School Choice, Full Conversation

Oh, boy.

Well, I can't say that I miss it. I had to make certain concessions to age. First thing I did was get off the lecture circuit, and then the column. But it really is wonderful, because it means I don't have to follow politics. I can watch the news when I get the weather and the sports results, and turn it off if I don't feel like listening to the utter nonsense that politics has become.

Well, this is the tragic thing about the low educational achievements in so many minority schools, the students have no way of knowing. You were lucky, you discovered this while you were still in school. These kids are passed along from grade to grade, whether they know anything or not. And they get out into the world, many of them celebrating their high school graduation as if that really means something, and they discover that other people have been educated while they've been passed along, and they're just way behind, and they learn it when it's too late. Years ago at Columbia there was a fellow graduate student going on for a PhD in English. In her first classes the professor on the first day said, "How many of you have learned Latin?" Half the class raised their hand. "How many of you learned Greek?" The other half raised their hand. She had learned neither. And that's when she realized the inadequacies of her educational preparation. That is not the time to learn it. It is too late then.

Yes. And nowadays, the stuff is going downhill for everybody. When I was teaching at UCLA, this was a white student, I finally asked him a question I'd wanted to ask before: "What were you doing for 12 years before you got here?" He knew nothing about anything. But of course, for the kids who are in poverty, and this is their one ticket out of poverty in most cases, to pass them along and let them talk about how they're gonna grow up and become a doctor or a pilot, when they can't do fractions and decimals, that is just utter nonsense. You're gonna need math, and higher math than you're getting here. And by the time they realize that, it's too late. That's really one of the central tragedies of a minority-community traditional public school. Charter schools, thank heaven, most of them, and they're not all good, the others not all bad, but by and large the difference is huge. In New York City they give the math and English exams every year to both charter and traditional public school students. I did my study by collecting data for all those schools where both charter and traditional public students were educated in the very same building, took the very same tests. In those places, in the traditional public schools in these minority communities, 10% of the students passed the math exam. In the charter school, in the very same building, 68% passed. That's almost seven to one. And they come up with all kinds of excuses. The difference is: one of them teaches seriously and the other doesn't.

Yes. The irony is that when Chief Justice Earl Warren said that separate schools are inherently unequal, at that point Dunbar High School had a higher percentage of its graduates going to college than did any white public high school in the city of Washington. And Dunbar was located only about a mile from where Warren made his pronouncement.

Oh, absolutely. I have data from the 1940s comparing various schools in Harlem with various schools on the Lower East Side, which at that time was where second- and third-generation immigrant children were, from Ireland, Italy, wherever. There was never any major difference between their test scores. Sometimes the Harlem schools were a little ahead, sometimes the Lower East Side, but they were pretty much neck and neck.

If you start out with a group that has a lower income, and you have policies which subsidize people with lower incomes if they have special problems such as fatherless children, they'll be impacted. So much that we discuss in terms of race is really not. I do some studies of education in England where the underclass is predominantly white, and you see exactly the same phenomenon. In one year I studied, both countries had the same functional illiteracy rate, 16.6%. And in England, among the various ethnic groups poor enough to have free meals in school, the group that scores the lowest are the native-born white English children. And the kids who come there from Africa, from the Caribbean, from India and China, who are all in that same low poverty group, they all score higher on all the tests. That seems very strange compared to what happens in the United States, but it's really not that different. In both cases it's the native group that has been fed this welfare-state picture that everything they don't have is somebody else's fault, that you're being taken advantage of and you have no chance. And it produces the same result in both countries: you send them out into the world without basic skills, but well supplied with resentment and rhetoric. And before those riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, the very same riots occurred a few years earlier in London and Manchester, destroying people's businesses, throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, the whole bit. We don't see many people doing these comparative studies. And you realize, no, it's not race. It's this miserable education, so much devoted to indoctrination with the prevailing propaganda of the times, that sets up all of these deadly kinds of consequences.

