{Dwayne Betts}
If you read this in a major newspaper the headline likely would read: school overrun by violence. Teaching at the school has taught me that it's more complicated than that, but I've also learned that the struggles to maintain a sense of normalcy in the classroom push good teachers away. One of the best young teachers I worked with is off to Kipp, and most of the other good young teachers in public schools across the city are finding reason after reason to go work in charter schools or private schools - even when it means working more hours and longer school years.
This is where James Forman Jr.'s essay "No Ordinary Success" comes in. In "No Ordinary Success" Forman looks at two models of school reform, Geoffrey Canada's Promise Academy based in New York and the Kipp Charter Schools that are in 19 states across the country as he tries to answer his own question: How much can schools improve the life prospects of children growing up in poor neighborhoods? I highly recommend the article, which you can find here.
As a starting point, Forman talks about Richard Rothstein's 2004 book Class and Schools. I mention it for the same reason Forman does. Rothstein concluded that "the challenges facing low-income students meant that they would always do worse, on average, than their higher-income peers." It reminds me of the Boston Review article by Patrick Sharkey in which he asserts that "almost three out of four black families living in today's poorest, most segregated neighborhoods are the same families that lived in the ghettos of the 1970s." His article, The Inherited Ghetto, can be found here.
The point is, of course, that anyone jumping into school reform has a fight on their hands and if what Rothstein says is true, and what Sharkey says is true....
There's no real reason for me to rehash the details of the article, except to say this: Canada's model looks to transform an entire neighborhood. That is to say that he started Harlem's Children Zone (HCZ) a complex network of parenting classes, health centers and tutoring spots to serve about a 100 square foot are of Harlem. Initially, Canada used the HCZ to aid the schools, and he had people in schools to support the public schools. He found the public school's didn't support his efforts, and that his efforts weren't producing the expected results. So he started Promise Academy. Canada makes a point to take all students, no matter their reading levels, no matter how problematic their behavior is, and looks to transform lives. Canada does this, too.
Kipp's model is a little different. David Levin and Michael Feinberg began working in the Houston schools with teach for america and when they weren't getting the support they expected - and after a few disturbing incidents that you can read in the article - they began Kipp. Kipp relies on rigorous standards and teachers who are willing to work longer hours and students who are in school for longer hours over longer periods of time and commit to two hours of homework each night. Kipp has been able to sustain achievement over the 19 states and 66 schools.
But this is the trouble with this manner of school reform - only a limited number of students have access to these kinds of programs. What of the other students? When Forman brings this question of pockets of success to Jay Mathews, author of Work Hard. Be Nice., a book about Kipp's history, contends that a school like Kipp proves the idea that kids from low income neighborhoods can't achieve success is a lie. The assumption behind his statement is that the underlying reason money, resources and time aren't put into public school systems is because the larger society sees them as hopeless. I tend to think a large number of the public, especially the educated public, believe this. It might very well be a false assumption but it seems the American myth of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps infects many minds, to the point that Mathews would even assert that there is a need to "prove" students from low-income neighborhoods can succeed. But that's the narrative of the underdog - do it to prove you can do it is what people are sold again and again when the evidence says that the solution goes way beyond a lack of work ethic.
In the end, Forman believes that Kipp and the Promise Academy should be seen as viable models, but not the only model. He argues that they work, in part, because of the hyper dedicated people they bring around them. Specifically citing Kipp's HR department's ability to attract talent. Forman doesn't really answer his question directly. He gives us more than enough examples to show that it's possible to improve the life prospects of young kids in poor neighborhoods - but it seems that finding the answer he sought, led him to reveal to us a more troubling problem: How do we create environments where average teachers, even just good teachers, can excel in a school system that provides a quality education - if we aren't going to acknowledge all of the complex needs and issues that are part and parcel with a student's success and independent of homework?
Even tackling that question will keep us from arguing about the need or lack thereof for charter schools that, by their nature, can only provide services for a limited number of kids in any community.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I'm a little biased, but I believe the Catholics had this figured out a long time ago.
Just look at the success of some of these inner city Jesuit high schools. Each year they send almost all their graduates to college, and dozens to elite Ivies.
Having gone to one myself, I can attest to the fact that these schools are no joke. Dress code is strictly enforced (ties are a must). There are no detentions. Instead they have JUGs: Justice Under God, where you sit, back straight, hands folded facing the crucifix for an entire hour in complete silence.
There are no electives, besides which language you want to learn. The curriculum is based around the fundamentals: Science, English, Philosophy, Religion, Math, History, and Geography. Grading is steep.
The motto of all boys Jesuit schools is Men For Others. At the top of each paper submitted, you must write AMDG - Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (For the greater glory of God). You must go to mass on holy days. For one day every week during your senior year, you go out into the community and volunteer. Then you must write your capstone on this experience.
The experience of going to a Jesuit school shaped me into the man I am today. I am a firm believer that education can not be taken out of context of moral development and character development.
It's kind of funny, I just got my PhD at a Jesuit university and I found the Catholic context stifling and oppressive (i hope to never set foot on a Catholic campus again, to be honest).
Stifling and oppressive . . . oh yes! That just makes the sex so much better ;)
Which University was it and what was your doctorate? I will be going to U of D Mercy for PA school soon.
Boston College. Sociology.
I honestly wouldn't wish Catholicism on my enemies.
I agree with you that Catholic schools can be a "saving grace" so to speak for a lot of low income kids.
Yeah I owe everything to those tough Irish bastards. The great thing about the Catholics is that they see education as a *spiritual* pursuit. You are educating your mind as well as your soul. This is something that is sorely missing from public school education.
I too went to an inner-city Jesuit High School. One difference you fail to mention: If a kid doesn't get with the program pretty damn quick, his ass is thrown out. The hardheads in my freshman class didn't see Halloween.
That's not an option in public schools.
Dwayne,
I've mentioned this on this blog before, but you may want to look into "Abbott schools" in NJ. Long story short: as a result of a state supreme court decision a couple of decades ago, NJ spends more per student in poor, minority districts such as Newark than it does on average statewide. The results haven't been encouraging.
There are other examples of high spending on low income minority districts that have had similarly unimpressive results. John McWhorter has spoken about the experiment in Kansas City, for example.
Further, if you look at SAT scores by race/ethnicity and income (I don't know if they still compile this info, but you can find it from the 1990s at least) you find that white students in the lowest income group, on average, outperform black students from the highest income group. All of this raises questions about frequently cited economic explanations for gaps in achievement.
I'm going to look up the "Abbott schools." I hear what you're saying - but I think what's going on here is that people are arguing that it boils down to more than per capita spending on students. DC spends a lot of money per student - but you wouldn't know that if you walked into one of the schools, or one of the classrooms.
What are you suggesting are the reasons for the disparities? The tests themselves?
Two points are worth considering here. The first is that there are racial gaps in scores even at similar socioeconomic levels. For example, as The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education notes,
The second point is that, although the racial gaps persist at higher income levels, within each race, at higher family income levels, you get higher scores. Now, the conventional, leftish explanation for this is that it means that the kids from poorer families go to schools that aren't as well funded, etc. (disregarding counter examples such as the Abbott districts). But this explanation probably confuses correlation with causation. Think about this: on average, smart people tend to make more money than not-as-smart people, right? So it's likely that higher-earning parents are smarter than lower-earning parents, on average, and have smarter kids than them, on average. There are exceptions, of course, but this would partly explain why kids in affluent towns such as, say, Demarest, in NJ tend to out-perform kids in poorer districts such as Newark or Paterson, even when the poorer districts spend more per student than the affluent districts.
One thing that deserves mention in these discussions is that "income levels" is a misleading measure of "socio-economic" level, particularly when race is introduced into the equation. See the work of Dalton Conley and others regarding how one accurately measures relative wealth and socio-economic class of blacks vs. whites. This isn't a satisfactory explanation of the entire picture, but it needs to be considered if one is going to maintain an accurate picture of the race/class nexus.
Dave,
There are a lot of advantages for a kid in a family with a higher income besides the "superior genetics" of the upper middle class. Many of these advantages can lead directly to higher school performance and test grades:
1. Exposure from a very early age to people with higher education
2. Parents able to help with homework
3. Parents able to afford tutors: the parents of a lot of kids from higher income families spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars specifically on test preparation with tutors.
4. Family's ability to travel and expose their kids to cultural enrichment
5. Higher expectations from within the family and from all the people one encounters during education: teachers, guidance counselors, etc.
6. Oftentimes one parent at home rather than both parents working (or a single parent), so that there is one parent to provide one-on-one guidance with homework, etc.
7. Being able to focus exclusively on studies and not have to get a job to help the family out, or help watch younger siblings after school.
8. And many more
I still think the schools probably need more money in some instances, because it's the all around approach that works and that is often most expensive. But, who knows, maybe there is such waste in the system that more money isn't necessary. I would just like the debate to be about how to make it work, rather than talking about all the ways it hasn't worked so far, as this leads to the abandonment of the public system the original post talks about.
Also, has your life experience really led you to believe that the people making the most money are the smartest people? Really? Even if you have some IQ statistics to quote me, I am not swayed. That's just more people testing well. My life experience has proven something quite to the contrary.
This is a reply to Jennifer, as much as to David.
I think it is a mistake to look for genetic explanations. Brains and minds are dynamic systems, and intelligence is created in response to a complicated feedback system.
But that doesn't mean that it's reducible to economics, either. Certain ethnic groups have consistently shown better academic performance. What distinguishes them isn't "superior genes," but it also isn't money: it's the very early childhood environment and the various behavioral reinforcements that accompany them.
Your list, Jennifer, makes it all about money. But the data shows that money isn't the whole story, and not even an important part of it. Poor Chinese and Jewish immigrants outperform a lot of wealthier ethnicities. As long as you attempt to cram differential performance into rather simple narratives about the lucky rich white folk and the poor disadvanteged everyone-else, you're going to simply see the problems perpetuate.
Really regarding Lemmy Caution's post:
Culture does matter hugely. The fellow from MN (I assume he means Hackensack, MN - lake country) is way off base in his genetic logic, and I agree that money doesn't explain everything either, although class mobility in our society verges on pathetic, given our country's widely championed "values" regarding equality.
I think Lemmy is pointing out one of the not very comfortable observations many shy away from. In my inner city classrooms, the recent and destitutely poor immigrants from Asian countries did disproportionately well in classes, usually as a result of the prodding they were receiving at home. This is observable in larger studies as well. It has nothing to do with the melanin content of anyone's skin, but some values (adoptable by anyone) do very much indeed aid a kid, a family, or a whole hazily defined social group. However, this again is something beyond the schools' ability to really affect.
Larger meta-programs that I have read about that focus on healing whole communities through a range of poverty assistance programs and adult education provided alongside effective schools can accomplish change in culture, but there is really no way a public school's academic and support staff alone can take this all on.
Kipp academies are almost a recognition of this - if you accept it as unlikely that cultural change can be imposed, just take the kids away from other influences for so much of their waking hours that the school's culture becomes their dominant influence. It requires the parents to trust the school with far more than many would be comfortable with, but it shows strong results in many respects because of this phenomenon.
Jennifer,
"There are a lot of advantages for a kid in a family with a higher income besides the "superior genetics" of the upper middle class."
That's true, and I haven't argued otherwise. I also didn't even mention genetics at all in my comment above, despite you putting the phrase "superior genetics" in quotes.
Very true. Just see Dave's comments above. Well, this is a subject that's dear to my heart as I have a daughter in a city public school.
