(reposting of reply to "Does it ever end?")

Most of my adult life has been passed outside the US. Nonetheless, I was a schoolboy in a Mid-Atlantic city when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Further, I recall the Nixon Adminstration's follow-up implementation of an array of affirmative action measures. During that period, in which my parents, avid advocates of public education whose carefully selected school district underwent painful changes that dominated local and, often, national headlines, I witnessed a sharp decline in the quality of education and tiresome diatribes not undifferent than what I've read here during these past few days. I also witnessed America change profoundly.

A truly diverse culture has been achieved. My white skin color assures me not of class, wealth, or cultural sophistication. Nor do my years. The black, Hispanic and Asian teenagers who now occupy the streets I grew up on spend their days much as I did. They likely enjoy more consumer power than I did at 17 (although that point can likely be debated.) They may hopefully be less inclined "to work in an office downtown" than I was.

So, I'm saddened to hear this noise. The time to move on arrived a long time ago, but the hour waits.

Now as a European citizen and an employer, I will offer a challenge: focus on restoring core curriculums and values at the earliest stages of education. Redefine those which should be uniform and consistent across the society. Isolate and minimise exceptional needs. Foster inclusion, not self-indulgence or self-obsession. Societies must share common ground. Creativity and innovation will THEN flourish. What passes as such today in the US media is too often as tiresome as this discussion.

Europe, you ask? I live in a country that is smaller than the state I grew up in. It has four languages, with each student required to master a pair of them PLUS English. Immigration is proportionately a far greater challenge here than even the extraordinary post-1964 integration of blacks in the US was on a national basis. Yet, there is consensus that the goal here is a unitary society that fosters respect for differences and unfettered opportunity. The goals here are no different than they were there when LBJ signed the CRA. What is different, apart from valid historical factors, is that there is less tolerance for self-indulgent demands, apologies and endless accusations for past mistakes, or failed public policy.

The challenges are formidable today across Europe. It is America that should be providing lessons here today. Demonstrating that the US is moving into the 21st century and extending its cultural focus on new horizons rather than old wounds would be a good thing for all.

The quality droppped largely because you expanded the population of students to be educated by about 15%, but if you go look at the NCES data, budgets did not expand concomittantly. And so classrooms went from an average class size of 22-24, to 25-28. And as the research shows, there is a marked threshold of teachability at 24.

Sadly your white skin color still brings you DAILY unearned benefits. They may be as simple as being able to hail a cab in any neighborhood, or as subtle as being granted more time to answer a posed question (as white males in school are given). But over the course of a year, a decade or a K-12 career, it still adds up.

Your challenge simply doesn't correspond well with what is known about what works and does not work in education.

• Currently average ACTUAL class sizes run around 31 pupils/teacher. It is well known that at that size, most classes are not able to be academically focussed unless they are "Perch and Preach". And P&P only works for about 30% of the population because of how human brains are wired
• We know that the single most effective program for preventing drop-outs and improving academics is an enhanced performing arts program (be it music, stage or dance). At Risk Youth enrolled in these programs are dramatically less likely to drop out.
• We know that the ideal class size is 12-15. And that teachability drops dramatically below 24.
• We know that parental involvement dramatically improves educational outcomes - but a school program that has huge summer gaps doesn't work well with working parents and also meanst that about 20% of every school year is spent on remediating the previous year.

To implement programs to address alll those would pretty much double the property taxes that most americans pay. And that won't happen any time soon.

That leaves us with an educational system where there is viscious competition for resources. And sadly it means that continued racism is used as a weapon

You can enforce all the 'affirmative action' you want; racism will NOT be defeated in schools. It will only be defeated in the home.

If you want a colorblind society, then be (and teach your children to be) colorblind.

Your points are well taken. Class size is an issue. It is becoming one here as well.

Arts programmes. Classical training is seriously at risk. Lack of teachers. Even in Russia, which certainly has med in teaching fundamentals of technique. Non-"classical" must endeavour to be something more than time filling. This is very much a discussion point on this side of the Pond.

Somehow, after WWII, which led to profound social changes and family upheaval, there was a collective will to invest in education. We should revisit where this came from.

