Exclusive: Walter Williams proves all races, genders are not created same

Are women equal to men? Are Jews equal to gentiles? Are blacks equal to Italians, Irish, Polish and other white people? The answer is probably a big fat no, and the pretense or assumption that we are equal – or should be equal – is foolhardy and creates mischief. Let’s look at it.

Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses 7-to-1. Female intelligence is packed much closer to the middle of the bell curve, whereas men’s intelligence has far greater variability. That means that though there are many more male geniuses, there are also many more male idiots. The latter might partially explain why more men are in jail than women.

Watch any Saturday afternoon college basketball game and ask yourself the question fixated in the minds of liberals everywhere: “Does this look like America?” Among the 10 players on the court, at best there might be two white players. If you want to see the team’s white players, you must look at the bench. A Japanese or Chinese player is close to being totally out of the picture, even on the bench. Professional basketball isn’t much better, with 80 percent of the players being black, but at least there’s a Chinese player. Professional football isn’t much better, with blacks being 65 percent. In both sports, blacks are among the highest-paid players and have the highest number of awards for excellence. Blacks who trace their ancestry to West Africa, including black Americans, hold more than 95 percent of the top times in sprinting.

By contrast, blacks are only 2 percent of the NHL’s ice hockey players. But don’t fret about black NHL under-representation. State under-representation is worse. Most U.S. professional hockey players were born in Minnesota, followed by Massachusetts. Not a single U.S. professional hockey player can boast of having been born and raised in Hawaii, Mississippi or Louisiana. Any way we cut it, there is simply no racial proportionality or diversity in professional basketball, football and hockey.

A more emotionally charged question is whether we have equal intelligence. Take Jews, for example. They are only 3 percent of the U.S. population. Half-baked theories of racial proportionality would predict that 3 percent of U.S. Nobel laureates are Jews, but that’s way off the mark. Jews constitute a whopping 39 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. At the international level, the disparity is worse. Jews are not even 1 percent of the world’s population, but they constitute 20 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners.

There are many other inequalities and disproportionalities. Asian-Americans routinely score the highest on the math portion of the SAT, whereas blacks score the lowest. Men are 50 percent of the population, and so are women; yet men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. I’m personally wondering what whoever is in charge of lightning has against men. Population statistics for South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their respective populations is black. By contrast, in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented in terms of their percentages in the general population. Pima Indians of Arizona have the world’s highest known diabetes rates. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. Cervical cancer rates are five times higher among Vietnamese women in the U.S. than among white women.


Soft-minded and sloppy-thinking academics, lawyers and judges harbor the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination, we’d be proportionately distributed by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere, at any time, that proportionality is the norm anywhere on earth; however, much of our thinking, many of our laws and much of our public policy are based upon proportionalities being the norm. Maybe this vision is held because people believe that equality in fact is necessary for equality before the law. But the only requirement for equality before the law is that one is a human being.

via Are we all really equal?.

Speaking publicly for the first time since Chicago Public Schools announced that more than 50 schools are to close, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the motive behind the plan is to ensure that all children in Chicago receive a quality education.

Emanuel faced media Saturday afternoon during an unrelated press conference in the Pullman neighborhood. The mayor spoke softly and calmly when focus shifted to the CPS controversy that took place while he was on a family skiiing vacation in Utah.


“The decision to deal with the 54 schools was not taken lightly but it was taken with the notion of ‘How do we make sure that every child can get to a quality school with a quality education?’ Because you do not get a repeat on this,” Emanuel said. “And for too long we have not been able to do that for every child in the city of Chicago and for all of the families.”

Emanuel called education as “the great equalizer” and said the decisions behind the school closures all pointed back to equal education opportunities for children in Chicago.

“We have to make sure we are investing in quality education. This is very difficult and there’s a lot of anguish — I understand that and I appreciate it,” he said.

Emanuel said the backlash from closing the schools pales compared to the anguish that comes from “trapping children in schools that are not succeeding.”
via Emanuel on school closures: ‘Investing in quality education’ – chicagotribune.com.

KIPP Baltimore Executive Director leads broader education reform effort

Baltimore, MD –KIPP Baltimore founder and former teacher Jason Botel is taking over as executive director for MarylandCAN: The Maryland Campaign for Achievement Now.

“Maryland’s policy climate makes it very hard to lead children from underserved communities to achieve at high levels,” Botel said. “As I have watched KIPP and other education reform efforts grow much more quickly in other regions due to more conducive political climates, I have decided that after 12 years with KIPP and 11 years leading KIPP Baltimore, I want to contribute to KIPP’s mission in a different way. As MarylandCAN’s executive director I will fight for the laws and policies necessary for all children in Maryland to receive an excellent education.”

