“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that.”

In a related thread on the blog KitchTableMath, commenter Crimson Wife said:

Richard Nisbett has a long discussion about race & IQ in his book Intelligence and How to Get It. He makes a convincing argument that the differences are mostly environmental (which can be changed) rather than genetic (which obviously can’t). If it were genetic, then IQ in blacks would be positively correlated the degree of white ancestry- and it isn’t.

Well, it is, but never mind. The broader point is that Nisbett is a spirited defender of the politically correct view that racial disparities in IQ result primarily from differences in children’s environments. The implication is that these disparities will mostly vanish if environments become more similar.

That’s more wishful thinking than argument, and it’s “convincing” only to those who already agree with Nisbett’s thesis. But it’s too vast a subject to settle here, so let me just offer a couple of links.

In a May 2009 working paper, J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen critique Nisbett’s book point by point. If you agree with Nisbett, you won’t agree with them, and vice versa, but if you’re going to write about these things you ought to be familiar with arguments on both sides.

About five years ago, Jensen and Rushton published a paper, “Thirty years of research on race differences in cognitive ability,” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 11, 235-294. They do not claim that environment plays no role in cognitive ability — indeed, no one has ever claimed that, as far as they know. Their much more modest claim, that the effect of heredity is greater than zero, is radioactive enough. Remember that Nobel laureate James Watson was hounded from his position for much milder comments, and he didn’t even mention heredity.

That’s one reason so few researchers risk working in this area. But both Rushton and Jensen have already survived that gantlet — Jensen more than 40 years ago — so they have nothing further to fear.

I should add the disclosure that I am slightly acquainted with both men, and admire them, their work, and their determination.

Recently, someone wrote (as part of a longer post):

I’ve read the entire Coleman report; Coleman makes the distinction that teacher quality is the definitive variable. I think we can deduce from “teacher quality” that what we are really talking about is what the teacher is doing in the classroom, or more simply put: how the teacher is teaching.

However, we cannot deduce any such thing. Coleman explained what he meant, later in life. Here’s my response:

>>>
I had the privilege of a slight acquaintance with James Coleman, near the end of his career. I was a (non-traditional age ~ 50) grad student in Linguistics at the University of Minnesota (1988-1992) and working at the student newspaper, so when he came to campus as a visiting scholar I assigned myself to write about him. I had read a talk he gave as his acceptance speech for an award in the Sociology of Education, and he was pleased about that, and was generous with his time for an interview. A couple of years later, speaking at a conference of the National Association of Scholars, he spoke again on the same subject — the extent to which research in sociology, and in education in particular, is distorted by political pressures.

Neither talk is available online, as far as I know, though I had copies in my extra-essential stash of articles up until the day I retired, and they’re still packed away in one of those moving boxes. But they were published in the NAS journal Academic Questions,

Coleman, James S.
Response to the Sociology of Education Award
(vol. 2, no. 3; Summer 1989)
The Sidney Hook Memorial Award Address: On the Self-Suppression of Academic Freedom
(vol. 4, no. 1; Winter 1990–1991)

so it is possible to know, what he felt himself unable to say in the Coleman Report, what he meant by “teacher quality” — teachers’ scores on a basic test of spelling and vocabulary.

Those of you who keep up with these matters will immediately recognize this is a proxy for IQ, which was and is radioactive, but it’s bad enough without knowing that. How could he make a recommendation that would drive a highly disproportionate number of black teachers out of their jobs? (Propose hiking the passing score on Praxis tests, and see what happens.) How could he ask grad students and untenured junior faculty to work on a subject that would blight their careers? (Look what happened to Richard Herrnstein Arthur Jensen in 1969, when he candidly answered the question about how much the achievement gap could be reduced. “Not much,” he said.)

So what Coleman said instead was true, but misleading. Black children did better in classrooms where a majority of their classmates were white. Well, duh. Classrooms with a majority of while children didn’t have the barely literate teachers found in black segregated schools. If they had black teachers, which was probably rare, they were likely the best teachers in the school. They had to be.

