My thoughts? I think it is racist and sexist.
Are you asserting that the summary is inaccurate? Which part isn’t true?
Standardized tests are not racist. What is racist is the interpretation of results such as claims of systemic racism. IQ results are reliable globally in terms of racial performance… Poor results cannot be conflated to cultural environment. Standardized tests are also very reliable in predicting future academic success as well as future wealth acquisition. Despite all the welfare programs worldwide, the racial gap has remained stable during a half century of testing.
The environmental argument is further dashed by students from destitute Asian immigrant families scoring significantly higher than black students who reside in upscale suburban neighborhoods. Why isn’t a chihuahua a Great Dane? Why are African elephants larger than Indian elephants? Why are Pygmys short? Why do Asians and Ashkenazi Jews score highest on IQ tests? The answer is NATURE not NURTURE.
Warden, I enjoyed your last post, because it has you speculating paradoxically about race relations. I have wrestled often with similar thoughts. When teaching, I would root for the underdog even though seldomly did the underdog surprise me. When a surprise happened and a student exhibited uncommon motivation, you cannot imagine the amount of praise I bestowed at such a joyous happening. Fighting for justice and the American Way is exhausting even I imagine for the Man of Steel.
One of my good friends is one of my former students of color. His name is Charles, and Charles was the lone black student in a second level course in Spanish I taught some four decades ago. The class was composed of extremely bright students including Charles, but Charles had a difficult time and struggled. Every paper Charles turned in to me was returned, always the next day–I never once failed doing my teacher homework–and I always wrote on Charles’s papers a personal note of encouragement, telling him not to give up, that his “Eureka” moment would eventually transpire. And, for Charles that moment did happen, and I don’t know who was happier, myself or Charles; he finally caught on understanding the frequent use of the subjunctive in Spanish. Liked by all his teachers, Charles epitomized determination to succeed.
Years went by, and I received a letter from Brazil from Cargill, Inc. I opened the letter and noticed it was written in perfect and eloquent Spanish. It was from Charles who worked for Cargill. My Charles became Vice-President of Cargill, Inc, in South America. Cargill is the world’s largest private company. Of all the students I had in my class that year, only one ever mastered the language, and it was Charles who is now my friend and neighbor. We converse in Spanish, he also knows Portuguese as well, and now it is Charles who corrects my mistakes not the other way around. Charles is married to a Japanese girl from Sao Paulo and has three great kids who are all on the Honor Roll.
Secondary education in America needs complete revamping. You are 100 percent correct Warden that “Catering and lowering the bar isn’t working.”
Copy that. Good reads, and I appreciate the info. I’ll take a look through.
This is bunk.
I’m not saying that a parent’s intelligence absolutely can’t have some kind of genetic effect on their children, but attempting to say Asian genetics are smarter and African genetics are dumber is extremely misguided.
In fact, I’d guess the predominant reason Asians do so well academically is because they are wealthier than other groups. Scroll a few posts up to Warden’s Median Household Income chart and it will be plain that income and SAT scores correlate almost exactly.
- Asians
- White
- Hispanic
- Black
The result is, when it comes to education, we are ABSOLUTELY talking about opportunity, and we are ABSOLUTELY NOT talking about race.
Perhaps culture, standards, parental guidance and resources also play a role?
I am not talking about intelligence but performance on standardized tests. You’ve interpreted it as intelligence. Intelligence has numerous factors that are not measured by IQ. They are exceptional in prediction of academic and economic success.
My argument is I think valid with regard to nature versus nurture. It’s ridiculous to impute systemic racism in IQ testing, much less some sort of worldwide conspiracy against some races to the benefit of others. IQ testing has extraordinary validity and reliability over scores of years. I maintain it is the interpretation of results that is faulty which of course fall within the purview of liberal academics. Such liberals studies offer invalid “excuses” for lack of performance.
By your closing statement 305, I am given to believe that your discernment of opportunity is relegated entirely to race. IQ testing and SAT testing are valid measures of achievement. They are NOT racist.
If wealth controlled IQ performance why would destitute Asians score higher than well-healed blacks Seemingly, the more prosperous black test subject should score higher according to your premise, but they do not, so your premise is faulty.
Shocker
And
Idiotic
I mean…Why let facts get in the way from our “ist” police?
Except for repeatedly referring to intelligence…
This is the exact opposite of my conclusion, which is that better financial situations lead to better test outcomes. I have repeatedly asserted that race has nothing to do with it.
Where is this aggregate data you’re referring to without citing?
More wealth absolutely increases opportunity. Better schools, better tutoring, more time for parenting, access to test prep, etc. to argue that wealth doesn’t increase outcomes is disingenuous.
On average, Asians are the wealthiest racial group in the United States, therefore their test scores are highest. These mean trends don’t apply to anecdotal specific situations; they are an aggregate.
Source: extracted from https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/student-achievement-3-8-academic-performance-2022.html
Thanks for the link.
First, these are NYC assessments of grade school kids (grades 3-8). The chart isn’t showing test scores, just who is “proficient”, so perhaps above average versus below.
