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PARTISAN REVIEW
dards. I think standards at the elementary and secondary school levels are
part of the problem: they are extremely hard to institute. We have come
to label as discriminatory traditional methods of streaming and sorting
students, of recognizing that some students are performing academically
better than others. So there's a whole leveling thrust that has very dire
implications. Not only for the way we group students, the way we or–
ganize the classroom, the way we recognize excellence, but also for the
curriculum. That is, once you start arguing that blacks think differently,
that they can't be tested by the standardized tests we now use, you are
revising the curriculum in the ways we now know.
Jean Elshtain:
And there self-esteem kicks in again.
Abigail Thernstrorn:
Well, that's part of the issue. Affirmative action
policies are affecting not only the way we organize education but also
the way we teach.
AI
Shanker:
They are affirmative action policies based on the theories
that black kids can't make it in terms of standards. An interesting piece of
evidence recently was pointed out by Barbara Lerner: in the late sixties
and early seventies a reform swept states across the country, to develop
minimum competency exams for high school graduation. It was believed
that by establishing these exams, black students would drop out, that
they would stay in school only if they knew that they were guaranteed a
diploma: if they had to pass an examination they would drop out due to
their fear of not being able to pass; and that those who remained would
not be able to pass and get their certificate. Yet courts in a number of
states permitted testing. In the first two, three years, indeed, there were
very huge rates of failure by black students. But after four, five or six
years, the rate of failure was around three percent among whites and
around six percent among blacks.
The main thing that's happened, reflected in this example, is the
huge increase in achievement on the part of black youngsters, about
eighty percent of whom used to be in the bottom categories, the illiter–
ate, the semi-illiterate. They're not there anymore. They just went right
up because there was a standard, and something was attached to it that
was important to them, namely high school graduation. Teachers
thought it was important, parents thought it was important, students
knew it was important and they reached it. There has been a failure to
take note of this experience . Yes, there might very well be a disparate
amount of impact if we raised the standards. But setting standards over a
period of time will result in huge numbers of minority students meeting
standards. One other thing. I'm bothered by conceding the word
