A drop in the bucket my friend The title says it all: Intense Tutoring for the Suburban, Smart and Disadvantaged. Wealthy schools can afford to coddle and encourage their tokens and push them forward as shining exemplars of their race. You have to read the article to taste the patronizing attitude. One thing that really bothers me is the idea that you "need to see someone like yourself that has made it to know you can succeed." Is this true? I don't know or care much myself. Godless rolls his eyes: First off, Razib is entirely correct when he dismisses the "role-model" rationale. It's total BS - Asian males are invisible in the media and in entertainment, yet they don't seem to suffer academically from a "lack of role models". However, the worst bit of the article was this line:

She is a student at Greenwich High School, a bastion of wealth and accomplishment, where it would be easy to hide the performance of a few minority children amid the high test scores of the majority. Or would have been easy before a new federal law, the No Child Left Behind Act, that aims to expose this unpleasant corner of American education. Under the law, schools will be forced to publish achievement data broken down by race and will be shamed, with escalating penalties, if disparities are not corrected.

The disparity must be "corrected". How is this possible if the disparity is partly biological in origin, a hypothesis that must be entertained if we are to proceed with any measure of objectivity? This article resorts to the false invocation of the axiom of equality more immediately and blatantly than most. The most objectionable part of this farce is that there is now every incentive for the school to evade penalties...by lowering standards to blur distinctions between high-achieving pupils and their less intelligent counterparts. In other words: they will "correct" the disparity by softening the tests. But the real world doesn't work this way. You're not going to be building bridges and developing diodes if you can't understand mathematics. Lowered standards will eventually come back to bite you if you do battle with nature or with organizations that have high standards. Killing the messenger will not "correct" anything... Oh yes...one other paragraph of this execrable article stuck out:

Dr. Gordon added that the Prep model "helps us understand what a good education has to look like," including music lessons, travel, tutors and college counseling, especially for "kids whose lives don't predispose them to high achievement."

Again, total nonsense. All you need to get a good education is a library card and possibly a computer...and a high IQ. Music lessons are fine, but all the rest is just fluff. Most of the friends of mine who went overseas for "studies" just had boozy fun. They got little or no education out of their "travel". As for tutors and counselors...well, let's just say that you'll never be on the cutting edge of anything if you always need someone to teach you something. Razib's addendum: It strikes that perhaps what these educators are trying to inculcate in their charges is exactly the wrong attitude: that of the pampered privileged prep schooler of the days of yore. Forgotten today, but standardized tests were the tools of the meritocracy that broke the old-line WASP stranglehold on the Ivy's. At these schools, a "well-rounded extracurricular background" is probably more typical of the legacies (an excuse to let them in without being totally shameless) than kids that made it by merit alone-who had plenty of sports and activities, but are distinguished by their academics. Another thing is that underrepresented minorities that do well in school and are poor to boot also have a huge handicap in their favor in terms of getting scholarships and acceptance into elite schools. Seems like these "enrichment" programs make up for that, so perhaps they should not be eligible??? In any case, these programs exist more for well-off white liberals than anyone else. It is a self-affirmation of their inherent virtue as they take up the latter-day white man's burden. The minorities who follow the path of identity politics-who accept the little "good as white but a little smudged on the outside" sticker-are the modern day colonial collaborators.