The fact that our society has decided to write off some kids is so troubling to me, especially when education has been proven to be one of the key factors in not becoming a statistic in the permanent ghetto. Isn't it just a matter of what we decide to spend our money on? We always seem to have enough money for wars and banks, but when it comes to these kids, the solutions are just too expensive and complicated. And, similar to my issue with AA in recent posts, we seem to give up quite easily. We try some programs for a few years, and if they don't work, we throw up our hands and say oh well.
And there does seem to be an institutional resistance to trying new approaches. As you outline, the problems can't all be fixed directly in the classroom. A holistic approach that encompasses everything from parental training/involvement to what the kids are eating for breakfast, and what chores they have when they get home from school (i.e., are they babysitting for younger siblings when they should be doing homework?) is what's needed. Sure, it's big and unwieldy, but is it really insoluble? It seems to me that a lot of people have decided it is, with varying degrees of guilt.
Here in San Francisco the public school system where I have sent my daughter for the past 15 years is only 10-13% white. They fled long ago and it is just not their problem.
Then too - I just look at how we pay teachers and how the teaching field ranks among the most respected among college age adults who haven't chosen a profession.
I'm not sure how you make teaching as respected as lawyering, or doctoring or working on Wall Street - but until it is, I think the students will continue to suffer.
We pay teachers fairly well, all things considered. To see that, take teachers salaries, and multiply them by (12 months pay / 9 months work). Then add in the value of tenure and union protection, which makes it difficult to fire teachers even for flagrant violations. You'll discover that we probably overpay teachers.
Incidentally, one thing that lawyering, doctoring and Wall Street work share is merit pay and a complete lack of job security. The best lawyers, doctors and wall street types get paid far more than the worst. This doesn't happen with teaching.
"We pay teachers fairly well, all things considered. To see that, take teachers salaries, and multiply them by (12 months pay / 9 months work)."
No we don't. Teachers are paid for 10 months of work, we are not paid for the summer unless we work during the summer. In addition most of us are only paid for 35hours of work when we actually work 70-80 hours a week. When doctors and lawyers are out having cocktails or playing golf we are at home grading mountain loads of papers.
In addition most of us buy the supplies we need to perform our jobs. I haven't heard about too many doctors buying their own scalpels or shots. Teachers buy the most basic of supplies.
Alegna, false. Unlike doctors and lawyers, teachers typically work a bit under 40 hours/week.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
Compare that to the 100 hour weeks of medical residents or even the 60 hour work weeks (50 weeks/year) of investment bankers.
As for whether you are officially paid for the summer, it doesn't matter. Dwayne is comparing teachers to doctors. Teachers work 9-10 months. Doctors work 12. Even if teachers and doctors deserved equal weekly pay, teacher pay should still be only 9/12-10/12 of doctor pay for the simple reason that they work fewer weeks.
Incidentally, any doctor working in private practice does buy his own scalpels and shots.
Ninja Zombie writes "typically teachers work under 40 hours a week." That is false and wrong. I am a teacher I know how often I and my colleagues work and it is 70-80 hours a week. And in your first year of teaching it can be 100 hours or more and is extremely grueling. You are with students for 35 hours but all of the planning, grading, evaluating, meeting with parents, and researching takes place outside of that. I'm not even including coaching, tutoring, and running the many after school programs. It is extremely time consuming. Visit http://englishcompanion.ning.com/. And ask the group of teachers there (teachers from all over the country) how many hours they work and you will be surprised.
Alegna, fail. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (in particular, the American Time Use Survey) has better data than some internet poll. Here is their data again:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
That's just the average, so it's certainly possible you work more (and someone else works less). The fact remains: on average teachers work just under 40 hours/week, 9-10 months/year. This number includes hours worked both at home and at work.
Also from the report:
"Teachers employed full time worked 24 fewer minutes per weekday and 42 fewer minutes per Saturday than other full-time professionals. On Sundays, teachers and other professionals worked, on average, about the same amount of time."
Long time reader, first time poster. Can't resist joining in this discussion...
Background: I'm a 20+ year teaching veteran who didn't come through a traditional undergraduate teaching program. I probably have a lot in common with Teach for America candidates: an undergraduate degree in the subject I teach from competitive university, idealistic, willing to work hard, etc. Unlike most TFA teachers (not a judgment- the program is upfront about the 2-year commitment) I fell in love with teaching and decided it was my calling. Still love going to work every day!
Ninja Zombie- thanks for the link. I'm not completely surprised by its results. The fact is that there will always be teachers who work 60+ hours and ones (obviously many more, according to the study) that work less than 40-hour weeks. We probably do overpay many teachers and certainly underpay others.
I don't agree that "The best lawyers, doctors and wall street types get paid far more than the worst." Paul Farmer (of Partners in Health) is an outstanding doctor and I'm sure there are many terrific public defenders and prosecutors who make considerably less than their private practice colleagues.
Alegna- Just as there are doctors who spend considerable time having cocktails and playing golf, there are teachers who leave with the bell and don't do much at home. Having two brothers who are doctors I realize that these generalizations or stereotypes don't do service to either profession. I don't begrudge my brothers their higher salaries- I saw them work unbelievable hours through most of their 20s and once they started practicing.
I've worked in schools where all the teachers put in 60+ hours a week and I've worked in schools where 75% put in less than 40 hours a week. Would I like to see merit pay? You bet! But I have yet to see a merit pay proposal that truly measures the worth of a teacher. Yes, test results can give some information but in many secondary subject areas there is no yearly testing that could accurately measure the "value added" by a particular teacher.
More importantly, even the best evaluators with the resources to conduct meaningful observations cannot measure the true scope of what an excellent teacher contributes to the growth of his or her students: devoting time to reading and writing even if one is not a language arts teacher; creating and assessing enriching and relevant lessons that go beyond the state standards; providing hours of after school help for students who are struggling or need an adult to help them sort through a difficult situation; reaching deep for the energy needed to guide one's students through designing and carrying out a science fair project or writing an in-depth research paper.
Great teachers do these things because they realize teaching is a profession and they have pride in their work.
Spending personal money on school supplies has always been an unfortunate part of the teaching profession. There are terrific websites that link people wanting to support education to teachers (many in high poverty schools) with specific needs:
http://www.donorschoose.org/
http://classwish.org/
In addition to spending money on supplies, many teachers have to spend money on professional development to renew their license, but so do many other professions. I don't subscribe to the "teacher as martyr" point of view. Many professions are challenging but the reward is in meeting the challenge!
I just have to chime in on this one. Having worked in 7 inner city schools over the years, I really think that teachers working under 40 hours a week is way off base. For this average to be reasonable, there would need to be quite a few schools where teachers are working 5-10 hours or something to drag down all the schools I have taught at and the ones that pretty much everyone I still know from training ended up working at as well. My wife is a surgeon, and for fun/commiseration, we tracked our hours all through her med school and residency years. On only one two month service did her hours exceed mine (although hers often were less predictably spread through the day). I have known literally hundreds of teachers over the years, and only a few very memorable exceptions worked less than 50-60 hours a week, all of whom were slowly forced out by administrations with the full support of the teaching staff.
Teachers work their a**es off, and anyone who says otherwise either inhabits some very exceptional community of loafers, or does not know what they are talking about.
One of the worst things about ed policy debates is arguing with the folks who think they have the data. Any argument based on personal experience is greeted with, show me the data. I'm waiting for that response now.
The problem is, so much of the data is based on false assumptions, or just bad.
Not only that, but teachers unions typically oppose paying higher salaries to teachers with degrees in more demanding fields (e.g., mathematics instead of education or sociology), which limits schools' ability to attract good math and science teachers.
Thanks Bob TX.
Farley Bean I did not intend to denigrate the work of lawyers or doctors. I don't resent other professions. I love teaching and feel that it is a great profession. I am tired of people writing about the hours that teachers teach without actual knowledge or based on assumptions or faulty studies. It requires a lot of work and dedication. I give it because I love it; otherwise I would do something else. But just as Bob TX states most teachers work the same hours that I do...
Hi Dave in Hackensack. My name is John. I was actually one of Ms. Abbott's students in Camden, NJ. Go rest her soul. I'm sorry but you got your facts wrong. The school districts who spend the most money per pupil are not Abbott School Districts. The Highest Aboot district, I believe is Millville, NJ and thats a strictly rural school district in the poorest county, Cumberland, in the state. Abbott districts get more of their money from the state, not the state spends the most money on abbott disticts. In fact I believie Pennsville or princeton spends the most per student in the state. As a teacher, yes in Camden, we are privy to these facts every year.the overwhelming reason that Abbott school districts generally fare worse on the NJASK and HEPA, is that most of their pupils do not come from two parent households and/or households where at least one of the parents hold a BA, BS degree. As far as the low income whites versus blacks, that study has been refuted on many occasions. Check the Rowan school of Education info. Compare the SAT scores of Pennsauken school dstrict, predominantly Black, against the Magnolia or Cinnaminson school district, both predominantly White, and the data is nearly identical. They all are around the same income level and other socieconomic variables are essentially the same.
Hi, assuming this post isn't a joke, do you have any cites for this? I found a partial list of district per-student spending in NJ(link below), and it appeared that after a few extremely tiny Cape May districts with huge per-student expenses, the next on the list were the Abbott districts of Hoboken and Asbury Park. What little I've read about the Abbott districts has always suggested the per-student spending in these districts is among the top in the state, I'd be interested in seeing data that said otherwise.
On the second point, was the Rowan school reference supposed to be an href? If so, it didn't come through, and I would be very interested in seeing the study you're referencing (my limited google-fu skills failed to find it).
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE3D81530F937A15750C0A9619C8B63
That's false. Here are the numbers from this year, via James Ahearn of the Record:
Hi Dave,
The article you refer to suggests that that money was not spent on students or schools but went to greedy public officials. Perhaps that's a large part of the problem.
Alegna,
Whenever you have a lot of taxpayer money being spent, you have a lot of it going to public officials (e.g., principals, superintendents, etc., with six figure salaries and pensions). This is true in affluent districts as well. Nevertheless, significant amounts of money do make it to the classroom. There was an NY Times article recently, for example, about intensive one-on-one tutoring available to students at a Newark school, "Glimmers of Progress at a Failing School". This article, incidentally, provides a tiny bit of anecdotal evidence to back up the second point I made above, in my response to Dwayne. From the article:
What does Ms. Muhammad, 39, do for a living? The article notes that she is a customer service representative for a supermarket. Isn't it likely that a 39-year-old woman working in an a low-paid, entry-level job might not be that smart? Isn't it also likely that, if she's not that smart, her kids won't be that smart either? Chances are, if Ms. Muhammad were smarter she would be working in a higher-paying job and living in a more affluent area, and her children would be doing better in school -- not because their mother had more money, but because their mother was smarter, and smarter mothers tend to have smarter kids, right?
Of course, in America, suggesting that some kids might be smarter than other kids is frowned upon, so the NYT article doesn't raise this possibility. But in other parts of the world (e.g., parts of Europe) they take a more pragmatic approach and track their kids according to ability.
