The Power of Race

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/03/elite

by tokenadult • 17 years ago

10 6 17 years ago

RK• 17 years ago

the authors suggest that it's time for a massive federally supported effort, equivalent in intensity to the Manhattan Project, to determine the source of academic achievement gaps and to develop plans to shrink them.

I don't even know how to comment on that. I'll just point this out as a choice sentence from the article.

ksvs• 17 years ago

I noticed that too. What if the source is something that can't be shrunk?

tokenadult• 17 years ago

Richard Nisbett's recent book

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-How-Get-Schools-Cultures/...

is the subject of an academic study group I'm participating in this semester

http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall09/mcguem/psy8935/defau...

and one of the amazing conclusions from broad literature reviews is that there is STILL remarkably little research on educational outcomes with sound experimental designs.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

There may be some rather inexpensive and simple (once discovered) interventions that could do a lot to close group achievement gaps, but today no one is sure at all.

araneae• 17 years ago

It's actually become an annoyingly common metaphor. A good friend of mine wrote an article about it http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32726

(he's a hacker too.)

patio11• 17 years ago

I have always thought that the "soft variables" which are used as the explanation for why Asian students don't get admitted as well as their hard credentials would suggest are, if you forgive me, a crock. Its kind of like a poll test: sure, a requirement that somebody be literate to vote is facially neutral, but in both aim and application it is designed to fall nearly exclusively on black voters.

Soft factors, in aim and application, allow universities to shape their entering class to fit their preferences. One of the key preferences of selective American universities is that they have a rough idea of how many black and Hispanic students they want in their classes, and they will discriminate on the basis of race to achieve that rough idea. So, wham, soft factors.

Universities will profess that they love admitting students who do hip hop and don't particularly need to admit more students who do violin, but if its a Korean doing hip hop and a black guy doing violin they will change their minds in a hurry.

Plus it is an undeniable, documented historical fact that the "soft factors" introduced into university admissions were explicitly designed to keep out the undesirably academically competent disfavored minority du jour -- at the time they were first instituted, that was Jews.

ShabbyDoo• 17 years ago

I generally oppose race-based preferences, but I have recently forced myself to think about them from a different perspective. What if I was the US's benevolent dictator? I would be concerned with large, concentrated populations of very poor black people. To break the cycle of generational poverty, I could institute all sorts of social service programs and provide hand-outs. Or, I could game the incentives people observe so that they would be more likely to take actions that would improve their situation. Observing more people "like you" opt into higher education and get middle class jobs sufficient to buy homes in the suburbs might make you think that you too could achieve a similar outcome. But, if you had no such role models, you might decide that your fate has been pre-determined and make no effort to improve your lot. So, I wonder if the value of affirmative action is not to the individual so much as to the group.

I still oppose racial preferences. As a teenager, I opposed them from a civil rights standpoint -- after all, they're a blatant form of institutionalized discrimination. In college, I had an experience that made me oppose preferences for a more pragmatic reason -- they can be cruel. I had a summer internship at a large company that made a substantial effort to recruit minorities. One guy in my internship class was a student at a small, historically black college in the South. He was a great guy...fun to hang out with, and had superb interpersonal and communication skills. Ostensibly, he was a computer science major but once admitted that his school had not required that he write "a program" in more than two years. This company, with all good intentions, put him in a very technical role for the summer. He failed miserably and accomplished nothing. On one of the last days of the internship program, I heard him literally sobbing to his mentor that he had accomplished nothing during the summer. He was right and smart enough to know it. If he had been white (or, more correctly a "non-disenfranchised" minority), someone would have told him that he could have a great career in marketing, PR, sales, whatever. Writing code wasn't for him, but it's not for most people, and that's quite ok. Had he not been wooed because of the color of his skin, he could have opted into a mutually beneficial internship with a PR firm where he would have learned a lot and gained self confidence. Instead, he got the message that he sucked.

The Power of Race

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