In elite circles, where they keep changing pedagogical methods until every child is equitably illiterate, the test for being licensed as a social worker has been branded “racist.” John McWhorter points out a problem with the conclusion.

The Association of Social Work Boards administers tests typically required for the licensure of social workers. Apparently, this amounts to a kind of racism that must be reckoned with.

There is a Change.org petition circulating saying just that, based on the claim that the association’s clinical exam is biased because from 2018 to 2021 84 percent of white test-takers passed it the first time while only 45 percent of Black test-takers and 65 percent of Latino test-takers did. “These numbers are grossly disproportionate and demonstrate a failure in the exam’s design.”

This is a disparate outcome, certainly reason to inquire further as to why that exists. What it is not is proof, in itself, of racism. It’s merely the first step, “is there a potential problem?” leading to the next step, “if so, why is there a problem?” But that’s only true if one is allowed not to assume that there can be no other reason for disparate outcomes than racism.

[T]he petition states, adding that an “assertion that the problem lies with test-takers only reinforces the racism inherent to the test.”

What’s not considered, nor permitted to be considered, is that the problem can both lie with test-takers and not be racism at all. McWhorter provides two examples of rationales for the disparity.

The petitioners add that the exam is administered only in English and its questions are based on survey responses from a disproportionately white pool of social workers.

Should the exam only be administered in English? It’s unclear what that would do for black test takers, unless the unspoken alternative is AAVE, although that might prove hard to grade. We don’t have a national language, but should a license issued by the government have a component that the person seeking the license be capable of using the dominant langauge? It could be a legit gripe, although it would still need to be ascertained whether it was really a cause of the disparity. As for answers coming from a “disproportionately white pool of social workers,” would it be any different if it was proportionate to something, whether the percentages in the population or the percentages of licensed persons? Should it be?

But does any of this cause the disparate test outcomes? Post hoc ergo propter hoc? No one knows and no one wants to ask because it might result in the one answer no one is willing to face: maybe it is the test takers and the exam is fine.

McWhorter goes on to discuss a linguistic based explanation, because that’s his bread and butter, for the disparity.

One source I’ve always valued is a book published in 1983, “Ways With Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms,” by the linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath, who compared how language was used with children in a middle-class white community, a working-class white one and a working-class Black one. She found that in conversation, questions were wielded differently depending on the community. A key difference was that in middle-class white ones, children were often asked disembodied, information-seeking questions as a kind of exercise amid general social interaction.

This is the linguistics piece of a much larger rationalization, giving rise to such seemingly bizarre arguments that perfection or punctuality is white supremacy, those bourgeois traits that worked so very well for some but are now demonized as privilege by those who can’t manage to be on time or get things right.

But if we can’t change the cultural inputs that will result in equitable outcomes, whatever that means, we can always demonize the characteristics so as to justify rejecting them and put all our effort into achieving better outcomes. Except that’s not working either.

It has been more than 15 years since two of the country’s top public university systems, the University of Michigan and the University of California, were forced to stop using affirmative action in admissions.

Since then, both systems have tried to build racially diverse student bodies through extensive outreach and major financial investment, well into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Those efforts have fallen abysmally short, the universities admitted in two amicus briefs filed this month at the Supreme Court, which is set to consider the future of affirmative action in college admissions this fall.

In the nature of a “dirty little secret,” this has been going on the decades before the 15 years they admit to. Bakke, anyone? And when it’s a public university, guess who pays the tab for good intentions?

The outreach programs are extremely costly. The University of California system says it has spent more than a half-billion dollars since 2004 to increase diversity among its students.

So the solution, two very big, very progressive, state universities argue, is to do the same, but more of it, because it’s been a miserable failure.

In the briefs, lawyers for the universities argue that, without affirmative action, achieving racial diversity is virtually impossible at highly selective universities.

“Despite persistent, vigorous and varied efforts to increase student body racial and ethnic diversity by race-neutral means,” the brief from Michigan stated, “the admission and enrollment of underrepresented minority students have fallen precipitously in many of U-M’s schools and colleges” since the end of affirmative action.

Except affirmative action hasn’t ended. And as much as it’s proven useful in creating a less homogeneous and more diverse body of students, all similarly capable of academic success but bringing varying life experiences to their education, what it has not done is make the numbers on the back end match up with percentages in the population, which must happen in the Kendian-type rationalization or it must be racism for there can be no other reason.

But as this confession of failure from California and Michigan show, it’s neither true nor working, and doing more of a failed thing is not going to change the results. If people really want to know why the numbers on the back end are disparate, they need to do some hard and unpleasant research and thinking into how that happens. But if they refuse to do so, they will never correct what’s wrong and will instead keep doing damage to things that aren’t broken but are permissible targets of change.