Closing The Racial Achievement Gap

Here's an essay so counter to much of what passes for intellectual thought these days that it had to be published in the Journal of Free Black Thought:

The persistence of this achievement gap is harmful to society. But how can we close the gap, and whose responsibility is it to do so?

To many college and university officials, the reason for the gap is racism. Moreover, colleges and universities have decided that they know how to close the achievement gap and that they should assume the primary role in doing so...

These efforts, however, demonstrate academia’s unwillingness to hold black students primarily responsible for their own academic uplift. Largely by design, colleges and universities have taken it upon themselves to be the main agents for improving black academic achievement.

This is a profoundly misguided idea. It is premised on the assumption that colleges and universities alone can close the gap by making a few changes here and there. But they don’t actually know how to close the gap, and most of these changes will do nothing to address it.

Lowering academic expectations for black people is one new change, and it is a regressive one. It fosters the notion that blacks can’t cut it when it comes to academics.

If you truly believed that black students are capable, you would hold them to high standards and let them prove how capable they are.  Treating them like delicate flowers would be among the last things you would do.

Moreover, lowering enrollment standards in order to admit more black students whose academic skills are measurably inferior to those of other admittees inevitably consigns many of the black students in question to the lower spectrum of the academic performance scale. This cruel fate will surely undermine their self-respect.

Some call that "the soft bigotry of low expectations". 

What, then, is to be done? The most effective strategies for closing the achievement gap are straightforward. Moreover, these strategies must be implemented by black people themselves. First, blacks need to accord greater respect to black intellectual achievement... Second, blacks must never let racism become an excuse for not excelling academically...Third, black students should stretch themselves intellectually...Fourth, blacks must reject being subjected to lowered expectations...Fifth, blacks must avoid engaging in self-defeating behaviors...My final recommendation is that black people should not rely on others for their academic success...

Although these recommendations seem like common sense to groups that have already achieved academic success, when it comes to blacks, the recommendations suddenly become hot-button issues. Even though college and university officials want blacks to do well in school, this desire is conditioned upon doing it a certain way: avoiding difficult conversations, lowering academic standards, engaging in wishful thinking, and then taking credit for being tolerant and open-minded. It is a play that has been run repeatedly, despite never reaching the goal officials supposedly seek: closing the achievement gap.

Make no mistake, racism still exists. But racism today is much less powerful than it was even two generations ago. It is certainly not an anchor that can keep down a race of people who place great value on education for its own sake, who relish the opportunity to meet intellectual challenges, who insist on being held to high standards, who refuse to make excuses, and who celebrate academic high achievers.

This can all be distilled to a catchphrase I've used a lot lately:  you don't raise standards by lowering them.