Someone liked one my comments to this and it reminded me of the piece, and I had a new thought.
In Britain, activist/campaigning organisations that are in any sense "on the left" will result in people asking each other "are they TIGMOO?"* TIGMOO refers to any organisation that operates inside the Labour movement. There are two general differences between a TIGMOO organisation (on, say, civil liberties) and a non-TIGMOO one. The first is their relationship to governments; most NGOs have the choice between a strategy of trying to get government to do what they want and a strategy of trying to attack government for not doing what they want; a TIGMOO organisation will consistently choose the first when Labour are in government and the second when the Conservatives are, while a non-TIGMOO organisation is more likely to be consistently insider lobbyists or consistently outsider campaigners. The second is the degree to which a specific-to-one-cause organisation affiliates to wider leftist causes, which is much more consistent for TIGMOO organisations than non-TIGMOO ones.
Having TIGMOO organisations that work with the main progressive party and non-TIGMOO ones that don't actually works out quite well. It lets the specific cause run an inside/outside strategy without any one organisation trying to look like it's having things both ways. The problem is usually when there's only one big organisation and it's not very clear on its TIGMOOness; Stonewall, our main LGBT+ rights NGO is a great example, as it has always had TIGMOO and non-TIGMOO wings within it and has had a few spells of a year or three where it fell into infighting between the wings and became very ineffective.
Of course, "being TIGMOO" isn't something that things officially are or are not. But it tends to become clear - people who align with another progressive party are pushed out, people who are tied to the single issue and are not broadly progressive also leave. Non-TIGMOO single-issue organisations tend to have lots of Lib Dems and Greens and liberal Conservatives (a faction that officially no longer exists because Boris Johnson purged them in 2019, but there are still people unofficially affiliated) involved.
Having an organisation that is part of a broad progressive movement and one that is outside of that both working on the same single issue is probably a useful thing to do - and having that as a conscious division probably helps with getting staffers who aren't comfortable with compromising their broader progressive principles to stick to the ones in the movement, and getting staffers who aren't comfortable compromising on the single issue to stick to the ones outside.
* "ThIs Great Movement Of Ours", a common phrase used by speakers at Labour (Party) Conference and the Trades Union Congress to reference "the labour movement", ie the combination of the unions and the Labour Party. It came to be used, first jokingly and later more seriously to refer to any organisation that was formally outside Labour or the Unions but was dominated by a sensibility of attachment to them.
If I'm reading the underlying NBER paper correctly (https://www.nber.org/papers/w20962) the data for the affirmative action U-Curve is from 1991 - do you know if there's been a more recent analysis done? I'm curious how the shape of this curve has changed over time.
I have schadenfreude about the backlash to Taylor Lorenz's boorish response to Matt's 'all future types due to long covid' joke. Twitter has a way of making us all terrible people.
The issue is not the diversity of the staff or "pipeline." The issue is two fold: First, that the types of people who increasingly staff these institutions are the products of elite educational background and wealthy families whose views on activism are polluted by new-line left-wing academic training. Second, the institutional incentives of many of these organizations is not based on outcomes or success but attention and participation in broader coalitional work. They have no skin in the game. And when your funders are just rich people who don't have skin in the game either, you get a bunch of relatively coddled, recent college grads for whom politics is expressive and no one within the institution can check that because the institutions have little skin in the game. The managers and executive directors jobs are to flatter the funder and often the staff. When they lose, it is only more evidence as to why they need money. On the Hill, these groups have become all but worthless as they move from discrete issue advocates to basically just another iteration of moveon.org.
Most of what I got from Grim's piece was that he's super pissed about the Intercept's staff union but doesn't want to come right out and say it.
Indeed, the lack of any comments from actual staffers, especially staffers who have had to get rid of a bad boss, was really damning. He sort of tried to stake out that ground in advance, but it fell flat to me... as a staffer who has had to get rid of a bad boss before.
The first time I read it, I bought it, because it reflected some of my core beliefs about the younger generation. But then I was like, "Well, wait a minute..."
Why was there so much dunking on the LGBTQ thing? Every group in there except gay men get pregnant. Even the most committed lesbians get raped and there's nothing about being bi or trans which signifies not having the chance for unintended pregnancies.
