<p>Simba, I read most of your 50 pages from that link.</p>
<p>If I get into Princeton and end up in the bottom third of the class, that’s not a good thing? I should have gone somewhere else?</p>
<p>You do realize that it is going to take generations to solve the racist problems in this country, not years? So when you measure results in short increments these results may not tell the story. You do realize that?</p>
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<p>Has enough progress been made? Clearly not–but progress toward providing equality in the US is glacially moving forward.</p>
<p>dstark: so you do not have any data that race based AA has resulted in any measurable goals. Almost 2 generation of AA is not a short interval of time.</p>
<p>“You do realize that it is going to take generations to solve the racist problems in this country”</p>
<p>Race based admissions and the racist problems are two different issues.</p>
<p>Simba, I am looking at your data. 50 pages. I don’t come to the same conclusions.</p>
<p>“Almost 2 generation of AA is not a short interval of time.”</p>
<p>Yes it is.</p>
<p>People in power with racist thoughts are going to have to die before racism really ends.</p>
<p>“Race based admissions and the racist problems are two different issues”</p>
<p>One is a subset of the other.</p>
<p>If I get into Princeton and end up in the bottom third of the class, that’s not a good thing? I should have gone somewhere else?</p>
<p>“If I get into Princeton and end up in the bottom third of the class, that’s not a good thing? I should have gone somewhere else?”</p>
<p>Perhaps yes, you should have. If at other place you could be at the top of your class. At Princeton you are at academically mismatched school.</p>
<p>Simba, do people ask you which percentage of the class you graduated in?</p>
<p>If I don’t go into academia am I failure?</p>
<p>Am I expected to do as well as others if they have had 12 years of better preparation than I have? Should I be measured the same as the students who have had better opportunities? Does my outcome have to be as “good” as the others for me to have had a good learning experience?</p>
<p>Do students benefit if they sit in a classroom with students from different backgrounds and experiences?</p>
<p>Has your culture and identity been destroyed by others? Have you been demonfied? </p>
<p>Have you ever read anything by John Ogbu?</p>
<p>Have you ever seen the video, “The Color of Fear”?</p>
<p>dstark: You are becoming emotional. Let us stop.</p>
<p>I’m not emotional at all. </p>
<p>Have you ever seen the video “the Color of Fear”?</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.stirfryseminars.com/pages/coloroffear.htm[/url]”>http://www.stirfryseminars.com/pages/coloroffear.htm</a></p>
<p>You are interested in AA. I think you may like it.</p>
<p>No I have not seen the video. I do not have to see the video. I accept the fact that racial problems/tension between blacks/white, blacks/asian, blacks/hispanics exist in every day life. However, as I have stated that has nothing to do with race based admissions. You may think that it ‘fixes’ the problems of the past injustice. But, the reality is they don’t. When the SAT average of middle class black kids from an educated family is less than the average of poor white or asian kids, something else beside racism is at play. Rewarding lower academic performance with admissions to elite colleges will not solve the racial problems. Wouldn’t you agree that the scociety today does not tolerate overt form of racism? Isn’t that a progress?</p>
<p>“When the SAT average of middle class black kids from an educated family is less than the average of poor white or asian kids, something else beside racism is at play.” </p>
<p>If you saw the video, you wouldn’t be saying that. I think you would think differently. It sucks that the video is so much money.</p>
<p>I don’t think AA fixes past racial injustices, but it helps.</p>
<p>“Rewarding lower academic performance with admissions to elite colleges will not solve the racial problems”</p>
<p>What rewarding? You are so off track.</p>
<p>Does your daughter at Princeton feel the same way you do? I’m curious.</p>
<p>“Wouldn’t you agree that the scociety today does not tolerate overt form of racism? Isn’t that a progress?”</p>
<p>I’m sorry. I really don’t know how to answer these questions. We are not close to ending racism. </p>
<p>If you really have a chance to pick up the video in a library or a college, really watch it. You are interested in the subject matter.</p>
<p>Have a Happy Thanksgiving.</p>
<p>“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”</p>
<p>Martin Luther King, Aug 28th 1963 speaking at the Lincoln Memorial</p>
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I still can’t figure out the math that requires that every student everywhere is supposed to be in the top half.</p>
<p>calmom:</p>
<p>The article Simba linked indicated that employment opportunities tend to be better for one ranked higher at a particular tier college than if that person was lower ranked at a higher tier college.</p>
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<p>SAT averages are directly influenced by income…but that is not the full story. The full sotry is that SAT scores are directly influenced by generations of high income and education. Most of the wealthy AFAm families that I know (sorry anecdotal) do not have generations of high income and high education. Both of my grandfathers went to college at the turn of the 19th century. It isn’t that surprising that my boys tested well with minimal effort.</p>
<p>Interestingly, my husband’s family came out of abject poverty. Even though all the siblings had university educations, a few of them did not marry college educated spouses. All the families are middle class and higher but the non-college educated spouses had more difficulty providing stable homes. In one family, the children have done very well in school–but not nearly as well on the SATs as my boys–nearly 200 points lower in fact. In the other family, the SAT scores are 300 to 400 points below. The other spouses are clever and bright individuals but they do not have three generations of college education behind them. They are not as ardent about higher education as I am. </p>
