Is American Education Coming Apart? A Lunchtime Lecture with Charles Murray - June 26, 2012

an education reform think tank based in this building in DC and in Dayton and Columbus Ohio we are along with doing studies and analyses and reports and newsletters and blogs and tweets and other things we have occasional events such as this where we are able to explore serious and important topics often in a lively way with serious and interesting people and we are particularly pleased today to have charles Murray here to talk with us about education in the context of his very impressive and best-selling and well reviewed new book which I suspect you know or see about I've seen coming apart which is one in a the most recent in a long parade of provocative and controversial often Murray books there was there was the one called the bell curve they've got a little bit of conversation going and about four years ago right in the middle of the presidential election he reminded me he he brought out a book devoted to education real education four simple truths were bringing America's schools back to reality so this is a topic that Charlie Murray has has grappled with for a long time along with many other topics he is a political scientist obviously an author and the WH Brady scholar at AI the American Enterprise Institute probably first leap to national attention in 1984 with a publication of losing ground which was I think fairly credited as the intellectual foundation of welfare reform in the United States we're going to see whether today's conversation becomes the intellectual foundation for education reform in the United States and it would be it would be a good thing if it if it did these other books include in addition to the bell curve which I mentioned the what it means to be a libertarian a human accomplishment in our hands and as I mentioned real education he's been at AEI I've known him forever it feels like but he's been at AEI since since 1990 and before that was it Manhattan Institute and AI R and has of course a Harvard ph.d beg your pardon I was misled by my briefers for for the in addition to our a full house of studio audience we have a worldwide audience watching via the miracle of the Internet and let me say to them that when we get to Question Time or actually any time you can do this but we won't use them until we get to question time you can email questions to questions at ed excellence dotnet questions at IDI excellence net and if you are so rash as to do tweeting or twittering or whatever it's called you can do that using hashtag coming apart hashtag coming apart and we'd be happy to receive messages questions either way please make sure if you're sending in a question from afar that it's clear since it's very hard to ask a question or for clarification when they're not here to to stare at but we are glad to have have people participating in this so the plan is Charlie's going to talk for about 30 minutes based on the book and beginning to draw education implications from it and then I'm going to ask him some questions particularly pushing on k-12 education implications there's a lot in the book about college less in the book about k12 and I want to because that's what we do at Ford I'm going to make sure we get to that topic and with with some by me and then some by you and so those in the studio audience as well as the worldwide audience should be getting ready with good clear crisp questions not long rambling ones without further ado it's an honor and a pleasure to introduce Charles Marie thank you very much checker we have known each other forever basically and also checker has a special place in my heart because he reviewed the bell curve for commentary and apart from what he said a plus or minus in the review he actually read the book which not very many reviewers of the bell curve did as far as I can tell the audience here is not old enough to remember what that conversation was like but to call it a conversation is charitable at best anyway I am going to as Checker said talk first about the themes of coming apart but I want to focus on one aspect of coming apart namely the formation of the new upper class because that has all sorts of educational aspects to it in part because of the causal relationship between the formation of the new upper class and its characteristics at education and also because of what I see as some real problems with the new upper class which I also think if they are going to be addressed will have to be addressed in large part by education so that there are two large clusters of issues in coming apart and they are the formation of a new lower class and they are the formation of the new upper class I do want to give at the beginning of my remarks an indication to you of what's going on with the formation of the new lower class what I have in mind by that and then turn to the formation of the new upper class America has never been a classless society we've always had rich people and poor people they've always lived in somewhat different parts of town but there was such a thing as a common Civic culture by that I don't mean we had perfection and in fact that common Civic culture in important ways left out minorities especially blacks at the time I opened the data in 1960 but in terms of American civic culture of civic culture among whites it was there was such a thing as a civic culture oh just a footnote that I always have to make clear the subtitle of the book is the state of white America 1960 to 2010 the reason for that is very simple I'm going to be using numbers which if I hadn't limited them to white America would have everybody in this room saying well is Murray talking about a problem that's really a national problem there isn't that really mostly concentrated in in the black community or in the Latino community or something like that using only white Americans non-latino whites as my database simplifies the conversation enormous ly and concentrates attention enormous ly anyway that this common civic culture meant that on a variety of basic institutions that were the building blocks of the limited government of people behave pretty much the same across classes the the paradigmatic example of that is marriage marriage in a free society with limited government is absolutely essential because you you need to have people be able to take care of their own problems either as families or as communities and the family is the the brick that builds that wall that enables these dysfunction take place as of 1960 among non Latino whites ages 30 to 49 prime of life you had something in the order 94 percent of whites were married whites in the upper middle class meaning that they had college education and we're working in managerial or professional positions 94 percent and you had about 84 percent of whites in the working class meaning high school education blue-collar jobs low-level service jobs on the level white-collar jobs about 84 percent of them were married so there was a difference but marriage was the norm the overwhelming norm throughout America fast-forward 2010 you are still at about 84 percent of whites in the upper middle class who are married you know one of the things that's gone unnoticed in the discussion of the problems of marriage had is that actually the upper middle class the decline in marriage stopped in the mid 1980s and has stayed stopped since then and not only that divorce has gone down so not only do you have 84 percent married an increasing proportion of those marriages are the one and only marriage anyway that's still the norm in upper middle-class white America in working-class white America 48% of adults ages 30 to 49 are married that divergence is not a statistical statistically significant that diversions is cataclysmic if you're talking about the functioning of Americans in a culture and I go through indicators involving industriousness involving honesty and involving religiosity which show the same kind of divergence a coming apart in terms of the culture of the classes and this is not I want to emphasize driven by money since I'm not going to spend a lot of time on on the formation of the new lower class we might want to deal with this in questions but if you're saying well but didn't you have the disappearance of the family wage and the rest of that doesn't that account for this diversion in marriage or changes in the work ethic and I will just say to you no it does not so that's the new lower class and it's a serious set of problems that have developed with regard to that but I want to move immediately to the formation of