I agree with you here up to a point. And a couple of years ago I would've said this exact same thing: it's too late by college. Invest in pre-K, grade school, lift up the bottom. And to a certain extent, that is still definitely true. But here in California, taxes are high and the low-income schools get more money than the suburban, wealthier schools (which they should. I'm fine with that.) Here's the problem for which I don't have a good solution: more money hasn't made much difference beyond a certain point. It sounds like your school definitely needs more money, but what I've realized is that the left's tendency to just throw money at a problem doesn't always solve it or improve it. And I don't have a solution to that. I'm open to listening though.
You’re highlighting an important truth: there isn’t a one size fits all solution. Is it possible to have national standards but local turnkey interventions?
My elementary age son goes to a Title 1 school (although we wouldn’t ourselves qualify for it, the percentage of low income students is so high the school has a grant to prove free breakfast and lunch to all students). The school is beautiful and fairly new and has great tech and I’ve been very happy with all the teachers my sons have had there (my eldest is now in middle school but he went there too). What that school funding doesn’t fix is the conditions in the 17 hours of the day when the kids aren’t at school. Food insecurity, parents who are struggling with addiction, legacy poverty, parents doing shift work, the host of additional educational hurdles caused by the pandemic, parents struggling to manage the schedules of multiple children, childcare etc etc etc. Seems to me THAT is the holistic situation that needs to be addressed.
It’s like all the woo woo wellness fads that convince people drinking celery juice will heal their ailments, rather than recognizing the innumerable knowable and unknowable factors beyond any individual’s control that shape a person’s health outcomes. There’s a huge difference between health markers/healthy practices and health outcomes. That goes for the health of the education system.
Freddie addresses that very point in the section "Racial gaps in SAT data are perfectly predictable given antiracist beliefs." (I know this specifically calls out race but if you accept that class barriers also exist, it can be applied in the same way.)
One other point is relevant. The "college success" metric used in many studies lump together different majors and courses with radically different content and difficulty. From what I've seen of data on individual courses, admissions tests are even better predictors than one would think from the inappropriately lumped success metrics.
As I've mentioned before, Freddie's arguments also apply to GREs and grad school, at least in physics.
And another key point to support Freddie: In order to conclude that GREs are worthless, the largest study made about 6 major statistical errors, laughably bad. The study was supported by 4 NSF grants, had an author who was a director of the American Physical Society, and two authors who are no on a select committee of the National Academies dealing with these issues. It's not a fringe issue. There's something broken in the culture.
I am unclear why you are spending time on this when far more serious issues in education are not being addressed, specifically the pervasiveness of dangerous items that children are bringing to school daily (paperclips, google it) and pencils and pens (weapons, google it). And yes i am being ironic, originally from the Greek eironeia, that is, simulated ignorance, which i wouldn't have known had i not had teachers that insisted on rigor in thought and in my developing the ability to think critically. I found, even then, that the teachers who were most insistent on my learning to reason, cared most deeply for me. I watched them closely. I could see no indications of racism or sexism in them, only a fierce hatred of human insistence on remaining ignorant and a deep love of the capacity in every one of their students to become a thinking being.
I have a friend who just completed his doctoral studies in higher education, and his thesis addressed the cultural experiences of Black students at a very prominent Southern university that is mostly white. He found these students were sent into a crisis of identity (he is a Black man who attended that mostly white prominent Southern university as an undergrad) and there are virtually no support resources for them to deal with it. Some of the students, having come from Black neighborhoods, had never actually been around so many white people before, and the experience was highly disorienting to say the least.
So on top of the stresses of 1) leaving home for the first time, 2) adjusting to the rigors of college, 3) going through the age-appropriate development of sexuality and individuality, these students are dealing not just with potential discrimination or feeling like outsiders, but the unique experience of grappling with their Blackness and what it means to them in their context. Again, without support. Not to mention the family of origin worries that come along with being a lower-income, Black student that higher-income White students don't have to deal with.
The desire to ignore the implications of SAT scores isn't going to address the problems and inequities indicated by lower performance. And ignoring the SAT scores may simply erase focus on the lower-performing students and their needs.
None of this acknowledges that there are outliers in every statistical analysis. What's being done to get the outliers in a pipeline to the resources and highest-level educational opportunities? We can't all be exceptional, by definition, and the focus on raising the tide for all boats should only be one prong in the movement toward equity.
