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((The kicker he ''(I)f he actually cares about doing a good job as
President." He still has a shot at that but he'd better do an Immelman
now if he wants any odds of success. Bret.))

May 24, 2009
Obama’s Nixon-Goes-to-China Opportunity

By Steve Sailer

The Obama Administration’s munificence toward state and local public
schools ($100 billion in stimulus funds, including a $5 billion slush
fund to try to figure out “what works”) is bringing out of the
woodwork the usual array of miracle workers with cures for whatever
ails us educationally.

What’s palpably lacking in the Obama Administration’s approach to
schooling, however, is frank empiricism, wisdom, and humane empathy
for all types of children.

Fortunately, America’s leading social scientist recently published a
short, lucid book of his characteristic judiciousness laying out a
roadmap for fundamental reform of schooling: Real Education: Four
Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. It
begins with these words that every parent and teacher deep down know
to be true:

“The educational system is living a lie. The lie is that every child
can be anything he or she wants to be. No one really believes it, but
we approach education’s problems as if we did. We are phobic about
saying out loud that children differ in their ability to learn the
things that schools teach.”

Worse, the opinion-setters angrily castigate those who explain the
implications of how they behave when it comes to their own children.

“Not only do we hate to say it, we get angry with people who do. We
insist that the emperor is wearing clothes, beautiful clothes, and
that those who say otherwise are bad people.”

The author notes of realism:

“This is not a counsel of despair. The implication is not to stop
trying to help, but to stop doing harm. Educational romanticism has
imposed immeasurable costs on children and their futures. It pursues
unattainable egalitarian ideals of educational achievement (e.g., all
children should perform at grade level) at the expense of attainable
egalitarian ideals of personal dignity. We can do much better for
children who are below average in academic ability, but only after we
get a grip on reality.”

The author demonstrates four simple truths and their profound
implications:

*

Ability varies.
*

Half of the children are below average.
*

Too many people are going to college.
*

America’s future depends on how we educate the academically
gifted.

For example, to give some sense of just where “average” is, the author
provides this question from the federal government’s National
Assessment of Educational Progress for 8th graders:

Example 1. There were 90 employees in a company last year. This year
the number of employees increased by 10 percent. How many employees
are in the company this year?

(A) 9 (B) 81 (C) 91 (D) 99 (E) 100

Guess what percentage of 8th graders got this one wrong?

62 percent.

And it’s actually worse than that, because a sizable fraction of the
right responses were likely eenie-meenie-minie-moe guesses.

Most 8th graders can figure out what 10 percent of 90 is. And even
more can add 90 and 9. What the majority can’t do is put to
cognitively analyze the problem and put the steps together.

Once you admit the four simple truths, it’s not hard to come up with
solutions that will make schooling more effective for most students.

Tracking, for instance. Why humiliate the worst students and bore the
best students by clumping them in the same classroom? But tracking has
been out of fashion ideologically since the late 1960s, in large part
because it tends to lead to racial segregation within schools.
Fortunately, it keeps creeping back in under various disguises
(witness the proliferation of Advanced Placement classes in this
decade.)

Discipline is another perfectly sensible notion that gets lost, in
part due to anti-discrimination laws. The Los Angeles Unified School
District, the country’s second largest, has a particular problem with
enforcing discipline because LA has three essentials for
discrimination lawsuits over “disparate impact” in discipline: its own
deep pockets, lots of unruly non-Asian minority students, and an
extraordinary number of high-powered LA Law-style lawyers constantly
trolling for anti-discrimination suits.

Similarly, progressive education’s animus against having students
memorize the times tables and historical dates is better for teachers
(i.e., it’s less boring to teach) than it is for students, especially
the left half of the bell curve. As the author points out, “memorizing
is something that children do much, much better than adults”.

Moreover, Real Education is scathing on the myth of “Yale or jail”
propagated by the education establishment:

“Worst of all, the current system watches these students approach the
age at which they can legally drop out of school and acts as if it
wants to push them out, urging them to take more mathematics, language
arts, history, and science courses that they don’t want to take, so
that they can pursue the college chimera.”

For example, the rich Gates Foundation put on a full court press a few
years ago and persuaded the LAUSD school board to mandate that, to
graduate from high school, students must pass not only Algebra I and
Geometry, but also Algebra II—a class that is simply beyond a large
swathe of humanity’s powers of abstract cognition.

For students in the mid-range of academic ability, those who today
typically start higher education but wind up years later with tens of
thousands of dollars in tuition debts but no four-year degree, the
author offers a plan to break up the monopoly of the B.A. degree as a
signaling device. (It would also reduce the frantic scramble to get
into prestige colleges to acquire a halo effect with future
employers.)

The author advocates, modeled on the existing Certified Public
Accountants exam, more national certification tests in a wide array of
careers. Let students get as much higher education as they need to sit
the exam in their chosen career. Then publish their scores for
employers to see. Maybe the kid who spent two years working very hard
at a community college learned more of relevance to his future
employers than a kid who spent four years at Swarthmore.