This well-intentioned misdirection had catastrophic effects. The obvious response, if majority-white classrooms helped minority kids, was to bus kids around like sacks of cement so as many classrooms as possible had white majorities. Parents, both black and white, objected to having their children used as objects in other children’s education, and there was a massive flight of middle-class families out of city schools and out of center cities altogether. Classmates’ race might not matter all that much, but SES did.
>>>

(I think I should have said “vocabulary,” rather than including spelling.)

I listen to WFMT (streaming on the Web), and recently DePaul has been running ads focusing on a professor in the Chemistry Department named Quinnetta Shelby. She doesn’t stop at just doing her research, the ad gushes; no, she’s on a quest.

She “actively recruits undergraduate students of color, as well as female students, both groups that are underrepresented in graduate schools and careers in chemistry, for her research team.”

I am well aware that race and gender discrimination are widely practiced in higher education. I discontinued support to my college’s alumni fund when they proudly announced they had signed an amicus brief supporting the University of Michigan’s admissions policies. But bragging about it on the radio is still a bit much, don’t you think?

DePaul has no warrant to adopt discriminatory policies of its own in order to engineer social outcomes it prefers, even if it believes that “underrepresentation” is a problem. “Overrepresentation” is not a problem, and you can’t increase one without decreasing the other.

If my son were still of an age where he was choosing a college, I would not permit him to apply to DePaul.

I never received a reply, and then the station went into a pledge period and so I wasn’t listening to it for a week or so. But since I came back, I haven’t heard any ads for DePaul at all. Maybe the recruiting season just came to its natural end. Or just maybe, somebody thought better about advertising that it practices and approves race and gender discrimination in its science programs.

Suppose you simplified spelling so that written English became a perfectly transparent writing system like Spanish. It would be obvious to one and all that written English is a code, that spelling means encoding the sounds of the English language, and that reading means decoding the sounds of the English language.

Would schools use phonics to teach children how to read?

To which the obvious answer is “No.” People so determinedly wrong-headed as those in ed schools would just find some other excuse to miseducate prospective teachers. Math is, after all, perfectly transparent, and they’ve got that entirely wrong.

Anyway, I disagreed, and in the comments I said:

“Simplified spelling” is a false hope. There are reasons why linguists (that is, people with actual credentials in the study of language — I was a grad student in linguistics) are generally unconvinced it’s a good idea.

First: You have to decide whose spoken English is encoded into this mythical “perfectly transparent” writing system. London? Boston? New Orleans? For that matter, why not Calcutta or Shanghai?

Which is more transparent, Burma or Myanmar? Cambodia or Kampuchea?

We actually do have a perfectly transparent way of transcribing spoken language, called the International Phonetic Alphabet. Do people use that to teach reading? (I understand the answer in China is sometimes “yes.”)

Second, “simplified spelling” erases the historical and logical relations between words whose pronunciation has shifted over centuries, making it harder to learn new vocabulary beyond the words children know.

An example: English plurals are spelled with “s.” Most English speakers are blithely unaware that the “s” is pronounced like the phoneme /s/ after unvoiced consonants, e.g. /t/, and like /z/ after voiced consonants and vowels.

Or at least they were until “Boyz” hit their consciousness. And now we have “Bratz.”

Thus perfectly illustrating the problem; “Bratz” is wrong. That’s an /s/, but nobody noticed.

Would it be easier to learn English plurals, or possessives, or third-person singular verbs, if children had to distinguish cats from dogz?

Third, we’d lose most of written literature. If you grew up with a simplified-spelling version of English, Shakespeare would be as remote as Chaucer, and only the relative handful of books that were translated from historical originals would be accessible to you.

The People’s Republic of China adopted simplified spelling, in the form of simplified characters, in the name of improved literacy, but the political purpose was to obliterate access to written history that did not conform to the party’s vision.

