SCHOOL LIVES MATTER: Bigots under quite a few beds!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2015

Conclusion—Justice Scalia and others: Did Justice Scalia make bigoted comments at the recent Supreme Court hearing concerning admission procedures at the University of Texas?

That's what some have said! Before we look at Scalia's remarks, let's review some ugly comments by Justice Alito at that very same hearing.

Alito was speaking with Gregory Garre, lead counsel for the University of Texas. When Reverend Sharpton spoke with Chris Hayes that night, he spilled with praise for Garre, a former solicitor general under President Bush:

SHARPTON (12/9/15): You had the former solicitor general to Bush, to George Bush, as the attorney for the University of Texas, saying how this program had added to a real problem of having low numbers of black enrollees, low diversity on the University of Texas campus, and it worked for the campus, period, it helped education for majority and minority students. This is a Bush solicitor general who was the lawyer for UT saying this...

I thought that there was an excellent argument by the UT attorney. I never thought I'd be commending a Bush appointee, but he did an excellent job.

Sharpton was impressed by Garre. Concerning the wealth of horrid remarks which punctuated the hearing, consider one exchange Garre had with Justice Alito.

In the exchange, Garre was defending the university's "top ten percent" program. Under that program, Texas kids who graduate in the top ten percent of their high school class get admitted to UT-Austin.

Some people have criticized that part of the Texas plan, even including the highly suspect Justice Ginsburg. They say that the "top ten percent" plan encourages black high school students to remain in single-race schools. They also say that it means that kids from "lower performing" all-black schools are gaining admission in lieu of black kids from more challenging mixed-race schools who may be better prepared.

In the exchange shown below, Garre fights the "pernicious stereotype" which lies behind such presentations. Alito proceeds with his bigoted comments. We've made one minor unmarked deletion, which we'll restore below:

GARRE (12/9/15): It's kind of the assumption if a student, if a black student or a Hispanic student is admitted as part of the top ten percent plan, it has to be because that student didn't have to compete against very many whites and Asians in the high school class. It's a really pernicious stereotype.

ALITO: It's not a stereotype at all. It's based on the undeniable fact about the manner in which the "top ten percent law" operates...The fact is, is that the way the "top ten percent law" admits minority students is by admitting those students from the lower-performing, racially identifiable schools.

Disgusting, isn't it? In that exchange, you see the ugliness which was common at the hearing. Garre attacked a "really pernicious stereotype" about kids who graduate from all-black schools. In response, Alito insisted it wasn't a stereotype at all. According to Alito, the "stereotype" was, in fact, an accurate assessment of students admitted to UT-Austin "from the lower-performing, racially identifiable schools."

In that exchange, you can see why Sharpton spilled with praise for the greatness of Garre. You can also see this—Alito could have been attacked for his bigotry that day, much like the bigot Scalia.

Except wait! We've made a minor mistake! We've accidentally switched the names of the players in that exchange! It was really Justice Alito who railed against that "pernicious stereotype." And it was really UT's own lead counsel, Garre, who sneered at the "lower-performing" all-black schools.

Below, you see the actual exchange, with the words "your honor" restored:

ALITO (12/9/15): It's kind of the assumption if a student, if a black student or a Hispanic student is admitted as part of the top ten percent plan, it has to be because that student didn't have to compete against very many whites and Asians in the high school class. It's a really pernicious stereotype.

GARRE: It's not a stereotype at all, your honor. It's based on the undeniable fact about the manner in which the top ten percent law operates...The fact is, is that the way the top ten percent law admits minority students is by admitting those students from the lower-performing, racially identifiable schools.

If Alito had said what Garre said, it would have been easy to pull his remarks out of context and attack him as a bigot. Instead, Sharpton went on corporate liberal TV and praised Garre for his greatness.

That same night, our own Lawrence O'Donnell was saying that black kids could do perfectly well at Harvard, just so long as they took easy courses and chose their majors with care. A person could almost have thought that his remarks had the ring of a "pernicious stereotype" too. But no one challenged these remarks. Lawrence is part of our tribe!

Our basic point would be this. Especially at highly fraught times, it's easy to spot bigoted comments under every bed. That may be especially true in the context of a Supreme Court hearing, where time is extremely limited, interruptions are constant and a great deal of information is presupposed by the participants.

Did Scalia make a bigoted comment at the hearing that day? It all depends on how much you want to believe in bigots. More precisely, it all depends on how much you want to believe in the presence of bigots Over There, over in Their demonic tribe, where all the bad people are.

(We humans have always loved that story. How much do you want to believe it?)

Below, we show you the full text of Scalia's remarks. It's the passage which had Our Team reeling in the face of his bigotry.

In the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf criticized Scalia for these "careless" remarks, then criticized Scalia's critics for over-reacting to his remarks. We agree that Scalia could have been much more careful in the way he framed his comments.

On the other hand, Scalia was raising types of questions which are perfectly reasonable, unless you only care about wins in our dull-witted tribal wars. Here's the full text of what he said:

SCALIA (12/9/15): There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas, where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school, where they do well.

One of the briefs pointed out that, that most of the, most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas.

GARRE: So this court—

SCALIA: They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're, that they're being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them.

GARRE: This court—

SCALIA: I'm just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer. Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe some— You know, when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks, admitted to lesser schools turns out to be less. And I don't think it stands to reason that it's a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible. I just don't think so.

Do we want to call Justice Scalia a bigot? If so, he gave us some ways to do that:

To avoid being attacked for one's alleged bigotry, it would be better to avoid terms like "less advanced school" and "slower track school." In this case, it would have been better for Scalia to have referred to "excellent schools which are less competitive academically than the University of Texas' Austin campus, which is of course highly competitive."

It would also be better to draw a clear distinction between "some" and "all." (Jeffrey Toobin failed to do so on CNN that same night.) Taken literally, it sounds like Scalia is saying that all African-Americans are overmatched in the classroom at UT-Austin. Obviously, that isn't the case.

Most of the subsequent fainting-away turned on a reading in which Scalia was saying that no blacks should be admitted to Texas, since no black kids will ever do well there. Presumably, Scalia can't believe something so foolish. But then, can Reverend Sharpton really believe that Scalia was calling for a return to "separate but equal?" Because that's what the overwrought reverend said on that evening's All In.

(Two hours later, O'Donnell was saying that black kids can do well at Harvard if they just take easy courses. Because the cocksure cockatoo comes from our tribe, his remarks were judged A-OK. A lawyer from the Legal Defense Fund seemed to second his comments!)

Scalia drove the final nail through his own palm when he said that maybe UT-Austin should have fewer black students. That's always possible, of course—it all depends on the facts on the ground—although the current black enrollment, four percent, strikes us as remarkably low.

Here at THE HOWLER, we emerged from last week's non-discussion discussion with one basic question. Why in the world is black enrollment at Austin so low? Even with the administration looking for ways to enroll more black kids, enrollment remains at a very low number. Down in the Lone Star State, what occurs in the lives of our many good decent black kids that keeps them from attaining the skills that would get them admitted to Austin?

What goes on in the school lives of Texas kids? What goes on in their preschool lives? In their family lives?

We liberals rarely discuss such questions concerning the school lives of our good decent kids. You will watch MSNBC night after night, for month after month, and never see its millionaire hosts ask even one lone question about the school lives of our millions of good and decent and deserving black and Hispanic kids.

The topic never comes up. Instead, we play our Salem Village games. We get down on our hands and knees. Perhaps occasionally shrieking a bit, we look under every bed.

We know there are demons under those beds, and our word for demon is "bigot." We look away when Our Own Tribe seems to misspeak, exult as we go after Theirs.

Meanwhile, a lingering question remains—where will Mya Alford end up going to college? (Remember her, from the week's first two posts?) Will she get to go to college at all? What has her school life been like up to now? What could be done to make the school lives of such good decent kids happier and more productive?

Go ahead—turn on your TV machine thingy! As is made clear night after night, Rachel doesn't care about questions like that. Neither does blowhard O'Donnell.

Relentless silence, year after year, makes their disinterest abundantly clear. Within our vastly self-impressed tribe, no one actually cares about the school lives of black and Hispanic kids, except to the extent that their lives can be used to tag The Others as bigots.

We leave you with one final question. Why has the rest of our self-impressed tribe never quite noticed this problem?

The tale of the tape: You can listen to tape of Scalia's remarks through this link to C-Span.

You can still hear Scalia's remarks. At the start of the week, you could hear the full hearing at that link; we gave it a listen or three. Scalia's comments can still be heard at the start of the tape, but the rest of the tape went on the fritz on Wednesday.

We hope C-Span restores the tape. Before the tape went down, we transcribed Alito's attack on that stereotype right around the 0:44 mark. Scalia's tribally pleasing remarks occur at 1:08.

SCHOOL LIVES MATTER: But war comes first!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2015

Part 5—What Lawrence and Reverend Al said: We emerged from last week's Scalia Wars with a basic question.

Why is the freshman class at Texas only 4% black? Even with the university trying to increase black enrollment, why is the number that low?

