Academic inferiority, its recognition and treatment
by tdaxp ~ February 19th, 2009
One of the reasons that No Child Left Behind is such a wonderful program is that it forces schools to recognize the poor performance of their black and hispanic students.
Before George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” Act, schools sweep their failure to teach black and hispanic students under the rug. The mandatory testing and requirement for continuous improvements forces schools to come to grip with the particularly awful education that this country provides for too many black and hispanic children, and deal with it.
The compassioniate way to fix the problem is to fix education, to do the hard work to make sure that black and hispanic children are prepared to learn.
The way popular among many school bureaucrats is to deny the problem.
To wit:
Unless you believe that African-American and Latino kids are somehow, as a group, academically inferior to white kids,” Welner said, “then you have to believe there are a lot of kids in those lower-track classes who have the potential for tremendous academic success.”
The way that African-American and Latino kids are somehow, as a group, ‘academically inferior is that schoold don’t educate them. What person believes that blacks and hispanics earn graduate degrees, earn undergradate degrees, or graduate high school at the same rate of whites? Who thinks that blacks and hispanics enter the 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd, or 1st grades, or kindergarten for that matter, with the same academic advantages as white children?
The context for the above quote is a story, courtesy of Half-Sigma titled “Higher learning: More middle-schoolers leapfrog into advanced classes — but are minorities being left behind?:”
For decades, high-school students have taken community-college courses to dress up their resumes and prepare for college.
Now, competitive middle-schoolers in Florida are flocking to sign up for high-school classes.
For parents and students, it’s a great chance to get ahead. And school districts have something else to brag about: seventh- and eighth-graders completing courses such as Algebra II Honors and biology that had been reserved primarily for ninth- and 10th-graders.
But the nation’s foremost scholars in middle-school education are worried the fast-growing trend is leaving minority children behind. They also question whether the practice is legal because, nationwide, it has tended to result in students being segregated by race.
In Florida, high-school-level classes at middle schools are filled mostly with white kids. That’s the case even at some schools where most of the kids are black or Hispanic, according to an Orlando Sentinel analysis of public records from the Florida Department of Education and school districts.
The trend has sparked a lively debate nationwide between those who say middle-school students aren’t ready to be treated like high-school students and those arguing that the brightest children shouldn’t be held back because minorities aren’t signing up for certain courses.
Some disparities in Central Florida this school year include:
*At Lee Middle School in Orlando, 93 percent of the kids who take high-school geometry and 77 percent who take Earth-Space science are white. Meanwhile, 29 percent of all Lee students are white.
Predictably, the leftists want to criminalize education, both to hold down high-performing kids and hide exposing the fact taht schools leave blacks and hispanics as the low performing kids:
Though officials at the federal Office of Civil Rights wouldn’t speculate about whether local schools have broken any rules, some of the country’s leading scholars say it could be just a matter of time before such disparities trigger an investigation.
George Bush was the greatest President for civil rights that America ever had. While other Presidents either ignored the issue or took the easy way out by puffing their chests and staging worthless shows of force, Bush recognized the crucial role that education plays. George Bush revolutionaized America’s educational system, creating the “No Child Left Behind” framework that forces schools to objective assess students and show continuous improvements.
While leftists, both in this article and elsewhere, want to make American education equally useless to everyone, those who care about our nation’s future want every student to be rigorously educated. Even if the first step in that process is recognizing that we fall short of that goal now.
The New York Times uses top 1% of income, not wealth. From the legend:...
February 19th, 2009 at 7:56 am
These people are so damn ignorant its appalling.
The dream of many minority parents whose relatively bright children are trapped in failing schools is for their child to get the kind of opportunity these children in Florida are getting. Who wants to be the bright star in a room of dark clouds?
I can relate to this personally because a number of black students in my graduating class were actually from the nearby city of High Point (whose schools then were horribly overcrowded and dens of crime, low-test scores and drugs) but attended my middle and high school because they lived with a retired nurse in our town. 11 of those 14 students were members of the Beta Club by 10th grade.
Of course, let us not let progress get in the way of political correctness and ideology.
February 19th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Are blacks and hispanics, as a group, intellectually inferior on average? Isn’t that a question science has answered?
February 19th, 2009 at 9:58 am
These are (for me) the telling quotes from the original Orlando Sentinel article:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/orl-middle1509feb15,0,7368875.story?page=1
“But many minorities aren’t choosing the high-school classes — a situation that should change as more kids learn about the program, said Dianne Lovett, the school district’s senior director for advanced studies.”
“Kevin G. Welner, a professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, said parent education is among the biggest deciding factors. The children of college-educated parents tend to look for tougher classes. Their parents are more likely to make sure their kids are doing work that will best prepare them for high school and college.
