Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Well this is a pretty bald-faced summary of facts. I imagine little critical theory minds popping everywhere. From We Must Face Persistent Racial Gaps in Academic Performance by Stuart Taylor Jr. I have few quibbles about interpretation of evidence here and there but this is perhaps the most succinct and honest summary of the known data which I have seen in a very long while. These are not things people wish to acknowledge; but by ignoring the data, we keep repeating policies which have consistently and repeatedly failed. We need to try new approaches and yet we keep hoping that policy preferences informed by ideological illusions will carry us through to better outcomes. They don't.

In covering the most highly publicized “affirmative action” lawsuit in decades – against Harvard University -- the news media are continuing their pattern of averting their eyes from stubborn facts that cut against their ideological preferences.

In recent trial testimony, Harvard and other selective schools claim that the only way they can maintain adequate racial diversity is to use large racial preferences to admit a great many more black (and brown) students than would otherwise get in based on their academic performance.

A person of ordinary curiosity might wonder: Why is that? Just what is the state of black academic performance, after more than 40 years of racial preferences? Is it improving? How soon might significantly more black students gain enough ground on whites and Asian-Americans to win admission to selective universities based on merit? And what about the Supreme Court’s unanimous assertion in 2003 that “[e]nshrining a permanent justification for racial preferences” would be unconstitutional?

The news media, like the universities, do not ask questions like these because they cannot accept honest answers, which include the following inconvenient truths:

--The state of average black academic achievement, from kindergarten through graduate schools, is extremely discouraging -- far behind that of Asian-Americans and whites, and substantially behind that of Latinos.

--Worse, black academic achievement in K-12 schools has not improved noticeably relative to that of whites or Asian-Americans in about 30 years, and has in some ways deteriorated, despite the growth of the black middle class. There is little reason to believe this will change in the foreseeable future.

--For those reasons, the tacit meaning of “diversity” has morphed into “racial preferences forever” in the minds of many university officials and journalists

These well-documented but disheartening facts are treated as taboo by academia, the media, and other establishment institutions. But the taboo is unhealthy. “Closing the racial achievement gap is the most important civil rights battle of the twenty-first century,” as the distinguished African-American Harvard sociologist Roland Fryer wrote in 2012.

And as long as the nation shrinks from facing the racial academic gaps, they will persist, and perhaps grow larger – as did the white-black gap in 12th grade reading between 1992 and 2015 (the last year for which comparative data are available).

The racial gaps make it imperative to find effective ways to improve the academic achievement of black (and Latino) children – and to end policies that may make hold kids back or diminish their incentives to excel academically.

In this regard, there is evidence suggesting that far from being part of the solution, racial preferences in college admissions are part of the problem with K-12 black education.

I won't excerpt the litany of facts which Taylor musters. They are grim but also consistent with the data I have been seeing from multiple sources.

One interesting twist is the knitting together of two different observations which I think are true but which seem inconsistent with one another at a superficial level. The first observation is from Taylor's article.

But these hopes looked forlorn as long ago as 2003, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for herself and four other justices in Grutter v. Bollinger: “[T]he number of minority applicants with high grades and test scores has indeed increased. ... We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further” racial diversity in selective college enrollments.

The claimed increase in high-end achievement by minority applicants was wishful thinking, for which Justice O’Connor cited no data and not one serious study. As I wrote in 2003, at the time there was “overwhelming evidence that the racial academic gap [was] enormous and ... [had] been growing for the past 15 years [since about 1988].

This reversed a trend of rapid progress in closing the racial gaps from the 1950s until about 1988. But over the three decades since 1988, there has been no significant decline in the test score gap between both black and Hispanic high school seniors and their white counterparts.

From research and data I have seen, that early data of the 1950s looks too early but whether it is 1950s to 1988 or early sixties to 1988 is not especially critical. The important thing is that out of the civil rights and desegregation era we did get a twenty year bump in performance. But that trend of gap-closing ended in 1988 and has actually on some measures regressed since then.

I have written elsewhere that it is difficult to disentangle the various things that were happening circa 1955-1965 which might have led to that twenty year run from 1968-1988 when the gap was closing. While I do not like the statism and ignorance of much of the desegregation era (right policy, bad implementation), I do suspect that desegregation was one of the principle mechanisms for closing the academic gap. Not necessarily because of desegregation per se but because desegregation brought new money to education, brought an overdue upgrading of facilities, brought greater transparency and accountability, etc. I suspect that is what was going on but I cannot prove it. It might be attributable to other factors.

We picked the low-hanging fruit of improving facilities, providing adequate funding, and improving transparency and accountability and that gave us a twenty year bump in performance that narrowed the gap but did not eliminate it. But then the gap stabilized and started widening again, suggesting that facilities, funding and transparency were not the sole root causes of the gap, not even the primary causes.

The other observation is from Thomas Sowell and appears to be in opposition with Taylors assumption. Taylor says that educational gaps narrowed between the 1950s and 1988 before widening again.

On the other hand, Thomas Sowell makes the argument that on virtually all the key indices of psycho-social well-being, the measures and trends for African Americans were very positive from 1880 to the mid-1960s before then taking a plunge.

One of the major findings and conclusions is that affirmative action (and its new form, diversity), as nice as it sounded, has been an almost unmitigated disaster. It has provided official endorsement to the idea that African Americans are not equal, it has undermined the accomplishments of those who do achieve, it has doomed some of the best and brightest African American students to lesser academic achievement than they would otherwise have attained, it has bolstered drop-out figures, it has burdened otherwise capable students with unsupportable debts, etc.

