Nonexistent “Resegregation,” Phony Polls, and More

This month the Congressional Quarterly Researcher published this short piece I wrote for them on the (purported) “resegregation” of public schools in the United States:

No child today attends a segregated public school. Not one. “Segregation” means telling children they cannot attend the same school as children of a different color. It does not mean a failure to have socially engineered racial balance.

It is true that there are educational disparities across racial lines, but racial imbalances in classrooms have little if anything to do with this. Black children do not need a certain number of white children in a classroom in order to learn.

The real reasons that racial disparities exist are ignored by those who complain about “resegregation.”

When you think about it, a child’s environment has three major components — parents, schools, and peers — and in all three respects African American children face more hurdles. They are more likely to grow up in single-parent homes, go to substandard schools, and have peers who are, to put it mildly, unsupportive of academic achievement.

But the Left is slow to acknowledge that out-of-wedlock births are a bad thing or that anti-“acting white” peer pressure exists. They will admit that substandard schools are a problem, but resist (partly because of recalcitrant teacher unions) the most promising reforms: competition among schools, merit pay for teachers, and more choice for parents and children.

The only way to bring schools into the politically correct racial-balance that the Left wants is not by ignoring students’ skin color, but by using it to sort, assign, and bus them. This is flatly inconsistent with Brown v. Board of Education, which prohibited race-based student assignments.

In addition, there is no increase in racial imbalance in schools. In No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom [she’s on the Center for Equal Opportunity’s board of directors, by the way] conclude that “minority students are not becoming more racially isolated; white students typically attend schools that are much more racially and ethnically diverse than 30 years ago, and the modest decline in the exposure of black and Hispanic children to whites is solely due to the declining share of white children in the school age population.” And race is no proxy for disadvantage.

Nor is there any validity in the Left’s premise that more racial-balance means better education. To quote the Thernstroms again: “The most sophisticated research on the subject does not find that having white classmates notably improves the academic achievement of blacks and Hispanics.”

So forget racial bean-counting and focus on improving our schools.

* * *

For the first time in its history, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission today has filed lawsuits that claim discrimination on the basis of transgender status violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of “sex,” among other things. The press releases are here and here.

I don’t think that this is sex discrimination within the meaning of Title VII; certainly the folks who passed Title VII in 1964 would have been surprised at this interpretation. ”Sex,” they would have said, means being male or female; it doesn’t mean changing from one to the other. But it will be interesting to see how the courts handle this issue.

And, in another report from our brave new world of progressive sex, the German Ethics Council has recommended abolishing laws against incest.

* * *

“An agenda-driven poll on affirmative action?” That’s the headline the Los Angeles Times gave my response to a recent op-ed it had published:

The premise of Karthick Ramakrishnan’s Op-Ed article hinges on the positive response he received to one survey question: “Do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs designed to help blacks, women and other minorities get better jobs and education?” (“California needs to look again at Asian stance on affirmative action,” Op-Ed, Sept. 25)

Now, was this objective or simply an attempt to get the result the professor wanted? A more objective question would be: “Do you believe there should be discrimination or preference on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex in deciding who is admitted to public universities, awarded public contracts and hired for state and local employment?”

That question would more fairly mirror the language in Proposition 209 that was at issue here. And, based on many other surveys, it would not have been likely to lead to the positive response that Ramakrishnan wanted.

* * *

But let’s end on a somewhat lighter note. By way of background, the Washington Post’s weekly “Style Invitational” is a contest in which readers compete to submit the funniest entry. This week the winners were announced for the funniest (made up) course description from a college catalogue. First-place was awarded to: “PSYC 207: Welcome to Your College Nightmare. Participants will not be notified of their enrollment in this class until the morning of the final exam. Note: Class location is subject to weekly change without notice; each student will attend at least one class session in the nude.”

Very good, but what I wanted to note is the entry that won second place: “SOC 101: Overcoming Prejudice. In this course, you will learn to identify and overcome the various prejudices — racism, sexism, classism, etc. — that all people like you have.”

Of course, the really funny (and sad) thing is that, while it might be described slightly (but only slightly) differently, my sense is that this is not at all an uncommon, let alone a fictional, offering.

Kudos to the Post, by the way, for its willingness to make a politically incorrect award, even if it was rather clueless in its apparent failure to see that too many academics and students won’t get the joke.

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