In his new book, Facing Reality, Charles Murray writes,
Because we have not talked openly about group differences, we have kidded ourselves that the differences are temporary and can be made to go away.
maybe the Jewish advantage will turn out to be cultural. If that’s true, I think it would be even more interesting – it would mean there’s some set of beliefs and norms which can double your income and dectuple your chance of making an important scientific discovery. I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be – as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview. But if I’m wrong, figuring out exactly what was the active ingredient of that payload would be the most important task in social science, far outstripping lesser problems like crime or education or welfare (nobody expects good policy in these areas to double average income!).
There is a folk theory that says that cultural differences explain group differences in academic achievement. Jewish and Asian culture places a premium on academic achievement, while African-Americans who do well in school are derided by their peers as “acting white.” I don’t know how to test the folk theory rigorously. You can’t randomly assign children to different sets of parental and peer influences.
I doubt that the folk theory explains a lot. But I am a bit surprised that both Murray and Alexander slide past it.
Another folk theory is that differences in school quality explain a lot. On the contrary, I believe in the Null Hypothesis. As Murray puts it,
no one has yet found a way to increase cognitive ability permanently over and above the effects of routine education. The success stories consist of modest effects on exit tests that fade out.
Murray says that the purpose of his book is to get society to treat a black individual primarily as an individual. Instead, identity politics puts all the emphasis on black.
Murray admits that it is “paradoxical” that he is devoting a book to analyzing differences in group outcomes in order to get people to stop focusing on group differences. He wants to convince people that we should blame differences in group outcomes largely on immutable characteristics. Call that option A. But we might be better off with what I might call option B: stop paying attention to differences in group outcomes.
Neither option A nor option B is palatable on the left today. But I bet that option B stands a better chance of becoming accepted in our society.
1) 9/10 blacks don’t want to be treated as individuals. They would lose out compared to the current regime. Their polling and voting reflects this preference. A few high achieving blacks that wouldn’t lose anything if they got treated as individuals want to be treated as individuals, but they are a minority.
The only way people are going to get treated as individuals is if we ignore the wishes of blacks.
2) People like doing what they are good at. Since Jews and Asians are good at academics, their cultures value academics. Since Blacks aren’t, they don’t. This is a GOOD THING. Trying to shove something down the throat of someone that has no chance of success isn’t helping them, it’s a waste of time at best and cruel at worst.
The complaint here always comes from the oddballs. The intelligent black that doesn’t fit in with black culture. The artsy Asian that doesn’t want to be a doctor or lawyer. The Jewish…(you guys would know better).
3) Option B is simply the 1980-2010 consensus. Why did the consensus fail? What is different about today that would make it work again? Can Option B proponents provide answers to these questions?
I think that Option B was inherently temporary. Something people would only put up with IF achievement gaps were temporary in nature. The best example being Sandra Day O Connor stating in 2003 that affirmative action could last another 25 years because that’s how long it would take to close the achievement gap. 25 years is 2028, and its obvious that we aren’t going to close the gap by then.
I will add one more thing perhaps more up my professional alley. I think the information revolution and spreadsheetificiation of everything over the last few decades makes it very very hard to ignore something like racial gaps which are so easy to track in a spreadsheet and post on a website. Recent experience with the pandemic, and the relentless drive to track everything (to the point of not letting us have antigen tests a year ago because they couldn’t track it) drove this home to me. In some ways the practical difficulty of tracking everything under the sun by race in the pre digital era put something of a limit on how much of that our society could do.
African Americans are too well organized politically to be ignored. Simultaneously, the majority of the public is sympathetic to them and their cause. So affirmative action, minority owned business contracts, and certain Civil Rights protections are not going anywhere.
I’m pretty sure wealthy black people have very similar politics to poor black people. For white people, conservatism correlates with success, but not really for black people. Bryan Caplan argues (I think correctly) that individual self interest isn’t as important as group identity in voting behavior. Black people don’t have the politics they do because each one believes he’ll benefit from his politics, but because he thinks the group with which he most identifies (black people) will benefit from his politics.
If blacks benefit, individual blacks tend to benefit as well.
Black people generally have black spouses, black kids, black cousins, black neighboors, etc…of course they want those people to do well.
