Ramblings

by Allan C. Brownfeld

      Allan C. Brownfeld is our correspondent covering issues in Washington D.C.

Attack on the SAT: A Classic Case of Killing the Messenger

      The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) is under attack, largely because minority students do not do well in these tests and, as a result, fare poorly in gaining merit-based acceptances at competitive colleges and universities.
      In a move that has created great controversy within higher education, University of California president Richard C. Atkinson has asked the university's academic senate to discard the SAT as a basic element in determining which high school students should be accepted to the University. Atkinson wants the nation's largest university system to take a more "comprehensive" and "holistic" approach to evaluating prospective students. Ultimately, Atkinson wants state schools to abandon all numerical measurements of student aptitude.
      For a number of years, the SAT test has been attacked as culturally biased by such groups as the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens. Two years ago, the Clinton administration's Department of Education floated guidelines that stated

. . . the use of any educational test which has significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin, or sex is discriminatory and in violation of Title VI and/or Title IX, respectively, unless it is educationally necessary and there is no practicable alternative form of assessment which meets the educational institution's needs and would have a less disparate impact.

      When objections were heard from universities across the country, the Education Department backed off. The new call for ending the use of the SAT at the University of California, it seems clear, is a response to Proposition 209-the California initiative that ended racial preferences in public education, and to lawsuits challenging race-based admission in other states.
      Edward Blum, director of legal affairs at the American Civil Rights Institute, points out that

Disarmed of the race preference, California's elite campuses no longer have the proper numerical racial "diversity" (read, proportional representation) so beloved by university administrators. Even though the top four percent of all qualified high school graduates in California are assured spots at the University of California, some campuses-Berkeley and Los Angeles-and graduate programs have not recovered their pre-209 levels of minority enrollment. Atkinson's push for a more "holistic" approach to evaluating applicants is naïve at best, cynical at worst. For 2001, the California system has received 90,000 applications for undergraduate admission. For the sake of efficiency, GPAs and test scores must be the main criteria for screening applicants. While small, liberal arts colleges may have the luxury of considering a broad range of factors, this would be unworkable at any large university system. Dr. Atkinson surely knows this.

      Ward Connerly, a Regent of the University of California who is black and has been a vigorous opponent of race-based admissions policies, declares that,

The act of applying to a competitive college is, in itself, high stakes. It is therefore all the more important to have some numerical, common standard of merit as one major component of an otherwise mysterious process over which applicants feel little control. In recent years, there has been a constant whittling away of academic merit and less emphasis on academic excellence. Many higher education administrators have pushed for an array of strategies such as the "X" percentage plan that guarantees admission regardless of test scores; a "misery index" that emphasizes obstacles over achievement; and group representation that promotes entitlement over individual merit. We should not usher in a whole new breed of preferences with the aim of increasing skin-deep diversity.

      The particular criticisms made against the SAT are of questionable merit. Critics charge that the exam is culturally biased against minorities, but Asian students consistently outscore whites. It is charged that the exam measures only the ability to take the exam, but the results have been found to be reliable indications of whether a student needs remediation in basic subjects, and reliable predictors of future success in higher education. It has also been said that the availability of SAT preparatory courses skews the scores of students for families affluent enough to afford them. It has been shown, however, that the average gains of students who take the prep course are only 6-12 points on the verbal section and 13-26 points on the math section-out of a possible 800-and that comparable gains can be achieved simply by taking the test twice.
      Grade inflation in high schools makes judging students on the basis of their GPA alone less than effective, since different schools use radically different standards in grading. A recent study by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA found that 42.9 percent of college freshmen reported that they earned A averages in high school, up slightly from 42.7 percent last year, but double the 17.7 percent of 1968.
      Does this mean students are devoting more time to their school work and learning more? The HERI survey reported a record low 36 percent of students spending more than six hours a week studying and doing homework, down from 47 percent in 1987-the first year the question was asked. As for their curiosity, a record low 28.1 percent of students said they kept up with politics, down from a high of 60.3 percent in 1966.
      Mark Goldblatt, who teaches at the State University of New York, notes that,

. . . we know that students who study less than ever before are getting higher grades than ever before. . . . Which leads us back to the SATs. If we confront the fact the teachers' grading in high school has begun to resemble judges' scoring in figure skating-glide through a flawless program, and you earn a perfect 6.0; fall on your butt a half-dozen times, and you earn a 5.7-then the necessity for an objective yardstick to guage students' preparation and aptitude for college becomes clear. The SAT is one of the last vestiges in U.S. education of the notion that merit should be judged objectively; it stands as a stubborn bulwark against the touchy-feely subjectivism of self-esteem pedagogy, of the mindset that argues that every child deserves an outstanding grade for being outstanding at being himself.

