Please Stop Helping Us_How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

  Most of the five million government employees who work in public education are organized into highly effective unions, which support candidates like Kennedy and policies he favors, such as national health insurance and affirmative action. With support from Kennedy and others, the unions have built a Berlin Wall that protects the public education system from competition and prevents poor children from leaving bad schools.38

  In education circles, public high schools that graduate 60 percent or fewer of their students on time are referred to as “dropout factories.” In 2011 more than one and a half million children in the United States attended such schools, and one in four of them was black.39 And most of the black kids who graduate have the reading and math skills of an eighth grader. Among the institutions with an acute appreciation of this sad state of affairs are the nation’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which are much more likely than non-HBCUs to be faced with college freshmen who aren’t college ready. Some black colleges are doing better than others, but a large majority are struggling, and on balance these schools have seen declining enrollments and low graduation rates for decades. One assessment of eighty-five of the nation’s 105 black colleges found that between 2010 and 2012, nearly a third saw their enrollment decline by 10 percent or more.40

  The reasons vary. Most of these schools were founded after the Civil War, when white institutions refused to accept blacks. Today, of course, that’s no longer the case. More than 90 percent of blacks who attend college choose a non-HBCU school, and with good reason. In 2006 the six-year graduation rate at HBCUs was 37 percent, or 20 percentage points below the national average, and 8 percentage points below the average of black students at other colleges. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 2012 that only four HBCUs in its survey had graduation rates above 50 percent, and at nearly half of the black colleges the graduation rate was 33 percent or less.41 A 2010 survey of colleges with the worst graduation rates by Washington Monthly magazine and Education Sector, a think tank, had black schools in the first and second place and in eight of the top twenty-four spots.

  Unlike in the past, HBCU graduates today on average are worse off economically, according to a 2010 paper by Roland Fryer of Harvard and Michael Greenstone of MIT.

  In the 1970s, HBCU matriculation was associated with higher wages and an increased probability of graduation, relative to attending a [non-HBCU school]. By the 1990s, however, there is a substantial wage penalty. Overall, there is a 20 percent decline in the relative wages of HBCU graduates over just two decades.42

  They concluded that black colleges

  may have provided unique educational services for blacks in the 1970s. However by the 1990s, this advantage seems to have disappeared on many dimensions and, by some measures, HBCU attendance appears to retard black progress.43

  Black colleges traditionally have been heavily reliant on federal subsidies to stay afloat. Very few are capable of large capital campaigns or have substantial endowments. More than 80 percent of HBCUs get at least half of their revenue from the government. And as with K–12 education, taxpayer dollars continue to be thrown at failing schools in the name of helping blacks. In 2010 President Obama pledged to invest another $850 million in these institutions over the next decade. Some supporters of HBCUs play down their academic record and emphasize their history of educating so many consequential black professionals—including many of the civil rights leaders who helped end segregation. Others circle the wagons and are quick to dismiss any criticism of black schools as illegitimate or racially motivated. But these arguments ultimately put institutional preservation ahead of the needs of black students. The relevant issue is whether these institutions still have a role to play in black education. And the reality is that a few might, but most clearly don’t—at least not as they are currently constituted.

  “The glory years are long gone,” wrote Bill Maxwell, who both attended and taught at an HBCU.

  Now only 1 in 5 black students earn bachelor’s degrees from historically black schools, which have increasingly become dependent upon marginal students from poor families. Two-thirds of HBCU students receive federally funded Pell Grants, aimed at families earning less than $40,000 annually. More than half of the students receive those grants at every HBCU except at 13 of the best schools, such as Spelman, Howard and Morehouse.

  Maxwell also described his teaching stint at Stillman, a small black college in Alabama:

  Studies show schools with a high number of Pell recipients tend to have low admission standards, and the reasons for their low graduation rates are well-documented. Most low-income students have parents who did not attend college, which often signals that their homes have few books or other reading materials. Many of the students never develop a love of learning, and they tend to perform poorly in class and on standardized tests.

  The statistics reflect my experience as a professor between 2004 and 2006 at Stillman, which had fewer than 1,000 students. Most of my students would not study, regularly turn in their homework on time or read the assigned material. I walked grumbling students to the bookstore to try to force them to buy their required textbooks.

  These students lacked the intellectual vigor taken for granted on traditional campuses. They did not know what or whom to respect. For many, the rappers Bow Wow and 50 Cent were at least as important to black achievement as the late Ralph Bunche, the first black to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and Zora Neale Hurston, the great novelist.

