Decades ago, the Left played the class-war game. These days it’s a war on competence and achievement, hiding beyond claims of racial and sexual equity.
In Virginia, we are to believe that on their own, high school administrators in seventeen schools decided not to inform those of their students who had scored high enough on their scholastic aptitude tests to be named National Merit semi-finalists. Of course, it was not coincidental. Two factors are involved: The spurious claim that schools can achieve the impossible -- equal outcomes for all -- a claim which must not be challenged by contrary facts; and prejudice against high-achieving students -- most likely, given historical records, majority Asian and white. Hugh Hewitt thinks this was a clear violation of the students' civil rights for which Fairfax County may end up paying heavy legal damages.
A Massachusetts congresswoman, Ayanna Pressley (who represents, inter alia, most of Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts), plainly revealed what is the basis for the war on intellectual achievement:
“IQ is a measure of whiteness.”
It isn’t, of course. It’s a combination of genetics (dare we say this?), home environment, including familial respect for achievement, personal interests and motivation, and to a certain extent, the caliber of the education received.
This is not just a K-12 excrescence. For some years now it has metastasized to higher education.
Richard Vedder noted four years ago trends in this direction which have only accelerated since then.
1. A decreasing portion of institutional resources is going to fund academics -- teachers and researchers. Spending on disseminating and creating knowledge is being crowded out by massive increases in administrative staff overseeing student affairs, new sustainability and diversity bureaucracies, intercollegiate athletics, etc.
2. Students on average are spending far less time on academics than they did a generation or two ago, and almost certainly are learning less from their schooling.
3. America’s clear global lead in research is rapidly ending as other nations, especially China, are vastly increasing research spending relative to that in the United States, where political leaders increasingly forfeit future investment and...