      The assault on the SAT as in some way "racist" is completely without merit. The fact is that blacks and Hispanics, for whatever reason, score lower than whites and Asians not only on the SAT-but on all standardized tests. What we should be doing is trying to find the reasons for this gap and address them. Attacking the messenger-in this case the SAT-is counterproductive and potentially dangerous.
      The gap in testing may represent not a gap in intelligence but a gap in schooling. Abigail Thernstrom, author with her husband, Stephen, of America in Black and White, states:

What I can say with total confidence is this is not an I.Q. story. Black I.Q. scores haven't gone down, and we are seeing too many success stories. This is a story about schooling. You look at the places that really are doing a great job with highly disadvantaged urban kids-and they exist all over the country-and you know it can be done.

      A two-year study by researchers at Harvard University, Georgetown University, and the University of Wisconsin has found the black students who switched to private schools from public schools on scholarships that were similar to vouchers performed significantly higher on standardized math and reading tests than similar students who remained in public schools.
      Paul E. Peterson, the Harvard researcher who was one of the four authors of the report and the principal investigator in the three cities studied-New York City, Washington, D.C. and Dayton, Ohio-said that the study provided evidence the private-school vouchers can help to achieve "a nontrivial closing of the gap" in achievement between black students and the rest of the population.
      The SAT test diagnoses educational failure-and those who have presided over our failed public school system would, it seems, rather eliminate the test than improve the schools.
      Gary Lavergne, director of admissions research at the University of Texas, states:

All is not lost for the SAT. For most universities, the SAT actually works, in that the exam does do well as predicting future achievement. And the "holistic" approach embraced by testing opponents has dangers of its own. How can a college admissions officer explain to an applicant "other applicants had richer life experiences than you" or "we were hoping to admit someone from another high school"?

      The SAT is not perfect-as no test could be. But "dropping the SAT makes no more sense than dropping classroom grades," says the College Board's Gaston Caperton. We do minorities no good by abandoning standards to insure admission to those who are unqualified. We would do better to improve elementary and secondary education so that the gap we now see between the achievement of different groups would narrow in a real and meaningful way.

Crusade for Reparations for Slavery Represents a Misreading of History

      Every year since 1989, Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) has introduced legislation calling for a comprehensive study of reparations for black Americans who are descendants of slaves. Every year the legislation has stalled.
      Now, the social and legal movement calling for reparations has taken on substantial force. Black professionals and scholars are taking up the cause. And beyond the efforts to gain governmental restitution, there is a new focus on winning reparations from corporate targets that once profited from slavery.
      This year, a California law took effect that requires every insurance company licensed in the state to research its past business, and that of its predecessor companies, and report to the state whether it ever sold policies insuring slave owners against the loss of their slave property, and if so to whom.
      A team of prominent black lawyers has announced plans to file lawsuits early next year seeking damages from the federal government and companies that profited from slavery. The team is part of the Reparations Coordinating Committee, led by Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, and Randall Robinson, the founder of TransAfrica, a lobbying group.
      Advocates for reparations are also fighting to make compensation for slavery an official theme of the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in August, and hoping to win a declaration that slavery is a crime against humanity for which reparations should be paid. TransAfrica's Randall Robinson said,

As a result of the ravages of slavery and the racial strictures that followed it, blacks in America were consigned to this nation's economic bottom. . . . A yawning gap was opened. It has been a static gap since the Emancipation Proclamation. This condition can no longer be tolerated.

      Reparations moved further into the spotlight recently when David Horowitz, a conservative author and political activist, placed full-page advertisements in several campus newspapers attacking the notion of slavery reparations.
      Titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea-And Racist Too," the ad counters several commonly held arguments for reparations. Among other things, the ad declares

Only a minority of white Americans owned slaves, while others gave their lives to free them. . . . There is no single group that benefited exclusively from slavery.

The ad also states that,

Slavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade was born, and in all societies, but in the thousand years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians-Englishmen and Americans-created one.

      Sadly, from the beginning of recorded history until the nineteenth century, slavery was the way of the world. Rather than some American uniqueness in practicing slavery, the fact is that when the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787 slavery was legal every place in the world. What was unique was that in the American colonies there was strenuous objection to slavery and that the most prominent framers of the Constitution wanted to eliminate it at the very start of the nation.
      Slavery played an important part in many ancient civilizations. Indeed, most people of the ancient world regarded slavery as a natural condition of life, one that could befall anyone at any time. It has existed almost universally through history among peoples of every level of material culture-it existed among nomad pastoralists of Asia, hunting societies of North American Indians, and sea people such as the Norsemen. It existed in Africa-black Africans were sold into slavery to white Europeans by other black Africans.
      The legal codes of Sumer provide documentary evidence that slavery existed there as early as the fourth millennium B.C. The Sumerian symbol for slave in cuneiform writing suggests "foreign."
      The current reparations movement overlooks many important facts. First reparations usually are paid to direct victims, as was the case when the U.S. Government apologized and paid compensation to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. Similarly, Holocaust survivors have received payments from Germany. In addition, not all blacks were slaves, and an estimated 3,000 were slave-holders. Also, many immigrants not only came to the U.S. long after slavery ended, but many of them were also confronted with discrimination. Should they pay reparations, too? Or should they receive them?
      Reparations would raise more concerns than they relieve, argues television talk-show host Armstrong Williams:

