Thomas Sowell on Berkeley High’s ‘White’ Science Labs
The inimitable economist Thomas Sowell has written an article on Berkeley High School’s proposal to eliminate science labs to divert funds to closing the racial academic achievement gap.
“This is a proposal to redistribute money from science to social work, by providing every student with advisors on note-taking, time management and other learning skills…The point is to close educational gaps among groups, or at least go on record as trying. As with most equalization crusades, whether in education or in the economy, it is about equalizing downward, by lowering those at the top. ‘Fairness’ strikes again!
…
“In keeping with the rhetoric of the prevailing ideology, our education professor refers to ‘privileged’ parents and ‘privileged’ children who want to ‘forestall any progress toward equity.’…In the language of the politically correct, achievement is equated with privilege. Such verbal sleight of hand evades the question whether individuals’ own priorities and efforts affect outcomes, whether in education or in other endeavors. No need to look at empirical evidence when a clever phrase can take that whole question off the table.” [emphasis added]
Truly maddening. The professor accused parents who stress education of trying to keep others down. As Sowell notes, somewhere along the way, achievement became a synonym for privileged. Only in a PC-saturated, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of world is such a thing possible. People of Japanese descent in Canada and the U.S. tend to have higher incomes than other minorities and even whites. Given past discrimination against this ethnic group, does the privileged accusation make sense? Of course not.
“Achievement by overcoming obstacles is a special threat to the left’s vision of the world, and so must be magically transformed into privilege through rhetoric…Those with that vision do not want to even discuss evidence that students from different groups spend different amounts of time on homework and different amounts of time on social activities.” [emphasis added]
Sowell appeals to common sense–rather than wrong-headed social engineering schemes to take from one group and give to another–when discussing how individuals can improve academic performance: change attitudes, priorities, and behavior.
George Leef at the Phi Beta Cons blog writes:
“Welcome to the world of the education experts, where families that encourage children to work hard in school are ‘privileged’ as though they were our equivalent of European nobility, and where the primary educational goal is ‘equity’ among designated groups rather than assisting all pupils to progress to the best of their ability.”
