Keeping Georgetown Law School Profs from Talking About Black Students' Low Grades Helps No One

Townhall.com ^ | March 17, 2021 | John R. Lott, jr

[Kaslin]

Some simple, obvious facts are too politically incorrect for academics to state publicly. Georgetown University just fired law professor Sandra Sellers and forced out professor David Batson. Sellers' offense? "I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks," Sellers' said in discussion with another professor at the end of a Zoom call.

Batson's offense? He didn't condemn the statement, but instead sympathized with Sellers’ concerns. “What drives me crazy is… my own unconscious biases playing out in the scheme of things” might be responsible for their poor scores, he said. The logic is that blacks do poorly in college because of professors' biases.

Georgetown Law Dean Bill Treanor said he was "appalled" by these statements, but all academics know that this is true. 

I held teaching or research positions at many universities – the Wharton Business School, University of Chicago, UCLA, Yale, Stanford, and Rice -- and I have heard these concerns raised many times. I have listened to even the most liberal professors make the same statements as Batson and Sellers.

But the left has only itself to blame for the harm that affirmative action in academia does to black students. For decades, black law school students' LSAT scores have regularly been much lower than those of whites or Asians. At the University of Chicago Law School, I heard faculty say that over several decades there was only one time when the highest black LSAT score was above the lowest white score.

The purpose of standardized tests is to predict how well students will do in college and law school. So guess what? Students with much lower scores than other students don't do well. Some of the students are so overwhelmed with the material that they get little out of their classes. Others switch to softer majors that don't prepare them well for successful careers after college. Still others drop out with such low grades that they can’t get admitted to other schools that might be more at their level.

When I was on the Wharton Business School’s faculty in the early 1990s, one of the most shocking things that I learned was that only 26 blacks in the country that year had scored above 700 on the math section of the SAT. Only 64 scored above 700 on the verbal part of the test. The average entering undergraduate at Wharton had an average SAT score in the mid-1,400s, but while Wharton ideally wanted a hundred black students admitted each year, there weren't many in the country who had scored over 1400 on their SATs. Wharton is competing against many other top schools, so the only way of accepting more blacks into its ranks is by dramatically reducing its standards of admissions. 

Schools have tried to give a helping hand to these students, but with little success. When I taught at UCLA's business school, special summer sessions were set up for minorities to bring them up to speed with the other students. But one summer-long course couldn't make up for the skill gaps.

This affirmative action has caused major changes in how colleges operate. For example, students are no longer failed out of school the way that they were in the 1960s. If they were, most of the students who flunkout would be black. Have you ever wondered why colleges report SAT and ACT test scores as ranges from the 25th to the 75th percentile? Why not from the 5th percentile to the 95th? The 25th percentile cutoff conveniently hides the low scores of affirmative action students.

Political pressure has gradually corrupted standardized testing. When the SAT started, the goal was to design a test that would best predict student performance in college. However, over time, test questions were excluded if minorities or women tended not to do well on them. If women did relatively poorly on the SAT History subject questions that contained dates, dates were excluded. If blacks or women did relatively poorly on certain types of Math or English questions, the College Board replaced them with ones on which they did relatively better. That sealed the fate of SAT analogy questions such as "warm is to hot, as amusing is to hilarious."

Some state legislatures ban public universities from engaging in affirmative action, so colleges resort to other tricks. For example, instead of relying on standardized tests, they simply admit the top 5% or 10% of their high school classes. Since some schools are overwhelmingly black or Hispanic, this ensures admission of certain percentages of minorities. But it’s not a good way of measuring academic ability. After all, the 25th-ranked student at one school might be smarter than the top student at another school.

The University of California and University of Texas systems are abandoning standardized tests in admissions, which only means more randomness in who gets in. Many smart students lose out. 

The fault doesn’t lie with the universities. The fault lies with horribly performing public K-12 schools — a result of protecting teacher unions from competition. Hoping that colleges can make up for this damage is irresponsible.

Firing Sellers and Batson won't solve problems, but it will make everyone afraid to talk about them. The real losers will be black students.

[ClearCase_guy]

Firing Sellers and Batson won't solve problems, but it will make everyone afraid to talk about them. The real losers will be black students.

I can imagine a CNN headline: "John Lott calls black students 'losers'" which will be followed by demands that he be cancelled and banned from all public forums.

[newfreep]

>"The fault doesn’t lie with the universities. The fault lies with horribly performing public K-12 schools"<

The actual "fault" is the absolute failure of black culture.

That the "media & culture" bombards us with the myth of how wonderful & great the black culture is in America speaks volumes of the Goebbels propaganda machine despite the historical reality.

