Day 57.
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Posted on 08/26/2013 7:12:52 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Los Angeles Times recently published a devastating case study in the malign effects of academic racial preferences. The University of California, Berkeley, followed the diversocrat playbook to the letter in admitting Kashawn Campbell, a South Central Los Angeles high-school senior, in 2012: It disregarded his level of academic preparation, parked him in the black dorm — the “African American Theme Program” — and provided him with a black-studies course.
The results were thoroughly predictable. After his first semester, reports the Times:
[Kashawn] had barely passed an introductory science course. In College Writing 1A, his essays — pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases — were so weak that he would have to take the class again.
His writing often didn’t make sense. He struggled to comprehend the readings for [College Writing] and think critically about the text.
“It took awhile for him to understand there was a problem,” [his instructor] said. “He could not believe that he needed more skills. He would revise his papers and each time he would turn his work back in having complicated it. The paper would be full of words he thought were academic, writing the way he thought a college student should write, using big words he didn’t have command of.”
His grade-point average was 1.7, putting him at risk of expulsion if he didn’t raise it by the end of the year. The one bright spot in his academic record? Why, African American Studies 5A, of course! Kashawn had received an A on an essay and a B on a midterm, the best grades of his freshman year:
Kashawn reveled in the class [a survey of black culture and race relations], in a way he hadn’t since high school. He would often be the first one to speak up in discussions, even though his points weren’t always the most sophisticated, said Gabrielle Williams, a doctoral student who helped teach the class.
He still had gaps in his knowledge of history. But, Williams said, “you could see how engaged he was, how much he loved being there.”
Did Kashawn’s good grades in African American Studies 5A mean that he had suddenly learned how to think and to write? Not at all. He was advancing little in his second go-round at expository writing: “On yet another failing essay, the instructor wrote how surprised she was at his lack of progress, especially, she noted, given the hours they’d spent going over his ‘extremely long, awkward and unclear sentences.’”
His (to him) unforeseen academic struggles took a psychological toll:
He had never felt this kind of failure, nor felt this insecure. . . . Each poor grade [was] another stinging punch bringing him closer to flunking out. None of the adults in his life knew the depth of his pain: not his professors, his counselors, any of the teachers at his old high school.
He tries to rally his spirits with heart-wrenching pathos: “‘I can do this! I can do this!’ he had written [in a diary]. ‘Let the studying begin! . . . It’s time for Kashawn’s Comeback!’”
A counselor in the campus psychologist’s office urged him to scale back his academic ambitions. “Maybe he didn’t have to be the straight-A kid he’d been in high school anymore,” the counselor advised him. This “be content with mediocrity” message is hardly a recipe for future success, but it sums up the attitude that many a struggling affirmative-action “beneficiary” has adopted to get through college.
The black-themed dorm and student center also operated exactly as one would expect, confirming their members’ belief in their own racial oppression:
“Sometimes we feel like we’re not wanted on campus,” Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dorm mates, all of them nodding in agreement. “It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.”
Of course, the only reason that Kashawn and many of his fellow dorm mates are at Berkeley is because the administration “wants” them so much, regardless of their chances of success. It is unlikely, however, that African American Studies 5A discussed the academic-achievement gap in Berkeley’s admissions between black, white, and Asian students. That gap, not racism, explains why Kashawn is not a sought-after addition to study groups. (Kashawn came to Berkeley through one of the University of California’s many desperate efforts to evade California’s ban on governmental racial preferences: an admissions guarantee for students in the top decile of their high school classes, regardless of their test scores or the caliber of their school.)
Kashawn is on tenterhooks waiting to learn if his second-semester grades will allow him to continue into sophomore year. Which course gave him an A–, to pull his GPA over the top? Hint: It wasn’t College Writing.
The Times could not have written a more resounding confirmation of mismatch theory if it had tried. (The paper’s motivations for the story remain mysterious, since the Times is conventionally liberal on race matters.) Mismatch theory, most recently expounded by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, is the most powerful critique of affirmative action yet developed, demonstrating empirically that students admitted to academic environments for which they are ill prepared learn less, and are less likely to pursue rigorous majors, than had they been enrolled in schools where their peers shared their level of academic preparation.
But the Times story conveys a subtler point as well: Racial preferences are not just ill advised, they are positively sadistic. Only the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty is served by such an admissions travesty. Preference practitioners are willing to set their “beneficiaries” up to fail and to subject them to possible emotional distress, simply so that the preference dispensers can look out upon their “diverse” realm and know that they are morally superior to the rest of society.
— Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and the author of Are Cops Racist?
Heather Mac Donald is a great reporter and analyst. Her reports on immigration and gang violence are the best out there.
So this kids butt is parked at the racist UC-Berkeley where he obviously did not belong instead of learning a trade?