And as long as I’ve mentioned Chinese, character languages are a lot further from phonetically transparent than any alphabetic language, yet Japan, Korea and Taiwan have literacy rates that NAEP should envy. Spelling is not the problem.

The question was prompted, she tells us, by her 3-year-old son, who objected that something he’d been watching on his laptop wasn’t a book, as the computer had described it. “It’s more like a movie or a video,” he said.

Well, yeah, though I think she may be making a bit too much of this. If the child masters the reading code, I’m not sure whether it makes much difference where or how he learns. Yes, college professors complain that their students no longer have the attention capacity to slog through long or difficult texts. But I suspect college professors were saying that long before their students grew up with TV or laptops.

I’d like to draw your attention, however, to a point she made in passing:

In their book “Freakonomics,” Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books. But they also contend that reading aloud to children and limiting their TV time has no correlation with success on tests. If both of these observations hold, it’s worth determining what books really are, the better to decisively decorate with them. The widespread digitization of text has complicated the matter. Will Ben benefit if I load my Kindle with hundreds of books that he can’t see? Or does he need the spectacle of hard- and softcover dust magnets eliminating floor space in our small apartment to get the full “Freakonomics” effect? I sadly suspect he needs the shelves and dust.

I haven’t read Freakonomics, though I do like the blog, so I can’t say whether Heffernan has correctly reported what the authors say. And I don’t doubt the first claim, that children who grow up surrounded by books do better on school tests than those who don’t (though I’m not so sure about the next part). What seems odd to me is that she seems to imply the books are the causal factor, to the extent of speculating whether having them in pixels rather than on paper will lessen their influence.

Doesn’t the chief causal argument run like this?

Oh, we all know exceptions to these correlations, but the significant point is that the causal relation doesn’t run backwards. Doing better on school tests won’t make you smarter than you would be if you never took them, though it has other benefits that can amplify the effects of being smarter, in line with Malcolm Gladwell’s example of children who are among the oldest in their cohort when they begin playing hockey. Filling your house with books won’t make you smarter, though reading voraciously may make you more successful than others who start with similar smarts. Having smart children doesn’t retroactively make you smarter, though it might cause people who know you to wonder whether they may have underestimated you.

When I read things like this, I always wonder whether the writer is truly oblivious to what’s in front of her eyes, or whether she just feels it is obligatory to pretend she doesn’t see.

Years later, they are more likely to be depressed.

From Science News:

“We found that students in the first grade who struggled academically with core subjects, including reading and math, later displayed negative self-perceptions and symptoms of depression in sixth and seventh grade, respectively,” said Keith Herman, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the [University of Missouri] College of Education. “Often, children with poor academic skills believe they have less influence on important outcomes in their life. Poor academic skills can influence how children view themselves as students and as social beings.”

Johnson cites Zig Engelmann on the misguided justification for placing children in classes too hard for them:

Rule 3: Always place students appropriately for more rapid mastery progress. This fact contradicts the belief that students are placed appropriately in a sequence if they have to struggle—scratch their head, make false starts, sigh, frown, gut it out. . . . The assumption seems to be that students will be strengthened if they are “challenged.”

This belief is flatly wrong. If students are placed appropriately, the work is relatively easy. Students tend to learn it without as much “struggle.” They tend to retain it better and they tend to apply it better, if they learn it with fewer mistakes.

Johnson’s been in the trenches.

If schools grouped kids homogeneously and used precision teaching or Direct Instruction, you wouldn’t see the less-talented kids developing depressions 5 years down the line. Even without precision teaching or Direct Instruction, you wouldn’t see depression. You wouldn’t see it because these kids wouldn’t be struggling. They’d be taught at their level, they’d be given the time they needed, and they’d learn.I think it’s time to look into the emotional costs of heterogeneous grouping.

Having lived through 3 years of my own child struggling through a class that was over his head, I can tell you that it’s not good for the child. Heterogeneous grouping is no picnic for the kids on the bottom.