Hey two points, first the article you cite speaks to money going to officials. Second, the per capita was based on add figures to the etsimate student spending. Those added figures were the now defunct nj school building fund. Thded fed government sent money down for old schools, which were usually located in the rural and inner city areas, to by built. Under Mcgreevy, and before him, Whitman, the money went stright to the crooked pols and contarctors, Libiando and Sweeney come to mind. Now tha fund is bankrupt and under investigation. To hide the fruad, McGreevy hid the figures in the estimate school spending per district to keep from being reviewed by the state board and eventually the Supremes of Jersey. I stand by my figures, Trust me I had enough in-services on this topic to bore you silly. My school email address is JohnRandalljr@camden.k12.nj.us. I believe I still have some of those documents left on the school site, i will check and forward all of them to you. they are not on a website though so they can't be linked. But you mind find some of the info on the courier post website or the burlington county times. Once you remove the bogus njschool trust figures from the equation, the per capita spending sticks out like a sore thumb. If that doesn't do it, feel free to come visit my class room and tell me if you see $17,000 per student being spent. I can't even let me kids have a text book. And we are always understaffed and usually have layoffs every year. And trust me, our payscale is not remotely close to even atlantic city let alone cherry hill, moorestown and west windsor.
Isn't it likely that a 39-year-old woman working in an a low-paid, entry-level job might not be that smart?"
Only in the sense that a 39-year-old person might not be that smart- 1 in 2, if you regard "below average" as "not that smart".
"Isn't it also likely that, if she's not that smart, her kids won't be that smart either?"
Not especially.
"Chances are, if Ms. Muhammad were smarter she would be working in a higher-paying job and living in a more affluent area, and her children would be doing better in school -- not because their mother had more money, but because their mother was smarter, and smarter mothers tend to have smarter kids, right?"
In a meritocracy where merit= intelligence, yes. In the world I live in, no. Within a given race, culture, community, and social class, my anecdotal observation is that smarter people achieve more economic success. But the effect is so weak compared to the effect of their own expectations and aspirations, and the expectations of those around them.
But sure, maybe Mrs. Muhammad isn't that smart. Must our examples of how schools should and should not serve students always be above average students? That kind of leaves out half the population.
The policy debate about how to run schools is much too complex and out of my element for me to have proposals. But I can recognize success: public education should provide all but the hopelesssly stupid the means to live a decent life- to be socialized, be able to think, understand enough about the world to get by, know that the world is larger than your own community, and make a secure living. And lots of other things. My point is that successfully educating students may be easier if they're smarter, but if education relies on the smartness of its students for success, it's not a plausible model for a public system.
I went to a fabulous elementary school in a rural ghetto that brought a first-rate education to every student in the school, smart and dumb. I can't tell you how it could be replicated, but I know it can be done.
Good reply. Dave is clearly out of touch on this issue, with his blatant racial and class prejudices. Makes you wonder why he bothers to comment on the blog of someone who comes from Tah-Nehisi's backround? As another commenter said, I'm glad he is not a teacher, with his offensive snap judgements. He probably would have written of Tah-Nehisi when he struggled in school, as "not that smart".
"Must our examples of how schools should and should not serve students always be above average students? That kind of leaves out half the population."
You're right, and that's why I believe we ought to use tracking, similar to what some European countries do. The problem is that many elites in America look down on trades (which can provide good livelihoods as well as a sense of job satisfaction, as a recent NY Times article by a political scientist-turned-motorcycle repairman noted), and want almost every kid shoe-horned into a college prep curriculum.
That's not relevant to case of Ms. Muhammad's daughter in third grade though, as I think most tracking programs don't split off kids into different tracks until later grades.
Replying to Dave in Hackensack-
Thanks, I think you see my point.
I can't just agree though, as you raise a further pet peeve of mine- the assumption that the trades are an appropriate destination for the less-smart. (OK, I'm a construction worker with a very fancy education, I'm hyper-sensitive on this). As that great article pointed out, at least some of the trades require an extraordinary amount of analytical ability. It takes a lot more brains to be a motorcycle repairer than some other things. I don't really want to pick out anyone's career as not requiring brains, as I'm aware that everything can be challenging or easy, depending on how you look at it. But I guess what I'd rather see, in the way of tracking, is "advanced English" vs "basic English", Algebra and caclulus offered but classes in basic math for those who haven't mastered it, and yes, beginning shop class and advanced shop class.
In third grade that kind of tracking doesn't seem so useful. But you can still offer a variety of kinds of study so that most kids get a chance to shine at something, and you could still have an expectation that every kid will learn and improve, regardless of how fast they move.
In my (fantastic) elementary school, all work was at your own pace. There was a series of math books that you'd work through as fast as you worked through them, and for reading you read your own choice of books. For a writing assignment, you could write at your own level. Grading was basically personal- if you were sandbagging, you'd get a low grade, even if you were reading at higher level than everyone else in the class.
So, there was a terrible rate of child abuse and neglect and drug abuse in my community. But if a kid wasn't doing well in school, the adults in the school poured out their hearts to support that kid. They also made the social environment of the school their business and bullying was not tolerated. Each child was protected and encouraged. Not every kid made it to adulthood whole, or made it to adulthood. But for those who didn't, no one could say the school failed them.
You can't clone my elementary school teachers. I wish you could. I bet, if you knew more about educational administration and theory than I do, though, you could bring some of their virtues into wider application.
It's summer and I'm under-caffeinated, so I'll keep it brief: As a 10 year veteran in the public schoolteaching hustle I've noticed it all boils down to this-- schools must do what parents can't.
Resources and time. That's it. I've spent this decade staying past my duty day to simple re-raise other folks kids. The more time spent away from their homes, the more successful they become.
Keep your charters, kipps and second harvest garvey eachone teachone academies...the successful ones merely follow the adage, "it takes a village" and amend it with "...to keep these children AWAY from their ig'nant parents and into post-secondary school."
It's not about money, it's about proximity to caring, academic minded individuals for the majority of their waking moments. Here's the rub, though: what does that say about these communities of people who act as a drag on their fecund youth?
For my part, I was raised in Little Rock during the eighties by some "normal" black folks. We're all shaking our heads at this mess.
I agree totally. I'd also add that as a nation, and as representatives of school districts and schools and all that - we have generally done a terrible job of using the talent that flocks to some of our communities to attend school. Most of the time, I was the first person my students knew who had been to college. (Outside of teachers. And I was the only student they knew currently in college.)
I don't think we can solve the problem of homegrown talent leaving once they do get into college and get successful without creating better communities, but we can do a better job of bringing the college kids into communities, just so that students know colleges exist. I know I spent my early years in tag and magnet schools and still don't recall seeing college kids - ever.
I think the whole of the argument in any situation whatsoever regarding public school reform is that the main problem is the parents. And that's the case with any public school district, inner city or not. I remember seeing my teachers lose it over certain students whose parents either spoiled them or just didn't care about them (and they just acted totally obnoxious as a result), and it brought down the class as a whole, and being in school even more so. And this is coming from someone who went to a halfway decent public school system in suburban Rhode Island.
The thing is, though, that the children who have a home environment that fosters this kind of achievement will always - always - have a leg up on the children who don't. And even if you try to compensate, the families of the other children will also be "upping their game" to stay ahead.
Which is why I generally agree with the unpopular sentiment that it is boarding schools and high-discipline (a la Jesuit) educations that are the only way to have true generational educational mobility at a "catch-up" rate. And it is depressing, and perhaps even oppressive, to think that the best chance for a generation is to insulate them as much as possible from their parents. Largely because I think a lot of baby gets thrown out with that bathwater: even parents who don't know how to create an environment that can foster academic achievement are still caring, loving, capable of transmitting important social, cultural, and even spiritual knowledge on to their children.
Does our culture, perhaps, over-reward academic achievement? How much of this has to do with the collapse of blue-collar jobs?
Sorry for the hasty grammer, but arguments like that burn my ass. I grew up in the poorest city in the country. At every turn I was told I wasn't good enough to compete with the kids from Moorestown and Cherry Hill. Had it not been for my father I would have succumb to such assbackward thinking. It wasn't until I went to college and the professors didn't give a damn where I was from that I began to realize that I was just as smart, and in a hell of alot of cases, smarter than everyone else in the room. Teaching the kids of my city now, I am faced with the same situation. Many of my kids can compete if just given the confidence and most importantly the expectation to succeed. If you people begin to raise their expectations, I'm certain that would be half the battle. Not to toot my own horn, but my kids regularly have the highest test scores in the district. Not because I'm good, but I expect and demand that they be good. If George W. Bush said anything worth a damn in his eight years in office it was that the nation could no longer afford the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Which he must have meant in an Orwellian way, it appears. No Child Left Behind, the product of his efforts to fix "the bigotry of low expectations," is a disgrace (passed with heavily bipartisan support, I should add). Most of my fellow graduates of the education masters program that I attended have left teaching primarily out of a hatred of incessant standardized test focused education. Teaching kids to be great bubble test monkeys/parrots/whatever does not really substitute for teaching them more real world applicable literacy, mathematics, science, etc. My students also regularly did extremely well on the testing, especially given that many were literally living in cars or locked outside all day with the family's multiple pit bulls (usually beating the best of the rich end of the district soundly). However,in saying this, I am not tooting my own horn because I think the whole system of pretending that those scores reflects much is bunk. Visit Texas sometime to see what this whole system of relentless standardized testing as the end all looks like a few more years advanced. It is bull. Up here in the Northeast, I just got too depressed about watching the same slide I already witnessed occur again.
As a fellow teacher, I totally agree that many kids who haven't been encouraged to do so before can indeed compete on par with those who got all the breaks, but NCLB's incessant testing is not helping anyone. I may have a more extreme view of it as a former elementary teacher (the testing is not as all pervasive at the HS level in most states, although it can be oppressive depending on how an admin or district approaches it).
Which he must have meant in an Orwellian way, it appears. No Child Left Behind, the product of his efforts to fix "the bigotry of low expectations," is a disgrace (passed with heavily bipartisan support, I should add). Most of my fellow graduates of the education masters program that I attended have left teaching primarily out of a hatred of incessant standardized test focused education. Teaching kids to be great bubble test monkeys/parrots/whatever does not really substitute for teaching them more real world applicable literacy, mathematics, science, etc. My students also regularly did extremely well on the testing, especially given that many were literally living in cars or locked outside all day with the family's multiple pit bulls (usually beating the best of the rich end of the district soundly). However,in saying this, I am not tooting my own horn because I think the whole system of pretending that those scores reflects much is bunk. Visit Texas sometime to see what this whole system of relentless standardized testing as the end all looks like a few more years advanced. It is bull. Up here in the Northeast, I just got too depressed about watching the same slide I already witnessed occur again.
As a fellow teacher, I totally agree that many kids who haven't been encouraged to do so before can indeed compete on par with those who got all the breaks, but NCLB's incessant testing is not helping anyone. I may have a more extreme view of it as a former elementary teacher (the testing is not as all pervasive at the HS level in most states, although it can be oppressive depending on how an admin or district approaches it).
Sorry for the double post, I'm still learning this format, and thought the internal server error meant that the first one did not stick. Anyone care to let me know how to delete the duplicate?
For the kids who aren't growing up with these individuals as their parents or neighbors, where are they supposed to meet them exactly? If at school, seems like someone will have to hire them, which means ... money.
Sorry, that was supposed to reply to whilome.
It doesn't really mean money. It means finding nontraditional ways of bringing caring folks into the schools - seniors, young college students, volunteers. The money that's needed would be to pay someone to organize that, but I figure that would be less than what it costs to overhaul any one of these school districts yet again.
You're right ... That's a good idea.
