of qualified applicants, then use a lottery to pick the winners.
If you like, weigh them according to the racial makeup of the U.S. 20 percent black? Twenty percent of the class will be picked from the black pool.
Of course, in the case of the Ivies, the first third will be legacies, and the second third from overseas, leaving a small pool for the rest, and you'll still end up with a graduating class with a third-rate education but first-rate networking, but it'll be open and above-board.
"He had been there long enough to learn that Dr. Taza was perhaps the worst physician in Sicily. Dr. Taza read everything but his medical literature, which he admitted he could not understand. He had passed his medical exams through the good offices of the most important Mafia chief in Sicily, who had made a special trip to Palermo to confer with Taza’s professors about what grades they should give him. And this too showed how the Mafia in Sicily was cancerous to the society it inhabited. Merit meant nothing. Talent meant nothing. Work meant nothing. The Mafia Godfather gave you your profession as a gift."
--The Godfather, Mario Puzo
A few thoughts, from the viewpoint of a Stanford Med School grad, former US Navy Medical Officer, and former full-time UCSF Med School professor:
If the purpose of Med School is to produce the most competent physicians possible (in other words, the kind of doctors that patients prefer for their personal health care), then using admission criteria that are the best predictors of future success should dominate the admission process.
Those predictors are pretty straightforward: undergrad GPA in STEM classes and MCAT scores. Other criteria like collegiate athletic records, parental income, parental donations to the Med School, race, religion, biological sex, or the neighborhood where someone grew up are not particularly useful for selecting doctors who know exactly what to do for a sucking chest wound at 2 in the morning in an Oakland ER.
Giving those other criteria equal weight in admissions is just a way to game the system for political/social justice ends, but not for producing high-achieving clinicians. Diversity is not the same as competence.
It is not. Even at K, racial disparities in cognitive skills, in distributions across large groups, are already large. They persist and have been obvious for a century.
We've spent billions of dollars trying to fix this precise problem over the last 58 years with the Headstart program. Every credible study has shown that there are no lasting benefits, but nobody has the balls to support ending it.
The problem isn't just cognitive skills. It's also poor parenting (partly due to the lack of two parent families) and toxic culture (that encourages and supports the lack of two parent families and devalues educational success as "Whiteness").
Instead of providing excuses to Black kids, we should be telling them they need to study more and work harder to be successful.
Ann Althouse said...
This problem will never be solved. People will never even be able to understand it, let alone figure out what should and could be done and implement it.
Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill.
Exactly, Althouse.
I do think if your parents are poor and you went to a poor school but excelled, you should get fresh eyes looking at your application because you did the best in the circumstances you were granted in life. But everyone faces some sort of adversity...
Say you are a child from an upper middle class family, but you were sexually molested as a child. Do you have to admit that in order to get admitted to a good university? This all seems very invasive. Everybody has a story to tell.
This all misses the point. The only criteria should be “can this person be academically successful at our school”. All the rest is colleges thinking way too highly of themselves. Dump all those bs administrators and make the price tag less
Those on the inside of the admissions process are outraged by the new decision and adamantly believe it's wrongly decided and actively evil.
My emphasis.
Based on? I mean, these are the people who control who is admitted to a university, aren't they? And for twenty years they've been able to claim (without evidence) that racial diversity was a value that would materially improve the academic stature of the university and the critical thinking skills of its graduates, plus it would be good for society because it would racially desensitize the general population and create a new cadre of minority (ok, black) professionals and academics who could then carry the torch into the future for their own children and mentees. And they've been able to implement this claim through their control of college admissions.
Twenty years. That's long enough for those first AA candidates to graduate and get quite high up in their fields. My husband, whose "adversity score" would have been very high if such a thing had existed despite his lack of melanin, went from first college graduate in his family to CFO of a mid-cap publicly traded company in 16 years, and that included a complete change of careers from geologist to finance guy via 2 years of MBA.
So what have these admissions people been doing wrong for the past two decades, that they haven't moved the needle?
(For the record, the needle has clearly been moved. By them? I think that's much less clear. But over the past twenty years, we have all seen explosive growth in the number of black college graduates and black professionals and academics. Still, let's let the admissions people keep trying to make their case.)