<p>Asian families have worshipped higher education and prosperity for thousands of years. Their daily mythology is all about prosperity and wisdom.</p>
<p>When middle class black children have generations of wealth and education behind them and more than one or two black classmates in the chair beside them in honors classes, there will be a corresponding rise in SAT scores. So says me.</p>
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Very likely its the implicit cultural bias of the test itself.</p>
<p>That’s what I don’t get about this whole claim of “bias” against Asians because of their higher SAT scores. It seems to me that rather than suffering a disadvantage, they are at an advantage in the admissions process precisely because of their tendency to do well on one area where relatively little effort is expended (only a few hours spent during testing). </p>
<p>The SAT is only a small part of the admissions process, and it is given relatively low weight by admissions in part because it is so easily coachable, and in part because it has so little predictive value related to school performance. The argument about bias seems to me to be a demand that the colleges change their admission criteria to benefit a particular group that happens to test well… without regard to the other criteria that are important to admissions officers.</p>
<p>I’m not a fan of the test. I test well, but the fact that I test well is part of what makes me skeptical – because I have always tested better than I performed. My son tests well, but the story is the same… uneven performance. My daughter consistently tests below her level of performance – and I am very glad for her sake that the elite schools she applied to seem to have been paying more attention to her GPA and class rank than to the test scores. </p>
<p>Standardized tests are not all that useful because the testing situation is not at all similar to the academic context: on the standardized test, the student needs to make quick choices, thinking at a superficial level. In college, the expectation is to for deep thinking and exploration of a topic, and the environment is one which demands sustained effort. </p>
<p>Those of us who can breeze through a test often do not have the patience and stamina required to attend our classes regularly and keep up with all the readings – the standardized test format is one which rewards those of us who can take strategic short cuts (example: answer all the easy questions first, come back and do the hard ones; use strategic guesswork to choose the correct answers where we are unsure). We often can get away with similar short cuts in academia --I took many classes as an undergrad and in law school where I showed up only for the final exam and got A’s – but that doesn’t make us ideal students. </p>
<p>Of coure there are many students who are good at both… but you aren’t going to be able to know that from looking at the test score by itself. If the test score is below the level of actual performance, you’ve either got a kid who tests poorly or one who works very hard (or both) – and that kid is likely to do well in college. If the kid needs extra academic support, that kid is also likely to take advantage of available resources. If the test score is above the level of actual performance, there is a good chance that the kid may be prone to slacking off and may not be willing to put in the work required to keep up with the higher academic demands of college.</p>
<p>Cheers:</p>
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<p>You says right! For a very long time I have known that this issue is cultural, based upon a certain culturally ingrained sense of academic destiny. There are many reasons why black culture has pushed us toward academic failure, and these reasons are affecting even rich blacks. But I think the good news is that there are ways to counter them, to build black micro-cultures that short-circuit the general problems affecting us.</p>
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<p>Unless one has literally been living in the hole in the ground, Dr. King’s dream is still a dream deferred, because it has still not come to fuition. Perhaps you did not listen to any of the speeches that were recently given at the dedication of his memorial at the sme Lincoln memorial where he spoke in 1963.<br>
I will be the first to say that I am no fan of our president, however, even he knows that we are a long way from the dream becoming realized.</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/index.asp?layout=articleXml&xmlId=531249167[/url]”>http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/index.asp?layout=articleXml&xmlId=531249167</a></p>
<p>The pace of change is so much faster than most other nations, that is heartening. On the ground in the US however, the pace seems glacial, tiny steps decade by decade. Most disheartening, there are too many black men incarcerated for some portion of their lives. That has a huge effect on every young black male. Whatever they need to rise up above that grief, I say let’s try to give it to them. </p>
<p>sybbie…I loved Bernice King’s citation. </p>
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<p>Amen to that.</p>
<p>“it is a nice 50 page summary of what is wrong with the race based AA.”
For the record, I do not advocate either form of AA. My point was that given the current composition of the defenders of AA, SES-based AA is unlikely. That said, a good majority of Americans are against racial AA, and might support SES AA. However, as the Michigan case demonstrated, everyone who’s anyone in politics supports racial AA for some reason, even those whose constituents are against it, like the Republican Party.</p>
<p>“But AA is better than nothing as a tool of redressing past wrongs and paving way for the future.”