That means a lot of minority kids, whose parents are less likely to have gone to college and be involved, stay in the lower-level courses, said Welner, who just finished a paper on the subject. Often, black and Hispanic children remain in the lower classes in middle school and into high school.”
To say that minority middle school students are being unfairly denied placement in high school courses is false. To say that these courses aren’t being offered to all students is false.
Assuming the parents of the white children in the advanced classes are better educated and/or more involved that the parents of the minority students not in the advanced classes, then the problem here is apparently cultural, not discriminitory. Schools exist to teach and should do their best to offer the best education possible, but you can’t make students learn or parents care. They have to do that for themselves.
February 20th, 2009 at 6:56 am
Eddie,
Exactly.
Obama’s old church in Chicago argued against the adoption of ‘middle class values’ for just this reason, but on the other end: if you’re busy politically organizing a community, you don’t want to ‘decapitate’ that community by allowing the best and brightest to better themselves! [1]
sonofsamphm1c,
Yes. This is true whether you are looking at working memory capacity (IQ – fluid intelligence), learned knowledge base (crystalized intelligence), time-preference, etc.
The reasons for thsi are debated, but one easy way to see it is to go to the GSS [2], enter ‘RACE’ in the row field and ‘WORDSUM’ in the column field
Arherring,
A critical point.
While the article discusses race, probably the bigger issue is socioeconomic status. Those who come from homes where they are not nurtured, not well fed, not read to, not given to understand that education is important, not expected to do well, etc., both will do worse and be less motivated to do better. [3]
[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2008/07/08/decapitating.html
[2] http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss06
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status
February 20th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
This is what I don’t get. If a neighborhood school is 90% black and hispanic, then how can expecting that school to perform on average on the same test like a neighborhood school that is, say, 90% Asian, be reasonable? Or, for that matter, 90% white?
February 21st, 2009 at 5:07 am
The short answer: work.
Knowledge-training is like strength-training: exercise matters. Some people have biologies that allow them to bulk up easy, stretch easier, or run easier. These people have an advantage in athletics. So if you’re a weakling and want to be able to fight, what do you do? Start exercising your body.
The same goes for education. Some people have biologies that allow them to learn faster, with less effort. These people have an advantage in academics. So if you’re less sharp and want to be able to do well, what to do you? Start exercising your mind.
The correlation between IQ and success goes down with academic level. One reason is that as you specialize, what really matters is (a) doing the work and (b) knowing your topic. With a ‘mental exercise’ program, (a) comes naturally and (b) comes as a result.
Hard work matters.
February 21st, 2009 at 4:28 pm
“. . . if you’re busy politically organizing a community, you don’t want to ‘decapitate’ that community by allowing the best and brightest to better themselves!”
Sad thing about that sort of attitude? It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You assume that the best and brightest won’t want to return if given a chance to leave, so you force them to stay . . . making them feel trapped and want to leave.
But if you let them leave and pursue their dreams, at least some of them will be drawn to return anyway by emotional attachments; such individuals would bring with them more knowledge, skill and experience with them to apply to the task of becoming the next generation of leaders.
February 22nd, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Michael,
Something like your strategy is being conducted by India, which gives emigrants an equivalent of a green card when they take up citizenship in the United States or another country.
Of course, India is a large country… wrt race, if the top 10% of blacks were allowed to culturally integrate, even if 1% did not do so, that’s still a large loss that might not be recoverable.
February 27th, 2009 at 12:22 am
The NCLB is good in a sense that all schools provide quality education for everyone.
But education goes both ways. Students should want to learn too. And motivation to succeed boils down to motivation and having a sense of purpose. Learning the proper outlook begins at home. Until families start bonding the way they should, children will always get left behind.
February 27th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Tony,
Thanks for the comment.
Your comment raises two important points, on the need to increase motivation and the need to increase home environment for students.
Motivation can be altered by working on self-efficacy [1], whcih (because it involves hard work and achievement, as opposed to worse-than-loses self-esteem building exercises) is unpopular with many leftist school activists. NCLB helps in this. [1]
Improving home environment is much harder, of course. [2]
[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2009/02/20/self-efficacy-not-self-esteem.html
[2] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2009/02/12/the-future-of-modifying-our-genes-to-improve-our-health.html
February 27th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
“Of course, India is a large country… wrt race, if the top 10% of blacks were allowed to culturally integrate, even if 1% did not do so, that’s still a large loss that might not be recoverable.”
Yes and no. India is a large country, but it had to send people to other continents to pursue their dreams. This would rarely be required by poor American communities, so maintaining emotional ties- and being compelled by those ties- would seem to be easier.
Until I can find data on the rate of return for people who leave such communities, though, this is pure speculation on my part:P