93% black homicides are black-on-black
80% black babies born into fatherless homes
25 Million black babies murdered, dismembered & organs harvested for sale by PlannedButcherhood in black
neighborhoods Education is frowned on in black neighborhoods

Reality101:

[newfreep]

I missed a line break....it should read:

93% black homicides are black-on-black
80% black babies born into fatherless homes
25 Million black babies murdered, dismembered & organs harvested for sale by PlannedButcherhood in black neighborhoods
Education is frowned upon in black neighborhoods

[euram]

Average black IQ is 85. Average white IQ is 100.

Headstart, and all the other attempts to change that haven’t helped.

But, you’re not allowed to even think that there is a difference.

[Liz]

Georgetown conferring law degrees on those that dont measure up is appalling.

Even more scary.....Georgetown conferring medical degrees on the unqualified.

They are out there in our hospitals, treating our families, prescribing meds, performing surgery.

[Jewbacca]

I’m surprised that book hasn’t been quietly banned.

[Mouton]

Come on diversity is our strength. Meld 100 with 85 and we get 185 as the fable would have us believe.

[rarestia]

The entire “unconscious bias” movement is an effort to force (mostly) whites to contort factual assessment into a feeling of regret for even thinking the facts could be true.

I don’t look at a black man and think, “I’m smarter than him.” Quite the contrary, most blacks I pass in the grocery store or WalMart are going about their day, same as me. I don’t pay them mind at all, if I’m being honest. They’re just another human being living their life.

Why should I commit any brain power to that person simply because they’re black? I thought the whole civil rights movement was to NOT judge people by the color of their skin?

Further, by forcing anyone to look at race through this lens, you’re necessarily introducing those pesky little facts such as incarceration rates, out-of-wedlock birthrates, and fatherless homes, which are all writ large not only in statistics but in their own world of entertainment and media! So I’m suddenly supposed to just ignore that but still pay them mind for the color of their skin? How is that not racist?

[Varda]

The fault doesn't lie with K-12 (although it doesn't help). As he said SAT scores predict who will do well in college. There is a one to one relationship between those groups that have high illegitimacy and those that have low test scores.

[Blennos]

Headstart, and all the other attempts to change that haven’t helped.

They could not help. It is a matter of hardware. On average, a tortoise is never going to run faster than a hare. But, of course, this is a verboten topic.

[Liz]

And it's going to get worse----forget teaching academics.

Educators have plans to inculcate kids about housing rights, eviction, redlining, police abuses, urban pollution, and all of the other systems that harm the lives of Black people, in the hope that theirs will be the generation that fixes those problems.

The agit-prop is "When we say Black lives matter, how are we articulating that in rooms and institutions that govern people’s lives?"

[I want the USA back]

So, adjusting their test scores hasn’t helped. Giving them free tuition didn’t make them smart. Pretending they passed when they failed hasn’t raised their IQ. Allowing them to falsely accuse any White of anything hasn’t improved race relations.

Firing profs for saying the truth is stupid and means that the colleges are furiously trying to cover up the truth and will fire anyone who reveals the truth they are hiding.

[newfreep]

Perhaps "they" believe by ignoring it, the information will be ignored by the masses.

[patriotspride]

Barry O a prime example of non teleprompter verbal skills.

Of course he would blame it on his white oppression of him and his preferred ethnicity

[cnsmom]

This is like out running a bear the left will just destroy another identity group to save the black students. I suspect female students will be sacrificed for this

[USS Alaska]

Firing Sellers and Batson won't solve problems, but it will make everyone afraid to talk about them. The real losers will be black students.

My relatively new next door neighbors are a young black couple and just had their first baby.

I met them before they bought the house and he asked me about the local school system and about local issues, fire department, EMS, police etc.

They spent many months and dollars doing a total remodel of the house and it looks great.

The father told me the other day, that he and his wife decided that when their son is school age, they are sending him to the Catholic School {a least through grade school} even though we have a fairly decent public school system, the teachers are unionized and they are not fully open {like the Catholic Schools are}.

If I were a young parent and saw what is going on with this hoax and the way the public union teachers are avoiding teaching 5 days a week, I'd probably do the same thing.

This young black baby is going to have a tremendous advantage in life, he will be called names because he has two parents that live together, work, both have parents that live together and work and visit their children and grandson.

I don't know what this kid's IQ will be, but he will be able to read and write, because there is a family structure supporting him.

I think it will be called, "Parent Privilege".

[linMcHlp]

Good story; tx.

[the_individual2014]

Maybe,

But I do not have any low IQ people in my family, plenty of tech and college grads and some who are high GPA achievers. I was not the best academic for a times I didn’t care about school at times or too much of an overthinker when it came to math, but I work in the IT field, a field that requires a certain amount of brain power, maybe I was lucky.

[Lurker]

“ I’m surprised that book hasn’t been quietly banned.”

The author was viciously attacked when he tried to speak.

L