Leaving aside race and IQ (and that last post comes quite a bit closer than I am comfortable with to touching the subject with the proverbial ten-foot pole), IQ matters for social policy. We do need to know whether g, the general intelligence factor that IQ is supposed to measure exists, how much of it is simply genetic, and how much more of it consists of environmental factors that we can reasonably change.
Because, assuming that it exists, but that the biggest problem for low-income children is environment, I don't know what sort of policy interventions this reasonably implies. Contrary to the glowing paeans to early childhood interventions that I frequently hear when I talk about schools, as far as I know the gold standard of early childhood interventions was the Perry Preschool Project, and intensive preschool program for three and four year old children run in the 1960s. The results, while admirable, were extremely expensive (contra that website, I calculate, using the Rand results, that the cost per child was about $18,500 per year in today's dollars). This bought lower poverty rates, less teen pregnancy, and lower incarceration rates. But it helped establish the kids in the bottom tier of the working class, with median incomes in the range of $20K. It did not come close to bridging the gap between those kids and the world of the middle class.
Even earlier interventions might help somewhat, but the earlier you go, the more problematic such interventions become. The younger the kids are, the more individual attention they require, which is why preschool is more expensive than fifth grade. Even if you're willing to pay for it, where are you going to find these millions of highly qualified early childhood experts to become, in effect, the surrogate parents to these children?
Not that I'm against trying--early childhood intervention seems to me, like schooling in general, to be one of those goods that society has an obligation to provide children if their parents are incapable. But as I've written before, good early childhood programs have enormous scale problems; I'm not sure how we overcome them.
The most obvious policy implication of the problems caused on average by lower IQ individuals is:
Stop letting illegal immigration make the problem worse.
Let's make like Canada: keep out illegal immigrants and choose legal ones (in part) because they show signs of being smart, honest, and hard-working.
"How to Help the Left Half of the Bell Curve"
That's the name of the five part series I wrote seven years ago for VDARE.com:
http://www.isteve.com/How_to_Help_the_Left_Half_of_the_Bell_Curve.htm
Since then, I haven't seen much interest at all among people on the right half of the bell curve in helping people on the left half of the bell curve.
@Steve:
Yes, the problem with the education of inner-city non-white children is *clearly* illegal immigration. That was sarcasm. The issue of blaming all of our problems on "them" resembles much of the political discourse in 1930s Germany.
One thing nobody is saying is: maybe IQ is a bogus measure.
The most obvious implication is that our culture needs to stop inculcating the "Yale or Jail" mentality in youth with two digit IQs. We need to de-emphasize going to college, and re-emphasize the idea that if you work hard, save your money, and stay out of jail, you'll then be able to afford to get married, buy a house somewhere, and have kids someday -- even without being smart enough to graduate from college.
John Gardner of the Milwaukee School Board told me in a 2001 interview:
A: The entire "Educartel" is focused, almost exclusively, on getting students into four-year colleges.
Here are the reasons for this, in priority order:
1. The people who run the Educartel are all, by definition, four-year college grads, and believe that is the path to success and productivity. They are also, increasingly, from families, neighborhoods, and affiliations ever more distanced from working class high-wage productivity, such as construction workers, toolmakers, and line electricians.
2. The only way the Educartel can imagine doing anything else is reverting to old "voc/tech" programs. These are accurately remembered as a dismal failure in their dying decades of the late '70's through '90's, and no one seriously wants to bring them back in that state. They were also very expensive, compared to the capital outlay for classroom chairs, desks, and blackboard. In eras of tightening educational financial margins, often miscalled "cuts" or "decreases," spending comparatively more money per student for vaguely remembered failed programs does not get anyone's support.
3. Powerful skilled labor unions, especially construction and heavy manufacturing, used to support voc/tech programs. They supplied political muscle in a very effective labor-management alliance that crossed general partisan and ideological boundaries. Private-sector labor unions have lost their membership and clout as construction and heavy industry have found ways to reduce labor membership and power. The combination of off-shoring, out-sourcing, mechanizing and cybernizing has also reduced employers' need and support for domestic high skilled labor.
4. Four-year colleges are voracious recruiters, and offer increasingly attractive spaces in both public and private sectors. The oversupply of four-year colleges, even after the late '70's-early '80's shake-out, gives college counselors an easy out for their seniors, including their least academically ambitious or capable seniors: "Go to college."
5. Power brokers and powerful leaders put this dilemma pretty low on their priorities. The kids getting messed over by Educartel failure lack political support. They are minority, poor, and concentrated in low-votership districts.
6. The legislators and civic leaders representing them have bought into the go-to-college mania.
7. No one's really showed a cost-effective alternative.
In addition, the Educartel has done a magnificent job, in collusion with colleges and universities, of selling the notions that four-year college works. No one but the Army even tries competing with that message, and you may notice that much of the military's advertising appeal is improving chances for college.
http://www.isteve.com/2002_QA_John_Gardner.htm
In a fine example of the thoughtful discourse we so often see on this topic, Nelson sneers:
"Yes, the problem with the education of inner-city non-white children is *clearly* illegal immigration. That was sarcasm. The issue of blaming all of our problems on "them" resembles much of the political discourse in 1930s Germany."
Look, there are now more Hispanic children than African-American children in America. In effect, through immigration policy, we've about doubled the size of the problem of "the education of inner-city non-white children" since the 1960s.
Largely because of illegal immigration, California, where America's demographic future is already here, has now fallen almost to the bottom of the 50 state rankings on the federal government's NAEP school achievement tests.
We haven't figured out how to solve the problem, so can we at least stop making it worse by not letting in more unskilled foreigners?
The solution is better education, not reducing the number of children you want educated.
Here's a real solution: We should fund schools at the National level so education funding isn't determined by how expensive the houses in the neighborhood are. Moreover the funding should be in the form of vouchers that can be used for public *or* private schools so that parents can choose among competing schools rather than be forced to send their kids to the only one available regardless of quality.
McCardle wrote: "The results, while admirable, were extremely expensive (contra that website, I calculate, using the Rand results, that the cost per child was about $18,500 per year in today's dollars). This bought lower poverty rates, less teen pregnancy, and lower incarceration rates. But it helped establish the kids in the bottom tier of the working class, with median incomes in the range of $20K. It did not come close to bridging the gap between those kids and the world of the middle class."
Did you adjust those incomes for inflation as well as the cost of the program? If not, then you've demonstrated a sort of bias (over-emphasing the cost but not the benefit by placing both in current dollars).
Also, have you consider the savings because the people who passed through that program as less dependent on social services and the criminal justice system?
It sounds like the program worked very well if you ask me. What would we find from IQ/Race studies that would change our approach? That's what I'd like to know. Not a single person has told me what they would change. (And let's please forget all the nonsense about immigration letting in low IQ people--hasn't that already been argued with the Irish, the Polish, the Jews, and everyone else who wasn't strict Caucasian. Enough of that.)