And one of Johnson’s commenters sums it up:

Maybe there aren’t groupings that are effective for everyone, but the heterogeneous grouping seem to be bad for most.

It has been a disaster for my children. My oldest child has learned not to pay attention in class. She reads novels all day. My middle child has learned that children of a specific ethnic group are dumb. My youngest thinks that school is where you goof off with your friends.

I have also seen how awful the heterogeneous grouping is for my friend’s son with a learning disability. He sits in class all day struggling. He knows he is at the bottom of the class, and so do all the other kids. He is in the same classroom as my daughter who reads at a high school level. The teacher doesn’t have anywhere near the time to deal with both kids.

It is hard to see that there would a solution that is worse for the low and high kids than the current heterogeneous groupings.

I’ve excepted below my comments (not about pay) and the context that prompted them.

Joanne:

See how well your school district pays its teachers, writes  the Sacramento Bee. California’s average teacher earned $65,808 last year, an increase of 3.4 percent from 2007, but pay varies.  High school districts pay the most, unified (K-12) districts are in the middle and elementary districts usually have the lowest pay.

I noticed pay averages $93,283 at my local high school district, with a starting salary of $59,692 and top pay of $112,796. That’s the highest, especially the starting pay, in our high-cost county.

From comments:
# 30 linda seebach Jan 12th, 2009 at 7:52 am

McSwain, above (# 9 McSwain Jan 11th, 2009 at 1:06 pm), says, “With NCLB and mainstreaming, I have special ed students, gifted students, and English Learners in my classroom of 30+ kids, and I have to differentiate instruction for ALL of them. The planning time for that is astronomical, and there is zero down time in the classroom.”

Deliberately mixing academically dissimilar students in a single classroom not only requires astronomical planning time, it guarantees an unsatisfactory outcome for nearly all the students. All in pursuit of an illusory goal of “inclusion.” Wouldn’t it work better to group similar students together, so they could progress at similar rates?

Of course it would, but that’s one of the things that Cannot Be Said. Let alone done.

The system does make teachers’ jobs harder than they need to be. On the other hand, a lot of the people filling those jobs would have a hard time making the same kind of money (considering security and benefits. especially retirement benefits, as well) in other careers. They certainly wouldn’t in journalism.

# 31 Margo/Mom Jan 12th, 2009 at 8:04 am

linda–it can be said, and frequently is said–particularly by those who advocate for advantaged students. the problem is that while it appears to be “logical,” based on our post-industrial experiences, to group students by “ability” and achieve better outcomes for all, the evidence doesn’t point in that direction. Most research that I have seen on the topic shows that, particularly at an early age, ability grouping reinforces, rather than compensates for differences. Furthermore, mixed groupings typically produce better outcomes for those on the bottom with no harm to those on top.

# 36 Tracy W Jan 13th, 2009 at 1:30 am

Margo/Mum, one of the programmes shown to be most effective at teaching students is Direct Instruction, which uses grouping by ability. See http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm and http://www.aasa.org/issues_and_insights/district_organization/Reform/overview.htm

This programme focuses on grouping children by two factors – how much they already know and how much they learn. So a kid with an IQ of 120 who starts school not knowing their alphabet would be placed earlier in the lesson sequence than a kid with an IQ of 80 who starts school knowing their alphabet. Kids can and often are placed in different places in the maths and reading sequences based on their results. Replacements are frequently reviewed. And if a kid misses a chunk of school, say due to illness, they’re placed back where they left the sequence, rather than being expected to have magically learnt everything their class learnt while they were missed. There are a lot of other things that Direct Instruction does, including providing scripted lessons to teachers and providing school backup for teachers dealing with difficult students. But this brief description of how placement by ability is done in Direct Instruction indicates how difficult it is to make general statements about grouping by ability – the Direct Instruction system is very different to, say, giving kids an IQ test and then using the results of that test to assign them to one stream for all their academic lessons.

