Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

Disparate Outcomes, Desperate Logic

“Virginia AG’s office finds elite Loudoun STEM school discriminates against Black, Hispanic students,” declared The Washington Post headline. 

Falsely. 

On Friday, Attorney General Mark Herring — another blackface-​wearing state government leader — issued a 61-​page report, saying “the Office of Attorney General Division of Human Rights finds there is reasonable cause to believe that Loudoun County Public Schools’ administration of the Academies of Loudoun program resulted in a discriminatory disparate impact on Black/​African-​American and Latinx/​Hispanic students.” 

Though the investigation found the admission process to be “facially-​neutral,” The Post informs that the program “in fact barred from admission qualified Black and Hispanic students who applied during the fall 2018 cycle.”

Yet blacks and Latinos were not barred. 

This year, 7 percent of black applicants were accepted and 11 percent of Hispanics. True, the acceptance rate for Asians was 13 percent and 15 percent for whites. But this gets tricky. Given their percentage of the overall student body, Asians were 42 percent overrepresented in the applicant pool, while blacks were 4 percent underrepresented, Latinos 6 percent, and whites underrepresented by a whopping 23 percent. 

“We request that Loudoun County Public Schools eliminate its discriminatory practices,” the report concludes. But … it did not stipulate any specific form of discrimination. Rather, it instructed the school district to work with the Loudoun County NAACP “to begin developing revised policies within 60 days.”

What sort of revisions are likely? 

Lower the entry requirements, reduce testing and “take into consideration the principle of geography/​socio-​economic equity.” 

You see, the problem they’re trying to fix isn’t racism, but the lack thereof.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
too much government

For a New Normalcy

Science writer Ronald Bailey argues that the best path to “a New Normal” can be found by rolling out home COVID-​19 tests. But notes they are illegal.

Bailey’s November piece in Reason magazine informs us that “biotech startup E25Bio, diagnostics maker OraSure, and the 3M Co., are working on and could quickly deploy rapid at-​home COVID-​19 diagnostic tests.”

These tests work, he says, “by detecting, within minutes, the presence of coronavirus proteins using specific antibodies embedded on a paper test strip coated with nasal swab samples or saliva. Somewhat like at-​home pregnancy tests, the antigen tests change color or reveal lines if COVID-​19 proteins are recognized.”

So why not go ahead with these antigen tests? Well, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t allow it. Bailey quotes a Harvard epidemiologist: “Until the regulatory landscape changes, those companies have no reason to bring a product to market.”

Regulatory blocking and kludge are just one reason this is not possible.

But if you — or for that matter, Mr. Bailey — think that this problem can just be solved with a Trumpian executive order or a quick legislative fix, there are reasons for doubt.

Our whole system is government-​rigged. And, as Ludwig von Mises made clear in Bureaucracy, clunky slowness is not just a bug of such systems. It’s the feature

And it’s a bad feature. 

It’s why many of us oppose regulation by bureaucracy and prefer a rule of law and competition within markets to supply the regulation that businesses need.

Which suggests to me that the best way back to normalcy is not through a quick government fix but by nixing government fixes more broadly.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Photo by Marco Verch

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