An interesting piece.
One of the more interesting things to come out of last year's UK Commission on Race and Equality was the comparison between the UK's racial attainment gap in education and the US's. The US's is 8 times wider than the UK's (-0.89 v -0.1). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-rac…
In the UK, the report confirmed that the groups with the lowest attainment are both white --Irish Travellers and white boys from a disadvantaged background.
One part Sowell in his essay on Black Rednecks got wrong was his assertion that the English/Scottish borders culture had somehow vanished in the border region of England/Scotland (or indeed Northern Ireland), it hasn't and the low education attainment etc is indeed cause for concern for the UK government.
The Department of Education in England (this is a devolved matter) has had some recent success in improving overall literacy and numeracy levels through the use of phonetics and math hubs. The over all basic literacy rate of the UK is 99% but functional illiteracy continues to limit life chances. The UK does have severe problems with social deprivation.
To contrast the basic literacy rate of California is 77% (on par with Rwanda 73 and significantly below Barbados at 88% -- As an aside Rwanda's basic literacy rate is on the increase and California's is sliding). New Hampshire which is the top state for basic literacy stands 94%. Basic literacy and numeracy enables people (and societies) to progress. Rather than being on par with other Western countries such as Norway (100%) or Canada 99%, the US basic literacy rate appears to be decreasing.
One does not need to know the precise cause to know that there is a systematic incompetence of state funded education in the US. And the big question is why is the US so profligate with democracy's most precious resource namely its home grown human capital?
As Ellen Wilkinson, the UK politician who overhauled the UK's education system in the 1940's, a sound education affects several generations and the converse is also true.
The US Supreme Court decision of Hirabayashi v United States namely "Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. " should hold true for basic literacy and numeracy. There should be no reason why the various state education departments should not be able to get the basic literacy rate of 15 year olds to 99% regardless of their skin tone. Other countries do.
Thank you, Michelle. Yes, yes: basic literacy should be a primary focus. I also think that helping young people learn emotional management and regulation is key. Some call this "soft skills"; I prefer Seth Godin's term: real skills to enhance civil dialogue and interpersonal relationships.
I also appreciate you making comparisons beyond simplistic racial categorization, focusing instead on where the U.S. overall is falling down in basic education. That's why on my recent appearance on The Glenn Show (with FAIR advisory board member, Glenn Loury), I mentioned that, one, among OECD nations, the United States is 28th out of 38 nations with regards to STEM education, and, two, that according to a U.S. News & World Report study, the U.S. is 26th in terms of Quality of Life.
Being the wealthiest nation in the world won't mean much if the overall quality of life is down the tubes.
We agree, Michelle: it's time for us to start getting our priorities straight.
Yes, good. It is long past the time the US public started to get its head around the failure in basic domestic education for all its citizens problem, instead of being distracted by St Ives type considerations which are the simplistic racial categories (I assume you know the old nursery rhyme which goes when I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives, and every wife had seven sacks, and every sack had seven cats and every cat seven kits -- kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many were going to St Ives? The answer is of course 1 -- the speaker). If you have 100 students, and 25 do not have basic skills. It doesn't matter how you parse their make up or ancestry, at the end you still have 25 who remain in need of a basic education. It goes down to whether or not you want a gold , silver and sewage for the rest education system or one which enables all citizens to become active contributors to society's overall quality of life.
Immigration and the immigrant's drive to succeed to a certain extent has allowed the US to be distracted from the decades long domestic failure in providing adequate public education to its native citizens, but ultimately how long US society can rely on draining brains from other countries is an open question.
It is also about improving occupational mobility -- providing the skills which will enable citizens to move to jobs which provide a better lifestyle -- this is a slightly different emphasis than social mobility. I think this is what you are getting it as well. Occupational mobility allows for people to improve their quality of life.
One only has to look at ancient Rome and the slide into the so-called Dark Ages to see what happened when the skill sets of the native population started to decrease significantly.