# 37 Margo/Mom Jan 13th, 2009 at 6:19 am

[To] Tracy W.
I am no intuitive fan of Direct Instruction–but I do pay attention to research and what it says, and I am aware of the research re DI and what it says and doesn’t say. The grouping used in DI is flexible ability grouping. This means that children are assessed frequently and placed in groups accordingly. These groups are used for reading instruction. This is a very different thing from ability streaming or tracking–which is what I understood to be advocated. These systems typically lack flexibility, apply across the board–so that students are abundantly clear regarding who are the smart kids and who are not, and the earlier that this tracking takes place, the less likely kids are ever to move from one group to another (particularly upward).

. . .
Early studies with school integration, in which minority students who performed less well were integrated with better performing majority students. The minority students tended to do better with no detriment to the majority students. Studies of inclusion of students with disabilities have tended towards similar results.

# 39 linda seebach Jan 13th, 2009 at 10:01 am

Margo/Mom above said, “Most research that I have seen on the topic shows that, particularly at an early age, ability grouping reinforces, rather than compensates for differences. Furthermore, mixed groupings typically produce better outcomes for those on the bottom with no harm to those on top.”

It is almost certainly correct that ability grouping reinforces differences. But that’s not a bug, as she seems to think; it’s a feature. The difference between a child with -2 S.D. IQ and +2 S.D. cannot be “compensated for;” the only thing mixed grouping can guarantee is that time does not widen it as much as should happen if every child is achieving his or personal best.

(See Malcolm Gladwell’s example of the Canadian hockey rules that inadvertently privilege young players who happen to be born early in a calendar year.)

If one child makes (or can make) two years’ progress in a school year, and her sister can make only a half-year’s progress in one year, it is immoral to hold the brighter child back so the gap between them does not grow.

And as public policy, it’s insane. If you’re worried about America’s global competitiveness, worry about the competition at the top for the best-trained brains, not the competition for slightly better performance in entry-level jobs, however important the latter is to the life chances of people who will never get much past entry-level jobs.

James Coleman explained why minority children who previously attended segregated schools did better when they began attending schools with white children; they had more effective teachers. His research was too explosive to publish at the time, he said in a lecture I heard him give much much later. So even if they did, that does not provide evidence in favor of the proposition that it was smarter *classmates* who made the difference.

Racial issues aside, I doubt that the experience of feeling that just about everybody in your class is smarter than you are confers any academic benefit. Especially if you’re right.

For that matter, neither does thinking you’re smarter than just about everybody in your class. Even if you’re right.

The research that purports to show that high-achieving children are not harmed by heterogeneous grouping is methodologically suspect. (see, e.g., the work of Deborah Ruf at wwww.educationaloptions.com/ ). She explains that most of the instruments available to researchers have rather low ceilings, so they don’t show that children above the ceilings are making slower than normal progress (for them). That’s harm, in my book.

Margo/Mom goes on to quote some boilerplate balderdash from the National Association of School Psychologists in defense of her support for “heterogeneous classrooms with instruction differentiated to meet the needs of all students.”

Trouble is, in the real world most teachers can’t provide that.

Goldin and Katz make two largely correct diagnostic points in The Race Between Education and Technology; that the United States got a significant head start on economic development because it expanded access to secondary and post-secondary education sooner than other countries, and we are no longer ahead in that regard. Their prescription, however, is largely incorrect. We can’t get ahead of other countries by increasing the number of Americans graduating from college, because nearly all of the students who can do so are already trying.

Joanne Jacobs posted on this in the context of David Brooks’ NYTimes column and I left this comment there:

>>>>
If no European country in 1950 had more than 30 percent of its older teens in school, that was an inefficiency that the United States could exploit to its advantage. But if every young person who can benefit from staying in school long enough to graduate is already doing so, there’s nothing further to exploit.