If redressing wrongs is taken to mean reducing and even eliminating the black-white gap, it hasn’t had much success. To be blunt, If it is taken to mean a system wherein blacks are given benefits at the expense of others, then it has.</p>
<p>“Harrison proposes that some time limit be set”
I consider this very unlikely, as the demands for (relatively) equal outcomes between the races, most notably in their presence in a given context being proportional to that amongst the general population, are strong. The black-white gap has shown little sign of abating, despite the growth of a black middle-class. Enough people cannot stomach the drastic reductions in minority presence that abolishing AA entails. Efforts at abolishing it either do not occur or are ‘half-assed,’ as in the case of the UC’s, which has begun to emphasize non-academic credentials to make minority admission easier. Not to say that the UC’s haven’t also blatantly violated prop. 209 as well(<a href=“http://home.sandiego.edu/~e_cook/analysis/RaceTriplesYourChances.html[/url]”>http://home.sandiego.edu/~e_cook/analysis/RaceTriplesYourChances.html</a> - an 0.9 Standard Deviation difference between Whites/Asians and Blacks/Hispanics, for the first class to be admitted supposedly without AA. oh, the title of that page is wrong - the the two groups have different averages, so it’s not merely a triple chance. An anonymous statistician analyzed those numbers and found that in the absence of preferences, only 1 or 2 of the 191-strong freshman med-school class would be black or Hispanic.).</p>
<p>“Whoever thinks admissions were based purely on merit before AA is delusional.”
It all depends where. It was at the City University of NY, “poor man’s Harvard,” the public college with the most nobel laureates among its alumni. It has since fallen tremendously in prestige, due to enacting open admissions, acquiescing to the demands of protestors. It probably was at the University of Chicago as well, which hadn’t any Jewish quotas.</p>
<p>“Now, maybe you have a disadvantaged group (Asians) and another disadvantaged group (African Americans). They both might be discriminated against, and the remedy is to hurt the more disadvantaged group.”
Li’s gone about this the wrong way. His chances of affecting change are much better if he concentrates on colleges prefrence for whites over Asians, ceterus paribus.</p>
<p>" one of the major benefits of AA is reducing the size and impact of a permanent underclass that is both very expensive to the state and taxpayers, and threatens the status quo."
The underclass isn’t quite in a position to benefit from AA; AA isn’t ‘jail to Yale.’</p>
<p>“You do realize that it is going to take generations to solve the racist problems in this country”
Saying a policy will “take generations” is a euphemism for “it has visibly failed.” So you’re falling back on “institutional racism,” a conspiracy theory with an academic facade. Ah, communism’s failing because the current generation is not truly in tune with the ideals of Marx; it will take generations for us to perfect communism. By failure I mean the ‘resilience’ of the black-white academic gap.</p>
<p>"If you saw the video, you wouldn’t be saying that. I think you would think differently. "
Movies are a propagandistic medium that play on the viewer’s emotions. It’s inappropiate for an empirical discussion.</p>
<p>Citation X, MLK was for AA, not that it says anything about AA. (For liberals, <a href=“http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/2/1/1359/58645[/url]”>http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/2/1/1359/58645</a> , for conservatives, <a href=“http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/epstein9.html[/url]”>http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/epstein9.html</a> )</p>
<p>“Their daily mythology is all about prosperity and wisdom.”
Isnt’ "Get Rich or Die Tryin’ " too?</p>
<p>"claim of “bias” against Asians "
The bias is, everything else equal, colleges prefer whites over Asians. The (tentative) evidence is a Princeton study (<a href=“Affirmative action in the United States - Wikipedia”>Affirmative action in the United States - Wikipedia; )</p>
<p>The SAT is not easily coachable ( <a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools; ) and has high predictivity ( "The corrected correlation of .76 that Ramist et al. (1994)
found when predicting first-year grades from SAT scores
and high school records is large (Cohen, 1977) - <a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools; p.32). The UC study that found a piddling r=.2 validity suffered from a major flaw, the failure to correct for restriction of range, as it only analyzed those admitted, and not also those it rejected. (An analogy I saw in a psychology textbook: Say you look at all football players, and you find a correlation between weight and tackling success. Then you take say, the top quarter by weight of football players, and find a correlation for that group. The second figure will be significantly smaller.)</p>
<p>I’d say more, but I fear the ‘prevailing structure of taboo’s’ guarantees that my message would be silenced by condemnations.</p>
<p>I haven’t lived or travelled in Africa (yet), so I do not know the historical mythology and culture of Africans as well as I know Asian culture–having lived in Asia. And, although I grew up in a suburb that is 39% black, I did not attend the public schools. I could only guess at the historical mythology of African Americans, but among my AfAmfriends, many of whom have more prestigious degrees and far more wealth, “Get rich or die tryin’” is NOT part of their family culture. From everything I have read and heard, “Get rich” is not historically a core African value, in fact. I tend to agree that Africans
M W Magoba UWSA</p>
<p>Among, my wealthy East and South East Asian friends, the daily rituals and superstitions about education and prosperity are well known and a constant source of amusement and discussion. Unlike western cultures, however, Asian cultures place equal importance on community over the individual, in other words, they are happy for the individual to rise to great heights as long as he or she shows devotion to the harmony of the community.</p>