One wonders, for example, what percentage of black blood would entitle a citizen to reparations? What reparations, if any, would Africans be required to pay for selling their own citizens into slavery? Would American Indians be able to make a similar claim? How about the various religious groups that the Puritan settlers persecuted? Would modern-day members of the occult be entitled to reparations to make up for the fact that their predecessors were burned at the stake? . . . If it literally paid to be a victim, countless people would rush forward to adopt the mantle. Plainly, forcing this government to pay reparations to the biological, cultural or religious offshoots of every group it wronged over the last two hundred years would bankrupt this country . . .

      Beyond all of this, it is a serious mistake to attribute the problems of the nation's inner cities to the "legacy of slavery."
      The problems, of course, are quite real. In inner-city neighborhoods, 80 percent of all babies are born out of wedlock. According to Department of Justice statistics, 45 percent of violent crimes are committed by black males, who are only 6 percent of the population.
      But slavery has little to do with the difficulties we now face. In his book, The Black Family from Slavery to 1920, Herbert Gutman shows that more black children lived in two-parent families during slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crowism than at the present time.
      In his book, Race and Culture, economist Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution, points out that

In reality, most black children were raised in two-parent homes even during the era of slavery and for generations thereafter, blacks had higher rates of marriage than whites in the early twentieth century, and higher rates of labor force participation in every census from 1890 to 1950. [T]he real causes of the very different patterns among blacks in the world of today must be sought in the twentieth century, not in the era before emancipation.

      Dr. Sowell, who is black, points out that many of the values, such as respect for education, which motivated so many former slaves to excel in the years after the Civil War, has been abandoned by many in today's inner cities. He writes:

Despite the desperate efforts of freed blacks to educate themselves after the Civil War, and to find family members who had been sold during slavery and sent elsewhere, a segment of today's black and white intelligentsia excuses contemporary blacks who disdain education as "acting white" or who abandon their families-both patterns being represented as being a "legacy of slavery," though blacks born under slavery or living immediately after emancipation did not exhibit this pattern to the extent seen today.

      Slavery did not leave its victims without certain attitudes, just as it left former slaveholders with a mindset which, in the end, has proven harmful to the descendants of both. If slavery has a "legacy" for the present day, it may be somewhat different from the one often discussed.
      In this connection, Sowell noted,

Among the negative aftermaths of slavery has been a set of counterproductive attitudes toward work, among both the slaves and their descendants and the non-slave members of slave societies and their descendants. "Work is for Negroes and dogs," is a Brazilian expression that captures a spirit bred by slavery and not unknown in the American South and among whites in South Africa. Nor is this purely a racial phenomenon. Descendants of the slave-owning and slave-trading Ashanti tribe of West Africa have exhibited a similar disdain for work. Free women in Burma were unwilling to do disagreeable work that had been associated with slaves. There were similar reactions by the Egyptian lower classes against doing work associated with slaves . . .

      Those who make the self-serving case for reparations would do well to review the complex history of slavery and the real problems faced by minorities at the present time. Their crusade is a diversion we can ill afford.

Needed: A Standard of Church-State Relations that Reflects the Vision of the Framers of the Constitution

      In recent days, church-state relations have been very much in the news. Late in May, the Supreme Court decided to stay out of a dispute over whether the Constitution permits the display of the Ten Commandments on government property. The court let stand a December ruling by a federal appeals court, which said Elkhart, Indiana, may not keep a granite pillar engraved with the Commandments on the lawn of its town hall. Its display in that place amounted to a government endorsement of a particular religious belief, the appeals court held, and therefore violated the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state.
      In a statement dissenting from the court's refusal to hear the city's appeal, Chief Justice William H. Rhenquist, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Tomas, strongly implied that the lower court had gotten the case wrong. Rhenquist wrote:

The monument does not express the city's preference for a particular religion or for religious belief in general. . . . It is simply reflects the Ten Commandments' role in the development of our legal system . . . "

