{"id":929,"date":"2015-07-16T16:55:54","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T16:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/?p=929"},"modified":"2015-07-16T16:55:54","modified_gmt":"2015-07-16T16:55:54","slug":"the-sowell-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/?p=929","title":{"rendered":"The Sowell Solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Time:\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong> 1944<\/p>\n

Place<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0 Junior High School 143 in uptown Manhattan, not far from Harlem<\/p>\n

Action:<\/strong> Mrs. Sennett, a Guidance Counselor, is giving a classroom full of ninth graders advice about which NYC high school they should attend next year<\/p>\n

She begins by telling the kids to be realistic; not everyone can go to the city\u2019s elite high schools \u2013 Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Tech, and Stuyvesant. She goes on at excessive length so that they really get the message. Then she calls on each kid in turn and asks where they want to go. Eventually she calls on a black kid, slouching behind his desk, who looks rather bored as he sketches in a notebook.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere do you want to go to high school?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStuyvesant High School.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHaven\u2019t you been listening to anything I said?<\/strong> What makes you think you can go to Stuyvesant High School?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a friend who goes there, and he has never seemed to be a better student than I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh really? Let me look at your IQ.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mrs. Sennett reaches for the student\u2019s folder, which is in a pile on her desk. When she gets to the folder (the student later reported) \u201cher sneering expression turned to cold resentment.\u201d<\/p>\n

That bored black kid, Tom Sowell–along with his two best friends in junior high school, Vegas and Rosen–scored 100 on the entrance exam. All three went to Stuyvesant High School, where the workload was extremely heavy\u2014particularly for Tom, who had to commute an hour each way, changing trains twice as he traveled from Harlem to the Lower East Side. He came home exhausted, and slept before tackling hours of homework.<\/p>\n

A Most Varied Career<\/strong><\/p>\n

Family problems forced Tom to quit high school and get a job at age 16. That marked the start of an incredibly tortuous, and sometimes torturous, career that included a short stint at the Home for Homeless Boys; a hazardous job in a machine shop; a job delivering telegrams for Western Union; a hitch in the Marines (but Tom\u2019s expertise in photography kept him out of the Korean War); jobs in the Federal bureaucracy; courses at Howard University in DC.; getting a BA from Harvard University, an MA from Columbia, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago; and then teaching gigs at many colleges and universities, including Douglass College, Howard, Cornell, Brandeis, Amherst and UCLA. He also did research for some DC think tanks that were waging the \u201cwar on poverty.\u201d Eventually Dr. Sowell settled at Stanford\u2019s Hoover Institution, becoming one of America\u2019s most influential economists and public intellectuals.<\/p>\n

Brilliant though he was, Thomas Sowell still struggled with tough academic challenges at various points in his career. To keep up during his first year at Harvard he had to take \u201cstay awake\u201d pills and work non-stop. But eventually he learned how to succeed at an elite university and did fine.<\/p>\n

Judging from his autobiography, Thomas Sowell\u2019s modus operandi as a professor was to never, ever adhere to the maxim \u201cTo get along\u2014go along.\u201d He was as rigid as a crowbar. Instead of \u201cgoing along\u201d with academic standards that became increasingly lax during the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Sowell stubbornly insisted on excellence in his economics classes from all his students, whether white or black, male or female. He never graded on a curve. So he was constantly at loggerheads with university bureaucrats who begged him to \u201cmake allowances\u201d for poor performers.<\/p>\n

Sliding Standards<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sowell\u2019s autobiography is entertaining but depressing, because it shows\u2014anecdote by anecdote, confrontation by confrontation\u2014how racial paternalism subverted academic standards, to the detriment of black students. As education became increasingly politicized and racialized\u2014more about racial integration of society than the education of individual students\u2014it became harder for black kids to get a top-flight education. From first grade to ninth grade, all but one of Thomas Sowell\u2019s teachers were white, but he did not believe that it hindered his education.\u00a0\u00a0 Partly because the student body was polyglot\u2014there were so many minorities, no one was a minority\u2014New York\u2019s educational environment was relatively colorblind in the 1940s and 1950s. Smart black kids could get a good education at public universities such as City College, the \u201cHarvard of the Working Class\u201d; one of its graduates, Colin Powell, sings its praise in his autobiography. But beginning in the mid-1960s, educational standards steadily declined, thanks to:<\/p>\n