"Some of the students, having come from Black neighborhoods, had never actually been around so many white people before, and the experience was highly disorienting to say the least."
Someone should have told them that diversity is our strength and that being constantly subjected to alien peoples and environments makes us better. Then he would have been fine.
Here's the conclusion of my arXiv paper on GREs, obviously omitted from the peer-reviewed version of the technical aspects:
The issue of how our profession should choose its new members faces a variety of not always parallel social goals and is fraught with uncertainties. Despite these difficulties, finding the best
selection method is trivial in one limiting case. If we do not try to maintain minimal standards
of competence and transparency or even basic logic in our treatment of data, then the
optimum group of students whom we should be educating is the empty set
My brother and I both have ADD (it expresses very differently, but we both have it). In my case, I managed to get decent grades all throughout school but never really learned how to cope with the condition or how to manage my workload in a more productive way, or how to find activities or jobs that matched my abilities... I just learned how to work hard and get A minuses.
My brother wasn't even able to get passing grades without drugs. After a while, he was able to get very good grades with the drugs, but in the end, he couldn't keep it up.
Both of us now have jobs that match our actual potential and abilities to varying extents, but we're both unsatisfied because we worked so hard at trying to achieve "more."
Both of us were completely underserved by a system based on the false liberal premise that getting grades up fixes your life, and also that if your grades are up, your life is fixed. As many will say, liberals believe in education because if you're not a socialist, education the only solution that your limited imagination can think of.
My brother and I are white ashkenazis and I can only imagine how much more destructive and burnout-inducing this system is for people who have fewer opportunities than us.
This analysis is rigorous and thoroughly argued. My only question is whether affirmative action for race alone w/o SES is valuable to serve as representation. Remember the article about the 3-yr old AA girl standing gazing at the portrait of Michelle Obama in awe? That little girl can gaze up at someone who looks like her and think unconsciously, "that could be me."
So case in point in my family. My husband's brother (white) is married to a first generation Mexican American. Their two daughters were raised with every privilege Freddie points to in this analysis. They were *groomed* for college from the start: fancy private schools, club sports, tutors, etc. And they both went to elite colleges and are lovely, independent young women. The older daughter actually had legacy from their dad's side AND the race factor from their mother's side. You can just picture the university drooling, right? These young women were going to be fine wherever they went. Why should they get the benefit of affirmative action?
But let's zoom out for a minute. My Mexican American SIL is one of the most amazing, resilient people I know. Her parents were working class. Her mother died when she was 9-years old and her dad married a woman with 5 kids of her own, so there was a blended family. My SIL didn't get along so well with her step-mother and was kicked out of the house at 19-years old and managed to put herself through nursing school. On her side, her daughters are the first ones to go to a 4-yr college in the family. So maybe these women serve as role models for the cousins growing up behind them? Maybe they serve as role models for other Latina teens who can picture themselves now going to college?
We had this debate in my family recently b/c there was a referendum recently here in California to try to re-institute race for affirmative action for the public colleges and universities. It was ultimately defeated (here in CA- a very blue state), which should tell you how the general public views all this critical race theory stuff. I ultimately voted no b/c these institutions are already allowed to factor in class (which in the end serves as a better marker for true affirmative action for race as Freddie points out) and I think the critical race theory stuff has gone too far. In addition, I think such a policy would be biased and discriminatory against Asians.
"That little girl can gaze up at someone who looks like her and think unconsciously, 'that could be me.'"
Has there been any research on whether this sort of "representation" is actually necessary for people to realize which opportunities or career paths are open to them?
It seems to be taken for granted in so many of these discussions. But before I started my career, the only person I'd ever met who worked in this field was a woman. It never once occurred to me that, as a man, I wouldn't be allowed to do this type of work, or successful at it, or respected for doing it.
I have wondered this as well, largely because I've personally never paid any attention to potential role models, spent most of my growing up years being the outsider with no correlative role models, and never felt part of any broader identity group, and still don't. But I'm seeing the impact of what Elana mentions by watching my daughter. She's in the super-sponge age where everything she sees, she tries on as her own identity. She is currently the Scorpion King from The Mummy Returns. I was never like that. She is. Everything new she sees expands her universe of potential roles and identities, new scenarios in which she envisions herself. This is just a limited anecdote, but watching my daughter makes me think the role model representation could have an impact. I too would love to know if this has been researched.