Is their claim truly that the US's "systemic racism" is so pervasive and profound that even their best efforts over two decades to bring in great minority candidates, and their universities' best efforts to educate, graduate, and place them, have been overwhelmed by it?
Ok. Say that's true. (It isn't, obviously, but say it is, for the sake of their argument.) Why, then, do they think continuing to do the same thing is going to be effective now?
IOW, it's a grift.
Affirmative Action opened the Pandora's box of institutionalized unfairness, and now the squawking has become an argument of nuance as everybody makes their case for preferred access to the carcass. Sometimes, the privileged elite are rich, privileged, and elite for very good reasons. Sometimes, not.
What is the end goal, if it is not strictly merit-based? And if it is not strictly merit-based, then when do we start applying these principles to, say, the NBA? That seems to be the most enforceable question to ask now. What is your end goal, and be specific. Because if it is anything other than a student cross-section that exactly, precisely mirrors that demographic of society, then what you are doing is morally indefensible. And I want to hear you say that as you have your diversity brain surgery flying on a diversity aircraft.
"Thank God my primary is a 40ish year old white guy...
So's mine. He noticed something during a routine exam four years ago that led to discovering a birth defect that left uncorrected, would have killed me. He referred me to a 40ish year old white guy cardiologist who diagnosed the problem, who referred me to a 50ish year old white guy surgeon who corrected it.
When I went for my annual exam this year, I found that the cardiologist had left to start his own practice and I was seen by a female (40ish, maybe) doctor. Is she a good one? I don't know, I made an appointment with the 40ish year old white guy.
Also, this seems to create more focus on the current vogue way of thinking, that everyone is traumatized and everyone should wear their trauma like an important badge. If you are a successful student who worked hard and always kept a positive attitude and didn't let roadblocks affect your mental health, are you going to get into university?
"Headstart program. Every credible study has shown that there are no lasting benefits,"
Its defenders say that's because the program ENDS too early and so we should extend full service handholding throughout K12.
Which is happening in a lot of places.
A friend of mine has a theory, one I've come to find increasingly persuasive over the years, about the relentlessly obstinate disparity between African Americans and others, including black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.
All of us in this country are descended from people who chose to leave their ancestral homes in search of a better life. So their DNA have been transmitted to us.
The sole exception are the descendants of those who were kidnapped and brought here in chains. While a percentage of those captives would have, under the right conditions, chosen to come here themselves for a better life than what they were experiencing back home--Thomas Sowell's and Clarence Thomas's, just to pick two names--the majority are related to people for whom good enough was good enough.
So it's not race. As Nigerian and Caribbean immigrants prove every day by how well they do here.
The whole "diversity" scam rests on the idea that human beings are interchangeable- that what one person can do, all can with the proper training and preparation.
Spoiler alert- they're not, and they can't.
When your premise is false, you're going to reach unproductive conclusions.
The fact that special considerations are necessary to achieve racial diversity in post-graduate professional schools provides clear evidence against the argument that "disadvantaged" groups contain lots of undetected strivers who will flourish if they are admitted to a top college.
A good way to see how people really feel about the importance of diversity in medicine would be to assign doctors to patients by matching members of the same racial category to each other, then allowing any patient to request a different doctor. The extent to which blacks truly believe the "systemic racism" story would become immediately evident through their choices.
"This problem will never be solved. People will never even be able to understand it, let alone figure out what should and could be done and implement it.
Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill."
I believe school choice, where state tax dollars follow the student, has a good chance of improving the situation. Surely minority parents will not let their child languish in poorly performing schools if they are given a choice.
It's preposterous to assume that that any kind of scale to measure adversity will measure anything except the prejudices of the people who make the scale.....Do children of divorced parents suffer more than children of alcoholics? I be the children of the divorced think so and would integrate that into their scale of adversity......Why are jocks given a leg up? It seems to me that klutzy kids have a much more difficult time in school. Ditto with the stupid. It's hard to negotiate life when you're truly stupid. Shouldn't our elite colleges take this into account and give some extra consideration to stupid kids.....I think transitioning men should be given more points than transitioning women. It's much more difficult to cut your penis than your breasts off....Think of all the things you're bitter about, all the golden blessings God granted other people while shortchanging you. Do you think any of this would have been taken into account by a fair minded admissions committee?