There's a related question concerning Hispanic enrollment, of course. For reasons no one ever explains, this entire discussion is conducted in the context of black enrollment, even though the state of Texas has tons more Hispanic kids.

If we might quote the state itself: "In 2013-14, Hispanic students accounted for the largest percentage of total enrollment in Texas public schools (51.8%), followed by White (29.5%), African American (12.7%) Asian (3.7%), and multiracial (1.9%) students."

Down in the Lone Star state, public school enrollment is majority Hispanic. But then again, whatever! Also, who actually cares?

For the record, black kids in Texas outperform their counterparts around the nation on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, our one apparently reliable testing program. So do the state's Hispanic kids; so do white kids in the state.

That said, substantial "achievement gaps" still obtain; those significant gaps help produce those enrollment figures in Austin. That said, why do those gaps obtain? What happens in the school lives of Texas kids which helps create this phenomenon?

(Also in their family lives, and also in their preschool lives. What happens to hold back our good decent Texas kids?)

To tell the truth, questions like these are rarely asked within our national discourse. To state the world's most obvious fact, no one actually cares about the answers to these questions. To cite an embarrassing set of examples, you'll almost never see such questions examined at our own corporate liberal news orgs.

Rachel Maddow doesn't care about what happens to black kids in Texas. She wasted her first twenty minutes last night with a ludicrous, embarrassing mess which started with a detailed "argument" from the former Rhodes scholar star, in which she showed that George Pataki and Jim Gilmore aren't really trying to get elected.

Maddow pretended to blow a train whistle, helping us stave off boredom. She incessantly drummed on her table, as she now persistently does; she pretended to snore and fall asleep at the mention of Pataki's name. Our analysts writhed like Salem girls as this incessant, months-long gong show and mental breakdown continued. (It dates at least to May 3.) They looked at us with pleading eyes, asking when someone will finally appear on the set and lead this strange person away.

Black kids in Texas barely exist on The One True Liberal Channel. Our corporate stars don't consider their problems. They show very few signs of caring about their lives.

Last week, though, heaven arrived in the form of a comment by Justice Scalia. Our tribal wars could be fought on this turf! The school lives of Texas kids were briefly mentioned, in passing.

Was there something wrong with Scalia's comment, which we'll review below? Maybe yes and maybe no, but there was certainly room for complaint.

At the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf complained about Scalia's "lazy characterization" of so-called “mismatch theory.” Friedersdorf continued: "I do not think it overzealous 'political correctness' to expect more carefully drawn words on this subject in a high-profile hearing, given Scalia’s prominence and the ugly, wrongheaded belief in black inferiority that persists in bigoted enclaves. A man of his position and intellect is capable of better."

Friedersdorf knocked Scalia's remarks, but also knocked his critics. In a piece for CNN, John McWhorter voiced a softer view. "I don't usually agree with Justice Scalia's perspectives, but we are doing him wrong on this one," he said at the start of a lengthy piece about "mismatch theory." That said, McWhorter complained that Scalia "didn't express himself as gracefully as he could have."

Elsewhere, we liberals pleasured ourselves in our standard way; we accused Scalia of bigotry. This touched off the latest tribal war, with our team complaining about all the bigotry and their team complaining of all the correctness.

Our view? Along the way, our tribal leaders said many things that were dumber than the things Scalia said, which weren't gigantically dumb at all, depending on how you took them. We chose to take them as acts of war--but this is now the only way we know how to take remarks.
The school lives of Texas kids briefly got mentioned, but only in the context of the latest pleasing war.

How offensive were Scalia's remarks? We'll look at his statement below. But in response, a whole of other people rushed to embarrass themselves in the usual mandated ways.

By the night of last week's hearing, it was clear that tribal war was on. On CNN, legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin explained "mismatch" theory to Erin Burnett. Was this really the best he could do?

BURNETT (12/9/15): So let me start with you, Jeff. Is this fair that [Scalia's] receiving all the criticism he is receiving when you read that? What did you hear?

TOOBIN: Well, he is citing a brief that refers to a theory known by the shorthand of "mismatch," that students—African-American students do better, they get better jobs, they graduate more often if they go to lesser schools, say the University of Texas at San Antonio, at Arlington, as opposed to the flagship campus at the University of Texas at Austin.

That is a very controversial theory. A lot of people say not only is there something distasteful about that argument, they say it is simply wrong on the facts. But it is an argument that has been made in the brief.

Was that really the best he could do?

In fact, "mismatch theory" doesn't say that "African-Americans" (full stop) do better at less competitive schools than UT-Austin. Mismatch theory says that some African-American students would do better, perhaps substantially better, at less competitive schools.

According to proponents of mismatch theory, some kids who are being admitted to highly competitive schools through affirmative action formulas are being thrown in over heads. In current circumstances, such kids are black (and also Hispanic, although those kids are never mentioned). But presumably, most white kids might also be over their heads at our most competitive schools.

Duh. Anyone can be thrown in over his head in some academic setting! This possibility isn't restricted to black kids, except when we don't use our words.

As so often occurs, Toobin forgot to say "some." Somehow forgetting to use all his words, he thereby delivered a burlesqued account of so-called "mismatch theory."

At the Atlantic, you can see Friedersdorf assailing Scalia for using the same formulation. "Scalia’s error was to talk carelessly and imprecisely about a predictably fraught subject," Friedersdorf sensibly writes.

For whatever reason, Toobin couldn't rush fast enough to make the same careless mistake on several CNN programs. That said, tribal war feeds on burlesque, although it's good for network ratings and it provides a welcome sense of tribal moral greatness.

Later that evening, Lawrence O'Donnell played a ridiculous series of cards as he discussed Scalia's bigotry on his MSNBC show. Lawrence spoke with Janai Nelson, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Eventually, Lawrence would tell poor Nelson that he was sorry that she had to be exposed to Scalia's untoward behavior. Nelson agreed that it had been "pretty jarring...to hear a Supreme Court Justice make those types of comments that are just rolled up in assumptions about racial inferiority."

In the end, Lawrence apologized. First, though, he explained how a black kid could do well at his own famous alma mater.

As Lawrence explained, the analysts screamed and howled like a gang of afflicted Salem girls. Had Scalia made remarks that "were just rolled up in assumptions about racial inferiority?" If we wanted to be unkind, we could claim to hear the same assumptions in this great progressive's remarks:

NELSON (12/9/15): It was pretty jarring, I think, for most people in the courtroom to hear a Supreme Court Justice make those types of comments that are just rolled up in assumptions about racial inferiority, just thoughts that you cannot imagine a figure of such stature and in such a respectable position would make.

O'DONNELL: And it is filled with just wild assumptions. The first of all, the notion that you can define this hierarchy of schools, "this school is higher that school" and so forth.
Let me just say confessionally, I went to Harvard College. It is the easiest college in the world if you choose the right courses.

You have 6,000 courses to choose from, and I promise you a thousand of them could not be easier. And, so it is, with schools, you know, all over the country. You cannot—these are not apples and apples. They are all different.

NELSON: That is right. It depends on your experience with classes you take.

O'DONNELL: Yes. What your major is.

NELSON: What your major is, what activities you are involved in. It is really unfortunate to cast, again, an entire group of people and suggest that they cannot compete at this high level of higher education.

Question: By the time these two progressives got through, who needed alleged bigots like Scalia?

According to Lawrence, black kids could do just fine at Harvard. They just had to be sure to take all the easiest courses! There must be a thousand courses a black kid could choose from, the cable star helpfully said. Also, please choose a soft major!

It sounded like Lawrence was advising the UNC football program, circa 2005. Recovering from her jarring experience, Nelson agreed with his thoughts.

On the bright side, Lawrence had "confessed" to going to Harvard. Less helpfully, he had instantly run to a stereotype—black kids at a school like that will need to take easy courses!

That statement is probably true, of course, for a lot of black kids. But it's true for tons of white kids too! The large majority of high school graduates of all so-called races don't "qualify" for our most competitive schools. They may therefore attend less competitive schools, after which they may proceed to do great things in the world.

By now, the analysts were writhing. Several swore that they had seen Lawrence turn into a fox, or perhaps even a cat. Earlier, though, they had encountered the strangest comment of the night. It had come from Reverend Sharpton, appearing on All In.

We were big fans of Sharpton for years, due to his humor and his intelligence. In our view, his years on cable haven't done much for his game.

At any rate, he was reporting for Hayes this night. At the start of the show, and then again, Hayes teased what was to come:

HAYES (12/9/15): And amazing new polling on where rank and file Republicans stand on Donald Trump's bigotry. Plus outrage over Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's remarks about affirmative action.

[...]

HAYES: And later, the shocking comments made by Justice Scalia in the affirmative action case. Reverend Al Sharpton is here and joins me to respond.

Tribally, it sounded good. We'd get some "bigotry" from Candidate Trump, along with "outrage" about Scalia's shocking remarks.

How shocking were Scalia's remarks? In our view, they weren't as foolish as this:

HAYES: Joining me now, Reverend Al Sharpton, host of MSNBC's Politics Nation. And Rev, you were in that room and the Times described that moment when Justice Scalia was talking about a "slower track school" as that comment being met with audible gasps in the chamber.

