Manhattan Contrarian

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A Look At The Pipeline For Future "Diverse" Tech Workers, Professionals And Corporate Executives

Francis Menton

As we have seen, corporate American has now fully bought in to the mantra that “any racial disparities are the result of racist policies.” See Friday’s post focusing on Google for one example of a company whose “antiracist” training materials use just that language. Essentially every major institution in the country — corporations, professional firms, universities, you name it — is on a mission to get the percentage of minorities in high-paying technical, professional and executive positions up to the percentage that those minorities represent of the population as a whole. That goal particularly applies to African Americans.

Yet despite all the pledges and commitments, change occurs at a glacial pace. As Friday’s post reported, the likes of Google and Facebook, despite seemingly having adopted “diversity and inclusion” as the single most important focus of their operations, have only moved the ratios of black “tech” workers and executives by about a percentage point or two over eight years of reporting data. At Apple, the percentage of black “tech” workers has actually gone down by 2% since 2016. In my own field of major law firms, some fifty years of affirmative action have only brought the percentage of black partners overall to about 2-3%.

Perhaps there is a problem that the pipeline is just not producing a sufficient pool of potential candidates for all major institutions to hire 13% blacks into all high-ranking positions at the same time. The pipeline I’m talking about is the nation’s K-12 schools. Among all of our societal institutions, those K-12 schools are the ones most firmly in the control of the progressive left. Whether it be the administrators, the teachers unions, or the teachers themselves, these are the people who most constantly vociferously accuse the rest of us of being “racists” and “white supremacists.” (Note that the term “white supremacist,” as used by the progressive left, is by no means limited to people of white ethnicity, as California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder has recently learned.). Surely then, of all institutions, the the very holy and pious K-12 schools have fixed racism by now.

To get an idea how the K-12 schools are doing in fixing racism, let’s look at some data from what’s called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Since many readers may be unfamiliar with NAEP, let me give some background. NAEP is a Congressionally-sponsored project, administered by the federal Department of Education. The NAEP people call themselves the “nation’s report card.” Supposedly, the goal is to get an idea whether schools in a city or state, or in the nation as a whole, are performing better or worse over time. These are national tests given every two years to a sample of kids in the fourth and eighth grades. The sample is relatively small (e.g., only about 3000 in New York State). The test is not “high-stakes”: no results are reported to individual students, and no life consequences, such as admission to selective schools, depend on the outcome.

NAEP has a level they call “proficient,” which they define as “demonstrat[ing] solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” If that definition seems unspecific, it may help to learn that when you look at their data nationwide, roughly half the test takers on any given test score at or above the “proficient” level. In other words, although they don’t call it that, it is roughly the mean. For each test administration, results are reported in two categories, math and reading.

Most of the NAEP data is reported only on a state level. However, beginning in 2001 they started specifically testing certain large urban districts in a program called the “Trial Urban District Assessment” or TUDA. The TUDA program started with only 6 districts, but gradually has expanded until it reached 27 in the 2017 and 2019 administrations of the NAEP tests. (The 2021 results have not yet been released.). The cities that are now part of the TUDA include many to most of the large and troubled urban school districts in the country. Among the cities included are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Washington DC, Atlanta, Memphis and Houston.

It turns out that if you dig deep enough through the NAEP website, you can find data for what percentage of the black students scored at or above the “proficient” level in each of these districts and for each of math and reading. So let’s collect some of those data. Remember that overall approximately 50% of the test takers score at or above the “proficient” level. The following data are for eighth grade students designated by NAEP itself as “black,” in the most recent (2019) administration of the test:

You get the picture. Note that these are not the results of IQ or “intelligence” tests, but rather are tests of actual learning or achievement. Really, the scores are as much a measure of the success (or failure) of the schools in teaching the kids as they are a measure of the kids themselves.

These are the young people who supposedly will be ready to go to college in 2023, and to come out into starter tech jobs and corporate training programs and law schools in 2027. How many of the 85-96% of them who scored below “proficient” in reading and math in 8th grade are really going turn it around sufficiently to be able to move into these high-end jobs by their early 20s?

The simple truth is that without an education system that produces young black people at an equivalent educational level to young people of other ethnicities, it is never going to be possible for corporate America to get to universal 13% representation of blacks among executives, tech workers, lawyers, doctors, and so forth. As I said in Friday’s post, I would have some sympathy for them if they just had some humility and stopped accusing the rest of us of being racists and white supremacists. For the so-called “educators” in these big-city schools, who run failure factories year after year with no accountability, while fighting any and all potential competition, I have no sympathy at all.