"The reason elite universities resorted to admissions preferences in the first place was that there is an enormous academic achievement gap separating white and Asian American students from Black, Latino, and Native American students. Affirmative action tried to fix the problem at the end of the pipeline by giving underrepresented students a small admissions boost when they applied for college — after they had spent 18 years falling behind. A far more potent solution is to fix the pipeline earlier so that the pool of applicants reaching elite colleges is not so hopelessly skewed.
Earlier this month, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes released a national study on charter schools. It confirmed what many others have found before: Urban charter schools produce dramatic learning gains for Black and Latino students. CREDO’s study identified approximately 1,000 schools nationally that it called “gap-busting schools” able to eliminate learning disparities." - short article by Jonathon Chait
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/after-affirmative-action-lets-fix-the-education-pipeline.html
It would be interesting to track cases of medical malpractice over the decades, let's say from the 1970s on, and match them up with the affirmative action policies over those same years. I guess school policies don't actually match up to law, but it would still be interesting to note. Malpractice as well as lawsuits over unnecessary death or injury.
Curious people who might need a doctor want to know.
Same thing with lawyers and law schools.
Same thing with engineers and engineering schools.
I'm OK with the Oenologists.
And those studies may prove out to be nothing. I don't honestly know. But, personally, its more important to me that my doc was a great student at a good school, or a good student at a great school than it is knowing what gender or color he or she might be. And I'm not sure I know what a great school is any longer.
Most of the insufficiencies of K-12 education are due to the inability to acknowledge that Black students in general ... come from a toxic culture that devalues education.
Ellipses to avoid wading into the IQ thing, which, ok, statistically probably has foundation but (like everything else statistical) doesn't have any weight for any particular individual. And, as Murphy has pointed out IIRC (I haven't read The Bell Curve in many years), there's a lot more overlap than there is difference. And finally, it's not as if standard, non-Special Ed K-12 education demands an IQ over 90, does it?
Sigh. Look at that - I waded into it anyway.
My point, dang it, is merely that "toxic culture that devalues education" is the biggest and most thorny problem for poor, urban black people in America, and has to be read as including absent fathers, mothers who chose those fathers on terrible criteria, not enough grandmothers who remember what values their own families had prior to the Great Leap Forward - oops, of course I mean the Great Society, a society-wide culture (thank you, '60s) that overvalues youth and especially the judgment of young people (it is to laugh - don't any of these people remember how stupidly they acted in their youth?)...
As many successful black people, intellectuals and cultural icons alike, have pointed out, "black culture" has to solve its own problems. Unfortunately those voices are generally drowned out by many more black intellectuals (which should be in quotes here, based on their lack of intellectual rigor) and cultural icons who would rather keep the gravy train rolling, apparently, even at the cost of thousands of dead young black men and hundreds of thousands or millions of hopeless ones.
Everyone knows the school-to-prison pipeline arises from awful culture. But the left wants to pussyfoot around pretending that that culture arose from and is perpetuated by Republicans' keeping a brotha down rather than from Democrats' excusing, and much worse, incentivizing horribly destructive life habits.
Go on about how "actively evil" this ruling was, admissions goons.
In the early Soviet Union, when the parents and children of the elite and middle class realized that Communism was going to be around forever, they found ways to conceal or obfuscate their class background and go onto successful careers in the new Soviet state....People who are successful in their careers are more apt than not to be successful in choosing a spouse and in rearing their children. If a child comes from a stable home where the parents encourage studying, that's a great and nearly indestructible advantage. The middle class survived under Bolshevism. They will survive college admission committees....Perhaps the committees should go full Pol Pot and deny admission to students who wear glasses or whose parents wear glasses.
Re Wild Chicken's comment---full service handholding is what a stable two parent family provides.
Given that background and upbringing there'll still be a normal bell curve distribution of talent and intelligence.
Absent that background various anomalies will play their role. And I'm not certain that Headstart or the handholding that goes on even into colleges and grad schools today (note that the Boston University law students needed some "thereapeutic help" after this weeks affirmative action SCOTUS ruling, can fix that lack of a good start. I will say that those wannabe Boston U lawyers are going to be in for some nasty surprises in their future legal careers. Sometimes you lose a case that you shouldn't have lost. And it does hit hard.