I did enjoy the readout of your conversation with Lloury -- WEIRD is a great acronym. As an aside, you were the second intellectual to talk about so-called French Theory I have read this week. History Reclaimed had a good article about deconstructing French theory. https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/deconstructing-french-theory/ in case you have not seen it. History Reclaimed is a Robert Tombs/ David Abulafia project (both Cambridge professors) and an interesting resource.
Exactly. One of my biggest issues with the “woke” ideology is that it lends itself to a zero sum mentality. These are our children and the future of our country; if some are not able to fulfill their potential due to economic disadvantages and/or the circumstances of their birth, this should concern all of us. Likewise, the tools, skills and support children needed to break the cycle of generational poverty are going to look very similar, whether we are talking about children in inner city neighborhoods or children in rural Appalachia.
Re: American literacy decreasing: There are lots of stats about inner city school failures to educate, hence the rise of the charter school movement to get around dismally performing unionized schools. Also, the USA has seen millions of migrants come into the country in the past several decades. Mostly recently, it has been noted that many coming from Mexico & Central America are illiterate- which could have the effect of pulling down the USA’s literacy rate.
The answer is not necessarily more funding either as you suggest. New York City pays a record rate of $28k per student per year and I have read of similar stats in Boston and elsewhere. And their outcomes are abysmal! In recent years, only 25% of inner city students have passed state exams. It’s not the funding. There is something more profound going on - Union strangle hold of education which creates inflexibilty, tamping down innovations, dysfunctional family structures etc. It comes to a point when the state can no longer expect taxpayers to pay increasingly larger amounts with nothing to show for it.
The literacy rate apparently takes into account immigration levels. The UK in recent years has also seen huge rates of immigration from least developed nations and has still maintained at 99% rate. Norway has also had significant immigration and maintains 100%.
I do agree about the money not being well spent. The average spend per pupil in the UK is less than the US and yet the UK is considerably higher up the league table.
The UK also suffers from areas of extreme social deprivation and family dysfunction. They have put a lot into the inner cities education but know there is a significant way to go. But the fact remains a solid education is the best way to increase social mobility and ensure society progresses.
Interestingly, the Times of London had an anecdotal article about Ukrainian refugee children in France and Italy being a year ahead in maths earlier this week. According to the OCED, Ukraine is supposed to be behind, but the children are outperforming in the class room. In Ukraine apparently they used 1940s style textbooks and the discipline (including silence in the classroom) is much stricter. Apparently their language skills are great as most speak Ukraine and Russian and are therefore able to rapidly pick up French or Italian.
I do agree that there is profound systematic incompetence in the US state education system which has serious implications for US society going forward. It is in many ways why I think parents are fighting back against school boards etc in the US as the basic compact of state education has been broken by the various state education administrations. If parents felt their children were being educated in the basics, they would be more willing to overlook some of the societal engineering which French Theorists are attempting. As it is the so-called French Theory (crt, queer theory, decolonization of history etc) serves a distraction from the real problem which is the failure to educate American children properly.
re: your conclusion - 'couldn't agree more. Any given child has to get the basics down first (reading-writing-arithmetic)...the focus on extraneous and even questionable material is a damaging sideshow. Parents & taxpayers have the right to demand better. You could say it's 'American Decadence & Wealth' that has contributed to the superfluousness of today's current curriculums. Countries not as wealthy as the USA, like the Ukraine, Russia - can't afford all the foolishness; They have to get it right the first time - no remedial learning, no community 'remedial' colleges. They don't have the money to do 'do-overs'. We are an indulged society. Just think, American companies & universities now employ thousands and thousands of 'diversity counselors' just to 'monitor the halls' - we have laws on the books that do the same thing - whereas this human capital, these diversity counselors could be far more productive in actually producing something useful. 'Diversity Culture' is now an industry employing literally an army of Sociology and Ethnic Studies majors. But these jobs, don't produce anything - nothing - they are nothing but another' American indulgence'. As a nation, we will fall from our own rot, a rot from within, from the bad use of human resources and funds. And if we don't start getting serious about educating our youth and demanding more from the work place, yes, we are doomed to be a second rate nation. We are on our way.