SHARPTON: That's only because we are not allowed to do anything but gasp...

None of us were prepared to hear what Scalia said, because in essence what he was saying is, "Let's go back to pre-Board of Education, Brown versus Board of Education, 1950s America," where blacks are doing all right going to black schools or schools where blacks go. He said, go to less advanced schools where they do all right. We're going back to separate but equal.

And as I said to the press coming out, this is like the biased, anti-Muslim bias at a Donald Trump rally, but we're hearing this on the bench of the Supreme Court, a Supreme Court justice saying that it's just fine for them to go to less advanced schools, they do fine. This is appalling. I don't care who you are.

Scalia was calling for separate but equal! He wanted to go back to 1950s America! Or at least, so Sharpton said.

For our money, those comments by Sharpton were substantially more foolish than anything Scalia had said. We don't disagree with Friedersdorf when he says that Scalia could, perhaps should, have chosen his words with more care. But for our money, Sharpton's comments were more foolish than that.

On the other hand, they gave us the pleasures of name-calling tribal war.

Poor Sharpton! Later that night, O'Donnell would tell Nelson that he was sorry that she had to be exposed to Scalia's remarks. ("Janai Nelson, I am sorry you had to listen to some of that today.") As he ended his session with Hayes, Sharpton described his own jarring experience.

Earlier, Hayes had said he would try to "bend over backwards" to be fair to Justices Scalia and Thomas. Now, Sharpton said this:

SHARPTON: I think Ms. Ifill of the LDF gave every argument backward and forward that you could want. But for Scalia to say this and not have other justices gasp, Justice Sotomayor was absolutely superb, but to have people sit there and not respond to this was something that I walked down those steps— You think you leaned over backwards? I had to lean forward to even get down the steps after being insulted like that by a Supreme Court justice.

Justice Sotomayor was superb, even though she forgot to gasp. But Sharpton said, and perhaps even felt, that he had been insulted.

Increasingly, the American discourse, especially on cable, is all about judgments like that. On liberal cable, that means that our tribe will be fed, in Hayes' words, "bigotry. Plus outrage." Also, "shocking comments!"

Tomorrow, we'll look at what Scalia and several others actually said that day. Meanwhile, what about the school lives of our many great kids in Texas?

We've never seen the topic discussed on any MSNBC program. The channel exists to keep feeding us porridge. In the world of its millionaire hosts, with their snoring and clowning, do those good decent kids exist?

Tomorrow: Scalia and Alito and Garre oh my! A long string of jarring remarks

Supplemental: Covering up for Michael S. Schmidt!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2015

Gorilla dust spreads confusion: We're closely tracking Kevin Drum today. That said, we wanted to add one note to his post about the latest groaner by the New York Times' groaner-infested whiz kid, Michael S. Schmidt.

In this post, Drum discusses Schmidt's latest groaner. It involves the claim, apparently false, that K-1 visa star Tashfeen Malik had "talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad."

Does the New York Times' Michael S. Schmidt ever not get it wrong? Drum says this is his second major howler. We feel fairly sure that it's at least his third.

At any rate, here's our addendum to Drum's basic post:

Just check this morning's news report, in which the Times pretends to set the record straight concerning their latest howler. As we read that report this morning, we were struck by the practiced way the Times seemed to be spreading gorilla dust around.

In our view, it was hard to tell that the Times was correcting its own bungled work. Among other helpings of fudge and points of confusion, it was all just a "clarification!"

Al Baker and Marc Santora wrote the skillfully jumbled piece. We'd say they're skilled at obfuscation, or maybe their editor spread the dust which produced the helpful confusion.

In a land of broken elites, it's all in a solid day's work.

Supplemental: More overflow from the watershed!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2015

A crackpot named Fiorina: Yesterday, we said we're living in a watershed era—an era which features the death of the gatekeepers.

Journalistic gatekeepers used to protect us from hearing crazy ideas and claims. Republican and Democratic party gatekeepers used to protect us from being exposed to crazy White House candidates.

All those protections are gone. We're constantly hearing crazy ideas and crazy claims from crazy candidates. Many voters can't seem to identify them as same. They never had to exercise such skills before.

Meanwhile, crazy people are quite widespread in our for-profit media. At one time, craziness was a disqualification. Now, craziness is virtually a job requirement.

Candidate Fiorina is a bit on the crazy side. Years ago, a crazy person like Fiorina wouldn't have been permitted to run for the nomination of a major party. In Tuesday night's debate, one of her statements was so crazy that Gail Collins even noticed part of the problem:

COLLINS (12/17/15): Let’s see, what else? Several candidates seemed to think terrorism on U.S. soil is entirely due to “political correctness.” Carly Fiorina promised to bring back “warrior class” generals like David Petraeus who “retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear,” skipping the part about giving classified materials to a biographer with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

Colins was able to notice the oddness of the remark about Petraeus. On Fox Business, they noticed that the oddness of Fiorina's full remark extended light-years beyond that.

Below, you see Fiorina's fuller statement, which was delivered with her trademark sense of fury and grievance. Below that, you see the further correction of her lunacy, courtesy of Stuart Varney, who is normally one of the biggest hacksters on Fox:

FIORINA (12/15/15): One of the things I would immediately do, in addition to defeating them here at home, is bring back the warrior class—Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn't want to hear.

[...]

VARNEY (12/16/15): Did you in fact, general, give advice to President Obama, which he didn't want to hear and didn't take?

GENERAL JACK KEANE: No, I have never spoken to the president. That's not accurate, and I never served this administration. I served the previous administration.

Angrily, Fiorina said she knows all the generals! But uh-oh! As noted on last night's Maddow Show, General Keane retired in 2003. He's never even spoken to Obama, Keane told Varney on Fox.

(The angry claim about McChrystal also didn't make a huge amount of sense.)

Under the old rules, a person like Fiorina wouldn't have been permitted to run for president. Now, with party gatekeepers gone, all such protections are gone.

To the extent that they actually care, the press corps doesn't seem to know how to deal with such craziness. It doesn't matter with Fiorina, who has ceased to be a significant factor in the Republican polls.

But to the extent that they actually care, the press corps has shown little sign of knowing how to deal with the serial craziness of Candidate Trump. We're talking about his serial, repetitive factual howlers, not about his policy proposals, however unusual they may be.

That said, Trump made a basic budget proposal in September which, by any traditional standard, is essentially crazy. But so what? The budget proposal was barely discussed, despite its manifest lunacy.

(On CNN, Erin Burnett told Don Lemon that Candidate Trump was "in his wheelhouse" with the crazy budget proposal. Around the press corps, the crazy proposal was barely discussed. At this point, no one even seems to feel the need to pretend.)

The danger for liberals is failing to see the role we play in this process. For our money, this latest piece by Rebecca Traister represents a brand of near-crazy—a brand of near-crazy which helps the topsy of the overall crazy continue to grow.

All the rules have been thrown away. The whole world is typing up novels.

In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer's books all had the word "death" in the title. Our novels all revolve around the use of the B-word. Increasingly, it seems to be the only framework we know.

SCHOOL LIVES MATTER: Plato visits the Ivy League!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2015

Part 4—In theory, mismatch happens: Is the University of Texas making bad judgments concerning freshman admissions?

Aside from that, is the school doing something that's unconstitutional?

In theory, those are separate questions. In theory, the Supreme Court is considering the second question, especially concerning the use of race in admission decisions.

If memory serves, race is considered a "suspect category" under prevailing constitutional frameworks. For that reason, the use of race must survive "strict scrutiny" if challenged in court.

Or something! We haven't seen many legal explanations in the week since this complex matter got hot and went viral again. Nor have we seen many attempts to describe the actual lives of the actual students involved in these decisions.

What we've seen is the usual screeching displays, with members of our warring tribes yelling names at each other. All in all, we don't seem to hugely care about the school lives of actual kids. We do seem to hugely care about our tribal warfare.

Is Texas doing something wrong in its admission procedures? In the past week, the discourse has focused on a specific question: In an attempt to increase black enrollment, is the prestigious flagship campus admitting black freshmen who are destined to flounder or fail?

Because real students are involved, that's an important question. We'll start with two basic points:

First, to whatever extent UT-Austin is practicing race-based "affirmative action," it hasn't exactly been flooding the campus with black kids. According to this official "Student Profile," the student body at Texas was 4% black last year.

That seems to refer to freshmen only, although, in best bureaucratic fashion, it's a bit hard to tell. At any rate, four percent is not a giant figure, student enrollment-wise.

We'll add a second point. Presumably, it's perfectly possible to admit freshmen—black, white or brown—who may be likely to struggle, flounder, suffer and/or fail. Are you running a "selective" university? If you are, presumably you could admit students where academic "mismatch" occurs.

