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 On taking office, President Joe Biden signaled that the
nation’s long-held principle of equality for all was over, signing executive
orders to advance racial equity “across the Federal Government” – equity
referring to the idea that merely treating everybody the same is not enough, and
that an equal outcome for all people has to be the goal.
Over the last few months, many Ivy League and flagship state
universities have moved away from a seemingly neutral measure long used to
assess applicants – standardized test scores – to give minorities a better shot
at admissions.
In May, Hewlett-Packard decreed that by 2030 half of its leadership positions
and more than 30% of its technicians and engineers must be women and that the
number of minorities should “meet or exceed” their representation in the tech
workforce. United Airlines announced that half of the 5,000 pilots it would
train at its proprietary flight school between now and 2030 will be women or
people of color. United did not reveal whether there were enough qualified
blacks and women in the pipeline so that a black/female quota of 2,500 new
pilots could be filled – or about what it would do if there weren’t enough
qualified candidates.
Other major American companies including Delta Airlines, Ralph Lauren, and Wells
Fargo have also announced hiring quotas as a way to redress racial imbalances.
The equity movement is rooted in a deeply pessimistic view of the United States
as irredeemably white supremacist. The transition from equality of treatment to
equality of outcomes tests one of the basic post-civil rights principles of
American life – namely, that the same standards should be applied to all people.
The issue of standards is not just a matter of values or fairness. With the U.S.
falling behind other countries in math and science, notably China, standards are
matters of competitiveness and national security – even as the military, CIA and
other federal agencies embrace equity.
But discontent over the
pace of racial progress has led to an explicit rejection of meritocracy and a
call for old standards to make way for new ones.
In May, the Princeton University classics department announced that in an effort
to combat “systemic racism,” it would no longer require classics majors to take
Latin or Greek. Is it really OK for future professors of classics not to know
Latin?
The American Medical Association has released a strategic plan calling for an
expansion of “medical school and physician education to include equity,
anti-racism, structural competency, public health and social sciences, critical
race theory, and historical basis of disease.” The AMA doesn’t say whether
adding those subjects to the curriculum will take away time from other more
germane subjects to the study of medicine such as anatomy, microbiology, and
genetics.
“Scientific evidence tells us that racism has caused significant harm to people
– and their health – throughout our nation’s history,” Gregory E. Harmon, M.D.,
the AMA’s president elect, who is white, said in an email to RCI, explaining the
initiative.
Perhaps the most striking passages in the AMA document are those that have to do
with equality and meritocracy, which it calls “malignant narratives.”
“Seeking to treat everyone the ‘same’ ignores the historical legacy of
disinvestment and deprivation,” the document says of equality, while meritocracy
is “a narrative that attributes success and failure to individual abilities and
merits. It does not address the centuries of unequal treatment that have
historically robbed communities of the vital resources needed to thrive.”
Some critics note that the strategic plan says nothing about competency; several
doctors posting to the blog Legal Insurrection asked if members of the AMA would
be comfortable allowing them or their families to be treated, as one of them put
it, “by those who have MD attached to their names solely in the name of equity
... not because of meritocracy or qualification.”
The strategic plan offers no concrete suggestions for increasing the numbers of
Blacks in medical school, and it makes no analysis of whether it’s even possible
to do that. Is there a pool of qualified candidates that, somehow, is not being
considered?
The authors of the studies argue that admitting students with lower MCAT scores
would “diversify the physician workforce.” But given that Black students are
already being admitted at a significantly lower standard, at least as defined by
MCAT, than whites and Asians, how much lower can the standard go? The studies
give no answer.
The AMA Plan also fails to address the question of principle raised by applying
different standards to different groups. Is it fair to effectively prevent some
qualified individuals from becoming doctors because their gender or race
requires them to score higher than other genders or races? It's the same
question that applies to the different standards applied to Asians, compared to
both whites and blacks, in school admissions, a matter that is the subject of
several lawsuits.