Like idk, I've been around a lot more risky parties than many of my straight friends, it doesn't seem even particularly weird to think that it would have a disproportionate impact.
Because (1) by definition a large part of "LGBTQ" (i.e., all of "G," probably most of "T," and a substantial part of "B") will as a matter of biology never personally need an abortion and thus have a stake in the subject that is at minimum indistinguishable from cishet males and in many cases probably even lower since they are unlikely even to have a partner get pregnant; (2) even to the extent that some L_BTQ individuals will need abortions, the number of cishet women needing abortions is almost certainly at least an order of magnitude, if not approaching two orders of magnitude, larger; and (3) the preceding points all go to the fact that to the extent you want to talk about restrictions on abortion impacting particular groups, it's arguably insulting to omit just plain "women" since that's the largest category affected *and* the most affected one (except for women born with conditions rendering them sterile, all women theoretically could need abortion services at some point in their life) and it goes to the overall pattern in recent years of treating women as a group less deserving of concern.
Of course the raw number of cishets are higher but it's about disproportionate impact, it doesn't say these people and no others. It's kind of impossible to forget that women have abortions, just that it effects certain types of people at higher rates than others. Of course many LGBT people can't have kids but it's sort of apples and oranges.
So Human Rights campaign Is just making shit up when they say more queer women and trans men need abortion services per person than cishet women. Of course the population sizes are different and yeah cis men and trans women are excluded. So the baseline is all people capable of having birth and then some communities are higher than that.
This doesn't seem like some sort of wild game of statistics here the population is people who could possibly need abortions and the focus is who actually does at above and below the average rate.
There's like a whole fucking fetish of people who want to rape lesbians straight but sure let's pretend that bi people don't exist and Lesbians who get pregnant are all unicorns.
Someone in the ‘management theory’ space could sell a bunch of books right now by writing up a series of case studies on approaches to DEI, idpol and staff conflict at some non-profits, for-profit companies with a lot of young educated staff, and explicitly political employers like campaigns and unions. It’s tough bc most employers that have had challenges in this space don’t want to talk frankly about it, but surely someone is connected enough to get the access. I would genuinely like to get a broader comparative view on the terrain.
The mid-level trap is so real. We interview and rank a very diverse group of residency applicants but the Harvards and Stanfords take a lot. Because it's already a pretty small pool of applicants overall, we need to either somehow outcompete the top tier of programs or take on a higher academic risk profile (and risk being put on probation by the accreditation agency if too many people fail exams).
I am reminded of something my dad taught me. He was a Senior Executive who worked for the USAF for 35 years before retiring in mid 2000s. We were talking about diversity of women in the military and he said he always went out of his way to mentor women throughout his career. He was not unaware of the nasty comments that arose nor the implication of improper relations with each mentee. I asked why and he told me 2 things.
Women had a tough time in the military for obvious reasons but that this bled over onto the civilian side quite often so he saw it as his moral duty to try and fix that.
Secondly if he was ever confronted with two roughly equivalent resumes one which is a man and the other a women to always choose the woman. His reasoning being the woman had to be better just to achieve the same quality of a resume as that of any man.
It is one of the things that stuck with me all my life and something I think about whenever gender equality discussions come up.
It seems to me that the obvious approach to a mass of amorphous complaints from staff is unionisation.
Create a proper formal grievance process for individual grievances - and have the union's backing so it can't be used for retaliation - and then have the union put together organisation-level proposals for change. If staff are unhappy, then someone has to collect together the problems and have a coherent set of demands, rather than just letting everyone mouth off whenever they like: and that's something that unions are really good at: turning complaints into specific, implementable demands and then negotiating on them, picking priority and non-priority items, etc.
The balancing act that some companies perform seems to be "targeting the pipeline". E.g. if you're a tech company, and 35% of new computer science graduates are women (I don't know the actual number), then your "target" is for ~35% of new hires (or at least, out-of-college hires) to be women. That's the only way to do it without creating a version of that U-shaped curve for industry.
Sure, but the choice of population that doesn't create that U-shaped curve is fairly constrained. E.g. every tech company can simultaneously try to match the demographics of new CS graduates (at least for out-of-school hires). It wouldn't be possible for them all to match, say, the demographics of new sociology graduates. (Nor would it make much sense.) Do you have a different population in mind that a whole industry can target? If some industries have significant non-academic pipelines (e.g. boot camps) or pipelines from other majors (data scientists used to come from all over the place), then it makes sense to include them. But I think that's the exception rather than the rule.
