Inputs affect outputs

Thomas Sowell is a conservative scholar at the Hoover Institute in California. I find him attractive for his predisposition to argue from evidence as illustrated in his many books including Conquests and Cultures, and his very ascerbic The Vision of the Anointed. In addition to being a prolific author, he is also a productive essayist. Education & The Fallacy of "Fairness" is a brief observation on how we sometimes get all tangled up in our language and lose sight of our real objectives.

What they need are the attitudes, priorities and behavior which produce the outcomes desired.

But changing anyone's attitudes, priorities and behavior is a lot harder than taking a stance as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil.

To the extent that doing the latter misdiagnoses the problem, it makes solving the problem even harder. That does no good for those who are lagging, however much it exalts those who pose as their defenders. "Fairness" indeed!

This is not dissimilar to the situation in reading where differences in performance are ascribed to issues of access or instruction rather than to issues of personal practices and values which is what the data points towards.