In response to Saturday’s post, several commenters remarked that it is not appropriate to blame “bad schools” for the poor academic performance of many children from minority groups, particularly black children. These commenters suggest that there are other factors that play a principal role, and that these factors are things that schools can do nothing to change, particularly low IQ and/or a culture that does not value education.

The problem with this contention is that there is actually substantial and even definitive evidence that schools can make a very large difference in the educational outcomes of minority children. I previously discussed some of that evidence in this post from August 2020. That post focused on the issue of school discipline, as well as on Thomas Sowell’s recent book Charter Schools and Their Enemies.

Today I’ll focus on some data generated by the State of New York.

As we have seen, corporate American has now fully bought in to the mantra that “any racial disparities are the result of racist policies.” See Friday’s post focusing on Google for one example of a company whose “antiracist” training materials use just that language.

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.

Yet despite all the pledges and commitments, change occurs at a glacial pace. As Friday’s post reported, the likes of Google 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%.

Perhaps there is a problem that the pipeline is just not producing a sufficient pool of potential candidates for all major institutions to hire 13% blacks into all high-ranking positions at the same time.

In the field of racial “equity,” the gap between the talk of woke American corporations and their actions grows wider every time you look. Nowhere is that gap wider than at Google.

As readers here know, I was involved for decades in the efforts of a major law firm to recruit, hire and retain increasing numbers of blacks and other minorities. From that experience, I know that this is a difficult, long-term and often frustrating process. A large dose of humility is in order. No one company or institution, no matter how big, will create utopia in a day.

Well, the giant tech companies don’t do humility. After all, they started from nothing just twenty or thirty years ago, and today they are worth trillions. Obviously, their leaders are geniuses, and therefore qualified to lecture everyone else about proper woke morality and how to perfect the world by some time tomorrow afternoon. And proper woke morality of this moment focuses on “antiracism” and “diversity, equity and inclusion.”