the new upper class because the people in this room are either largely members of the new upper class or you are one of the members of the new upper class and probably will make it over the course and in fact all sorts of things I'm about to say regarding the culture of the new upper class you are not going to find surprising it's the way you live your life okay the new upper class came about because of some of the dynamics that we actually discussed initially we meaning to Kern Stein and I in the bell curve you had a combination of two things happen in the course of the 20th century that were decisive one of these was the brains became much more valuable in the marketplace just sheer intellectual brainpower the example I always use to illustrate this is suppose that you were a person with very very fine math skills you're really terrific in math and you are a complete nerd socially you are completely inept socially you can't be trusted to go across the street and buy a loaf of bread without messing it up in some way and forget about making friends or influencing people with the rest of that what could you do in 1920 you could become a math professor maybe or you could work as an actuary but there weren't a whole lot of other ways to make a living a good living if you had extremely high math abilities and nothing to go with those today Google or Microsoft if you've put those math abilities in the service of computer computer programming which a lot of them do we'll pay you six figures you can go to the some of the quant funds in New York City and they will realistically offer you the prospect of wealth beyond your wildest imaginings because those quant funds use pure mathematicians and they have no interest at all and whether you have social skills but the same thing happened in a much wider range of occupations in fact in virtually every occupation being a lawyer didn't always use to mean making a whole lot of money because the things that lawyers did well important first if they if they had personal clients they had to rely on the amounts of money that ordinary people can afford to pay if they have to have a lawyer and as those are not huge amounts of money and if you were a corporate lawyer you were a corporate lawyer which made you to met you made a corporate salary which is good but it doesn't make you fabulously wealthy today what happens if you are a first-rate lawyer which also means high cognitive ability well you can be worth millions of dollars in the Commission if you have the ability to negotiate she ate a complex merger of two multinational corporations why do lawyers in Washington DC make obscene amounts of money I shouldn't have said obscene that's a value judgment the market the market is rewarding them for value delivered because if you can deal with a regulatory agency negotiate your way through that labyrinth you can be worth a regulatory shift or interpretation that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars to a corporation so in almost any occupation you can mention the value of brains went up now at the same time that happened especially during the 1950's we had a revolution in higher education we don't usually think of the 1950s as being a revolutionary era but that's when it happened in 1952 the mean SAT verbal score of incoming Harvard freshman was about 587 plus or minus a few points I can't remember exactly those of you in this audience who have recently taken the SATs did not apply to Harvard if you had SAT verbal scores of 587 because they would have laughed at you for doing so by 1960 just eight years later the mean verbal score of incoming Harvard freshman was in the high six hundreds a freshman who would have been in the top 10% of the class in 1952 in SAT scores was in the bottom 10% of the class in 1960 in eight years and Harvard knew at the time what it was doing it made a very conscious decision and so did the rest of elite colleges around the country and it actually filtered all the way down so state universities were also starting to jack up a lot of their requirements at that time but it happened mostly in the elite universities and the best private schools and it transformed the nature of their student bodies Harvard went from a rip place which had a lot of rich kids and a few smart ones to a place that had a lot of smart kids and a few rich ones in part we were witnessing the realization of an American dream we I went to Harvard in 1961 from Newton Iowa my mother had been to college but my father hadn't been and nobody in Prior generations and either side of the family had ever been to college and Here I am in a small town in Iowa and I decided I wanted to go to Harvard and I ended up going to Harvard it wouldn't have happened you know 10 15 20 years earlier and that was happening to all over the country that's great that's what America is supposed to be you identify talent wherever it is you ship them off to good schools but there was a problem not a problem that we can get rid of by changing the rules because you don't want to control who can apply to what college you don't want to stop people from getting these chances but you are also bringing people of high cognitive ability to gather at a time in which they are socialized into all sorts of things and as a result we have a new upper class that has an entirely different set of bonds than the old upper class did my favorite table in the entire book is one in which I assembled data on 14 neighborhoods that were already considered to be where the elite lived in 1960 places like the Upper East Side of New York Northwest Washington at plus McLean and Potomac and Bethesda and so forth the North Shore Chicago Beverly Hills you know that the standard places where rich powerful people lived in 1960 the median family income in those elite neighborhoods was 83 thousand dollars in 2010 dollars that's not wealth it were their wealthy people living in those neighborhoods sure there were there were lots of people who were not wealthy as well the mean percentage of people with bas was around 26% that's an even more telling statistic because if you have 26% of all the adults with bas most of the couples even those that are rich probably have one member of that couple that does not have a college education with all that implies about social and the rest of it fast forward to 2010 TSA's I don't have the numbers for 2010 yet I'm really eager to see what they look like but in 2000 same 14 neighborhoods mean a family income was median family income was a hundred and sixty three thousand dollars and I believe it's 67% had college degrees an awful lot of those were advanced degrees and the the typical rich powerful couple in these neighborhoods now both had gone to colleges and oftentimes both had gone to elite colleges and both had advanced degrees so this is a different kind of elite in this this difference manifests itself in all sorts of ways all kinds of ways here's here's a way to to gauge it I bet a great many of you went to really good schools and really good suburbs or you went to a good private schools so you know what family night looked like back-to-school night at your schools you can still remember that what you may not have noticed is how skinny everybody was about more than you know half of Americans are obese now or what is it like the ANU upper class is unusually skinny in the new upper class at my age group I'm probably in the heaviest 20% I suppose in the new upper class suburbs I am probably I'm sorry in Frederick County where I live I'm in the bottom 20% I mean we're talking about a 50 pound difference I imagine if you just walk into a room and look at males my age or in their 50s and 60s and so forth that that's a trivial difference there are other trivial differences involving the things people eat not everybody goes out and love sushi as much as you guys do it involves things that are more important like the age at which we get married the average age for marriage in this country is still in the low 20s for members of the new upper class for college-educated people it's around 29 and if you're talking about people with graduates degrees it's in the 30s that's another difference than that back-to-school night at an elementary school at an ordinary school in mainstream America you're looking at lots and lots of mothers in that room that are in their late 20s or early 30s in an upper-middle-class or elite school in a in an elite school you're looking at mothers who are usually in their late 30s or in their 40s and don't even ask about how old the guys are you've got some real geriatric dads