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New York City’s
Stuyvesant High School is one of those all too rare public schools
for intellectually outstanding students. Such students are often
bored to death in schools where the work is geared to the lowest
common denominator, and it is by no means uncommon for very bright
students to become behavior problems.

Recent statistics
on the students who passed the examination to get into Stuyvesant
High School raise troubling questions that are unlikely to receive
the kind of serious answers they deserve.

These successful
applicants included 9 black students, 24 Latino students, 177 white
students and 620 Asian Americans.

Since this
is definitely not the ethnic makeup of the general population of
New York City, we can expect to hear the usual sort of comments
from those who are in the business of being indignant and offended.

The most common
of these comments is that the tests are “unfair.” That is of course
possible, but it is also possible that the groups themselves are
different. Yet only the first possibility is allowed to be mentioned,
in an age when race can be discussed only with pious hypocrisy and
obligatory lies.

However shocked
some people may be by the ethnic breakdown among students who passed
the test to get into Stuyvesant High School, similar disparities
can be found among students from different ethnic backgrounds in
other countries around the world. Back in the decade of the 1960s,
students from the Chinese minority in Malaysia earned 20 times as
many Bachelor of Science degrees as students from the Malay majority.

In Sri Lanka,
children from the Tamil minority consistently outperformed members
of the Sinhalese majority on university admissions tests and, in
at least one year, made an absolute majority of the A’s on those
tests.

Back in the
days of the Ottoman Empire, Armenian students did better than Turkish
students when it came to writing in the Turkish language.

What does all
this mean? That people are different. Would ordinary observation
and ordinary common sense not tell you that? Or dare you not even
think that, in the suffocating atmosphere of political correctness?

These differences
are not set in stone. Back during the First World War, low mental
test scores among Jewish soldiers in the U.S. Army led one mental
test expert to declare that this tended to “disprove the popular
belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”

But many of
the men taking the Army’s mental tests during the First World War
were the children of immigrants, and had grown up in homes where
English was not the language used. Mental tests in later years showed
Jews scoring above the national average.

Every study
I know of that compares the amount of time that black students and
Asian American students spend watching television, and how much
time they spend on school work, shows disparities as great as the
disparities in their academic outcomes.

When teaching
at UCLA, years ago, I once went into a library on a Saturday night,
noticed how many Asian students were studying – and looked around
in vain for any black students. How surprised should I have been
when Asian students did better in the courses I taught?

A few years
ago, Professor Amy Chua of Yale caused a controversy when she wrote
a book about Asian “Tiger Moms” who put heavy pressure on their
children to succeed in school. But a more recent book (Gifted
Hands) by black neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson shows that his
mother was as much of a Tiger Mom as the Asians.

Not
only did Dr. Carson rise from the ghetto to become an internationally
recognized neurosurgeon, his brother became an engineer – both
of them children of a poverty-stricken mother with only three years
of education. But Tiger Moms get results.

Unfortunately,
we are at a stage where the interests of race hustlers is to cry
“unfair” at the tests – and they have a lot more political clout
than black Tiger Moms have. So long as the rest of us are silenced
by political correctness, racial progress on that front is unlikely.

Put differently,
whole generations of black young people can continue to go down
the drain because their fate carries less weight than fashionable
racial rhetoric.

April
10, 2013

Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
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