EQUAL, NOT EQUITABLE

A Leg Up, Not a Guaranteed Outcome

Imagine you have a child in school.  She’s incredibly hard-working, smart and successful.  She earns top grades.  But one day, in keeping with the norms of “social justice,” the teacher announces that to make things fair to those who might have had a tough start in life, all grades will be averaged.  The teacher thinks that the best students will continue to work hard and that even minority students will continue to push themselves.  She will be wrong.

The first week, grades average at a B, which makes the teacher happy.  The next week, the average grade is a C, and she can see her top students caring less about homework and studying for tests.  The poorest scholars of the minority students are perfectly happy with a C, which is better than they might have expected.  And, they aren’t working any harder, perhaps even less than before.

This study has been done at various schools.  But, as with most experiments, it’s important to look at long-term results, not just the outcome of the test.  When you take a student who is struggling and simply give them a better grade, you’re telling them that they aren’t good enough, that they will never be good enough.  You’re also telling them not to bother to learn much.  Why should they?  A big effort on their part probably won’t move the grade that much, as it is still being averaged. 

Equity is About Outcomes, Not Fairness

The fairest thing you can do to any child who has poor parents, parents who don’t speak English or some other factor that makes school tougher for them is to give them tutoring and more resources to help them achieve.  It’s the difference between handing a kid with a broken leg a crutch instead of getting the leg set so it can heal. 

The same result comes when you give people free money.  When you decide that some people are disadvantaged by past harm, you have the choice to put them in a wheel chair, or set their injury and give them physical therapy with a goal of allowing them to heal and achieve.  Free money usually doesn’t transform, while earned money is empowering.  Look at the lottery; how many people have much left the following year?  How much did it change their lives?

The fairest way to treat anyone is to believe in them, give them the support they need to truly achieve and watch them rise.  I think that’s what Martin Luther King saw in his people, and in the early days of the ‘60’s, as the Civil Rights Movement took off, he saw his people take charge of their lives and succeed.

Instead, we now have a Left that believes that the people they expect to vote for them are actually enfeebled and incapable.  What an insult!  When you expect little of someone, that’s what you get.  But when you believe in them…that’s magic.  I’ve written about this before, but when a tester switched IQ scores in a grammar school class, the formerly poor performers excelled.  Why?  Because the teacher “knew” they could.  Why don’t we believe this about everyone?

Equity Hurts

When affirmative action is applied to a person, it can have two toxic effects.  One, it diminishes accomplishments they truly earn.  If you know an attorney got affirmative action to help him enter and complete law school, do you trust him to handle your affairs?  No.  The other effect is failure.  If you have spent years in bad schools, being social-promoted grade to grade without actually learning the things you need to learn, you are bound to fail when the progressives help you get into Harvard.

Failure is a difficult thing to overcome, though we all have to learn from it.  But when you’re told you’re great and given A’s on work that doesn’t merit it, you don’t understand failure very well.  A good parent helps a child confront small failures early in their lives—not getting selected for a sports team, not getting the A they hoped in a class—so that when they get older, they know they can cope with the larger failures that life throws at all of us.  Even more so, they have witnessed their own recovery from failure.

Equity used to mean fairness in the way people are treated.  But it doesn’t mean that anymore.  It’s a twisted attempt to create an outcome without creating the means for that outcome to be real.  Let’s look at an example most parents can remember—teaching their kids to drive.  It’s a slow process because there are so many skills required.  You build them over time, in parking lots and deserted streets.  As the skills build, the teenager grows in confidence, but for many years, you keep honing those skills.  Instead, what if we said “Driving lessons are too hard for him or her.  Let’s just give him a license.”  Anyone sign up for this?

Watch the Language of the Left

The Left shields its toxic prescriptions by saying that they “care about people.”  But they don’t.  They only care about their vote.  To care about someone means giving them the ability to succeed, not to give them that success unearned. 

Affirmative action, reparations, social promotion, grade-norming…all these attempts just say one thing.  YOU’LL NEVER BE GOOD ENOUGH.  Is that a message anyone should ever hear?  I don’t think so

.Jordan Peterson on the subject