Klarinet Archive - Posting 000242.txt from 1999/02

From: DHmorgan@-----.com
Subj: Re: [kl] Women and orchestras
Date: Sat, 6 Feb 1999 02:28:02 -0500

Everything that you say below about the need to equal out opportunities is
fine, but it has nothing to do with the point I was making and muddies the
issues considerably. I'm not making an argument for or against affirmative
action--though, if it's the best we can do at the moment, I for one will take
it rather than nothing.

It's interesting that you mention that legal writing is very specific
technical writing because this is the very point. One would think that bias
would NOT creep in where the criteria are so specific, but that's just where
it DOES creep in and that is why social research is occaissonally helpful in
getting a grasp of reality.

Lets say there are ten black law students. Let us say that their writing
skills are, indeed, poor. But they are MORE POOR in the eyes of white graders
than in the eyes of BLACK graders. Let us say some of them do pretty well.
They do LESS WELL in the eyes of their white graders than their black graders.
Let's say a woman writes a poor essay. She does LESS POORLY in the eyes of
women graders than she does in the eyes of male graders. Now, do
blacks/women/men/whites take pity on their own kind and grade them higher even
when they do poorly? Do they punish the other group by grading them unfairly
low? I have no idea--and it doesn't matter. The evidence of the study in
question, which I don't have on hand and am getting tired of trying to recall,
seemed to indicate that the BIAS was there, irrespective of performance.

Now, if one says, "Oh, well, that's the way of the world," then fine. I can
see an argument for that. Personally, I try to take the bias effect into
consideration. I try to be aware that my own judgements are skewed towards
people in the various groups I belong to, and make and effort to be inclusive
and open minded about differences in approach.

Or maybe the study WAS critically flawed--I have no idea at this point. I'm
begining to recall why I left race relations. Lets talk about clarinet
playing, shall we?

Truly,
Don

In a message dated 2/5/99 7:12:15 PM Pacific Standard Time,
kevinfay@-----.com writes:

<< DHmorgan wrote:

<<<I'm sure if you had polled law professors before they did a controlled
study of the issue, they would have been outraged at the suggestion that
they are systematically grading people of their own race and gender higher
than others--since they were grading nameless papers tracked by numbers only
and had no conscious idea who the author was--they would have considered
that a 'jump'.>>>

I'd bet a double tall latte that I am the only person on this list who has
graded law school blue books. The experience quickly leads me to believe
that the touted "blind test" was not scientifically accurate at all. In the
study, I have no doubt that the white male professors graded the white
students' papers higher on average. This does not tell me that race
matters--it tells me that the black students did not do as well on the test.
Did they statistically norm the study based on admissions criteria?

This argument is up there with the assertion that the LSAT is racially
biased. It's not--it merely does its job all too well. The LSAT is
designed for one purpose, and one purpose only: to predict how well the
taker will perform in the first year of law school. If you track LSAT
scores against first year grades at a law school where there is a
statistical variation in the class (i.e., not Harvard where a significant
portion of the class maxes out the test), you will see an amazing
correlation between the scores and the grades.

The LSAT, and to a large extent, all law school exams, is a test of the use
of standard written English. Legal writing is nothing more than "proper
English on steroids"--much of it takes basic grammar to ridiculous extremes.
There are sentences in the Internal Revenue Code and the Social Security
regulations that literally go on for pages. Parsing through that muck is a
learned skill; it should not be surprising that students with higher English
proficiency simply have a head start at that task.

The truth about affirmative action is that students admitted on a
preferential basis simply do not do as well, on average, as their
traditionally-admitted peers. Most of this is due, IMHO, to the disparate
ability to write standard written English on the way in. One simply can't
catch up and improve the ability to wordsmith in three short years,
especially while stuffing your head full of arcane rules about real
property, crimes and (ick) corporate taxation.

Please do not take the above as a polemic against affirmative action. It's
not. I strongly favor retaining those programs. But those programs deal
only with the effect, not the cause, of the problem of educational
inequality. People waste a great deal of time arguing about whether it's
"fair" to "lower standards." Affirmative action is about neither fairness
nor standards--it's about making more minority professionals in the cheapest
way possible.

Here's what I mean. When putting the Great Society together in the '60s,
welfare payments were adopted as the method of choice to maintain the living
standards of the underclass, despite the foreknowledge that such payments
would lead to dependency (Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted this from the
start). Why? Because it was cheaper than doing the "right" thing, which
was to get these people jobs. Direct payments cost less than economic
renewal; at the time, it was a conscious choice.

Affirmative action for graduate schools is a lame attempt to get the
end--more minority professionals--without reforming the means. The reason
that it's necessary is that minority applicants, on average, don't have the
same undergraduate opportunities as whites. More whites go to college (and
"better" colleges when they do) because, on average, secondary education is
better for whites in this country. And on and on down the food chain until
you end up at the inner city schools, which suck by any measure. Plus,
students in the inner city are poor, which is by itself a drag on
educational opportunity. Cultural factors also don't help.

Rather than spend the enormous amounts of money to fix opportunities
throughout the entire educational food chain--which WOULD be "fair"--our
society tries (or tried, until recently) to obtain the same results by
fooling around with the tip of the iceberg.

Sorry to get political--I promise to stop.

kjf >>

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