It’s not news that black ethnic nepotism is a racket…the question is why do non-blacks put up with it. Blacks are 40% or the population in MS, but they have zero political power in MS. The issue is that whites nationally battle each other and one faction is willing to use blacks as a club against the other and things like AA are blacks payoff for helping them in their inter-ethnic struggle.
However, just stating that openly would make it harder to make it work, so you need some Havel’s Green Grocer plausible deniability even if its a joke.
Calling in outside mercenaries to win your internal struggles often has long term consequences…
I suspect most black people would say, “I want to be treated as an individual, but I can’t in this racist society.” Since all the best whites say so, it’s easy to believe.
“Since all the best whites say so”
I don’t overly begrudge blacks their racket, they don’t have a lot of options and its a free $100 bill on the sidewalk.
It’s the enablers I despise.
I think that leftists whites are basically failure whites. Even when they have a good genetic profile they tend to squander it. They are mentally ill, they can’t form good relationships, they don’t start families or have kids. Their activism mostly flows from their having a lot of dead time in their lives to fill.
They say we lost of the culture war, but whites still vote 60/40 for sanity and they the right are the only ones having kids. Absent immigration we would be talking about the inevitable decline of the left. Leftists aligned with brown people because they have the kids they are too weak and pathetic to have.
White leftists are the equivalent of a decadent court faction of a declining civilization that invites some barbarian horde in to gain power, then is surprised when that horde takes over and doesn’t need them anymore.
Wow, I’ve never seen things described like that before. Alas, it does have a certain plausibility.
I believe in the following folk theories:
1) good teachers matter for a child’s development, and
2) a child’s peer group matters.
It just so happens that the above average schools tend to attract better teachers and peer groups based on a sorting mechanism known as relative housing prices. The successful are able to filter out the destructive riff raff from their communities, which is attractive to high quality teachers and other successful parents.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any evidence to substantiate this other than I continue to bet in this direction.
I believe that IQ is mostly genetic and has the most explanatory value in explaining differences in achievement. But, IQ is just a prerequisite or entry fee. That raw talent needs to be developed and nurtured by someone.
For example in athletics, the most successful have a combination of elite raw talent combined with years of vigorous training. I wonder what happens when that vigorous training is replaced by less vigorous training?
Agreed. But in the USA, it seems that the difference between a just competent teacher and a great teacher doesn’t show up in any statistics. And almost all teachers are at least competent.
“[E]lite raw talent combined with years of vigorous training” sounds like grad school.
“It just so happens that the above average schools tend to attract better teachers and peer groups based on a sorting mechanism known as relative housing prices. ”
Roger already mentioned the major objection, but it’s also worth pointing out that successfully teaching low to mid ability kids is a shit-ton harder than teaching high ability kids. Above average schools do not attract better teachers. They have their pick of the litter and they do pick younger teachers, but whether the younger ones turn out great or competent is a crap shoot. But it doesn’t matter.
Notice, too, that you assume that disruptive kids are a reality to be dealt with. But that’s a function of our laws that we might want to reconsider.
So, what makes bad schools bad schools?
Is it the teachers, the parents, the lack of innate talent of the students or spending? What relative weight to apply to each variable?
To a first approximation, good students make good schools and bad students make bad schools. “Good” is a combination of intelligence, interest, and positive behavior. “Bad” is the opposite.
Take a state of the art school with highly qualified teachers and put “bad” students in it and it will be a failure. That’s what happened in St. Louis after a federal judge required them to rebuild the system and substantially increase taxes to do it.
Take a very ordinary school and fill it with “good” students and people will wonder, “What’s the secret of its success?”
“Good” teachers don’t seem to make much of a difference. Nor does spending. Some high-spending schools with “bad” students do terribly, e.g., DC. Some low-spending systems with “good” students do well, e.g., Utah.
Parents make a big difference because of their genes, but what they do after birth doesn’t seem to have a great deal of effect on their kids’ schooling. Similarly, smart conscientious parents tend to live in places that spend a lot of money on schools and care a lot about schools. But they also generally have smart, conscientious kids, and it’s that, not the spending and caring, that largely makes for the “success” of their schools.
Alas, most of popular writing and political rhetoric in education is all about, “That can’t be true! I have a plan to fix things.” Shockingly, none of those plans have lived up to their promises. (Well, actually, there are many “successes” but they all seem to rely on special circumstances that don’t last (e.g., Jaime Escalante), or the gains fade out after a few years.