Sailer, the use of the term "educartel" gives you the charmingly earnest air of a one-world conspiracy theorist, and I find it amusing that you're still spamming the Atlantic with the same interview you've pasted at Matt's place on multiple occasions.
But...
There is definitely something to be said for the point Gardner makes. We have increasingly attempted, as a nation, to pretend that everyone is capable of earning a college education and settling down with a nice white-collar job. This is wishful thinking at best.
We don't even need to bring race into the conversation to note that 50% of children will always be below average, and many of them will get left behind in a four-year college. Or to note that a society where every child feels entitled to a college degree and a white collar job is going to have some combination of the following features: declining academic standards, a lot of frustrated young adults, and a lot of blue collar jobs that only immigrants want to fill.
I'm never going to believe that some generic intelligence quotient defines children's potential at the moment of conception. I've met too many late bloomers who were written off as dumb kids before they suddenly found something that INTERESTED them. But any test is going to have a high score, a medium score, and a low score. The kids who consistently get low scores need career options that don't involve sitting in a bigger classroom and taking harder tests.
It would be nice if people like Sailer would stop obsessing about racial disparities in skull volume, and stick to talking about this stuff, because this stuff matters and talking about in terms of race just short-circuits the conversation. We need to seriously discuss the fact that some children will be left behind when our entire socioeconomic system is designed to put kids either in college, in dead-end low-wage jobs, or in jail. And we'd get a lot further if people would stop waving the bloody shirts of segregation in the air and start seriously questioning the false assumptions in our school systems.
MM wrote: The results, while admirable, were extremely expensive (contra that website, I calculate, using the Rand results, that the cost per child was about $18,500 per year in today's dollars). This bought lower poverty rates, less teen pregnancy, and lower incarceration rates. But it helped establish the kids in the bottom tier of the working class, with median incomes in the range of $20K. It did not come close to bridging the gap between those kids and the world of the middle class.
Assuming the $20k is also inflation adjusted...why is this a bad thing? Is there *any* social policy that can vault a long-standing underclass squarely into middle class in one generation? A step-wise approach is far more practical and fare more likely to succeed over several generations.
The last figure I heard for incarceration in the US pegged the average cost at something like $50k/person/year. An additional $20k education outlay, and perhaps $10k/year in welfare-related subsidies, is a bargain by comparison if it actually works. Certainly better that, than to have some guy rotting away in jail while five single mothers raise his offspring who will, in all probability, continue the cycle.
General Specific, those are inflation adjusted figures at least through the 1990s; adjusting to today might push them up a little, but it wouldn't significantly vary the results, which is that they're still stuck in the bottom one or two income quintiles.
The solution is obviously not insisting that everyone learn "everything" and then progressively reducing the scope of "everything" until everyone can learn the redefined "everything". We have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that that approach does not provide the desired results.
The objective of education should be to assist all students in learning as much as each of them is capable of learning. That means that all outcomes are not and cannot be the same. However, it does mean that all outcomes are individually optimal; and, thus, that the societal outcome is optimal based on the inputs provided.
The objective of social policy should be to assure the opportunity for intellectual development, regardless of race, national origin or social status. However, I fail to see how this can be accomplished when parents and the local community don't support and encourage intellectual development.
LaFollette correctly notes: "We don't even need to bring race into the conversation to note that 50% of children will always be below average,"
Right. And, in say, Finland or South Korea, they structure their educational systems around this simple truth, and have more effective systems.
In America, however, what happens is that 80-90% of the African-Americans 70-80% of the Hispanics wind up below average. This causes a huge outcry from the various ethnic and liberal lobbies that the test or the educational system is biased against blacks and Hispanics, so this simple truth that we don't live in Lake Wobegon where all the children are above average falls under the No Fly Zone of things that can kill your career if you publicly discuss them in too much detail.
Thus, the biggest piece of domestic legislation of the decade, the NCLB, is premised fundamentally on the assumption that we _do_ live in Lake Wobegon and that _all_ students can be above average ("proficient") by 2014.
So, do you now see how the process of intermittently crushing people like James Watson and Larry Summers fundamentally degrades public discourse about policy in America?
Megan,
Putting aside the issue of comfort regarding the empirical study of race and IQ, I must ask you about something you touched on in your previous post, and due to its policy implications, relates to this one. Whenever the issue of testing and national scores is raised, especially in the political arena, and especially when used for comparison with other nations, we frequently hear of the scores for Math and Science. In fact Math and Science seem to be used as the barometers in the educational sphere for the very strength of a child's education, as if Math and Science skills were the end all and be all indicator of a proper and comprehensive education. Whenever these commentators bandy about claims of academic deficiency, there is no discussion of a mean score of verbal and math, nor is there even an explanation as to the obsession with the quantitative disciplines. I myself was a terrible math student, mediocre in science, yet I was a straight A in English and History, with an IQ of 149. I would have, no doubt, been a contributing factor in bringing our nation's test scores down, yet I do not consider my education lacking. I consider that I, like many, have an inherent weakness in math, while possessing a strength in humanities.
I have some suspicion that the significance of math and science in test scores in terms of national placement has something to do with how well a generation might fare in solving future monetary or economic tasks. It may also be an indicator of the skill a certain child might have in problem solving. But to ignore an entire area of education that is just as important to the intellectual development of a human mind in evaluating the quality of a nation's education system is not only poor policy management, it also shows how much we neglect the importance of the creative impulse of individuals in lieu of their value as simple parts of a whole who might some day contribute a quantifiable percentage.
And just for the record ... I DO support some form of vouchers. This is not a passive aggressive argument for the merits of government education.
I am an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, now in Arlington, VA, so here is what I know about IQ, relevant to your post.
First, intelligence, as people customarily think about it, is not a unitary entity, but is multiple, multidimensional, so a single number is not adequate to express it. But for most schooling as now arranged, IQ is a very useful measure, because schooling concentrates on the symbolic (verbal, numerical) things that IQ tests measure. The question is whether we should change the schooling (which is inevitable, given the internet, in my opinion, having been a DARPA grantee on the subject) or change the testing .
Second, chasing the environment vs heredity idea is doomed to failure, because 'heritability' is a measure of the percent of variance accounted for by genes, and that depends crucially on how much other variance is environmental, so if we had a society in which everyone had an equally good environment, then 100% percent of the variance would be genes (because, by the assumption above, there is no variance due to environment) not exactly what those wanting to equalize environments have in mind.
As far as social policy, what we want is to allow to happen all the different kinds of intelligence, including ones we don't even know about yet, and ones we don't know how to test yet. Which is more or less what is happening in developed societies.
Peter - Focusing on math and science probably is politically safer. It guards against those ever-willing to blame all test score discrepancies on racism or ethnocentrism.
The question then becomes; how well do institutional changes which improve math and science correlate with improvements in other subjects.
Les - One thing nobody is saying is: maybe IQ is a bogus measure.