Jason got his start as a Teach For America corps member in Baltimore and went on to found and lead KIPP Baltimore, which operates two high-performing public charter schools and an alumni support program. In 2012, KIPP Baltimore had the highest eighth-grade reading and math proficiency rates in Baltimore on the Maryland School Assessment.

Throughout his tenure, Jason has rallied hundreds of parents to fight to allow KIPP Baltimore to continue to operate in Maryland. In 2012, he secured the approval from Baltimore City School Board of a 30-year lease for KIPP schools.

“I’ve been privileged to witness Jason build schools in Baltimore that challenge children, infuse their days with joy and put them on a path to college and success in life,” said Thomas E. Wilcox, President and CEO of the Baltimore Community Foundation. “In his new role, Jason will fight for every child in Maryland to have the same chance. I look forward to continuing to partner with Jason to advance the cause of educational transformation in our state.”

Botel helped found MarylandCAN as a founding member of the advisory board, along with leaders Peter Kannam, Omari Todd, Marina McCarthy, Howard Stone, Jeff Cohen and Alice Johnson Cain.

Since launching just over a year ago, MarylandCAN has led efforts to reform public school policy in the state, including hosting a 300-person rally in Annapolis last month for charter school reform, publishing school report cards and policy reports and building a strong network of advocates.

Botel is taking over for Curtis Valentine, who served as founding executive director of MarylandCAN since September 2011.
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About MarylandCAN: Launched in January 2012, MarylandCAN: The Maryland Campaign for Achievement Now, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit education reform advocacy organization building a movement of Marylanders with the will to enact smart public policies so that every Maryland child has access to a great public school.

J. Martin Rochester is Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor of Political Science
at the University of Missouri-St. Loui

Michael F. Shaughnessy –

1. You have not written a book-length k-12 education book since Class Warfare 10 years ago. What has changed since then?

A lot has happened –the growth and demise of No Child Left Behind, the development of the Common Core standards and the Obama administration’s efforts to tie school reform to the efforts by Bill Gates and others to base reform on assessment of teacher quality and student learning outcomes, and other developments as well. However, especially in k-12, the more things change the more they stay the same.

I am reminded of the comment of Arthur Levine, the former head of Columbia University Teachers College, made around the time I wrote Class Warfare: “We will never have national standards since the conservatives do not like national and the liberals [progressives] do not like standards.” This is essentially still the case, as these battles are still being fought on both sides of the political spectrum.

More importantly, I have not seen one iota of progress in improving academic standards in k-12 in terms of rigor and challenge.

2. You have published several article-length commentaries, such as “The Progressive View of School Choice,” in Flypaper (Fordham Foundation) on January 17, 2013. Could you summarize the main points for us here?

Just as when I wrote Class Warfare, the “progressive education” paradigm still dominates much of k-12 in the United States, that is, the stress on the “student-centered,” “active and cooperative learning” classroom. Although some traditional pedagogy has made a bit of a comeback, the schools of education still dominate the training and credentialing of k-12 teachers along with their in-service professional development; and there is no question that schools of education remain as hopelessly committed to progressive pedagogy as ever.

What prompted the article was an interview I had with a local high school principal in St. Louis. I lamented the fact that it was getting more and more difficult to get students in k-16 to read dense gray text (aka books) since they were so used to the instant gratification of the Internet (the Wikipedia sound-bite culture, the click-click of the mouse, glitzy graphics, texting and tweeting, etc.). His response to me was that “today’s students are so much smarter than yesterday’s students since they, unlike in the past, choose their own books to read.”

I was flabbergasted that the mere act of choice is now equated with increased intelligence and academic rigor, as if “I choose, therefore I am” is the new mantra of education. I noted that this mindset led at my own local high school to a student in an Honors English class selecting Paris Hilton’s autobiography as the semester research project, and I had to wonder how many kids, given the choice, might choose, say, Moby Dick. The larger point was that it is strange that, at a time when so many educationists do not want to expand parental “school choice,” they do want to expand the choices open to children.

3. You also wrote “In Defense of the F-Word in K-16 Education,” which was also published in The Flypaper on May 31, 2012. What were the main points you tried to make there?

The F-word refers to failure, i.e. flunking students. I noted that the entire “self-esteem” paradigm that most k-12 schools had adopted in the 1990s translated into administrators telling staff that “failure is not an option,” so that this only fueled grade inflation and made it almost impossible for teachers to flunk kids even if they made no real academic effort; students were being given at least a passing grade even if they turned in no work, on the assumption that they could never recover from a zero or even a grade of 50, deserved or not.

