DO BLACK KIDS (ACTUALLY) MATTER: The brilliant students of tribal lore!

THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019

At Vox, does anyone care?: "How did things ever get so far?"

We believe Marlon Brando said that. He was delivering a scripted line from a little-known film, The Godfather.

Brando's question might also be asked about the remarkable state of affairs which seems to obtain in the New York City Public Schools. Yesterday, we showed you the relevant data, which are constantly disappeared:

Average scores, Grade 8 math
New York City Public Schools, 2017 Naep
White students: 290.71
Black students: 255.63
Hispanic students: 263.56
Asian-American students: 306.03

How did things ever get so far? As we look at data like these, we're forced to say that Brando was asking a very good question.

Those data define a vast problem. According to a standard, though very rough, rule of thumb, those data say that the average black kid in Gotham is five years behind his or her Asian-American counterpart in math, just by the time of eighth grade.

If true, that should be a gigantic concern. Almost surely, this explains why data like these are constantly disappeared.

Those data concern average scores by the kids in four different groups. That said, average achievers aren't the kids who get admitted to Stuyvesant High, the source of so much pseudo-liberal hand-wringing last week.

By long-standing design, spots at Stuyvesant go to Gotham's highest achievers. With regard to Gotham's highest achievers, the relevant data say this:

90th percentile scores, Grade 8 math
New York City Public Schools, 2017 Naep
White students: 337.79
Black students: 299.75
Hispanic students: 309.51
Asian-American students: 355.63

Those are ugly, horrible data. Luckily, you'll never see them in the New York Times, an upper-class, Hamptons-based newspaper where it seems that nobody cares a whole lot about the lives, and the interests, of Gotham's black kids..

Those data are drawn from the most recent administration of the Naep, the widely-described "gold standard" of domestic educational testing.

There's no such thing as specialized "test prep" for the Naep; it's just plain straight-ahead testing. Nobody preps for the Naep. For the individual kids who get tested, it's a "no-stakes" test.

Meanwhile, can that very rough rule of thumb possibly be correct? Can it really be true that, at the 90th percentile, Asian eighth-graders in New York are more than five years ahead of their black counterparts?

Should such a rough assessment be believed? Measures like that tend to lose meaning when such large statistical gaps are involved. That said, you'll never see that issue discussed in the New York Times, which joins an array of pseudo-liberal news orgs in selling silly tribal dreams to vastly misled subscribers.

Tomorrow, we'll show you how dumb it can get when the Times sells you those dreams. For today, let's consider "the brilliant students of Vox"—the high-achievers the Ezra Klein rag sold to its readers last week.

Within the pseudo-liberal world, everyone knew what stories to tell when admission offers to Stuyvesant High were accounced last week. As usual, we liberals were told it was all "test prep," with a bit of test bias thrown in.

Kevin Drum objected to the latter idea. Tomorrow, we'll show you what Drum said about that, and we'll examine some of the clueless comments left by a range of his liberal readers.

For today, let's consider the way we liberals manage to get so misinformed. Let's consider the brilliant students of Vox, the ones to whom we were introduced in this presumably well-intentioned report.

The report was written by Jose Vilson, an experienced middle school math teacher in Manhattan. Vilson didn't mention the brutal data we've shown you. Instead, he started like this:

VILSON (3/22/19): When news broke this week that only seven black students were accepted into New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, an elite public school that supposedly only takes the most advanced students in the city, I wasn’t surprised. In my 14-year career as a middle school math teacher in Manhattan with majority black or Latinx students, I’ve had thousands of kids who were rejected from magnet public schools like Stuyvesant. It breaks my heart every time.

[...]

I’ve had to console far too many brilliant students who didn’t get chosen for the high school they wanted to go to. They checked off all the proverbial boxes: great attendance, high grades, strong work ethic, and had positive relationships with adults and peers. They studied hard for the Specialized High School Admission Test—an assessment given to eighth or ninth graders for entry into eight of the elite magnet public schools in New York City—for months. Because a student’s score on that test is the only criterion for high school admissions, the stressful three hours spent taking this exam could determine a student’s future.

As a teacher, I try to assure my students that they will be fine regardless of which school they attend. But I often wonder if we educators are doing a disservice—and perpetuating the lie of meritocracy—by continuing to tell kids that if they work hard and excel then they can get what they want in life.

For starters, who would tell eighth-graders something like that? Who would tell a bunch of eighth-graders that if they work hard and excel, "they can get what they want in life?"

What if they work hard and "excel" but a lot of other kids work hard and excel even more? Already, this essay was making little sense, except on an emotional level.

That said, if Vox readers got all the way to Vilson's third paragraph, they read about the "many brilliant students" who don't get admitted to Stuyvesant High each year. Eventually, the conspiratorial strain would come in, with these readers being told that "none of this is by accident."