Considering that Blacks score differently than whites, on average, you can be sure that a LOT of people are saying this.
Not many people are providing alternatives which are more predictive of success, though. If you know one, I'm all ears.
Fair enough Ryan ... I suppose. I think what really frustrated me was the failure of anyone to even mention as a preface the reason for this bias. The omission and the resulting silence in terms of questioning it made me feel insane.
In response to your second point, an interesting one indeed ... I think that if we were to hypothetically improve math and science scores, we would raise the bar for academic achievement. The position of the bar, raised as it may be, ceases to impress and our attention, rather than centering on the leveled playing field of math and science, falls towards that of the humanities. I imagine that attention towards student achievements in literature for instance, might draw considerable controversy for the same reason Harold Bloom's work aroused such ire. After all, if a young inner city African American has no felt connection to the world of the white man as a result of his economic and cultural situation, how is he to be expected to relate to Nathaniel Hawthorn sufficiently enough to write an essay analyzing his themes and style.
To this I must say two things. First, I grew up in the same lower class world many of my black peers did, and while I cannot claim nearly the same experiences they did as a member of that race, I can neither claim any more connection to Nathaniel Hawthorn or any other so-called "dead white males" until I was taught them in class. As teenagers in urban environments, and many of us coming from ethnic minorities, as I myself did, we soon learn that any kind of upward mobility comes very much from assimilation. For some it is admittedly easier than for others. However, joining the global community depends on engaging with the modes which we are offered enabling us to do so. Encouraging the inclusive ghetto mentality that characterizes so much of the lambasting of the western academic cannon is counterproductive to the very community values that these so-called "multi-culturalists" claim to espouse.
Ed Reid correctly says:
"The objective of education should be to assist all students in learning as much as each of them is capable of learning."
But, in the U.S., the official objective of the NCLB is _not_ to allow each student to come closer to fulfilling his or her individual potential. No, the mandate is to Narrow The Gaps between the races.
But, we don't know how to raise the achievement of NAMs (Non-Asian Minorities) without also raising the achievement of Whites and Asians, which does nothing to Narrow the Gaps. So, steps that are good for everybody are given less priority than fads that promise to Narrow the Gaps but turn out to be yet another waste of time and money.
So, I come back to reiterate the first law of sensible behavior: when you find you're digging a hole for yourself, stop digging. Letting in huge numbers of illegal immigrants with fifth grade educations is just exacerbating a problem that we don't know how to solve, and, by enlarging the NAM voting bloc, creating ever more political pressure
for more destructive policy responses.
Steve:
1. No one here (i.e. on this board) think it's a good idea to have more illegal immigration. While they may argue with you at the edges, I don't think we'll have people who think that it's a good idea.
2. No one here thinks NCLB is a really, really great idea. At most, people think that it was (like most Bush-era ideas) interesting and ideal, but poorly conceived and executed.
Please, quit harping on these two red herrings.
But, we don't know how to raise the achievement of NAMs (Non-Asian Minorities) without also raising the achievement of Whites and Asians, which does nothing to Narrow the Gaps. - Sailer
Your math is wrong. Raise the achievement scores of the poor without raising those of the rich. Even if the racial gap within each wealth stratum remains identical, the overall racial gap will fall, because black and hispanic people are more likely to be poor.
the assumption that we _do_ live in Lake Wobegon and that _all_ students can be above average ("proficient") - Sailer
For many skills, there is little meaning to "average" or "above average". Reading, for instance: past a certain level, you can either read or you can't. You can have a society in which 95% of citizens meet the top meaningful literacy scores. (A few people will be able to read a page in 20 seconds, but that's just freak talent.) Addition and multiplication: you can either do it or you can't. It's not important whether you can figure huge, complex sums in your head. On these kinds of basic skills, it is perfectly logical, indeed it is critical, that we demand that all of our students become "proficient".
"Proficient" is a term of art in ed-speak. There are five categories, roughly equivalent to A through F grades:
Advanced
Proficient
Basic
Below Basic
Far Below Basic
(Sometimes the latter two are clumped together).
The NCLB demands that every single student in the U.S. at every grade level be Proficient -- i.e., above average. Currently on the federal NAEP, typically only 27-30% score Proficient or Advanced.
The Kennedy-Bush NCLB is hardly unique -- it is simply the most widely known example of the kind of dysfunctional thinking pervasively afflicting our educational system because of the huge mental No Fly Zone around racial differences in IQ.
How does this address the point? Are these categories explicitly supposed to be assessed in terms of a curve? If not, what is the contradiction in believing that everyone should be "proficient" in, say, reading? The distinction between "basic" and "proficient" reading skills seems common-sense enough, and I don't believe that it reflects some kind of subconscious averaging. In math, the distinction is even more clear. You would at a minimum need to demonstrate why you think our vision of "basic" reflects a subconscious average, rather than a reasonably objective definition.
Charles Dickens: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery."
To Do: spend much more time teaching personal finance to children who can add and subtract. This subject is way more important than "Literature". The "biggest problem for low-income children" is that they're about to start leveraging their future paychecks at "The Money Tree" (at hilarious interest rates) and using credit to buy big, stupid toys instead of to buy an income stream.
Steve: Please point to an independent source that supports your assertion that "proficient" has a legal definition in NCLB? It appears from my reading that no one knows what 'proficient' means.
In addition, don't you think this flaw in NCLB would have been harped upon by its opponents or is this yet another example of IQ-taboo?
N.B. Steve, your habit of giving cute names to everything (Iraq Attaq, No-Fly-Zone, itw-itw-ihttw) is annoying and not-so-cute whimsical.
@klug
After googling "proficient NCLB", I was able to find this:
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/downloads/teachers/WhatsProficient.pdf
I don't think Sailer ever asserted a "legal" definition (that's a pretty high standard for blog don't you think?), but the above teacher's union article, after complaining about varying state standards of proficient creating confusion does say this on the top of page 10:
It would not be unreasonable to think that the proficiency levels on NAEP represent a standard of achievement that is more commonly associated with fairly advanced students. But if NAEP is
NCLB’s “check” on the states, then NAEP proficiency levels are what all fourth-, eighth-, and 12th-graders are expected to achieve by 2014.
I have seen many complaints that NCLB sets unrealistic expectations, just because you haven't seen the harping doesn't mean it exists.
As for IQ and Policy, one way improve the average environment for *future* children would be to restore the social taboo and end the fiscal subsidy of unwed motherhood. Many women who are horrible mothers when they are single and 16, would make adequate mothers at 23 and married. And the men need all the time they can get to get their act together.
benp: Thanks for the interesting link. I've heard plenty of NCLB harping, but "everyone above average" is unique to Sailer, it seems.