The racial stuff has definitely made it worse but this has been a problem for years. They aren't pouring fuel on a fire, they are adding pure oxygen to a fire that has been raging for over a decade. I was the chair of a nonprofit for the New Atheist movement waaay back in 2012 when this thing called "Atheism Plus" showed up and basically tore the entire thing apart. The left has always had a problem with schisms, Monty Python had their number in Life of Brian, but it has reached a new level these days.
The racial front is just another battle in a war. It is a symptom, not the cause of the disease. If we solve the pipeline problem, there will be hundreds of other areas that will be used to launch attacks.
I don't know what the solution is. I don't even know the exact cause. And after having been ripped apart by these nuts myself, for nothin, I'm not even sure they deserve to be saved. But I suspect the real problem here stems from a variety of issues: The internet exacerbating grandstanding and conflict, elite overproduction, administrative capture, the economic marginalization of middle-brow voices, lack of social cohesion and trust, a philosophy of humanities education that has abandoned traditional virtue and civics to focus on divisive conflict- and critical-theories that center narcissism and paints all disagreements as illegitimate and oppressive, and frankly an adoption of just plain old bad ideas like removing any formal hierarchy or authority no matter how much a person knows or does which guarantees the loudness of an employee matters more than their output.
Whatever the exact cause, the left has adopted an operational theory that doesn't work. I do not at this time believe that the left is structurally capable or ideologically willing to move past this. There is no force internally that can resolve this tension, resolution must come from outside. There are still organizations that do work, philosophies that succeed, there are ideas and charities that are still leading to human flourishing. I don't agree with those philosophies 100% but they work and that is more important. This is where I'm at. I believe in a progressive world. But if my philosophy, my ideology, leads to negative outcomes repeatedly, I need to change philosophy.
This discussion reminds me of a conversation I had once with the friend of a hiring manager at a company. The company had diversity quotas, which the hiring manager was under pressure to meet, even if it meant hiring less-qualified people. Once on the job, these less-qualified people didn't perform well, leaving their co-workers to pick up their slack. In turn, this led to racial resentment, as even black and Hispanic people who did do their jobs well were pre-judged by co-workers as mere "diversity hires". The net result: diversity quotas that are supposed to counteract racism actually increased it.
This is a simple example of why hiring quotas don't work. By all means, hire people who are qualified, and if they happen to be people of color, so be it. But, hiring people who are not qualified, just to be able to say that X% of staffers are people of color is just plain dumb, and helps nobody.
Good rich stuff as Wodehouse might have said. But he would also have advised you through the agency of Jeeves to consider the psychology of the individual. I think people often underestimate the competitive nature of ideology. It is an unfortunate side effect of the truly inevitable nature of identity politics that people have multiple identities. The introduction of intersectionality made this obvious. When combined with the highly competitive nature of virtually any organization, commercial or non-profit, this results in trumpism. With a small t. I'll see your two identities (say, white and male) and raise you to three (or four. or five). As a Vegan female of color, my intersections outweigh yours. And therefore you are evil even if you don't know it yet.
If it weren't so lamentable it would be humorous. Maybe it still is.
Excellent reporting on the pipeline for diversity. We all know of people who are extremely successful who have grown up in poverty like Val Demings for one. A key to her early success in school, as I understand her story, was a mother who valued education plus Val was able to focus and work hard. You can name hundreds of people with different ethnicities who have done the same.
Our long-standing problems with American schools is an ever increasing difficulty getting kids to focus. Articles point out lack of sleep 😴, social media, parents with two jobs, depression caused by Covid isolation and on and on. From my teaching and consulting experience, I have noticed that success improves with three things: 1) Parents who value education over social life 2.) A school Principal who runs a clean, well ordered school and 3.) Clear State and District goals for success. This goes to Grim’s point of the need for organizations to unwrap multiple Progressive goals and focus on one at a time.