Excellent reply, thanks. We agree that innate intelligence is the essential ingredient.
However, I’m still wedded to the idea that peer groups and teachers matter as other important ingredients. In terms of the latter, I remember my best and worst teachers in k-12 and college extremely well because the best motivated and sustained me in ways that the worst could never do. Is there a bigger buzz kill than a mediocre teacher?
I will grant you that my experience is anecdotal, but I’m sticking to this over whatever data have to say. I guess I’m unfollowing the science in this case and I’ve got no qualms about it.
E.g. the best firearms instructors are so much better than the average or below average instructors. It isn’t even close and I’ve taken a ton of classes. Holy cow on the differences!
Of course, I’m assuming that the best teachers are naturally attracted to the best schools, but this doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable.
Separately, our host is probably one of the best teachers around. He can take complex concepts and boil them down to something easy to understand. You wanna take an intro stats or Econ class with him or some mediocre grad student TA?
I should probably have been more nuanced in my reply. Teachers can make a difference but at least in K-12, it seems to be marginal (I’ve never taken firearms instruction). There are, of course, teachers who are more interesting, more personable, or more knowledgeable, and that can make for a more enjoyable experience, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference for student achievement (it makes some difference some times). Almost all K-12 teachers are knowledgeable to the level they are teaching.
At least around here, teachers who switch schools go to the bottom of the seniority scale, which determines pay rates and some times class assignments. So there is a limited amount of “good teachers” moving to “good schools”. Besides, if you move, you become a provisional teacher again, with a three year probation period. You’ve lost that nice “I can only be fired as part of a reduction in force, and even then they have to start at the bottom of the seniority scale.” K-12 teachers tend to be risk averse.
In regard to switching schools, I should add that it’s very hard for the hiring school to know who is a “good” teacher. They don’t have access to the teacher’s classroom and they don’t have access to the records of the teacher’s students.
“I’ve never taken firearms instruction”
Show up uninvited at our home in the wee hours of the night and we can demo the differences between a great instructor vs. a mediocre one.
I’m kidding of course. Thanks for your replies, but I’m still unfollowing the science on this one. My anecdotal experience is not going to get overturned barring something really really interesting.
Purchasing a home in a certain neighborhood and choosing a school is something that cannot currently be unbundled in some easy or affordable sense. When we bought where we bought, we made a decision based on location, neighbors, peer group and schools. No regrets unless you can demonstrate that a more balanced investment portfolio would somehow outperform our various allocations.
If the schools are good, that almost certainly means they have good students, which probably means that your kids have good peer groups. Which probably also means that your neighbors are not ne’er-do-wells.
The three are correlated like doing well in history AND math AND English. Most people will do somewhat better in one than the others but almost no one will do well in one and poorly in another.(and, no, a B minus is not poorly).
“I was raised by Ashkenazi Jews and I cannot even begin to imagine what those beliefs would be – as far as I can tell, the cultural payload I received as a child was totally normal, just a completely average American worldview.”
I imagine that a lot of groups, if you were to do some type of GSS analysis, would on average be different regarding culture. Recent immigrants, American Indians, African Americans etc. I do think culture matters a lot, but not generic stuff like how you spice your chicken or what kind of hats you where, actual attitudes. Attitudes towards savings, attitudes towards authority, attitudes towards education, attitudes towards family structure, valuing continuity at a job or in a relationship. Having read a few of Thomas Sowell’s books I am aware of real achievement amongst African Americans in the past as well as some obvious cultural barriers to success that have emerged. I’m not totally convinced by his ideas but there is a solid base there for some improvement. Ultimately, the Charles Murray POV about insurmountable IQ differences has pretty consistently seemed to be part of the issue. I’ll admit I’ve never felt anyone has satisfactorily disposed this given we have about one century+ of fairly consistent data.
“Option B” is quite unrealistic: group differences are too blatantly obvious to pass unnoticed. And some sort of “discrimination” (in a pejorative sense) has in the past been a major factor in explaining such differences; thus, the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow weighs upon us.
Regarding the idea that option B is impossible: short people are significantly less successful than tall people in pretty much every area of life, including cognitive ability, but no one really notices (you’ll notice if you know about it, e.g., that scientists tend to be on the tall side), and no one cares. There are a lot of axes along which group differences are noticeable but no one cares. Men underperform women in many of the same ways black people underperform white people, and underperform them much worse (the coefficient on being make for being shot by police, incarcerated, sentencing, etc. is larger than it is for being black), but no one cares about it (though I guess one could say we all notice but society actually accepts option A when it comes to men).
