Shocker.
Via Beltway Confidential:
With national unemployment figures parked above 9% and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., openly questioning President Obama’s fidelity to the black community, Obama tapped Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, to chair the White House Council of Economic Advisers, a decision that might subtly figure into Obama’s expansion of outreach to the black community, given Krueger’s expressed interest in “the legacy of racial inequality in academic and economic opportunity.”
Throughout his career, Krueger contributed to multiple studies of race as a factor in educational and economic success. Most recently, Krueger coauthored a 2005 study about affirmative action policies, in which he expressed his belief that vestigial discrimination and the “legacy” of racial discrimination has compromised the opportunity for success among the black community.
In this particular study, Krueger questioned whether universities could suspend affirmative action policies in the foreseeable future without a significant drop in the number of black students at the best schools in the country. Answer: no, because “there will simply be too few high-scoring black students,” Krueger says, to match the numbers of students who currently benefit from racial preferences in admissions policies.
To what does Krueger attribute this bleak forecast for black students’ academic achievements? From the outset, Krueger points to “the legacies of de jure segregation and racial discrimination in the United States” which, in concert with “continuing bias,” results in a “substantial gap in measured academic performance between black children and white children.” The academic gap, of course, derives to a large degree from an income gap between white and black parents. Fortunately, as adult black workers since the civil rights movement earned more money due to “a reduction in discrimination in conjunction with normal market forces,” that academic gap diminished.