Trying on the Scorpion King as an identity would seem to suggest that demographic representation isn't much of a factor. If a young girl can imagine herself in the place of Dwayne Johnson, surely she can also imagine herself in the place of Joe Biden or Jeff Bezos.
Absolutely. My daughter simultaneously refutes and makes the point. She refutes it by imagining herself in any given role, whether or not she has anything in common with the role model. She makes it by demonstrating that she is influenced by what she's exposed to, that the options presented to her trigger her imagination and how she sees herself. This is in contrast to how I was when growing up, where my mind didn't go racing to possibilities open to me based on what I saw in front of me.
I should add, while I'm laughing my head off here, that Dwayne Johnson in The Mummy Returns was largely a sloppy CGI of a giant half human, half scorpion murderous monster. My daughter doesn't even discriminate across species, much less genders.
Great question. I don't know. Not sure exactly how that would even be studied. It certainly *seems* correct, but you're right that our instincts can be wrong.
If representation was that significant a thing, then having men of any race or black or Asian or northeast/coastal women as industry reps would be a discouraging factor for me, and these people would be as incapable of mentoring me as I would be of younger men, black women, Asian women, women from SF and Boston, etc. (Practical application has shown this theory to be incomplete at best.) I think there is something to having a mentor 'translate' a new culture into habits and mores that a new worker can understand - but I think most of the representation push is a method to get more jobs for persons of X group hired, which I might also be pushing for, if I was of X group.
"these people would be as incapable of mentoring me"
I think this logic is inside-out. Of course one can be mentored by someone of another race or gender, but there may be an added connection or benefit of having someone of the same race/gender doing that mentoring -- a kind of extra understanding of what it's like to walk your walk. You are right that representation may be over-emphasized and I think Jesses point is well taken: where is the data? What do the studies show?
And I think you're right that the idea can be an excuse to promote discrimination and bias. If you are making it a priority to choose one gender or race, then you are automatically limiting the other gender/races. And it also begs the question whether we need every career to be completely equal/balanced. It turns out that in societies where there is more of a push for gender equality, there is MORE self-segregation of genders into traditionally gender-based careers, not less.
I agree that there could be that sort of extra understanding - but there are so many other factors on which two people could 'click' & form understanding. I agree that data would be good. The last I saw was that women engineering students benefited from having (some) women instructors, and that African American male students (primarily urban ADoS) benefitted greatly from having (primarily) male AA instructors, but I'm not finding any of the studies. (These were in terms of objective outcomes, not self-reported improved confidence things.)
As for the logic being inside out - I don't think so. If it's bad/less desirable for AA students to have non-AA instructors, then it's a hard sell to insist that it's not equally bad for Euro-descent students to have AA or Asian instructors/supervisors. (In my work experience, a problem with the young hires/kids these days is repeated failures to approach and work with a supervisor of a different race, and instead go to a different section/area of responsibility to find a supervisor of the same race. This is not the way.)
Hi Jesse - someone on Slow Boring showed me this article which relates to your question whether there was actual data showing that "representation" is a real phenomenon.
They look at the likelihood of innovation based on background. Not surprisingly, there are huge differences based on socioeconomic class. Also someone is less likely to be an innovator if that person is of color or female gender. But there was some data showing that girls who grew up in area where there were more women innovators were more likely themselves to become innovators separate from SEC or other variables:
"women are more likely to innovate in a particular category if there were more
women innovating in that category in the area where they grew up. We reject the null hypothesis that the coefficients are the same for both genders with p < 0.02 in both of these specifications, implying that the findings in columns 2 and 3 are not due to selection across categories"
I am certainly no expert at looking at data sets such as these but the study itself seems pretty rigorous.
All this energy we spend talking about the SAT while Jared Kushner's dad buys his mediocre son a spot at Harvard. Can you imagine if legacy/donor/lacrosse player admissions didn't exist and the Ivy League schools suddenly all proposed a change: they were gonna let rich people buy their way in?
It's genuinely astounding that leftist energy on this subject is focused anywhere else. We do not have to dive into a pile of numbers on a hunt for abstract forms of injustice. Harvard's administration is absolutely thrilled that we've decided to spend our time on this nonsense instead of building a campaign to end non-academic admissions.