Dear Klug:
A report prepared for the Campaign for Educational Equity by Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder sums up the absurdity of NCLB in its title: "'Proficiency for All' – An Oxymoron." They point out:
"In its administration of NCLB, the U.S. Department of Education barely acknowledges this human variability. … Under NCLB, children with I.Q.s as low as 65 must achieve a standard of proficiency in math which is higher than that achieved by 60 percent of students in Taiwan, the highest scoring country in the world (in math), and a standard of proficiency in reading which is higher than that achieved by 65 percent of students in Sweden, the highest scoring country in the world (in reading)."
http://www.epi.org/webfeatures/viewpoints/rothstein_20061114.pdf
The essential insanity of NCLB was perhaps more or less "unique" to me and a small group of other people for the first few years, but it's now more widely understood. The reason the Democrats and Republicans got together and, with the praise of the media, passed a law in 2001 that makes absolutely no sense was because if you want to think sensibly about educational achievement, you have to think in terms of bell curves. And thinking about the bell curve makes you an evil person, so most people just won't do it.
"Raise the achievement scores of the poor without raising those of the rich."
It would be easier to just take all the money from the rich, seeing that equality is the ideal, right?
I eagerly await the next NFL season, where we add weights to the uniforms of the faster players to equalize team speed. It's only fair.
There is a point that Steve Sailor makes that has gotten lost in the shuffle, I think. He is correct in saying that children are pushed, in many ways unreasonably, into a college or nothing track. As a business owner, I used to speak to at-risk kids in inner-city Philly about what they wanted to do after high school. The audience was always high-academic kids from poverty level homes. Every child was being pushed to go to college and all indicated they wanted to be lawyers in order to "give back to society". Not one of them knew what a lawyer did, how long it would take to get a degree nor how little money they would make by getting a second rate law degree. They were told that this was the ONLY path to success.
The last time I was asked to speak I was on a panel, all educators but me, to 200 kids in the program. I spoke last. My statement was very straightforward- "The average car salesman in the region makes 70k and the highest paid makes 250k. None have a degree. They have drive, ambition and the ability to relate to and communicate with all types of people. There are thousands of jobs like that where a degree is not needed. A skilled machinist can make 80k easily and a degree is not needed. Explore other options. " I was never asked to speak again.
We need a return to skilled apprentices to stop this mindless march to meaningless Bachelor degrees.
It seems rather self-evident to me that it does not - at least as a single linear metric.
At the very least, we would need to chop it into several components. "Creativity", which is already a pretty broad brush - inventing the iPod probably doesn't involve the same mental circuitry as Beethoven writing a symphony, is obviously a separate trait from "Pattern Recognition". I plucked those two traits somewhat randomly, but I'm sure if you sat down a bunch of cognitive science experts with a bunch of teaching experts, after a few months of yelling at each other they could come up with something significantly better than what we have now. I'm picturing something vaguely like Myers-Brigg personality typing, where it's four scales, not one.
I've known several people who, at one particular type of thinking, could vastly outperform other people thought to be "smarter". I suspect all the readers here have similar experiences somewhere in their pasts or presents. It does not seem novel or controversial to me that there are different categories of mental proficiency, and that not all humans can be linearly ranked in "smartness".
I'm not saying "don't try to measure intelligence", but the measuring stick we have now is so rudimentary as to be nearly useless. We can do better.
My wife is a teacher and I've noticed from talking to her that they are under pressure to get students to achieve good scores on the standardized tests OR have them categorized as "resource", meaning they are mentally handicapped, learning disabled, or somehow otherwise impaired. The resource kids don't affect the school's rating the same way that non-resource kids do. So by setting high standards, schools are under pressure to either meet them standards or get the kids declared officially defective.
As far as "intelligence" goes, regardless of what seems logical or makes sense, my understanding is that there is a general intelligence factor that is measured by IQ tests that is the best predictor of performance in school and work. It's not perfect but better than any other measure. This correlation must mean something... The military has gotten quite good at measuring "intelligence" in a meaningful way (a way that predicts ability to perform in a variety of tasks). Certainly some individuals will be better or worse at specific tasks and that should be taken into account. But general intelligence is not a useless or meaningless measure.
One issue with interventions to help young children is going to be parental interference. Parents will need to be a part of any program to help young children and, unfortunately, not all parents understand the need for or care about education.
EI
I think MM has come out for increased illegal immigration in the past and has said nice things about NCLB, so I don't think Sailer is too off topic bringing those things up.
To echo an earlier point, as long as you are not grading on a curve, why can't 80% of students be to taught to read proficiently? There are very few Micheal Phelps around but almost every American can swim or be taught to swim proficiently.
The culture of some places in this country makes it very hard for those who live there to make good choices. Unfortunately it is very hard to change a culture. I remember reading about how a Catholic bishop was able to remake Irish-American culture to be more healthy about a hundred and twenty years ago, but the power of organized religion is much less now, so that is probably not replicable. I think the only solution is better policing and continued economic growth, so that those who work hard and play by the rules can be seen to prosper while those who choose crime or indolence can be seen to fail. If this happens, eventually the culture will change.
reduxredo
It is not the school's place, unless of course it is a school which specializes in or offers an elective course in such, to instruct children how to handle their future finances. This is a matter of personal responsibility and values, and is the province of parents in the home. I feel that efforts to shove this into curriculums, often times at the expense of other programs, in an effort to solve a perceived problem with credit debt is nothing short of social engineering.
For the record I also do not believe in the teaching of ethics in school either for the same reason.
EI-
I thought Cosma Shalizi effectively debunked the idea that 'g' has any statistical meaning, and effectively tells us nothing.
The fact that IQ tests are a effective predictor of future success tells us nothing about genetics. There is a mountain of evidence that IQ tests do not measure simply the innate capabilities of a person, but rather, their educational level (much like SAT's and GRE's). This is why IQ can change, why there is a convergence between black and white IQ scores, why the Japanese ethnic minority group, the Burakumin, score worse on IQ tests than the majority Japanese people, despite being the same 'race'.
Aside from every issue raised, there is a profound disconnect in the black community about the details of how the world functions.
Often enough, among blacks and those teaching them, you hear the mantra "If you don't know your past, you don't know future".
This intense focus on "blackness" and black history (and often dubious versions of it) does not help in a modern world where the focus should be on success or process, and regardless of ethnicity.
There are a lot of details about how things function that blacks don't have, and that lack of information informs how they make their daily decisions and their perception of the levels of racism in the world.
If you take a man even with a high IQ and put him in the middle of game with rules he is unaware of, he will flounder or look for ways to shortcurcuit the process.
So along with everything else (how schools are funded, de-emphasis on college, addressing single motherhood, better assessment methods, better education delivery methods, better healthcare), we really need to profoundly change the content of what is taught to blacks.
No black child (or any child) should come out of school not knowing how banks function, or how capitalism works, or what steps to take if you want to be a Ben Carson, Ken Chenault, James Simons or local bus driver.
"This intense focus on "blackness" and black history (and often dubious versions of it) does not help in a modern world where the focus should be on success or process, and regardless of ethnicity."
Same with a Jewish identity... oh wait.
