Current read: Woke Racism by John McWhorter

I'm currently reading Woke Racism by John McWhorter. It's a critique of "wokeness", the latest name for political correctness. I won't blog the whole book because much of it is unsurprising to me. Gratifying to read, well-stated, but not new or surprising.

But I have to talk about pages 104-105. McWhorter is discussing college admissions and argues that there's nothing wrong with attending a less selective school. One intriguing thing he delves into is the difference between a general education course at Columbia (where he teaches) and some less selective school. At Columbia every student is assigned to read all 300 pages of Plato's Republic. At a less selective school students might read ~50 pages of carefully curated excerpts. McWhorter notes that most people (aside from diligent philosophy majors) will not recall much of the Republic beyond the Allegory of the Cave, so what's the harm in just reading that excerpt and really delving into it? They'll still be prepared for thoughtful examination of the world around them.

There's much that one could say in defense of reading the entire book. (Disclosure: I read the whole thing nearly 20 years ago, but I don't remember much except the part about the cave.) And obviously philosophy majors should read the whole thing, as well as more theory-oriented political science majors. Even those who aren't philosophy majors might benefit from reading the whole thing and discussing other parts besides the cave. There are always good reasons to read all sorts of things. And surely students at other schools could read the whole book, if the reading assignment were spread out over a couple weeks and the discussion were more gradual.

But we shouldn't get too hung up on the particulars of this one text. McWhorter's main point is that at Columbia the courses will go into more depth than an analogous course elsewhere, because the students are prepared for it.

But one might turn it around: Why does Columbia make everyone read the whole thing? Why do they aim their program at the level of kids who were privileged to get the sort of k-12 education that would prepare them for a very intense general education program? Why shouldn't Columbia admit students with great potential but less preparation and Meet Them Where They Are At, to use a common phrase in education? Do you really want to deny a kid with great potential the chance to study at a great place just because they weren't prepared for a certain pace of assignments? Why not take them and groom them and lift them up?

The short answer is that you can't do that AND simultaneously challenge the other kids at the level that they're ready for. At least not in the same class. And as soon as you have different tracks like that we're back to all of the same dilemmas. It's not so different from trying to teach physics to a group in which some students are struggling with high school algebra and others have mastered differential equations.

But some people would push back and say that the kids who can handle long reading assignments or hard math problems or whatever don't need our attention. And I guess the question then is whose attention? Obviously the Columbia-ready kids won't be coming to me, so there's no need to deliberate over whether they need, deserve, or get my attention. But the more fundamental dilemma is about how to handle different levels of preparation, and I know and work with people who would say that in every case we should prioritize the least-prepared. From a religious perspective, well, Jesus said that we need to serve the least of His people. 

The question, though, is whether the least prepared are actually well-served by being pushed along paths that aren't working for them and can't really be made to work for them via any means plausibly available to me. There's also the Parable of the Talents to consider. Should the well-prepared twiddle their thumbs or develop their talents?

This is very much a Rohrschach test.

My apology to the k-12 system

On any given day, when students are staring at a diagram and not getting that when there's a right triangle you need to use trig functions, I might start cursing the k-12 system and proclaim my desire to reanimate Stalin so he can deport all of our mis-educators to Siberia.  When native English speakers from middle-class suburban backgrounds can't get their subjects and verbs to agree, there's a good chance that I'll call for high school English teachers to be sent to North Korea so that they can starve.  But those are emotional responses.  In my more rational moments, I know that teachers have far less influence on students than their families and the wider culture, and that teachers cannot simply fail vast numbers of students without incurring the wrath of school boards and legislators.

I rarely like the NYT Education Section, but this article and the associated charts are priceless.  The charts clearly show that factors contributing to socioeconomic status (including race) are major determinants of student success (or lack thereof).  Schools are limited more by their inputs than their practices.  (And, FYI, in a footnote the article says that socioeconomic status, hereafter abbreviated SES, was measured by "income, the percentage of parents with a college degree, the percentage of single parents, poverty, SNAP and unemployment rates".)

One particularly important thing about this analysis is that it doesn't just compare districts with each other, it also compares racial groups within districts.  In the second chart, black, white, and Hispanic students within the same districts are compared.  (Asians are left out because this is a nationwide analysis and in most districts there are too few of them to make for valid comparisons.)  Besides showing that blacks and Hispanics are disadvantaged, it also shows that they tend to perform at levels comparable to other members of the same SES groups in other districts.  Yes, there are racial gaps even after controlling for other aspects of SES, but the important thing about breaking it down by race is that within a district black, white, and Hispanic students will usually NOT be of the same SES.  If you didn't factor that in, you might wonder whether SES variables were actually telling you something about the schools themselves (via funding and local taxes) rather than the students that those schools receive. But students from different SES groups in the same district perform more similarly to kids in other districts with similar SES rather than kids in the same district but from different strata of society.

Now, the third chart does show that racial gaps persist even within the same SES, and that's an ugly aspect of US history and culture that we need to confront.  But just as measurable non-racial aspects of SES are beyond the ability of schools to single-handedly correct for, so are the sad fruits of America's continuing racial inequities.  I don't claim to know what the full solution is, and I freely recognize that schools can play their part, but it's only a part.

Anyway, this means three things, one of which I can use as an excuse and the others of which I will just have to accept:  On the one hand, my students are the way that they are for reasons that go well beyond any particular failings of their k-12 teachers.  On the other hand, at least it means that nobody can fault me.  But it also means that I am doomed to spend another 30 years shepherding people through the system without seeing them improve as much as I would hope, and without seeing most  of them perform at a particularly high intellectual level.  I am as limited by my inputs as the k-12 system is by its inputs.  On the other hand, it also means that maybe my colleagues are right to focus their attention on "special programs."  Most people will not beat the odds (that's the definition of the odds, after all) so maybe the only source of satisfaction is in focusing on anecdotes.

Finally, as informative as this NYT Education article was, it's still a NYT Education article.  They can't resist the temptation to find The Fix.  They note that This One School District in New Jersey seems to have beaten the odds.  The fact that they only found one, in an analysis of thousands of districts, really ought to tell you that maybe there are not magical solutions, but instead they spend the last few paragraphs going on about how great this school district is and wondering if there's a lesson that can be learned and scaled.  I doubt it, but I pity the k-12 teachers who will get to be subjected to workshops on the Best Practices from This One District.  Just as the NYT helps me finally get over my desire to see k-12 teachers suffer, it also proposes a new way to make them suffer.  Thanks, NYT.  Thanks a lot.