Inside American Education (21 page)

These are empirical questions and there is no reason why there must be one answer for all institutions and all kinds of students. A substantial number of colleges and universities prefer the ACT to the SAT, some in the past have used I.Q. scores, and a few places like Bates College require no test scores at all. In addition, each admissions office gives these scores whatever weight it chooses, based on its own experience and judgment. There is no reason why “experts” must settle this question, once and for all, though they are of course free to produce a better test, if they can, and to enter it into the competition.

This does not mean that facts are irrelevant. Some of the most strident criticisms of standardized tests are demonstrably false. For example, it has been claimed—and repeated like a drumbeat—that standardized tests under-estimate the “real” ability of racial and ethnic minorities, and therefore predict a lower future performance in college than these groups will in fact have. Whatever the initial plausibility of this claim, there is no reason why there should have been more than 20 years of controversy over it (still continuing), because that means that more than 20 years of factual results have accumulated, and can be used to test the competing theories.

These facts have demonstrated repeatedly that the SAT (and numerous other tests) did
not
predict a lower academic performance (or other performance) for blacks, for example, than in fact later occurred.
⁹⁹
SAT scores have in fact proved empirically to be
better
predictors than high school grades for blacks, though the reverse has been true for whites and Asians.
¹⁰⁰
Insofar as there is any difference, on average, between the level of blacks’ academic performance predicted by the SAT scores and their actually observed performance, the latter has been slightly lower. In short, every aspect of the argument that “cultural bias” makes test scores invalid as predictors of minority student performance turns out to be false empirically.

It would be impossible to understand the persistence and vehemence of these arguments against test scores without understanding the political purpose they serve. Arguments that test scores under-estimate the subsequent academic performance
of minority students (1) serve to justify preferential admissions of minority students and (2) permit denial that these are in fact preferential policies, by enabling the claim to be made that different admissions standards merely adjust for the “unfairness” of the tests. In reality, the tests are not unfair. Life is unfair and the tests measure the results. Ignoring those results merely sets the stage for more and bigger problems, as will be seen in Chapter 6.

Many people are uncomfortable with any conclusion that tests, on average, reveal differences in the current academic capabilities of different racial or ethnic groups, because this conclusion seems too close to the theory that some groups are innately and genetically inferior to others. But these are, in reality, very different arguments—and the truth of one is perfectly consistent with the falseness of the other.
¹⁰¹
Even on socalled “intelligence” tests (as distinguished from “aptitude” or skills tests such as the SAT), whole nations have, over a period of decades, significantly increased the number of questions they can answer correctly, though this worldwide phenomenon has been inadvertently concealed by re-norming of I.Q. tests to produce the definitional average I.Q. of 100. In other words, the same number of correct answers which would have given an individual an I.Q. of 110 fifty years ago might give that individual’s son or daughter an I.Q. of 90 today, because the average person today answers more questions correctly—and whatever the average number of correct answers might be at a given time iis, by definition, equal to an I.Q. of 100.

When whole nations do significantly better on I.Q. tests over time, this undermines the claim that such tests (or any tests) measure “real” or genetically innate ability. So too does a change in the relative standing of different groups, such as the Jews, who scored below average on intelligence tests given to American soldiers in the First World War,
¹⁰²
but who have since scored above the national average.
¹⁰³

Test results within some other nations likewise suggest that test scores may provide valid predictions without necessarily measuring so-called “real” ability or innate potential. In the Philippines, for example, people growing up in Manila tend to score higher on standardized tests than do people in the hinterlands. This may well be because of differences in social circumstances rather than differences in innate or “real” ability.
Yet low-scoring individuals from the hinterlands performed no better at the university than did equally low-scoring individuals from Manila.
¹⁰⁴
Similarly, in Indonesia, people on the island of Java have averaged higher test scores than people from the outer islands. Yet outer islanders with a given score did not perform any better at the university than did people with the same score from Java.
¹⁰⁵

Whether in the United States or in other countries,
developed capabilities
differ significantly among people, depending upon the circumstances in which they have grown up and the cultural values which have influenced their own efforts to acquire education—or to direct their energies in other directions. The relationship between their innate potential and their developed academic skills may be quite loose—and yet differences in levels of academic skill cannot be sweepingly dismissed as “irrelevant” or as showing arbitrary “cultural bias” in tests. There is no point chasing the will o’ the wisp of a “culture-free” test or any other culture-free criteria. Whatever anyone accomplishes anywhere in this world will always be accomplished within a given culture. No race, no country, and no period of human historv has ever been culture-free.

Preferential Admissions

Colleges’ preferential admission of different categories of people is not a new phenomenon. Athletes for the schools’ sports teams have long had preferential admission, not only in powerhouse Big Ten schools but also in the Ivy League. Private institutions, attempting to develop loyalty among alumni families who will donate money, have likewise long given preferential admission to the sons and daughters of people who graduated from the particular college. Not all alumni children get admitted, but it is not uncommon for them to be put in a special category by admissions committees at many private colleges, including Harvard. The more difficult the school is to get into, the more valuable is this privilege—and presumably, the more generous the alumni are expected to be when donations are sought. State universities, as a matter of course, give preferences to students applying from within the state as compared
to out-of-state applicants, not only in admissions but also in the tuition charged.