Who let the left end in?
And let's please forget all the nonsense about immigration letting in low IQ people--hasn't that already been argued with the Irish, the Polish, the Jews, and everyone else who wasn't strict Caucasian. Enough of that.
The "low IQ" thing keeps coming up, but it's bogus. The tests referred to were biased tests (from the early years of IQ testing) given to recent immigrants in the 'teens and 20s, few of whom spoke English and many of whom had no idea what the purpose of the tests was. Those tests (I've seen them) were about cultural information as much as "IQ" information, and would have been incomprehensible to a non-English-speaking recent immigrant.
I suspect that less-biased tests given in their home countries in their native language would have shown them to have much higher IQs.
I have no idea if the tests of Mexicans referred to earlier (IQ of 89) were given in Mexico, in Spanish, or in the US, in English, and when they were given.
Sailer: "So, do you now see how the process of intermittently crushing people like James Watson and Larry Summers fundamentally degrades public discourse about policy in America?"
Will you ever see that insulting large swaths of the population fundamentally degrades the public discourse and short-circuits the process of education reform? People are not walking manifestations of median test scores for census-defined race categories.
I do think Watson deserved to be criticized for the legitimately bigoted comment he made... "anyone who's worked with black people knows..."
But no, I'm not a fan of the "crushing" process. I don't think the vindictive response to these sort of statements is useful.
However, the flip side of your question is why an educated adult who lives in the United States would think it's more "bold" and "heroic" to deliberately provoke such a response than to work on the areas where there is a genuine chance of building a consensus for change. Namely, the lack of opportunities available for those who aren't proficient at our standardized tests. Because that is your goal, right? You want us to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't primarily motivated by racial animus, right?
The fundamentally fallacy in NCLB, the idea that every child can be "proficient," would be fallacious in an all-white society as well.
Backlash politics have their very own special, self-aggrandizing form of political correctness. You're just picking at scabs. No good can possibly come of it.
"The fundamental fallacy in NCLB, the idea that every child can be "proficient," would be fallacious in an all-white society as well."
I'm glad somebody said it. The idea behind NCLB is one born from social engineering. It is a utopian conceit that is progressive at its core, despite incidentally being implemented during a so-called neoconservative administration.
We must be willing to admit, for it is one of the very foundations of our society, that some individuals are exceptional. Achievement only stands out if we drop the idea that we must homogenize our community. And lest we forget that great progress springs forth from the minds of such exceptional minds, we mustn't seek to create equality where equality does not exist naturally, and more importantly, where diversity should be recognized. This is not to say that we shouldn't seek to provide a good education for those who would otherwise not have as much, but rather remember that, as a wise cattle-rancher once said to me ... "There ain't no cure for stupid."
"The fundamental fallacy in NCLB, the idea that every child can be "proficient," would be fallacious in an all-white society as well."
Exactly.
They don't have insane laws in Finland or South Korea. Nor do they have NCLB in Canada, where the immigration policy tends to choose high achieving immigrants and keeps out illegal immigrants, so there are not major IQ differences between large racial groups.
But, we in the U.S. have stupid policies like NCLB in large part because our racial IQ gap creates this vast No Fly Zone around hard-headed thinking about education.
What can we do about it? Not all that much, but two obvious steps to slow down the rate at which our thinking about education becomes ever more ruined by political correctness are:
First, stop firing heretics like James Watson.
Second, stop making the problem worse by importing huge numbers of low IQ illegal aliens.
LaFollette,
We need to know what causes the differences in standardized test scores between different groups, including racial groups, in order formulate a proper policy response, if there is to be one. The tendency of so many "progressives" to shout "racism!" any time the possibility is raised that genetic as well as environmental factors may account for such differences is not helpful to this goal.
The hypothesis that reprodutively-isolated human populations evolved significant differences in cognitive abilities as well as in anatomical features, skin color, vulnerability to particular diseases, and other biological traits, is not obviously false and deserves to be investigated scientifically, not shouted down.
jbb wrote: "The average car salesman in the region makes 70k and the highest paid makes 250k. None have a degree. They have drive, ambition and the ability to relate to and communicate with all types of people."
While I respect the point you were attempting to make, this strikes me as just about the worst example possible. The average car salesman job-hobs 2-6 times per year and blows large quantities of that income to fund a substance abuse problem.
The money is certainly good, but save for the very few who possess both the salesman skillset and a measure of well-honed self discipline, it often leads to a very unstable lifestyle with overtly destructive tendencies.
Oh anonymouse,
It's comments like that one that let me know that teetotalers and moral pugilists of a 19th century ilk still exist. Where on Earth do you find such dubious statistics enabling you to broadly posit the depravity of the lower-class affluent? Bad personal spending coupled with a dionysian lifestyle is nothing new, and for that matter neither is puritanical scolding of such. What I suspect is truly at the heart of this need to monitor the credit abuses of the imprudent is the iniquity of the Federal Reserve system that creates the problem. I suggest that instead of attempting to wag the dog by forcing people to spend better by teaching it in school, we might admit that this credit problem isn't the fault of the human beings who use it to their advantage, but the government's, who created the mechanism that enables the materialization of our debt.
It's comments like that one that let me know that teetotalers and moral pugilists of a 19th century ilk still exist.
You'll have to point one out for me, because I haven't seen one today, and I looked in the mirror twice this morning just to be sure.
Where on Earth do you find such dubious statistics enabling you to broadly posit the depravity of the lower-class affluent?
Haven't, didn't. I was talking about car salesman specifically. And to answer a suitably revised version of that question: I have worked with them, homie. A temporary support staff position, made available after the previous occupant of said position committed his second felony in a dealer vehicle. One of several previous lives during a five-year spell when the economy was slow and I couldn't get work in my primary occupation. My uncle is also an extremely good parts manager and has worked under three different dealer brand marques for the same owner over twenty-five years, and has accumulated a large store of observational evidence in that time.
Loosely put: The personality that enables a person to be an effective car salesman, as such sales are structured in the present US market, carries a fairly typical set of reagents that frequently react badly with a catalyst of easy money. About a third of car salesmen are basically stable. About another third maintain a decent amount of job stability, but have a classifiable substance abuse problem, either with alcohol or illicit drugs, but manage to keep a decent lid on it, or else eventually become part of the final third. The final third are highly unstable, typically because they can sell cars but they can't keep enough professionalism to maintain persona gratis at one place for very long, so they job-hop, sometimes as little as every two months. More than a few of these also have a classifiable substance abuse problem, which when present, is a primary cause of the professionalism problem.
Bad personal spending coupled with a dionysian lifestyle is nothing new, and for that matter neither is puritanical scolding of such.
You appear to be moving well beyond anything I wrote, into a new work of creative fiction. I look forward to reading the results. Carry on:
What I suspect is truly at the heart of this need to monitor the credit abuses of the imprudent is the iniquity of the Federal Reserve system that creates the problem. I suggest that instead of attempting to wag the dog by forcing people to spend better by teaching it in school, we might admit that this credit problem isn't the fault of the human beings who use it to their advantage, but the government's, who created the mechanism that enables the materialization of our debt.
