Whining in the Times

Writers in the New York Times whine a lot, often to no apparent purpose.

A good example was the recent article about the dearth of women bloggers. Aside from the fact that the article is largely inaccurate — there are a large number of women bloggers– is the author suggesting that some sort of barrier is keeping women out? If so, she should have analyzed it. If not, what’s the problem? In the absence of discrimination, is there some injustice afoot if less than half of the people who choose to blog are female?

Another good whine is Katha Pollitt’s recent lament about the difficulty of getting New York kids — hers and others — into gifted and talented programs, and the severe “underrepresentation” of poor and minority students in those program.

You remember Katha Pollitt. She’s the Nation writer who (in)famously wrote, shortly after 9/11, that

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. “Definitely not,” I say, “The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.”

In her recent OpEd, she explains the hoops she had to jump through to get her obviously bright daughter into one of New York City’s gifted and talented programs, which resulted ultimately in attendance at the famously selective Stuyvesant High School.

Her point, I think, is that the bureaucratic hurdles placed before the parents of gifted children are too high and that poor and minority parents aren’t as good at working the system as people like herself, resulting in G&T programs looking more like “Bavaria” than a cross-section of New York.

[T]he fact is the schools and programs in demand are oases of comparative privilege in a desert of deprivation: middle-class, disproportionately white enclaves often located within school buildings that are almost entirely minority and largely poor.

G&T programs, of course, are not designed to be racially and ethnically representative. Does Pollitt think they should be? While whining that they aren’t, she doesn’t come right out and say they should be.

I’m not personally familiar with the New York City school system, but I am more familiar than I’d like to be with several others. If NYC is like the ones I know, much of the necessity for working the system, for securing letters of recommendation from parents of kids already in your desired school, for writing “sycophantic letters in which [parents] profess allegiance to the school’s educational philosophy, promise to work their tails off for the parents association and read their child French fairy tales at bedtime” could be obviated if the schools based their admission decisions exclusively on some combination of IQ and achievement tests. You will note that Pollitt does not recommend this solution. I wonder if that’s because such a procedure would produce a similar racial and ethnic imbalance.

And what of the content of the G&T programs? Pollitt writes:

At one program I visited, the administrator who showed prospective parents around boasted that students had science three times a week, not once a week like the children in the regular school