First, we must close discussion of race. Even if there are continued "advantages" to one side or another. We also must be realistic about individual competencies and potential. Black, white, Hispanic or Asian, no culture generates only top scientists or artists. We all need to learn early what it is we do well and what it is we can do better. Frank talk is healthy. Children understand and appreciate this.

That essentially places no costs on continued racism and continued acceptance of white and particularly white male privilege.

The best example that AA works is the evolving presence of women in the senior levels of the workforce. And in part that is because sexual discrimination is easier to prove.

The best way to defeat racism is by leveling the playing field and allowing those who are capable - of achieving on as level a field as is practical. And even then it will take generations.

But pretending to be a colorblind society in law, when in actuallity the society is far from it, is to enshrine racism in the protection of pretense.

Your comments suggest a need for relatively permanent affirmative action. The perils of such should be obvious.

When I was in the US in the late 1970s, affirmative action unquestionably marked early success and justified related imbalances. Is this the consensus 40 years later?

As for women, I think it inappropriate to apply the affirmative action label. The barriers to women in the workforce and professional development are wholly different from those affecting race. In simple terms, in a given society, women are co-partners in ownership; this is not so in the case of exclusion due to race or nationality. Women's challenges are related to gender-based differentiation in life-cycle, life-style and, in limited cases, physical competencies. Some challenges are shared, i.e., glass ceilings to club leadership, salary biases, etc. Men suffer their own sets of exclusion factors in such cases. In France, non-franc-maçon (Masons) are notoriously blocked from advancement in established organisations and companies. School ties are hardly rational. Etc.

France, more than most of Europe, is officially colour blind. Race and nationality are forbidden identifiers on any dossier. More than here in Switzerland, one can see various nationalities and both genders well placed. Look at the current government there, for example. There is little US-stuyle noise over the presence of competent women lading the Finance ministry or of a young Tunisian woman leading another. Defense in France has been led by a woman for a decade, and she is respected universally across Europe, which is more than can be said of Condoleeza Rice or even Hillary Clinton, whose consistent professionalism is no match for that of Marie-France Alliot.

Yet there are other biases at work there that are infamous and pernicious. This is life, no?

Switzerland is another story, but one led by a woman.

Thanks for your measured and reasoned response

When bigotry is pervasive in society, the only way to effectively deal with it is to remove the unearned benefits it conveys. The only way to remove those benefits is to acknowledge that those who received them accomplished less than those who did not receive them. And that is all that Affirmative Action does. And frank talk about the unearned benefits that whites and white males receive WOULD be welcome

Education was seen as important post WWII because

1. WWII generated a massive amount of social mobility through the economic displacements it created
2. it created an environment where lots and lots of 20 something men were seen to be owed a debt BY society and the GI Bill was seen as the repay part of that debt. The result was a massive explosion in 2 and 4 year degree enrollment.
3. With the launch of Sputnik, this effort was redoubled, particularly in the sciences.

But since then, we've had "no Gnu Taxes" after "when will the Democrats have taken enough" demagougery like California's Proposition 13, and Washington's Initiative 601, 695. Combined with the historic underfunding, we now have average class sizes well above the threshold of teachability.

One of the nastiest pieced of demagougery against education took place in the mid 1990s when Gingrich lead a very public effort to try and destroy the Washington DC public school system (ever since BrownVBoardOfEd - Republicans have opposed public education, going as far as to eliminate it in Georgia for a number of years in the early 1960s) by promoting a voucher system. The claims made by the GOP were that local parochial schools were getting better results for about 2/3 of the spending that WA DC public schools were spending ($5k tuiting vs $7500/pupil spend). The gotcha was that they were comparing SUBSIDIZED TUITION with actual per-pupil spending. When reporters actually interviewed the head of Archdiocsal education, it turned out that the parochial schools were SPENDING almost $12k.

Thus what we have is a history of about 25 years of anti-public school activism (starting with Reagan) on the part of the GOP, with openly hostile rhetoric for the last 12 (since 1994) for funding public ed. Little wonder the schools are overcrowded, underfunded and underfunctional.

