Jay P. Greene's Blog

Kimberle Crenshaw is a law professor at UCLA who is best known for coining the term, “intersectionality.”  As Wikipedia describes it, intersectional theory is “the study of how overlapping or intersecting social identities, particularly minority identities, relate to systems and structures of oppression, domination, or discrimination.  There is nothing particularly harmful (or novel) about noting that people have multiple identities and that those identities overlap, sometimes in important ways.  The problem with intersectionality, which makes Crenshaw worthy of The Higgy, is that it has fueled an intellectually lazy and politically disastrous approach to virtually all social issues.

Intersectionality is intellectually lazy because it provides a single, overly-simplistic framework for understanding everything.  As Jonathan Haidt describes it, intersectionality divides the world into victims and oppressors.  In a type of re-warmed Marxism, all victims share the same struggle against the same underlying oppression, because all forms of oppression are connected.  The fight against racism cannot be won without addressing sexism, classism, ableism, etc…

Rather than having to learn about the complex circumstances and histories of different conflicts around the world, all we have to do is figure out who the victims and oppressors are.  Once we’ve forced the world into our Manichean framework, we know who should be helped and who should be stopped.  The problem is that the world is a lot more complicated than that.  People can be both oppressors and victims at the same time, depending on which issue we choose to make the focus of our attention.  And the struggle against one oppression may be completely independent of or even undermine the struggle against another oppression.

For example, the National LGBTQ Task Force decided to exclude an organization that seeks to make connections between LGBTQ communities in Israel and America from holding an event at the Task Force’s national conference in San Francisco.  Invoking the idea of intersectionality, some people convinced the Task Force that LGBTQ people in Israel could not be seen as victims (the good people) because they are oppressors of the the real victims, Palestinians.  Of course, dividing the world into oppressors and victims obscures the complex ways in which Palestinians may be oppressors of LGBTQ people or Jews at the same time that they may be victims of other types of oppression.  People are typically a mix of good and bad, which means that we might want to consider each type of grievance independently and understand it within its own context.  Instead, intersectionality encourages its adherents to label everyone as good or bad abstracted of individual circumstance or history, so we know who should be helped and who shunned (or worse).

To earn the good status of being the victim rather than the oppressor, people will compete in the who has suffered more Olympics, which is hardly a rational way to make moral or political judgements.  The people who claim to have suffered more may not be the most virtuous and those who are prospering may not be the most evil.  And encouraging people to compete for victim status discourages people from doing things that may help themselves so that they don’t risk appearing less victim-like.

In addition to being intellectually lazy, intersectionality is politically disastrous.  By connecting all issues, intersectionality prevents its adherents from agreeing with people on one issue while disagreeing on another.  If certain people are the oppressors and others victims, you can’t make common cause with the “oppressors” for the issues on which you have common interests.  You might think that linking different victims would give them a larger political coalition, but linking different oppressors drives away even more since few are the victims of every oppression.  Almost everyone can be framed as an oppressor in one way or another, all of whom are ineligible from joining your coalition against any particular injustice.

We’ve seen this type of political self-immolation in education reform, most notably at the infamous New Schools Venture Fund conference.  The more people demand that everyone in their coalition join them in opposing all injustices, the fewer people they have left to oppose any one injustice.  Some charter school people who have turned their hostility against private school choice are about to discover how lonely, small, and weak their purified coalition is about to become.  Especially given that Republicans dominate most state governments, purging mainstream Republican ideas from their version of the choice movement seems doomed to fail.  But given that intersectionality may find virtue in failure and sin in success, perhaps these folks don’t mind failing so much.

I don’t know enough about Crenshaw to say whether she has other redeeming qualities, but The Higgy does not demand that its recipients be awful people.  They only have to have done something to detract significantly from the human condition.  Introducing and promoting the concept of intersectionality certainly qualifies Crenshaw for this dishonor.

It is time once gain to solicit nominations for the William Higinbotham Inhumanitarian Award.  Below I reproduce portions of the first announcement of “The Higgy” in 2012, so you have an understanding of the historic significance and criteria for this dishonor.

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As someone who was recognized in 2006 as Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, I know a lot about the importance of awards highlighting people of significant accomplishment.  Here on JPGB we have the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, but I’ve noticed that “The Al” only recognizes people of positive accomplishment.  As Time Magazine has understood in naming Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Ayatullah Khomeini as Persons of the Year, accomplishments can be negative as well as positive.

(Then again, Time has also recognized some amazing individuals as Person of the Year, including Endangered Earth, The Computer, Twenty-Five and Under, and The Peacemakers, so I’m not sure we should be paying so much attention to what a soon-to-be-defunct magazine does.  But that’s a topic for another day when we want to talk about how schools are more likely to be named after manatees than George Washington.)