in those schools it goes to to some degree two political views but that can easily be overstated if you take the elite as a whole for the entire nation I don't think there is a pronounced leftward tilt to it the leftward tilt comes from a few major metropolitan areas Washington DC New York City San Francisco region and Los Angeles the problem with force four I just mentioned of course is that is where the major institutions of the country are run out of but but but overall the differences in the new elite culture between conservatives and liberals isn't that great you probably run a higher chance of being spanked if you are the child of a conservative elite family than you do if you are a member of a liberal elite family but in most other ways the child-rearing practices are the same if you want to read a discussion of the lifestyle of the new upper class you can get a wonderful book that's ten years old twelve years old now but it's still just as accurate as it ever was and that is bobo's in Paradise by David Brooks both very funny and very astute and and and very accurate but in fact most of you already know what I'm talking about because you have either grown up in these kinds of suburbs or you have moved into them after you became adults and your tastes and preferences are those of the new upper class in one sense that's fine you know you have different cultural tastes and preferences than mainstream America and who cares because in a lot of cases it's not better versus worse it's just different there are however problems associated with this and one is that the new upper class has so much influence over the rest of the country I mean it's obvious the ways in which they have influence politically but also they do in terms of the culture you know it who runs the major film studios who runs the television networks who runs the public book publishing industry who runs the music industry in terms of the executives making the decisions and it's a very highly educated very intelligent elite that has largely been socialized by the process I just described and a lot of times they are pretty good at looking at the polling data well enough to see what's going to get good ratings but they don't necessarily understand what it's like to live in mainstream America and the problem of this with this gets more severe much more severe as you move into the next generation you know if you grew up in a small town or if you grew up in in Queens or you grew up in a working-class neighborhood you may become rich and famous but you remember what it was like where you came from you still could be put down in Topeka Kansas and walk down the streets and and know what country you were in and know what the social signals are that you're getting and you would feel at home if you have grown up from birth in MacLean or Bethesda or the North Shore Chicago and you've gone to an elite private school or a public school that's in Winnetka nutria or something like that and then you go off to a good selective private school or you got into the Honors Program of of one of the better state universities you know the honors programs places like Michigan State and and other great universities are pretty much indistinguishable in many ways both in selectivity and in the socialization process from Harvard Yale and Princeton if you've done all that and then you've gone directly from that into law school and gone directly from law school into your six-figure salary I'm using an extreme case here I understand most of you have not gotten six-figure salaries after you leaving college but if that's the nature of your life's trajectory you don't have a clue about how most Americans live you you have had no experience with a specific example I've written a book about IQ along with dick Bernstein the mean IQ in the population as a whole is 100 that's the way it's designed if you went to one of those elite private schools secondary schools or you went to a first-rate probably school in a in a rich neighborhood probably the mean IQ in your class and yet in your entire student body was probably in 100 20s and the dumbest kids in the school were well above the national mean if that has been your experience in school you haven't a clue about what the cognitive functioning is like of half of the population or well over half of the population now I want to hasten not to be misunderstood with what I've just said it is not that oh if you knew how stupid those other half were you would have much more realistic appraisal of what's going on no I'm saying actually it's the reverse that's likely to be the case that you look upon all these other folks for whom you have note with you whom you have no direct contact and you are likely to think that they are boobs that can't think their way out of a paper bag and can't be trusted to make their own decisions and you know better it would be really healthy if you had intimate personal contact with a lot of people who have IQ 90 and who are interesting funny and thank you very much don't need your guidance in there major life decisions at all but you have no personal experience that lets you make those kinds of judgments now let me just make matters look worse in all of this because something else has gone on in this development of the new upper class which has longer term ramifications and that is the thing called homogamy by the sociologists that is the tendency of people to join together with likes marital homogeny or cognitive amalgam a means you marry people of a similar cognitive level that you are suppose you were a guy who was a CEO of a major company in 1960 if you had gotten married when you were 21 22 as you might very well have done if you were CEO in 1960 you probably married the girl next door somebody from your town and whereas you were probably attracted to her in part because she was was smart enough to be good company for you you weren't picking from a very large pool and if you got married after you had gotten to be rich and powerful you probably married a tract ofwomen who went to the same Country Club you did not a pool that's well known for its high IQ necessarily at as of 1960 of who do you do you marry now if you're a CEO of a large company well if you got married fairly young you probably married somebody was the same school you were so if you were at Harvard you married to somebody where Radcliffe if you got married later as is more typical you you may very well have ended up marrying the litigator who was helping your company in a merger who went to Yale and so you are bringing to that marriage a merger might be a web better way of putting it you're bringing to that merger a couple of really smart people well I Q the correlation between parental IQ and children's IQ is about 0.5 you don't need to worry about whether that's nature or nurture that's just the existing correlation that we have so that you have a phenomenon known as regression to the mean that applies to everybody it's a statistical phenomenon and that means your kids are are probably not going to be as smart as you are they're going to be between where you are and the mean but the higher the IQ is that the parents bring together the lesser the the less the size of that regression is going to be or I should say the farther above the mean it still leaves the average kid and more to the point if you're talking about the next generation of children who are unusually talented they will overwhelmingly come from people who have married with the jointly very high levels of ability if by the way you are saying oh I don't have to worry about that because I don't believe in IQ which is sort of like saying you don't believe in the Battle of Gettysburg you don't really have a choice as to whether to believe in IQ or not but never mind that I can talk about general ability because that's also correlated between parents and children whether you're wanting to talk about interpersonal ability intrapersonal ability almost any of Howard Gardner's eight or nine or however many there are intelligences have the same kind of phenomenon people will become highly successful have a cluster of talents and two people who are highly successful bring together a transmission of those talents to the next generation all of this means that we are looking at a tenacious upper class much more tenacious than it used to be in preserving its capital not just its monetary capital but its human capital now I'm not leaving as much time for the educational implications I intended we may be closer to ten till okay bear with me because I do want to talk about what bothers