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Tom Sowell's latest book is about why Charter Schools work. Sanctimonious liberals and progressives don't want them because blacks would become educated and then break from the radical Democrat Party to which they remain enslaved.
Thomas Sowell Has Been Right From the Start
His latest book on charter schools continues his research on minority success in education.
By Jason L Riley
The economist Thomas Sowell’s new book, “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” was published last month on his 90th birthday. I hope he’s not done yet, but you could hardly find a more suitable swan song for a publishing career that has now spanned six decades.
Mr. Sowell’s earliest tomes—an economics textbook for college undergraduates and a book on economic history—were directed at students of the dismal science. But his third book, the semiautobiographical “Black Education: Myths and Tragedies,” was published in 1972 and written for the general public. It grew out of a long article on college admissions standards for black students that he wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1970 after leaving his teaching post at Cornell. And it begins with a recounting of his own education—first at segregated schools in North Carolina, where he was born, and later at integrated schools in New York City, where he was raised.
The topic of education is one that he’s returned to repeatedly in his writings over the decades, in books like “Education: Assumptions Versus History” (1986), “Choosing a College” (1989) and “Inside American Education” (1993). In addition, he’s done pioneering research on the history of black education in the U.S. The preface to his latest work describes a conversation he had in the early 1970s with Irving Kristol, the late editor of the Public Interest. When Kristol asked what could be done to create high-quality schools for blacks, Mr. Sowell replied that such schools already existed and had for generations.
Kristol asked Mr. Sowell to write about these schools for the magazine, and a 1974 issue of Public Interest featured a lengthy essay by Mr. Sowell on the history of all-black Dunbar High School in Washington, which had outperformed its local white counterparts and repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests throughout the first half of the 20th century. Over an 85-year span, from 1870 to 1955, the article noted, “most of Dunbar’s graduates went on to college, even though most Americans—white or black—did not.” Two years later, in the same publication, he wrote a second article, on successful black elementary and high schools located throughout the country. Mr. Sowell later told a friend that his work on black education had been “the most emotionally satisfying research I have ever done.”
In a sense today’s public charter schools, which often have predominantly low-income black and Hispanic student bodies, are successors to the high-achieving black schools that Mr. Sowell researched 40 years ago. The first part of “Charter Schools and Their Enemies” describes—in damning detail and with the empirical rigor we’ve come to expect from the author—how successful certain charter schools have been in educating poor minorities. To make sure he’s comparing apples to apples, his sample is limited to charter schools that are located in the same building with a traditional public school serving the same community.
And what’s irrefutably clear is that these charters schools are not simply doing a better job than their traditional counterparts with the same demographic groups. In many cases, inner-city charter-school students are outperforming their peers in the wealthiest and whitest suburban school districts in the country. In New York City, for example, the Success Academy charter schools have effectively closed the academic achievement gap between black and white students.
“The educational success of these charter schools undermines theories of genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in the tests, assertions that racial ‘integration’ is necessary for blacks to reach educational parity and presumptions that income differences are among the ‘root causes’ of educational differences,” Mr. Sowell writes. “This last claim has been used for decades to absolve traditional public schools of any responsibility for educational failures in low-income minority communities.”
The point isn’t that there are no subpar charter schools—there are—but it’s clear to the author that any honest assessment of the data shows that school choice is a boon for groups that have long been poorly served by the system. It’s also clear that successful charter schools are a threat to the current power balance that allows the vested interests of adults who run public education to trump what’s best for students. As Mr. Sowell reminds us, “schools exist for the education of children. Schools do not exist to provide iron-clad jobs for teachers, billions of dollars in union dues for teachers unions, monopolies for educational bureaucracies, a guaranteed market for teachers college degrees or a captive audience for indoctrinators.”
In recent years, charter-school skeptics have made headway. Limits have been placed on how many can open and where they can be located. And Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, is being pressured by progressives to limit charter growth if elected. All of which makes Mr. Sowell’s new book, in addition to its many other attributes, quite timely.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Dershowitz on law and justice.
And:
Progressives have a message for cities:
Progressives to Cities: Drop Dead
The ruin of major liberal cities by progressive policies is a significant political event.
Wonder Land: The ruin of major liberal cities by progressive policies is a significant political event. Image: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
On Tuesday the New York City sky was clear, blue and filled with sunshine. That’s it for this week’s good news. We turn now to Portland, Ore.; Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco and all of America’s other seemingly Godforsaken cities.
President Trump watches a lot of television, so he’s seeing the same daily urban nightmares we’re seeing. It’s hard not to sympathize with his instinct to send in federal authorities to restore civil order to cities like Portland, as he proposed Wednesday with the expansion of an urban anticrime initiative called Operation Legend to Chicago and Albuquerque.
