Charles Murray Sort of Making Sense?

It is striking that just as a Harvard Law School student was being rightly condemned for suggesting in a brief private email that African Americans might be genetically less intelligent than whites, the New York Times offered space on its op-ed page to Charles Murray, who in The Bell Curve publicly and at great length made precisely that argument.

It is even more striking that Murray’s op-ed was about two-thirds correct.

In the piece, Murray, a strong proponent of private school vouchers and charter schools, frankly conceded that the test score results for those policies were underwhelming.  In this regard, Murray is part of a larger retreat from school vouchers.  New York University’s Diane Ravitch has reversed course on her earlier support of vouchers.  And even Harvard’s Paul Peterson, who for years was the nation’s leading academic supporter of vouchers, has acknowledged that the grand expectations of voucher supporters have not been met and has shifted his emphasis to online learning.

Murray was also correct to note that research, going back to the famous Coleman Report of the 1960s, has consistently found that the socioeconomic status of a student’s family is the single biggest predictor of academic achievement.  The Coleman Report is a reminder that poverty is not an “excuse” made up by lazy teachers but a genuine impediment to learning that requires vigorous public policy interventions (a higher minimum wage, better housing and health care policies, stronger pre-K programs, and the like.).

Murray was wrong, however, to ignore Coleman's second big finding, which was that peers matter a great deal to a student’s learning. Coleman wrote: "The educational resources provided by a child's fellow students are more important to his achievement than are the resources provided by the school board." Classmates, Coleman found, trump expenditure, which explains why high poverty schools are so hard to “fix” with more money.  Research finds that the policy Murray advocates in his op-ed -- having every child go off to a private or public school of her choice, without any serious government oversight -- would actually increase economic school segregation, which is presumably why he ignored Coleman's second major finding.  Far better are the policies of some 70 school districts across the country to use public school choice to give all children a chance to go to good, economically mixed, schools.

For someone like Charles Murray, who embraces extremist views on genetic inferiority, however, getting two out of three questions right is not bad.