The environment that fosters academic success begins in the toddler years. What is difficult to supply to children who do not have it: home environments which encourage quiet immersion into difficult subjects, the trained ability to focus on tasks that are not overtly stimulating, a high threshold for frustration, etc. The absence of a very early training of attention and mental habits is something that is difficult to compensate for later in development.
Newt Gingrich had an idea along these lines: have local pharmacists teach chemistry at high schools.
What I think gets lost in all the discussion about "How to Fix Public Education." and "Look at how Amazing Charter Schools Are!" is that public schooling is universal. Public schools are required to educate all children, even new immigrants who don't know English yet, kids with mental illnesses, physically and mentally handicapped kids, kids with discipline problems, kids with unsupportive parents, and so on and so forth. If Public Schools could ditch the kids that are harder to teach the same way that charters can, we would have some fantastic public schools, even in our poorest neighborhoods. As Forman mentions, HCZ had some success educating kids it didn't want, but that was on such a small scale, and required such gargantuan effort, that it's hard to consider that a replicable model for public education. Until charter schools prove that they can handle any students thrown at them, just like ordinary public schools, there's no reason to consider them anything other than government-funded private schools. The good ones are a tremendous privilege for those who get into them, but they can't be considered a model for what public schooling could be or should be.
Everything you mentioned is true - particularly how you break down the reason charter schools have such an advantage, but that's why I wrote:
"How do we create environments where average teachers, even just good teachers, can excel in a school system that provides a quality education - if we aren't going to acknowledge all of the complex needs and issues that are part and parcel with a student's success and independent of homework?
Even tackling that question will keep us from arguing about the need or lack thereof for charter schools that, by their nature, can only provide services for a limited number of kids in any community."
School reform always turns to us circling a wagon where we refuse to look at why, say, Japan can succeed in educating its students and we can't. But more than that, most of the general interest stuff that's written doesn't seem to appropriately look at models from other nations. Unless I'm looking in the wrong places.
Dwayne, I almost added your comment about Japan to my list of myths below. What's it based on (other than common knowledge)? There are always ways to learn and improve, but I'm skeptical that Japan is doing better with poor kids of color than we are.
I was an educator of elementary-aged inner-city kids in the Southwest and the Northeast for several years. I called it quits this last year. I just wanted to chime in with the observation that Kipp style schools do not really have all that many more hours worked per teacher, in my experience. In several public schools, my hours usually hovered around 70-80 per week, about the same ballpark as the Kipp teachers I know (I've talked to the founder of Kipp about this as well). While one could say there are fewer exceptions to the normal teacher work ethic in Kipp (why would they try to teach in one?), there were very few "less committed" teachers in the public schools I worked in either.
What is starkly different is what the schools make their teachers spend their time on in these different systems. Public schools spend an agonizingly large portion of their time trying to game test scores now under no child left behind. I left my stable, well paying job were I was wanted over this issue alone. I did not believe in what I was doing anymore. Public schools under NCLB seem primarily concerned with creating multiple choice test takers, because they live or die by the scores their kids make on these. The students seem to slowly have any curiosity or drive crushed out of them over years of witnessing the fact that this is all the system they inhabit cares about. While teachers and principles all DO care about the whole child in the public system, every incentive and pressure is exerted on them to just focus on the test scores. I left because I do not think this is either ethical or even something I could have stood for much longer. I am now retooling and pursuing my second grad degree (my prior degrees being focused on teaching), and am infinitely happier, but still coming to grips that I could not stand inhabiting the profession I still love. I just didn't see things changing in the foreseeable future.
Also "earning hemistway" has the issue by the horns. Having the toughest kids in your classrooms makes things infinitely harder. Why else would private schools be able to offer so much lower salaries and still have many of the best public school teachers lining up for a pay cut? I would like to see how a Kipp academy would handle the number of homeless kids coming in and out of their rooms that I typically had each year (I usually had about 25% of my original class left at the end of a year). I don't know what system can effectively deal with this type of turnover.
One other thing, if the "bootstraps" myth is an issue, I think this is an even larger one:
We as a political culture have decided that in lieu of actual large scale social nets like Europe etc., the schools will be our solution to poverty. The degree of mission creep this results in is amazing (though not at all surprising when you have a community of compassionate teachers who can easily see all the needs in their communities), and results in a system that is more bloated and monetarily inefficient than any other developed nation's. Rather than put in the large scale effort needed to deal with the fact that we really are a nation of intermingled first and third world communities, we pretend that just offering a bit more effective math and science, or "testing accountability," we can address the social problems of a community.
I definitely agree with this. The lack of real social safety nets in America works to increase the amount and variety of supports that schools have to provide for students. More than that though, the lack of a social safety net means that education (and particularly higher education) has become the necessary (but not solely sufficient) prerequisite for moving out of or staying out of poverty. That's a mighty large burden to place on our education system.
I also agree with what Dwayne Betts said earlier: "The assumption behind his statement is that the underlying reason money, resources and time aren't put into public school systems is because the larger society sees them as hopeless. I tend to think a large number of the public, especially the educated public, believe this". However, I would go one step further and say that a large part of the American public assumes / believes that the *kids* in public schools are hopeless and ultimately unable to learn. I think at the heart of the matter, we as society, assume that poor children are incapable of real education, achievement, or success, so we effectively refuse to "waste" resources on them. This is incredibly sad and infuriating.
A great article from a number of years ago relating to the subject of the schools being expected to be a panacea for poverty. Particularly the fifth paragraph.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000116mag-traub8.html
Dwayne thanks for posting this and the article. This is something that occupies much of my thinking. As Deborah Meier often points out we are now educating more people than we ever have. More people attend and graduate high school than they have in our history. Our fundamental beliefs about different groups of people are challenged by this. Educating students is a difficult task but I agree with Randall that one of the major ideas that lead to success is just simply believing in students and having high standards. The more adults in a school that believe in the kids, the easier it will be for kids to achieve. Kipp and Canada's schools are successful not primarily because of the wrap around they provide--which is important---but because they have been able to attract and surround students with a building of adults who truly believe that the students will achieve. This should not be EXTRAORDINARY. In the article Dwayne links to about Kipp and Canada the writer talks about how Canada's ideas were not as fruitful until he left schools that didn't believe in his ideas. Even kids who did not have the benefits of the supports Canada provides succeeded. We often devalue the importance of beliefs but beliefs control everything. If you work in a school and believe it is impossible or that these kids can't achieve, in your core, even if you never say it out loud, you bring that energy into the building and you sabotage your efforts and the efforts of those around you. The message that we provide as a society to many students is that they are less than. When you operate off of the idea that students will be successful they are, because you bring in that energy. It takes a lot of focus and effort because everything in our society counteracts that message. We are a problem driven society and not a solutions/wellness driven society. Ideas and beliefs are everything and I do not have any illusions about what happens in public schools. I say this as someone who has been teaching in both charter and public schools for the last 7 years. And the charter that I work at operates off a lottery, we do not choose students. Students are not problems. It is an honor to teach students; children our gifts not problems. I am a better mother and parent because I teach.
(Dwayne on another not wholly unrelated topic, I answered your question about standardized test bias that is not related to affording materials, with links, in Adam’s Ricci commentary.)
Thanks Alegna,
I'm going to check the links out today.
I've thought about this a lot over the years. Presumably because of the timing - right around the NCLB debate - this was a popular topic in several of my college courses. As I started doing less homework and more journalism I wound up covering an epic years-long fight over school funding formulas. I've gotten about as intimately familiar with a lot of these issues as you can without being in the classroom every day (and arguably more so because I wasn't). I can see the merit in much of what's been posted here.
But no matter how much I've heard and read about the topic I never get a great answer to the question "why didn't I drop out?"
This isn't entirely pointless narcissism. I grew up with the full list of disadvantages you've heard all about before (more Eminem than Easy-E, but I doubt that makes much difference). Statistically, I should be a drug-addicted drop out with a rap sheet and few prospects. Instead I worked my way through school, graduated cum laude from a name university got a decent job (in journalism, but still...)
I know a lot of people from similar backgrounds who can't say the same, and I've never been able to really answer why. What was different about my situation, influences, environment, etc. that helped me do this while many of my peers did not?
It ain't brains. I'll cheerfully proclaim my genius to anyone who'll listen. But I know a couple of other people from similar backgrounds who're at least as smart as me who didn't do well in school, go to college, get a real job, etc.
It isn't luck. If I have any it's bad. It sure isn't any sort of special moral virtue or strength of character. Trust me.
It's hard to argue it was anything measurable about the school system -- I was in the same classes with the same teachers as lots of kids who dropped out (or might as well have for all the good it did 'em) and lots of kids who were, by the standards of educators and political types, successful
The only thing I can point to is terribly nebulous -- culture. We had a fairly mixed income school system (nearly all white, but a mix of trailer trash poor all the way through vacation-home-owning summer-as-a-verb rich). The town and the schools had what I can only describe as a broadly liberal bent, and it was a small town with a state university campus casting a big shadow.
This all combined to create this assumption that You Were Going To Go To College. It was an assumption that my mom seemed to buy into, in a very low key way but with a surprising amount of conviction for someone who never graduated high school. I think it created a subtle sort of brainwashing. I was far from immune to the impacts of a disadvantaged upbringing, but because of the cultural expectations that I'd internalized there was nothing that was going to keep me sidetracked for long.
This isn't a satisfying conclusion, if for no other reason than because it's hard to quantify "culture." It don't spreadsheet well. I can't think of an easy way to put it in a syllabus at a teachers college. But I can't escape the idea that it matters, maybe more than a lot of other stuff we consider when we consider education.
Sorry for the essay-length comment. I've always given editors this excuse, as originally used by Mark Twain, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Amen! The issue is not poor kids per se, or funding formulas per se, but rather the whole interconnected system that concentrates poverty in a few enclaves, rather than spreads poverty out among middle class influences. In states where schools are funded primarily by property taxes, you see shocking difference between school districts, some just a few miles away from each other. In states where funding is more even, the suburbs are not sliced and diced into such neat SES packages. Poor kids get to attend school with kids who are expected to attend college, and it rubs off.
This problem is more concentrated in northern areas, where restrictive housing convenants based on race prevent even the most determined families from buying up into school districts that might offer their kids a decent chance at doing better than they did (see James Loewen's Sundown Towns for a discussion of the way that minorities are restricted from buying and living in more affluent towns with better schools). Unless and until we choose to de-ghetto-ize our housing system, this problem will continue and no amount of KIPPs or Charters is going to make a dent.
@DaveinHackensack
Am I the only one having an aneurysm over this? Are you actually arguing genetics as the reason some students fail to do as well as others? Now, maybe I am being too sensitive, but what this sounds like to me is that you are saying that most, if not all, working class people are stupid. Is that what you are saying, Dave?
Thank you. I sure wouldn't want Dave to be my kids' teacher; who knows what snap judgements he might make about them.
Since a higher proportion of working class people are people of color, are you saying that black and brown folks are stupid? The whole thing is ridiculous.
Hi Jenn,
No I have been thinking about how to respond but I think Dave fundamentally believes this. My simply saying that wealth is not related to some genetic capacity for knowledge will probably not suffice for Dave. The empty-headed wealthy people who parade on many reality shows--The Real Housewives and The Hills--not withstanding, are not enough proof for Dave. But I haven't given up on you Dave.
Thanks you guys! That made my head feel better to know I am not alone. Aneurysm avoided. Now off for the July 4th weekend and promising myself I ... will ... not ... bring my laptop!
