Education

Assumptions versus History: Collected Papers

Thomas Sowell

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780817981136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Essays in Education

In the papers collected in Education: Assumptions versus History, Dr. Thomas Sowell takes a hard look at the state of education in our schools and universities. His imperative is to test the assumptions underlying contemporary educational policies and innovations against the historical and contemporary evidence.

Assumptions Versus History in Ethnic Education

Even more important than the assumptions and beliefs that guide educational policy is the extent to which these assumptions and beliefs are tested against facts, rather than judged by their individual plausibility or by their consonance with some general vision of education or society. In the area of race and ethnicity, many key assumptions behind current policies remain untested against either current or historical facts.

Perhaps the best-publicized assumptions guiding judicial educational policy today are that segregated schools are inherently inferior (Brown v. Board of Education), and that the equalization of per-pupil expenditures is essential to an equalization of education (Serrano v. Priest). A more general assumption, encompassing these and other policies, is that the large disparities in school performances among racial or ethnic groups (1) are unusual and suspicious, and (2) reflect differences in the way those groups are treated by the schools and/or the society. These are not unreasonable assumptions, but reasonableness is no substitute for empirical verification, especially when so much is at stake. There is no a priori reason why statistics collected at a given institution must be solely the result of the policies of that institution, rather than the characteristics of the population in question.

Other common educational doctrines seldom seriously tested include the belief that school performance is greatly influenced by family socioeconomic status, class size, teacher-student differences in ethnicity, and the cultural bias of tests. Statistical correlations are abundantly available in support of some of these doctrines, but the principle that “correlation is not causation” cannot be simply a pious disclaimer uttered in passing while proceeding post haste to equate the two in cognitive conclusion or policy application.

History is important because it allows a given principle to be tested under a far wider variety of conditions than are likely to be found contemporaneously. Despite the unplanned nature of historical “experiments,” they can sometimes provide a richer set of data. At the very least, history provides an additional set of evidence.

SEGREGATION

There is no serious question that the segregated black schools long traditional in the South generally had educational results inferior to those in the white schools in the same communities. The Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education attributed causation, thereby making segregation the reason for educational and psychological problems in the black schools, and in turn this state-enforced educational inferiority constituted a denial of the “equal protection” required under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. But the mere contemporaneous existence of two striking social phenomena—rigid racial segregation and large differences in academic performance, in this case—does not automatically establish one as the cause of the other. At the very least, such a conclusion should await consideration of alternative hypotheses and the derivation of evidence that would distinguish one hypothesis from the other.

Among the best-known competing theories are that deficiencies in educational performance are the result of either (1) a unique black heredity or (2) a unique black environment or history. Tempting as it is to plunge into the Jensen controversy (as I have done elsewhere¹), we must recognize how limited the significance of these hotly disputed theories is for the issue at hand. Before resorting to either hereditary or environmental theories which—even if true—would be applicable only to the special case of blacks, we must first determine whether the performance disparities between blacks and whites are themselves unique. In other words, we need to frame some general hypotheses, going beyond black-white differences, and at least see whether these larger patterns apply to racial as well as ethnic or other socioeconomic group differences. If such an attempt fails, there will then be time enough to formulate theories applying solely to blacks and whites. But we should not begin by presuming that such an attempt must fail, before even trying.

To present an alternative hypothesis: What would we expect to see if segregation were not a significant cause of educational differences? Unless we presume a genetic basis for unique black intellectual or educational results, we might expect to find at least three major phenomena:

1. Black intellectual or education performance would not be unique in level or pattern, but would be closely approximated by some other group(s).

2. Some groups who live in the same neighborhoods and attend the same schools together would be expected to exhibit intellectual or educational differences of a magnitude comparable to black-white differences in the segregated South.

3. Performance differences within the set of segregated black schools should be of a magnitude comparable to those between black and white schools in the segregated South.

A case could be made that the unique historical background of blacks might take the place of a unique genetic background in preventing these phenomena from emerging. However, if these phenomena do emerge, despite some unique features of black history, then the argument that segregation has had the devastating educational effect attributed to it is undermined all the more. That is, the uniqueness of racial segregation plus all the other unique features of black history—put togethe...