Here are two examples of successful schools with great educators: First, way down in Brooklyn, NY, I visited a tiny black public school with one of the best Principals I’ve ever met. The school was narrow, 5 floors with no useable elevator. This Principle hired teachers with disabilities and with different life styles. He had the 5, 6 grade children wear uniforms and walk in a single file up and down stairs quietly. We were warned that it would be too dangerous for us to even walk around the block in the neighborhood. This school was awarded a designation as one of the Best Public Schools in NYC.
Another terrific school with an exceptional Principal was in Bloomfield, CT. Almost all black, middle class students. These were the early days of classroom computer education. Each student was given a computer to use, take home, and bring back to school each morning. The Principal stood in front of the only open door each morning and personally greeted each student, making sure the computers were back in school. Just another example of organization and focus aiding student learning.
I would imagine that students from both of these public schools went on to a successful life.
That can't happen in progressive areas, not at public schools anyways. Telling student's what to do is pretty much racism as far as admin is concerned. All you can do is coddle them and beg them to try and hope today is one of the days they decide to work.
I teach in California. Kids go to admin to file complaints against teachers on a regular basis for minor discipline issues. There are just big swaths of kids we don't try with or we'll get burned. These kids have their counselors numbers in their phone. So we just stick them in the back, let them play on their phones, and find any excuse to give them a C.
My school no longer does detention, no lunch, no afterschool, and Saturday school is now optional. No dress code at all except for gang colors, they can wear hats and hoodies in class, ( I used to joke that our dress code is they have to be dressed, but then some girls started coming in what was basically lingerie and the school just let them so even that's not true anymore). No phone policy, we have one but trying to enforce it will get a complaint and the same is true for airpods so they just sit in class with airpods and hoodies on there phone and admin tells us to just let them (in fact it's our fault since we aren't inspiring them to learn). We scraped our tardy sweeps and just send a parent email with no consequences and only do something when a student has missed so much class the school might lose funding (told to count students as here all day if they show up for a minute). We got rid of hall sweeps so even going to class is now mostly optional. No OCI or "quite room" since all interventions are now to be "in class". No suspensions (except for when it's admin that's getting cursed at). No hard deadlines or due dates. No points for participation. We moved to a "no zeroes" 50% system where every assignment gets 50% minimum (they're moving to a "mastery" system next year that uses 1-5 but basically puts grades at 20% increments so a student could get a C with 40%). and any summative assessment that can't be gamed is now suspect so tests are out, nebulous group projects are in. Any time a student is being too crazy and I write a referral we now do a restorative meeting where the counselor and admin and student and parent all come in and ride my ass.
I have been teaching for 5 years, and we have seen an exponential shit explosion in education. They used covid as a cover to ram through a massive, untested, ideologically driven rewrite of education. And the results are terrible. I would never. Ever. put my child in public education in California.
I used to try, I really did. But this year broke me. I just let them play on their phones and listen to their music. As long as they don't disrupt the 6 or 7 students who actually do their work I don't care. They learn nothing, they get a C, everyone wins I guess.
This sounds like the bottom most level of Hell! I can only imagine how terrible your days must be! However, your tale of just how bad “progressive” area schools can be brings me back to my main points. If your school district doesn’t define actionable objectives; your Principal doesn’t organize & insist on a clean, structured environment; and the Parents don’t support educational goals, it is impossible to teach for success. For our future Citizens sake, I hope the States and school
districts return to primarily focusing on Reading, Writing, Math, History (that shows how different cultures work or not), Geography and Computer Literacy. That would make a full day with subjects that can be evaluated.
I'm also curious about economic and class diversity - that seems important but no one talks about it. What percentage of the staff come from affluent backgrounds? I believe it's fairly high.
Or in general why do class issue get so much less weight that racial issues. If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd say racial issues are being promoted over class issues to keep the lower orders down. Racial issues alienate the normies and ensure meaningful change doesn't happen.
As an example, it seems like a lot of poor and working class whites are put off because trans issues are stressed much more strongly than things like the opioid epidemic which impacts a far larger group of people.
Or, if you want to get all Scott Alexander about it, the MAIN thing is birth order. The oldest kids get all the brains and that leads to unequal outcomes.
Someone liked one my comments to this and it reminded me of the piece, and I had a new thought.
