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Thernstrom and Thernstrom

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from: Abigail Thernstrom

More Data, Less Spin

Posted Friday, Dec. 11, 1998, at 4:59 PM ET

Dear Steve:

Black professionals do know the sources of their own success, but obviously they don't have the very last word on which colleges are "best" for black students. Bowen and Bok could answer, well, our data shows...and then go on to make their elite (mostly private) schools pitch. High graduation rates. No sense of stigmatization. Many going on for further professional education and eventually to high-paying jobs. Lots of activity in civic affairs, etc.

Well, I like data too, but, as you know, their numbers don't hold up. Just for starters, black drop out rates are high at the 28 highly selective schools Bowen and Bok studied--3.3 times that of white students. Those dropout rates are undoubtedly closely linked to the fact that, on average, preferentially admitted black students have not been doing well academically. But this is the beginning of too long a conversation for Slate readers.

Before dropping the subject, though, I can't resist a verbal smile. In my Wall Street Journal op-ed on Bowen and Bok, I went through all the non-select schools that highly successful black journalists had attended--journalists who have suddenly decided that only the professionally-doomed go to ordinary colleges. Thus, for instance, Brent Staples went to Widener University, while Bob Herbert attended Empire State College. The survey of black professionals reported in the Times makes the same point.

If the Mellon Foundation is seriously interested in the important question of black social mobility, it will fund a study of academically-talented black students at non-elite schools, and trace their lives--professional schools, civil activities, and so forth. Already we know that black Ph.D.s come disproportionately from the historically black colleges. But we need more good data, not spin from the former presidents of Princeton and Harvard who designed and implemented the very policies they now so vigorously defend.

And we need to talk about the real subject: how to get black students ready to compete on a level playing field when they apply for college in the first place. As you know, K-12 education has become my mantra. And I wish black parents would get very, very angry. In Massachusetts, some urban schools are doing very well with their students; most are doing horribly. And what's worst, if the patterns of the past continue, the schools in which kids are learning nothing won't look for inspiration to those that could light the way to a different future.

Abby

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819202122
from: Abigail Thernstrom

More Data, Less Spin

Posted Friday, Dec. 11, 1998, at 4:59 PM ET
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Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education. Stephan Thernstrom is a history professor at Harvard University. They are co-authors of America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible.
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