Okay, you've got the victimhood part down; that's definitely popular. But -- what? No sunset and a pretty girl? No good. I am remanding this to you for further editing, as it will never sell in current form.
mouse,
Drawing sweeping conclusions about the general characteristics of a broad group of people, such as car salesmen, on the basis of your personal experience with a tiny fraction of that group is not justified.
Peter,
I hate to break it to you, but those of us who were raised as lower-middle class white guys couldn't relate to Hawthorne either. Or Dreiser. Or Fitzgerald. Or Steinbeck. Or etc. etc. etc. In fact, there are very few authors who write about anything I find remotely familiar. Same goes for TV shows--I'm not a city person, and a lot of shows are centered around big city life.
My point is that literature is not a black-white thing, but rather a generational and situational thing. The galaxy that The Fire Next Time is set in is just as far far away as that of An American Tragedy.
Perhaps that's why I like Science Fiction so much.
As for education, we have to do something. The latest study (last year) on adult literacy estimated that one-third of the adults in the U.S. are in the bottom two literacy categories, which probably roughly equate to Below Basic and Far Below Basic (or maybe they're set even lower).
Refusing to take IQ and interest into account when setting up classes is simply stupid. The major cultural challenge we face is overcoming the minority culture that says that being interested in education is "whitey's thing."
Rex,
the point of my original post was that literature is a deeply personal thing in terms of whether or not one can relate to it, dependent not on race, class, or creed, but on individual factors, and I suppose as is my point, how each teacher relates the material to her students.
Oh and mousy,
you missed my point regarding the Fed, which wasn't to victimize the poor and downtrodden masses. On the contrary, people will always have to deal with their own self-destructive behavior, substance-related or financial, as a matter of personal responsibility. My point was that we needn't point to people as the problem of society's credit abuse. After all, why should a problem endemic to bad character be a cause for public policy. If living on credit is truly a problem that must be dealt with in the public sphere, I am arguing that it should be dealt with as monetary policy, and not social engineering.
I took your remarks on self-made salesmen making good money being inherently self-destructive, many of whom I've known who weren't, as some indictment of individuals who manage to achieve outside the progressive institutional system. It's possible I misunderstood. But attempting bold generalizations about the types of personalities required to become a salesman, and how that tends to attract a decadent sort is foolish. I wonder if you are aware of how many well-paying jobs and careers require a person be this type you mention. Charismatic, confident, persuasive, fast-thinking, chameleon-like, persistent, and yes ... even greedy. It's a competitive world mousy.
rickm:
I think the meaning (or lack thereof) of g is a running dispute within psychology, though that's not my field. I'm not convinced that a blog post, however well written, is going to resolve it.
That said, anyone who hasn't should read Cosma's posts on heritability and g.
ISTM that the usual back and forth on this issue works like this:
Standard position: IQ is meaningless, race doesn't exist, and all races are the same.
Contrary (mostly unacceptable) position: IQ is meaningful and well-understood, race is meaningful biologically, etc.
Informed Response: IQ, heritability of IQ, and the interactions between genes and race are rather complicated, and the picture isn't nearly as clear as Contrary position made it out to be. (This is how I'd parse Cosma's and Manzini's posts.)
New standard position: See, IQ and race have been debunked, and I was right all along that it's all meaningless.
The informed responses I've seen call the data and assumptions of the IQ crowd into question, but they don't seem to give strong evidence against their claims. I read them as saying "not so fast, you haven't proven nearly as much as you think you have." That's really important, but it doesn't justify throwing out the evidence that is there, and which you don't like much.
Whether g is anything more than a statistical artifact, IQ scores do seem to to a passable job of predicting academic success and job success, and do differ between blacks and whites. It would be nice to know why, because it sure seems plausible that the IQ difference is related to the performance gap in school, and closing that gap is something we ought to do if we can. I don't recall seeing a lot of mainstream media discussions of closing the performance gap that brought up the IQ difference, though. Why not? (The frustrating thing here is that, while the IQ boosters seem to me to oversell what IQ means/is good for, it's *designed* for predicting academic success, and the difference in IQ scores is surely relevant for differences in academic success!)
IQ scores predict 'success'? Really? How is 'success' defined? And what is the research that shows this? The very brightest people I know - and they are much, much smarter than, say, a banker, a politician, a lawyer - tend to be underpaid academics. Their work seems to be publications with titles like "Localization of tight closure and modules of finite phantom projective dimension" or "An improved Briancon-Skoda theorem with applications to the Cohen-Macaulayness of Rees rings".
I have to agree, at least in spirit, with this notion. What kids need from an early age on, is parental involvment. I don't have any cites handy (my bookmarks are a book as it is), but I've read what seems to be credible research that indicates a correlation between, shall we say, a certain mental competence, and active, extensive parental engagement with the child. That's very hard to do with a single parent. I'm not saying single parent-hood should be stigmatized, btw, just that being a single parent is very definitely much, much harder than having the resources of two parents to draw upon.
Oddly enough, I had just posted that on another thread. Here is the link. If there was one thing I would change about the more formal aspects of schooling, it would be a much more intensive grounding in statistics. A fascinating subject in and of itself.
Oddly enough, I had just posted that on another thread. Here is the link. If there was one thing I would change about the more formal aspects of schooling, it would be a much more intensive grounding in statistics. A fascinating subject in and of itself. Sorry, the link works now - sticky quote key.
Oddly enough, I had just posted that on another thread. Here is the link. If there was one thing I would change about the more formal aspects of schooling, it would be a much more intensive grounding in statistics. A fascinating subject in and of itself. Sorry, the link works now - sticky quote key.
Sigh. Not too bright, am I? I think the pointer is fixed now.
I'll ask again - cites? I had heard that it was the income level and background of the parents, and parental involvement myself.
Funny thing, that: I teach at the college level to mainly white kids who also do not think that education and interest in education is "whitey's thing." There is, I am sorry to say, a fundamental culture of contempt towards formal education in America. Which is, imho, a good deal with what is wrong in America today.
On a more related note,
Megan, why do you call MAnzi's post the best post on the subject, when he spouts obvious nonsense such as this:
"The key estimate developed from these studies is “heritability” of IQ. Heritability of 0.0 implies that 0% of individual IQ variation within a given population is genetically determined, and heritability of 1.0 implies that 100% of individual IQ variation within that population is genetically determined."
I'll ask again - cites?
See the APA report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, which cites a number of studies that found significant correlations between IQ scores and school performance, job performance, income and social indicators such as juvenile crime.
Mixner and Scent of Violets:
Yeah, the APA consensus statement seems like a solid source for this. But I don't think the correlation between IQ and school performance is in any kind of doubt. My parents were special ed teachers, and they certainly used IQ scores as part of their evaluation of kids.