Or maybe not. But why not have an objective way for employers to find
out?

Unfortunately, this wise man’s name is Charles Murray. So Real
Education has been almost completely ignored in this Era of Obamania.
[VDARE.com Note: It received a brief review in the NYT, (Title: Just
Leave Them Behind) and a nasty one by Michael J. Feuer [email him]in
Issues in Science and Technology, (Title: Danger: Bell Curve Ahead) in
which Feuer said that if it weren't for Murray's fame and influence,
dating back to Losing Ground, "there would be little reason to dignify
the current polemic with a review in a magazine of the National
Academy of Sciences."]

A tenuous relationship between Obama and Murray goes back to 1994, the
year Murray co-authored with Richard Herrnstein The Bell Curve.

Although Barack Obama has a strong urge toward literary self-
expression, his prudential awareness that what he didn’t say now
couldn’t hurt his career later meant that his publications during the
1990s were extraordinarily limited. Although he was editor of the
Harvard Law Review, and later employed as a lecturer by the U. of
Chicago Law Review, he authored no legal scholarship. Obama wrote
obscure columns for the Chicago black newspaper and for the local
weekly of Hyde Park, the upscale liberal enclave in which he kept
himself ensconced, but they are not on line. (There is of course the
massive exception of his 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father, a
tome so interminable in length and slippery in style that few have
managed to figure out what Obama was talking about. See my America’s
Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama’s "Story Of Race And Inheritance.)

Unsurprisingly, the subject of Obama’s lone foray into national
punditry in the 1990s, a commentary on National Public Radio, was so
uncontroversial that it couldn’t possibly backfire on his ambitions: a
denunciation of Charles Murray for co-authoring The Bell Curve.

Fifteen years later, the headline reads as the quintessence of irony

Charles Murray’s Political Expediency Denounced
Byline: Barack Obama

Showing little evidence of having read the book he excoriated, Obama
demanded more government spending on social programs that would
benefit his political bases: blacks and social workers He said: “Now,
it shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that with early intervention
such problems can be prevented … In the short run, such ladders of
opportunity are going to cost more, not less, than either welfare or
affirmative action.”

Although the President constantly demands that the best teachers be
sent to teach the worst students, in his own much-praised teaching
career he made sure to teach only some of the most carefully selected
elite students in the world: University of Chicago Law students.

In 1995, Obama became Chairman of the Board of the lavishly funded
Chicago Annenberg Challenge, dreamed up by unrepentant terrorist Bill
Ayers among others, and operation run out of the same floor (perhaps
the same office) as Ayers’s Small Learning Community educational
project. Years later, a careful study of test scores of students
showed that Obama and Ayers had wasted about $100 million.

Having failed dismally as a school reformer himself, Obama has hired
Mayor Daley’s school chief Arne Duncan to run the Department of
Education. But Duncan is so handcuffed by the convention wisdom of
educational romanticism that he won’t accomplish much.

The reason that almost nobody wants to think honestly about schooling
is that each of the four truths exhibit “disparate impact” on non-
Asian minorities. Once you start thinking hard about the data, you
inevitably wind up a crimethinker:

*

Ability varies. Both between individuals and between races.
*

Half of the children are below average. And more black and
Hispanic children are below average than white and Asian children.
*

Too many people are going to college. (Especially blacks,
although perhaps not Hispanics.)
*

America’s future depends on how we educate the academically
gifted. (Relatively few of whom are black or Hispanic.)

Murray largely avoids talking about race in this book. But, in
reality, there’s no escaping it for him. He’ll always be demonized as
the co-author of The Bell Curve.

And yet there is a possibility for breaking this vicious cycle of
denigration of the best social scientists and the inevitable result of
knuckleheaded social policies.

The poisonous cultural atmosphere could be radically improved with a
stroke of the President’s pen:

Obama could appoint Charles Murray his Senior Advisor on Education!

Obama’s Nixon-goes-to-China endorsement of Murray would radically
clear the air in our society, undercutting the knee-jerk viciousness
routinely directed at social scientists who dare to tell the truth.

Is there any chance Obama would do this?

Consider Obama’s appointment of that bête noire of feminists, Larry
Summers, to an equivalent role on economic policy. Granted, that’s
different because Obama—as far as I can tell from his autobiography—
doesn’t care about feminism at all. (Note how during last year’s
campaign, Obama revamped his wife’s image from $317,000 per year
career woman to stay-at-home earth mother.)

In contrast, Obama deeply cares about race, as the subtitle to his
autobiography—A Story of Race and Inheritance—suggests. He’s risen to
the White House as the prime beneficiary of the conventional wisdom
about race.

So why would he overturn the reigning dogmas?

Well, there’s only reason he would do so: if he actually cares about
doing a good job as President.

We shall see."

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/090524_obama.htm