In Britain, activist/campaigning organisations that are in any sense "on the left" will result in people asking each other "are they TIGMOO?"* TIGMOO refers to any organisation that operates inside the Labour movement. There are two general differences between a TIGMOO organisation (on, say, civil liberties) and a non-TIGMOO one. The first is their relationship to governments; most NGOs have the choice between a strategy of trying to get government to do what they want and a strategy of trying to attack government for not doing what they want; a TIGMOO organisation will consistently choose the first when Labour are in government and the second when the Conservatives are, while a non-TIGMOO organisation is more likely to be consistently insider lobbyists or consistently outsider campaigners. The second is the degree to which a specific-to-one-cause organisation affiliates to wider leftist causes, which is much more consistent for TIGMOO organisations than non-TIGMOO ones.
Having TIGMOO organisations that work with the main progressive party and non-TIGMOO ones that don't actually works out quite well. It lets the specific cause run an inside/outside strategy without any one organisation trying to look like it's having things both ways. The problem is usually when there's only one big organisation and it's not very clear on its TIGMOOness; Stonewall, our main LGBT+ rights NGO is a great example, as it has always had TIGMOO and non-TIGMOO wings within it and has had a few spells of a year or three where it fell into infighting between the wings and became very ineffective.
Of course, "being TIGMOO" isn't something that things officially are or are not. But it tends to become clear - people who align with another progressive party are pushed out, people who are tied to the single issue and are not broadly progressive also leave. Non-TIGMOO single-issue organisations tend to have lots of Lib Dems and Greens and liberal Conservatives (a faction that officially no longer exists because Boris Johnson purged them in 2019, but there are still people unofficially affiliated) involved.
Having an organisation that is part of a broad progressive movement and one that is outside of that both working on the same single issue is probably a useful thing to do - and having that as a conscious division probably helps with getting staffers who aren't comfortable with compromising their broader progressive principles to stick to the ones in the movement, and getting staffers who aren't comfortable compromising on the single issue to stick to the ones outside.
* "ThIs Great Movement Of Ours", a common phrase used by speakers at Labour (Party) Conference and the Trades Union Congress to reference "the labour movement", ie the combination of the unions and the Labour Party. It came to be used, first jokingly and later more seriously to refer to any organisation that was formally outside Labour or the Unions but was dominated by a sensibility of attachment to them.
If I'm reading the underlying NBER paper correctly (https://www.nber.org/papers/w20962) the data for the affirmative action U-Curve is from 1991 - do you know if there's been a more recent analysis done? I'm curious how the shape of this curve has changed over time.
I have schadenfreude about the backlash to Taylor Lorenz's boorish response to Matt's 'all future types due to long covid' joke. Twitter has a way of making us all terrible people.
The issue is not the diversity of the staff or "pipeline." The issue is two fold: First, that the types of people who increasingly staff these institutions are the products of elite educational background and wealthy families whose views on activism are polluted by new-line left-wing academic training. Second, the institutional incentives of many of these organizations is not based on outcomes or success but attention and participation in broader coalitional work. They have no skin in the game. And when your funders are just rich people who don't have skin in the game either, you get a bunch of relatively coddled, recent college grads for whom politics is expressive and no one within the institution can check that because the institutions have little skin in the game. The managers and executive directors jobs are to flatter the funder and often the staff. When they lose, it is only more evidence as to why they need money. On the Hill, these groups have become all but worthless as they move from discrete issue advocates to basically just another iteration of moveon.org.
Most of what I got from Grim's piece was that he's super pissed about the Intercept's staff union but doesn't want to come right out and say it.
Indeed, the lack of any comments from actual staffers, especially staffers who have had to get rid of a bad boss, was really damning. He sort of tried to stake out that ground in advance, but it fell flat to me... as a staffer who has had to get rid of a bad boss before.
The first time I read it, I bought it, because it reflected some of my core beliefs about the younger generation. But then I was like, "Well, wait a minute..."
Why was there so much dunking on the LGBTQ thing? Every group in there except gay men get pregnant. Even the most committed lesbians get raped and there's nothing about being bi or trans which signifies not having the chance for unintended pregnancies.
Like idk, I've been around a lot more risky parties than many of my straight friends, it doesn't seem even particularly weird to think that it would have a disproportionate impact.
