There are just three blocks between the housing project where Kareem Butler lives and Mott Hall Bridges Academy, where he is in seventh grade, was named a scholar of the month and plays on the basketball team.
But three blocks in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the poorest neighborhood in New York City, can be a gantlet of gangs, drugs and violence…
For Kareem, Mott Hall Bridges Academy is more than just a place to learn algebra and history. A public middle school, it is seen by many families as a safe zone in a crime-plagued neighborhood, and a gateway out of generational poverty for those born with few advantages in life. Nearly all 191 students in grades six through eight are black or Hispanic; more than 85 percent are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches…
In its most recent evaluation by the city’s Education Department in October, the school was rated “proficient” in the rigor of its curriculum and the effectiveness of its teaching and learning. It excelled at establishing a culture of learning that communicated high expectations to staff, students and families. But the school’s performance on state math and English tests, though improving, still falls well below the citywide average.
Parental involvement — a staple of many high-performing schools — has also been a challenge. While there are some involved parents, many others do not bother to show up for the year-end parent-teacher conferences to collect their children’s report cards. The school has to mail them home, along with a letter on the importance of communication with parents.
Professor Linda Gottfredson published an important paper titled, “Social Consequences of Group Differences in Cognitive Ability”.
First, much civilian and military research has detailed how brighter individuals are more educable and trainable, often learning 2-5 times faster than their less able peers when exposed to the same instruction. They cost less to train per unit of skill or knowledge acquired. They can also learn difficult material that less able individuals cannot, even when the latter are given more time and assistance. This is a major reason why the military and some large civilian employers in
the United States test all applicants for mental ability. Intelligence has little value unless conscientiously applied, to be sure, but motivation cannot substitute for mental competence. Coming from a higher status family is of no value because trainees must do their own learning.Second, IQ predicts later job performance but family background does not. Supervisors are often swayed by factors other than actual performance when they rate workers, but the correlations between IQ and performance on a job increase when performance is assessed in a
more objective manner. This is the opposite of what social privilege theory predicts. Studies by industrial psychologists, particularly John Hunter and Frank Schmidt, show that higher g workers perform better partly because they have learned more about their jobs but also because workers must continue to learn and reason once on the job. No training program can ever prepare workers for all contingencies, especially in a changing world. Workers must continue to learn on their own, apply old knowledge to new situations, plan, spot problems, and use their judgment. Higher levels of g enhance job performance because they provide greater capacity for continued self instruction and independent problem solving once on the job. Researchers have not found anything—not family wealth, long experience, or a favorable personality—that can substitute for this capacity in getting the work done.Third, other evidence confirms that higher-level jobs really do require workers to perform more mentally demanding tasks. It comes from job analysis studies, which catalog the various tasks that specific jobs require workers to perform to get the job done in a competent manner.
These studies, which are used to design training and compensation systems, consistently show that the major distinction among jobs lies in the overall complexity of the duties they require workers to carry out. Recall that complexity of information processing is the very same
ingredient that draws forth g in IQ tests.
