Posted on 07/04/2018 8:09:39 AM PDT by Kaslin
Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, has come under attack and scathing criticism because she dared criticize the school's racial preferences program. In an interview with Brown University economist Glenn Loury, discussing affirmative action, Wax mentioned how racial preferences hinder the ability of blacks to succeed academically by admitting them into schools at which they are in over their heads academically. At UPenn's seventh-ranked law school, Wax said, she doesn't think that she has ever seen a black law student graduate in the top quarter of his class, and "rarely" is a black student in the top half.
That got her into deep trouble. UPenn students and faculty members charged her with racism. UPenn Law School Dean Ted Ruger stripped Wax of her duty of teaching her mandatory first-year class on civil procedures. I'm guessing that UPenn's law faculty members know Wax's statement is true but think it was something best left unsaid in today's racially charged climate. Ruger might have refuted Wax's claim. He surely has access to student records. He might have listed the number of black law students who were valedictorians and graduated in the top 10 percent of their class. He rightfully chose not to -- so as to not provide evidence for Wax's claim.
One study suggests that Wax is absolutely right about academic mismatch. In the early 1990s, the Law School Admission Council collected 27,000 law student records, representing nearly 90 percent of accredited law schools. The study found that after the first year, 51 percent of black law students ranked in the bottom tenth of their class, compared with 5 percent of white students. Two-thirds of black students were in the bottom fifth of their class. Only 10 percent of blacks were in the top half of their class. Twenty-two percent of black students in the LSAC database hadn't passed the bar exam after five attempts, compared with 3 percent of white test takers.
The University of Pennsylvania controversy highlights something very important to black people and the nation. The K-12 education that most blacks receive is grossly fraudulent. Most predominately black schools are costly yet grossly inferior to predominately white schools and are in cities where blacks hold considerable political power, such as Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia. In these and other cities, it's not uncommon for there to be high schools where less than 17 percent of the students test proficient in reading, and often not a single student in such schools tests proficient in math. Nonetheless, many receive high school diplomas.
It's inconceivable that college administrators are unaware that they are admitting students who are ill-prepared and have difficulty performing at the college level. There's no way that four or five years of college can repair the academic damage done to black students throughout their 13 years of primary and secondary education. Partial proof is black student performance at the postgraduate level, such as in law school. Their disadvantage is exaggerated when they are admitted to prestigious Ivy League law schools. It's as if you asked a trainer to teach you how to box and the first fight he got you was with Anthony Joshua or Floyd Mayweather. You might have the potential to ultimately be a good boxer, but you're going to get your brains beaten out before you learn how to bob and weave.
The fact that black students have low class rankings at such high-powered law schools as UPenn doesn't mean that they are stupid or uneducable. It means that they've been admitted to schools where they are in over their heads. To admit these students makes white liberals feel better about themselves. It also helps support the jobs of black and white university personnel in charge of diversity and inclusion. The question for black people is whether we can afford to have the best of our youngsters demeaned, degraded and possibly destroyed to make white liberals feel better about themselves. You might ask, "Williams, without affirmative action, what would the University of Pennsylvania Law School do about diversity and inclusion?" I'd say that's UPenn's problem.
Colleges are happy to take gov’t loan & grant money for as long as they can fill the seats.
She will find there is no free speech and expression in academe.
“The K-12 education that most blacks receive is grossly fraudulent. Most predominately black schools are costly yet grossly inferior to predominately white schools and are in cities where blacks hold considerable political power, such as Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia. In these and other cities, it’s not uncommon for there to be high schools where less than 17 percent of the students test proficient in reading, and often not a single student in such schools tests proficient in math. Nonetheless, many receive high school diplomas.”
Cue up any commentary by the NEA about this. Listen for the crickets. Take DC for instance, where spending in the public schools is the highest per student in the country. Results are poor. None of the elected bums would even consider putting their kids in public school. Yet all we hear from the educational unions is we need higher pay. IMO, culture plays a far larger roll in education achievement than teacher pay.
It's not just the schools, it's the over-all culture. By puberty, kids are most influenced by their peers. If their peers don't think school is important, they won't either. Inertia grips the entire student body and even if you swapped teachers with the best "white" school in the state, you wouldn't get that much difference in result.
"where less than 17 percent of the students test proficient in reading" and there is absolutely no excuse for this.
it doesn't take a computer or ANY technology at all for that matter to teach reading!
simple newspapers will do the job and give a good range of vocabulary at the same time
there are only two possibilities at play here, they simply do not want to and will not learn(in which case the teachers cannot make them learn), or the teachers should all be fired
The teacher cannot undo in 6 hours five days a week what is done to/around the child the rest of the time.
(Insert Here) Studies Programs in the Sociology departments need warm bodies because apparently very little of their published “research” is ever cited. Without warm bodies no one would ever know they existed. Without those warm bodies writing yet more published articles that no one will ever read in turn teaching even more warm bodies in turn how do the same how will anyone ever know someone knows they knew they existed?
It all comes down to incitement to uncitement. Exciteing, isn’t it?
... I sense a heart wrenching PSA in this ... is Sally Struthers available?
holy moly. out of curiosity, I looked up Amy Wax’s U Penn faculty profile. This gal is pretty impressive. Yale undergrad, Harvard med school, Columbia law. A former neurologist, she switched to the law early in the med career and had a substantial appellate practice. Says she’s argued 15 cases before the SCOTUS, and was an assistant SG of the US from 88-94 (obviously in both Bush and Clinton administrations).
She has written on lots of sensitive topics, including welfare and same sex marriage.
I don’t know....just looking at her...she looks like she might be a bit, ahem, libertarian. But the point is that she is a serious scientist, a serious lawyer, a serious scholar who has earned the right to speak freely about whatever the hell she wants; least of all should she be harassed for simply speaking the truth (noting, as Williams does, that they don’t care to refute her facts, but just to harass her).
This woman is obviously not a racist. She’s a serious academic. She doesn’t deserve to be shouted down by political correctness gone completely radical.
Here’s an excellent op ed that Wax recently wrote. I’m afraid with stuff like this, she’s going to be run out of U Penn on a rail:
you don’t need an education to have a career in welfare queendom or street drug dealing. period.dot
Eliminate welfare, legalize and tax the hell out of mj. Truancy rates and poor performance instantly plummets.
Not only is truth not a defense, it’s the corpus of the offense.
Seriously, Dude? You may need to change your FR name. Making declarations about people based purely on your interpretations of their appearance is the stuff of the Left. You're better than that.
Yes. She is more concerned about facts than pushing an agenda. That is a sign of a true academic.
I always thought it was more logical and fairer to improve black education from the ground up at the elementary level than throw people in over their heads at a higher level.
They will never say it's because the schools blacks tend to come from are industrial-strength craptacular and graduate ill-prepared students AND because modern black culture, as a whole, does not value education like others do.
Like it or not, they don't. Their schools are lousy and their culture is destructive to academic aspirations i.e. "acting white."
Everyone knows it, but we're living in an emperor has no clothes society these days.
Watch her interview on C-Span. It’s from a couple of weeks ago. She talks about the career switch and what’s happened to her in the halls of Penn.
Amazing woman.
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