There are types of early childhood interventions that differ from Headstart, both in terms of design and outcomes. The two that are regarded as providing the clearest evidence of success are the Perry Preschool Project (mid 1960s) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (early 1970s).
The Perry Preschool Project was a mid-1960s experimental program designed to identify any lasting causal effects of early-childhood education on the lives of children with poor educational prospects. University of Chicago economist James Heckman found clear evidence of a causal impact on a wide range of favorable long-run life outcomes.
I would gladly support funding for universal pre-K designed along the lines of the successful programs in exchange for an end to the counterproductive quest for diversity.
Future resumé enhancers for CA black kids:
* skip school regularly
* join a gang
* do a little time in Juvie Hall for shoplifting (where that's still a crime)
* come out as a tranny
* announce to all that you are "turning your life around"
* apply to UC.
* get admitted and receive an "adversity scholarship" to boot
A winning strategy, no?
Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill.
It's going downhill because of the college educated liberal white women who control public school monopoly and the teachers unions.
Fees all around....
When you look at a surgeon with his/her scalpel just before the anesthesia kicks in will you be comforted in your last thoughts by the fact he/she was the product of a med school that championed DEI (or DIE if you live in Oregon), or a med school that focused on training the best doctors that could be without putting a thumb on the scale for race?
Ellipses to avoid wading into the IQ thing, which, ok, statistically probably has foundation but (like everything else statistical) doesn't have any weight for any particular individual. And, as Murphy has pointed out IIRC (I haven't read The Bell Curve in many years), there's a lot more overlap than there is difference. And finally, it's not as if standard, non-Special Ed K-12 education demands an IQ over 90, does it?
In California, in order to qualify for admission to Special Education services (extra academic help, smaller classes and simplified curriculum) you have to demonstrate a gap between measured IQ and academic performance. (While teaching middle schools I had the misfortune of having to tell parents that their kids did not qualify for Special Ed because there was no such discrepancy. How do you tell parents their kids are simply stupid?)
However in California it is also illegal to give Black kids IQ tests for such purposes. (Too many Black kids were being denied Special Ed services) What else could possibly explain this accept an unwillingness to confront an unpleasant reality?
I believe school choice, where state tax dollars follow the student, has a good chance of improving the situation.
I do too, and I'm a public school teacher. If nothing else, it would force many public schools to improve.
Surely minority parents will not let their child languish in poorly performing schools if they are given a choice.
Sadly, I disagree with this.
Jamie, you waded in anyway?
"And finally, it's not as if standard, non-Special Ed K-12 education demands an IQ over 90, does it?"
Unfortunately, a 90 IQ person really can't read or learn much math beyond simple counting. Now, perhaps you meant out K-12 education system doesn't really require reading and math to get a high school diploma, with which I would agree.
And finally, it's not as if standard, non-Special Ed K-12 education demands an IQ over 90, does it?
Actually, increasingly, high school does. There has been a steady determined shift from a system with general education classes with vocational opportunities for the majority of students, and AP and honors classes for the academic elite, to a system predicated on college for all, college prep classes using AP strategies for all (except low performing Special Ed students) and the deliberate destruction of vocational education.
"Adversity Score." Cue up the Yorkshiremen sketch from Monty Python.
The sole exception are the descendants of those who were kidnapped and brought here in chains.
Black slaves were not kidnapped they were purchased. They were bought from their African brothers who enslaved them, put them in chains and sold them to European slavers.
After law school I was working for a big NYC firm when I decided that I really wanted to be a professor. So, I quit and entered a PhD program. After a few months, it became widely known that the best job available in my field that year was teaching ethnic film studies at a state university in the Southwest. I realized that, as a white Ivy Leaguer, the chances of my ever getting a good job as a professor were approximately zero. So I returned to law. This was in 1986. I very much doubt that the employment opportunities for white males in university-level teaching have improved since then. On the other hand, the financial rewards available from working in finance or tech have increased dramatically. My point is that nobody ever mentions one of the biggest problems with affirmative action -- that it has lowered the quality of teaching that goes on in colleges. Given the available career options, how many white males who have done well in college have been going to graduate school when it is clear that they will be discriminated against in hiring?
I have written it before- the problem with the US education system isn't with the teachers and the schools- it is with the student bodies of the individual schools those student bodies' parents.