Because (1) by definition a large part of "LGBTQ" (i.e., all of "G," probably most of "T," and a substantial part of "B") will as a matter of biology never personally need an abortion and thus have a stake in the subject that is at minimum indistinguishable from cishet males and in many cases probably even lower since they are unlikely even to have a partner get pregnant; (2) even to the extent that some L_BTQ individuals will need abortions, the number of cishet women needing abortions is almost certainly at least an order of magnitude, if not approaching two orders of magnitude, larger; and (3) the preceding points all go to the fact that to the extent you want to talk about restrictions on abortion impacting particular groups, it's arguably insulting to omit just plain "women" since that's the largest category affected *and* the most affected one (except for women born with conditions rendering them sterile, all women theoretically could need abortion services at some point in their life) and it goes to the overall pattern in recent years of treating women as a group less deserving of concern.
Of course the raw number of cishets are higher but it's about disproportionate impact, it doesn't say these people and no others. It's kind of impossible to forget that women have abortions, just that it effects certain types of people at higher rates than others. Of course many LGBT people can't have kids but it's sort of apples and oranges.
https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/human-rights-campaign-fact-sheet-lesbian-bisexual-queer-women-who-have-been-pregnant-are-more-likely-to-need-abortion-services-demonstrates-impact-roe-reversal-would-have-on-lgbtq-people
So Human Rights campaign Is just making shit up when they say more queer women and trans men need abortion services per person than cishet women. Of course the population sizes are different and yeah cis men and trans women are excluded. So the baseline is all people capable of having birth and then some communities are higher than that.
This doesn't seem like some sort of wild game of statistics here the population is people who could possibly need abortions and the focus is who actually does at above and below the average rate.
There's like a whole fucking fetish of people who want to rape lesbians straight but sure let's pretend that bi people don't exist and Lesbians who get pregnant are all unicorns.
Someone in the ‘management theory’ space could sell a bunch of books right now by writing up a series of case studies on approaches to DEI, idpol and staff conflict at some non-profits, for-profit companies with a lot of young educated staff, and explicitly political employers like campaigns and unions. It’s tough bc most employers that have had challenges in this space don’t want to talk frankly about it, but surely someone is connected enough to get the access. I would genuinely like to get a broader comparative view on the terrain.
Yeah people being petrified to even begin talking about it with anyone is by far the biggest impediment at this point.
The mid-level trap is so real. We interview and rank a very diverse group of residency applicants but the Harvards and Stanfords take a lot. Because it's already a pretty small pool of applicants overall, we need to either somehow outcompete the top tier of programs or take on a higher academic risk profile (and risk being put on probation by the accreditation agency if too many people fail exams).
I am reminded of something my dad taught me. He was a Senior Executive who worked for the USAF for 35 years before retiring in mid 2000s. We were talking about diversity of women in the military and he said he always went out of his way to mentor women throughout his career. He was not unaware of the nasty comments that arose nor the implication of improper relations with each mentee. I asked why and he told me 2 things.
Women had a tough time in the military for obvious reasons but that this bled over onto the civilian side quite often so he saw it as his moral duty to try and fix that.
Secondly if he was ever confronted with two roughly equivalent resumes one which is a man and the other a women to always choose the woman. His reasoning being the woman had to be better just to achieve the same quality of a resume as that of any man.
It is one of the things that stuck with me all my life and something I think about whenever gender equality discussions come up.
It seems to me that the obvious approach to a mass of amorphous complaints from staff is unionisation.
Create a proper formal grievance process for individual grievances - and have the union's backing so it can't be used for retaliation - and then have the union put together organisation-level proposals for change. If staff are unhappy, then someone has to collect together the problems and have a coherent set of demands, rather than just letting everyone mouth off whenever they like: and that's something that unions are really good at: turning complaints into specific, implementable demands and then negotiating on them, picking priority and non-priority items, etc.
Trust me, though: it doesn't stop EDs from whinging about recalcitrant staff.
The balancing act that some companies perform seems to be "targeting the pipeline". E.g. if you're a tech company, and 35% of new computer science graduates are women (I don't know the actual number), then your "target" is for ~35% of new hires (or at least, out-of-college hires) to be women. That's the only way to do it without creating a version of that U-shaped curve for industry.