Absolutely everyone agrees that this can happen in theory. In yesterday's New York Times, a former president of Princeton said this rarely happens. But even William Bowen agrees that it could occur:

BOWEN (12/15/15): To be sure, admissions officers could, hypothetically, admit minority students with no real chance of success at the selective institutions in question, but the great bulk of evidence shows that they have not done so. On the contrary, minority students admitted as undergraduates to selective institutions consistently graduate at higher rates than do peers with similar qualifications who attend less-demanding institutions. And available evidence indicates that the great majority of beneficiaries of affirmative action go on to enjoy successful careers and live lives enriched by civic contributions.

According to President Bowen, academic "mismatches" could occur, but admissions officers have been careful not to let this happen.

Warning! President Bowen has played a leading role in this debate since the 1990s. That said, his research has been challenged by other academics. Because this is a complex matter which has become highly partisan, it presumably wouldn't be easy to determine who is more right.

Today, we'll make a key addition to President Bowen's language. Presumably, admissions officers could admit plenty of white students "with no real chance of success at those selective institutions in question" too. The vast majority of college students—white, black and brown—do not attend our most "selective" schools. If black kids can be thrown in over their heads, it can happen to white kids too.

Bowen says that isn't happening, at least not on a serious scale. We don't know if that's accurate. At any rate, UT-Austin is more "selective" than most American universities. Presumably, a lot of students—white, black and brown—might experience academic difficulties there.

That doesn't mean that students like that have to crawl on the junkheap and die. In the language of last week's Supreme Court hearing, it doesn't mean they have to attend some "inferior school."

(As we'll note again tomorrow, that infelicitous phrase was used by UT's chief counsel, not by one of the Justices.)

How "selective" can it get at major state universities? Let's consider the California example, where some freshmen enroll at the Berkeley campus and others enroll at San Jose State, roughly thirty miles away.

According to this official profile, average SAT scores at Berkeley approach 2100 out of a possible 2400. Across the bridge and down the road, average scores at SJS seem to be more like 1550.

Presumably, the are plenty of kids at San Jose State who might imaginably face an academic struggle at Berkeley. But guess what? This country is full of superlative people who went to San Jose State.

(It's also full of overrated louts who went to Stanford or Yale. Just turn on your TV some night!)

Regarding great people from San Jose State, our high school basketball coach, Name Withheld, was and is one such person. (He graduated as the third leading scorer in San Jose State history.) In a somewhat similar vein, a fellow named Lyndon Johnson graduated from Southwest Texas State.

Today, the school is known at Texas State. It's one of the campuses Texas kids attend in lieu of the more selective UT-Austin.

Should our public university systems have "selective" campuses at all? Is that the best way to play? It's done that way all over the world, at the college level and in high school, in places where race is a factor and in settings where all the students are of the same "race."

That said, does it make sense to sort freshmen this way? We'll leave that tempting discussion to the ideologues.

For today, let's consider some things that can imaginably happen to actual college students, given the way our public university systems are currently arranged. For our guide, we'll select John McWhorter. He actually spoke about actual kids in a recent piece on this topic.

McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia. He wrote his piece for CNN. Regarding the greatness of our admission committees, he doesn't seem inclined to agree with President Bowen.

Does "affirmative action" sometimes result in academic mismatches—mismatches which poorly serve the black students involved? McWhorter seems to think so. He starts with some theoretics, built around academic procedure at his own Ivy League school:

MCWHORTER (12/13/15): Black and Latino students are often less prepared for the pace of teaching at tippy-top schools because of the societal factors that dismay us all: quality of schooling, parents denied good education themselves, complex home lives. The question is: Do we respond to this by nonetheless placing students in schools teaching beyond what they are prepared? The data suggest this harms more than it helps, and that is not a racist observation in the least.

An example: Plato's "Republic" runs about 300 pages. At Columbia, we assign it to every sophomore as the first reading of the year. They are expected to have been able to get through it, to discuss it for two or three two-hour classes, and refer to it in a paper or two after that.

Imagine being a student who is quite bright but is from a home without many books in it. He isn't the fastest reader in the world, and his schools didn't expose him to much discussion of ideas as opposed to facts. All of a sudden, he's in a classroom where students marinated since toddlerhood in books and top-quality education are confidently discussing this book, blithely tossing off concepts he's rarely heard of, all doing a fine job of at least faking having gotten through all 300 pages.

Again, McWhorter imagines black and Hispanic kids who aren't ready for the fast pace, and the faking, he describes at Columbia. Again, we'll note an important point. Presumably, there would be tons of white high school graduates who would be challenged by that pace too.

Everyone can be thrown in over his or her head in some academic setting! Somewhere or other, in some setting, President Bowen's hypothetical could presumably happen to anyone, not just to black college kids.

Has this sometimes happened to black kids because of affirmative action? Presumably, the answer is yes, at least in limited cases. Every system breaks down at some point.

McWhorter, though, seems to think that a substantial problem is involved. He gives an example from the California system:

MCWHORTER: [H]ere's what happens on the ground. At the University of California, San Diego the year before racial preferences were banned in the late '90s, exactly one black student out of 3,268 freshmen made honors. A few years later after students who once would have been "mismatched" to flagship schools UC Berkeley were now admitted to schools such as UC San Diego, one in five black freshmen were making honors, the same proportion as white ones.

Uh-oh! At least on the surface, McWhorter has slid past the point. He pictures black freshmen at UC-San Diego making the honor roll. Previously, under the affirmative action regime, they would have been at Berkeley or UCLA.

It does seem that the termination of affirmative action strengthened the black freshman class at UC-San Diego. But none of this shows that those same black freshmen couldn't have made the honor roll at Berkeley too, just as they did at UCSD! McWhorter thought he had made his point, but he still had a ways to go.

Alas! It isn't easy to nail down the ultimate answers in a complex, tribalized matter like this. If you want to drive yourself crazy, McWhorter links to a lengthy paper by Gail Heriot, a law professor and a member of the civil rights commission, who challenges Bowen's past research.

These questions all bubbled up, of course, because of Justice Scalia's comment last week, which was instantly famous. His comment last week, during the UT Supreme Court hearing, touched off the latest battle in our endless name-calling wars.

We love to fight those tribal wars! We spend less time discussing the actual school lives of actual American kids. Even with affirmative action, why is the Texas freshman class still only 4% black? What can we do to improve the world from which that low number flows?

Those questions involve the real school lives of actual Texas kids. In our view, the questions get discussed extremely poorly, to the extent that they get discussed at all.

We care about our tribal wars; nothing could be more obvious. Do we care about the school lives of our many good decent kids?

Tomorrow: Scalia v. Sharpton

Supplemental: Lessons from The Year of the Trump!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2015

After the gatekeepin's done: Kevin Drum says that Candidate Trump gave last night's worst answer. It came when Hugh Hewitt popped a question concerning our aging "nuclear triad."

Hewitt's a conservative talk show host. Keep that in mind for later.

Like Drum, we'll provide Trump's answer in full. We'd like to add a couple of points to the standard derision:

HEWITT (12/15/15): Dr. Carson just referenced the single most important job of the president, the command, the control and the care of our nuclear forces. And he mentioned the triad. The B-52s are older than I am. The missiles are old. The submarines are aging out.

It's an executive order. It's a commander-in-chief decision. What's your priority among our nuclear triad?

TRUMP: Well, first of all, I think we need somebody absolutely that we can trust, who is totally responsible, who really knows what he or she is doing. That is so powerful and so important. And one of the things that I'm frankly most proud of is that in 2003, 2004, I was totally against going into Iraq because you're going to destabilize the Middle East. I called it. I called it very strongly. And it was very important.

But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ball game. Frankly, I would have said get out of Syria; get out—if we didn't have the power of weaponry today. The power is so massive that we can't just leave areas that 50 years ago or 75 years ago we wouldn't care. It was hand-to-hand combat.

The biggest problem this world has today is not President Obama with global warming, which is inconceivable, this is what he's saying. The biggest problem we have is nuclear—nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon

That's, in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.

HEWITT: Of the three legs of the triad, though, do you have a priority? I want to go to Senator Rubio after that and ask him.

TRUMP: I think—I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.

Trump didn't have much to say about the nuclear triad. His answer reads like a third-grader's essay on "what I did on my summer vacation concerning the nuclear triad."

"I seriously want to hear anyone on the right side of the aisle defend Trump as a potential commander-in-chief after hearing this," Drum said, after providing that answer by Trump.

Let's add a couple of points. Let's start with this year's transformation in the role of accurate statement:

Trump had nothing to say about Hewitt's question. For that reason, he quickly recited a giant howler which has been floating around, with few objections from the press, since the first GOP debate:

"One of the things that I'm frankly most proud of is that in 2003, 2004, I was totally against going into Iraq because you're going to destabilize the Middle East. I called it. I called it very strongly."

Back in September, at the second GOP debate, Trump made a lengthy presentation on this theme. It seems obvious that his claim is false. To this day, he doesn't even seem real clear concerning the year the Iraq war started.

(He keeps saying he was "totally against going into Iraq" in 2004. That's fine, except the war began in March 2003. In August, at the first debate, he offered a shorter speech about his opposition. "In July of 2004, I came out strongly against the war with Iraq," he flawlessly said at that time.)