We can argue about what the ideal high school graduation rate should be, that is, what the criterion for graduation should be, and what needs to be done to ensure every child who is capable of meeting the criterion has resources and opportunity to do so. But it is delusional to believe that we can have both a meaningful criterion for graduation and a 100 percent graduation rate.

I suspect the true graduation rate should be between 80 and 85 percent. Maybe we could push it to 90, subject to the law of diminishing returns, if we poured every possible dollar into the last few marginal students — though, as James Heckman has demonstrated, we’d get much higher returns if we invested the money in them when they were little.

Something similar operates all along the line of returns to increasing education. There are non-economic returns to more education, but they don’t depend on credentials. If everyone who is capable of benefiting economically from higher education is already able to earn a degree, there is no further inefficiency for the U.S. to exploit.

If other countries have larger percentages of their populations who are capable of benefiting from more years of education than the U.S. does, well, what are we supposed to do about that?
>>>>

Brooks cites economist James Heckman in support of early intervention, but Heckman’s point is not that early intervention is a panacea, but that whatever it can accomplish will be most effective if it’s done early rather than late.

I haven’t read the Heckman paper Brooks is citing, but Heckman has said — very circumspectly — that African Americans and Hispanics begin school with similar performance deficits, but that Hispanics are much more likely to make them up.

From a column I wrote:

. . .
“Our analysis of the Hispanic data illuminates the traditional study of black-white differences and casts doubt on many conventional explanations of these differences since they do not apply to Hispanics who also suffer from many of the same disadvantages.”

I know this is contrary to just about everything you’ve heard or read, so you’re asking, “Who are these people?” They’re Pedro Carneiro, University College London; James J. Heckman, University of Chicago, American Bar Foundation and University College London (and winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in economics for developing the kind of technical statistical analysis that undergirds this paper) and Dimitriy V. Masterov. The paper was written for the Institute for Labor Market Policy Evaluation, a part of the Swedish Ministry of Industry, Employment and Communications, in Uppsala, Sweden.

The paper is “Labor market discrimination and racial differences in premarket factors” and it’s at www.ifau.se/swe/pdf2005/wp05-03.pdf on the Web.

Steve Sailer has written about the Brooks column. See also this post at the population genetics blog gnxp.

(For a bonus, the immediately preceding gnxp post dissects the media coverage of the math/gender study.)

I first encountered Kors when I was a grad student at the University of Minnesota, working for the student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, and was assigned a story about university speech codes (around 1990). Since people in favor of speech codes were thick on the ground, I needed someone who thought they were pernicious, and I called Kors because he was quoted in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

He was extraordinarily gracious to a student journalist calling him out of nowhere, and he was also passionate about the issue. So much so, that even if I hadn’t already agreed with him, I’d likely have been persuaded to change my mind.

I wasn’t surprised when I learned later that he’d emerged as the faculty advocate for a Penn student named Eden Jacobowitz, who was hauled before a kangaroo court for shouting at a noisy gaggle of drunken sorority women outside his dorm in the middle of the night, “Shut up, you water buffalo!”

The women, being black, took this rather improbable insult as racist, although at its source in Hebrew it’s about as racist as “dodo.” Well, I guess “dodo” is more closely African than “water buffalo,” although neither of them is black.

What Kors learned about campus judiciary systems during the water buffalo case eventually impelled him to write a book, The Shadow University, with co-author Harvey Silverglate, about the due-process violations implicit in many campus judiciary systems.

The examples the authors collected during the writing of the book led to the founding of an organization, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (here), dedicated to preserving the rights of students and faculty sucked into the gears of their university’s thought police. FIRE is not, you need to understand, ideological in choosing the people it defends. If the people it defends are more often on the right than the left, as seems to be the case, that is only because the right is mostly where the university thought police seek their victims.

The award is richly deserved (and it’s worth $250,000, which is not too shabby either). The intriguing thing is, why is what Kors has done — following his conscience, and damn the consequences — so rare among academics as to merit a prestigious and lucrative award?