The bottom line, it’s not inevitable, imo, that people will coalesce around any particular trait and identify with it so that it becomes too salient to ignore. Racial affinity groups are “socially constructed” one might say. It’s no more inevitable than height affinity groups or what have you. Of course that doesn’t mean existing affinity groups are easy to dislodge or undo, once people have already decided that a given trait is important and started to identify with it.
People will stop paying blacks mind when having them as part of your coalition causes more harm than benefit.
Right now the ideological basis of our society forgives a lot of the negatives of blacks, and the media does a lot to cover it up.
Keep in mind 13% of the population splitting its vote 90/10 has the same impact on outcomes as 52% of the population splitting its vote 60/40. When you don’t split your strength you can punch way above your weight.
Do you have any thoughts on Fryer’s analysis of “Acting White”?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25098746
I do. It’s a stupid hypothesis. Nonbright black kids who “act white” will do ok because they are well-behaved and there’s an incentive to give As and then hire well-behaved black kids, but their ability won’t be changed a bit.
A quote… “option B: stop paying attention to differences in group outcomes”.
That might be good but Charles Murray has a think tank job and writing produces additional income so he will keep paying attention.
How do you propose “stop paying attention to differences in group outcomes” would work? Ban all research on it? Censor and jail anyone who brings it up? The fact is we live in a world where 80% of the NBA is black and 99% of S&P 500 CEOs are not black.
If diversity were truly our strength, like the left is always claiming, we could talk openly about how each group has its strengths and weaknesses. Yet, because of a racial fundamentalist minority that crazily wants to deny basically all racial group differences, the rest of society is forced to tiptoe around these dimbulbs.
I say that we ignore them and talk about it openly, while always emphasizing, like Murray, that every person should not be stereotyped because of the group they happen to belong to.
If every attempt to blame whites for black dysfunction was met with a unified white resistance than it would end.
In Singapore the Chinese majority does have racial solidarity, is quite racist, and had a leader and government that openly acknowledged genetic differences. It worked.
It’s my belief that only the white racial consciousness can enforce a kind of detente on racial issues. Fear will keep the race hustlers in line. Empathy is clearly something they view as a weakness to exploit.
A “white racial consciousness” is the tribalist response to these tribalist race hustlers: I would prefer reason and statistics. After all, to make the case for racism, they are making a statistical case, not one with any evidence of actual racist acts. They simply invoke the boogeyman of “systemic racism” to explain statistical group differences, just as supposed hidden sexism explains the gender wage gap in their worldview.
The case for innate differences instead is easy to make- almost everyone knows and accepts innate group differences at some level- but the problem is the race/gender hustlers try to stir things up, and a coalition of ignorant people and money-grubbers forms.
Effectively casting them out is the problem we need to solve.
The only real world example I can think of where a multi racial society existed in stable equilibrium is Singapore and Israel.
In both cases the superior majority ethnic:
1) Makes sure it remains a majority
2) Acts in unison
3) Makes it clear they are dictating the terms and if you don’t like it go fuck yourself
That’s it. That’s how you handle having a low performing ethnic minority. You tell them to assimilate or drop dead.
Imagine a world where, as Steve Sailer puts it, we just told blacks to “cut the crap”. And to the extent they didn’t it they were faced with an effective arrangement of carrots and sticks to shape their behavior to something acceptable.
Wouldn’t be so bad, would it.
I dare you to go look up the quotes of LKY. In public speeches! It’s all a highly problematic and cancellable. Not even by 2020 standards, what he says would be out of line by 1980s standards. He understood reason and statistics, he still told people to fuck off.
There is this speech he gives early in his reign calling people out. That’s the speech of a man. That’s what we need now, not politely asking blacks to kill at slightly slower rates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZdeqbJUSwM
“Imagine a world where, as Steve Sailer puts it, we just told blacks to “cut the crap”. And to the extent they didn’t it they were faced with an effective arrangement of carrots and sticks to shape their behavior to something acceptable.”