This was grounded in the work of Rick Dufour and other education gurus who wanted to put all the onus on the teacher on whether students succeeded or not, and presumed that the proper “intervention” could produce a passing grade. These same k-12 products then entered my classroom with the attitude of the student I had recently failed who told me “you should be embarrassed to fail a student.” She had done no work in the course, but assumed, thanks to her k-12 experience, that I was the one to blame.

4) What do you see as the problems with the “student-centered” paradigm that dominates so much of k-12?

Some student-centered learning of course is appropriate and good. However, it is utterly naïve and pretentious to think that children can take the lead in their education as much as ed schools urge. As I say in my book, little Johnny and Shirley can barely find the potty, yet –with reggio and similar pedagogy, as early as preschool — they are now supposed to do “critical thinking” and decide whether to read or play in the sandbox and, again, if they read, pick what to read.

I recall an instructional tech guy named Bob Clapp leading a workshop on my campus several years ago, when he claimed “we are now moving from the old model of “teacher 90% and student 10% to student 90% and teacher 10%.” I said that was a bunch of claptrap and asked whether anyone had ever calculated how much wasted time occurs when you have students who know almost nothing interacting with other students who know almost nothing. I also wondered why we were going to pay so much money to instructors for glorified day care, whose job was mainly putting kids in a circle for “pair-share.”

5) Now, can we discuss grade inflation? How pervasive a problem is it? And how much of a problem does it cause when these student reach college ?

The problem is huge. There is a real reluctance to grade with strict standards. It is partly due to a kind of “Alfie Kohn” resistance to grading and competition that infects much of the k-12 culture. But it is also a collective action problem, meaning that, even if a school board recognizes the problem and wants to mandate that staff grade in a more rigorous fashion, there is a reluctance to issue such an edict since there is a fear that their district’s students will be disadvantaged when they apply to colleges unless all districts grade equally rigorously. When students get to college, they are used to passing if they have a pulse and used to getting the “gentleman’s C” if they do just the minimum of work.

What is more, colleges are now being pressured to adopt the k-12 “coddling” paradigm by instituting all kinds of “support and retention” (aka remedial) services, partly because so many students are in need of such and used to such and partly to keep the cash register “cachinging”, so that students stay in school and keep paying tuition. Indeed, at my university, the multicultural relations office just instituted “relaxation” and “stress-reducing” activities around mid-term exams that included yoga exercises, anything to keep students happy and not too stressed, never mind that they study less and less. See the recent book by Prof. Arum, Academically Adrift, that documented the decline in studying by college students in recent years. So, the relaxation of standards in k-12 is definitely affecting higher education.

6) There seems to be an unwillingness to flunk students. Even when I taught, I was accosted by principals who pretty much demanded that some type of “extra credit“ be conjured up somewhere, somewhere, someway. Is anyone studying this phenomenon?

I know of no studies on this. Extra credit as much as anything has contributed to grade inflation. It is not only extra credit. It is also the “redo” culture, that is, if at first you don’t succeed, you get second and tenth chances to redo exams and papers.

7) Let’s talk student responsibility for learning- what is your perspective on this?

There are several “villains” who contribute to our k-12 “problem.” First are the students themselves – too many students fail to be willing to do the work, period. Next in rank order are the parents, who too often make excuses for their kids not turning in homework or papers on time; the 1966 Coleman Report rightly noted there is a limit to what schools (teachers) can do in the absence of strong home support systems (parents who turn off the TV, read to their kids, insist on respect for the teacher etc.). Next come the education schools and the administrators who parrot their latest education school training, who push pedagogies that are a disaster (e.g., whole language reading instruction, fuzzy math, and other such curricula) and also do not support teachers when it comes to enforcing discipline of disruptive kids.

Next come teachers themselves, who also often buy into the latest fads without protest and who take Mickey Mouse “grad” courses in education schools rather than serious, demanding advanced courses to deepen their subject matter expertise of the discipline they teach, all to move up the salary scale. And finally I would list boards of education, most of which are clueless about these problems, who should be pushing for such reforms as merit pay but too often are afraid to rock the boat.

The point is that I agree with folks like Diane Ravitch that movies like Waiting for Supermen put too much of the onus for failure on teachers; but she and others fail to acknowledge the complicity of schools (administrators and teachers at times, in league with education schools and the professional development industry). So kids/families are partly to blame, but also schools.

8) Now, what about the family’s responsibility? Can it be evaluated, should it be evaluated, and how so?