Trump made a giant, absurd presentation on this theme at that long-ago second debate. He claimed he could produce dozens of news reports about his opposition to the war.

No such reports have ever appeared or have ever been found.

Three months later, the candidate still feels no compunction about repeating this apparently bogus claim. His absurd statements simply continue.

During this, The Year of the Trump, routine dissembling of this type has been completely normalized. The press corps has completely accepted this practice. Even at a major event like a debate, giant howlers by a front-runner can go completely unremarked and unnoticed. Ludicrous invention is now the normal state of affairs.

Earlier, Drum authored a capsule account of each candidate's performance last night. This was his capsule on Trump's performance. We highlight a very key point:

DRUM (12/15/15): Donald Trump took a step backward to his persona from the first debate: lots of mugging for the camera and no apparent policy knowledge at all. He doubled down on killing the families of terrorists; he answered three or four different questions by saying he opposed the invasion of Iraq; and then produced one of the night's most fatuous lines: "I think for me, nuclear, the power, the devastation, is very important to me." That's his position on the nuclear triad? It's hard to believe this isn't going to hurt him in the polls, but this is not a normal world we live in these days.

In fairness to Trump, we can't find the three or four places where he supposedly said he opposed Iraq. Still:

"This is not a normal world we live in these days?" That is a very key point.

We live in a world in which the journalistic and political gatekeepers are completely gone. Last night, near the end of the evening, Hewitt asked Trump, once again, if he would pledge to support the Republican nominee.

When Trump said yes, the audience applauded. Incredibly, though, so did Hewitt! Old standards are totally gone.

Under the old procedures, journalistic and political gatekeepers restricted the ideas we could hear and the candidates we could consider. We weren't allowed to hear crazy ideas. Crazy people weren't allowed to become candidates. Also, people who knew nothing at all weren't allowed to be candidates.

By now, all those restrictions are gone. Anyone can be a candidate. They can say whatever they want. The moderators get to applaud.

(Crazy people even get to be doctors. We base that on the recent letter from Trump's alleged physician, who he apparently hired away from Kim Jong-Un.)

Under these transformed procedures, we can choose whatever candidate we want. We can choose to support any proposal and accept any factual claim. Under the old arrangements, we simply wouldn't have been exposed to many of those ideas and claims. Today, tout est permis. That's French for "way too much is permitted."

Now that all the restrictions are gone, we're learning something intriguing. Many voters are open to candidates who say and do unusual-seeming things. Many voters are open to candidates who seem to lack any serious knowledge about a wide range of affairs.

As liberals, we can see the craziness unleashed by these new arrangements when it seems to appear on The Other Side. It's harder for us to see the way our own tribe is slipping and sliding.

It's easy for us to spot their biases. It's hard for us to see ours.

Last night, Hewitt applauded Trump's answer! Truly, all the rules are gone. Everything is now allowed.

Did you know that Justice Scalia is in favor of separate but equal?

SCHOOL LIVES MATTER: Lone Star and Golden State editions!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2015

Part 3—About those "inferior" schools: Where will Mya Alford go to college, assuming she gets the chance?

We have no idea. Maybe Alford, age 16, will apply to Penn State. Maybe she'll stay closer to home.

(State College is 135 miles from Pittsburgh, where Alford is junior class president at historic Westinghouse High.)

We have no idea about that. We can tell you this—if Alford were a Texas kid, she'd be admitted to UT-Austin, assuming she finished in (roughly) the top ten percent of her graduating class.

Texas kids get admitted to Austin under the so-called "top ten percent plan." Justice Ginsburg made a somewhat sardonic comment about this procedure during last week's Supreme Court hearing about admission procedures at Austin. In her subsequent column in the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus offered some background:

MARCUS (12/13/15): The university, segregated by law until 1950, has been grappling with this issue for decades. After an earlier affirmative action program was invalidated in 1996, African American enrollment plummeted, from 309 students in 1995 to 190 in 1997, out of a freshman class of 7,085.

In response, the Texas legislature adopted a program to grant automatic admission to those in the top 10 percent of their high school class, a nominally race-blind approach that ironically relies for its effectiveness on the state's continuing pattern of residential segregation, and consequent clusters of overwhelmingly minority high schools.

As we noted yesterday, the "top ten" plan hasn't exactly flooded Austin with black kids. That said, the plan was adopted as a way to admit more black kids to Austin and, at least imaginably, it can have pernicious effects. According to the New York Times, Justice Ginsburg spouted off about this during last week's hearing:

LIPTAK (12/10/15): But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the top-10 program was itself problematic. ''It seems to me that it is so obviously driven by one thing only, and that thing is race,'' she said. ''It's totally dependent upon having racially segregated neighborhoods, racially segregated schools, and it operates as a disincentive for a minority student to step out of that segregated community and attempt to get an integrated education.''

In theory, all that is true.

In part, Justice Ginsburg was noting one of the ironies—one might even say hypocrisies—in the Texas affirmative action fight. The top 10 program, which "is so obviously driven by one thing only," isn't the part of the school's admission procedure which is being challenged before the Court. The challenge is aimed at the other part of the admission procedure, the so-called holistic review, which admits only 25 percent of the overall freshman class.

In theory, the other part of Ginsburg's comment is also true. In theory, an ambitious black kid in Texas might decide to stay in a less challenging single-race school as a way of guaranteeing admission to Austin, as opposed to attending a more challenging citywide "magnet" school where he or she might fall out of the top ten percent.

In theory, that could happen, as Justice Ginsburg noted. That said, how often does this actually happen? Does it ever happen?

You won't likely get an answer to that in the New York Times. In point of fact, nobody cares about kids like Mya Alford, whether they go to Westinghouse High or live in the Lone Star State.

Within our journalistic elites, no one actually cares. That's also true on corporate liberal cable and at our biggest liberal orgs, whose stars would jump off the Golden Gate Bridge before they would spend their time discussing the real school lives of good decent kids like Alford.

They refuse to discuss our public schools in any way, shape or form. They refuse to present the most obvious facts about the performance of the students in those schools.

They refuse to challenge pernicious narratives about the failures of those schools. They refuse to speak to pernicious claims about the ratty teachers in those schools, with their fiendish teachers unions.

There's no sign that our high-flying liberal elites care about students like Alford—except to the extent that they can be used to let us shriek and wail and cry, not unlike the tormented girls in Salem Village, so many years ago. (We continue to struggle and fight with Stacy Schiff's hard-to-read book.)

Last week's Supreme Court hearing produced the predictable cries. In a display which was truly Salemistic, the Reverend Sharpton was soon on TV, telling corporate liberal star Christopher Hayes that one of the Justices wanted to return to the bad old days of separate but equal schools.

"We're going back to separate but equal," the tormented reverend cried.

The reverend didn't claim that he saw a miniature version of this Justice perched on Hayes' shoulder. To his credit, he didn't claim that the Justice was biting him even as he spoke.

But in the lunacy of his claim, the writhing reverend did come pretty darn close. When Schiff describes those shrieking girls, we think about episodes like this.

Tomorrow, we'll review the demonic statement which touched off the shrieking and wailing from Reverend Sharpton and quite a few others. As it turned out, the Justice who made the demonic statement wasn't Justice Ginsburg, who merely noted a few of the weirdnesses built into this discussion.

It was a second Justice, Justice Scalia, who proposed the return to separate but equal, at least according to Reverend Sharpton, who may have spotted a yellow bird perched on Scalia's shoulder as he watched him propose this demonic reversion.

Scalia had dared to make a suggestion. He had dared to suggest a possibility—the possibility that some black kids might do better at "lesser schools" than at a highly competitive school like UT Austin.

His use of that term—"lesser school"—was clearly infelicitous. That said, the chief counsel defending the UT plan quickly went him one better, referring to the "inferior schools" to which Scalia would consign such kids.

That phrase was even less felicitous. It went unmentioned by our twitching, afflicted tribal leaders, since it didn't suit the purpose of creating a tribal explosion.

That said, almost all kids who get to go to college attend such "lesser, inferior schools." For today, we thought we'd show you what that means in the Texas context.

Suppose a student, black, white or brown, can't get admitted to Austin. To what sort of "inferior schools" might she be shipped off instead?

We hate to intrude when our tribal priests are staging one of their breakdowns. But within the University of Texas System, those "inferior schools," which aren't separate but equal, would include schools like the one names below.

Within the University of Texas System, a student who doesn't get admitted to Austin might hope to attend UT-Dallas or UT-San Antonio or UT-Arlington, among a list of eight major campuses. But wait, folks. That's not all!

Within the Texas State University System, he or she might hope to attend Sul Ross State or Lamar University—or Texas State or Sam Houston State.

(Just for the record, Lyndon Johnson, a former president, graduated from Texas State. Dan Rather is a Sam Houston alum.)

Except to the giants who run our world, these aren't "inferior" schools. They clearly aren't "separate but equal." As an example of what we mean, we recommend a fascinating presentation by UT-Arlington, in which the school boasts about its world-class diversity.