That America did exist from the end of Reconstruction until the beginning of the Civil Rights movement around 1954. Even as a somewhat conservatarian white person who feels fed up with most contemporary racial politics, that is not an America I want to return to at all.
When I go to East Asia I feel like I’ve been transported to America in the 1950s…and it doesn’t seem that bad. I keep wondering what was so bad about it that it was worth destroying? Are Baltimore and Detroit better?
This seems like a recipe for constant (often violent) racial strife (and indeed it was when the US took something like this approach). You forget that white Americans are not like Singaporean Chinese. Some of them are: New England and upper Midwestern urban and suburban white people. But rural southern, Appalachian whites cannot be trusted in such a paternalistic position. Every problem black Americans have, they have too. They’re poorer, more violent, have kids out of wedlock, poorly educated. In fact a some of black America’s problems (including their poor diet) are the cultural inheritance of being ancestral deep southerners.
In short, this kind of hierarchy won’t likely work when half of the purported superior race are bona fide untermenchen.
“This seems like a recipe for constant (often violent) racial strife (and indeed it was when the US took something like this approach). ”
In the 1950s Baltimore didn’t have race riots, and after Civil Rights it had constant race riots, soaring murder, and 50+ years of depopulation.
Civil Rights brought nothing but racial violence. People commit violence when they think they will get away with it.
“Appalachian whites”
The murder rate in West Virginia, literally the worst part of Appalachia, is 0.04 per 1,000, literally below the national average.
The murder rate in Detroit, is 0.41, ten times West Virginia.
No, even hill crackers are superior to blacks. By a long shot. I just lived on the border of an Appalachian white trash and black neighborhood back in Baltimore. The white trash neighborhood was gentrifying and nice. It has low crime and zero riots. The black neighborhood was the center of the riots. Black routinely victimized me and me neighbors, the white trash didn’t. The white trash didn’t vote for the corrupt and incompetent black city leadership, the blacks did.
Given that there are no blacks living in Appalachia it seems pointless to worry about hill crackers being in charge of them, but honestly it would still be an upgrade for blacks if they were.
Even if we believed that whites in WV were say 5 IQ points dumber then whites overall, that would still make them smarter than the vast majority of blacks.
Sounds like you want separate tribes throwing statistical research at one another. That would be one realization of talking openly. In my opinion, the value of tribalism if justified through statistical gathering, isn’t sufficient value to justify the cost of division and conflict and resentment and the resulting loss of productivity. That’s why I think our blog host’s option B is the better choice.
In Singapore what Kendi is doing would actually be an illegal and jail able offense. That would put an end to race pandering right away.
The Chinese majority continually elects a party who has that as an official policy and supports it.
Whites get taken advantage of by blacks because they are weak, blacks sense that and act out expecting to be rewarded. If whites would punish rather than reward them when they act badly they would stop acting badly.
Going to answer inline, so the nesting stops.
asdf, not sure much can be drawn from small polities like Singapore and Israel, particularly given the ongoing strife in the latter. I don’t think much of “assimilate or drop dead” as a solution, too hard-line and unrealistic.
Sailer wrote the best piece on dealing with the US’s race problems that I’ve read in my life last month, that’s more like it.
I agree with you that reasonable people need to take a stand, as Murray is with his book, but amping up the tribalism just makes things worse. We need to be able to talk about our tribes without becoming tribal.
Brian, they are throwing statistical group differences at you and claiming your hidden racism is the reason, so unless you’re willing to paint a fuller statistical picture as Murray does, you are going to see much worse division regardless. I don’t think averting our eyes is going to work.
I propose making it illegal for any agency of the Federal government to inquire about a person’s race on any form, including the census. If private actors or state and local governments want to collect data on race, they can. If researchers want to keep studying race, they can. But once the Feds get out of the racial classification game, I think that game will lose at least some of its excitement.
France did this and indeed went further by also regulating private collection of this kind of information, and did so way back in 1978 before the IT revolution hit everything. There are a few exceptions, but in general they’ve taken it quite seriously for 43 years.
It didn’t accomplish anything, even in combination with other ‘Universalist’ uniform secularization policies like laicite. And now France simmers with ethnic tension and is a powderkeg for various kinds of explosions of unrest, and there was that famous recent open letter from the generals warning of looming civil war. Things like that can’t work in isolation to produce a harmoniously multiethnic society when one lacks the will to enforce them and other laws consistently against underperforming minority groups for fear of being accused of racism, which ends up feeding into exactly the same depressions and dysfunctional pathologies we have here.
