Keeping It Real-and Relevant: "[Thomas] Sowell has spent his career putting truth above popularity. We need 100 more just like him.".

• Author: Riley, Jason L.
• Position: AMERICAN THOUGHT

WHEN I was researching my biography of economist Thomas Sowell, I kept coming across Sowell's own descriptions of scholars he admired, and I often was struck by how well those descriptions applied to Sowell himself.

For example, after the death of Nobel Prizewinning economist George Stigler, who was one of Sowell's professors at the University of Chicago, Sowell wrote: "In a world of self-promoting academics, coining buzzwords and aligning themselves on the side of the angels of the moment, George Stigler epitomized a rare integrity as well as a rare intellect. He jumped on no bandwagons, beat no drums for causes, created no personal cult. He did the work of a scholar and a teacher--both superbly--and found that sufficient. If you wanted to learn, and above all if you wanted to leam how to think--how to avoid the vague words, fuzzy thoughts, or maudlin sentiments that cloud over reality--then Stigler was your man."

Here is Sowell describing another of his professors at Chicago, Milton Friedman: "[He] was one of the very few intellectuals with both genius and common sense. He could express himself at the highest analytical levels to his fellow economists in academic publications and still write popular books . . . that could be understood by people who knew nothing about economics."

I am hard-pressed to come up with better ways than those to describe Thomas Sowell. When I think about his scholarship, that is what comes to mind: intellectual integrity, analytical rigor, respect for evidence, skepticism toward the kind of fashionable thinking that comes and goes--and then there is the clarity. Column after column, book after book, written in plain English for general public consumption.

In 2020, at the age of 90, Sowell published his 36th book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. I hope he is not done writing books but, if he is, you could hardly find a more suitable swan song for a publishing career that has spanned six decades.

Sowell's first two books were scholarly, but his third book, published in 1972--the semiautobiographical Black Education: Myths and Tragedies--was written for the general public. It grew out of a long article on college admissions standards for black students that he wrote for The New York Times Magazine in 1970, and it begins with a recounting of his own education--first at segregated schools in North Carolina, where he was bom, and later at integrated schools in New York's Harlem neighborhood, where he was raised.

The topic of education is one that Sowell has returned to repeatedly over the decades. In the preface to Charter Schools and Their Enemies, he describes a conversation he had in the early 1970s with Irving Kristol, the editor of Public Interest. Kristol asked Sowell what could be done to create high-quality schools for blacks, and Sowell replied that such schools already existed and had for generations.

Kristol asked Sowell to write about these schools, and a 1974 issue of Public Interest featured an essay by Sowell on the history of all-black Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., which not only had outperformed its local white counterparts, but had repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests throughout the first half of the 20th century. From 1870 to 1955, Sowell wrote, "most of Dunbar's graduates went on to college, even though most Americans--white or black--did not." Two years later, in the same publication, he wrote a second article on successful black elementary and high schools throughout the country.

In a sense, today's public charter schools, which often have predominantly low-income black and Hispanic student bodies, are successors to the high-achieving black schools that Sowell researched more than 40 years ago. As he points out, these charter schools are not simply doing a better job than traditional public schools with the same demographic groups--in many cases, inner-city charter school students are outperforming their peers in the wealthiest and whitest suburban school districts in the country. In New York, for example, the Success Academy charter schools effectively have closed the academic achievement gap between black and white students.

Sowell writes: "The educational success of these...