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<p>I don’t know about that - it’s no more of a generalization than saying that smokers have worse health than non-smokers. Obviously that’s not to say that EVERY smoker has worse health than EVERY non-smoker. You could smoke several packs a day and still live to be over 90 (I know a guy who did that). You could never smoke, exercise constantly, and still die of a heart attack in your 20’s (I know a woman who this sadly happened to). But * in general*, smokers suffer from worse health than do nonsmokers.</p>
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<p>Forget about the Ivies or other elite schools. Look, in this country, if you have a work ethic, you can get into and graduate from some college. There are over 2500 4-year colleges and universities in this country; surely, if you have a decent work ethic, you can find at least one of them who will take you and where you can successfully complete a degree. And by doing so, you are already exceeding the national average of educational achievement. Only 27% of all Americans age 25 and up even have a college degree. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/001863.html[/url]”>http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/001863.html</a></p>
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<p>Look, what do you want me to say? Life is not fair. I wish I was 6-foot, 5-inches tall, looked like Brad Pitt, had the athletic ability of LeBron James, the body of Schwarzenegger, and the natural intelligence of Einstein. But I don’t. Some people are born with better genes or in better straits than others. That’s not fair, but that’s life.</p>
<p>What we can offer is the opportunity to improve your station in life through hard work. Look, I agree that if you’re born poor then you have a tougher row to hoe, just like if you’re born short, fat, and ugly (not speaking from personal experience, I’m just using that as an example), then you similarly have a tougher row to hoe. But you can still accomplish things through hard work and good attitudes. </p>
<p>As a case in point, consider the history of Dunbar High School, a public black high school in Washington DC back in the days of segregation. Blacks in those days still suffered from Jim Crow laws and pervasive racism throughout the country, yet Dunbar graduates evidently did quite well for themselves.</p>
<p>Back in 1899, in Washington, D. C., there were four academic public high schools-- one black and three white. In standardized tests given that year, students in the black high school averaged higher test scores than students in two of the three white high schools.
This was not a fluke. It so happens that I have followed 85 years of the history of this black high school-- from 1870 to 1955 --and found it repeatedly equalling or exceeding national norms on standardized tests. In the 1890s, it was called The M Street School and after 1916 it was renamed Dunbar High School but its academic performances on standardized tests remained good on into the mid-1950s.
When I first published this information in 1974, those few educators who responded at all dismissed the relevance of these findings by saying that these were “middle class” children and therefore their experience was not “relevant” to the education of low-income minority children. Those who said this had no factual data on the incomes or occupations of the parents of these children-- and I did.
The problem, however, was not that these dismissive educators did not have evidence. The more fundamental problem was that they saw no need for evidence. According to their dogmas, children who did well on standardized tests were middle class. These children did well on such tests, therefore they were middle class.
Lack of evidence is not the problem. There was evidence on the occupations of the parents of the children at this school as far back in the early 1890s. As of academic year 1892-93, there were 83 known occupations of the parents of the children attending The M Street School. Of these occupations, 51 were laborers and one was a doctor. That doesn’t sound very middle class to me.
Over the years, a significant black middle class did develop in Washington and no doubt most of them sent their children to the M Street School or to Dunbar High School, as it was later called. But that is wholly different from saying that most of the children at that school came from middle-class homes.
During the later period, for which I collected data, there were far more children whose mothers were maids than there were whose fathers were doctors. For many years, there was only one academic high school for blacks in the District of Columbia and, as late as 1948, one-third of all black youngsters attending high school in Washington attended Dunbar High School. So this was not a “selective” school in the sense in which we normally use that term-- there were no tests to take to get in, for example-- even though there was undoubtedly self-selection in the sense that students who were serious went to Dunbar and those who were not had other places where they could while away their time, without having to meet high academic standards. (A vocational high school for blacks was opened in Washington in 1902).
A spot check of attendance records and tardiness records showed that The M Street School at the turn of the century and Dunbar High School at mid-century had less absenteeism and less tardiness than the white high schools in the District of Columbia at those times. The school had a tradition of being serious, going back to its founders and early principals.