Alegna,
For the third time, I never brought up genetics in my comments that made Jennifer worry about having an aneurysm. She is the one who brought up genetics in this thread. Have that discussion with her.
Regarding empty-headed wealthy people on TV, two points:
1) Note that I used words and phrases such as "tend" and "in general" and explicitly acknowledged that there were exceptions.
2) I noted the correlation between higher intelligence and higher-paying, more demanding jobs. Obviously there are other ways to acquire wealth: you can marry into it, inherit it, win the lottery, etc.
That is what he has been saying, even though he pussyfoots around the issue to avoid being banned. It is the age-old right wing elitist refrain that it is the poor's fault they're poor, otherwise they wouldn't be poor. A self defeating delusion that leads to social upheaval when the downtrodden cast off the self-congratulatory aristocrats.
Despite his willingness to cite "genetics", I doubt he knows anything about the subject, otherwise he would be citing something like the SNP's that have been shown to express more than .4 of an IQ point, and how said "genetics" is unevenly distributed among ethnic groups. He doesn't do this of course, because there are no "g-factor-genes" found to date, despite scientists using the most powerful microarrays to look for them and in the process finding genes strongly associated with a multitude of other personality traits, but not IQ (for more than .4 of a point). Therefore, he is simply peddling in understated and undersupported bigotry to buttress his right wing ideology and troll an African American liberal blogger with his racialism.
Jennifer,
This is the second time in this thread you've brought up genetics in response to a comment by me, even though I don't recall bringing up genetics at all. Perhaps you can explain why you are focused on genetics.
I don't think it's a crazy observation though that smart parents tend to have smart kids and not-so-smart parents tend to have not-so-smart kids. There is more than one possible explanation for this, as you suggest. We can all think of exceptions, at both ends of the spectrum, but isn't this the case generally?
Neither did I say that "most, if not all, working class people are stupid". Smart people often work are forced to work at low-level jobs for various reasons (e.g., they are recent immigrants, whose professional credentials aren't recognized here, etc.). There are also smart people who lack ambition and work in jobs below their ability levels. But in general, smart people tend to work in more demanding jobs and earn more money. Again, we can all think of exceptions, but this seems to be another common sense observation, no?
Further, in general, smart people tend not to try to raise four children (apparently alone, as no husband, boyfriend, or father is mentioned in the article) on a customer service rep's salary, as Ms. Muhammad is doing.
Dave,
Isn't genetics basically "inherited characteristics?" That's what your line of reasoning seems like it's focused on to me.
I started reading this blog to follow the campaigns, but my background is in education, and I'm always pleased when it gets a mention. I've taught in Long Beach, CA, and the South Bronx, and I've worked in the DC city gov in education as well as currently in the NYC Dept of Ed.
And BobTX nails it, especially in his last post. I like what he says about testing. And I, too, feel that when it comes down to it, our hopes of succeeding for ALL of the hardest to reach students within the current system are nil.
The fundamental issue, as BobTX states, is that we want to believe that the schools will be our solution to poverty. And that's false.
The other issue that is always on my mind in education debates is, do we expect the same things for poor kids of color as we do for our own? (I say "our" loosely; in my case, I'm the child of two academics from an upper middle class family.) Too often, the answer is no.
I'm going to make a few points here, but I'll try to keep them concise. IMO there are a number of myths running through the thread here.
1) DaveinHackensack says, "It's likely that higher-earning parents are smarter than lower-earning parents, on average, and have smarter kids than them, on average." But then how do you explain why the proportion of white folks who are higher income is so much higher than the proportion of black folks? It seems that it would follow from your logic that whites are smarter than black folks. Furthermore, it is a great leap to assume that a few thousand dollars difference in per pupil expenditures would somehow have closed the gap, if only everyone were equally smart. Your logic does not hold up. (And BTW, your generalizations about smartness don't work for me anyway.)
Here's some stats for you, from Paul Tough's book on the HCZ:
-the official poverty rate among blacks, at more than 24 percent, is three times higher than the poverty rate among whites.
-45 percent of black children born into "solidly middle class" families slip into poverty as adults, while only 16 percent of white children follow the same path.
-While black people make up only a quarter of the total population living in poverty, 80 percent of children who grow up in long term poverty (poor for at least nine years of their childhoods) are black.
Racism and poverty matter.
2) The next myth is that school spending is not the issue. It's true that DC spends a lot, and that it does not show up when you go into their schools. But it's also true that so often the people who are screaming the loudest that money is not the problem are sending their children to schools where the tuition is much higher than the per pupil amount in DC. To them, the funding a school receives does matter. The great materials, the well-paid teachers, the sharp facilities, the school trips, the technology, it all DOES matter for their own kids, but when it comes to poor kids, money is not the issue.
(Part of the issue in DC is the huge amounts of spending on special education. It's not that every kid is getting that per pupil spending average. Special education skews the average.)
3) Parents are the problem. I hate that myth. Talk about blaming the victim. And it's short-sighted, like saying, the reason why I can't walk is that my feet hurt--while ignoring the fact that I'm barefoot.
All parents want what's best for their kids. Many don't trust the school system nor know how to navigate it, don't trust that society will give their kids a chance, and have questionable lifestyles. But so much of that dysfunction--or to put it another way, the disconnect between the culture of the school system and that of the parents--is a result of living in deep, entrenched poverty.
(For Wire fans, I think about how Namond's mom was raising him to be a gangster.)
At the end of the day, those who believe school reform is the answer to all of society's problems are willing to allow children to live the next 20 years in poverty so that, if they work hard and have good schools, they can work their way out. I can't live with that.
TNC made a reference the other day to our unwillingness to address poverty as a country. It is doable. And for many kids, poverty is the biggest obstacle to success in school.
"But it's also true that so often the people who are screaming the loudest that money is not the problem are sending their children to schools where the tuition is much higher than the per pupil amount in DC."
Do you have any evidence that this is true? I guess you have to define "people who are screaming the loudest" first.
Fair enough. Permission to rephrase?
In my observations, those who argue that money is not the problem rarely address the fact that those who can so often choose to send their children to schools where the tuition is much higher than the per pupil amount in DC.
Really? I've heard it addressed often. Private schools work, probably because they cherry pick the best students and guarantee parental involvement. Putting more money into a successful system makes sense.
The inner city public school system doesn't seem to work, and within these districts it seems that there isn't much connection between money spent and education success. Putting more money into a system that doesn't work seems pointless and wasteful.
You might disagree with it, but I've heard this argument virtually every single time school reform is debated. I'm not sure how you missed it.
@WoofWoof, you say, "within these districts it seems that there isn't much connection between money spent and education success."
What I hear others say, however, is that money is not the issue. I don't hear them talking about how more money for private schools is a good thing, and more money for public schools is not worthwhile. I just hear, money is not the issue.
In the thread above, no one says that money for private schools makes more sense than money for public schools. You only have to read this thread to see what I'm referring to.
That's fine, but I disagree as to where that observation leads. It doesn't mean that the extra money is creating extra results, it means that the results in DC public schools are so bad that people are willing to pay extra money to avoid them. It's supply and demand more than resource allocation.
@Josh M
That's one way to read it. But the point that I am trying to make is that parents who pay $15000-$30000 in annual tuition cleary believe that extra funding equals extra results. Otherwise they wouldn't pay up.
But there are folks who would argue that funding is not an important issue in education. And you may argue that this is a leap, but IMO their tacit argument is this: funding is important for the children of the elite, but it's not important when we're talking about public school students.
The extra dollars for private school usually go towards one thing: exclusivity. Parents pay to keep little Johnny away from Baybay Kids. That's pretty much all they get for those dollars.
And that goes a long way. As a ninth grade English teacher and parent of a 14 year old, I had to make a choice to have my daughter educated at my workplace or somewhere else.
Guess what choice I made? Shhiiiiit.
I believe racism is at the heart of this unwillingness to address poverty. It has been the wedge. When you look at countries that have statistics of being happier, healthier or more educated you see mostly groups that are monolithic and not as diverse. The problems are everyone's--you get national healthcare, effective schools that focus soley on educating, etc. In our society the problems are "those" people and therefore are not worthy of "our" resources.
"When you look at countries that have statistics of being happier, healthier or more educated you see mostly groups that are monolithic and not as diverse."
It's an interesting observation, but there are also homogeneous societies that are poor and not so happy, e.g., Cambodia, Haiti, etc.
Thank you for pointing out the myth that parents are always to blame. I get annoyed when parents are inevitably invoked as the magical catch-all to fix education, as though they aren't already involved. It's never going to go away, though, since everyone knows at least one or two genuinely crappy parents who don't encourage their kids, who can then sub in their minds for the majority of parents, and it keeps people from looking at uncomfortable questions about the school system.
Parents are emphatically not usually to blame, but I have seen many parents control their home culture to insulate their kids from horrible surroundings with effective results. You can't blame people living in nearly third world inner city situations for not choosing this path (many have thought about it and realize that even still it is far fetched from their starting points), however, parenting can massively up the odds of a kid making it out of poverty.
Culture Matters... (not meaning anything racial or ethnic, simply the value set a kid absorbs from his/her family, society, and media).
"It seems that it would follow from your logic that whites are smarter than black folks. "
That is precisely his logic. Of course, if he states it as such, he would probably be banned.
Wow, great post. I like this:
So true. In SF, the average private high school is $25-$30,000 per year.
And the strange thing is that many schools with $15-30,000 per-pupil tuition actually pay the teachers the same or less - but many will jump at it because you get to escape the degrading (for you and the students) testing, and you will have far less difficult kids. The money these families pay does buy their children a better shot, but usually not a lot goes to the teachers themselves. I'm not trying to make any incredible point by that, but it is very interesting. I have several friends that teach at some of the Gold Coast's most expensive private schools in CT, and some of them make less than I made teaching public - most of them left because of the NCLB garbage or slowly getting worn out from discipline problems.
Undoubtedly many of our parents, teachers, and boards-of-education could do a better job, but we've got to re-think whether we want our kids' babysitters to be the Disney Channel, Viacom (MTV & BET), and video games.
And as Sam said above, "racism and poverty matter".
Education reform articles are important, but they're so predictable and depressing.
First, start with the strawman argument that people think poor kids can't learn, which almost nobody believes. Then provide an example of one of the two models (or in this case both) that everybody knows will work:
Model 1: the extraordinary inspiring leader who transforms a school (like Promise Academy), which is great but nobody knows how to make that work everywhere
Model 2: pick out the better students and give them a much more disciplined environment (like KIPP is doing, using attrition as a selection mechanism). Again, nobody knows how to make that work for all students.
For extra credit, point to some other country that has much less entrenched poverty than the US and say that if they can do it we can. Or, my favorite, after admitting that nobody knows the answer to the problem, suggest the only reason we are failing is because nobody cares. Or point out that the real solution is some massive restructuring of society (treat teachers like doctors, eliminate poverty), which is a good idea, sure, but if that's the only answer then this whole school reform debate is completely irrelevant.
I like the inspired kids stories in a novelistic way. And there's a very good question, usually ignored in these stories, about whether the public school system should or should not be tracking kids into Kipps-like magnet schools within the public system. But other than that, it's just the same old retread arguments with no real solutions; important, but predictable and depressing.
KIPP is almost exclusively at the middle-school level. There's not a lot of data that it would do anything at the high-school level.
Also, articles on KIPP always fail to note the high burn-out rate of their teachers.
