The Only Two Questions You Need to Answer If You Want to Improve Your Finances

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I came across yet another academic study that blamed the achievement gap between black and white students on—you guessed it—something other than black students and their parents. This time the culprit was segregation and poverty.

The study, Is Separate Still Unequal, can be downloaded here, and it’s worth a look if you don’t mind reading academic studies and have an hour to kill. I normally have a knot in my stomach when I read such studies because the authors typically absolve black students and their parents of any responsibility for the achievement gap that exists between black students and white students. This study—hallelujah—doesn’t go nearly that far. But its authors still nonetheless absolve black students and their parents of most of the responsibility for the achievement gap. And here’s why I think that this study, and the authors’ conclusions, is little more than Progressive propaganda.

Where Are the Asians?

This study, like every study on the achievement gap, conveniently omits Asians. Why? Asians are the best performing group on achievement tests, not whites. Shouldn’t researchers be exploring the achievement gap between blacks and Asians rather than between blacks and whites?

A Black-White Only Comparison Makes Things Look Ominous

I suspect that the authors omitted Asians because they want to portray America as a racist country and the academic success of Asians pours cold water on that narrative. To show what I mean, let’s look at SAT results for the six racial/ethnic groups that the College Board recognizes.

Here are the mean 2017 SAT scores broken down by race and ethnicity:

Asian: 1181
White: 1118
Hispanic: 990
Pacific Islander: 986
American Indian/Alaska Native: 963
Black: 941

And here are the percentages from each race and ethnicity that scored 1200 or higher on more recent SATs:

Asian: 54%
White: 33%
Hispanic: 12%
Pacific Islander: 11%
American Indian/Alaska Native: 8%
Black: 7%

Now, when you only compare blacks to whites, the achievement gap looks ominous. Maybe blacks lag behind whites because there really is a great deal of “systemic racism.” But when you compare blacks to everyone else and realize that blacks do worse than everyone else, the achievement gap looks much less ominous. Maybe the problem isn’t “systemic racism.” Maybe the problem is black students and their parents.

Privilege Envy Syndrome

The students in this study were in the third to eighth grades, and the big takeaway from the study was this: Black students in schools with greater poverty lagged further behind white students academically than black students in schools with less poverty. These results, in turn, had nothing to do with school spending. The authors only compared blacks and whites within the same school district.

According to the authors, then, blacks do less well in school than whites because blacks tend to go to schools where the student body poverty rate is higher. In other words, whites have more—in this case, they tend to go to schools with better-off classmates—and this automatically means that blacks don’t have enough.

Really?

I can see schools with more poverty having more behavioral issues. But we’re not talking about high schoolers where the distractions of sex, drugs, sports, after school jobs, and gangs are more at play and understandably make the job of keeping students academically engaged more difficult. We’re talking about kids who range in age from eight to thirteen. And you mean to tell me that the adults running our schools can’t manage kids that young and maintain a chaos-free learning environment?

But here’s what really twists my undies. As long as the schools in question are free of chaos—that is, the schools in question maintain order and provide their students with adequate teachers, books, food, and recreation—why should learning in a school with relatively high poverty rates be more difficult than learning in a school with relatively low poverty rates? In other words, do stakeholders base their actions on school poverty rates?

Teacher: I’m normally very conscientious. But now I work in a school with a lot of poverty, so I just go through the motions.

Parent: I’m normally a taskmaster when it comes to homework. But now, because my kids attend a school with a lot of impoverished classmates, I’m very indifferent to homework. If my kids want to do their homework, fine. If they don’t want to, that’s fine too.

Kid: I’m eight years old and want to do well in school. But I refuse to apply myself because the schools across town have much less poverty. The adults who let this happen are big smelly doody heads!

Perhaps I’m just dense. But after one reading of this study, all I see is correlation. I see no evidence that unequal poverty rates cause otherwise bright and curious kids to lose interest in school.

The authors of this study have done nothing to improve the prospects of struggling students—black or otherwise. All they have managed to do is give a very destructive attitude—privilege envy syndrome—the appearance of respectability.

