Back By Popular Demand

I periodically re-read Thomas Sowell, the former Stanford professor and prolific author whose works on Affirmative Action should be required reading in government civil rights agencies and in corporate HR departments.

Here, as a re-posting, is one of his speeches on race, culture, and equality. An excerpt:

Back in 1899, when the schools of Washington, D.C. were racially segregated and discrimination was rampant, there were four academic high schools in the city-- three white and one black. When standardized tests were given that year, the black academic high school scored higher than two of the three white academic high schools.6 Today, exactly a century later, even setting such a goal would be considered hopelessly utopian. Nor was this a fluke. That same high school was scoring at or above the national average on IQ tests during the 1930s and 1940s.7 Yet its physical plant was inadequate and its average class size was higher than that in the city's white high schools.

Today, that same school has a much better physical plant and per-pupil expenditures in the District of Columbia are among the highest in the nation. But the students' test scores are among the lowest. Nor was this school unique in having had higher academic achievements during a period when it seemingly lacked the prerequisites of achievement and yet fell far behind in a later period when these supposed prerequisites were more plentiful.