The presentation bears this title: "The Power of Diversity/A University for the 21st Century." This chart is the tiniest part of the presentation by a school which our own shriekers and bewitched believe to be offering "separate but equal:"

UT Arlington Diversity at a Glance
Student Ethnicity
White: 47.1 percent
Hispanic: 15.2 percent
African American: 13.9 percent
Asian/Pacific Islander: 10.6 percent
International: 10.6 percent
Native American or Alaska Native: 0.5 percent

We're struggling to find the part of that chart which says "separate but equal." Among its additional list of "Fast Facts," the school includes this note:

"More than one-third of faculty members identify themselves as minorities."

That presentation by UT-Arlington strikes us as fantastic, new, borderline inspiring. We see pictures of a profoundly modern campus, a campus which may put UT-Austin to shame in some ways.

Texas kids who don't get admitted to UT-Austin may go to UT-Arlington. They aren't attending an "inferior school," although its admission criteria are less demanding than those maintained at Austin. And they certainly aren't attending a school which has accomplished a reversion to "separate but equal."

What would happen to Mya Alford if she was a Texas kid? We have no idea. Black enrollment at UT-Austin seems to remain quite low, as we noted in yesterday's afternoon post. But the state is full of other choices, and some of those choices truly do seem like "21st century universities."

Within our journalistic and legal elites, this may not seem to matter. They want their kids to go to Austin or Yale, campuses from which some of the most god-awful "journalists" on the planet have emerged in recent years.

Meanwhile, within our own shrieking tribe, only one thing seems to matter. We like to spot the demons and the witches. We then like to utter our piteous cries, not excluding "separate but equal," one of our greatest crowd-pleasers.

Separate but equal! This makes us liberals very dumb as we try to catch up with The Other Tribe. It also helps us ignore the actual school lives of superb young people like Alford.

Nobody cares about kids like Alford. Can we at least get clear on that fact?

Tomorrow: What various people said last week

Coming this afternoon: Golden State edition

Supplemental: Diversity at UT Austin!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2015

According to Ruth Marcus: How many minority students attend the University of Texas at Austin, the system's prestigious flagship campus?

It's an important question. In Sunday's Washington Post, Ruth Marcus answered the question, or seemed to do so, with a brief history lesson:

MARCUS (12/13/15): The university, segregated by law until 1950, has been grappling with this issue for decades. After an earlier affirmative action program was invalidated in 1996, African American enrollment plummeted, from 309 students in 1995 to 190 in 1997, out of a freshman class of 7,085.

In response, the Texas legislature adopted a program to grant automatic admission to those in the top 10 percent of their high school class, a nominally race-blind approach that ironically relies for its effectiveness on the state's continuing pattern of residential segregation, and consequent clusters of overwhelmingly minority high schools. Even so, the program's impact was debatable; just 3.4 percent of the 2002 freshman class was African American. (The numbers for Hispanics are healthier, reflecting the state's changing population.)

As a result, after a 2003 Supreme Court decision narrowly upholding racial preferences, Texas added a "holistic review" program, eventually endorsed by the legislature and expanded to include 25 percent of the entering class, that took race into account as one factor among many in determining admission. Enrollment of African American students nearly doubled between 2002 and 2008.

Marcus' account of the matter ended there, in 2008. In her column, she suggested that this is hardly the time to curtail the university's efforts at increasing black enrollment.

Rereading her account this morning, we were struck by the amount of murk it contained. Let's go back and tease out some basic facts.

According to Marcus, black enrollment in 1997 was remarkably small. She seems to say that Texas had just 190 black freshmen that year, out of a total freshman class of 7085.

For the record, that would have been a tiny black enrollment—just 2.7 percent.

According to Marcus, adoption of the "ten percent" program produced an increase in black enrollment, albeit a small one. In 2002, black enrollment in the freshman class was 3.4 percent.

Marcus says the addition of the "holistic review" component produced a larger increase. "Enrollment of African American students nearly doubled between 2002 and 2008," she writes. That would suggest that black freshman enrollment was close to 7 percent by the end of that period.

Marcus ends her history there, in 2008. We decided to see where matters stand today.

You'd almost think that such information would be easy to get. That isn't exactly the case. That said, this official UT fact sheet seems to give these numbers for total enrollment, including graduate students:

Apparent enrollment at UT Austin, fall 2015
White 45.1%
Black 3.9%
Hispanic 19.5%
Asian-American 17.2%
Foreign students 9.7%

That's a small black enrollment. It may bump up to 4.5% if we include a group of students who checked two or more races/ethnicities.

We'd call that a small black enrollment. Exuding green eyeshade, a second document seems to list this breakdown in total enrollment for the fall of 2014:

Apparent enrollment at UT Austin, fall 2014
White 46.9%
African-American 4.4%
Hispanic 19.9%
Asian-American 17.3%
International 7.8%

A third official document seems to put black enrollment in the freshman class at 4%. Except it isn't clear what year the document is discussing, and it isn't entirely clear that the document is discussing the freshman class.

(You think you live in the information age. Then, you try to look something up, especially from a bureaucratic source. Or you read a major newspaper column.)

Anyway you slice it, UT Austin seems to have a rather small black enrollment. For a final bit of context, you might want to know what student enrollment is like in the Texas public schools. An official state report breaks it down this-a-way for the 2013-14 school year:

TEXAS EDUCATION AGENCY: In 2013-14, Hispanic students accounted for the largest percentage of total enrollment in Texas public schools (51.8%), followed by White (29.5%), African American (12.7%), Asian (3.7%), and multiracial (1.9%) students. The percentages of enrollment accounted for by Asian, Hispanic, and multiracial students increased between 2012-13 and 2013-14, whereas the percentage accounted for by African American students stayed the same, and the percentage accounted for by White students decreased.

That Hispanic enrollment at UT doesn't look gigantically "healthy" now.

None of this says what admission procedures the school should follow. This doesn't tell us which admission procedures are or should be legal or constitutional.

We're just showing you what we found when the fuzziness in a major column sent us hunting for facts. Do you think we live in the info age? Go ahead! Look something up!

SCHOOL LIVES MATTER: Or so we say!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2015

Part 2—Life before Garinger High: Where will Mya Alford, 16, end up going to college?

We have no idea. At present, Alford is president of the junior class at Pittsburgh's historic Westinghouse High. (Alumni include Erroll Garner, Ahmad Jamal and Billy Strayhorn.)

As we noted yesterday, Alford wants to become a chemical engineer. But she didn't have a real chemistry teacher during her sophomore year. And when she was a freshman, she didn't get a permanent biology teacher until midway through the year.

According to the Washington Post, things are better at Westinghouse High this year. But the problem Alford has encountered affects a lot of other kids in our urban school systems.

Back on December 5, Emma Brown did a front-page report on this topic in the Washington Post. Needless to say, her report has produced exactly zero discussion, and zero discussion will follow.

In the New York Times and on cable TV, young journalists have been spending their time in the past week offering vapid speculations about what Cruz and Trump may perhaps and possibly say to each other tonight. This is an utterly pointless waste of time, for which their upper-end "educations" have prepared them quite well.

In the course of all the yammering, you haven't heard a single word about Alford's situation. But along the way in her Post report, Brown described a similar situation in a Charlotte high school.

According to Alford, Westinghouse High is better this year thanks to a hard-charging principal. Brown spoke with a new principal in Charlotte who's trying to fight the same good fight on behalf of some other good kids:

BROWN (12/5/15): Kelly Gwaltney, who formerly served as chief school performance officer in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, said teacher instability is a common problem in struggling high-poverty schools.

"The number one reason why people leave is it's hard," Gwaltney said. She left her central-office position this year to become a principal at high-poverty Garinger High, where she hopes to make a bigger difference by working directly with students and teachers.

This fall, she had a group of incoming freshmen who had not had a permanent math teacher in eighth grade. Eighty percent of them were not proficient in math, according to state tests, she said—because "they didn't get instruction last year."

She also had a group of sophomores who had had subs in place of a permanent math teacher. Gwaltney invited those students to an extra month of math lessons during the summer.

"You have to think through what happened last year and what was their experience," she said. "How do you make sure that kids don't go two years without a teacher?"

For the record, some "permanent substitutes" may be perfectly competent teachers. That said, Gwaltney describes a situation which is absurd on its face.

That said, we'll have to admit that Brown's description of the situation at Garinger High skimmed the surface for us. Principal Gwaltney described a bad deal a bunch of kids were handed before arriving at Garinger High. Implicitly, we the readers were invited to add a note of causation to Brown's report.

We were invited to suppose that those ninth-graders are in a world of hurt because of their missing eighth-grade math instruction. That said, some questions entered our heads:

What percentage of Garinger's other ninth-graders scored "proficient" in eighth-grade math last year? In the current semi-chaos which obtains with changing statewide testing progreams, what percentage of eighth-graders across the state of North Carolina scored proficient?

Concerning those Garinger sophomores who had no regular teacher last year, how far behind the norm are they in math at this point? How much of that potential "gap" could be addressed by one extra month of math instruction over the course of the summer?