Since the 1960s, another category of preferentially admitted students has been added—racial and ethnic minorities. In the controversies which have arisen around the issue of preferential admissions by race or ethnicity, those on both sides of the issue have often argued as if the circumstances—and especially the academic failures—of minority students were unique social phenomena with unique causes. In reality, there is nothing uncommon about a high failure rate among people preferentially admitted to college. This pattern has long been common among college athletes, whether they were white or black. Even a highly privileged group like alumni sons at Harvard, during the era when more than half of those sons who applied were admitted, were disproportionately represented among students who flunked out.
¹⁰⁶
Similarly, when students at the University of the Philippines could be admitted at the discretion of the university president, by-passing the usual academic competition, those preferentially admitted tended to be from the more privileged classes—and tended also to perform less well at the university.
¹⁰⁷

In short, preferential admissions tend to lead to substandard academic performance, whether those admitted are privileged or underprivileged. What has been unique about students preferentially admitted by race has been the large numbers involved, the magnitude of the preferences, the magnitude of the hypocrisy, and the magnitude of the academic and social disasters which have followed.

CHAPTER 6
“New Racism” and Old Dogmatism

I
NCREASING HOSTILITY
toward blacks and other racial minorities on college campuses has become so widespread that the term “the new racism” has been coined to describe it. For example, a dean at Middlebury College in Vermont reported that—for the first time in 19 years—she was now being asked by white students not to assign them black room mates.
¹
There have been reports of similar trends in attitudes elsewhere. A professor at the University of California at Berkeley observed: “I’ve been teaching at U.C. Berkeley now for 18 years and it’s only within the last three or four years that I’ve seen racist graffiti for the first time.”
²
Another Berkeley professor, recalling support for the civil rights movement on the campuses of the 1960s and 1970s, commented: “Twenty years later, what have we got? Hate mail and racist talk.”
³

Much uglier incidents, including outright violence, have erupted on many campuses where such behavior was unheard of, just a decade or two earlier. At the University of Massachusetts, for example, white students beat up a black student in 1986 and a large mob of whites chased about 20 blacks.
⁴
. A well-known college guide quotes a Tufts University student as
saying, “many of my friends wouldn’t care if they never saw a black person again in their lives.”
⁵

Racism, as such, is not new. What is new are the frequency, the places, and the class of people involved in an unprecedented escalation of overt racial hostility among middle-class young people, on predominantly liberal or radical campuses. Painful and ugly as these episodes are, they should not be surprising. A number of people predicted such things many years ago, when colleges’ current racial policies began to take shape. They also predicted some of the other bad consequences of those policies. These predictions and warnings were ignored, dismissed, or ridiculed by those who believed the prevailing dogmas on which academic racial policies were based. Now that these predictions are coming true, the dogmatists insist that the only solution is a more intensive application of their dogmas.

PREDICTIONS VERSUS DOGMAS

When the idea of special, preferential admissions for racial and ethnic minorities became an issue during the 1960s, two fundamentally different ways of evaluating such proposals emerged. One approach was to discuss the
goals
of preferential admissions, such as the benefits assumed to be received by minority students, by the groups from which they came, by the institutions they would attend, and by American society as a whole. This became the prevailing approach, which dominated both intellectual discourse and academic policy-making.

Another approach was to ask: What
incentives
and
circumstances
were being created—for the minority students, for their fellow students, for college administrators, and for others—and what were the likely consequences of such incentives and circumstances? When the issue was approached in this way, many negative potentials of preferential policies became apparent. However, relatively few people risked moral condemnation by asking such questions in public, so that there was little need for those with a goals-oriented approach to answer them. Now history has answered those questions, and these answers have provided both abundant and painful confirmation
of the original misgivings, based on examining the incentives and constraints of academic racial policies.

The issue is not one of a simple, direct reaction to preferential admissions policy, though that by itself generates considerable resentment. The many academic and emotional ramifications of such policies set in motion complex reactions which pit minority and non-minority students against each other, and generate stresses and reactions among the faculty, administrators, and outside interests. Though many colleges and universities have been caught by surprise and have been unable to cope with the unexpected problems—or have responded in ways which have created new and worse problems—much of what has happened has followed a scenario set forth by critics more than two decades ago, and much of the intervening time has seen a steady building of tensions toward the ugly episodes of recent years, which have now been christened, “the new racism.”

What was at issue, then and now, is not whether there should be larger or smaller numbers of minority students attending college, but whether preferential admissions policies should be the
mechanism
for making a college education available to more minority students. There are other ways of increasing the number of minority students—not only in theory, but as a matter of historical fact. Between 1940 and 1947, for example, there was a 64 percent increase in the number of nonwhite students attending post-secondary institutions
⁶
—due to financial aid under the G.I. Bill for veterans returning from World War II. This made a college education available to the black masses for the first time.
⁷
During a corresponding period of the 1960s—from 1960 to 1967—there was a 49 percent increase in the number of black students attending college, but this later increase was often accompanied by preferential admissions policies, while the earlier and larger percentage increase had been accomplished simply through more financial support.