      There has also been growing debate over the Bush administration's plan for a faith-base initiative which would give federal funds to religious organizations engaged in charitable programs, such as homeless shelters and drug treatment programs. The same issue has been the focus of attention in consideration of the question of school vouchers and whether or not they should be used for religious schools.
      There are many who have sought to virtually excise God from our public discourse and our lives. Those who have embarked upon a crusade to eliminate religion from American life often speak as if they were embracing the philosophy of the Founding Fathers with regard to separation of church and state. This is at variance with the historical record.
      The fact is that the United States was founded on the concept that our rights, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, come from our "Creator." The intent of the First Amendment, writes Professor Charles Rice in his book, The Supreme Court and School Prayer, was to make government neutral among religious sects, not neutral between religion and non-religion.
      He writes:

The public life of the American states was based upon the unapologetic conviction that there is a God who exercises a benevolent providence over the affairs of men. This is not to say that all Americans then recognized God, or that there was agreement of all details of his attributes. But to those who assert that the First Amendment was designed to prevent the government from recognizing God and praying His aid, it can be rightly said that they will have to find evidence for their claim elsewhere than in the history prior to 1787.

      Reference to God has been present in our public life from the very beginning. The Declaration of Independence acknowledges God in four separate places. The framers of that instrument announced that the colonies were assuming "the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them." The Declaration states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Those who signed the Declaration proclaimed:

And for the support of this Declaration, with firm reliance in the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

      The Continental Congress opened its sessions, beginning in 1774, with prayer delivered by a clergyman. In 1776, regular chaplains were authorized and subsequently appointed by Congress. In 1778, Congress provided an annual salary for the chaplains. In 1787, Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance, for the governance of the Northwest Territory. Article 3 proclaimed:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall ever be encouraged.

      In his book, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, Yale Professor Stephen Carter argues that over the past thirty years religious devotion has been mistakenly trivialized in public life.
      The overwhelming majority of Americans-more than ninety percent-are believers. They attend church and synagogue with greater regularity than people in any other Western country. The "elites" who dominate so much public discourse, however, are decidedly secular, if not hostile to religion.
      Indeed, sociologist Peter Berger of Boston University notes that India is the most intensely religious country in the world and Sweden in the least. He declares that America "is a nation of Indians ruled by an elite of Swedes."
      The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the journal, First Things, writes that,

The modern state is advancing on every front, and we are in a situation that wherever the state advances, religion must retreat.

Because the U.S. was founded on the concept that our very liberties come from God, the official banning of God "delegitimizes the basis on which we believe in other people's rights," declares Neuhaus.
      It is historically inaccurate for those who oppose such manifestations of religion in public life as nonsectarian and voluntary school prayer to tell us that the framers of the Constitution meant to establish a Society in which God was excised from, among other places, the public schools. While the farmers opposed the "establishment" of any particular religion, it is clear that they established a society based upon the belief that man has dignity and freedom precisely because he is a creature of God, who endowed him with these attributes. If government becomes neutral about the source of freedom, perhaps it will soon become neutral about its value as well.
      The late chief rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, Lord Jacobovits, criticized those in the U.S., particularly those Jewish groups, who have sought to remove all religion from the schools. He said:

Children should not be deprived in their schooling of the opportunity for religious education. Too many are growing up pagan. They are left in a spiritual no-man's land.

      Completely excluding religion from public schools, stated Rabbi Jacobovits, leads youngsters to think religion is not valid and of no real value:

They grow up with no faith, believe in no god, with no accountability before the Creator. In effect, their citizenship is defective. If they don't believe they're accountable for specific virtues, they don't have the discipline of those who acknowledge the religious way of life.

      As the debate proceeds over the proper role of religion in our public life, it is important to remember the vision of the founders. America was not to be a Protestant, a Catholic or a Jewish nation-but it was to be a nation that recognized its dependence upon a Supreme Being. On our coins is written, "In God We Trust." Sessions of Congress begin with prayer. The Supreme Court itself starts its meeting with prayer-although it has made similar prayers illegal for school children.
      What the First Amendment really was saying has been all but forgotten. Judge Thomas Cooley, a leading constitutional scholar of the nineteenth century put it this way in his Principles of Constitutional Law:

By establishment of religion is meant the setting up or recognizing of a state church, or at least the conferring upon one church of special favors and advantages that are denied to others. It was never intended by the constitution that the government should be prohibited from recognizing religion, or that religious worship should never be provided for in cases where a proper recognition of Divine Providence in the working of government might seem to require it, and where it might be done without drawing invidious distinctions between different religious beliefs, organizations, or sects. The Christian religion was always recognized in the administration of the common law; and so far as that law continues to be the law of the land, the fundamental principles of that religion must continue to be recognized in the same cases and to the same extent as formerly.

      Those extreme sectarians who want to impose their own form of religion on the American society must, of course, be resisted. But the imposition of an extreme version of secularism is itself a form of religious "establishment." In both cases, the framers of the Constitution would be opposed, as any reading of the historical record will clearly show.