Concerning Garinger High as a whole, how many low-income kids go to school there? In general, how far behind the norm are Garinger's kids when they enter as freshmen?

Are they years "below grade level" in math? If so, how many kids are years behind? And how many years behind are they?

Regarding that one group of freshmen, we tried to scare up some answers. It looks to us like 43.2 percent of eighth-graders tested "proficient" in math across the Tarheel State last year, although we wouldn't swear to the accuracy of that figure (see note below).

Beyond that, it looks to us like 23.2 percent of black eighth-graders in North Carolina scored "proficient" in math last year. If that figure is accurate, then those Garinger freshmen may not have scored too far below their peers across the state, though none of this is addressed or explained in Brown's fleeting account.

How far "behind" is that one group of freshmen at Garinger High? How far "behind" are Garinger freshmen in general? We have no idea, and no way of finding out.

That said, we long for the day when big newspapers will present front-page reports which go beyond bare-bones, lightly novelized accounts of the type Brown offered in that passage. We also long for the day when questions like these get asked:

If some kids are years "behind grade level" in math when they enter Garinger High, what sort of math instruction do they receive in ninth grade? And by the way:

Given the broad range of achievement levels displayed by kids by the start of ninth grade, how do states like North Carolina adjust instruction to meet the varying needs of their kids? In line with current conventional practice, our states keep churning out uniform "standards" in reading and math for each of the various grades. (Or they accept the Common Core standards for each grade.) But how in the world can these uniform standards be applied in American classrooms, given the widely varying achievement levels displayed by American kids?

That last question is the most obvious on the face of the earth. In forty-plus years of public school watching, we have never seen a major newspaper ask that obvious question.

On cable TV, our upper-end children are speculating about what Cruz might say tonight. On the rare occasions when they stoop to discuss the school lives of low-income kids, they rarely show the slightest sign of knowing what questions to ask—or of caring about those lives, the school lives of good decent kids. We care about churning dumb stupid shit concerning Cruz and Trump.

(Rachel burned half her show in the same old way, obsessing again about why Rand Paul will be included tonight. Few topics could be more pointless.)

Ten days ago, Emma Brown described a problem which will go undiscussed. We pretend that we care about low-income kids. The evidence say we don't.

Since Brown's front-page report appeared, no one has had a word to say about the school lives of Mya Alford and so many other good kids. Instead, our TV stars ranted, raved and railed last week about a statement or question by Justice Scalia concerning admission procedures at the University of Texas.

We love to rant and rave and rail about such disgraceful statements, especially when they're made by those in The Other Tribe. Meanwhile, what's going on at Garinger High?

Few folk in our tribe give a good goldarn! Few facts could be much more obvious.

Tomorrow: School lives in the state of Texas! We'll start with what Justice Ginsberg said.

Concerning those North Carolina data: It looks to us like 43.2 percent of North Carolina eighth-graders tested "proficient" in math last year.

(States are making it harder to score proficient. Inevitably, these are subjective standards.)

Beyond that, it looks to us like 23.2 percent of black eighth graders scored proficient. It looks like 27.7 percent of low-income kids scored proficient.

We can't swear to those figures. Not long ago, North Carolina published test score data which were extremely user-friendly. Today, as with many other states, North Carolina almost seems to be trying to make it harder to get accurate data.

We started here, then clicked some more. We don't feel sure about what we found. Maybe you can do better.

Supplemental: Kessler reports who's been naughty and nice!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2015

Insists that Both Sides Do It: Glenn Kessler is the editor of the Washington Post's Fact-Checker blog. This morning, he posted his list of the twelve biggest whoppers of the entire year.

At the top of the Post's web site, these statements are currently being advertised as "the most outrageous claims" of the year. This is the way the copy reads at the top of the site:

Who made the most outrageous claims in 2015?
The presidential campaign has dominated our coverage. In particular, businessman Donald Trump—who rocketed to the top of the GOP field—also soared to the top of our list.

By Glen Kessler/Fact Checker

If you click the link, you get to peruse Kessler's choices. He introduces his list like this:

"It's time for our annual round-up of the biggest Pinocchios of the year."

What were the year's most outrageous claims? Who made these outrageous misstatements? In our view, Kessler's list is rather strange—except as an illustration of a form of journalism which everyone has long rejected as bogus.

Who made the year's most outrageous claims? For starters, Brian Williams didn't make the list!

We'll chalk that one up to professional courtesy. But Carly Fiorina didn't make the year-end compilation either.

Who did make the year's biggest misstatements? Uh-oh! Executing an awful old mandate, Kessler matches six misstatements by Republicans with six misstatements by Democrats. He rattles them off in perfect order—Rep/Dem, Rep/Dem—all the way to the end.

We've never seen a more perfect execution of the "Both Sides Do It" mandate. In the year of Williams, Fiorina and Trump, it makes for a puzzling display.

Let's be fair! Kessler lists misstatements by Candidate Trump in three of the twelve spots on his list. Still and all, his seating chart reads Rep/Dem, Rep/Dem all the way to the bottom.

Fiorina's dogged misstatements about Planned Parenthood didn't make the list. Instead, Kessler includes relatively marginal alleged misstatements by the likes of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Elizabeth Warren.

We were puzzled by parts of the Kerry indictment when it appeared in March. It doesn't make better sense today. (Hint: A person can "help organize" a hearing he doesn't himself attend.)

The alleged misstatement by Clinton is a bit skeevy too. As best we can tell, it isn't clear that Kessler even knows that the statement in question is false.

Obama had to be included, of course. His "outrageous claim" seems somewhat less than outrageous too. But if you're wed to "Both Sides Do It," it simply has to be done this way. By law, you're required to list six howlers from each of the warring tribes.

Might we state a few basic principles at this point?

Fact-checking is a good thing; silly fact-checking isn't. Fact-checking starts to get silly when fact-checkers invent silly rating systems (in this case, based on Pinocchios) or when they create year-end lists to compete with those which name the year's best movies.

Largely because of Candidate Trump, this has been an extremely strange, watershed year in the realm of public misstatement. No one else has ever repeated bogus claims with such total abandon, unless it's Kessler's own colleagues at the Post or figures from talk radio.

Fiorina followed Trump off the edge of the world with her Planned Parenthood misstatement, which she simply refused to acknowledge, repair or correct. But because of Kessler's seating chart, she didn't make the list.

A year-end essay by a fact-checker might have noted such facts. Instead, Kessler constructed the ultimate "Both Sides Do It" list. Because of his "Both Sides Do It Equally" mandate, he didn't have room for Fiorina, or for several more of Trump's extremely weird repeated misstatements.

In our view, Kessler's list is strange and sad. As we scanned it, we thought of Goofus and Gallant.

Do you remember Goofus and Gallant? The youngsters have been starring at Highlights for Children magazine since 1948. They are used, in cartoon form, to illustrate good deportment.

Goofus always screws everything up; Gallant does everything right. To refresh yourselves about this pair, you can just click here.

Goofus is naughty and Gallant is nice. But so what? If Santa worked the way Kessler does, Goofus would get the same toys Gallant does every year! The youngsters were equally wrong!

Fiorina made no gross misstatements this year. Neither did Brian Williams.

SCHOOL LIVES MATTER: But only in theory!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2015

Part 1—The Washington Post pretends: The city of Pittsburgh is full of good, decent kids. Mya Alford, a high school student, is one of those good, decent kids.

Alford is a junior at Pittsburgh's historic Westinghouse High School. According to the Washington Post, she wants to go to college and study to become a chemical engineer.

That sounds like a great idea, but the Post says Alford has faced a problem in recent years—a "disadvantage." Nine days ago, Emma Brown described the problem at the start of a lengthy, front-page report you've never seen discussed:

BROWN (12/5/15): Mya Alford dreams of studying chemical engineering in college, but the high school junior is at a disadvantage: Last year, her chemistry teacher at Pittsburgh's Westinghouse Academy quit just weeks after school started, and the class was taught by a substitute who, as Mya put it, "didn't know chemistry."

The year before, there was no permanent biology teacher until December. Students at Westinghouse, a high-poverty school in one of Pittsburgh's roughest neighborhoods, often see a rotating cast of substitutes, Mya said.

"You're looking at test scores," Mya said of the school's low performance on state standardized tests in math, science and reading. "But we didn't have a stable teacher."

As she continues her lengthy report, Brown describes this as a common problem in the nation's low-income urban schools. According to Brown, "it is not uncommon for classrooms to churn with substitutes as teachers leave in large numbers each June, or quit midyear, and principals struggle to fill the positions."

Brown provides some statistics about the teacher shortfall in urban districts. (At present, "Detroit needs 135 teachers—more than 5 percent of its teaching positions.")

She provides occasionally euphemistic explanations of the reasons why teachers leave urban districts—explanations which sometimes border on darkly comical.

(One teacher had to leave a D.C. high school "after she started having anxiety attacks and chest pains that she attributed to job stress." According to Brown, this teacher "was known for her strong relationships with students"—except, apparently, for the students who were throwing objects at her head and otherwise making her "find it difficult to maintain order.")