You want to fix the education system in, let's say, Baltimore? Here is what you do- eliminate attendance requirements completely- if the parents can't be bothered to get their children to school each day on their own volition, they won't care enough to ensure the student studies and learns and doesn't disrupt the class. The only other thing you need to do is to have firm advancement criteria that actually matters by measuring things- if you can't read at 2nd grade level, you don't move on to 3rd grade, and you don't stay with the new 2nd grade class- you go a different school designed for students your age who have fallen behind.
You have to be willing to let children fail out of school altogether- no one benefits from having students in the class who can't do the work and won't behave themselves. You have to triage the student bodies ruthlessly- if you don't, you condemn every student in the school to a subpar education
As for affirmative action at post-high school level- minimum scores on the ACT/SAT and normalized GPAS- minimums that realistically reflect a 50% probability of actually finishing a college/law school/grad school/med school degree (this is easy to figure out just from historical data that is widely available even if politically incorrect). Once you have that pool of applicants, the names go into a bin are randomly drawn publicly via live streaming until the required number of students are met for a particular school. This is as fair as you will ever get in the admissions process.
Yeah, let's all compare Obama's daughters acceptance to a poor white boy from Appalachia with a 1,500+ SAT.
How may points do I get for being a white guy beaten up by a gang of black youths on Plymouth and Penn, who then stole his ten-speed bike?
(true story)
"Seriously,
do you want a surgeon that knows what side your liver is on?"
A patient with situs inversus totalis can make that a little tricky.
Those on the inside of the admissions process are outraged by the new decision and adamantly believe it's wrongly decided and actively evil.
@Althouse: I know you have experience on the inside of the admissions process, and I completely trust that what you say here is true. But I am baffled as to how that group's beliefs can be so at odds with the beliefs of the general public. Do they know relevant facts the rest of us don't know? Are they tasked with juggling competing (and perhaps unacknowledgeable) interests the rest of us can't understand? Are there non-merits factors pushing that group toward such beliefs (e.g., people who don't believe strongly in the benefits of AA won't be drawn to/hired for careers as Admissions officers)? Is it a simple matter of what makes them feel good about themselves? All the commentary before and after the decision has failed to provide insight.
I, for one, don't care what color my doctor is, I prefer that my doctor be an expert in the diagnosis, treatment and cure of my complaints. If UC Davis Medical School is producing such doctors, more power to them. If their doctors end up having statistically worse patient outcomes than doctors from a school that ignores diversity and admits solely on merit, then hey, follow the damn science.
I suspect the UC Davis doctors end up "good enough" and OK for the vast majority of patients most doctors will see. It is in the marginal extreme cases of rare diseases or complex multiple issue treatment requirements that an excellent doctor will outperform your run of the mill doc in a box. I note Ben Carson studied neurosurgery and practiced at Hopkins. Diversity or merit?
Boatbuilder nails it in one line. The English Bar is famously stuffed with the products of Public Schools (that’s prep schools to you) and their silken advocacy and razor sharp intellects are why Russian oligarchs litigate their disputes in London not Moscow. Yet the “leaders “ of the Bar want these guys cancelled (whilst continuing to bring in the work, naturally) because of their obeisance to Diversity. Adversity might be an indicator of grit and determination, but it is no indication at all of intellectual ability.
If you like, weigh them according to the racial makeup of the U.S. 20 percent black? Twenty percent of the class will be picked from the black pool.
Actually, the U.S. is 13.6% black according to the latest census data - people persistently overestimate that number.
"It's an ongoing experiment, and it's never going to end."
It could, but then what would the people who are making big bucks running it going to do? Rich people love themselves some welfare too, when that sweet money drops into their laps for keeping the problem alive.
There is a lot of history to the affirmative action push and the adoption of the various civil rights, voting rights, and fair employment laws and regulations.
As a starter, we need to revisit the legislative history of these statutes. There was extensive debate about the prospect that the fair employment provisions would lead to employment quotas by race. There were vociferous assurances by the bills’ sponsors that there would be no quotas. Absolutely no quotas. None. Within two years my father’s company was being pressured by fair employment bureaucrats to agree to employment “goals” by race. I believe that affirmative action began as “outreach” and ended up as a goal-oriented quota system. The bureaucracy in place wil not give up their pay, perks, and power on the whim of judges far away in a marble temple. Listen to the squealing. Do you think it will stop?
