Diversity For Dummies

In the latest head-scratching episode of Wrong Answers Only, the American Bar Association is contemplating eliminating the LSAT as a requirement for law school admission. The "logic" is the usual - not enough People of Color are scoring well enough to get into law schools, therefore the test and the process must be racist.

You've heard it all before. If the racial percentages of a certain group or category don't match that of society as a whole, that's "proof" of systemic or structural or [insert woke adjective] racism. This is the ‘disparate outcome’ test that’s the favorite cudgel of woke-activists and other race racketeers.

Never consideration of other factors, of course, because reinforcing the predetermined conclusion is all that matters.

Before I get into those other factors, consider what dumbing down admission standards for schools that provide professional training in fields such as the law, medicine, science, and engineering will mean. At least one of two things becomes inevitable. Either some of those underprepared or under-qualified students (not the same thing) will fail out, or schools will have to dumb down their curricula and testing thresholds in order to keep those students from failing.

The latter is already the way, and the trend will continue. This means our next generations of lawyers, doctors, engineers, and the like will be less well-trained than current and previous generations. While there's much that is rote in those professions, there's a fair bit that isn't, and poorly prepared lawyers and doctors and engineers will translate to more harm and more lives ruined or shortened or lost. How is society served by weakening the pool of important service providers? While top performers will still exist, those "wouldn't have gotten their degree but for weakened standards" people will end up being relied on by people for things that are vital to their lives. The market will inevitably sort those weaker professionals - there's no woke remedy for such market forces - and society's poor will end up getting ever-shittier service by people who got crappy educations.

What's the point of all this? If it's about remedying the disservice "society" has done to minorities, this is exactly the wrong approach.

Instead, the aforementioned "other factors" should be addressed, rather than declaring racism and curing it with quotas. The biggie is the failure of the public education system in this country to properly prepare those minority kids for college, and by extension for graduate work. That failure, so prevalent in big cities' inner city schools, falls squarely at the feet of the education establishment, including the bureaucracies and their bosom buddies the teachers' unions. A tripling in inflation-adjusted per-student spending across the past six decades has produced no measurable improvement in results, so it’s not about money. Charter schools on the other hand, which draw randomly from the same populace that's otherwise stuck with the underperforming schools, and are less entrenched in the broken system and its broken ways, have produced drastically better results. The conclusion is obvious - the public education system, not racism, is to blame for minority students' relatives poor testing and tertiary school acceptance rates.

Since that system has been run by the Left's Best-and-Brightest for all that time, however, this conclusion cannot be uttered, because it would be a complete condemnation of over half a century of progressivism in education.

So, instead, they cover their decades of failure by screaming racism, social-promoting the kids they've done such terrible disservice to, and dumbing down the entire educational system. That dumbing-down will carry into society at large, with predictably negative consequences for all within it.

The rest of the world isn't going to commit to this form of societal suicide, and across time, such antics will be a major contributor to the sunsetting of America's status as global leader.

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A footnote. Today's title isn't a great fit for the material, but it was too snarky to pass up. The dummies are not the kids who aren’t getting into law school, they are the people who think that reducing or eliminating objective standards are the remedy. There is a tragic reality in all this: there are smart kids are trapped in lousy schools by the very people who claim to be their champions. Being underprepared is not the same as being dumb, and just as there is a spectrum of intelligence in the student body of every successful schools, such exists in poor and failing schools as well. Putting bright kids who've suffered through years of poor teaching and insufficient curricula into high-demand degree programs is setting them up for failure, and such failure will do lasting harm to their self-awareness and self-esteem. Matter of fact, the real racism in all this is the presumption that those minority kids need the system dumbed down for them to succeed.

Underrepresentation of blacks and latinos in high-achievement educational segments such as law schools can't be remedied with quotas or by dumbing down the admission requirements. The first order of business must be to fix the deeply flawed public education system. There is an at-hand remedy: school choice. Whether it be charters, vouchers, or full-on backpack funding, introducing competitive forces into a monopolistic mess is how the mess slowly gets un-messed. The biggest obstacle, of course, are the teachers' unions and all those therein who put employees ahead of customers. That is, teachers, administrators, support staff, and everyone else who pays union dues above students. The consumers, or in this case their proxies, i.e. the parents of students, must demand their representatives in government stand up to the destroyers of their kids' futures.

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Peter