"Your comments suggest a need for relatively permanent affirmative action. The perils of such should be obvious."

Some people cannot see any "perils" in permanent affirmative action. They are already in favor of permanent busing. For them, the need for affirmative action, busing and other forms of government coercion will never end. Why? Because some people believe in equality of opportunity, and others believe in equality of result. The latter mistakenly believe that if there is not equality of result then it must be because there is not equality of opportunity. The socialists will never be satisfied until income is equalized across the population and the government assigns us all housing based on government mandated racial and gender balancing quotas. Their quest for equality of result is never ending.

Your insight on American society is impressive.

"We also must be realistic about individual competencies and potential."

You hit the nail on the head, hommesuisse. This is the third rail of political philosophy: the problem no one is willing to acknowledge. The fundamental, and false, belief underlying socialism is that we all come into the world as a blank slate, with the same potential, infinitely malleable by our environment. Thus, if someone fails, it is solely because of outside forces: class size or racial composition, racism, sexism, social class, etc.

We do not all come into the world with the same potential. For simplicity's sake, we might divide the population into three segments: the Brights, the Normals, and the Dulls. We need to figure out how to modify the gene pool so society produces more Brights and fewer Dulls. More George Washington Carvers, for example. Take a look at Carver's bio on Wikipedia if you want to marvel at how someone can overcome unbelievable obstacles to become one of the world's greatest scientists.

We need to identify the Brights early and cultivate them like hothouse flowers instead of forcing them into the same classes with the Normals and the Dulls like the socialists are fond of doing.

A professor at a prestigious university (coincidentally one of Dellinger's colleagues) once told his class that it is the students who make the school what it is, not the professors or the facilities. In other words, if we emptied out the students from Harvard and replaced them with students from Amarillo College, we would have just another Amarillo College.

BTW, one of the best classes I took in college was taught in an auditorium to 550 students. I have never understood why class size is so important, but I admit I don't remember much from my primary school education. I don't recall how big my classes were or if that was important to me at the time.

Not permanent at all, but when you have a history of 436 years of Affirmative Action for white males, 6 years (1972 - poll taxes eliminated - 1978 Bakke) of minority Affirmative Action just isn't gonna cut it. (and really it was only 1 since 1977 was Town of Newcastle losing its appeal to use zoning to de facto segregate).

It is a canard to assert that for there to be an equality of opportunity that you can only do this through being "color blind". Colorblindness ossifies the unearned advantages that 430 extra years of Affirmative Action. Its the equivilent of ignoring the fact that some corporations made tens of millions with WWII Slave labor.

For you to assert that "opportunity" is what matters and that "opportunity" is divorced from "outcome" is simply another way of you saying :

We gave them opportunity, its not white society's fault that blacks are too dumb to take advantage of those opportunities.

Because absent pervasive continuing prejudice (which you pretend doesn't exist since we are legally colorblind) two individual with equal opportunities are only separated in their outcomes by luck and by individual effort and capability. And since over broad statistical samples, luck gets zeroed out the claim that conservatives like you make in essence is that

Minorities are incapable of succeeding even when they are given equal opportunities because they lack either the capability or the willingness to put in the effort.

And that is racism, not "insight into america".

Ah yes, racism in the guise of "equal opportunity".

Since we know that in current society minorities do not do as well as whites and white males in particular there are two sets of conclusions we can come to from your assertions:

1. White males have a higher precentage of "brights" in the mix
2. White males are willing to work harder than their peers.

After all, if opportunity is equal then the only differentiating factor is effort or raw capability. Now we know from a variety of experiments that both of the above conclusions are wrong. Yet clearly that is what is at the core of your beliefs (and I would argue most conservatives). Sad really

as for class size in education - I would suggest you educate yourself first on cognition, learning modalities and how the educational process works. I can almost guarantee given what yoru upbringing sounds like that you had K-12 class sizes below 25.

Your ignorance of how education works is stunning.

No, we will never reach the cosmic justice you seek.

