The Price of Good Intentions

Walter E. Williams, one of America’s premier public intellectuals, died last week at 84, just hours after teaching an economics class at George Mason University, where he taught for 40 years, and the day after his final syndicated column appeared. (I’m still contemplating whether that is a model I hope to emulate.)

That last column, like so much of his work, and that of his best friend and fellow black economist, Thomas Sowell, dealt with the decline of human capital in the black community since the inception of the Great Society.

Williams began his column documenting the horrifying educational failures of inner city schools. In 13 Baltimore high schools, for instance, not a single student tested as proficient in math, and only 14 black students out of 3,804, in 39 high schools, did so. (Proficient is not the highest evaluation.)

The situation has not always been thus. Sowell documents in Education: Assumptions versus History the academic excellence of Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Already by 1899, black students at Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School, a black public high school in Washington, D.C., scored higher on citywide tests that any of the city’s white schools. From 1870 to 1955, most of its graduates went to college.