When We Reward Failure

How much damage is diversity mongering doing? Betheny Mandel explains that lowered standards demoralize those who have worked hard to meet the normal standards. She adds that choosing people to fill diversity quotas lowers the competence level of an enterprise.

The other night Tucker Carlson pointed out that we are now going to choose air traffic controllers based on diversity. We will not privilege candidates who have experience flying planes or who have excelled at science. Anything to increase the diversity of the controllers. When you are in a plane flying into an airport you naturally care more about diversity than about your safety.

And let’s not forget the systematic dumbing down of our education system. If colleges and universities fill their classes with subpar students in order to achieve diversity, professors will be forced to dumb down the lessons, lest these subpar students all flunk out. And this without considering the cost of all those diversity administrators. The University of Michigan has a hundred full time diversity administrators—who do you think is paying for that?

Thus academic excellence and professional competence are being sacrificed on the altar of diversity. This is not going to end well.

Anyway, Mandel begins her column with a story you have heard before. A child in a New Jersey high school failed to make the cheerleading team. She was so distraught that her mother filed a complaint with the proper authorities. The school—run by weak-kneed cowards—decided to place the child on the squad. It also decided to place any child who wanted to be a cheerleader on the squad. Good-bye, competition. Other cheerleaders complained bitterly about this injustice. And, we suspect, the girl whose mother caused this ruckus was naturally ostracized in school. Great job, Mom.

Mandel tells the story:

The proverb is simple: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But a teenage girl and her mom in New Jersey figured out how to circumvent that difficult “trying” part — by whining until success was easily achieved.

At Hanover Park High School last month, a mother complained when her daughter got cut after cheerleading tryouts. Instead of telling her tough luck, the athletic director placated the mom and changed the team’s policy, allowing any wannabe cheerleader to join the squad.

Naturally this upset the kids who made the team fair and square, and they brought their grievances to the school board.

“I did not put in 18 months of work to lead up to this moment just to be told it didn’t matter anymore,” sophomore Jada Alcontara told News12 New Jersey.

Student Stephan Krueger added: “I tried my hardest. Now everything is going away because of one child who did not make the team. Now all my hard work has been thrown out the window.”

Despite its reputation, cheerleading isn’t just about shaking pompoms and yelling catchy chants. Squad members practice gymnastic maneuvers that require strength, flexibility and flair. Now there will be cheerleaders on the team who won’t possess enough of these skills, while those who do have seen their talents devalued.

Many people think this way. They do not say it because they are not allowed to say it. If you place more underachieving students in college ahead of overachieving students in order to produce diversity, the students who have been rejected will probably feel some bitterness and resentment at the injustice.

Besides, we already know that those who seem to have been admitted to college through a diversity quota are not made to feel that they belong. We see this on college campuses, but we are not allowed to talk about it. Surely the same rule applies.

What happens, Mandel continues, when fire departments hire women who cannot meet the physical standards?

Three years ago New York City’s Fire Department found out after allowing female applicant Choeurlyne Doirin-Holder to fail her way into a $81,000-a-year desk job. Firefighters fumed at the preferential treatment in an online forum. “If you can’t meet the standards, you are a danger to yourself, the public and most importantly everyone operating on the fire ground who is doing their job,” one wrote, according to The Post.

That prediction proved accurate. After just 10 days on the job, Doirin-Holder was injured while inspecting equipment in a station house, stepping off a ladder incorrectly and fracturing her foot.

It isn’t an outlier. The Marines have lowered fitness standards because women could not meet the old standards. And it is not just about physical fitness. Schools across the nation have been lowering standards in order to pass more students. Mandel explains:

When schools were unable to pass the basic proficiency tests of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002, educators simply made the tests easier over the years, allowing more kids to pass while keeping the schools’ federal funding intact. And, as of last year, teachers in New York no longer have to take a literacy test that many found too difficult. Meanwhile, in England, schools are now removing analogue clocks in exam rooms and replacing them with digital versions because students unable to read clock faces felt stressed about it.

Think of it. Today’s British schoolchildren are incapable of reading an analogue clock and were so stressed about it that the schools decided to replace them with digital clocks. Might they not have taught the children to read clock faces? Apparently, it was too stressful a chore.

And, of course, this was all initiated by the pedagogues who decided that schools should provide therapy, not education. It was produced by teachers who fed their pupils a steady diet of unearned praise, thus systematically lying to them and causing them to mistrust adult authority.

Mandel quotes Jessica Lahey, a bestselling author:

Kids are smarter than we give them credit for, and they know when we lower our expectations for them. When we give praise, awards or a slot on the team unearned . . . they no longer trust adults to be honest and unbiased arbiters of quality. Lying to kids about the quality of their work or downgrading our expectations so as not to make kids feel bad will only result in their no longer trusting our judgment

To which Mandel sagely remarks, the children who did not earn their way or who were judged by different standards know that they are being patronized, and are less capable than the rest. Their experience is one of daily humiliation, not only because everyone knows that they do not belong, but because everyone is obligated pretend that they do. Better to pretend than to be accused of being a bigot.