Decent, impressive kids like Alford can get caught in the waves of confusion. Personally, we were saddened by this passage from Brown's report:

BROWN: Just 27 states require substitutes to be certified teachers, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. The council's database of teacher-related policies in 118 districts—including the 50 largest and the largest in each state—shows that just 61 districts, about half, require subs to have a bachelor's degree. Eleven require no more than a high school diploma or GED, and eight have no policies addressing substitutes' qualifications.

"It's the elephant in the room," said David Sapp, director of education advocacy and legal counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, linking the issue to "persistent chronic failure at certain schools."

The ACLU branch has brought several lawsuits related to public schools' teacher churn and heavy use of substitutes. "There are a narrow set of schools where this happens all the time, and until that gets really unpacked and resolved, there's only so much that can be done to close the achievement gap," Sapp said.

We don't doubt Sapp's good intentions. His lawsuits may have merit.

But can the shortage described in that passage really be the "elephant in the room?" The notion strikes us as utterly silly. It reminds us of a million such massively simplified claims which we've read in mainstream reports over these many long years. And when did it fall to the ACLU to serve as the nation's experts concerning our public schools?

Brown has produced a perfectly reasonable report—a reasonable report which does include a few shortcomings. We'll visit a few of those shortcomings in the course of the week.

That said, nothing will turn on Brown's report, whatever its merits may be. This is the first you've heard of Brown's report since it appeared on the Post's front page. Trust us! This will also be the last you hear of Brown's report.

Ten years from now, some other reporter will write a report about a similar shortage in low-income schools. We'll guess that someone wrote a similar front-page report back in 2005!

Why will Brown's decent report produce no further discussion? Because of a simple, fairly obvious fact—no one actually cares about the schools lives of students like Alford!

The mainstream press doesn't seem to care. It occasionally offers reports like this as a way of pretending.

The liberal world doesn't seem to care. You'll watch Rachel and Chris for years on end without hearing a single word about good decent kids like Alford. We're sorry, but on the corporate level, the Mya Alfords doesn't sell.

What will you hear about instead? Random comments by figures like Justice Scalia. As you know, the liberal world leaped into action last week, shrieking and wailing about one such wayward remark.

In our view, much of our liberal reaction was embarrassing to watch. By way of contrast, the Alfords tend to come and go with barely a word of concern.

Mya Alford's missing teachers v. Justice Scalia's wayward remark! We'll discuss these dueling topics during the course of the week. With respect to one of those topics, you'll see us liberals excitedly denouncing the Very Bad People found Over There in The Other Tribe. With respect to the other topic, you'll see us in our usual stance, ignoring the shortfalls which get dumped on many good decent kids.

At least for today, we'll close on an upbeat note. At the end of Brown's report, she offers a bit of good news.

According to Brown, Alford says that "her school has been transformed under the leadership of Principal LouAnn Zwieryznski, who is in her second year" at Westinghouse.

"We have teachers here," Alford is quoted saying, describing the current state of play at her school. "Every class is a steady teacher. You come in, and it's the same person."

Alford, who is 16, is junior class president this year. In this news report from the New Pittsburgh Courier, you can see a photograph of a good decent kid who's wearing a sweatshirt which says this: "Westinghouse Pride."

What happens to kids like this in their schools? On balance, nobody cares! Or have you seen such topics discussed on the One True Liberal Channel, whose millionaire hosts prefer to laugh and entertain you as they stage back-to-back segments about people who wet their pants after getting extremely drunk?

(For a good time, click here.)

In our view, those segments were a gong-show, the latest insulting disgrace. On the bright side, clowning like that almost surely helps pay some very large bills.

Tomorrow: Heart attacks over Scalia

Supplemental: Farhi starts to get it right!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2015

So does the Washington Post: Just for the record, we never discuss our private conversations with the Washington Post's Paul Farhi, even though, some years ago, one such conversation occurred.

Whatever! This morning, Farhi has started getting it right—and so has the Washington Post. We refer to the analysis piece on the paper's front page, an analysis piece which appears beneath these hard-copy headlines:

Misinformation enters mainstream with Trump
Sources come in from fringe to help perpetuate questionable contentions

"Questionable" contentions? Some editor may have started getting cold feet in composing that sub-headline, and in composing the weaker headlines which now appear on line.

One example: "Thanks to Trump, fringe news enters the mainstream"

"Fringe news?" "Questionable contentions?" In his report, Farhi discusses claims by Candidate Trump which he describes as false.

He writes about Candidate Trump's "non-facts," about his "inaccurate statements," about the "misinformation" he has helped promote. He even writes about this disgraceful episode—an episode the mainstream press has almost completely avoided in the six months since Trump launched his astounding campaign:

FARHI (12/12/15): Trump’s most famously false contention, of course, was his long, pre-campaign embrace of “birtherism,” the notion that Obama wasn’t born on American soil and is therefore ineligible to be president. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, including a birth certificate issued in Hawaii and a contemporaneous newspaper birth announcement, birther sites—from Birthers.org to Obamabirthbook.com—are strewn across the Internet, actively promoting a debunked thesis.

Accurate or not, the constant sowing of doubt has had a cumulative effect: Some 20 percent of people in a recent CNN/ORC poll said they believe Obama was born outside the country; 29 percent (and 43 percent of Republicans) said they believe Obama is a Muslim despite Obama’s profession of the Christian faith.

Those paragraphs don't begin to do justice to the sweep of Trump's disgraceful behavior in 2011 and 2012, which remains unexamined and unexplained. But they at least start to review that history—and Farhi refers to a "false contention," not to a "questionable" claim.

Whatever! For many years, we have been asking, begging, pleading for this kind of front-page reporting. We have said it again and again:

When major figures spread misinformation on a widespread basis, that behavior is news in itself. It should be reported as such.

Back in the day, we were talking about figures like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Farhi writes about Candidate Trump and his crackpot muse, Alex Jones. But this is a very important type of front-page news report. Major newspapers like the Post should do more of this type of reporting—and it should be done on those papers' front pages.

Farhi is off to a good start today. Let's note some imperfections:

First, a relatively minor point. It drives us crazy when journalists take it upon themselves to downplay the size of misconduct:

FARHI: Trump isn’t the first politician with a tenuous grasp of the facts, of course. But he may be the first politician to exploit both widespread, bipartisan distrust of conventional news sources and the alternative reality provided by the digital grass roots, from sites such as Jones’s Infowars to chain emails to social media.

For example, Trump’s recent evidence-free assertion that “thousands” of Muslim Americans in New Jersey celebrated the fall of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 parallels stories that have appeared in various forms in chain emails and elsewhere on the Web for years.

Doggone it! In his original statement, Trump actually said that he saw "thousands and thousands" of Muslims behaving that way.

"Thousands and thousands" is more than mere "thousands." Why do we choose to reduce the size of a misstatement that way?

A second note:

At one point, Farhi seems to suggest that misinformation and disinformation are only spread on the right. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. Over here in our own tribe, we've been developing our own favorite bogus statistics and our own preferred misleading accounts of certain major events.

Those efforts at fudge are important too. They too may belong on major newspapers' front pages.

A third complaint came into clearest focus at the end of Farhi's report. In this passage, Farhi discusses the death of journalistic gatekeepers—but he fudges another key point:

FARHI: Hemsley, the co-author of “Going Viral,” about the rapid spread of information, said the days when the nation had “a somewhat unifying story” from newspapers and the leading TV news networks are gone. Nowadays, people tend to pick their own news, and like-minded social contacts, which tends to reinforce their beliefs rather than challenge them.

This makes it increasingly difficult to dislodge misinformation, he said. Good information can still drive out bad, but usually only when “the truth is sexier than the lie.”

“Facts may be undervalued or losing their value in today’s world,” said Robert Mason, a University of Washington professor who has researched the spread of false information. “If you say it loud enough or long enough, people will believe it. That’s okay in theory, but when people act on it, that’s a problem."

According to Farhi's sources, "the days when the nation had 'a somewhat unifying story' from newspapers and the leading TV news networks are gone." As a result, "facts may be losing their value in today's world."

Those statement are basically true, of course. That said, that passage fudges another key point—at certain times in the past thirty years, misinformation and disinformation have flowed, in major ways, directly from the mainstream press corps' "unifying stories."

That was certainly true in the War Against Gore, which Farhi's newspaper helped invent and maintain from March 1999 right through the November 2000 election. We aren't likely to read about the reams of bogus statements and claims which constituted that war's "unifying stories," not even from someone like Farhi.

Final point: Information which gets disappeared is also part of this larger story. There are various important facts which our big newspapers tend to avoid like the plague. When basic facts are widely withheld, that produces a disabling type of misinformation too.

Misinformation can take many forms. That said, Alex Jones and Candidate Trump provide a good place to start in an attempt at pushback.

At any rate, "misinformation" has reached the headlines on the Washington Post's front page! Even after all these years, your incomparable DAILY HOWLER just keeps cranking out those results!