One of the big challenges in life is to resist the constant hype that says that something bad is good. Outreach to students with potential and proven achievement and offering them additional preparation and coaching might be good. Lowering standards in the name of “outreach”is bad.
Those recruiting goals will be coastlines if you devalue your product.
This is exactly the premise for the old radio & TV show, Queen for a Day. Three women would take turns telling their tale of woe (husband sick, house burned down, etc.) Then the host would put a hand over #1, then #2, then #3. The woman who received the biggest live audience applause for her tragic story would win prizes - and have a crown placed on her head.
I look for two things in a physician. Knowledge primarily (which inevitably leads to testing and merit). But along with knowledge, I look for compassion, with patience and the ability to attend to me without judgment. Knowledge is the essential thing, of course, but compassion is necessary too. I suppose someone raised in poverty could have compassion in a way a privileged person doesn't, but not necessarily. Compassion depends on temperament too.
How this translates into admissions policies, I have no idea. It would take the wisdom of Solomon to sort it all out.
Big Mike and Temujin have suggested using malpractice suits as a proxy for physician quality.
I have recently retired from 4 decades as a practicing physician, in a variety of settings. I have also done a fair amount of expert witness consulting as an expert witness in medmal cases. I have been retained by both plaintiff and defense.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of malpractice going on out there (defining malpractice as deviation from accepted standards).
There are also a lot of of malpractice suits filed.
These is depressingly little overlap in the Venn diagram.
There are multiple explanations for this, mostly revolving around the concept that patients do not sue doctors that they like, no matter how awful and avoidable the results of their care may have been.
It's not possible to define good medical care objectively but we docs know it when we see it- we refer ourselves, our families, and our tough patient problems to the good docs. Even when they may have higher complication or mortality rates, which we know may be due to them taking on the toughest cases.
In a Laboratory of Democracy experiment, Texas put in tort reform ~20 years ago. The number of medmal suits files dropped significantly, as they no longer paid enough to justify the required investment. Neighboring New Mexico is still Happy Hunting grounds for plaintiff attorneys.
Malpractice insurance premiums in NM are ~3X TX for the same coverage, same specialty. I have seen no evidence that medical care in NM is better than care in TX.
It would be nice to have a universally acceptable standard for quality in medicine, but, except at the extremes, malpractice is not it.
Should be costly, not coastlines.
I hate touchscreens and predictive spelling.
"Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill."
That's utter nonsense. First off, the dearth of black applicants with the necessary SAT scores has nothing to with K-12 education. Middle class and upper black students, regardless of family status, score lower than dirtpoor white students, ditto. THe black-white gap, as well as the white-Hispanic gap has remained depressingly constant for as long as we've tested it--more than 70 years.
Next, if there's one thing the recent NAEP scores show it's that black and Hispanic kids did *worse* without k-12 education, probably because they were more likely to be in remote and thus didn't even attend school at all. So apparently just parking asses in school has some impact.
If you are banking on school choice or vouchers or whatever asshat idea people delude themselves into thinking will work, abandon it. Charters didn't close the achievement gap. Vouchers actually made it worse.
If there's no AA, and if colleges abide by this rule (which they of course won't) and if we used the same baseline minimum SAT score that whites generally use (unofficially) to determine whether or not to go to college, then about 32% of blacks have an SAT score of 1000 or higher (43% for Hispanics). A more realistic college ready score of 1200 gets only 8% of blacks and 12% of Hispanics.
As for Jamie, who says, "And finally, it's not as if standard, non-Special Ed K-12 education demands an IQ over 90, does it?" and betrays just exactly how foolish she is:
Standard, non-sped k-12 education is best served with an IQ of over 90. But doing comfortably requires an IQ of over 100. College aptitude is probably about 115.
Only 36% of blacks have an IQ over 90, 16% an IQ over 100 and 3% over 115.
So using your own stat, Jamie, it's clear that most blacks do not have the IQ for what you consider a "standard, non-sped K12 education".
Yancey has a lot right, but throwing kids out of school is a bad idea. We should just stop pretending a high school diploma has any meaning, and we should focus on keeping kids learning at whatever rate they can throughout their high school years.