Here is an article from the NYT magazine in 2000 that is well worth reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/16/magazine/what-no-school-can-do.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
I posted this on earlier posts on education, but I'll repeat it here. I worked with a California state funded program in the late 1990s. There were two to three of us on the permanent staff and we coordinated a program with 7 universities (public and private) two community colleges, and 35 public secondary and elementary schools. We served students and their families from populations that had historically low college enrollment and retention programs with intensive mentoring, counseling, and tutoring programs. We held educational conferences, took kids on field trips to college campuses, had an awards program for participants, and a special summer learning program. We got results. The students we served, in the thousands every year, not only had higher college going rates than the populations from which they came, but higher college going rates than the population at large. One other thing, we did not limit our counseling to the college oriented student but directed them to trade schools as well.
This program took taxpayer dollars. That said, given the success we had, the numbers putting the program into play (all the institutions we worked with had volunteer members of their faculty, administration, and/or counseling staffs that worked with us) at the administrative level were as I have said 2 or at most 3, none of us making anything more than a lower middle class wage, and college students who worked for almost minimum wage. We worked our butts off and deserved more, but we addressed three fundamental areas: the first is we started with fourth graders. Studies at the time all pointed to the fourth grade as being the time when students become initially alienated in schools. We engaged families and community organizations (such as boys and girls clubs). Finally, with campus visits, intensive counseling that included families, and college students doing the field work with the kids, we demystified higher education for kids and families, who unlike those we did not work with, had no experience of higher education.
Finally, almost all of the community college students who worked with us either went on to professional careers or careers in education.
But then how do you explain why the proportion of white folks who are higher income is so much higher than the proportion of black folks? It seems that it would follow from your logic that whites are smarter than black folks.
Keep away from the word "smarter" and use "higher IQ" instead, and that is, in fact, the likely reason.
High IQ correlates very reliably with higher income--more so than perserverance, hard work, and connections. To put it bluntly, if you have a choice between being born poor with a high IQ or wealthy with a low IQ, the outcomes say that the former leads to a higher income and greater success.
The average black IQ is one standard deviation below the average white IQ. If it were just a few points (like the Asian IQ is higher than white IQ), it probably wouldn't explain the results, because once IQs get to a certain point (around 120, I think? maybe 110), then IQ becomes less important than "soft" factors (connections, perserverence, etc).
So yes, with that restatement, the most likely reason that blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented in high income populations is that they have, on average, a much lower IQ.
As has been pointed out, poor whites do better than wealthy blacks--and spare me the Clintonian arguments about "it depends on what you mean by poor". It really is important to understand this when we talk about improving education. It also doesn't mean "blacks are less intelligent than whites" or "working class people can't be educated". But denying reality doesn't help solve the problem, and wishful thinking doesn't get it done (notice how often people like Jennifer say "I like" one particular idea or another? As if personal preference has anything to do with it.).
I recommend reading Flynn's book on intelligence for some possible reasons why concrete thinkers have trouble in a world that rewards abstract thinkers. People with lower IQs (regardless of race) are, almost by definition, more concrete thinkers. If we understand this and educate them differently--more slowly, for starters--we might get somewhere. But even starting down that path is tough because people with low IQs are disproportionately African American and Hispanic, and the racism charges would start instantly.
I also agree with Dwayne Betts's primary point--that until we have a system that doesn't require teachers to be missionaries, we won't have a successful educational system. Charter schools not only aren't the answer, they take away from the answer by attracting--and then burning out--many strong teachers.
And, for the record, I just graduated from a very highly ranked ed school (second career), with three credentials (math, english, history). By choice, I'll be teaching students who struggle in math, and they will be predominantly African American and Hispanic. For the past three years, I've taught a very well-regarded ACT prep course that raises low income African American and Hispanic test scores to a point of the national mean. But of course, people who point out that the most likely reason for the performance gap is the well-documented IQ gap can only be racist. So square that circle as you see fit.
I know I'm going to regret getting into this, but... you are being completely dishonest with this statement:
"Keep away from the word "smarter" and use "higher IQ" instead, and that is, in fact, the likely reason.".
"Smarter" and "higher IQ" are synonomous!
And before you try to claim that you aren't making a statement about the intelligence of black and Hispanic people as groups, let me point out that later in your comment you make this statement:
"I recommend reading Flynn's book on intelligence for some possible reasons why concrete thinkers have trouble in a world that rewards abstract thinkers. People with lower IQs (regardless of race) are, almost by definition, more concrete thinkers."
If we aren't suppose to confuse "lower IQ" with "lower intelligence", why should we consult a book about intelligence to get a better understanding of the point you're making about IQ differences? And why, again, if "lower IQ" is not the same as "lower intelligence" do you in that same paragraph move the discussion from differences in IQ points to differences between "concrete thinkers" and "abstract thinkers"?
You can't even keep from conflating "lower IQ" and "lower intelligence" in the very statement where you try to claim that the two are different things!
Your comment (despite your sophistical protestations) is essentially, black and Hispanic people (as groups) are less intelligent than white and Asian people (as groups) and it is their lesser intelligence that is the reason why they're poorer. You need to stop pussyfooting around the topic and own up to what you actually mean (and what everyone can clearly understand you saying).
"Smarter" and "higher IQ" are synonomous!
No, they aren't. "Smarter" is a value judgment. "Higher IQ" removes the value one way or another and does nothing beyond state a fact. It is absolutely true that the mean IQ of whites is a standard deviation higher than the mean IQ of African Americans. No, IQ tests aren't biased. No, IQ tests don't track to income. And so on.
You want to change the words from "higher IQ" to "smarter" precisely because you recognize this difference, and want to label people who make that statement as racist. You are probably aware that you can't label the IQ statement as racist, as it is factually correct.
If we aren't suppose to confuse "lower IQ" with "lower intelligence", why should we consult a book about intelligence to get a better understanding of the point you're making about IQ differences?
Because laypeople (and I include myself) think of intelligence differently than psychometricians and other experts do. So I would try to avoid saying "whites, as a group, are more intelligent than blacks" because we put a whole lot of other values into the word. Flynn is an expert, and he's writing about "intelligence" as an expert would. But the book is entirely about IQ.
Your comment (despite your sophistical protestations) is essentially, black and Hispanic people (as groups) are less intelligent than white and Asian people (as groups) and it is their lesser intelligence that is the reason why they're poorer.
Again, I would change "less intelligent" to "have a lower IQ". Then note that I said "is the most likely reason".
So here you go, a restatement that you can still try to label racist, except each statement save the last is, I believe, a well-documented fact:
Black and Hispanics as a group have up to one standard deviation lower IQs than whites and Asians as groups. Higher IQs predict income better than race or socio-economic status; in fact, when controlled for IQ, the income disparity between blacks, whites, and Asians vanishes. Therefore, the most likely reason for the income disparity between the two group is the IQ difference.
It's probably the best explanation for the test performance gap, too.
That doesn't mean the situation is hopeless, nor is it a means of dismissing the problem. It certainly doesn't mean that all blacks and Hispanics are "stupid"--another value laden word. It does mean that a majority of African Americans and Hispanics have IQs below 100. But so what? There are probably more whites with IQs below 100 than there are blacks and Hispanics (although I haven't done the math), even if they are a smaller percentage of the entire white population. If you compare whites and blacks with IQs below 100, you won't find a whole lot of difference in outcomes.
The reason I mention the Flynn book is because he writes about the bias towards the abstract that the IQ test has. I personally believe this bias is in our educational methods as well, but I don't have evidence for it. It's a good book, although not very cheering.
@Cal
"It is absolutely true that the mean IQ of whites is a standard deviation higher than the mean IQ of African Americans." That statement, since The Bell Curve and before, raises peoples' ire. And with good reason. Because if you don't explain WHY it is so, the natural conclusion is that the people flaunting the statistic believe that it is evidence of a genetic deficiency of African Americans. (This is especially true because in your first post you make reference to people being "born with" a certain IQ.)
So I challenge you to explain why this conclusion would be false.
Aside from the fact that the onus is on you to explain why this is not an argument about genetics, we can't really solve the achievement gap unless we know what accounts for differences in academic outcomes. So to me your comment rings hollow because you're talking about addressing a statistic, rather than the factors that cause a statistic to be so.
Put another way, you seem to have concluded that our society is completely meritorious ("when controlled for IQ, the income disparity between blacks, whites, and Asians vanishes"). If that is the case, how do you explain why the proportion of blacks who are wealthy is so much lower than the proportion of whites?
BobTX above recommended an old NY Times article on the topic of education and poverty. For a great review of some of the research of the past 40 years, and alternative perspective on the achievement gap, I recommend it.
"Aside from the fact that the onus is on you to explain why this is not an argument about genetics"
Why is the onus on Cal to explain that to you? Why shouldn't the onus be on you to educate yourself on the topic? If you knew anything about the expert Cal cited, James Flynn (only one of the most prominent experts in the field of IQ research), you'd know that Flynn leans toward environmental, not genetic, explanations of the IQ gap.
"Put another way, you seem to have concluded that our society is completely meritorious ("when controlled for IQ, the income disparity between blacks, whites, and Asians vanishes"). If that is the case, how do you explain why the proportion of blacks who are wealthy is so much lower than the proportion of whites?"
It's a straw man argument to pretend that Cal wrote that "our society is completely meritorious"; it also muddies the waters by turning objective observations about correlation into a morality play. What Cal wrote is correct: higher IQs correlate strongly with higher incomes (and higher academic performance). In that statistical sense they "explain" the differences in average incomes. A difference in incomes is a strong factor in the difference in wealth, though there are other factors, such as societal and cultural attitudes toward saving (for example, a sociological study mentioned in the NY Times a couple of years ago found that some African Americans on welfare were afraid to save even small amounts of money out of fears that it would make them ineligible for welfare).
Because if you don't explain WHY it is so,
I don't have to explain WHY it is so. No one is certain WHY it is so. It is a fact. I understand that stating this fact upsets people, who then scream loudly, jumping up and down hollering "RACIST", hoping the fact will go away. Too bad.
A low IQ is not a genetic deficiency. IQ is inheritable, to a significant degree, but that's not at all the same thing. As I said, many whites and Asians have low IQs, while blacks and Hispanics also have high IQs. The entire range is possible.
Stating the fact about IQ differences between groups does not equate to positing a genetic deficiency (or superiority) for any one group.
we can't really solve the achievement gap unless we know what accounts for differences in academic outcomes.
Oh, come on. Now you're just being silly. I am saying that mean IQ differences account for the difference between academic outcomes.
Posit two groups of white people. One group has a mean IQ of 85. The other has a mean IQ of 100. Turns out that the second group, on average, is more likely to do well in school and go to college. But when you compare individuals within the groups, it turns out that individuals with the same IQ have similar outcomes. That is, a person with a 120 IQ in the lower mean IQ group has the same outcome as a person with a 120 IQ in the higher mean IQ group.
If race weren't involved, no one would have the slightest qualm about saying that the difference in the mean IQ explains a lot of the difference in the group outcomes. Also, no one would argue that the achievement gap between the two groups could be closed because in fact, there is no achievement gap when controlling for IQ.
So I am correct in my assertion that IQ accounts for a lot of the difference between outcomes (which is an open issue, I agree) then there may not be any way to close the achievement gap using current methods. That's why I'm interested in educating low IQ people (regardless of race) differently--as well as understanding if the IQ bias towards the abstract has some import in both our measuring and education of people with lower IQs.
If that is the case, how do you explain why the proportion of blacks who are wealthy is so much lower than the proportion of whites?