This kid is not going to magically become something he isn’t. Just because his public school pretended he was a genius doesn’t make him one.
He should have been a Plumbers Assistant or something. Probably even be employed by now.
It's 2013 and there is a black dorm at Berkeley?
It takes a case study to confirm what most people know instinctively; that placing a poor student in an academically stringent arena, where he or she is doomed to fail, is of no benefit to anybody.
But somehow, the progs expect magic to occur, and our hapless underachiever will become a scholastic wunderkind overnight.
(sigh)
Sounds like Michelle Obama's thesis at Princeton!
In a sane world the high school that gave this boy A’s should be audited and the administration sacked.
He is learning a trade.
“Sometimes we feel like we’re not wanted on campus,” Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dorm mates, all of them nodding in agreement. “It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.”
The victimology runs deep. Incredibly sad. The race-baiters nave been extremely successful. If you fail at what you do or are dissatisfied of your station in life, it’s always somebody else’s fault. In this case, it’s the “racists” on campus.
“Sometimes we feel like we’re not wanted on campus,” Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dorm mates, all of them nodding in agreement. “It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.”
I had similar problems and I am White. I was ignorant of a lot of knowledge that others had already accumulated but not being of a “privileged” minority I had no one to blame but myself.
I had to earn my way through school....wonder who paid for Kashawn and his friends.
true
And like the commies of old, today's lefties think the same thing...entrance to good colleges is just a matter of money or who knows whom. They are oblivious to the fact that most minorities aren't in upper level colleges because they simply can't do the work. Never mind...stick them in anyway. And when they fail, scream racism.
The following anecdote attributed (perhaps apocryphally) to Abe Lincoln takes the form of a riddle:
q. How many legs does a horse have, if you call a tail a leg?
When someone replies “five” he is corrected with:
“No, it is still four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
And calling a black student Cal/Berkeley material does not make him so.
In grade school, we HAD to diagram sentences and do all the other writing and reading assignments in order to pass to the next grade. Failing a class was VERY much a possibility.
If schools have dropped THIS approach in favor of something ‘kinder’ for students... then they are just putting off the hard work, disappointment and emotional let-down to a later date.
The optimum time to learn these basics is in grade school and it is a tremendous disservice to young people (who ever they are) to pass students without an understanding of this.
pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases”
RACIST!
Simply being an intellectual Pygmy doesn’t nean another one of these low performers can’t grow up to be mayor of a big city, a state governor, a senator, US president or first lady.
Ultimately Lefties like BO and is ilk could not care less about real outcomes and results.
All that matters is rigid loyalty to the IDEOLOGY.
Marching lockstep with the IDEOLOGY is the true test of Intellectualism. When results don't meet expectations, it is not the fault of the IDEOLOGY. The blame will be placed at the feet of some convenient scapegoat.
The IDEOLOGY and it's destructive manifestations will live on.
The only absolute is that EVERYONE must CONFORM to the IDEOLOGY. There is no room for dissenters.
There are many many more IDEOLOGICAL trains speeding down the tracks. Many of us see the light and hear the horn...but we are not allowed to get off the tracks.
A lot of blacks have a vastly-inflated sense of their personal abilities. This is why so many cry racism at the drop of a hat. They are not playing mind games. They do in fact think that they are putting out superior effort and results, and any failure to reward them for these outstanding efforts constitutes racism.
The UK's left-wing Guardian on the phenomenon, back in 2000:
The poor academic and economic achievement of black people is often blamed on low self-esteem, the result of discrimination from birth and endless negative stereotypes. But the most definitive study on the subject now contradicts this belief: black teenagers do not have lower self-esteem than whites, but higher. Anti-racism campaigners claim that the report suggests there is even more discrimination against blacks than previously thought.In an article in the US journal Psychological Bulletin, an African-American psychologist shows that whatever the effects of racism, poor self-esteem is not one of them. Except for the very young and very rich, blacks have higher self-esteem than their white counterparts, she demonstrates, and have had for years.
I visited China in 2001, the guest of a business acquaintance. He took me to a factory he owned; it occupied one floor of a building that had been erected during the Mao era.
No elevators. We started climbing stairs to get to the third floor, and I almost immediately tripped and fell. Puzzled, I looked closely at the stairway. Every step was a different height! Some were ~2 inches, some were ~3 inches, a couple were ~4 inches!
I asked him how this came to be. He told me that the building was built by “Peoples Construction Crews” or something like that. Mao believed that college-educated architects were counterrevolutionary, and so tens of thousands of buildings of that era were designed by “The People.” The stairway was one result.
I have to say the building seemed to me to be basically sound; perhaps a little old-fashioned in its over-solidity. I didn’t observe any other deficiencies.
Maybe just the stairways were made by The People.
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