Bob Somerby points out that Robert Samuelson, in a recent column, vastly undercounted the gains made by black students since the 1960s, based on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Jon Chait responded to Samuelson, but not in a manner to Somerby's liking, and he proceeded to excoriate them both for not caring about black kids.
The irony of Somerby questioning whether or not they care about black kids is that he's constantly tearing his hair out over liberals engaging foolishly on the subject of race. Or as Somerby himself puts it in that very same post, "Our liberal editors pose as Wiesenthals, heroically parading about the land, naming all the racists and bigots and inviting us to admire their own moral greatness. At the same time, they have created a black kid-hating culture—a culture in which our smartest players don’t have the first clue about the lives of these kids."
More on that later. Somerby's usual gig is media criticism, but I generally find his blogging on education far more valuable because of stuff like this, where he explains just how wrong Samuelson was:
An obvious question arises here: If black students gained 29 points in reading during that period, how could the overall gain in reading be only one point? There are two reasons for this state of affairs, each of which Samuelson seems to understand:
First, the gain by white 17-year-old students was relatively small during that 37-year period; their average score went up only eight points, as opposed to 29 points for their black peers. The second point is much more important. The balance of the demographic groups in the student population changed a great deal during that period; Samuelson explains how this factor works in the passage we've quoted. Samuelson: “Average test scores have remained stable because, although the scores of blacks and Hispanics have risen slightly, the size of these minority groups also expanded (our emphasis). This means that their still-low scores exert a bigger drag on the average.” That statement is completely accurate, except for the deeply misleading claim that the scores of black students rose only “slightly.” Alas! Black and Hispanic students still score significantly lower than white students, despite their larger score gains during this period. Because they now comprise a larger percentage of the student population than they did in 1971, the average score overall has changed little in that time, even though the average score of all three major demographic groups has advanced. This is counterintuitive, but it’s a well-known statistical artifact—and it’s clear that Samuelson understands it.
So Samuelson was dishonestly making an argument that improvements in education had no effect on black students, when in fact the opposite was obviously true. Samuelson's argument was a basic ideological one: Conservatives on principle believe that government can't do much to positively affect people's lives. Because liberals are often trying to use government to improve the lives of the poor, who are disproportionately black, conservative arguments about the pointlessness of government intervention often end up wrongly characterizing the exigencies related to black poverty as impossible to deal with, and conservative platitudes about culture, tradition, and human nature can take on a kind of sinister double meaning. These arguments get even more loaded when you're talking about an issue that was squarely at the center of desegregation, and the fact that the contemporary conservative movement was founded in defiance of civil-rights laws.
In any case, moments after attacking liberals for "heroically parading about the land, naming all the racists and bigots and inviting us to admire their own moral greatness," Somerby asks, "Does Robert Samuelson hate black kids?" becoming a caricature of the very liberal he loves to hate.
As for Samuelson, He's making an obviously wrong but entirely predictable ideological argument about the inability of effective government policy to help black children succeed, and in doing so he's hampering those chances for success. That's the more important issue. Does Somerby have a point that if liberals took more interest in the lives of black children, they'd be better prepared to rebut these kinds of arguments? Sure. But as Somerby himself might argue if he were talking about someone else, who'd listen to him?