You can't force private institutions to do anything. But Harvard is 1. a carefully managed brand and 2. an institution fully controlled by cultural leftists. You can put their feet to the fire in a way that you can't with ExxonMobil.
True, but who is going to put their feet to the fire? A big part of Harvard's brand appeal is that it produces an environment where you form bonds and networks with the rich and well connected. The rich with the mediocre progeny pay way more than basic tuition. I suspect that even the cultural leftists who send their kids to Harvard like to maintain the status quo at Harvard, where their kids can hob nob with the kids of not just their own peer group, but the super rich who had to buy their way in, and are a boon to the grading curve.
I think that's a good point, which might be a reason why Harvard students themselves aren't ever going to wage the campaign. But I do think that outside pressure on this can make a difference, especially if it's done in a way that's going to tarnish the brand. Pressure companies to not hire from universities that have legacy admissions. Write articles in the NYT tying legacy admissions at the Ivies to the r word. Call out the tenured self-proclaimed Marxist professors at these institutions who don't speak out on this subject and just coast on the prestige.
Harvard's core brand is ultimately still tied to smart kids choosing it over anything else, and if it becomes a controversial place to go to school, maybe that eventually does affect admissions. At the very least it becomes more similar to working for Facebook in 2021 - still good for your resume, but not something you want to brag about at parties.
Also good points. Your comment about the Marxist professors reminded of a post I saw on another Substack. It was a professor who send out a general email, appealing to the Marxist sensibilities of other professors, to note that taking extra summer work at the uni, when they didn't need the money, was channeling resources away from the less secure teachers. The response from the Marxist professors, none of which was named or personally addressed in this "Let's help out our more vulnerable teachers" email, was to report this teacher to the admin for harassments. This teacher ended up losing his/her job over this.
Long way of saying you can't always rely on the Marxist professors either.
What are the axes on the graph under "The perceived SES effect in SAT scores is a parental education effect." ? I'm not clear on what that chart is showing.
Sorry - those data points are schools rather than individuals and the axes are the % reaching advanced status in reading by % with parents holding bachelor's degrees.
FWIW, I don't think Leiter is trying to incite a pile-on; if anything, I would bet that he thinks Freddie is probably right, but wants to be sure before he accepts Freddie's conclusions.
"But I find it very disheartening how progressives routinely dismiss the excellence achieved by Asian students from socioeconomically and ethnically marginalized backgrounds - precisely the type of excellence you would expect them to celebrate."
I came to the US at age 9 in 1965 knowing no English. But was the beneficiary, at that time, of schools that had overwhelmingly (almost exclusive) English speaking students--and only English. My parents never learned English.
In the years since, I have noticed that when I tell people that, there are some people who almost resent it and are skeptical: I know English a little too well for someone from that background. And I have noticed that to a person, each of those people has been progressive/social liberals.
Those high-performing Asian kids (and me, to a minor extent) traduce the catechism of victimology. And within the progressive moral economy, the victim is the most venerated of figures, always acted upon, but never acting. Unsullied by agency.
Great shout on URI Talent Development. After 20+ years working in and around high schools in the Providence Public Schools it is maybe the one consistent success. My wife and I worked in a Gates small school era high school that for a while was sending a quarter to a third of the school straight into TD with great success. And then was summarily closed when Race to the Top started. Anyhow... TD survives and is a great service to kids in this community.
Also appreciate your perspective on the successes of lower-income Asian immigrants. My daughters attended a public elementary school in South Providence that quietly outperforms the other public elementaries (outside College Hill). At one point I looked at the data and in whatever year it was their mostly low-income Southeast Asian immigrant students were outperforming the elementary age Asian students in the top suburban districts.
I brought this up to some of the teachers in the school and other people in the community and it was basically un-parseable data. There was no particular program of focus whatsoever on the Asian students in the predominantly Hispanic school, and it didn't quite seem like something that would be appropriate to praise the school for. One bit of possibly explanatory data I found is that the Asian students reported feeling more safe and comfortable in that school than they did outside of school in general.
I agree with you here up to a point. And a couple of years ago I would've said this exact same thing: it's too late by college. Invest in pre-K, grade school, lift up the bottom. And to a certain extent, that is still definitely true. But here in California, taxes are high and the low-income schools get more money than the suburban, wealthier schools (which they should. I'm fine with that.) Here's the problem for which I don't have a good solution: more money hasn't made much difference beyond a certain point. It sounds like your school definitely needs more money, but what I've realized is that the left's tendency to just throw money at a problem doesn't always solve it or improve it. And I don't have a solution to that. I'm open to listening though.