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“We are taught to study for the test, to get good
grades,” Kenny Xu, author of a forthcoming book “An Inconvenient
Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for
Meritocracy,” said in an email. “Why? Because those good grades and
test scores will, and should, lead to rewards in the future.
“How would you feel if someone who studied a third as much as you
did got an opportunity you've been wanting for years? That would be
absolutely unfair. And yet, that is what woke ideology does.”
Despite views like those, standardized tests have been under assault
for years as obstacles to minority advancement, especially tests for
elite high schools in such cities as New York, Boston and San
Francisco, and the SAT used for college admissions.
Elite schools including Lowell High School in San Francisco have
dropped their admissions test in favor of a lottery system. This may
increase racial diversity, but will the school be able to maintain
its high academic standards? The same question applies to other
elite schools such as the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science
and Technology in Virginia, rated by U.S. News as the best high
school in the country, which is also jettisoning its former
standardized test in favor of “holistic” admissions.
Similarly, last year, in what might prove to be a watershed
decision, the regents of the University of California voted to phase
out the SAT in admissions for the entire system, whose nine campuses
make up the largest public university in the country.
All of this raises the possibility that the elimination of common,
neutral standards will bring an end to the existence of elite
schools for very gifted, very high-achieving students of the sort
who will ensure American competitiveness in the future.
“I wouldn't be surprised if in two or three years standardized
testing is eliminated altogether,” William Jacobson, a law professor
at Cornell who runs the Legal Insurrection website, said in a Zoom
interview. “You see people saying that the whole concept of
meritocracy is a device to maintain white supremacy. But if you
eliminate testing that has commonality to it, how do you judge
people?”
A similar rejection of the idea of merit
lies behind another initiative in California, where the state Board
of Education has adopted a “Framework” proposing that all gifted
programs in math instruction be eliminated, along with all
“acceleration” and “tracking” – that is, grouping students in
different classes according to their math aptitude.
“The subject and community of mathematics has a history of exclusion
and filtering rather than inclusion and welcoming,” the Framework
states. “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents ... and the
cult of genius.” Very early on, women and minorities get “fixed
labels of 'giftedness' and are taught differently” in a system
“designed for privileged white boys,” the Framework says.
No doubt, there's truth to the idea that some children are
discouraged early when it comes to math, and that that holds them
back. But the idea, as the Framework puts it, that “all students are
capable of becoming powerful mathematics learners and users” seems
utopian at the very least. Can all students become great
mathematicians, violinists, or professional athletes, or is the very
difference in natural abilities due to labels arbitrarily applied to
children largely on the basis of their sex or race?
Moreover, the assertion that the system is “designed for privileged
white boys” runs into some inconvenient facts: one is that plenty of
“privileged white boys” can't do math to save their lives; another
is that Asians, both boys and girls, many of them immigrants from
very modest circumstances, outperform these privileged white boys by
considerable margins. In addition, overall, girls get at least equal
or higher grades than boys in math from elementary to high school,
despite the stereotyping “labels” that, according to the Math
Framework, hold them back. As for gifted programs
favoring whites while keeping minorities out, according to the very
statistics included in the Math Framework, 32% of Asian boys and
girls in California are in “gifted” programs, compared to 8% of
whites and 4% of blacks. So it would seem indisputable that to
eliminate these programs would have the effect of placing many
Asians, but not many whites, in slower classes.
The solution to math disparities, according to the Framework, is to
group all students of all aptitudes in the same class and for
teachers to give “differentiated work and more open math questions”
to all of them.
The Framework doesn't say exactly why this would be better than
grouping more proficient math students in their own classes. Emails
asking that and other questions were acknowledged by the Board of
Education press office, but it did not respond to the actual
questions.
What all these efforts at “equity” ignore is that the national
effort to redress past wrongs has been going on for a long time in
America, making the matter of racial advantage and disadvantage a
matter of multivariable calculus. To adopt the view that meritocracy
is simply a disguised racist stratagem represents a sea change in
American life – but lots of evidence, across industries and
institutions, suggests that this is the direction in which our
society is headed. |