The family, as noted above, has a major, prime responsibility. I should add that some like Diane Ravitch want to blame “society,” that is, poverty. But this is being too charitable to parents and taking them off the hook too easily. After all, how much money does it take to turn the TV off? How hard is it to take your kid to the local public library, which has a free, inexhaustible supply of books in almost any community of any size? Poverty can be an obstacle, but we see too many poor parents overcome such obstacles to think poverty is destiny. Take the case of Dr. Ben Carson, head of pediatric neurology at Johns Hopkins Medical School, an African –American who grew up dirt-poor and , according to him, had a mother who could barely read but nonetheless found a way to impress upon him the importance of education.

Let me add that I do not mean to be so critical of Diane Ravitch, since I have great respect for her as a giant figure in k-12 who inspired much of my own thinking, but I feel she has limited her latest criticism to “the suits” (Bill Gates and the corporate types pushing for greater accountability) when the culprits are much broader.

9) What have I neglected to ask?

We could talk for hours on this subject, but this should do for now. The only other observation I would make is that it speaks volumes as to how confused the current k-12 discourse is when within conservative ranks –the ranks that have led the way in calling attention to the need for improvements over the years – not only have the likes of Ravitch done an about-face but there is considerable disagreement, especially surrounding the Common Core standards (e.g. Checker Finn and the Fordham Foundation has been generally supportive of the standards project while folks like Sandra Stotsky, Will Fitzhugh, and Williamson Evers have spoken out against them).

J. Martin Rochester is Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, One University Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63121

Michael F. Shaughnessy –

Paul Horton is State Liaison for the Illinois Council for History Education. He is also a History Instructor at University High School at The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools

1) Paul, you seem to be concerned that there is some skullduggery going on in terms of education. Can you tell us about this?

I think that there is so much money behind corporate Education Reform that we need to make a more concerted effort to follow the money. John Kenneth Galbraith used to speak of countervailing institutions in American politics that could play on a level field. We don’t have this any more. Think tanks like the Hoover Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute have flooded the media with positive stories about the promise of corporate reform, the necessity of more standardized testing, and the promise of the Common Core Curriculum.

At the same time, teachers and teacher unions have been vilified, not only by the above institutions, but by mayors of major cities who work closely with fundraising—they are the people who can make the calls to raise a lot of money fast. I refer especially to the mayors of Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. What we do have is major foundations with seemingly limitless resources and very wealthy individuals that are pumping money into political campaigns, school board elections, and lobbying efforts aimed at state boards of education, and to the creation of curriculum products that require more standardized testing. The public at large has been led to believe that unions have been the problem, but I think many people across the country are waking up to the fact that an agenda is being rapidly railroaded in without much oversight or discussion.

2) What are your main gripes or concerns?

The rapidity with which states are adapting the Common Core Standards is very concerning, especially when parents and educators begin to see how much more standardized testing implementation will involve. Also, especially alarming is David Coleman’s announcement that the SAT will be redesigned around the Common Core Standards. It is almost as if the proponents of Corporate Education Reform and the Department of Education realize that they are working on a time clock. I suspect that they are worried that public support for the Common Core will dissipate as the public learns more about it. So, I am trying to suggest that there “is an appearance of impropriety” that too many wheels are spinning in concert beyond public oversight. It is time for Mr. Duncan to make his dealings with Bill Gates, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Pearson LLC, and David Coleman completely transparent. Every e-mail, every discussion needs to be exposed to the light of day. Connections between employees within the Department of Education and these individuals and institutions need to be disclosed. This has to be done in a Democracy to maintain the public trust.

We also need to examine the “revolving door” between these interested individuals and institutions and public service. How many Department of Education employees have taken jobs with these institutions after they have left the employ of the Federal Government and how many current employees of the Department have received paychecks from these organizations prior to their employment for the public.

3) What about our current Secretary of Education? Arne Duncan? What is his role in all this?

If Arne Duncan will not answer the public’s questions or respond to their concerns about transparency, then he needs to be compelled to do so under oath. We are calling for State Attorneys General to investigate bribery and collusion connected with any school board elections or appointments. There are serious questions that are being raised now in Los Angeles, Indiana, and New York. The State’s Attorney of New York has already investigated the funding of junket trips by Pearson Education. In Texas, a reporter at the Texas Observer has done some good footwork on the activities of Pearson Education in Texas. It is easy to connect the dots, we might need each states’ subpoena power to get closer to the truth. We are also calling for State’s Attorneys to file complaints with the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice pursuant to discovery of evidence in possible quid pro quoagreements between corporate interests and public officials that have the effect of restricting the free market in interstate trade of Education products.