  In time, I realized that my standards were too high for the quality of student I had to teach. Most simply were not prepared for college-level work, and I was not professionally trained for the intense remediation they needed and deserved. . . .

  It does not help that too many black colleges have serious management issues. The media has regularly reported academic, financial or administrative problems at schools such as Morris Brown in Georgia, Lemoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Grambling State in Louisiana, Edward Waters in Jacksonville and Florida A&M in Tallahassee.

  The numbers for many historically black colleges are not encouraging. Declining enrollments, loose admission standards and low graduation rates produce ever-tighter budgets, less reliable alumni networks and grimmer futures.44

  Maxwell argued that “some schools are so academically inferior and so poorly serving their students they should be shut down,” while other schools need to make some “hard choices” and rethink their mission. Cynthia Tucker, a former columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, agreed, writing:

  There is no good reason to maintain separate-but-equal public facilities in close proximity. Today, vestiges of that outdated system remain in the form of colleges that are publicly funded and virtually all-black, frozen in place by inertia, political timidity and confusion about the mission of public institutions. Institutions supported by taxpayers should be diverse, educating men and women of all colors and creeds. There is no longer good reason for public colleges that are all-white or all-black.45

  There are any number of reforms that might help struggling HBCUs meet today’s challenges. Schools too small to continue independently could be consolidated to save money. Outside agencies, including for-profit entities, could be tapped to provide better management. Other HBCUs could be converted to community colleges that focus on remedial courses to compensate for the inferior K-12 schooling that so many black children continue to receive. These are the kinds of changes that would make HBCUs more relevant to the actual needs of black people today. And to their credit, some HBCU presidents have spoken out about the need for reform. In most cases, however, their criticism has not been well received. In 2009 word leaked that Jackson State University President Ronald Mason wanted to merge his school with two other Mississippi HBCUs. Trustees and alumni pushed back hard, and “black legislators exploded at the proposal.” A short time later Mason was no longer president of Jackson State.46

  In the past, celebrated graduates of these institutions weren’t afraid to view them
critically. In his biography of Thurgood Marshall, an HBCU alum, Juan Williams wrote that in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown decision the future Supreme Court justice spoke openly about how desegregation would impact black colleges. “What’s going to happen to the ‘Negro college’?” Marshall said in speeches at the time. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. It’s going to cheerfully drop the word ‘Negro.’” Marshall, wrote Williams, “cautioned that if these schools did not quickly measure up to the white schools, they could die off.”47

  Defenders of underperforming black colleges offer the same excuses as defenders of underperforming elementary and secondary schools. It’s the students, not the schools, they insist. Yet other schools are managing to educate kids from the same backgrounds. Defending schools that are doing an awful job of teaching blacks doesn’t help blacks. Black colleges certainly can be defended on school-choice grounds. If some kids perform better in an HBCU environment, or a single-sex environment, or a religious environment, there’s no reason in theory why those options should not be available. But that’s not an argument for sustaining black schools at all costs. Bad schools, including bad black schools, ought to reform, or close.

  06

  AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION

  On November 3, 1983, Thomas Sowell appeared on Firing Line, the long-running point-counterpoint public affairs show hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. Sowell is a breathtakingly prolific intellectual based at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and his scholarship over the past four decades is uncommonly broad, covering everything from economics to education to the history of ideas. During the 1970s and early ’80s, in books like Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, Race and Economics, and Markets and Minorities, he established himself as something of a maverick thinker, especially when it came to questioning the basic assumptions behind popular public policies aimed at racial and ethnic minorities.

  The format of Firing Line varied over the course of its three-decade run, but in 1983 most shows would begin with Buckley interviewing a guest on a given subject in front of a small studio audience. Then another person, typically someone with an opposing view, would question the guest. The exchanges often were sharp, but this was not combat television of the type that later would dominate cable news commentary. The tone was respectful and the pace was unhurried. Sowell’s appearance coincided with the publication of his most recent book, The Economics and Politics of Race, a pioneering international study of discrimination. And during the first part of the program he and Buckley covered, among other things, Sowell’s opposition to using racial preferences to assist poor blacks.

  “The net effect of the preferential treatment, which is preferential in intention more so than in results, is that those blacks who are particularly disadvantaged have fallen further behind under these policies,” Sowell declared. “Affirmative action has typically benefited people who were already well off and made them better off.” As usual, Sowell cited research to support his claim.

