Consider, just as one example, the paper "Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Increase Achievement Among the Poor? Evidence from the Harlem Children’s Zone" (Dobbie and Fryer 2011) https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/are-high-qual...

Here is the abstract:

"Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics. The effects in elementary school are large enough to close the racial achievement gap in both mathematics and ELA. We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. Community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient."

On the contrary, if you search through education literature, you will see countless successful programs, but why don't we see their effects at the societal level? Because it almost never scale. Education program is not something you can duplicate easily, it is almost always extremely localized.

In education, it is very difficult for a successful experiment / program to scale vertically (expand to all grade levels) or horizontally (expand to other schools, districts). Also treatment effects are difficult to retain after students left the program, or after the experiment ended.

Interestingly, Taleb just made a twitter this morning: "What works on a small scale almost NEVER expands to large scale." https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1035121052886728704

I think the answer to this question can be found in looking at incarnation rates. Right now there are about 1.5 million black men who are "off the grid" because they are locked up in prison[0]. How many of them have kids? How many men who were previously locked up were incarnated while their child was of elementary school age, and could not be there to provide the stability that is so crucial in the first five years of a kids life for them to succeed? Even if they came back into their kids life at 7 or 8 years old they missed out on kindergarten, which many study have shown that kindergarten performances correlates to school performance later in life.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missin...

It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group who is being discriminated against under affirmative action because their superior test scores would otherwise leave them hugely overrepresented vs. other groups.

Are we supposed to trace back how Asian overperformance is due to a history of institutional racism against whites in the USA? Or is the fact of a non-white group outperforming whites and then being discriminated against so counter to the narrative people want about race and affirmative action that they just go back to talking about Jim Crow? What are these Asian applicants supposed to do, just accept that they are held to higher standards than any other group? If Asians would just stop doing so well on the SAT we wouldn't have to discriminate against them ...

Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy.

Colleges like Harvard and companies like Google want a more diverse population and are willing to shape policy based on that; if America was truly a place of equal opportunity they would not need to bend their policies to reach out to marginalized groups at the expense of others who should qualify based on merit. If we want to remove the need for Affirmative Action we need to solve the underlying issues which made it seem so viable in the first place.

It makes sense because if most black children grow up in poor fatherless homes (and that is the cause of the majority of inequality), its not because white people are discriminating but maybe because that is just the state the black people are facing.

A good (race agnostic) way to solve it is just account for the fact the someone is fatherless and they come from low income households. Totally eliminates race.

Blacks will still be helped but unfortunately asian individuals will still have a large hurdle[0]

0 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

A useful thing to keep in mind is that "black", as in "African American", actually is a sort of synthesized ethnicity (their original cultures having been stripped from them in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade)... but "white" is not. There are Irish people and there are Slavic people and there are Sicilian people, and their cultures are not in fact all that similar. "White" just means what it needs to mean.

All you need to add to your mental model of "white" and "black" to fit low Asian American incarceration into it is the idea that Asians will soon attain "honorary white" status. That's not a message board concept; the transition of Asians from "model minority" to "white people" is much discussed in the real world as well.

I don't foresee Asians being seen as white people. Their origins are much different than the Irish, Italian and even Jewish cases.

Perhaps certain people such as yourself would do so as an adjustment to allow you to continue viewing through your same prism rather than getting a new prism.

I think people need to come to grips with the fact that there are definitions (obviously not the only ones but not the least important ones either) of "white" and "non-white" that boil down to "human" and "subhuman". That's not a thing I'm making up as message board rhetoric; it's a simple fact.

It was almost impossible for Asians to come to the U.S. before 1965. Wait another couple hundred years and check back on whether there is a reversion to the mean.

Less than half the arrest rate.

> It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group...

Actually, it's not bizarre at all. In fact, the long unsettled distraction of "black" vs. "white" is entirely what this whole dust-up is about. And while the particular case being litigated involves "Asian" students, the people/group funding the suit are non-Asian, IIRC. In fact, I believe they(the funders) actually did something of a casting call to find their plantiff(s), which isn't altogether uncommon. This case, ties into the previous anti-affirmative action cases that did not deliver the desired death blow. I don't have time (or interest really) to dig up old articles and such, but you shouldn't have any difficulty validating what I'm saying here if you are interested in doing so.

Also, there isn't much concern about Asian students who perform well on the requisite tests outnumbering other groups. The concern is about their outnumbering one group. W/all due respect, this should be pretty clear to anyone who understands the historical mission(s)-- which aren't all that different from those of current-- of such elite institutions. It's even clearer if one reads a little history (of the schools or broader society, your choice).

With respect to your question(s) about institutional racism, I'm not sure if you ask in earnest or are being rhetorical, so I beg forgiveness in advance. The simple fact of the matter is that the whole issue consists of many moving parts and circumstances. You say "Asian", but who are we even really talking about? That's a pretty diverse population. And it doesn't consist solely, or even mostly, of superior performers. All of the dysfunctions that many like to label as being exclusively 'Black' or (maybe) 'Hispanic' can easily be found among "Asians", too. And we still haven't even gotten to talking about which "Asians" from "Asia" are here and how they got here, or why.

> What are these Asian applicants supposed to do...

1) Question whether their understanding of admissions criteria is correct;

If they believe that their understanding of the admissions criteria is correct (I don't believe that it is based on personal experience/inside knowledge and research), and they believe that they meet the criteria for admission, then...

2) Start asking some very tough questions about why the bar is lower for everyone else; or

3) Opt out and do their own thing instead of seeking validation from, and validating, a system that for whatever reason(s) doesn't seem to value them appropriately.

Again, the entire issue is pretty complex, far more so than I've ever seen anyone here make it out to be. Which is why I hope you'll actually check out the video in the linked post.

Yes there are two criminal justice and police reform.

Perhaps...

> It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1]

This is wildly unsourced - what data do you have (ideally across nations/racial categories) for this?

https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...

http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...

Why do you think single parenthood is rising, or that adoption opportunities are drying up? I doubt there has been a time in the history of mankind that is more accepting of single parenthood, or where it's been more possible to raise a child on your own. Women by and large aren't financially obligated to give up their children in this day and age, and with society becoming more secular it's socially more acceptable to be a single parent.

Further, what makes you think any institutional policy, or anything at all, can fix single-parent households having worse outcomes than two-parent ones? It's just simple logic: two parents tend to meet children's needs better than one because there are two of them.

This and the other sibling comments seem focused on single-parenting and not the rest of the GP argument (which I still maintain is unsupported).