You’re highlighting an important truth: there isn’t a one size fits all solution. Is it possible to have national standards but local turnkey interventions?
My elementary age son goes to a Title 1 school (although we wouldn’t ourselves qualify for it, the percentage of low income students is so high the school has a grant to prove free breakfast and lunch to all students). The school is beautiful and fairly new and has great tech and I’ve been very happy with all the teachers my sons have had there (my eldest is now in middle school but he went there too). What that school funding doesn’t fix is the conditions in the 17 hours of the day when the kids aren’t at school. Food insecurity, parents who are struggling with addiction, legacy poverty, parents doing shift work, the host of additional educational hurdles caused by the pandemic, parents struggling to manage the schedules of multiple children, childcare etc etc etc. Seems to me THAT is the holistic situation that needs to be addressed.
It’s like all the woo woo wellness fads that convince people drinking celery juice will heal their ailments, rather than recognizing the innumerable knowable and unknowable factors beyond any individual’s control that shape a person’s health outcomes. There’s a huge difference between health markers/healthy practices and health outcomes. That goes for the health of the education system.
Yes! Help families so families can help kids.
Freddie addresses that very point in the section "Racial gaps in SAT data are perfectly predictable given antiracist beliefs." (I know this specifically calls out race but if you accept that class barriers also exist, it can be applied in the same way.)
One other point is relevant. The "college success" metric used in many studies lump together different majors and courses with radically different content and difficulty. From what I've seen of data on individual courses, admissions tests are even better predictors than one would think from the inappropriately lumped success metrics.
As I've mentioned before, Freddie's arguments also apply to GREs and grad school, at least in physics.
See: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHEvLUxTWGsAjNjR3epRiQw (talk)
or https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09442 (arxiv paper with references to published papers by me an others)
or https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/12/14/debate-involving-a-bad-analysis-of-gre-scores/ (Andrew Gelman's take on the issue, with extensive discussions)
And another key point to support Freddie: In order to conclude that GREs are worthless, the largest study made about 6 major statistical errors, laughably bad. The study was supported by 4 NSF grants, had an author who was a director of the American Physical Society, and two authors who are no on a select committee of the National Academies dealing with these issues. It's not a fringe issue. There's something broken in the culture.
I am unclear why you are spending time on this when far more serious issues in education are not being addressed, specifically the pervasiveness of dangerous items that children are bringing to school daily (paperclips, google it) and pencils and pens (weapons, google it). And yes i am being ironic, originally from the Greek eironeia, that is, simulated ignorance, which i wouldn't have known had i not had teachers that insisted on rigor in thought and in my developing the ability to think critically. I found, even then, that the teachers who were most insistent on my learning to reason, cared most deeply for me. I watched them closely. I could see no indications of racism or sexism in them, only a fierce hatred of human insistence on remaining ignorant and a deep love of the capacity in every one of their students to become a thinking being.
I have a friend who just completed his doctoral studies in higher education, and his thesis addressed the cultural experiences of Black students at a very prominent Southern university that is mostly white. He found these students were sent into a crisis of identity (he is a Black man who attended that mostly white prominent Southern university as an undergrad) and there are virtually no support resources for them to deal with it. Some of the students, having come from Black neighborhoods, had never actually been around so many white people before, and the experience was highly disorienting to say the least.
So on top of the stresses of 1) leaving home for the first time, 2) adjusting to the rigors of college, 3) going through the age-appropriate development of sexuality and individuality, these students are dealing not just with potential discrimination or feeling like outsiders, but the unique experience of grappling with their Blackness and what it means to them in their context. Again, without support. Not to mention the family of origin worries that come along with being a lower-income, Black student that higher-income White students don't have to deal with.
The desire to ignore the implications of SAT scores isn't going to address the problems and inequities indicated by lower performance. And ignoring the SAT scores may simply erase focus on the lower-performing students and their needs.
None of this acknowledges that there are outliers in every statistical analysis. What's being done to get the outliers in a pipeline to the resources and highest-level educational opportunities? We can't all be exceptional, by definition, and the focus on raising the tide for all boats should only be one prong in the movement toward equity.