Where were we?  Oh yes.  It is important to recognize negative as well as positive accomplishment.  So I introduce “The Higgy,” an award named after William Higinbotham, as the mirror award to our well-established “Al.”

Just as Al Copeland was not without serious flaws as a person, William Higinbotham was not without his virtues.  Higinbotham did, after all  develop the first video game.  But Higinbotham dismissed the importance of that accomplishment and instead chose to be an arrogant [jerk] by claiming that his true accomplishment was in helping found the Federation of American Scientists and working for the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons.  I highly doubt that the Federation or Higinbotham did a single thing that actually advanced nonproliferation, but they sure were smug about it…

I suspect that Al Copeland, by contrast, understood that he was a royal jerk.  And he also understood that developing a chain of spicy chicken restaurants really does improve the human condition.  Higinbotham’s failing was in mistaking self-righteous proclamations for actually making people’s lives better in a way that video games really do improve the human condition.

So, “The Higgy” will not identify the worst person in the world, just as “The Al” does not recognize the best.  Instead, “The Higgy” will highlight individuals whose arrogant delusions of shaping the world to meet their own will outweigh the positive qualities they possess.

We will invite nominations for “The Higgy” in late March and will announce the winner, appropriately enough, on April 15.  Thanks to Greg for his suggestions in developing “The Higgy.”

A Century Foundation researcher searching for evidence.

(Guest Post by Jason Bedrick)

ICYMI, our JPG blogger buddy Greg Forster has a new piece up at Education Next debunking a report from the Century Foundation that claims — based on mere conjecture and an ostrich-like ability to bury one’s head in the sand regarding the research — that school choice supposedly increases ethnic segregation.

The Century Foundation has published a report by Halley Potter that claims private school choice will increase ethnic segregation in schools. Although the text of the report constantly invokes words like “evidence,” “studies” and “data,” its conclusions are actually defended almost entirely by appeal to a lengthy recitation of hypothetical, ideological speculation. The report’s actual engagement with empirical research is as scanty as it is misleading. A real review of the evidence shows that private school choice has never been found to increase segregation and often seems to have provided a more integrated classroom experience.

There are a number of serious methodological challenges involved in empirical research on how education policies affect ethnic segregation. I wrote about them at some length in a report for EdChoice a while back. For example, some data don’t permit causal conclusions; some methods of comparison are unfair because they compare elementary grades to secondary grades inappropriately. Reviewing all of the empirical research on school choice last year, I found that 10 studies had been conducted that examine the relationship between school choice and ethnic segregation in some respect. Some are causal, some descriptive; all shed some light on the question. Nine of those studies found that school choice provided a more integrated classroom experience, one found no visible difference, and no empirical study had ever found that a school choice program made ethnic segregation worse.

That is the empirical evidence. Nine out of the 10 studies that have been conducted report positive findings on the actual, real-world impact of school choice programs when it comes to ethnic segregation.

The Century Foundation report mostly ignores the evidence, giving a distorted take on just two of the empirical studies on the effects of school choice on segregation. As Greg notes:

If you dig very, very deep into the report, you do eventually find a discussion of empirical studies. But this doesn’t mean the report gets much better, for Potter examines only two of the 10 studies that exist – and she has described them in a misleading way.

Looking at longitudinal studies in Milwaukee and Louisiana, she describes them in a way that will leave the impression that the results were negative for school choice: “In both cases, programs were used primarily by black students and generally did not exacerbate segregation in public schools; however, students using vouchers did not gain access to integrated private schools, and segregation in private schools actually increased.”

Now, even that misleading description would be enough to call into question the huge mountain of hypothetical, ideological speculation that occupies the overwhelming majority of Potter’s report. However, a more precise description of these two studies would look even worse for Potter, because it would look good for school choice.

The Milwaukee study found the voucher program made no visible difference to segregation, at least during the period under observation. It is the only such study ever to find no visible difference. Other studies in Milwaukee using different methods have found more encouraging results, though because of methodological restrictions, none of these studies can be considered a final word. The longitudinal study’s null finding is not as encouraging as a positive finding would have been, but the nightmare world of increasing school segregation promised by Potter’s lengthy speculations apparently did not come to pass in Milwaukee.

As usual with Greg’s work, I recommend reading the whole thing.

Sadly, the Atlantic ran an entirely uncritical piece parroting the Century Foundation’s “findings.” I’ve reached out to both the Atlantic and the Century Foundation yesterday–and again today–to share with them all the evidence that they ignored, but they have thus far continued to ignore both me and the evidence. I’ll update you if that changes.