It’s equally hard to disagree that, other than protecting federal facilities, Mr. Trump should let all of these smug Portlandia American cities stew in their own juices.
I loved it when Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, said the federal presence “is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism.” Where’s Groucho Marx when we need him to make sense of nonsense?
Still, no matter one’s politics, it is sickening to see this happening to any U.S. city—mobs hammering and burning buildings along Portland’s streets and then a carbon-copy mob battering Seattle.
Days before, we’d watched video of two groups of police beaten bloody on the Brooklyn Bridge. Days later 15 people were wounded in a gun battle at a Chicago funeral for the victim of a drive-by gang shooting.
There is a serious matter of civil order at issue here, but if you can look beyond the mayhem, something else quite sad is happening. The irrepressible vitality of these cities—their reason for being—is disappearing, undone by pandemic, lockdowns and a new culture of permanent protest.
For years, I’ve been on the email list of Spike Wilner, the owner-founder of two jewel-like jazz clubs in New York’s Greenwich Village—Small’s and Mezzrow. Mr. Wilner’s weekly paeans to jazz and the people who play it are always a good, diverting read. This week’s email was different. Here is a chunk of it, because he’s got the city exactly right:
“It’s hard to describe but the feeling is gone, the vibe absent. The thing that made New York, New York is missing. What’s it like now?
“It’s very tense. People are very anxious and angry. Everything is closed or, if open, listless. There is no nightlife. If you leave your apartment after 9 p.m. it’s a complete ghost town inhabited by wraiths and zombies, dangerous people. . . . In certain parts of town you have a mob of folks partying outside, like a street fair. Other folks keep their masks tightly on and live in fear. The only place I’ve found some civility and warmth is the city playgrounds where I take my daughter each day. The children are oblivious to the pandemic and just play and climb.”
Outside wartime, with bombardments turning blocks into rubble, I’m hard put to think of any precedent for what is happening to these U.S. cities now. The enforced pandemic closures and isolation were bad enough. But the endless protests—with their instinct to violence and atmosphere of dread—have broken the spirit of many cities.
The political story of the 2016 presidential election was Donald Trump’s identification of overlooked lower-middle-class white voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. A new political division may be taking place now in big cities—between progressive elites and working-class residents, primarily the people who own or work for the storefront businesses that are the lifeblood of these cities.
A story recently in Crain’s New York Business described how the outdoor dining tables of restaurants in Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s West Side are overrun by disturbed or half-dressed beggars, whom Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has housed in nearby hotels. Said one restaurant owner: “Every bit of progress this neighborhood has made over the years is stepping backwards.”
During New York’s 1970s financial crisis, the Daily News ran a famous headline about then-President Gerald Ford —“Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Here’s the update—“Progressives to Cities: Drop Dead.”
People living and working in these cities, most of whom consider themselves liberal, are being sold out by progressive politicians and activists blinded by politics to the quality of daily life.
Progressive prosecutors refuse to prosecute. Cops are holding back because progressive mayors and governors don’t have their backs.
Responding to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s directive that no alcohol can be served without food, many bar owners say they won’t survive. The state’s Labor Department just reported an unemployment rate in the Bronx of 24.7%, Depression level.
The progressive ruin of major cities inhabited by liberals is a significant political event. Consequences that might have emerged over years have been compressed into months by the pandemic and protests.
It is doubtful many will check the box for Mr. Trump in November, but who knows? Their alternative is Joe Biden, whose contribution to the urban chaos this week was: “There is no reason for the president to send federal troops into a city where people are demanding change peacefully and respectfully.” Which city is he looking at?
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Once again our State Department was behind the curve when it came to what was taking place in China. Now the autocratic slap down of various minorities is challenging an American response. Will we fail again? Stay tuned.
The West Reckons With Beijing’s Neocommunism
It’s more tech-based than Lenin’s model and more dangerous. The U.S. needs to treat it seriously.
By Walter Russell Mead
China’s rise is more than a problem. It’s a puzzle. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, most Western analysts have assumed that China is a communist country in the way that France is a Catholic one. That is, there remain Marxist believers in China and practicing Catholics in France, but Beijing is as little guided by Marxist ideology as Emmanuel Macron is led by the precepts of Pius IX.
That turns out not to be true. While Xi Jinping likely spends little time reading Marx’s “Grundrisse” or debating the labor theory of value with his comrades, today’s China combines a Leninist party structure with state control (if not always ownership) of the means of production, a planned economy, an intolerant atheism and a ruthless determination to hold on to power at all costs. That Beijing incorporates market mechanisms into its communist system is not new; Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921 to speed recovery from the Russian Civil War. But the Chinese Communist Party—armed with information technology that lets it monitor and control economic activity on a scale Lenin could only dream of—has grafted market mechanisms onto a communist state structure with great success.