Given the various Supreme Court dictates on racial discrimination and disparate impact, I’m not sure you’d be able to make it illegal to inquire about race.
Also, if you think the average American doesn’t want to know the demographics of cities and schools, think again.
I thought Nigerian Americans were actually the best academically performing immigrant group in the US. Maybe, pointing that out will demonstrate to people the deceptiveness of paying attention to differences in group outcomes. Group Nigerian Americans with other blacks and they will be part of a lower performing group. Group them by themselves and the exact same students will suddenly become part of a top performing group. Group them with a combination of other blacks and non-blacks and who knows that the result will be. I have no idea what the academic performance is of left-handed, tall people whose parental income falls between the 40th and 57th percentile, but that group probably contains a mix of Nigerians, non-Nigerian blacks, and non-blacks. The choice of groupings, which is what drives the group outcomes, is not as immutable or “natural” as many people think.
Sure, Asian overperformance is only because we get the cream of their crop, those who can afford to fly thousands of miles and get a high-paying job here. Go back to their home countries and examine their average person and you see why they left.
Still, we are faced with the fact that American Descendants of Slaves are underperforming, and it can’t all be blamed on Jim Crow or its legacy anymore. Kendi et al are starting witch hunts over this, so the truth of innate differences has to be examined, regardless of how the groupings are done.
Wrong. Early generation Chinese and Japanese Americans were mostly descended from people who worked on the railroads or sugar fields. Not that different in initial social class to most new Hispanics today. Yet they prospered. They outperformed early arrival Hispanics well before the 1970s when the modern Chinese and Korean arrivals began.
Filipinos do well despite the earlier generation doing below average in the US. And the majority of Fils in the US don’t come as doctors and lawyers or even nurses, but from people who do menial jobs or who did low level work for the US miliitary.
There is just no comparison between the systematically high performance of East Asian groups — unlike Indians — who came without top degrees or elite backgrounds in the first half of the 20th century when racism and racist laws were openly anti-Asian on the West Coast especially.
> Wrong.
Not sure what you disagree with, considering you then go on to violently agree with my central point that those ethnic groups had some differences that made them perform differently than other ethnic groups. If you’re quibbling with my “cream of the crop” comment, that is true of most of the arrivals over the last half century, who vastly outnumber the early Asian immigrants from a century ago and their descendants that you highlight.
As far as I know (and I could easily be wrong), it isn’t Nigerian-Americans who do well. It is Nigerian-Americans who are ethnically Igbo (one of the three main ethnic groups in the country).
It may be hard to randomly assign kids to different cultures, but whites have a habit of adopting kids from different races and ethnicities. I understand that when those children grow up, their relative performance on academic measures matches the standard Asian>White>Hispanic>Black.
Sadly we cannot test the hypothesis of Asian treatment because normal Asians who are products of Asian culture are reluctant to adopt non-relatives let alone kids from other races. It’s like looking at Asian American politcians or literature professors. Since East Asian families particularly discourage such career choices, you can be sure that the views of those who do choose politics or literature as careers are not the norm for their ethnic group.
I completely agree with Kling: it would be better to focus public education efforts on improving outcomes for all, and not focusing on racial group differences. I also agree that the left wouldn’t accept that option. And the left really runs the show, so I would bet against that happening in the near future.
This would be a compelling Republican campaign proposal; I support it, it has the moral high ground, but I’m skeptical it would win..
The characteristics aren’t immutable, but they can only be confronted on the individual level. I remember Richard Feynman speaking of his father as teaching lots about birds, but none of the names. Unlike the fathers of his friends, who knew the bird names and thought that knowing the name was knowing the bird. The name just wasn’t necessary to understand their nature. That is an individual intervention that facilitated future educational outcomes.
In December 2016, Timothy Taylor posted on a symposium that looked at the Coleman Report: 50 yrs later. He cited one paper that had the conclusion quote below as the best summary he could offer
“The overall conclusion of the Coleman Report—that family background is far and away the most important determinant of educational achievement and attainment—is as convincing today as it was fifty years ago.”
Seems to confirm your Null Hypothesis. The only way to overcome family background is to focus on the individual, not the group.
And, alas, often you just can’t overcome.