I believe the APA statement can be found linked off the Wikipedia article on _The Bell Curve_.
Scent of Violets:
I agree, both the anti-intellectual culture and less involved/not present parents are a disaster. My sense is that, for whatever reasons, these things land a lot harder on blacks than whites. (In the case of illegitimacy rates, I think this is very pronounced.) In particular, it's common to see public figures make science and math gaffes in public that should lead to *way* more comment than, say, Quayle's misspelling of potato did. And it's common to hear people sound almost proud of not knowing anything about math or science.
I think "success" in this context means stuff like graduating high school, graduating college, making an income in the top 1/5, etc. And of course, we're talking about correlations here--there's no contradiction between "higher IQ is associated with higher income" and "many very smart people don't make all that much money."
Ok. And because IQ is heavily influenced by formal education, and people with high levels of formal education do better in life... why exactly is this relevant, interesting, or evidence that black people are genetically inferior?
I would like something I can access online, or some quotes, please. I notice already that we've gone from 'predicting' to 'correlation'. Not the same thing at all, so I'm wondering exactly how this is phrased in the report itself. In fact, as I've said before, the most accurate _predictor_ of academic success is parental involvement. Here is one such example.
Scent,
I notice already that we've gone from 'predicting' to 'correlation'. Not the same thing at all...
No, they're not "the same thing," but correlations provide a basis for predictions. If A is correlated with B, then finding the presence of A predicts the presence of B.
Here is one such example.
I see nothing in your link supporting your assertion that "the most accurate _predictor_ of academic success is parental involvement." But this is an irrelevant strawman, anyway. The point you were questioning is that IQ scores predict academic success, not that they are "the most accurate" predictor.
And for links, just google the title of the APA report I mentioned. It's not exactly hard to find.
You've pretty much blown your credibility, Mixner, and nobody made you do it. I think it's been pretty well established already that you'll never admit you're wrong.
But since you're the one making these assertions, we don't really have to get you to say that, do we? All we have to note is that you have failed, failed spectacularly in making your case.
Scent,
You asked for citations to research showing that IQ scores predict academic success, work success, etc., and I gave them to you. Albatross has also mentioned the APA report.
I'm sorry if this research conflicts with what you desperately wish were true, but the world was not designed for your emotional comfort.
May I also point out poor kids might do better if we made damn sure they had less exposure to lead in the environment?
Lead seems to have a remarkable effect on growing brains--and not in a good way. We still have a sizable number of older buildings (especially in the poorer areas) that were painted with lead paint.
I suggest we look at a) environmental effects on growing brains, b) culture, c) stereotype mirroring, and d) level of poverty of the individuals involved before immediately jumping to a racial explanation. Considering how little we know about the effects of the environment (particularly chemically active ones) on turning on and off genes, can we honestly say there have been any studies out there that really have controlled for all factors?
Are you familiar with Glenn Doman's work? He has written 3 books advocating the use of flashcards with infants to stimulate their neural development. He found that the earlier the children started using the materials the better.
I am designing an online flashcard application based on Doman's research. Maybe my program or something similar could be made available to low income mothers with the goal of increasing the intelligence of her children. It can be done for a $500 computer plus a $60/month high-speed internet connection, which is a good deal less than $18,500/year.
Probably a computer program is not the whole answer, but it is one that can be implemented.
Lauxa,
You should speak with Computer Recyclers, a Pentium (CPU) pute running ~533MHz, or better, installed with an Ubuntu Linux OS and Open Office would be plenty of pute to run any kind of 'productivity' app needed.. the cost of such should be well below U$D500..
As far as the U$D60/month inet access is concerned, it may be easier/less expensive to put the exercises on CDs and/or speak with your local ISP and see if they'll negotiate a better price for your application..as well, there's always Wi-Fi if one has an antenna..Also, form a 501(c)(3)
Lauxa,
on the Wi-Fi front, check out www.newburyopen.net that type of thing can be replicated in just about any locale..
Grumpyrealist:
We definitely should be doing everything we can to get lead levels down (ISTR that black kids have higher exposures than white kids, probably because poor correlates with old housing), as well as providing whatever kind of better environments we can in other ways (like encouraging breastfeeding, marriage, proper vaccinations, head start, etc.) That's independent of the cause of the black/white IQ difference. We ought to do those things so everyone reaches their potential.
I can't even imagine how we'd get a study that controlled for all the differences in environments, outside of raising a bunch of kids in some kind of isolation from the outside world.
Rickm says, "And because IQ is heavily influenced by formal education, and people with high levels of formal education do better in life... why exactly is this relevant, interesting, or evidence that black people are genetically inferior?"
I have to wonder just what web site Rickm is reading--certainly not this one. I haven't seen where anyone, not even Steve Sailor, make that claim. What I HAVE seen is comments from people who say that to ignore the mean g-factor difference between races in formulating our educational policy is to ignore something fundamental which should be taken into account. If there is indeed a genetic component, there's not much we can do about it until the world is populated by brown mixed-race folks. We do know that there is an environmental component, and that is within our ability to improve.
And even if there is a genetic g-factor, acknowledging such does not automatically mean that some races are inferior to others.
Grumpy realist and albatross, re: lead - exactly. In fact, a study just last month found that very low levels of lead - below the current CDC standard - caused IQ scores to drop. Kids with blood lead levels of 5-10 micrograms/deciliter had IQs averaging 5 points lower than kids with levels of 0-5 mg/dl. Earlier work has shown that levels of 10-30 mcg/dl cause a small additional drop - I think about 2-3 points. So we're talking about a difference of half a standard deviation just from exposure to very low levels of lead.
"That's independent of the cause of the black/white IQ difference.
Yep - (and if one believes that the cause of this difference is partly genetic (although I see no reason to do so) , it's an even worse problem . . .
Yep - (and if one believes that the cause of this difference is partly genetic (although I see no reason to do so ...
That's because you're ignoring the evidence that the difference is partly genetic.
-------
"The results, while admirable, were extremely expensive . . . This bought lower poverty rates, less teen pregnancy, and lower incarceration rates. But it helped establish the kids in the bottom tier of the working class, with median incomes in the range of $20K. It did not come close to bridging the gap between those kids and the world of the middle class."
I'm having some trouble with the link, but this report [pdf] from the DOJ mentions that a 1993 cost/benefit analysis found a return of $7.16 on every dollar spent, while a later and more cautious Rand analysis still found a return of more than twice the initial investment. The kids were significantly less likely to be placed in special ed {15% vs 34%) when in school; they were also significantly less likely to be receiving (presumably, one hopes, needing) public assistance both at 19 (18% vs. 32%) and 27 years of age(15% vs. 32%). Now, these things are good in and of themselves, in terms of the kids' lives, but if we're going to focus on public savings, then they're also very interesting.