"Some of the students, having come from Black neighborhoods, had never actually been around so many white people before, and the experience was highly disorienting to say the least."
Someone should have told them that diversity is our strength and that being constantly subjected to alien peoples and environments makes us better. Then he would have been fine.
Here's the conclusion of my arXiv paper on GREs, obviously omitted from the peer-reviewed version of the technical aspects:
The issue of how our profession should choose its new members faces a variety of not always parallel social goals and is fraught with uncertainties. Despite these difficulties, finding the best
selection method is trivial in one limiting case. If we do not try to maintain minimal standards
of competence and transparency or even basic logic in our treatment of data, then the
optimum group of students whom we should be educating is the empty set
My brother and I both have ADD (it expresses very differently, but we both have it). In my case, I managed to get decent grades all throughout school but never really learned how to cope with the condition or how to manage my workload in a more productive way, or how to find activities or jobs that matched my abilities... I just learned how to work hard and get A minuses.
My brother wasn't even able to get passing grades without drugs. After a while, he was able to get very good grades with the drugs, but in the end, he couldn't keep it up.
Both of us now have jobs that match our actual potential and abilities to varying extents, but we're both unsatisfied because we worked so hard at trying to achieve "more."
Both of us were completely underserved by a system based on the false liberal premise that getting grades up fixes your life, and also that if your grades are up, your life is fixed. As many will say, liberals believe in education because if you're not a socialist, education the only solution that your limited imagination can think of.
My brother and I are white ashkenazis and I can only imagine how much more destructive and burnout-inducing this system is for people who have fewer opportunities than us.
This analysis is rigorous and thoroughly argued. My only question is whether affirmative action for race alone w/o SES is valuable to serve as representation. Remember the article about the 3-yr old AA girl standing gazing at the portrait of Michelle Obama in awe? That little girl can gaze up at someone who looks like her and think unconsciously, "that could be me."
So case in point in my family. My husband's brother (white) is married to a first generation Mexican American. Their two daughters were raised with every privilege Freddie points to in this analysis. They were *groomed* for college from the start: fancy private schools, club sports, tutors, etc. And they both went to elite colleges and are lovely, independent young women. The older daughter actually had legacy from their dad's side AND the race factor from their mother's side. You can just picture the university drooling, right? These young women were going to be fine wherever they went. Why should they get the benefit of affirmative action?
But let's zoom out for a minute. My Mexican American SIL is one of the most amazing, resilient people I know. Her parents were working class. Her mother died when she was 9-years old and her dad married a woman with 5 kids of her own, so there was a blended family. My SIL didn't get along so well with her step-mother and was kicked out of the house at 19-years old and managed to put herself through nursing school. On her side, her daughters are the first ones to go to a 4-yr college in the family. So maybe these women serve as role models for the cousins growing up behind them? Maybe they serve as role models for other Latina teens who can picture themselves now going to college?
We had this debate in my family recently b/c there was a referendum recently here in California to try to re-institute race for affirmative action for the public colleges and universities. It was ultimately defeated (here in CA- a very blue state), which should tell you how the general public views all this critical race theory stuff. I ultimately voted no b/c these institutions are already allowed to factor in class (which in the end serves as a better marker for true affirmative action for race as Freddie points out) and I think the critical race theory stuff has gone too far. In addition, I think such a policy would be biased and discriminatory against Asians.
"That little girl can gaze up at someone who looks like her and think unconsciously, 'that could be me.'"
Has there been any research on whether this sort of "representation" is actually necessary for people to realize which opportunities or career paths are open to them?
It seems to be taken for granted in so many of these discussions. But before I started my career, the only person I'd ever met who worked in this field was a woman. It never once occurred to me that, as a man, I wouldn't be allowed to do this type of work, or successful at it, or respected for doing it.
I have wondered this as well, largely because I've personally never paid any attention to potential role models, spent most of my growing up years being the outsider with no correlative role models, and never felt part of any broader identity group, and still don't. But I'm seeing the impact of what Elana mentions by watching my daughter. She's in the super-sponge age where everything she sees, she tries on as her own identity. She is currently the Scorpion King from The Mummy Returns. I was never like that. She is. Everything new she sees expands her universe of potential roles and identities, new scenarios in which she envisions herself. This is just a limited anecdote, but watching my daughter makes me think the role model representation could have an impact. I too would love to know if this has been researched.