University professors with tenure, after all, enjoy about as much personal and professional security as life affords anyone in this uncertain universe. Are they afraid that if they utter an impious truth, the president won’t invite them for tea again? Sometimes the truth is impious, but must be said.

Bader writes:

Diversity training often triggers workplace conflict and lawsuits, by compelling employees to talk about contentious racial or sexual issues, with resulting acrimony, and remarks that are misinterpreted or perceived as racially or sexually biased. For example, in Stender v. Lucky Stores (1992), statements made by managers during sensitivity training were held by a court to be admissible as evidence of discriminatory intent within the organization. That prevented the employer from getting a lawsuit dismissed.

Hattip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, whose link asked, “DOES MANDATORY “DIVERSITY TRAINING” JUST LEAD TO MORE LAWSUITS? I certainly hope so . . .”

Me too. They get what they deserve.

To be fair, employers often have no choice about offering such training and requiring employees to participate. Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, wrote about the sessions she attended on sexual and other workplace harassment, which are mandated by California law.

The villain of the harassment set-piece turns out to be a white guy who is angry about losing a promotion to a black woman, and sets out to harass her into not returning from a pregnancy leave.

This conflates two quite different issues. The harassment itself, as dramatized, is clearly unacceptable and nobody — this is a university workplace, remember — would seriously argue otherwise. But linking it to resentment over affirmative action is purely tendentious. An employee who believes he has been discriminated against — reversely or directly — has a fully protected legal right to complain about it, and the training material strongly suggests the opposite.

Heriot:

The message the employee is supposed to carry away is clear: Anyone who complains about any kind of inappropriate harassment or discrimination in the workplace must be treated with kid gloves (even if the complaint is silly), unless the complainant is a white guy concerned about “reverse” discrimination, in which case he’s “really out of line” and his conduct is “really offensive.”

It occurred to me that this training course is itself a rather blatant form of racial and sexual harassment. Employees taking the course are not so subtly being told, “Do not dream of complaining about race or sex discrimination if you are white or male.”

The question is, why is the training itself so incompetent — when it is is not downright counterproductive?

After years of attending sessions like this, I’ve come to think it’s because the people who seek out careers as diversity trainers are often people who are themselves bigots, and so assume everybody else must be too. Here are some stories about how I arrived at that conclusion.

The Minnesota Daily
The first diversity trainers I had to listen to came to the Minnesota Daily, around 1991. There were two of them, a white woman and a black man, and she treated him as barely more than an animate stage prop for her leading role. It made her preening claim of moral superiority all the harder to take seriously.

It is true that her unwilling audience was entirely white. But that was because our colleagues who were people of color were not required to attend. In fact she could scarcely have conjured up an audience more committed to “diversity” and less troubled by actual diversity. The Daily is an independent student paper, and its hiring policy at the time was in essence to hire every person of color who applied (which was not a large number as we were, after all, in Minnesota), and then complete the staff with the best-qualified white applicants, roughly a third of them. I think I was the only person who thought this was a really bad idea, at any rate the only person who was willing to say so.

The results were absolutely predictable. As the quarter wore on, the two-thirds of affirmative action hires who would never have been on staff if they were white crashed and burned. One quarter we had a Jayson Blair type, whose first story was a blockbuster about discrimination in the graduate program in English, marred only by the fact that the persecuted grad student he wrote about was entirely imaginary.

The paper summarily fired him, and the very next day he walked into a staff job at a large professional paper. I happened to draw the assignment of re-reporting the second story he was working on. This time the people he had quoted in his first draft were real. Only their quotes were fabricated.

Another minority reporter took exception to the way his story was edited, and threw a chair at the chief copy editor. Yet another quit in tears around Thanksgiving because she hadn’t yet finished a second story.

