What Do The LA School Wars Say About America`s Future?
Last week saw two events exemplifying the vast
contradiction between how the American upper middle
class views IQ and schooling in public—and what it
actually thinks in private.
The widely-reviled heretic
Charles Murray published three essays in the Wall
Street Journal on how we are kidding ourselves about
schooling ("Half of all children are
below average in intelligence, and teachers can do
only so much for them"),
college ("Too
many Americans are going to college"), and the
wisdom of the elite ("Those with superior
intelligence need to learn to be wise"), and was …
widely reviled for his heresy.
Meanwhile, the bourgeois parents of liberal Los
Angeles were in a frenzy as last Friday`s deadline for
postmarking applications for magnet public schools bore
down upon them.
Bob Sipchen wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
"Negligent Los Angeles
parents take note: You have only until Friday to get a
postmark on the magnet school application that your more
responsible peers regard—rightly or wrongly—as their
last desperate hope for getting their children a good
education at
taxpayer expense… It goes without saying that you`re
terrified of the
local middle school, which you just assume has lousy
test scores because of those
tough-looking kids you see hanging out in front,
presumably spreading
graffiti,
smack and
STDs." [How
to make it to a magnet By Bob Sipchen (Monday`s
Column, Jan. 15, 2007)]
For example, the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched
Studies (SOCES)
received 2939 applications last year for its 192
openings. That seven percent acceptance rate is lower
than
Harvard`s.
The LA Times ran daily updates of the "Ask
a Magnet Yenta" advice column by
Sandra Tsing Loh on how to manipulate the magnet
system to avoid having to send your kid to either a
normal public school or a private school that can run up
to
$27,000.
"Actually, now that there are so many
Democrats in private school, the preferred term is
`independent" school,`" acidly notes Loh, who may be
the only conservative performance artist in America, in
her hilarious “Scandalously
Informal Guide to Los Angeles Schools.”
Why does what Loh calls the "Prius-driving
screenwriter" class find magnets so magnetically
attractive? Some magnets have admissions requirements
(such as, in a couple of cases, scoring at the
99.9th percentile on the
Wechsler IQ test), but most magnets in the Los
Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)
choose students solely through lotteries. Yet many boast
significantly higher
test scores, up to 60 percentiles above the normal
open enrollment public school in the same neighborhood.
It would be nice if the magnets had discovered some
magic formula for making children brighter. But, in
reality, they typically succeed by attracting smarter,
more diligent
parents, who
tend to have smarter, more diligent
children. Notably, the better magnets tend to have
higher percentages of whites and Asians than are
found in the overall
LAUSD—the country`s second largest district, where
whites make up only
nine percent and Asians six percent of total
students.
The court order setting up the LA magnet system in
1977 established a quota of 40 percent for white
students. But far fewer
white kids now remain in LAUSD. So, in an amusing
example of "reverse-reverse discrimination", it`s
sometimes easier for whites to get into a fashionable
magnet than for the much
more numerous minorities. Further boosting the
desirability of magnets, Asians, who are so often
indefatigable in finding the best free schools for their
kids, are legally considered a minority in magnets
(unlike in
college admissions, where they are
normally defined as part of the majority). So many
magnets have only a limited number of Hispanics and
blacks.
And that`s definitely okay with LA`s liberal
upper middle class. They may talk a good game about the
benefits of diversity, but they ignore their
oft-proclaimed principles when it comes to what
their own children`s peer group will look like.
As Loh notes, at the hilltop "independent"
school where her Prius-driving screenwriter friend who
couldn`t get his kids into a magnet spends $38,000
annually to educate his six-year-old twins, they
"honor diversity among the foliage". And
yet…
"To judge by the student
population there, L.A. "diversity" looks like 14 white
kids and
Savion Glover. 10 white kids and 5 brown kids is
"urban", 5 white kids and 10 brown kids looks, well, not
safe".
So, what`s the magnet schools` secret for keeping
away uninvolved and unintelligent parents?
Simple: LAUSD makes the magnet application process
dauntingly confusing. As
Sipchen wrote in the LA Times:
"There is an element of
self-selection that gives magnets an advantage. If
Juanita-Jane`s mom goes through the psychic pain of
cracking the application process, is she going to let
her daughter mess up? And if parents are doing their bit
to keep their kids in line academically, is it any
wonder that the best teachers apply to these programs
and arrive at work with a good attitude?"
The most baffling aspect of the magnet system is that
it pays for your child to first be rejected for several
years. That`s the prime way for your child to build up
the requisite "magnet points" to move to the head
of the line in the lottery when you really want to get
the little dear into a magnet.
Are the Prius-driving screenwriters` stereotypes
about non-magnet public schools in LA correct?
Recently, reams of test score data about public
school students have become available.
Unfortunately, there are so many different tests across
the country that the scores are difficult for the public
to interpret.
For example, the LAUSD reports that
Jefferson High in Los Angeles has an
API of 482. But what does that mean? Is 482 high or
low? Parents of prospective students desperately want to
know, but education officials aren`t in any hurry for
you to get a good grasp of what that score means.
Fortunately, I finally found a database that reports,
for each of the 379 public high schools serving the ten
million people of Los Angeles County, the average score
on a test widely understood by Americans—the venerable
SAT college admissions test.
These high school SAT scores have important
implications for public policy. For example, in several
states where racial preferences in college admissions
have been challenged by referenda or by the courts, the
legislature
adopted plans guaranteeing spots in the state`s
university system to anyone whose grade point average
ranked in his school`s top twenty percent (Florida), ten
percent (Texas), or four percent (California)…no matter
how low his SAT or ACT scores.
Are all these students likely to thrive at state
universities? Or will many find themselves floundering
in a school where the pace of instruction is too fast
for them?
And what do these SAT scores by high school say about
the
No Child Left Behind act?
Finally, what do the
students of Los Angeles County portend for the
future of America, which is being transformed by public
policy into something that increasingly looks like LA
writ large?
I`ll review these data in detail next week.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