The Two-Question Solution

Because I have public service in my blood (I am an erstwhile government employee, after all), I’m naturally drawn to the plight of struggling students. So here’s my solution to the dreaded achievement gap. If you’re the parent of a struggling black student, sit down with your child and ask the following questions:

What do we want to accomplish?

What’s stopping us from accomplishing it?

Let’s suppose for the moment that your child is a seventh-grader and he or she isn’t proficient in seventh-grade math. And let’s further suppose that you and your son or daughter don’t like this deficiency.

Now let’s answer our two questions.

What do we want to accomplish?

The answer to this is very straightforward. You want your son or daughter to be proficient in seventh-grade math, and your son or daughter wants to be proficient in seventh-grade math.

What’s stopping us from accomplishing it?

The key here is to focus exclusively on your failures, not the failures of others. You can’t say your son or daughter sucks at math because he or she attends a poorly funded school, or has a racist white teacher, or is saddled with a bunch of unruly classmates. You ain’t gonna fix others, so focusing on the failures of others is a fool’s errand.

Nope, in the words of Jocko Willink, now’s the time for “extreme ownership.” No politician or community activist is coming to the rescue. If your son or daughter’s math skills are going to improve, you and your son or daughter need to get your acts together.

Getting your acts together, in turn, could mean any number of things. But after careful consideration, you conclude that it boils down to two things: You have to make sure your child has the tools and conditions necessary for effective study, and your child has to make sure that he or she devotes more time to math and less time to television.

With that in mind, then, here are what you and your child vow to do:

You

I’m going to make sure our home is conducive to learning. After dinner, there will be no television or music for an hour.
I’m going to make sure my child has a tablet for studying.
I’m going to make sure my child spends an hour every night watching Khan Academy videos and doing math problems.

Son or Daughter

I will ask my teacher for extra math help.
I will always do my math homework, preferably before I leave school.
Every night, I will watch two Khan Academy videos and do at least ten math problems.

There you go, groovy freedomist—my two-question solution to the dreaded achievement gap. And it would do far more to remedy the achievement gap than a thousand more academic studies. Why? Because it gets people to address two fundamental truths: Most people are their own worst enemies, and the actions needed to fix their problems are rarely herculean.

The Personal Finance Angle

The purpose of this post isn’t to rag on black students, their parents, and the pointy-headed academics who are hawking privilege envy syndrome with all their might. No, the purpose of this post is to “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” against lame-ass excuses.

I don’t know why it is, but it seems that our elites are hellbent on turning as many Americans as possible into weak, impotent souls who are utterly dependent on coerced charity (i.e., government welfare in all its glorious forms). Our elites don’t see it that way, of course. They think they’re helping matters. But by supplying the masses with an assortment of ever-handy and plausible excuses, they’re subsidizing stupidity. “No, Johnny. You’re not a loser because you learned nothing in high school and smoke pot and play video games all day. You’re a loser because the One Percent shipped all of our manufacturing jobs to China.” And like it or not, whatever our elites subsidize, we get more of. That’s why most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That’s why most Americans shove too much alcohol, medication, and processed food down their throats. And that’s why more and more Americans have become so flummoxed by life, they actually see subservience to the federal government as their salvation (i.e., they want full-blown socialism).

If you want to be a strong, resilient soul who needs little if any coerced charity, you must ignore our elites with extreme prejudice. My two-question solution is a much better foundation for financial success than anything our elites have to offer. Just focus on one troublesome aspect of your finances and take responsibility for it. Here’s an example.

What do I want to accomplish?

I want to get rid of my credit card debt.

What’s stopping me from accomplishing it?

I’m living paycheck to paycheck and only have enough money to make minimum payments. So to fix this situation, I’m going to…

Read three blog posts a day from bloggers who are dedicated to frugality.
Download and use Dave Ramsey’s EveryDollar app.
Deliver pizzas two nights a week to boost my income.

And when you fix that one troublesome aspect of your finances, apply the two-question solution to another troublesome aspect. It’s as simple as that, people!

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? I say our elite coddles the financially weak by providing them with psychological comfort (i.e., excuses), and this coddling is counterproductive. Coddled people have no reason to change. I also say that most financial problems can be mitigated by asking two simple questions. Are these observations fair? Or are they wildly off-base? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.