I wouldn’t link so often to pieces on NRO if a) such pieces weren’t so interesting and b) weren’t so well written. Even that outlet’s more langorous languorous libations manage to refresh. Here’s just such an article, by John Derbyshire, which uses about 800 words more than needed to make its point but which is nonetheless fully enjoyable. 

Derbyshire notes that most Americans, accustomed to observing inequality in most things, bristle when inequality of “smarts” crosses their paths. “The problem with this smartocracy,” he writes, “is, we have this itchy feeling that it’s un-American.” He makes many of the arguments usually associated with Charles Murray, who is not shy about pointing out that people with low I.Q.s are, generally, not going to do well in school and that not much can be done about it. (Murray makes precisely this argument in his forthcoming book, Real Education.)

Yes and no, of course. While it doesn’t hurt to acknowledge that a bell curve exists in academic achievement, as in most things, it’s tough to prove that the entire curve can’t be moved—i.e., that “average” can’t become better.

But Derbyshire is right that scads of people don’t like to acknowledge that some folks are smart, some aren’t, and that’s how it is. A perfect example is the widespread opposition to separating students by their abilities and teaching to those abilities. Instead of undertaking that sensible approach, we are bombarded with misguided ideas such as, for example, having all students enroll in AP classes, a proposition that defies logic. If AP means what it is supposed to me (the word “advanced” is, after all, in its name), then all kids cannot expect to take AP classes and succeed in them.

I read in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday that race+class school-assignment plans will succeed only if students are not just integrated at the school-level but also at the class-level. You see what’s happening here? It’s diversity creep, and it threatens to do a lot of damage (more than it’s already done) by allotting pupils to classes based not on students’ abilities but on their races and classes, all in the name of promoting some type of feel-good amalgam in which, we are told, poor and minority students, awash in the middle-class glow that emanates from their middle-class classmates, will see their academic achievement soar.

What nonsense. What would happen, of course, is either a) the less savvy students—many of whom will be poor and minority students—will not be able to keep up, or b) the class will regress to the lowest common denominator of academic rigor, such that the least-advanced pupil is able to digest the material therein served.

We should be wary of this and beat it back whenever and wherever it chooses to pop up.