Unfortunately, a 90 IQ person really can't read or learn much math beyond simple counting.
The range of "normal" is given as 90-109, so if what you're saying is true, my goodness, we really need to revamp primary education to allow for the illiterate to matriculate.
Gahrie, thank you for the insight on both special Ed and more on how crazy CA is! Geez. So you can't receive special ed services unless you are smarter (per IQ testing) than your performance would indicate? (Or, I suppose, you're dumber, per IQ testing, than your performance - like those who used to be called idiots-savants, maybe?) All this time, I've assumed special education was for those students who simply could not perform adequately in a "normal" classroom. That'll teach me to assume...
Gahrie,
Shirley Cassandra's point was not about who did the kidnapping/capturing.
"Black slaves were not kidnapped they were purchased. They were bought from their African brothers who enslaved them, put them in chains and sold them to European slavers."
Interesting footnote: the ship's masters and many of the owners or those ships on the Africa-Carribean-American East Coast leg of the atlantic slave-trade-triad have some odd similarity to their surnames. Did you know the first registered American slave owner was a black freedman named Anthony Johnson? Never learned that growing up in school.
I didn't learn about the slave-ship owners in school either. Funny how we have to find out about this stuff ourselves huh?
@West Texas, I'm okay with using some other objective measurement, but if you can't provide one then malpractice suits may be the best that can be done. Remember that it is not measuring an individual doctor; it is a measurement across a group of doctors and consequently it at least has the potential to even out the anomalous cases.
Please keep in mind that "we docs know it when we see it" is likely to be correct -- experts in any field know who's also an expert, who's a damned good expert, and who's faking it with a smile and some blather. However it is, absolutely, a subjective measurement, which I am trying to avoid.
"but throwing kids out of school is a bad idea. We should just stop pretending a high school diploma has any meaning, and we should focus on keeping kids learning at whatever rate they can throughout their high school years."
I would segregate the slow learners from the normal/fast ones, as I wrote in my comment above, but I wouldn't fight to keep them in school if they don't want to be there and their parents don't care. No child left behind is a fantasy- it always was.
Blogger Education Realist said...
"Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill."
That's utter nonsense. First off, the dearth of black applicants with the necessary SAT scores has nothing to with K-12 education. Middle class and upper black students, regardless of family status, score lower than dirt poor white students, ditto.
I disagree a bit. Glenn Loury says that without better K-12 ed we will not know what black kids are capable of. Glenn has a math degree from MIT and is obviously on the far right end of the Bell Curve. I think, without better K-12 we will not know.
But to the extent that was done, affluent, privileged minority applicants were used to meet the school's goals. Those students would not get a high "adversity score" in the U.C. Davis approach... unless "taking into account their life circumstances" ends up taking account of their race.
The whole point of getting rid of grades and test scores is that there's a lot of upper class parents who have kids who aren't as bright / motivated / hard working as the parents were. And the people at teh University admissions processes really want to run a class system, not a merit system, and therefore want to let those kids in.
And why wouldn't it? Those on the inside of the admissions process are outraged by the new decision and adamantly believe it's wrongly decided and actively evil.
Because they're a much of racist pigs and class conscious losers who hate people who actually earn their own benefits.
Now, they will be trusted to apply the new rules, whatever they are (and they are vague enough to manipulate). Some years down the road, we'll have the next round of litigation
Nope. There are going to be lawsuits in the next 12 months, and some of them will be going in front of Trump Judges who will look at 'Respondents fail to operate their race-based admissions programs in a manner that is “sufficiently measurable to permit judicial [review]” under the rubric of strict scrutiny.' (because they got rid of any objective measures), and summarily rule against the schools
SFFA said "you don't have to trust the school. You don't have to give them the benefit of the doubt."
And every honest judge is going to take SCOTUS up on that
Old black and white movies to the contrary, one person is not going to change the world, so take care of your own family first, pick a doc you think is good. When I tried Indian or Middle East docs, I thought they just told me what to do, even aggressively. Asian docs seemed too busy to deal with a discussion. I liked Jewish docs best, very careful and concerned. A heuristic, sure but it makes my life better.
In my professional work I always tried to find lawyers from the Univ. of Michigan or Michigan state, I got good work from them for whatever reason, the ivy guys just irritated me by going back to “ground zero” all the time.