Throwing money at schools has not shrunk the performance gap, reducing class sizes, eliminating rule enforcement, improving teacher credentials, relaxing grading standards, pre-k, wrap-around services, desegregation, eliminating assessments, none of these have closed the gap. None of the fads work. But we don't want to say so. Because if we did, then we might choose to do something truly radical, which is to focus on root causes and policies which would work.

What thirty years of experimentation have told us is that we have not yet identified the real root causes of the performance gap. We know it is not funding. Our schools are awash with money compared to history and compared to other countries. We might not be spending it well, indeed are almost certainly not spending it well, but money is not the issue.

Race per se doesn't seem to be the issue either. Within each racial group, there are sub groups who do fantastically well compared to their native born racial counterparts and others who do very poorly. African American students can't easily blame systemic racism if Nigerian and Haitian students (also black) do better than native born African Americans (and indeed, for Nigerians, better than native-born whites) and Somalis do even worse. Clearly something else is at play than simple racism.

I think the next frontier is, or should be, on folkways, culture if you will. It is not the race that matters, it is the culture. Taylor gets close to this towards the end of his piece. Most his recommendations look kind of anemic, but this one could be consequential.

Third, the focus of almost all academics, policymakers, civil rights groups, and others on perpetuating racial preferences and lowering academic standards for black students diverts attention, reformist energy, and resources from the far more urgent task of improving their educations at home and school during their first 18 years of life – “the most important civil rights battle of the twenty-first century,” in Roland Fryer’s words.

Focus on the folkways of people. We know folkways are a huge predictor of success, regardless of race. If you focus on family, and work, and education, and faith, and community, etc. then you are far more likely to experience life success.

Some of the many posts are here. There is no easy summary - read them for the larger picture. A summary of some of the most important folkways which have known predictive effects on life outcomes include:

Speech Ways: "Conventional patterns of written and spoken language; pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar."
Building Ways: "Prevailing forms of vernacular architecture and high architecture, which tend to be related to one another."
Family Ways: "The structure and function of the household and family, both in ideal and actuality."
Marriage Ways: "Ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and divorce."
Gender Ways: "Customs that regulate social relations between men and women."
Sex Ways: "Conventional sexual attitudes and acts, and the treatment of sexual deviance."
Child-Rearing Ways: "Ideas of child nature and customs of child nurture."
Naming Ways: "Onomastic customs including favoured forenames and the descent of names within the family."
Age Ways: "Attitudes towards age, experiences of aging and age relationships."
Death Ways: "Attitudes towards death, mortality rituals, mortuary customs and mourning practices."
Religious Ways: "Patterns of religious worship, theology, ecclesiology and church architecture."
Magic Ways: "Normative beliefs and practices concerning the supernatural."
Learning Ways: "Attitudes toward literacy and learning, and conventional patterns of education."
Food Ways: "Patterns of diet, nutrition, cooking, eating, feasting and fasting."
Dress Ways: "Customs of dress, demeanor, and personal adornment."
Sport Ways: "Attitudes toward recreation and leisure; folk games and forms of organized sport."
Work Ways: "Work ethics and work experiences; attitudes toward work and the nature of work."
Time Ways: "Attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the conventional rhythms of life."
Wealth Ways: "Attitudes towards wealth and patterns of its distribution."
Rank Ways: "The rules by which rank is assigned, the roles which rank entails, and the relations between different ranks."
Social Ways: "Conventional patterns of migration, settlement, association and affiliation."
Order Ways: "Ideas of order, ordering institutions, forms of disorder, and treatment of the disorderly."
Power Ways: "Attitudes toward authority and power; patterns of political participation."
Freedom Ways: "Prevailing ideas of liberty and restraint, and libertarian customs and institutions."

This is not about assimilating per se. It is about the extent to which any particularly integrating group already practices folkways which are predictive of success, and more importantly, the extent to which they are willing to modify their personal behaviors in order to exploit the benefits of those folkways.

Improving folkways is, I suspect, the easiest way to close the performance gap. It is also the way most opposed by both ends of the ideological spectrum.

The problem for us as a nation is that both the statists and the individualists have ideological challenges when considering the State to be endorsing particular modes of behavior.

Statists really don't want to let go of the idea that personal outcomes are the result of victimhood from the system. They want to believe that all people are potentially equal in outcome and therefore all variance in outcomes (failures) are a failure of system rather than a failure of individuals. They want to work on the system. That's what we have been doing for forty years to little effect.

Individualists are deeply opposed to the State being explicitly responsible for molding the folkway norms of a free people. They believe variances in outcomes are a natural consequence of any dispassionate system because of variances in individuals. However, they want the locus of decision-making to be the individual, not the State. If folkways are a means of achieving more equal outcomes, great. As long as people freely choose those folkways rather than have them imposed on them.

But folkways exact a cost from individuals. People benefit through adherence to folkways which are known to be conducive. We know we ought to value education very highly (as some do) but education is hard work. We know we ought to not have children out of wedlock but that requires a lot of self-control. We know we ought to defer to authority to an extent but that requires submission. We know we ought to save for the future, but that requires sacrificing current consumption for future well-being. When faced with the benefits of adhering to beneficial folkways, many people freely choose to be grasshoppers rather than ants.

And so the problem persists. For the time being, we keep fooling ourselves that the gap is because of systemic racism, or segregation, or insufficient resources, even when all the data shows that not to be the case. Eventually we will figure out how to foster beneficial folkways without it being a matter of State imposition.

Eventually, but regrettably not immediately. Taylor will be howled down and we will persist like Maduro, trying to make a known failed system work through sheer will and ideological wishfulness.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. And the truth is that folkways probably matter a lot more than we are willing to acknowledge.