Yes. That school Dunbar, though it hadn't been named Dunbar yet, in 1899 there were four academic high schools in Washington, DC. Three white, one Black. When they gave them the same test, the Black high school came in ahead of two out of the three white high schools. This is 1899. This is one generation out of slavery. And now, more than 100 years after that, we're still using the legacy-of-slavery argument as an excuse for bad education.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, there are not enough facts out there, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book. This book was a bear to produce. I have data on more than 100 individual schools identified by name in New York City, all in buildings where a charter school and a traditional public school are taught in the very same building, with the same ethnic makeup. So you get a really comparable situation, and that's when I discovered the charter schools were outdoing the traditional public schools in the same building. One thing I discovered after the book was already printed: there are 28 classes in which less than 10% of the students passed the math test. All 28 classes were in the traditional public schools.

I haven't looked into it enough. I've seen some material suggesting they're doing better than the other schools, although in the low-income minority neighborhoods that may not mean much.

I've never tested that empirically, but it's worth testing.

Oh, it feels remarkably similar to being 89.

Oh my gosh. I cannot imagine anything more irresponsible. This is what comes from this double-standard kind of thing. You're gonna get make-believe education. You're getting a grade that means nothing because it didn't require anything. I'm very discouraged when I see so many kids going to such extremes celebrating graduating from high school, particularly in areas where graduation doesn't mean you learned anything.

Not that different. My gosh, except I think Biden is a bigger risk than Hillary was.

Because first of all, he's not as smart. And the way things are poised, if he comes in and the Democrats take the Senate, I don't see anything getting better in this generation. I also believe that even though the country has weathered many bad things in the past, there is a point of no return, and I suspect that's where we're gonna be taken to. When I see people talking seriously about abolishing the police force, my gosh, insanity. And the biggest losers if they do that will be the low-income minority communities, where you already have these rising rates of murder as the police withdraw. The police themselves, when they realize there are politicians who will throw them to the wolves rather than confront the loudmouths, they pull back. They're not gonna go out there and risk their lives needlessly knowing the politicians will turn against them if there's any problem. What has happened in Seattle is a classic example, but I think it'll happen anywhere.

Politics is very tough to predict. I'm told that at one point someone had a 19-point lead at this time of year.

That's right. And it evaporated. They saw, by luck, Dukakis for what he was, a phony. And I think if they see Biden for what he is, not only a phony but an incompetent one, then all of this can turn around. But there's so much hanging on this. It means the Democrats will be able to appoint the next Supreme Court justices, and they have so many counterproductive policies that I'm not sure the country can recover from it.

I'm not sure it became clear at any point early enough for them to have done much of anything. You didn't have the scientific data. It's a new disease. So I'm not sure I would've been any more prescient than the people in charge.

Well, I tend to lead a hermit-like life anyway, so I'm less affected than most people. I have my mask and all of that, and I don't go out very much. I can't travel, which I would like to do. But I work at home anyway, and I go for months without ever seeing my research assistants.

I think they're one of a long list of groups that are self-serving, and I think they can do an enormous amount of damage just by promoting this belligerent attitude toward the police, which in turn tends to create all kinds of bad episodes. All of this furor has been created over an incident in which I don't see any serious disagreement, namely that the policeman had no business sitting on this man's neck. The most conservative people I know have said he had no business doing that. The liberals say it. I don't know what the argument is about.

They seize upon individual episodes and then extrapolate that to 300 million people. In a country of 300 million, you can throw together a couple dozen terrible examples of almost anything at almost any time.

Yes. The only analogous thing I can think of, and it wasn't really as bad, was the housing crisis, where they lowered the lending standards and forced the lenders to lend money to people who didn't meet the standards for repaying the loans. It was those people who ended up worse off than the lenders, 'cause they put money in that they'll never get out of the house again.

Absolutely.

My goodness. Well, great.

Because sanity prevailed. The thought had never crossed my mind, so I decided I'd try some people who are professionals in politics. It took them usually less than five minutes to say, "No, you're not the kind of person who's successful in politics." And so I'm very happy that I declined.

Well, in baseball only. If there were a contest for the worst basketball player of all time, anyone who saw me play as a teenager would certainly nominate me.

Oh, Babe Ruth. There's no question. If Babe Ruth had never hit the ball out of the infield, he would still have made the Hall of Fame. He was that good a pitcher. One of the things I love to do to trap people into betting with me is to say that Babe Ruth stole home more times than Lou Brock. Lou Brock had never stolen home. Babe Ruth stole home 10 times.

Take care.