Among these early principals was the first black woman to receive a college degree in the United States-- Mary Jane Patterson from Oberlin College, class of 1862. At that time, Oberlin had different academic curriculum requirements for women and men. Latin, Greek and mathematics were required in “the gentlemen’s course,” as it was called, but not in the curriculum for ladies. Miss Patterson, however, insisted on taking Latin, Greek, and mathematics anyway. Not surprisingly, in her later 12 years as principal of the black high school in Washington during its formative years, she was noted for “a strong, forceful personality,” for "thoroughness,’ and for being “an indefatigable worker.” Having this kind of person shaping the standards and traditions of the school in its early years undoubtedly had something to do with its later success.
Other early principals included the first black man to graduate from Harvard, class of 1870. Four of the school’s first eight principals graduated from Oberlin and two from Harvard. Because of restricted academic opportunities for blacks, Dunbar had three Ph.Ds among its teachers in the 1920s.
One of the other educational dogmas of our times is the notion that standardized tests do not predict future performances for minority children, either in academic institutions or in life. Innumerable scholarly studies have devastated this claim intellectually, though it still survives and flourishes politically.
But the history of this black high school in Washington likewise shows a pay-off for solid academic preparation and the test scores that result from it. Over the entire 85-year history of academic success of this school, from 1870 to 1955, most of its 12,000 graduates went on to higher education. This was very unusual for either black or white high-school graduates during this era. Because these were low-income students, most went to a local free teachers college but significant numbers won scholarships to leading colleges and universities elsewhere.
Some M Street School graduates began going to Harvard and other academically elite colleges in the early twentieth century. As of 1916, there were nine black students, from the entire country, attending Amherst College. Six were from the M Street School. During the period from 1918 to 1923, graduates of this school went on to earn 25 degrees from Ivy League colleges, Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan. Over the period from 1892 to 1954, Amherst admitted 34 graduates of the M Street School and Dunbar. Of these, 74 percent graduated and more than one-fourth of these graduates were Phi Beta Kappas.
No systematic study has been made of the later careers of the graduates of this school. However, when the late black educator Horace Mann Bond studied the backgrounds of blacks with Ph.D.s, he discovered that more of them had graduated from M Street-Dunbar than from any other black high school in the country.
The first blacks to graduate from West Point and Annapolis also came from this school. So did the first black full professor at a major university (Allison Davis at the University of Chicago). So did the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, the first black elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction, and the discoverer of a method for storing blood plasma. During World War II, when black military officers were rare, there were more than two dozen graduates of M Street or Dunbar High School holding ranks ranging from major to brigadier general.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html[/url]”>http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html</a></p>
<p>Or similarly, if poverty is such a debiliating factor, then why is it that so many immigrants, who generally themselves start off poor, tend to do unusually well? As a case in point, consider the economic performance of recent black immigrants from the West Indies or Africa vs. African-Americans. Most of those immigrants would be considered “poor” by American standards as the standard of living in the West Indies and Africa are much poorer than is so the US, and yet they tend to do relatively well for themselves.</p>
<p>*As one small example, a study published last year indicated that most of the black alumni of Harvard were from either the West Indies or Africa, or were the children of West Indian or African immigrants. These people are the same race as American blacks, who greatly outnumber either or both.
*</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006608[/url]”>http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006608</a></p>
<p>*Immigrants from Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and the Bahamas have been coming to the U.S. in significant numbers since the turn of the century, but in the past 15 years there has been an even stronger surge. From 1961 to 1970, 134,000 immigrants arrived from the West Indies. From 1971 to 1980, that number more than doubled. The number of African blacks coming to the U.S. has also doubled, from 7,000 in 1976 to 15,000 last year. Since 1969 blacks from the West Indies and Africa have accounted for slightly less than 10% of all immigration to the U.S. As a group, these newcomers have already surpassed the living standard of native American blacks.</p>
<p>West Indians have long produced a disproportionate share of black American success stories. Their average family income is now 40% higher than that of all blacks in the U.S., and the percentage who are professionals (9%) is equal to that of native-born blacks. Says Dr. Asa Hilliard, an educational psychologist at Georgia State University: “Immigrants from the Caribbean are, overwhelmingly, the most successful black immigrant group, both politically and economically.”*</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,959569,00.html[/url]”>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,959569,00.html</a></p>
<p>None of this is to say that poverty and accompanying social pathologies don’t matter. Of course they do. But so do attitudes and culture. Immigrants (of all races) in particular tend to have relatively little wealth, yet tend to enjoy remarkable academic success, because they have strong attitudes in favor of hard work and education that, frankly, a lot of native-born Americans (of all races) lack.</p>