Failure Factories

No workplaces are less diverse than those of Silicon Valley. The grandees who run the tech titans, fully woke that they are, most often hire for merit, not diversity. At times, as we have noted, they are obliged to hire graduates from China’s educational system, because our graduates, even the best and the brightest, cannot do the jobs.

If Asian-Americans and white Americans cannot do the jobs, do you really believe that these companies are going to be able to hire a more diverse workforce.

They say they are going to try. They have expressed their intent to remedy their systemic bigotry. Heck, they are even proselytizing the basic of tenets of Critical Race Theory to their white and Asian staffs.

Francis Menton, of the Manhattan Contrarian blog, (via Maggie’s Farm) remarks that these companies have had a come-to-Jesus moment. They have suddenly recognized that they do not have enough minority employees. They are not alone. All major companies, pusillanimously shrinking before the power of the mob, have recently discovered the same.

Essentially every major institution in the country — corporations, professional firms, universities, you name it — is on a mission to get the percentage of minorities in high-paying technical, professional and executive positions up to the percentage that those minorities represent of the population as a whole. That goal particularly applies to African Americans.

Of course, this thrust for diversity is not new. Diversity and affirmative action programs did not begin last year. America has been practicing them for decades now. How has it been working out?

... the likes of Googe and Facebook, despite seemingly having adopted “diversity and inclusion” as the single most important focus of their operations, have only moved the ratios of black “tech” workers and executives by about a percentage point or two over eight years of reporting data. At Apple, the percentage of black “tech” workers has actually gone down by 2% since 2016. In my own field of major law firms, some fifty years of affirmative action have only brought the percentage of black partners overall to about 2-3%.

Blaming it on systemic racism seems like a sop for the mob. In truth, Menton continues, is that the nation’s school system has not been teaching children the skills they need to work in high tech, or in most performance driven jobs. And, dare we notice, these schools are being controlled by the radical left. In fact, they have been doing such a bad job at teaching children math and science, that they have defaulted to teaching critical race theory.

We all recall the Los Angeles administrator who proclaimed that she did not care whether children knew their “times tables” as long as they knew about insurrections and rioting. I might have missed a beat here, but aren’t these tables called multiplication tables?

Among all of our societal institutions, those K-12 schools are the ones most firmly in the control of the progressive left. Whether it be the administrators, the teachers unions, or the teachers themselves, these are the people who most constantly vociferously accuse the rest of us of being “racists” and “white supremacists.” 

How are the schools doing in teaching children, and in preparing them for good jobs:

To get an idea how the K-12 schools are doing in fixing racism, let’s look at some data from what’s called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Since many readers may be unfamiliar with NAEP, let me give some background. NAEP is a Congressionally-sponsored project, administered by the federal Department of Education. The NAEP people call themselves the “nation’s report card.” 

What are the proficiency levels of black and white children? Nothing about these numbers will surprise anyone:

• New York City: 14% proficient in math (compared to 46% for whites); 14% proficient in reading (again compared to 46% for whites).

• Los Angeles: 8% proficient in math (compared to 37% for whites); 9% proficient in reading (compared to 41% for whites).

• Chicago: 15% proficient in math (compared to 56% for whites); 16% proficient in reading (compared to 55% for whites).

• Detroit: 4% proficient in math (no figure given for whites, presumably because there aren’t enough whites in the school system to get a meaningful result); 5% proficient in reading (again, no figure given for whites)

• Cleveland: 4% proficient in math (compared to 25% for whites); 10% proficient in reading (compared to 23% for whites).

• Baltimore: 6% proficient in math (compared to 32% for whites); 10% proficient in reading (compared to 48% for whites).

Note that these are not the results of IQ or “intelligence” tests, but rather are tests of actual learning or achievement. Really, the scores are as much a measure of the success (or failure) of the schools in teaching the kids as they are a measure of the kids themselves.

Do you really believe that these children will be ready to work for Facebook or Google? The prospect is laughable. It would be a great leap forward if these companies ceased forcing their staff to receive critical race training and started denouncing those who are running the nation’s schools.

These are the young people who supposedly will be ready to go to college in 2023, and to come out into starter tech jobs and corporate training programs and law schools in 2027. How many of the 85-96% of them who scored below “proficient” in reading and math in 8th grade are really going turn it around sufficiently to be able to move into these high-end jobs by their early 20s?

So, you can forget about equity and inclusion. The nation’s teachers and school administrators have made it, however laudable, a distant goal. The American school system, Menton remarks, is a failure factory.

The simple truth is that without an education system that produces young black people at an equivalent educational level to young people of other ethnicities, it is never going to be possible for corporate America to get to universal 13% representation of blacks among executives, tech workers, lawyers, doctors, and so forth. As I said in Friday’s post, I would have some sympathy for them if they just had some humility and stopped accusing the rest of us of being racists and white supremacists. For the so-called “educators” in these big-city schools, who run failure factories year after year with no accountability, while fighting any and all potential competition, I have no sympathy at all.