Sure, but the choice of population that doesn't create that U-shaped curve is fairly constrained. E.g. every tech company can simultaneously try to match the demographics of new CS graduates (at least for out-of-school hires). It wouldn't be possible for them all to match, say, the demographics of new sociology graduates. (Nor would it make much sense.) Do you have a different population in mind that a whole industry can target? If some industries have significant non-academic pipelines (e.g. boot camps) or pipelines from other majors (data scientists used to come from all over the place), then it makes sense to include them. But I think that's the exception rather than the rule.
The racial stuff has definitely made it worse but this has been a problem for years. They aren't pouring fuel on a fire, they are adding pure oxygen to a fire that has been raging for over a decade. I was the chair of a nonprofit for the New Atheist movement waaay back in 2012 when this thing called "Atheism Plus" showed up and basically tore the entire thing apart. The left has always had a problem with schisms, Monty Python had their number in Life of Brian, but it has reached a new level these days.
The racial front is just another battle in a war. It is a symptom, not the cause of the disease. If we solve the pipeline problem, there will be hundreds of other areas that will be used to launch attacks.
I don't know what the solution is. I don't even know the exact cause. And after having been ripped apart by these nuts myself, for nothin, I'm not even sure they deserve to be saved. But I suspect the real problem here stems from a variety of issues: The internet exacerbating grandstanding and conflict, elite overproduction, administrative capture, the economic marginalization of middle-brow voices, lack of social cohesion and trust, a philosophy of humanities education that has abandoned traditional virtue and civics to focus on divisive conflict- and critical-theories that center narcissism and paints all disagreements as illegitimate and oppressive, and frankly an adoption of just plain old bad ideas like removing any formal hierarchy or authority no matter how much a person knows or does which guarantees the loudness of an employee matters more than their output.
Whatever the exact cause, the left has adopted an operational theory that doesn't work. I do not at this time believe that the left is structurally capable or ideologically willing to move past this. There is no force internally that can resolve this tension, resolution must come from outside. There are still organizations that do work, philosophies that succeed, there are ideas and charities that are still leading to human flourishing. I don't agree with those philosophies 100% but they work and that is more important. This is where I'm at. I believe in a progressive world. But if my philosophy, my ideology, leads to negative outcomes repeatedly, I need to change philosophy.
This discussion reminds me of a conversation I had once with the friend of a hiring manager at a company. The company had diversity quotas, which the hiring manager was under pressure to meet, even if it meant hiring less-qualified people. Once on the job, these less-qualified people didn't perform well, leaving their co-workers to pick up their slack. In turn, this led to racial resentment, as even black and Hispanic people who did do their jobs well were pre-judged by co-workers as mere "diversity hires". The net result: diversity quotas that are supposed to counteract racism actually increased it.
This is a simple example of why hiring quotas don't work. By all means, hire people who are qualified, and if they happen to be people of color, so be it. But, hiring people who are not qualified, just to be able to say that X% of staffers are people of color is just plain dumb, and helps nobody.
Good rich stuff as Wodehouse might have said. But he would also have advised you through the agency of Jeeves to consider the psychology of the individual. I think people often underestimate the competitive nature of ideology. It is an unfortunate side effect of the truly inevitable nature of identity politics that people have multiple identities. The introduction of intersectionality made this obvious. When combined with the highly competitive nature of virtually any organization, commercial or non-profit, this results in trumpism. With a small t. I'll see your two identities (say, white and male) and raise you to three (or four. or five). As a Vegan female of color, my intersections outweigh yours. And therefore you are evil even if you don't know it yet.
If it weren't so lamentable it would be humorous. Maybe it still is.
Excellent reporting on the pipeline for diversity. We all know of people who are extremely successful who have grown up in poverty like Val Demings for one. A key to her early success in school, as I understand her story, was a mother who valued education plus Val was able to focus and work hard. You can name hundreds of people with different ethnicities who have done the same.
Our long-standing problems with American schools is an ever increasing difficulty getting kids to focus. Articles point out lack of sleep 😴, social media, parents with two jobs, depression caused by Covid isolation and on and on. From my teaching and consulting experience, I have noticed that success improves with three things: 1) Parents who value education over social life 2.) A school Principal who runs a clean, well ordered school and 3.) Clear State and District goals for success. This goes to Grim’s point of the need for organizations to unwrap multiple Progressive goals and focus on one at a time.