me about what's going on with a new upper class right now part of it is the isolation that I have already discussed but part of it also is the nature of what has happened college education and the ways in which it has fallen down in its job in socializing the new upper class and I'm thinking especially of elite schools at this point if you have a set of children going to young people going to a university who have gotten all the breaks in life they're coming from upper middle-class families which increasingly the student bodies of elite schools do come from so it's gotten that break they've also gotten the break of being really smart nobody deserves his or her IQ it's the luck of the draw you don't get it by studying so you have kids who have had all of these advantages and we now have a a higher education system which has decided that instead of serving as a bridge to adulthood which is what higher education used to do in addition to imparting knowledge we have now decided we are going to organize these to be institutions which prolong adolescence there are a huge number of examples the obvious ones are Great Inflation which you've all heard of there are other things like I hate to sound like the old codger talking about the old days but it did it did used to be true that if you didn't get a paper in on time well that was it unless you could prove that both parents have been killed in the car accident the night before and that you had a fever of 103 on top ah now you know if the paper isn't in on time well you really should get it on time next time but it's okay we can take that these are in some ways trivial examples but they are buttress by what's happened with the res life residential life all the staffs that are there to serve in loco parentis to to do all the things that your parents used to do for you when you were home there are the relationships with professors that are now the idea of calling a professor by its first name seems to if not a mortal sin at least a venial one the relationships of professors are not a bridge between the relationships you had with teachers in high school and the relationship you will have with supervisors on the job as they used to be they are rather much more likely relationships that used to have with teachers in high school friendly kindly and not too demanding and that brings me to my most emphatically felt criticism of higher education that no child who goes to these schools should be allowed to emerge from them without having been humiliated as matters stand now if you do not go into the sciences or math if you are in the Social Sciences or the humanities you can go all the way from kindergarten through graduate school without ever having been given an academic task you couldn't do everybody else knows what it's like to fail academically some kids learn what it's like in the second grade others learn what it's like in the eighth grade in ninth grade others learn that when they're getting done with high school others during college but the really bright ones never have that experience it is absolutely essential that they do if you have not had the experience of realizing you're not smart enough to figure something out you have a dangerous overestimation of your ability to figure everything out the George Christian who was but the Johnsons press secretary once had a wonderful statement that he made said no one should be allowed to work in the West Wing of the White House who has not suffered a major disappointment in life and that's as true today as it was before you especially ought to have a president who suffered a major disappointment in life - that's that's important which I'm not sure we've had with a couple of presidents of the recent past but the point is a serious one that kind of empathy with human limits including your own human limits is really important and the other thing that we are failing at in higher education is you don't remember anything you learn as an undergraduate substantively what you what you remember are certain kinds of rigor if you have been taught rigor in critical thinking which is to say the professor hands back the paper and it is graded down because your luck your argument didn't hang together logically even if it might have been right substantively but it was not presented in a way which met the test of rigor yet in the presentation of an argument I can't remember that sentence started you really need to have that kind of professor you really need to have a kind of professor who insists on clarity in language you need to have example you need to have experiences which which force you to evaluate data carefully you need all of these experiences because it is in that process of having your feet held to the fire that you pick up the habits that then become the resources that you bring to the rest of your life and as far as I can tell having had four children who have gone through very good colleges over the last 20 years as far as I can tell that unless you're in the sciences or in math you don't get those experiences so the the upshot of all that is we now have really smart kids who are getting out and getting really good jobs and then rising to those positions where they will run the country and they are doing so with a very exalted sense of their own entitlement an exalted sense of their own ability ah and a profound ignorance in many cases about what life in ordinary America is like that is a prescription for disaster with regard to the civic culture of America that we have known and thank you very much thank you very much indeed I think somebody's going to bring up a mic so that you can continue to be heard as we as we chat that was seriously interesting and I think fairly described as provocative and much appreciated we'll ask let me ask you to say a little bit more about the damage you see done to the Civic culture of America by the separation of the two classes can you give an example or two of things things that you think are going wrong or will go wrong as a result of the separation that you've described pretty pretty persuasively this is on already yes go for it the the main thing checker is uh that comes first to mind is with regard to public policy because the the mindset that I described a minute ago of people not being able to make their own decisions and that you need to have public policy which nudges them I think that's the current buzzword Cass Sunstein and the University of Chicago and others that that you you don't want to force people to do things but you're going to nudge them or in some cases you do things like say they're drinking too much coke we're going to reduce the size of their coca-cola it those individually are trivial but this notion that ordinary people can't run their own lives is becoming more and more pervasive among uh people who are influential in public policy and I will say that's true among some conservatives that I could name but will not as well as the left where it's virtually a theme song on the left that you must constrain people's behavior you must guide them you must support them because they can't run their own lives I submit to you that you only have the impression of ordinary people if you've never lived among ordinary people that ordinary folks not only are capable of running their own lives they get kind of irritated when people try to tell them they can't what we are getting instead I think checker is a kind of bimodal view that a great many of the elites have of American society they are super concerned about the disadvantaged so their parents for example may have when they were in high school had them go down to work a night every week of the soup kitchen partly to do good and partly to put on their college applications but they've gone down and they've done that or they've worked at Habitat for Humanity for summer so in they have had some exposure to the most disorganized the most chaotic most disadvantaged communities in the country having skipped everything in between and now I'm treading on dangerous ground here chucker but I'll go ahead and said it wouldn't be the first time no no I'm talking about especially with you I'm about the dangerous ground a Howard Gardner once said of the No Child Left Behind Act he said it in an email to me and I don't know if he ever said it publicly that it was as if you designed a an educational policy that was needed in Detroit and then applied it to the whole country and that that sort of captures what I'm trying to say that so many of our policies now are designed as if everybody else except weap members of the elite really