This again is just silly. Obviously, using this framework, the reason there's a lower proportion of wealthy blacks is explained by the fact that there are fewer blacks with higher IQs. You do understand what "standard deviation" means, right? 87% of whites have a higher IQ than the mean black IQ.
As for your final comment, how many times do people have to tell you that poor whites have better academic achievement (and higher IQs) than wealthy blacks? See also my point about being born poor with a high IQ. There are cultural issues associated with poverty, but low academic achievement is not explained by low income. Only after race is accounted for does income track with IQ.
I do not think that our society is perfectly meritorious. However, I do think the strong correlation between IQ and success is good news, overall, for our society. That doesn't mean we can't do better.
Two links that people should read:
Mainstream Intelligence Manifesto: after the Bell Curve came out, many scientists were appalled at the level of ignorance in the public discourse about IQ. So they took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal stating the widely accepted facts about IQ.
The Role of Intelligence In Modern Society: this is an excellent writeup about intelligence, particularly the psychometric vs. cognitive issues, the degree to which it can be changed, the degree to which it is inherited, and so on.
I also strongly recommend the Flynn book.
In all cases, if I made a statement that contradicts the facts in these links, it was an error on my part. I don't think I have, though, as I try to be pretty careful. IQ is a pretty loaded issue. But ignoring it in our debate on the achievement gap doesn't make it any less relevant.
When I previewed this, I saw that Dave in Hackensack already answered some of these points, but I have to go bake a bunch of pies and so I hope you all can deal with any redundancies.
"You do understand what "standard deviation" means, right?"
On a non-scientific, non-financial-oriented blog such as this one, I wouldn't assume that most people understand standard deviations. I blame whoever designs high school curricula for that. Some basic statistics would be more valuable for the average American than some of the more abstract algebra often taught in high school.
@DaveinHackensack and @Cal:
I think that these are tough issues, and I've tried to approach your positions with curiousity and equanimity. In a debate like this, I think it's important to be able to speak in a way that people can hear you. Dave, as you can see from the comments above, some readers were dismissive of you from the jump. I've tried not to do that.
I don't think I'm being silly at all, and I don't see how calling me that furthers the discussion. And I do know what a standard deviation is.
I think that a lot of people jump to the conclusion that those who support the arguments of The Bell Curve are racist. There's good reason for that. The history of the eugenics movement, for example, is full of scientists using data to justify racist explanations of human intelligence. And you don't have to study history to know that there are plenty of people who still believe that black people are generally not smart. Cal, you say, too bad if folks jump to conclusions. But if you want folks to hear you, I think you're going to have be more understanding of their concern.
The bottom line for me is that to even take part in this debate, I have to start from the place that there is no validity to a genetic explanation for differences in IQ scores between blacks and whites. I'd hoped that you guys could rule it out, but you haven't.
Sam,
"Dave, as you can see from the comments above, some readers were dismissive of you from the jump. I've tried not to do that."
I appreciate that.
"The history of the eugenics movement, for example..."
The eugenics movement certainly helped make any discussion of human biodiversity (as some call it these days) taboo, as did the subsequent pseudoscience and genocide of the Nazis. The odd thing about this, though, is that, historically, higher-IQ minorities have been more likely to be persecuted than lower-IQ minorities. German Jews, who scored higher, on average, on IQ tests than non-Jewish Germans, were one example; other examples include ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, ethnic Indians in Uganda, etc. As far as I know, though, Charles Murray is not a eugenicist.
"The bottom line for me is that to even take part in this debate, I have to start from the place that there is no validity to a genetic explanation for differences in IQ scores between blacks and whites. I'd hoped that you guys could rule it out, but you haven't."
I didn't bring up genetics in my previous comments on this thread, but, given that I'm not an expert on the subject, I'm not sure why you'd expect me to rule it out. From what I know of the subject, most experts believe that there is both a hereditary component and an environmental component to IQ/intelligence. Intuitively, that makes sense to me, as it is true of other attributes. For example, all things equal, tall parents are likely to have tall kids, right? But if the kids suffer from malnutrition (an environmental factor), then they may not grow as tall. If you prefer experts who lean toward environmental explanations, you may want to look at the work of Richard Nesbitt and James Flynn.
Dave, I thought I was done, but you pulled me back in! Thanks for writing back.
It makes sense to me, as you said, that some types of intelligence might be hereditary. For instance, my wife is a very skilled spatial thinker. This may increase the likelihood that my son will be a spatial thinker.
But that's different than saying that a child's IQ may be more likely to be higher or lower based on his her racial group. That's what I had hoped you would rule out.
Why would I expect you to rule that argument out? One reason is that it's racist. I don't know what else to call that. I've been holding back from using the word, and I'm not calling you a racist. But that's why I'd hoped you would rule out the argument.
The other reason is that racial categories are entirely inconsistent. Hines Ward is half "black" and half Korean, but society sees him as a black guy. My wife has Portuguese, Chinese, African and Native American ancestry, but she and society identify her as black. Julio Iglesias and Vicente Fox and Fidel Castro and Evo Morales could all be called Hispanic. And on and on. I don't see how the categories can be used to make generalizations about IQ.
Also, on a side note, whether or not Charles Murray is a eugenicist is irrelevant to the point I was making in my comment.
I highly recommend this video for more on the contradictions of race. Stuart Hall, "Race: The Floating Signifier." http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8471383580282907865 A classic.
I don't see how calling me that furthers the discussion.
Dude. You've been calling me a racist, and you're upset because I called you silly? Your questions, coupled with what you clearly thought was righteous indignation, warranted a deflating. "Silly" did nicely. And yes, you were being silly. Alternatively, you don't understand the discussion at all, but I didn't want to make that assumption.
there is no validity to a genetic explanation for differences in IQ scores between blacks and whites.
I have made no assertions as to the cause of the difference. I don't know what causes the difference. I do know that income, culture, and environment have been eliminated as causes of the difference--something that most people in this debate have trouble grasping.
Here's the thing, though: whatever the cause of the difference, the outcome of the difference appears to explain the performance gap.
I think that a lot of people jump to the conclusion that those who support the arguments of The Bell Curve are racist.
"Support the arguments of the Bell Curve"? You apparently don't understand what that means. The Bell Curve made specific policy prescriptions, which I haven't even mentioned. I am not promoting the Bell Curve.
The problem is that people like you simply don't understand the difference between The Bell Curve's policy prescriptions and the facts that aren't in dispute. Saying that blacks have a lower mean IQ than whites is not an "idea" that the Bell Curve pushes. It's a fact. It's also a fact that IQ predicts a variety of outcomes, including income and education. Both of these facts were well established before the Bell Curve's publication.
I don't have much interest in convincing people who can't accept facts. I just post corrections when I see misconceptions.
Cal, I didn't call you a racist; I didn't want to make that assumption. I don't know why you continue to insult my intelligence, though.
I came back because there was one other thing you said that I don't want to let stand: "I do know that income, culture, and environment have been eliminated as causes of the difference--something that most people in this debate have trouble grasping."
A quick review of the lit says that at the beginning of Chapter 13 of The Bell Curve, the authors explicitly don't rule out enviornment as an explanation. Dave from Hackensack says that Flynn, whose book you recommend, favors an environmental explanation. I don't see any way to rule out environment as a possible cause. Let me know if I'm missing something.
The best model for school reform I have seen to date is the one used in Finland. Now one might think Finland--come on! Yet they had their share not only of poverty but failing test scored, lack of engagement in the classroom on both sides of the desk.
I am sure if you google in Finland School reform you will locate the recent articles which first appeared in the Houston Chronicle.
I also like what Duncan did in Chicago before departing to work for the Obama administration. Students' writing scores were down and a program that simply--so simply--generated a policy of writing and more writing found instant improvement. It is like anything else; practice long and hard enough, you might play Carnegie Hall, as the old adage goes.
Very insightful post. Charters may be the future, but they have problems, too. Both still focus too much on the destination of Testing Day, not the journey of learning.What all schools need to focus on is having children master the fundamentals, (critical reading, writing proficiently, analytical thinking alogned with math abilities, and a respect for both science and social science inquiry) all the while never learning to hate learning. That is the tightrope teachers should walk, not the current one whose ends are frayed with unreasonable expectations and barren resources, devoid of effective leadership.
I haven't insulted your intelligence.
But that's different than saying that a child's IQ may be more likely to be higher or lower based on his her racial group. That's what I had hoped you would rule out.
Again, you conflate two different issues.
Fact: a child's IQ is likely to be higher or lower based on his or her racial group--even though a child of any race can have any of the entire range of IQs.
This is a statistical likelihood, not a certainty. It deals with groups, not individuals.
Cause: Undefined.
Could this, at least, sink in? The statement above is based on a fact--that the median black IQ is lower than 87% of the white population. It doesn't mention cause at all. You keep saying you "hope" that people can "rule out" a genetic explanation, but what you describe is not an explanation, but a fact in which no cause is offered.
The facts won't change based on your hopes. I have said several times that the cause of the difference is not known. You are demanding that I rule out a cause that not even experts have eliminated.
One reason is that it's racist.
The median black IQ is lower than the median white IQ. Causes that have been eliminated are measurement (the IQ test is accurate), poverty, culture. No one knows what the cause is.
The above statements are facts. Are you saying that facts are racist?
The other reason is that racial categories are entirely inconsistent.
Yes. You think that hasn't been noticed before now? Admixtures apparently influence IQ. Not in ways designed to make anyone cheerful.
Look, acknowledging even the possibility that the performance gap is caused by the different IQs of various groups does not mean giving up. It doesn't lead to lower expectations. The IQ differential applies to groups, not individuals.
I find it amusing, when it's not sad, that so many people who are shocked, shocked! at the possibility that the performance gap is explained at least in part by IQ will readily speculate that black people just have a deficient culture, that if they behaved more like white people, then by golly they'd do better. The cultural explanation is not only wrong, it's insulting and condescending.
But even if the IQ gap doesn't explain some of the performance gap, people should stop repeating shibboleths that have long since been disproven. The performance gap is not caused by poverty, or poor whites would do worse than wealthy blacks. It is not caused by culture, or blacks with "middle class white values" would outperform their IQs--or at least poor, low-class whites. You don't want it to be IQ? Fine, but understand that every one of the explanations proffered in this thread have been eliminated already.
I am much more interested in cognitive issues involving intelligence than psychometric ones--that is, I'm not terribly interested in measuring IQ so much as I am interested in why and how people learn. But IQ is an extremely accurate tool that successfully predicts many important outcomes. Ignoring its relevance in discussions of the performance gap may be one reason we have had so little success in closing the gap over the past 40 years.
Does this clarify? I said:
But that's different than saying that a child's IQ may be more likely to be higher or lower based on his her racial group. That's what I had hoped you would rule out.
Here's what I should have said:
But that's different than saying that a child may be more to inherit a higher or lower IQ based on his her racial group. That's what I had hoped you would rule out.
See my comment above, too, on environmental factors. The thread can get tangled.
Sorry, going a little comment crazy here as things occur to me.
First, I feel like I wasted your time with the lack of clarity in my first statement. I get what you're saying about the fact of IQ measurements. Yes, researchers have found that overall blacks have lower IQ than whites by one standard deviation. My comment is about ruling out a genetic explanation, and I *hope* (just as you hope that your points will "sink in") that this changes the way you read my response to Dave.
But this sticks out to me: "Admixtures apparently influence IQ. Not in ways designed to make anyone cheerful." What do you mean by admixtures? How do they influence IQ? I'm not being coy, I just want clarity.