Our main concern is for the public. We need to slow the process of the adaptation of Corporate Education reform down and really examine possible impacts before we push through an agenda that has not been tested.

4) Now, does Bill Gates, and The Bill and Melina Gates Foundation seem to be influencing education ? How so?

I heard Bill Gates speak here at the University of Chicago a few years ago. It is clear that he does not respect teachers. It is also clear that he is very aggressive in his business dealings. It is my opinion, and the opinion of many of my friends, that he sees a future where master teachers will use computers to individualize instruction in every school. He believes that eventually we can reduce the number of teachers in the schools and replace them with cheaper assistants who can guide students through individualized instruction. He clearly sees a future where we will not need as many teachers. He is going to support programs that create new markets for Microsoft and its subsidiaries that will push these types of changes.

Mr. Duncan bought into this Corporate Reform movement when he was CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. The idea of using standardized tests to measure whether schools should receive the “death penalty” was implemented during his administration. When the Obama Administration chose Mr. Duncan over Linda Darling-Hammond, it sent a clear message to teachers and teacher unions across the country. Many big Obama donors supported corporate education reform, including the person who will be considered for the Secretary of Commerce. She was on the CPS School Board and supported the idea of using student testing to evaluate teachers. In the eyes of most teachers, although Mr. Duncan tutored kids as a young man, he has no real experience in the classroom. He seems to listen carefully to the bankers and financiers who know less about teaching and the classroom experience than they do about credit default swaps when testifying under oath. Our agenda is being set by big money that knows nothing about Education and Arne is basically their tool.

5) Now Pearson seems to be a major player in the field of education- and it has been a long time since I studied the field of economics and the idea of a monopoly. Can you brief us on this?

Pearson has the most powerful lobbying presence at the state and Federal levels.They are pumping huge amounts of money into the lobbying. They recently acquired a 3.4 billion dollar testing company in Minnesota. Teachers are shocked by how Pearson has bought up the major publishing houses that publish textbooks and other ancillary materials. They seem to be on track to acquiring monopoly status in the primary and secondary Education marketplace. They need to be made a focus of a restraint of trade investigation. Another thing to consider is if the Anti-Trust Division will scrutinize Pearson’s acquisitions under the Tunney Act which requires an investigation of possible limits on free market activity brought about by a merger in contract.

6) Now- Educational Testing Service seems to have been around for a long time. What are they currently doing and what is your perspective on their impact on education?

While the College Board is chartered as a not-for-profit institution, the ETS that produces tests for the College Board is a huge corporation that has pumped a lot of money into lobbying. My face time with ETS came as a US History AP grader. During the opening night reception, we would always see these genius Princeton graduate students who worked for ETS. They would always tell us that they made the test and determined the normal curve. We college and High School teachers who had an average of twenty-five years of experience would look at each other in disbelief and shake our heads. We were going to take money from the College Board to grade these tests, but almost all of us could not believe that the test norm was going to be determined by multiple-choice section of the test. We all had students who had trouble with syntax and vocabulary who would bomb the multiple choice portion of the test, but who could rock the free-response essay part of the test. We thought the norm should have been determined by the free-response questions, but the ETS and the College Board were not about to trust the judgment of college professors and high school teachers who had much more experience working with kids than twenty-five-year-old Princeton graduate students. In short, the ETS wants to be just like Pearson. The public needs to wake up and see their scam for what it truly is.

7) I have tried to interview David Coleman, and will again- but he is a person who has been actually named in your writing. Your thoughts about this person?

David Coleman is essentially a flim-flam man selling snake oil. He has always been about making money for himself. We need to understand why he was able to get the College Board job. Who pulled the strings and what was the pay-off? He took big money from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to supervise the writing of the Common Core Standards, then our Education Secretary somehow determined that he should be on the Board that is overseeing the PARCC assessments for the Common Core Standards. Now, he has jumped the gun on the standards assessments and made the announcement from his holy perch that The New SAT will be designed around the Common Core Standards. This is completely absurd! How much power should one individual have over American Education? This must be his revenge on all of the deconstructionists and critical theorists he hated when he was a college English professor. To have so much power!

The American people need to wake up. I am a Progressive liberal, but many of the people who are concerned across the country are left and right libertarians, Conservatives, and Tea Party members. Occupy wants to sit in on Mr. Duncan’s office!

The court eunuchs of the Obama Administration need to wake up and understand how angry large numbers of the American people truly are about the way that this “New Class” of Corporate reformers is ramrodding unwanted reforms and standardized testing down the throats of the public. It is time for this administration to come clean under oath if it can.