really need a lot of help to get along with our lives so you're saying if I'm hearing you correctly that a kind of nanny state tendency emerges from this new upper class and without even realizing that that's what they're doing because it's sort of part of their their nature now could I just add a little bit more to that yeah because because I skipped over what I see as the as another really important problem with the separation it impoverishes the lives of the elite you know what think about the population of McClane or the population of Winnetka okay they've got a lot of nice interesting people in there you've also got a lot of boring ones all the interesting people in the world do not live in the Upper East Side of New York or in Bethesda Maryland or in the places where the elite live this country is full of rich vital activities and people and and places that the elite no longer encounters and they are also stripping themselves in many cases from the the richness of community now my wife and I moved out to Burkittsville Maryland in 1989 population hundred and seventy two it's a blue-collar working-class farming agricultural community with a couple of oddballs like my wife and me and I'm not trying to paint a a saccharine picture of what life is like out there but I will say this we have we are embedded in a community that has real problems to solve and it's engaged in the stuff of life in ways that's really hard to do I in a more isolated environment so in everything I've said if I'm going to make the case this separation is a bad thing I can't do it as a preface to policy prescriptions which will fix it I can only do it if individual readers look at their own lives somewhat differently having read the book and say you know what I still want to live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood but I also want to live in a real neighborhood with what with real people and maybe I can satisfy all of those needs at the same time which brings us to one of the educating the k-12 education policy questions that I think is on the table which is you are employing strongly the diversity amongst those around you is a plus for everybody affected that it's good for the upper class kids and I presume you would say it's good for the lower class kids though don't let me put words in your mouth and yet a lot of these nanny state policies that I think you're not very happy about our intended to foster diversity desegregated schools a firm ative action in in in university a variety of other settings where the upper-class has decided using instrumentalities of government that we're going to force diversity upon people you should it sounds to me think that that's a good thing I've reminded of Tom soles remark about the next time that you hear the elites tell you how wonderful diversity is ask them how many Republicans they have in their sociology department if you're talking about that ah look look diversity as as it has been uh as it had been voiced is just overwhelmingly focused on race and ethnicity socio-economic diversity is what I'm talking about okay and and it cannot happen because it's forced when you've what do you do it when you took what we're going to do when you try to bust people into schools and so forth you get a reaction which is people come together in communities because of shared values that's another instance of something I think I alluded to during the speech a great deal of what's going on here that I consider to have collateral bad effects are people doing very natural things when we moved to Burkittsville and put our kids in the public schools which we did I guarantee you I would not have put them in the public schools if we'd continued to live in Washington DC because except with few exceptions at that time I couldn't be confident that my children would be safe an in nurturing environment in a public school in Washington DC and whereas I was willing to put up with certain detriment in the quality of education I wasn't willing to put up with that so so you everything about diversity which indeed I do think is important but I'm talking about diversity of people in the dimensions of the way they are not the color of their skins that diversity must be because we think it's cool to be around a richer assortment of people than we are around right now and a lot of this the good news though a chapter in one in one regard I have seen people in this audience nod quite a bit at a variety of the statements I've made on this theme and it has been my reaction that a great many people are already worried about this stuff and I have especially found it in the reactions of successful people who themselves grew up in middle class or working-class backgrounds they don't like the way their kids are growing up even though they chose the suburbs they live in and chose the schools are going to they have they have known that something's not right about this that's not working out the way they wanted it to so I the good news is I wouldn't be surprised if if this is a set of ideas whose time has come and I don't have to persuade people of things I'm really talking about things that they've already been worrying about so you've talked a fair amount about the emergence of the new upper class and the forces that conspired to create it what about the emergence of the new lower class and in particular do you see the schools or the k-12 system as having played a role maybe by its failures I in the creation of the new lower class is there a education causation in in part at least in the lower-class phenomenon that's I you know what there there definitely is and I just realized that I well I I did not talk about causes of the new lower class in the book for a very specific reason because I think that a lot of those causes had to do with a wide variety of reforms that occurred in the 1960s that's was the argument in losing ground I still believe it it also makes the left crazy and and they insofar as we get into an argument about causes I am going to lose my audience altogether who would be otherwise be sympathetic with many of the things I'm saying on the left and so I'm sure there's no it here on the left and well but you know the interesting thing is that it the strategy worked and by the way it's a benign strategy oh I'm trying to do is try to get people the wide variety of political persuasions to be able to read the book without throwing it against the wall okay and so I took no shots at the left in the book and so you have people like Nick Kristof in The New York Times he wrote a column about the book which said look Murray's talking about real problems his politics are nuts but he's talking about real problems and I think we need more of that so I didn't talk about those but but now that you've asked me about education yet think of all the ways in which it has been k12 and especially k-8 education that has been the foundation of America civic culture to me one of the you know IDI Hirsch's a cultural literacy back in 1987 whenever he wrote it and his subsequent work are exactly right there are a whole variety of ways of being an American which require a familiarity with certain cultural prerequisites you know if you don't know what Valley Forge means in some ways you're out of the conversation with certain aspects of America there are a whole variety of such things that the schools used to do a really good job of teaching the schools also very openly used to be for immigrants the mechanism for socialization it was taken for granted you go to school and the parents were in favor this are going to learn English and you're going to learn to be an American and everybody bought into that the other thing um that the schools did was they could they could prepare kids for the world of work to some degree you don't prepare kids for the world of work by taking them on field trips to see work places you prepare them for the world of work by making it a habit from a very early age to no here's how you get up and do something even though you don't really feel like it here's how you operate in a supervisor subordinate relationship the school did all of those things really well and it stopped doing those things in around the 1960s and it especially stopped doing those things in work in schools and working-class neighborhoods and and and I think that this has been a deficit in the lives of children that nape test scores don't even come close to capturing and is probably one of the most crucial contributions that the schools used to make do you think there's any part of the remedy that the schools could participate