For some reason, socialists (the word liberal has been perverted) like yourself fail to recognize that members of minority groups do succeed in America, as bad as it is, in every walk of life. I do not denigrate their accomplishments by suggesting that they could not have achieved them without having the bar lowered.

I detest past injustices as much as you do, but as a practical matter, there is no way to right all the historical wrongs without committing further injustice. I am sure you cannot stand Thomas Sowell, but he wrote an excellent book on this subject entitled, "The Quest for Cosmic Justice." I recommend it.

Prend attention, Iwasblind! Your ideas regarding separate channels for the "Bright, Normal and Dull" are taking you down a slippery slope. The best case studies for your would-be programmes are found in the national experiences of 1930s/40s Germany and the Communist Soviet Union and her satellite states to our east. Here in Switzerland and France, the two school systems I know best, Socialism rules. Schools are community based. Funding is adequate to ensure balance classrooms and a wide range of resources, which permit students and teachers to 'tailor' educational objectives. The core thinking is that of community. While a small country, few Swiss ever move out of the canton of their birth. Fewer move out of their linguistic community (French, Italian or German; we also have Roma, the ancient language in the eastern cantons which loses out to the other three). From my childhood experience in the Northeast US, I had the impression that much was the same in the 1960s for people living in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey. Your school systems there, where I went to public primary and middle schools, seem little different then to what we have here now. WIthin a classroom, we all learned to live with each others' innate aptitudes; we found enjoyment in helping each other overcome our respective limits. We were taught there--and certainly here--to respect each other as we were (are). This is Socialism. Bussing, micromanagement of teaching and socialisation, political correctness and interminable positive discrimination (our term)/affirmative action (yours) are closer to National Socialism (Nazism) and Communism.

Re: Communism. Say what you will, but the Soviets and their Czech, East German, Hungarian and Polish counterparts succeeded in one area: they cultivated a select group of so-called Birghts into model performers. When the Wall came down, university presidents salivated over the vast numbers of outstandling physicists, mathematicians, doctors, researchers and GIFTED teachers. Sadly, so did Western multinationals. The result has been that a generation of gifted indiciduals have abandoned their homelands and/or their professions for US-style cash/credit.

Here in Switzerland, we benefit from and also curse the huge wave of immigrants who fit this profile. Here some teach our children piano, but far too many just seek jobs or men, and then keep our shops, casinos and discos hopping and help destabilise our real estate markets. There is now a younger generation back in Russia that cannot speak at all to the turns of European history, Swiss neutrality, or the existence of a United Nations. They can provide website addresses for our best shops and clubs. They do not have a clue as to what a piano can do.

Be careful what you ask for.

You say the Soviets and their satellites were successful in cultivating their brightest children. Is your only criticism that they might leave their country for better opportunities elsewhere?

Is it better to gear the education system to the lowest common denominator and thereby dumb down the entire population as we seem to be doing?

Take a look at the following article in Reason comparing American students to Belgian students:

"Stupid in America: Why your kids are probably dumber than Belgians"

<link>

My criticism of America's current education system (a broad thing it is) is an observed dumbing down at the public school level conflicting with conspicuous and sometimes ludicrously innovative pushes on the backs of those children whose parents have real money or easy access to home equity into fast-track schools. I think our community-centred approach suits all best. This requires an investment in teachers and resources, as has been noted often in this and similar blogs.

Re: the phenomenon, wake and plight of Soviet education, it is well recognised by those who know the former Communist states that their biggest risk is the loss of their most educated citizens. Today, following the rush of Visa-card capitalism in the 1990s and up through today, the teaching profession is near dead in most of these countries. Those who were deemed gifted as youths are now either working for a large multinational enterprise, punching a computer keyboard, or plying their gifts on the side in countries across Europe and likely the US. They now have good reasons to be again in Russia, but it will take more than a generation to restore the standards of excellence that were so widely observed in their schools 18 years ago. Look at the numbers of Russians, Poles, Czechs and others who comprise leading research teams in finance, science and technology. Look at the performance listings in any cosmopolitan city and see how many Slavic names are on the bill. Until recently, the Kirov and the Bolshoi were vanishing dinosaurs. Now they are somewhat back in form, but more as tourist attractions.