  For example, blacks who have relatively less work experience, lower levels of education, black female-headed families—all these groups have fallen further behind during a decade or more of affirmative action. Black female-headed households have had an absolute decline in real income over this span and have fallen further behind white female-headed families. At the same time, black couples who are both college educated earn higher incomes than white couples who are both college educated.

  Sowell’s cross-examiner that day was Robert Lekachman, a professor of economics at Lehman College of the City University of New York, who argued that racial preferences nevertheless are justified on moral and historical grounds:

  Has there not been throughout our history a whole set of formal, informal affirmative actions for white males, for Episcopalians, for graduates of Ivy League colleges . . . various clubs which are engaged in affirmative action for limited groups of their own members? In all of these clubs important business is transacted to the benefit of the members and to the exclusion of people who are not. We have affirmative action of all kinds in this country addressed to the interests of the stronger groups. Now comes a moment in our history when affirmative action, for a bit, is advanced for the benefit of groups which have been traditionally at the short end of the distribution of good things in our society, and there is considerable revulsion against it. Isn’t this just a bit of historical justice that’s being advanced?

  Sowell was having none of it. His point, he reminded Lekachman, was that the data showed affirmative action wasn’t helping the intended beneficiaries. “I simply do not see the justice in making people who are badly off worse off, in the name of advancing them.”

  Lekachman next challenged Sowell’s claim that affirmative-action policies had been ineffective. Specifically, he took issue with Sowell contrasting black experiences in the 1960s and the 1970s, given the economic turmoil of the latter decade. “What this suggests to me is that the gains of affirmative action are extraordinarily precarious if you run an economy at low levels of activity,” said Lekachman, ignoring Sowell’s point that the lag in the 1970s among poor blacks had been not only absolute but also relative to that of comparable whites.

  It’s a bad comparison because the ’60s were a period of expansion. With or without affirmative action, given the presence of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, given the 1954 Brown decision and the general climate of opinion. . . . Do you really think, these considerations taken into mind, that the ’70s disproved the efficacy of affirmative action?

  Sowell asked why the burden of proof is on affirmative action’s skeptics. “I think that when one makes a profound change in a society, arousing enormous passions across the board, that the burden of proof should be on those who think that this is beneficial,” he said. “I have been listening very carefully and have yet to hear the benefit to disadvantaged blacks that has been empirically discovered after affirmative action.”

  Then the following exchange occurred:

  LEKACHMAN: Well, how quickly do you expect the changes? . . . The problems have been of long standing in our society. The remedy of affirmative action is a novel one. . . .

  SOWELL: It’s fascinating. . . . I see this happening on all sorts of issues, from Federal Reserve policies on across the board. You’ll say, “Here’s this wonderful program and it will do wonderful things, and the burden of proof is on others to show that it will not do those things.” And no matter how long it’s been going on, it’s never long enough. If it failed, there just wasn’t enough commitment, the budget wasn’t big enough. It should have had a larger staff, wider powers. But there is never any sense of a burden of proof on you to say—when you’ve made this change that has caused such furor in this country, and has gotten people at each other’s throats, including people who have been allies in the past, such as blacks and the Jews—there is never any sense of a need for you to advance the empirical evidence to support what you’ve been doing.

  LEKACHMAN: I’m perfectly happy to subject the affirmative-action policies to reasonable statistical evaluation, given a sufficient period.

  SOWELL: What is a sufficient [period]?. . . You said “for a bit.” And now we’re talking a “sufficient period.” And I have difficulty with these, uh, what temporal units are you talking about? Centuries? Decades?

  LEKACHMAN: I would think of twenty to twenty-five years as a reasonable period.

  Of course, race-conscious public policies are no longer novel, and they have persisted for much longer than a quarter of a century, as have Lekachman’s arguments for keeping them in place. In a 2003 landmark decision upholding the use of race in college admissions, the Supreme Court declared, like Lekachman did two decades earlier, that affirmative-action policies just needed a little more time to work their magic. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary,” wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her majority opinion.

  Several major Supreme Court rulings regarding affirmative action have involved
higher education, but the concept originated in American law in response to employment discrimination. And while the beneficiaries of these policies would later include other groups—most notably, women—the impetus for the legislation was the plight of black workers.

  It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer . . . to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,

  reads the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As for enforcement, the law says that if a court

  finds that the respondent has intentionally engaged in or is intentionally engaging in an unlawful employment practice . . . the court may . . . order such affirmative action as may be appropriate, which may include, but is not limited to, reinstatement or hiring of employees, with or without back pay . . . or any other equitable relief as the court deems appropriate.