An interesting piece.
One of the more interesting things to come out of last year's UK Commission on Race and Equality was the comparison between the UK's racial attainment gap in education and the US's. The US's is 8 times wider than the UK's (-0.89 v -0.1). https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/education-and-training
In the UK, the report confirmed that the groups with the lowest attainment are both white --Irish Travellers and white boys from a disadvantaged background.
One part Sowell in his essay on Black Rednecks got wrong was his assertion that the English/Scottish borders culture had somehow vanished in the border region of England/Scotland (or indeed Northern Ireland), it hasn't and the low education attainment etc is indeed cause for concern for the UK government.
The Department of Education in England (this is a devolved matter) has had some recent success in improving overall literacy and numeracy levels through the use of phonetics and math hubs. The over all basic literacy rate of the UK is 99% but functional illiteracy continues to limit life chances. The UK does have severe problems with social deprivation.
To contrast the basic literacy rate of California is 77% (on par with Rwanda 73 and significantly below Barbados at 88% -- As an aside Rwanda's basic literacy rate is on the increase and California's is sliding). New Hampshire which is the top state for basic literacy stands 94%. Basic literacy and numeracy enables people (and societies) to progress. Rather than being on par with other Western countries such as Norway (100%) or Canada 99%, the US basic literacy rate appears to be decreasing.
One does not need to know the precise cause to know that there is a systematic incompetence of state funded education in the US. And the big question is why is the US so profligate with democracy's most precious resource namely its home grown human capital?
As Ellen Wilkinson, the UK politician who overhauled the UK's education system in the 1940's, a sound education affects several generations and the converse is also true.
The US Supreme Court decision of Hirabayashi v United States namely "Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality. " should hold true for basic literacy and numeracy. There should be no reason why the various state education departments should not be able to get the basic literacy rate of 15 year olds to 99% regardless of their skin tone. Other countries do.
Thank you, Michelle. Yes, yes: basic literacy should be a primary focus. I also think that helping young people learn emotional management and regulation is key. Some call this "soft skills"; I prefer Seth Godin's term: real skills to enhance civil dialogue and interpersonal relationships.
I also appreciate you making comparisons beyond simplistic racial categorization, focusing instead on where the U.S. overall is falling down in basic education. That's why on my recent appearance on The Glenn Show (with FAIR advisory board member, Glenn Loury), I mentioned that, one, among OECD nations, the United States is 28th out of 38 nations with regards to STEM education, and, two, that according to a U.S. News & World Report study, the U.S. is 26th in terms of Quality of Life.
Being the wealthiest nation in the world won't mean much if the overall quality of life is down the tubes.
We agree, Michelle: it's time for us to start getting our priorities straight.
Yes, good. It is long past the time the US public started to get its head around the failure in basic domestic education for all its citizens problem, instead of being distracted by St Ives type considerations which are the simplistic racial categories (I assume you know the old nursery rhyme which goes when I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives, and every wife had seven sacks, and every sack had seven cats and every cat seven kits -- kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many were going to St Ives? The answer is of course 1 -- the speaker). If you have 100 students, and 25 do not have basic skills. It doesn't matter how you parse their make up or ancestry, at the end you still have 25 who remain in need of a basic education. It goes down to whether or not you want a gold , silver and sewage for the rest education system or one which enables all citizens to become active contributors to society's overall quality of life.
Immigration and the immigrant's drive to succeed to a certain extent has allowed the US to be distracted from the decades long domestic failure in providing adequate public education to its native citizens, but ultimately how long US society can rely on draining brains from other countries is an open question.
It is also about improving occupational mobility -- providing the skills which will enable citizens to move to jobs which provide a better lifestyle -- this is a slightly different emphasis than social mobility. I think this is what you are getting it as well. Occupational mobility allows for people to improve their quality of life.
One only has to look at ancient Rome and the slide into the so-called Dark Ages to see what happened when the skill sets of the native population started to decrease significantly.