Trying on the Scorpion King as an identity would seem to suggest that demographic representation isn't much of a factor. If a young girl can imagine herself in the place of Dwayne Johnson, surely she can also imagine herself in the place of Joe Biden or Jeff Bezos.
Absolutely. My daughter simultaneously refutes and makes the point. She refutes it by imagining herself in any given role, whether or not she has anything in common with the role model. She makes it by demonstrating that she is influenced by what she's exposed to, that the options presented to her trigger her imagination and how she sees herself. This is in contrast to how I was when growing up, where my mind didn't go racing to possibilities open to me based on what I saw in front of me.
I should add, while I'm laughing my head off here, that Dwayne Johnson in The Mummy Returns was largely a sloppy CGI of a giant half human, half scorpion murderous monster. My daughter doesn't even discriminate across species, much less genders.
Great question. I don't know. Not sure exactly how that would even be studied. It certainly *seems* correct, but you're right that our instincts can be wrong.
If representation was that significant a thing, then having men of any race or black or Asian or northeast/coastal women as industry reps would be a discouraging factor for me, and these people would be as incapable of mentoring me as I would be of younger men, black women, Asian women, women from SF and Boston, etc. (Practical application has shown this theory to be incomplete at best.) I think there is something to having a mentor 'translate' a new culture into habits and mores that a new worker can understand - but I think most of the representation push is a method to get more jobs for persons of X group hired, which I might also be pushing for, if I was of X group.
"these people would be as incapable of mentoring me"
I think this logic is inside-out. Of course one can be mentored by someone of another race or gender, but there may be an added connection or benefit of having someone of the same race/gender doing that mentoring -- a kind of extra understanding of what it's like to walk your walk. You are right that representation may be over-emphasized and I think Jesses point is well taken: where is the data? What do the studies show?
And I think you're right that the idea can be an excuse to promote discrimination and bias. If you are making it a priority to choose one gender or race, then you are automatically limiting the other gender/races. And it also begs the question whether we need every career to be completely equal/balanced. It turns out that in societies where there is more of a push for gender equality, there is MORE self-segregation of genders into traditionally gender-based careers, not less.
I agree that there could be that sort of extra understanding - but there are so many other factors on which two people could 'click' & form understanding. I agree that data would be good. The last I saw was that women engineering students benefited from having (some) women instructors, and that African American male students (primarily urban ADoS) benefitted greatly from having (primarily) male AA instructors, but I'm not finding any of the studies. (These were in terms of objective outcomes, not self-reported improved confidence things.)
As for the logic being inside out - I don't think so. If it's bad/less desirable for AA students to have non-AA instructors, then it's a hard sell to insist that it's not equally bad for Euro-descent students to have AA or Asian instructors/supervisors. (In my work experience, a problem with the young hires/kids these days is repeated failures to approach and work with a supervisor of a different race, and instead go to a different section/area of responsibility to find a supervisor of the same race. This is not the way.)
Hi Jesse - someone on Slow Boring showed me this article which relates to your question whether there was actual data showing that "representation" is a real phenomenon.
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/inventors_paper.pdf
They look at the likelihood of innovation based on background. Not surprisingly, there are huge differences based on socioeconomic class. Also someone is less likely to be an innovator if that person is of color or female gender. But there was some data showing that girls who grew up in area where there were more women innovators were more likely themselves to become innovators separate from SEC or other variables:
"women are more likely to innovate in a particular category if there were more
women innovating in that category in the area where they grew up. We reject the null hypothesis that the coefficients are the same for both genders with p < 0.02 in both of these specifications, implying that the findings in columns 2 and 3 are not due to selection across categories"
I am certainly no expert at looking at data sets such as these but the study itself seems pretty rigorous.
All this energy we spend talking about the SAT while Jared Kushner's dad buys his mediocre son a spot at Harvard. Can you imagine if legacy/donor/lacrosse player admissions didn't exist and the Ivy League schools suddenly all proposed a change: they were gonna let rich people buy their way in?
It's genuinely astounding that leftist energy on this subject is focused anywhere else. We do not have to dive into a pile of numbers on a hunt for abstract forms of injustice. Harvard's administration is absolutely thrilled that we've decided to spend our time on this nonsense instead of building a campaign to end non-academic admissions.