in or what would it take for schools to participate in a part of a coming together just imagine a set of schools a national imagine if this nation schools all taught IDI Hirsch's core knowledge curriculum for those of you who aren't familiar with it this is a curriculum designed by the IDI Hirsch's foundation it's a wonderful curriculum I've looked at it quite carefully I would love to have had my children go through k-8 with that curriculum but it would have taught the cultural literacy and then about suppose you add on top of that that is taken for granted that the schools will serve first those students who are trying to learn and that it will take other measures to try it try to deal with the problem kids and so forth but it will not let the presence of problem kids detract from the education that is being provided to the kids who are there trying to do their darndest in other words suppose we simply return to the normal expectations of schools in the 1950s which I will say very quickly weren't that good in terms of the way that he went to them yeah yeah no I went to public schools in Newton Iowa and they ohayo yeah yeah so I'm not I'm not defending the a lot of things about the schools then I'm saying it did have some of those qualities and then parents okay we need we need a contribution from parents if we're going to foster this go back to the old assumption that if you're prostitute child has a problem with a teacher the default assumption is it's your kids fault instead of the teachers for stop being helicopter parents where everything that happens bad to your kid must be because you don't understand the teacher doesn't understand the special needs of this very special child of yours the parents parents have been complicit in a lot of this as well I don't know if you remember the first edition of Hersh's cultural literacy had at the back of it a list of the things that every educated American would know and he was immediately denounced this was 1987 actually for this canonical hegemonic white our archaic list of highly selective things that why do you really need to know them and what about all those other things I mean it was it was almost immediately discredit I think he left the list out of subsequent editions the book actually because it was so pounced upon by so many so many of his critics incident I'm a fan of that curriculum too and I've just joined one of their boards at the core knowledge foundation myself so mobility is is is an honored time-honored deeply set American value the notion that you know you can rise above where your grandparents or parents were and that parents can propel you to a place that is above in educational or economic or career or other terms beyond where they were this was the kind of profound immigrant wish for their kids and grandkids and so on and an awful lot of other people's to is your book essentially saying that social mobility is now gone or rare or much harder or less likely that's that's okay you know it's the best of times it's the worst of times answer it's the best of times in the following sense if you are a really smart in a backwater town in Mississippi I don't care if you're white or black this has never been a better time for you it's never been easier for you to no matter how poor your family is to get a full ride to a really good college if you're really if you've got a lot of talent we've gotten really really good at identifying talent wherever it is and I'm delighted about that here is the iron law of meritocracy that actually goes back to the bell curve I'm getting embarrassed about all the things that I plagiarized from the bell curve and coming apart well that's not but someone so easily since they didn't read the bell curve there was no danger and stuff back in this book to look the better the meritocracy the faster social mobility will decline say it again the better the meritocracy the more efficiently you identify and reward talent the faster that social mobility will decline over time and the reason that that happens is because of the correlation between parents and children that I mentioned earlier and the increasing homogamy whereby you have the successful marry that's successful and a lot of times the unsuccessful marrying the unsuccessful you know it used to be not only I noticed but even common um that you'd you'd run into these people who were working in blue-collar jobs who were obviously bright as hell and had all sorts of interests Oh your plumber might be humming Puccini while he was fixing your pipes because he's a big opera fan of that there was there was just talent in the United States as of 1960 Democratic you had if you had no sense in which the high IQ people were in one part of town and the way you do now now use I don't want to exaggerate it is not the case that all the smartest people are going to elite colleges under successful by no means but if you want to say has the pool changed yeah it has every year we draw a very large number of the most able people out of small towns out of working-class neighborhoods out of middle-class neighborhoods and they're never going back again and furthermore as then talent is transmitted to the next generation if you look at the socioeconomic backgrounds of incoming kids to elite schools they are overwhelmingly from the upper middle class in the face of policies where these schools really really want to get other kinds of kids and the reason is the highest test scores and the other evidences of high academic ability are overwhelmingly coming from the upper middle class much more so than it used to and that is just a paradox of meritocracy people ask why social mobility slowing faster in the United States than it does in Europe I submit to you it's because the United States has been a whole lot better than Europe at its meritocracy for half a century now one more from me and then we're going to open it up and when we open it up let me repeat again to the worldwide audience that you can email a question two questions a TED excellence net or you can tweet one to hash tag coming apart and we'll turn to questions in just a second if you're an upper-middle class parent with options for your kid today educational options for your kid we should you seek out a socioeconomically diverse school if you can find one either public or private is this a good thing for you your kid and the larger society or doesn't it much matter my wife and I made a life decision to do that to do that yeah and I shouldn't be too self congratulatory on that it was also the Washington DC was getting really expensive to live in so we were trying to look for a cheaper place but we didn't move out to the suburbs we moved way out to and we did it for exactly that reason it seems to me that if you if we have a real problem with the new upper class it is that the kids in that new upper class oftentimes are pre soft they have lived an extremely sheltered existence they aren't aware of how sheltered that existence is one wonders how well they will respond to the rough-and-tumble of the world and I didn't want my kids to be hothouse flowers um III you know what uncle weeds yeah I have to I have to I you know full disclosure compels me to reveal what my son said to me I see it finished his high school my my daughter Anna was it you know classes differ you can you can be in in one class in a school which is terrific in two classes later especially with a small school you just don't have any people that fit your kids needs well my daughter Anna had lots of good friends she had a great experience my son was in a class in his school's where he didn't really have close friends and upon heading off after high school he said to me dad you moved us out here so that we get to know lots of different kinds of people and all you did was make me into an elitist snob so parents decisions don't always get what you want immediate I'd like to think that as time goes on we'll reconsider that position godparents you know I I've now told you the whole story with regard to this uh but yeah that's I I think we all look for that good do we have a movable mic or how's that part going to work okay we have a movable mic we're going to take questions they've got to be real questions relatively brief I think I'm going to ask you to identify yourself so that everybody knows who is asking the question and you can also if you wish to identify yourself as a member of the new upper class if you think that that to label if you think that that label fits Charlie suggested early on that he thinks most people the room qualify as either members or