Med schools can filter, and so can I. You are in charge of who you hire, like college admissions depts. interview them and just say that’s who you liked best.
Is it discriminatory? Well the life of my family is important, to me anyway, my wife is not a sociology experiment. It’s not discriminatory to leave a bad doc.
Those on the inside of the admissions process are outraged by the new decision and adamantly believe it's wrongly decided and actively evil.
Oh, the rules--the laws!--don't count if you believe they're wrong? We shouldn't expect people in positions of trust, including people who're paid with or tax money, to follow the law even when they disagree with it?
The next time I hear one of these university administrators or professors thunder about the majesty of the rule of law I'll remember how one of their own, with decades of experience, seems to understand their mindset with regard to following laws they don't like.
You common people must follow the law and be subject to it even when you dislike the law and don't agree with how it was written/applied; we enlightened elites, on the other hand, know what's right and just and so we can actively work to undermine rules and laws we dislike and if you have a problem with that you'll just have to sue and try to stop us.
Rule of law, baby!
While I don’t think that an applicant‘s sob story is completely irrelevant to his qualifications for medical school, I personally don’t pick my surgeons on the basis of their sob stories. I care about their smarts, their medical judgement and their fine motor skills.
Education Realist said...
"Fiddling with admissions can never make up for the insufficiency of K-12 education, and that's going downhill."
That's utter nonsense. First off, the dearth of black applicants with the necessary SAT scores has nothing to with K-12 education. Middle class and upper black students, regardless of family status, score lower than dirtpoor white students, ditto. THe black-white gap, as well as the white-Hispanic gap has remained depressingly constant for as long as we've tested it--more than 70 years.
It’s called “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” and my family saw it take over our (then) local elementary school thirty-plus years ago when a school boundary change caused our local elementary school to go from serving a lower-middle and middle-middle mixed race demographic to a majority-minority and majority free and reduced lunch student body. Overnight black students — no matter whether their parents were middle class or the offspring of welfare recipients — became privileged individuals. White and Asian children got lower grades for comparable work and received detention for deportment that earned black kids — again, no matter their demographic — a mild scolding. And black children, no matter their socio-economic background, became conditioned not to be as disciplined as whites and Asians, not to study as hard, and not to learn as much.
What “Education Realist” is trying to say is that it is not the fault of K-12 teachers and school administrators and the conditioning they received in college. It’s just that black children are inherently inferior. But at 77 I can remember the days of Jim Crow, when black parents (there used to be two per child, back in those days) would push their kids to excel despite the obstacles. And I’ve worked for or with, recruited for my projects, and mentored black software developers. If one sets challenging goals for them, they can achieve those goals and take genuine pride in their achievements. Same as anyone else.
But we will need to re-educate two whole generations of college graduates with education degrees.
"What “Education Realist” is trying to say is that it is not the fault of K-12 teachers and school administrators and the conditioning they received in college. It’s just that black children are inherently inferior. "
I'm not saying that at all.
What I am saying, though, is that in the days of Jim Crow, when black parents pushed their kids to excel, the achievement gap was *worse* than it is now. So don't pretend that there was some magical time in the halcyon past when there was no achievemeent gap.
". Glenn Loury says that without better K-12 ed we will not know what black kids are capable of. Glenn has a math degree from MIT and is obviously on the far right end of the Bell Curve. I think, without better K-12 we will not know."
I agree that Glenn Loury is brilliant. But he has no specifics and he's got a magical belief in charters. And charters have had 30 years and haven't evne made a small dent in the gap.
"What “Education Realist” is trying to say is that it is not the fault of K-12 teachers and school administrators and the conditioning they received in college. It’s just that black children are inherently inferior. "
I'm not saying that at all.
What I am saying, though, is that in the days of Jim Crow, when black parents pushed their kids to excel, the achievement gap was *worse* than it is now. So don't pretend that there was some magical time in the halcyon past when there was no achievemeent gap.
". Glenn Loury says that without better K-12 ed we will not know what black kids are capable of. Glenn has a math degree from MIT and is obviously on the far right end of the Bell Curve. I think, without better K-12 we will not know."
I agree that Glenn Loury is brilliant. But he has no specifics and he's got a magical belief in charters. And charters have had 30 years and haven't evne made a small dent in the gap
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