How do you convince a private institution to refuse the money rich people are trying to stuff down its pockets?
You can't force private institutions to do anything. But Harvard is 1. a carefully managed brand and 2. an institution fully controlled by cultural leftists. You can put their feet to the fire in a way that you can't with ExxonMobil.
True, but who is going to put their feet to the fire? A big part of Harvard's brand appeal is that it produces an environment where you form bonds and networks with the rich and well connected. The rich with the mediocre progeny pay way more than basic tuition. I suspect that even the cultural leftists who send their kids to Harvard like to maintain the status quo at Harvard, where their kids can hob nob with the kids of not just their own peer group, but the super rich who had to buy their way in, and are a boon to the grading curve.
I think that's a good point, which might be a reason why Harvard students themselves aren't ever going to wage the campaign. But I do think that outside pressure on this can make a difference, especially if it's done in a way that's going to tarnish the brand. Pressure companies to not hire from universities that have legacy admissions. Write articles in the NYT tying legacy admissions at the Ivies to the r word. Call out the tenured self-proclaimed Marxist professors at these institutions who don't speak out on this subject and just coast on the prestige.
Harvard's core brand is ultimately still tied to smart kids choosing it over anything else, and if it becomes a controversial place to go to school, maybe that eventually does affect admissions. At the very least it becomes more similar to working for Facebook in 2021 - still good for your resume, but not something you want to brag about at parties.
Also good points. Your comment about the Marxist professors reminded of a post I saw on another Substack. It was a professor who send out a general email, appealing to the Marxist sensibilities of other professors, to note that taking extra summer work at the uni, when they didn't need the money, was channeling resources away from the less secure teachers. The response from the Marxist professors, none of which was named or personally addressed in this "Let's help out our more vulnerable teachers" email, was to report this teacher to the admin for harassments. This teacher ended up losing his/her job over this.
Long way of saying you can't always rely on the Marxist professors either.
What are the axes on the graph under "The perceived SES effect in SAT scores is a parental education effect." ? I'm not clear on what that chart is showing.
Sorry - those data points are schools rather than individuals and the axes are the % reaching advanced status in reading by % with parents holding bachelor's degrees.
Freddie, you might be interested to know that philosophy prof Brian Leiter is soliciting comments on this post on his blog: https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2021/05/sat-scores-and-socioeconomic-class.html#comments.
FWIW, I don't think Leiter is trying to incite a pile-on; if anything, I would bet that he thinks Freddie is probably right, but wants to be sure before he accepts Freddie's conclusions.
"But I find it very disheartening how progressives routinely dismiss the excellence achieved by Asian students from socioeconomically and ethnically marginalized backgrounds - precisely the type of excellence you would expect them to celebrate."
I came to the US at age 9 in 1965 knowing no English. But was the beneficiary, at that time, of schools that had overwhelmingly (almost exclusive) English speaking students--and only English. My parents never learned English.
In the years since, I have noticed that when I tell people that, there are some people who almost resent it and are skeptical: I know English a little too well for someone from that background. And I have noticed that to a person, each of those people has been progressive/social liberals.
Those high-performing Asian kids (and me, to a minor extent) traduce the catechism of victimology. And within the progressive moral economy, the victim is the most venerated of figures, always acted upon, but never acting. Unsullied by agency.
Great shout on URI Talent Development. After 20+ years working in and around high schools in the Providence Public Schools it is maybe the one consistent success. My wife and I worked in a Gates small school era high school that for a while was sending a quarter to a third of the school straight into TD with great success. And then was summarily closed when Race to the Top started. Anyhow... TD survives and is a great service to kids in this community.
Also appreciate your perspective on the successes of lower-income Asian immigrants. My daughters attended a public elementary school in South Providence that quietly outperforms the other public elementaries (outside College Hill). At one point I looked at the data and in whatever year it was their mostly low-income Southeast Asian immigrant students were outperforming the elementary age Asian students in the top suburban districts.
I brought this up to some of the teachers in the school and other people in the community and it was basically un-parseable data. There was no particular program of focus whatsoever on the Asian students in the predominantly Hispanic school, and it didn't quite seem like something that would be appropriate to praise the school for. One bit of possibly explanatory data I found is that the Asian students reported feeling more safe and comfortable in that school than they did outside of school in general.