As he continued, Vilson noted the remarkable fact that black kids received only 3 percent of admission offers last week to Gotham's eight "specialized high schools." Why are black kids so under-represented? Under a heading about "segregation," Vilson fingered the usual scapegoats:

VILSON: None of this is by accident. Some forty years after Stuyvesant High School opened, New York State passed the Calandra-Hecht Act in 1971 which stated that “admissions to [these specialized high schools] shall be solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination.” The bill was passed to preempt city investigations as to whether these institutions were racially discriminatory.

[...]

The Specialized High School Admission Test, much like the IQ tests of yore and the SAT or ACT of the present, has been gamed since its inception. Everything from expensive test prep centers concentrated in specific neighborhoods to private tutors who spend hours with students across the city helps exacerbate admissions, and with it racial disparity.

Any number of initiatives may provide free resources for students to improve their scores. But the history of schooling suggests this will only push the already privileged to seek more advantages. Even if we buy the premise that the test is a valid assessment, which it isn’t, we already see how the multimillion dollar test prep industry makes the prospect of taking this test daunting for black and brown children in our city.

The admission test isn't a valid assessment! Beyond that, the test has been gamed!

"Expensive test prep centers" have helped drive "racial disparity," thus helping "the already privileged." The reliance on an admission test, rather than on a (vastly subjective) measure like grades, has been "tacitly keeping these schools out of reach for under-resourced students."

To some extent, each of these claims may have some limited merit. That said, "expensive test prep centers" don't exist for the Naep, and Vox didn't ask Vilson to tell its readers what Naep data seem to show.

Nor was Vilson asked to say that the Asian kids who dominate enrollment at Stuyvesant come from the least economically privileged demographic group in Gotham. This fact has been widely noted, but it tends to disappear when sites like Vox peddle our tribe's favorite tales.

All is fair in love and war—and in dumbing us liberals down while ignoring the interests of black kids! Vox editors were even prepared to publish this in the never-ending drive to keep our tribe's piddle alive:

VILSON: These days, standardized tests don’t just create inequitable conditions for schools; they also bolster arguments of those who already preferred to consolidate education to the privileged few. In historian Horace Mann Bond’s 1924 paper “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” Bond brings this point home: “[T]o claim that the results of the tests given to such diverse groups, drawn from such varying strata of the social complex, are in any wise accurate, is to expose a fatuous sense of unfairness and lack of appreciation of the great environmental factors of modern urban life.”

Yes, you read that correctly. In that ridiculous passage, Vilson claims that Gotham's Specialized High Schools Admission Test is designed to serve the interests of "the privileged few" based upon a real-time assessment of IQ tests as they existed in 1924!

At Vox, some editor put that in print. There's truly no limit to what we'll do to keep preferred scripts alive.

In the process, we refuse to discuss the lives and interests of black kids. We refuse to report, let alone discuss or assess, these data from the Naep.

We started our review with a striking claim by Vilson. He claimed that "many brilliant students" are being kept out of schools like Stuyvesant under current arrangements.

Late in his piece, he returns to this pleasing claim. It's a type of claim our tribe has been making since the 1960s:

VILSON: Especially tragic is that so much of this debate ignores the brilliance that I get to witness on a daily basis from my students of color. I’ve seen the ways my students master scientific notation and systems of equations better than I could at their age. I hear them debate each other—often in vociferous ways—on whether a set of relations determines a function. I, and so many of their teachers, believe in their present and future.

Does Vilson witness brilliance every day from various students of color? We have no way of assessing that claim.

That said, we showed you the relevant data from the Naep. Edited down a tad, those data look like this:

90th percentile scores, Grade 8 math
New York City Public Schools, 2017 Naep
Black students: 299.75
Asian-American students: 355.63

Stuyvesant is currently full of high-achieving Asian-American kids. Does that fact remain a mystery after you've see those data?

Those brutal data from the Naep define "the problem we all [currently] live with." They also define a second problem:

They define the sweeping problem the people at Vox won't tell you about.

They define the sweeping problem you'll never read about in the Times, which uses Naep data for everything else, but won't report data like those.

According to our most reliable data, Gotham's highest performing black kids are many years behind their Asian and white counterparts by the time of eighth grade. That is the sweeping problem confronting New York City and the nation, not the much more limited, upper-end question of who gets into Stuyvesant.

Vox readers were told a pleasing old story last week. They were told that Vilson teaches brilliant black and Hispanic students every day of the week.

That may be true, of course; it all depends on what the meaning of "brilliant" is! But our most reliable data suggest that, as a general rule, their low-income Asian-American counterparts are outperforming them in the classroom by a very wide margin indeed.

Enter the role of disinformation! As liberals, we're kept from hearing such things at our favorite pseudo-lib sites. You will never hear such things at the New York Times.

As such, you'll never hear about a very large societal problem—the problem we're all ignoring.

Does editor-at-large Ezra Klein give a fig about the interests of black kids? Reading the pleasing piddle at Vox, we sometimes feel inclined to say that the answer might tilt towards no.

Tomorrow: Mara Gay hits rock bottom