wannabes with regard to the new upper class yes ma'am take the mic who are you my name is Stanley I'm not going to identify my class but I'm from the National School Boards Association there is an increasing requirement that young people have internships before they start good jobs but it seems to me that those internships only seem to be available to those people the upper-class because the connections they have would you suggest we do some volunteer ism and schools that's required you mean for everybody just out of mild curiosity how many people in this room at this moment could be called interns ha ha ha thank you I did not plant this question um look internships are affirmative action for privileged kids who can afford to take an unpaid internship this is not rocket science if you are coming from a poor family if you're piling up student loan debt you probably are going to say I can't afford to take these jobs and yet increasingly all of the cliches about the networking and and and getting you know you have a better job a better you're going to have a better chance of getting a job at AEI after you've graduated if you've been an intern at AEI it's not going to be guaranteed you'll have a better chance and and I think internships need to be rethought by the organizations that are offering them maybe it could be done by simply having scholarships where where because of financial need or a financial background you go ahead and you pay some interns and not pay others I don't know what the solution is but I think we need to recognize the degree to which they are indeed affirmative action for privileged kids I believe she's also asking however whether you think it'd be a good thing for schools to require a kind of volunteerism program for all of their students oh I think requiring volunteerism is an oxymoron and and let me put this in terms of the the way it's often phrased to me is should we have national service or something like that because look at how great the draft was and creating mix and so forth if we had national service civilian national service there's one problem with it you would not have the Uniform Code of Military Justice to back up the administrators when they had problems with people who were there and what you would have instead is a game in which people are in a situation of service or volunteerism in another case which they want to get out of if they can and if they're in it they're going to do as little work as possible it talked about unintended outcomes the requiring volunteerism or requiring national service would be to load it with them okay young man in the front row my name is Luca Toni celli and my Italian father comes from a title's family so draw your own conclusions um I was wondering if you could discuss the relationship between globalization and the cultural divergence that you're talking about in two minutes or less yeah and the cultural divergence you're talking about not just a global elite but the kind of culture we enjoy I hate it when I got a question I don't have a ready answer to I'm not sure what they are you know I think globalization tends to get blamed for a lot of things that it shouldn't get blamed for but I do not have a good answer to your question and if that's the case I should stop talking sorry it's a lesson that I've learned in question answering is don't fake it others yeah go ahead right behind him take the mic who are you I'm Peggy or Kowski from a public school background in California though PhD I'm congressional correspondent for the Hispanic outlook on higher education and I've quoted you many times in the magazine it's great I think a lot of only kids are being challenged these days and that's from the Asian kids coming into college and it's a good segue into the former question but what about that the majority of PhDs now especially the stems are being earned by foreign students and many of them may not be the best and brightest many of them they pay more especially in public yet they pay three times more tuition so do you have any thoughts about that well in terms of the being pushed hard by Asians you're also talking about mostly math and science right and and in those as far as I can tell the standards are still pretty demanding you can flunk out a course is real easy in physics and in engineering and the rest of it I'm actually told when I published real education and I said in there that at least science and math and engineering are still the standards are still there I did get some feedback from people on engineering faculties saying now there actually has been deterioration but insofar as people are being pushed I wish some degree that you'd have more Asians going into the social science and humanities except that what what difference does it make if you're all getting A's anyway in the course how do you get pushed to more rigor if the curriculum itself doesn't do it I think that rigor and the kinds of demands I'm talking about have to be imposed by the professor and by the course material and I don't see a whole lot of signs that that's going on you do have major differences between the top tier schools and second and third tier schools you still do have to write papers at least you have to write papers in the top tier schools don't you whereas in a lot of the second third tier schools you you want to take multiple choice exams throughout your entire ba we have to write the paper but you still get a minimum B grade on it our Asians I know this isn't your current data set better asian-americans making it into the new upper class I have a flash for you from the front I got the the 2010 census data I have just been released for race and ethnicity at the zip code level and so I downloaded all those and why am I telling this to the fordham Institute instead of publishing this someplace else nevermind I'll go ahead and and uh you might Mary lol Likud anyway um so what I did was I Census Bureau already leaked it apparently I just figured I don't know but they have it they haven't done it in terms of my scent aisle scores Oh cause he ID ranked all the ZIP codes in the country in the book on a con an index of Education and of income and so the very top cent I'll into the top two cent aisles of the country is comprised exclusively a zip codes like those in Northwest Washington or the Upper East Side of New York or Palo Alto and places like that they're really elite places ok Asians as a whole constitute five percent of the population as residents of these top two cent aisles of zip codes twelve percent in the 2010 census up from I can't give you the numbers up for much lower percentages in 1990 and 2000 you extrapolate that trend line out and you're going to have a major change in the competitive nature of and in the nature of the elites I am also told as I was mentioning to checker as we were coming down here that in some schools in California now which have over very large Asian populations you're getting white flight because these white parents know their kids can't compete and they want them to go to schools well there have a better chance of getting good grades and good applications to colleges it's a whole new meaning to white flight Susan Susan Schlow funny from the Pearson foundation so you can go right into your question I would like to know given that you don't believe that mandates are going to be particularly helpful in improving education what you think of the new Common Core State Standards which ostensibly are voluntary standards that 46 states have agreed to at least they're focusing on some of the issues that you're talking but do you think they're going to make a difference I got an email a couple of weeks ago from I will not identify the correspondent as someone who has dealt with a lot of the state standards who is extremely upset because she says and I don't know I've not personally I've also simply say what she said to me and she sounds like a serious educational scholar that a great many of these standards still focus on process you know it's not the content of what you've learned it's you know teaching kids how to learn to study history it's teaching kids how to learn to do something as opposed of teaching them history teaching the math teaching them the rest of it and standards that focus on actual learned material and I will tell you as someone who had children going through the public schools k12 in the late 1990s and the first half of the 2000s it drove me absolutely nuts to look at the homework they brought home because they had lots of homework the homework took lots of time and it was drivel and it was