Here are two examples of successful schools with great educators: First, way down in Brooklyn, NY, I visited a tiny black public school with one of the best Principals I’ve ever met. The school was narrow, 5 floors with no useable elevator. This Principle hired teachers with disabilities and with different life styles. He had the 5, 6 grade children wear uniforms and walk in a single file up and down stairs quietly. We were warned that it would be too dangerous for us to even walk around the block in the neighborhood. This school was awarded a designation as one of the Best Public Schools in NYC.
Another terrific school with an exceptional Principal was in Bloomfield, CT. Almost all black, middle class students. These were the early days of classroom computer education. Each student was given a computer to use, take home, and bring back to school each morning. The Principal stood in front of the only open door each morning and personally greeted each student, making sure the computers were back in school. Just another example of organization and focus aiding student learning.
I would imagine that students from both of these public schools went on to a successful life.
S.C. Jones
That can't happen in progressive areas, not at public schools anyways. Telling student's what to do is pretty much racism as far as admin is concerned. All you can do is coddle them and beg them to try and hope today is one of the days they decide to work.
I teach in California. Kids go to admin to file complaints against teachers on a regular basis for minor discipline issues. There are just big swaths of kids we don't try with or we'll get burned. These kids have their counselors numbers in their phone. So we just stick them in the back, let them play on their phones, and find any excuse to give them a C.
My school no longer does detention, no lunch, no afterschool, and Saturday school is now optional. No dress code at all except for gang colors, they can wear hats and hoodies in class, ( I used to joke that our dress code is they have to be dressed, but then some girls started coming in what was basically lingerie and the school just let them so even that's not true anymore). No phone policy, we have one but trying to enforce it will get a complaint and the same is true for airpods so they just sit in class with airpods and hoodies on there phone and admin tells us to just let them (in fact it's our fault since we aren't inspiring them to learn). We scraped our tardy sweeps and just send a parent email with no consequences and only do something when a student has missed so much class the school might lose funding (told to count students as here all day if they show up for a minute). We got rid of hall sweeps so even going to class is now mostly optional. No OCI or "quite room" since all interventions are now to be "in class". No suspensions (except for when it's admin that's getting cursed at). No hard deadlines or due dates. No points for participation. We moved to a "no zeroes" 50% system where every assignment gets 50% minimum (they're moving to a "mastery" system next year that uses 1-5 but basically puts grades at 20% increments so a student could get a C with 40%). and any summative assessment that can't be gamed is now suspect so tests are out, nebulous group projects are in. Any time a student is being too crazy and I write a referral we now do a restorative meeting where the counselor and admin and student and parent all come in and ride my ass.
I have been teaching for 5 years, and we have seen an exponential shit explosion in education. They used covid as a cover to ram through a massive, untested, ideologically driven rewrite of education. And the results are terrible. I would never. Ever. put my child in public education in California.
I used to try, I really did. But this year broke me. I just let them play on their phones and listen to their music. As long as they don't disrupt the 6 or 7 students who actually do their work I don't care. They learn nothing, they get a C, everyone wins I guess.
This sounds like the bottom most level of Hell! I can only imagine how terrible your days must be! However, your tale of just how bad “progressive” area schools can be brings me back to my main points. If your school district doesn’t define actionable objectives; your Principal doesn’t organize & insist on a clean, structured environment; and the Parents don’t support educational goals, it is impossible to teach for success. For our future Citizens sake, I hope the States and school
districts return to primarily focusing on Reading, Writing, Math, History (that shows how different cultures work or not), Geography and Computer Literacy. That would make a full day with subjects that can be evaluated.
I'm also curious about economic and class diversity - that seems important but no one talks about it. What percentage of the staff come from affluent backgrounds? I believe it's fairly high.
Or in general why do class issue get so much less weight that racial issues. If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd say racial issues are being promoted over class issues to keep the lower orders down. Racial issues alienate the normies and ensure meaningful change doesn't happen.
As an example, it seems like a lot of poor and working class whites are put off because trans issues are stressed much more strongly than things like the opioid epidemic which impacts a far larger group of people.
Or, if you want to get all Scott Alexander about it, the MAIN thing is birth order. The oldest kids get all the brains and that leads to unequal outcomes.