The inevitable effect of this on their white colleagues, most of them undergraduates in their first serious professional workplace, was devastating. They didn’t know about hiring preferences; all they had was the evidence of their own eyes that most of their minority colleagues couldn’t cut it. And the people who suffered the most were those who could, the people of color who would have been hired absent any preferences.

As typical as the trainer’s presentation was, she did come up with one so-far-unmatched idiocy. When she was growing up, she said, there was a lot of hostility between Lutherans and Catholics in her hometown.

Fortunately, she said, that’s no longer so much of a problem. “Nobody takes that religion stuff seriously any more,” she assured us.

Now that’s enlightened tolerance.

Contra Costa Times
Skip forward to a much ballyhooed diversity training session at the Contra Costa Times in California’s East Bay, in 1996 or so, maybe early 1997. (I worked at the Pleasanton office of the Valley Times, one of the CCT’s local editions.) This was a major corporate initiative, we were told, and we would be led down the paths of righteousness by a corporate bigwig from Knight-Ridder, which had recently bought the paper.

Nobody was thrilled about this, but we did understand that if corporate was flying in VIPs to instruct us, we had better pay attention.

In the event, though, the VIP had more pressing duties, and instead we got some hack who informed us that she had been a diversity consultant for 10 years and assured us that she would be teaching us how to be comfortable around people “who were different from us.”

Granted, she couldn’t win. First strike was what she wasn’t: important. Second was what she was: a hired gun for a disreputable enterprise. And third was what she said. Apparently unaware that just about everybody within sound of her voice was a lot more comfortable with diversity than she was, she proceeded to fling about stereotypes that would have gotten any of us fired.

For example, she said that putting together the first Unity conference was extremely difficult, because the Hispanic journalists’ group operated on “Mexican time.” (For those of you who don’t know about Unity, it’s a loose confederation of four ethnically separatist journalism groups who put on solidarity conventions whose main purpose is to charge exorbitant prices for recruiting booths so the employers can prove to any meddling federal bureaucrats who come snooping that they have indeed attempted to recruit underrepresented minorities. It’s a hustle.)

She’d been parachuted in from somewhere, maybe Miami, and evidently hadn’t given any thought to where she was. So when someone asked her about how gay and lesbian issues would be dealt with, she drew in a breath with that telltale hissing noise that means the speaker is discomfited. “That’s very difficult,” she said, adding that many companies didn’t cover it at all in their diversity training.

Remember, I said “East Bay.” This meeting was being held in Walnut Creek, which is maybe 30 minutes by BART from the Castro. I doubt that anyone present was troubled by that.

Rocky Mountain News
Rocky employees were required to attend diversity training sessions as a result of a court decision in a discrimination case which it had lost or settled, I forget which. The employee who brought the case had not worked in the newsroom, but in another division which by this time belonged to a different company. So there was considerable resentment that we, who had nothing to do with the employee or the case, were sentenced to collective punishment.

One of the trainers was a white woman in a bright pink suit, whom everyone afterward called “the Pink Nazi.” Her colleague was a black woman whose contribution to the session was to demonstrate how costly insensitivity was to a company, which she did by gloating about how much money she got in a successful discrimination suit.

Her other role was as a prop for the Pink Nazi, who demonstrated how not to behave by directing a stream of abuse toward her, including a prominent use of the n-word.

I’ve been working since 1957, and I had never before heard the n-word used in the workplace. (And exactly twice outside it.) What was this performance supposed to teach us? That it is acceptable to use racial slurs to abuse a black woman in public if you have a pure heart and lofty purposes?

The Pink Nazi also showed a couple of cringe-inducing videos, one of an outside salesman hitting on a secretary (unintended message, “anything short of this is permitted”) and another of a mildly effete young man being hassled by male co-workers who thought he was gay. At least I think that was the point; the Pink Nazi seemed to think it was an example of same-sex sexual harassment.

As Bader points out, relying on diversity consultants for legal advice is perilous.

How anyone can believe these heavy-handed attempts at indoctrination can improve workplace harmony entirely escapes me.