drivel largely because it was this constant stuff about process and so insofar as the criticism I got in the email about the standards still sticking with a lot of process focus I'd be worried about them to the extent that's not fair I'm more positive about I think you're acknowledging I haven't studied them closely yourself okay anybody on this side of the hall back row front of the window howdy I'm Justin hen typical DC intern I misled you go to college I go to Utah State University okay my question is on what are your thoughts regarding advanced placement tests in high schools you talked about how schools don't sometimes go with students helping them Excel and I can see AP classes allowing them to do that but at the same time you also get the possibility of groupthink because all these high achieving kids go to certain classes like AP classes and don't get to interact with other students that may be at a lower caliber yeah the old problem with you've just you've just stated the the age-old problem with with tracking my own view is this if you are in a school that has a lot of socio-economic diversity in it and if you have tracking you are going to have classrooms that also have a lot of socio-economic diversity in it and that's good and so so there although even though your kids are in classes of where they are with other high achieving kids they're going to have a lot more interesting experiences than if they're in classes with high achieving kids and kids who are also their same social socio-economic class I also having had a child of who had a quite specific learning disability in terms of visual spatial skills am quite familiar with the degree to which you've got to have clapped kids in classes where they have a chance of succeeding that it doesn't do any good to put a child in a class where there's no way no matter how hard he or she tries that they can do it and the solution that too often schools have taken when kids are all in the same classes is will make all the classes ones that the slowest kids in them can pass I think you've got an unacceptable educational situation so overall I come down on the side of tracking within the public schools recognizing that it does tend to have kids of similar ability hanging out with each other more than with the full range of students but I think that is a consequence that is a price that's worth paying for the educational outcomes is there anybody else that they see yes ma'am back there hi is this one yeah I was beginning with Samantha hello my name is Samantha Hodges and I'm at the poverty and race research Action Council again I am uh I'm at the poverty and race research Action Council thank you I was also a Pell grant recipient and attended Wesleyan University that's important at all but you make the argument that policy makers are currently very hands-on you know trying to guide people's behaviors with policy which I definitely agree can be detrimental to a certain extent but in the case of creating more socioeconomically diverse communities how do you think that can be accomplished without hands on policy so to speak and I'm thinking specifically about persistent segregation in the u.s. that hasn't really changed that much in the past 50 years actually actually you'd be interested in a an academic study that came out a couple of years ago and I'm blocking on the name I referenced it in the book whereas there is good news in that regard insofar as yeah there's still a lot of racial segregation but it is less residential segregation the trend is in the right direction but that same analysis of the data concluded that socio-economic segregation is increasing I cannot emphasize too strongly what I have said a couple of times these kinds of socio economic segregation result from people making decisions about what's best for them in their lives and and and any attempt to mandate socio-economic integration is going to fail and it's going to generate hostility it is going to produce the it's going to exacerbate the problems that it that it seeks to ameliorate the only way that we will have a lessening of this kind of extreme segregation is if people voluntarily think that their lives would be enriched by making other choices and that's the case I'm trying to make in the book that the reason you want to do this the reason you want to be in a community with a broader range of people is not to do good for anyone else it's to do good for yourself and your children I think we've got time for one more before yes sir before the witching hour arrives at 1:30 my name is Travis map I'm a teacher in DC Public Schools which school if I'm a Cardozo senior high school Cardozo organizations such as Teach for America recruit heavily among the elite schools and from the demographic that you have described how does this necessarily affect if at all their ability to function any type of urban schools that they are placed in how does it affect their ability to function those schools yeah to be effective in the urban school I should be asking that question of you if you've had experience with with such people I let me let me answer let me put it another way first I don't know the answer to your question I would imagine that they would have the same kind of a culture shock initially that someone like me had as a Peace Corps volunteer when I went to Thai villages it took me a few months to get my head squared away with what was going on I assumed that's that's happening I will say that something like that experience is going to be great for the teachers who engage in that kind of thing it will give them access to a different part of America that I think people need access to and so I'm in favor of that kind of program assuming that the people who are doing the teaching are doing a good job of teaching for the kids which is the question that you're in a better position to answer than I am and about which there's quite a lot of somewhat conflicting the research on the me on the effectiveness front one more quick one anybody yes ma'am you shorten snappy um what is your take speak into it cultural programs such as the one that was just closed in Arizona which keeps students from a different either racial or cultural backgrounds from the generic white population and it keeps them in special classes but it was closed down what could that because that created isolation as well um do you think that that had any benefits because although it created isolation from the rest of the students that kept those students in high school and possibly going on to college I'm not quite tracking what was closed down exactly that you're referring to speak into the mic Ken there are some programs in Arizona there's one of the Arizona School District I don't know the name of it Mexican American Studies program in this k-12 system okay and it was okay and it was closed down because it was okay it closed down because of what it closed down because of okay it was felt to be segregating you know what I just don't know about anything about the program so anything I would say about it would be useless except that it gives me as a closing state please forget about racial and ethnic in terms of the problems I'm describing to have a racially diverse community where everybody makes $250,000 a year is diverse in the most trivial of senses if your sense of diversity is my neighbor is black and he's also runs a five hundred million dollar corporation forget the diversity socio-economic diversity is what I'm after thank you Charlie before we dismiss the class the thank you all for attending their video from today's event will be on the Fordham website tomorrow and forever after so you can watch it again and again and again and show it to your friends the I'd also like to tell you that a month from today we are having a special conversation here in the space where former education secretaries Margaret Spellings and Lamar Alexander are going to explore the question of what are the current education priorities of the Republican Party and how have they shifted over the past decade you can RSVP for that event by visiting the Fordham live page of the Fordham website we hope you'll come back for that think it might be as at least half as interesting and provocative as today's excellent session has been why don't you join me in thanking our excellent speaker you

Channel: The Education Gadfly

Views: 32,811

Rating: 4.6486487 out of 5

Keywords: Charles Murray, American Enterprise Institute, AEI, Lecture, Coming Apart

Id: mXPNdHORpO4

Length: 81min 41sec (4901 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 26 2012