I did enjoy the readout of your conversation with Lloury -- WEIRD is a great acronym. As an aside, you were the second intellectual to talk about so-called French Theory I have read this week. History Reclaimed had a good article about deconstructing French theory. https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/deconstructing-french-theory/ in case you have not seen it. History Reclaimed is a Robert Tombs/ David Abulafia project (both Cambridge professors) and an interesting resource.
Exactly. One of my biggest issues with the “woke” ideology is that it lends itself to a zero sum mentality. These are our children and the future of our country; if some are not able to fulfill their potential due to economic disadvantages and/or the circumstances of their birth, this should concern all of us. Likewise, the tools, skills and support children needed to break the cycle of generational poverty are going to look very similar, whether we are talking about children in inner city neighborhoods or children in rural Appalachia.
Re: American literacy decreasing: There are lots of stats about inner city school failures to educate, hence the rise of the charter school movement to get around dismally performing unionized schools. Also, the USA has seen millions of migrants come into the country in the past several decades. Mostly recently, it has been noted that many coming from Mexico & Central America are illiterate- which could have the effect of pulling down the USA’s literacy rate.
The answer is not necessarily more funding either as you suggest. New York City pays a record rate of $28k per student per year and I have read of similar stats in Boston and elsewhere. And their outcomes are abysmal! In recent years, only 25% of inner city students have passed state exams. It’s not the funding. There is something more profound going on - Union strangle hold of education which creates inflexibilty, tamping down innovations, dysfunctional family structures etc. It comes to a point when the state can no longer expect taxpayers to pay increasingly larger amounts with nothing to show for it.
The literacy rate apparently takes into account immigration levels. The UK in recent years has also seen huge rates of immigration from least developed nations and has still maintained at 99% rate. Norway has also had significant immigration and maintains 100%.
I do agree about the money not being well spent. The average spend per pupil in the UK is less than the US and yet the UK is considerably higher up the league table.
The UK also suffers from areas of extreme social deprivation and family dysfunction. They have put a lot into the inner cities education but know there is a significant way to go. But the fact remains a solid education is the best way to increase social mobility and ensure society progresses.
Interestingly, the Times of London had an anecdotal article about Ukrainian refugee children in France and Italy being a year ahead in maths earlier this week. According to the OCED, Ukraine is supposed to be behind, but the children are outperforming in the class room. In Ukraine apparently they used 1940s style textbooks and the discipline (including silence in the classroom) is much stricter. Apparently their language skills are great as most speak Ukraine and Russian and are therefore able to rapidly pick up French or Italian.
I do agree that there is profound systematic incompetence in the US state education system which has serious implications for US society going forward. It is in many ways why I think parents are fighting back against school boards etc in the US as the basic compact of state education has been broken by the various state education administrations. If parents felt their children were being educated in the basics, they would be more willing to overlook some of the societal engineering which French Theorists are attempting. As it is the so-called French Theory (crt, queer theory, decolonization of history etc) serves a distraction from the real problem which is the failure to educate American children properly.
re: your conclusion - 'couldn't agree more. Any given child has to get the basics down first (reading-writing-arithmetic)...the focus on extraneous and even questionable material is a damaging sideshow. Parents & taxpayers have the right to demand better. You could say it's 'American Decadence & Wealth' that has contributed to the superfluousness of today's current curriculums. Countries not as wealthy as the USA, like the Ukraine, Russia - can't afford all the foolishness; They have to get it right the first time - no remedial learning, no community 'remedial' colleges. They don't have the money to do 'do-overs'. We are an indulged society. Just think, American companies & universities now employ thousands and thousands of 'diversity counselors' just to 'monitor the halls' - we have laws on the books that do the same thing - whereas this human capital, these diversity counselors could be far more productive in actually producing something useful. 'Diversity Culture' is now an industry employing literally an army of Sociology and Ethnic Studies majors. But these jobs, don't produce anything - nothing - they are nothing but another' American indulgence'. As a nation, we will fall from our own rot, a rot from within, from the bad use of human resources and funds. And if we don't start getting serious about educating our youth and demanding more from the work place, yes, we are doomed to be a second rate nation. We are on our way.