Additionally,
"Although fewer females in the program group were parents (64 percent versus 75 percent), significantly more of them were married, cohabiting parents (28 percent versus 8 percent). Fifty-seven percent of mothers in the program group gave birth out of wedlock, compared with 83 percent of mothers in the control group. In measures related to family stability, the program group scored significantly higher on a measure of closeness to family and friends (66 percent versus 48 percent) and the ability to maintain persistence at tasks (i.e., work or study hard all day) (47 per- cent versus 33 percent)."
This suggests that there might even be some generational advantage from the program - for example, the children of participating kids were over three times more likely to grow up in a household with married, cohabiting parents, compared to the children of control-group kids.
Now, you might not be as impressed by the results as I am, but I think it's important to look at the whole idea of intevention, at what the PPP and similar efforts are. We're talking about a program in which
* Three- and four-year old poor black kids specifically with IQ scores of between 70 and 85, and who were "at high risk of failing school",
* got to spend 12.5 hours/week in a cool preschool, had a teacher visit the family at home for 1.5 hours/week, and their parents participated in monthly staff-facilitated small-group meetings with other parents, for two years.
After this 730 day period, no further intervention was provided through this project. Unless the families were motivated by the experience to effectively search out some sort of additional help, there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that they received anything more, at least compared to the control group (also, parents may have continued using helpful practices, resources, attitudes, whatever they had learned about from the program).
The fact that this 730-day long intervention, involving maybe 1500 hours of the child and parents' time combined, resulted in significant improvements in employment, earning potential, welfare status, arrest record, and family stability over two decades later . . . I mean, damn. If you stop to think about it, it's . . . wow.
Now, it may be disappointing that a pricey but still relatively limited 2-year preschool program supplied to poor, low-IQ, 'at-risk' black kids between the ages of three and four failed to vault them into the middle class (at least by the age of 27 - these kids are in their early-to-late 40s now, having lived through the early 90s recession, the economic boom, and the Bush years.) It certainly would be nice if things worked that way. But without at all diminishing the value of the program - which seems extremely high, a very good thing - that seems a little crazy; at least, certainly not something we should expect.
Again, this has to do with the logic of 'intervention'. Imagine that some years ago the gov't had embarked on some horribly misguided leveling program, which aimed at closing the gap by pulling advantaged kids down. Now, I was raised in a two-parent economically secure middle class white family in a pretty safe neighborhood. Both my parents had a post-college education, and were quite comfortable and familiar with mainstream culture. Indeed, both were teachers - possessing both an informed appreciation for formal learning and a detailed knowledge of what would be required- and like others of their class and culture read me bedtime stories, took me to the public library, etc., from a very young age. Etc. Let's say, as part of this bizarre hypothetical program, for two years between the ages of three and four I had to spend 12.5 hours a week (2&ahalf hours a weekday) in a low-quality, deprived preschool, a teacher visited my family for 1.5 hours each week to give us bad advice and ignore useful knowledge about us, and my parents had to spend an hour or so each month refraining from high-quality childcare/education-related discussions with other parents. At the end of the two years, the de-enrichment ended and we were free to return to our usual practices (with the exception of any knowledge, practices, resources, etc. forgotten or never gained).
Now, I think I and the other kids would end up doing a bit worse than the control group in later years. But - assuming that by deprived we mean stuck in front of a tv with non-educational cartoons in a bookless room, exposed to only a limited and impoverished vocabulary largely through yelling or commands, etc. for rather than being fed lead paint, being seriously beaten, etc. - I don't think the results would be all that spectacular (all that non-spectacular?). Make sense?
Now, the conclusions here might seem kinda depressing, but I don't think so. For starters, the real-world good program was a lot more effective than we predicted for our bizarro-world thought-experiment evil version , which makes sense when you think about it. That's a good start. Then we have to begin thinking beyond the intervention model, beyond the rather bizarre idea that a brief 1500 hour program -however vital, however impressive is going to magically make up by itself for any problems in all the countless other thousands of hours. (It's like with the class size issue - some studies suggested that class size didn't really do much, until folks started saying, hey, maybe expecting a single year in a smaller class to have major effects doesn't make all that much sense - but what if we fund small (elementary-school) class sizes so that kids get it for several years? Ok, not cheap, sure, but would it be cost effective? And so on).
Now, this comment is long enough already, but I think it's clear where I'm going with this. We need (through whatever method) well-functioning and adequately funded schools, so we're not desperately trying to compensate in preschool for the next 13 years of crud. We need to work on policies to help as many people as possible up into the working and middle classes and help them stay there, that help poor and working families deal with all the countless problems of transportation, childcare, medical care, education employment, etc. that can make the difference between getting ahead and standing still (or falling behind) . . .
My parents had substantial advantages, for example, including some things that government or the private sector probably can't reproduce, but if they hadn't grown up in that postwar period a certain NY Times columnist is so fond of, if they hadn't had access to free and good public education, a free public college (City College pre-'75!), affordable housing (rent control), decent wages and benefits, if they hadn't raised their kid where institutions like the local public library and public school were, if not especially lavish, certainly not brutally underfunded like some of their counterparts within a mile or so further south.
Oh, hey, I didn't end that sentence. Sorry - well,
. . . if not for all those things, it seens quite likely I would be doing significantly less well - far more so than that that imaginary 'two-years-of-cruddy-cartoon-preschool' program could have managed. Make sense?
But Dan S, your evil preschool is already being supplied by the free market, at a profit. It's called Cartoon Network. Since consumers are willing to pay to make their kids stupider but not willing to pay to make them smarter, clearly, consumers want their kids to be stupid. And who are you to tell the market what it ought to want?
/oyvey
The main problem with using the Perry Preschool Project as an exemplar of education is that it is a one-off study whose results have never been replicated, even by the original researchers. Too boot the original study has some dubious research controls. In fact, when the researchers, High Scope, tried to take the program to the k-3 level and it was tested by independent researchers it failed miserably. See Project Follow Through and High Scope's Cognitive Curriculum model.
IQ makes a large difference at least at the preschool level when the instruction is poor (when in struction is poor only the smart will reliably learn). Instruction has almost always been poor in that historically only the very smart were ever educated. Instructional techniques ossified at this level and have failed to improve with the governmental take-over of public education (monopolies are not known for innovation). This is why it is difficult to teach the low IQ.
However, when instruction is improved, low IQ students can be taught, though they won't learn as fast as their higher IQ peers. They are at least capable of mastering much of the content taught at the k-8 level. See the Direct Instruction model of Project Follow Through (low IQ students learned about the same amount of content (with some additional instructional attention) as their higher IQ peers though they started out at a lower level.). The main problem that remains is teaching vocabulary and underlying conceptual content since schools general leave this to parents and as we know low IQ kids tend to have low IQ parents. A bit of a double whammy for the low IQ students.
Brooksfoe, but you can have your kids made stupider for such a low price. Making them smarter is expensive.
Wow, cool man, big thanks! http://wpgizsemvi.com