Sam,
"Admixture" refers to the presence of more than one racial ancestry in a person or population. For example, most African Americans have some white ancestry -- I forget the exact number, but I think the estimate is that African Americans have something like 15% white ancestry, on average. That's admixture. As far as how this influences IQ, African Americans tend to have higher IQs on average than Africans. Some have speculated that this is because of African Americans' white admixture. Others have speculated that this is because of environment, e.g., a lack of micro-nutrients and other nutritional deficiencies prevalent in Africa.
A quick review of the lit says that at the beginning of Chapter 13 of The Bell Curve, the authors explicitly don't rule out enviornment as an explanation. Dave from Hackensack says that Flynn, whose book you recommend, favors an environmental explanation.
You aren't talking about the same thing. I never said that "environment" had been eliminated, but "culture", which you wrongly consider synonomous terms. This is what I mean when I talk about laymen vs. experts. The laymen seize on words they think they know and imagine things that probably aren't true.
When you say "environment", you mean things like books in the house, parents who provide appropriate mental stimulation, and a model for living in the modern society.
When experts say "environment", they are including being dropped on the head, encephalitis, and insufficient iodine, which leads to cretinism.
And even the aspects of "environment" that sit precariously on your side of the semantic wall have a discouragingly small influence on IQ. That is, if you take a low IQ infant from birth, one who would have lived in the most abject poverty, and put him in an incredibly wealthy family who has the resources for immediate medical care, the adult IQ of that baby might possibly be raised 4 IQ points--which experts consider to be "significant".
The dozens upon nearly hundreds of adoptions studies have shown time and again that even in the most extreme variant cases (very poor adopted by very rich or vice versa) that the adoptee's IQ is best predicted by the birth parents', not the adopted parents'.
Culture has largely been eliminated--that may be too strong a statement, but again, it would involve the semantic differences between experts and laypeople (and may involve my own misunderstanding, as I'm no expert).
"Environment"--which includes disastrous health outcomes--has an impact, but all available evidence says that the tiny health and nutrition benefits alone are pretty small. A wealthy family can go running to the doctor and get immediate treatment in the event that an infant gets encephalitis. That's included in "environment".
Environment hasn't been entirely ruled out, and certainly the ability of wealthy parents to provide expert care can make a difference in extreme cases. But no evidence has demonstrated that lots of books in the house and parents with good vocabularies makes much of a difference at all--much less equalizing IQs. Last I read, the entire category of environment (defined as experts do) accounts for 20% of the IQ difference. And when you consider how little of that refers to a wealthy environment with books and the like, it can get discouraging.
Eliminating poverty entirely would reduce the IQ gap between rich and poor, but all available evidence suggests it wouldn't be much.
On admixture--no one knows the extent to which (black) African IQs are influenced by poor nutrition, but it is true that they have far lower IQs than African Americans (average of 70). But blacks of mixed race (white and black) have, as a group, IQs between blacks and whites. I don't do as much reading on this, so can't speak to the current research.
Yes, researchers have found that overall blacks have lower IQ than whites by one standard deviation.
In an earlier post you quoted exactly that statement and said that it "raised people's ire"--that is, just making a factual statement makes people angry.
Apparently, one can't state facts unless one goes further and reassures you that the CAUSE of the facts isn't on the Big Bad List Of Verboten Subjects. But--as you've been told some ten times now--no one knows the CAUSE of the facts. So apparently just talking about the facts is forbidden unless one is to lie and say "But of course, it can't be genetic. It must be poverty!"
But that's different than saying that a child may be more to inherit a higher or lower IQ based on his her racial group.
I assume you mean "more likely". If I understand this, you are saying that there is something about being white that makes you more likely to inherit a high IQ from your parents, and something about being black that makes you more likely to inherit a low IQ? And if that's what you are saying, you pulled all that out of nowhere.
To the extent that IQ is inherited (if it is), we inherit from our parents, not our race.
A quick review of the lit says that at the beginning of Chapter 13 of The Bell Curve, the authors explicitly don't rule out enviornment as an explanation. Dave from Hackensack says that Flynn, whose book you recommend, favors an environmental explanation.
You aren't talking about the same thing. I never said that "environment" had been eliminated, but "culture", which you wrongly consider synonomous terms. This is what I mean when I talk about laymen vs. experts. The laymen seize on words they think they know and imagine things that probably aren't true.
When you say "environment", you mean things like books in the house, parents who provide appropriate mental stimulation, and a model for living in the modern society.
When experts say "environment", they are including being dropped on the head, encephalitis, and insufficient iodine, which leads to cretinism.
And even the aspects of "environment" that sit precariously on your side of the semantic wall have a discouragingly small influence on IQ. That is, if you take a low IQ infant from birth, one who would have lived in the most abject poverty, and put him in an incredibly wealthy family who has the resources for immediate medical care, the adult IQ of that baby might possibly be raised 4 IQ points--which experts consider to be "significant".
The dozens upon nearly hundreds of adoptions studies have shown time and again that even in the most extreme variant cases (very poor adopted by very rich or vice versa) that the adoptee's IQ is best predicted by the birth parents', not the adopted parents'.
Culture has largely been eliminated--that may be too strong a statement, but again, it would involve the semantic differences between experts and laypeople (and may involve my own misunderstanding, as I'm no expert).
"Environment"--which includes disastrous health outcomes--has an impact, but all available evidence says that the tiny health and nutrition benefits alone are pretty small. A wealthy family can go running to the doctor and get immediate treatment in the event that an infant gets encephalitis. That's included in "environment".
Environment hasn't been entirely ruled out, and certainly the ability of wealthy parents to provide expert care can make a difference in extreme cases. But no evidence has demonstrated that lots of books in the house and parents with good vocabularies makes much of a difference at all--much less equalizing IQs. Last I read, the entire category of environment (defined as experts do) accounts for 20% of the IQ difference. And when you consider how little of that refers to a wealthy environment with books and the like, it can get discouraging.
Eliminating poverty entirely would reduce the IQ gap between rich and poor, but all available evidence suggests it wouldn't be much.
On admixture--no one knows the extent to which (black) African IQs are influenced by poor nutrition, but it is true that they have far lower IQs than African Americans (average of 70). But blacks of mixed race (white and black) have, as a group, IQs between blacks and whites. I don't do as much reading on this, so can't speak to the current research.
Yes, researchers have found that overall blacks have lower IQ than whites by one standard deviation.
In an earlier post you quoted exactly that statement and said that it "raised people's ire"--that is, just making a factual statement makes people angry.
Apparently, one can't state facts unless one goes further and reassures you that the CAUSE of the facts isn't on the Big Bad List Of Verboten Subjects. But--as you've been told some ten times now--no one knows the CAUSE of the facts. So apparently just talking about the facts is forbidden unless one is to lie and say "But of course, it can't be genetic. It must be poverty!"
But that's different than saying that a child may be more to inherit a higher or lower IQ based on his her racial group.
I assume you mean "more likely". If I understand this, you are saying that there is something about being white that makes you more likely to inherit a high IQ from your parents, and something about being black that makes you more likely to inherit a low IQ? And if that's what you are saying, you pulled all that out of nowhere.
To the extent that IQ is inherited (if it is), we inherit from our parents, not our race.
Again, you've lost me. You said "environment." Look at your post, which I quoted. If I conflated anything, it was your use of environment with Dave's use of environment. It's the same word, but I can understand if you're saying that they were used in different contexts. More later.
This will be my last post on this thread. Dave and Cal, thanks for sticking in there with me. This has been swirling in my head through the weekend and today.
That said, Cal, I have found your way of communicating to me both insulting and condescending. I was skeptical of your arguments--and you did make arguments, from the beginning--but when I argued back, uou quickly got on your high horse. Yes, the facts you choose to present, and more importantly the manner and context within which you present them, can raise peoples' ire. That's a fact, too. You can ignore it, and continue to throw stones, but I doubt that you'll convince too many people of your position that way.
I am really astounded by the notion of admixture. It sounds like pseudoscience to me. What is racial ancestry? That term implies that there are such things as pure races somewhere in our past. So when we're talking about Africans, are Xhosa, Egyptian, and Senegalese roots all likely to have similar correllations to certain IQs? And what is Hispanic? Is Sammy Sosa a pure Hispanic, or does he have a certain degree of admixture? What about Alberto Toledo? Shakira? What race are Iranians? Saudis? Native Alaskans? I don't know where you got this stuff, but it scares me.
The language of admixture is a language of race that is outdated and backward. And since it is an essential element of any genetic argument about race, it's yet another reason to throw the genetic arguments out.
"To the extent that IQ is inherited (if it is), we inherit from our parents, not our race." But a genetic argument would say that one's race makes it more likely for a child to be born with a higher or lower IQ. I'm sorry you can't rule that out.
Here are a number of articles that argue that race has no genetic basis: http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/ These researchers claim to know at least one factor that cannot be listed among the cause of the facts you state, Cal.
Sam,
On the off chance you read this comment, it was nice corresponding with you. Re your last comment, if race didn't exist, we wouldn't be talking about on this blog, we wouldn't worry about racial discrimination, we wouldn't have seen the need for Civil Rights legislation or affirmative action policies, etc. It seems oddly inconsistent to acknowledge the existence of different races in all those contexts (while acknowledging the obvious point that overlap and mixing of different races isn't uncommon) and then all of a sudden say that race is a meaningless concept when it comes to IQ, academics, etc. It doesn't make sense logically, but I can see the motivation with respect to societal harmony. That is, I think, the tack that Mexico takes: everyone there is considered part of the same "cosmic race", even though the elites tend to be Caucasians, with mestizos and pure Indians at lower levels of society. If you are going to minimize the role of race in the public imagination, you have to stop having the government authorize preferences by race.
Thanks, Dave. I think there is a distinction between genetic definitions of race and the social construction of race. I don't believe that race does not exist, only that there is no genetic basis for it. I think this is in line with mainstream academic writing on the topic, and it is articulated in the Stuart Hall video.
Again, thank you.
Sam,
"I don't believe that race does not exist, only that there is no genetic basis for it."
This is contradicted by recent research, and for that matter, by the forensic methods used by police all the time. E.g., if someone says a rapist was white, cops don't say, "well, race is a social construct with no genetic basis, so there's no use in analyzing the genetic evidence the racist left behind".
I get your motivation, though, and as I suggested above, it may not be a bad idea, for societal harmony, to stop talking about race. But as long as we have race-based policies such as affirmative action, we'll keep talking about it. The only way to minimize discussions of race is to phase out institutionalized preferences based on race, and let the chips fall where they may. If we do that, there will still be black geniuses who rise to the top, and we can all take pride in their accomplishments. We don't need to keep score as far as how many geniuses come from what ethnic group.
I am not aware that forensics can identify the race of a rapist based on their DNA. I thought they asked for the race so they could get a profile of the suspect, and they looked at the DNA so that they could match it to a suspect's DNA. Two different processes at work. Correct me with some evidence if I'm wrong.
Look, I've seen Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson, etc., I'll call them black. I'm not denying that the categories are real or useful. I don't think you understand.
I don't know where you got this stuff, but it scares me.
See, this is why I am more than a tad dismissive of you. It amazes, sometimes, the ignorance of people who purport to opine on the subject. You don't know of admixture, you don't know "where I got it from", and you can't even be bothered to do a google or two.
Read up, puppy. Until then, stop thinking you know anything.
Have a good one.