Second, these racial groupings are by NEIGHBORHOOD, not by family income, so while averaging a community in aggregate may be somewhat valuable, subdividing them into disparate groups is not. We simply have no idea how the income of the Asian group compares to the black group. That data isn’t there.
Finally, check out this chart from the same study you cited:
Although the income data is very generalized, this chart doesn’t subdivide the groups and thus will better represent the average.
And you can CLEARLY see a correlation in income and education level… which is exactly my point.
My point wasn’t that income generated higher scores, but that impoverished Asians achieved higher scores than prosperous blacks. You’ve wandered away from the basic premise of this thread which is that standardized tests are not intrinsically racist. Liberals have made excuses for lack of progress in closing the gap for more than a half century, yet despite all the liberal fixes such as affirmative action the gap in respective performance has not been closed. IMO, genetic science, hard science, is being rejected by liberals, replaced by nebulous social science theories such as those of Piaget et al. Affluence has only a marginal effect of increasing achievement test scores. Furthermore, the racial differences are seen pan-culturally which nullifies the canard that cultural differences explain lessor achievement.
You have no genetic science involved in any statement you’ve made thus far about this subject. You presented circumstantial evidence from test scores from a paper, “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence” written by Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending. Henry Harpending is a known white nationalist, believing that evolution is accelerated in Europeans. He also believed the medieval Europeans practiced eugenics and this created the industrial revolution, being a hard Eugenics supporter. Within said paper, they also emphasized that Ashkenazi Jews were concentrated in occupations where intelligence was likely to lead to financial success, specializing more and more in 1 occupation - finance. This is because of the prohibition of Christian usury at the time. "Later in Poland, Jews branched from moneylending and became “tax farmers, toll-farmers, estate managers and they ran mills and taverns.”
Under premodern conditions, richer people had more surviving children than poorer people. "So the unique occupational profile of the Ashkenazi community, allegedly, created a unique situation in which elevated intelligence led to elevated earnings which led to elevated reproductive success. "
Harpending believed that genetics alone determined success in both academia and in life.
“Group differences, as far as we know, are in the DNA. Nobody yet has found any credible environmental effect on IQ or academic achievement. And believe me, people have been frantically looking for one for sixty, seventy years. Nothing. If you look at the quantitative genetic analyses, they’ll talk about a contribution from genes, and a contribution from environment. What that contribution from environment is, is random error. It doesn’t matter who raised you, as long as they didn’t hit you on the head with a hammer. It doesn’t matter whether you have high or low self-esteem. Everything has been shown just not to be there. The gap between ethnic groups is not closing in this country. There have been announcements that it’s closing for at least the last twenty years, usually in the New York Times, it’s not there, there’s no difference. There’s no change. Nothing changes.”
—H.L. Mencken Club meeting, 2011
He spoke at a number of white nationalist conferences and is widely celebrated in forums like Stormfront and Vanguard News Network.
It’s pretty easy to see the overt lies and underpinnings of the ANTHROPOLOGIST, Harpending. If you’re not eating because your single mother or father is working 3 jobs, and you are raising your 2 little brothers, I think its pretty easy to see how that would affect your academic performance. All of us can come with a dozen scenarios that would contradict Harpending.
The paper has zero “genetic science” or “hard science” in it. Neither does the following book. You’re trying to pass off a white supremacist anthropologist’s dogma as “hard science.” Further, there is no biological race. It doesn’t exist. Biological race is an 18th century construct to justify some pretty bad actions. That fact dismantles his entire premise. Again, you’re throwing in your “all our racism” view that differences are genetic, success is genetic, etc.
All I was saying was affirmative action and changing testing standards just didn’t work.
I’ve not strayed from that topic at all. I have repeatedly, REPEATEDLY, agreed with you that standardized tests are not racist.
My other point was that income helps with better education outcomes. You denied that and I showed you your own data that proves the correlation.
Pan-culturally you say?
Then why do Nigerian immigrants perform so well at the graduate level?
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-most-educated-in-the-U-S-1600808.php
I’ll tell you why. They have the same advantage Asian immigrants do. The people who can afford to move across the world and be accepted by our immigration system have already gone through a “selection process” and are somewhat educated and affluent to begin with.
The dude is so ingrained with decades of racist pseudoscience, coupled with a sincere lack of integrity…his racism is his glasses by which he sees the entirety of the world. Some souls are just too stained to save
Nigerians are a sub class of Africa as a whole. That Nigerians succeed may well be along the lines of Koreans having higher average IQ scores than Japanese. Nigerians make excellent citizens and are specially compliant in paying income taxes. These are the type immigrants we should encourage. Biden should be impeached for refusing to carry out the laws of the land; I am referring here to immigration laws.
Small wonder that the lowest paying professorships are those found in the Social Sciences and Education. Persons of lessor computational skill drift into disciplines that are less rigorous than the pure sciences. I would aver the world needs even lawyers more than sociologists, psychologists, and social welfare graduates. So genetics when it comes to mental aptitude are less a factor in intellectual performance than the amount of money accrued by the family. In other words, morons can be turned into geniuses simply by improving their environment and saying nice things to them to enhance self-esteem.
You mean like linguistics?
As well as evidence against your racist theory. You forgot to mention that part.
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Without a doubt