Call it neocommunism or digital Leninism—it’s real. And while the U.S. foreign-policy establishment was congratulating itself on the end of history, China grew into a more formidable world force than the Soviet Union ever was. As the Tibetans and Uighurs can tell us, the new system is as ruthless as old-style communism and, thanks to technology, far more effective at crushing dissent.
American policy responses to this puzzling entity will have to take account of the geopolitical, ideological and economic dimensions of the new China. None of this will be easy. It’s unclear, for example, how entrenched the country’s latest bout of authoritarianism actually is. Clearly, under Mr. Xi China has taken a wrong turn. But perhaps in the future, as a result of either foreign pressure or domestic developments, the party might move again toward reform, and a different U.S.-
In any case, America’s goal even in a competitive relationship can’t be to stop China’s economic growth or dictate its political development. The country’s rise is a great moment in human history and the U.S. has no desire—and has no power—to prevent more than one billion people from working toward a better life. Sun Tzu’s observation that the greatest general wins without fighting is still relevant; the best way to win a conflict with Beijing is to avoid it.
Nevertheless, the U.S. relationship with a revisionist and possibly revolutionary neocommunist China can’t simply be business as usual. Countries like China—and Russia—that claim they are actively seeking to undermine U.S. interests and counter American values need to be taken at their word. U.S. diplomats and agents must respond to attempts to extend hostile influence in strategically important countries and proactively defend American interests.
The U.S. can’t treat trade as a purely economic question. In neocommunist China, distinctions between state-owned corporations and private business can no longer be taken at face value. Chinese businesses and investors are under Beijing’s thumb. Given the party’s ambitions, other countries have no choice but to monitor Chinese investment and financial flows, to audit their supply chains for key materials to eliminate any strategic dependence on China, and to eschew the use of Chinese tech that threatens their telecom and infrastructure security. China’s attempts to achieve technological supremacy through theft and illegal behavior pose direct security threats to other countries. These dangers must be addressed, even at significant political and economic cost.
Beijing’s steady military buildup—combined with its expansionist territorial claims and increased efforts to form partnerships with countries such as Russia and Iran—has major implications for the U.S. defense budget. America must scale up its efforts to ensure primacy on land, at sea, in the air, in cyberspace and in outer space sufficiently to deter any rivals.
And while repression is nothing new in China, the extraordinary measures the Communist Party uses against ethnic and religious minorities require an international response. There are many elements of Beijing’s governance that Americans don’t like, but we don’t insist that Chinese practice conform to our ways to have normal relations. The deliberate destruction of ethnic cultures and religious communities, however, crosses a line that the U.S. cannot ignore.
Developing the right policies for this new situation is a difficult but necessary task. Neocommunist China cannot be allowed to dictate the terms of its engagement with a global system that it seeks to destroy.
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I try to be logical and law school did help because the first thing you learn is seek the facts then apply the law and come to a reasonable conclusion.
Having said that it seems to me if we do not provide blacks with the opportunity of getting a good education and then promote them based on their color, and not ability, it follows our society's ability to compete will decline. That is not being racist that is simply thinking logically. This is why I have always believed the underclass deserve to be challenged by the best education we can offer and why I posted the op ed about Sowell above . It is self interest motivated but also morally justified in my opinion.
My father was a pro civil rights liberal but he also had a self interest economic message attached. He wanted black citizens to have good jobs for their sake and so they could pay his fees for his sake. Logical and not racist.
Finally:
I have a bright black friend who makes his living by helping corporations through sensitivity training. He hates Trump and wishes for him a tragic death. I submit that ain't a display of sensitivity but then I try to be logical.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Decent and conservative people do not hate nor are they demonstrative but they do get timorous and fear to assert themselves. The haters, attackers and anarchists understand this and win by default until someone steps in and starts banging heads.
We are past that time but Trump knows if he acts he will be blamed no matter what happens so he is in a win-less situation and the anarchists know that as well.
And:
Tear Gas: Portland's Democrat Mayor Stands With The Rioters Against Law And Order
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler stood Wednesday among the front lines of protests outside the federal courthouse, where he and hundreds of other people were tear gassed repeatedly by federal officers. "The reason I am here tonight is to stand with you," Wheeler told the crowd. "If they're launching the tear gas against you, they're launching the tear gas against me."
 And: Throwing down! [READ MORE] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
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