Casey: “I don’t understand the obsession with “the achievement gap.” Wouldn’t it serve everyone best to make sure our smartest students are in accelerated classes with other smart kids so they can eventually build great things? If we insist on putting them in classrooms where they emphasis is on dragging the dead weight average or dull students along, the smart ones can’t possibly learn as much as they would have if the teacher was focused on their success. It jut seems like getting everyone to “barely competent” isn’t as sane a goal as helping the few brilliant ones invent stuff we dullards can all use twenty years from now. An elitist education secretary would be refreshing.”
LINK: From SchoolsWeek in the UK:
IQ may mean achievement gap can never close
Sophie Scott | Sep 13, 2015
An academic researcher has suggested that academic achievement “gaps” between different groups of pupils cannot be closed as differences in intelligence cannot be “erased”.
Dr Stuart Ritchie (pictured), from the University of Edinburgh, presented research describing the genetic link to IQ, a measure of intelligence, and its controversies in education.
Ritchie has a new primer on IQ out: Intelligence: All That Matters.
Speaking to Schools Week after Saturday’s event, Dr Ritchie said teachers should not dismiss IQ tests.
“There is a very strong correlation between IQ and certain factors, such as mortality. Research with more than one million subjects shows this is not just a coincidence. It is strong evidence.
“Research shows that education can improve intelligence. But you cannot get away from the fact that is a genetic [intelligence] trait.
“There are various aspects of the environment that can improve intelligence – malnourished kids get poorer scores – but that is not as much of a problem in the UK.”
One delegate on Saturday asked Dr Ritchie: “If [achievement] difference is so genetic what does that mean for attempts to close the gap between pupils with disadvantaged and less advantaged backgrounds?”
He responded: “It means it is much more difficult than people assume.”
Dr Ritchie explained that while there is some evidence that environments can impact intelligence, most research suggested that education could lift all people’s intelligence, but not even it out.
“But maybe making everyone equal is not what we are looking for. Maybe we are looking for bringing everyone up, and everyone doing the best they can do, rather than only bringing up those at the lower end.”
Another audience member asked why [they] should be a teacher if the result “has nothing to do with [them]”.
Previous academic studies found that schooling could increase the average (mean) intelligence across cohorts, Dr Ritchie said.
“You could theoretically increase everyone’s intelligence, though the heritability levels stays the same. So you could think about raising people’s mean intelligence and not erasing the difference. So it is less likely that we can equalise intelligence — and not everyone even wants to do that — but it is much more likely we can raise mean intelligence than erase differences.”
In 2010 in VDARE, I proposed:
So what goal do I propose instead of Closing The Gap?
My goal, instead, would be to raise the average performance of all racial groups by half a standard deviation.
In other words, both goals are intended to improve the national average by half a standard deviation—but the Gates-Obama-Bush-Kennedy consensus wants to do it entirely by raising the scores of the minority half.
Which objective sounds more achievable?
Mine, obviously, for two reasons:
– Diminishing marginal returns: a one standard deviation improvement is not merely twice as hard to accomplish as a half-standard deviation performance, it’s much harder.
– Real improvements tend to better everybody’s performance. For example, I can drive a golf ball farther off the tee than I could 15 years ago because driver technology has significantly improved. (Clubheads are approaching the size of toasters, so you can now take a wild swipe at the ball without fear of whiffing). But then, Phil Mickelson can also hit the ball farther, too. So the pro-hacker gap in driving distance hasn`t closed.
In summary: my aim is both more achievable, more fair, and more sensible than the Gates-Obama-Bush-Kennedy consensus.
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* Blacks are good at music. Even blacks with an IQ that in a white person would render him or her totally dysfunctional are often capable of exceptional musical ability, by normal white standards.
Many Whites condemn black music out of hand because they think gangsta rap is typical black music, but there are many groups of blacks doing many kinds of music. Although none of them have the harmonic rigor of Mozart or Bach, most are also not overtly violent, destructive or antisocial. I’m thinking of many Caribbean forms, but also of the Hammond organ playing in hundreds of black churches, the sacred steel guitar in a few others, and indeed most of the jazz and mainstream classic pop black performers in the US. To say nothing of Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, the Fifth Dimension, and indeed a good part of the Motown catalog.
A few of these people are pretty smart even by white standards-I think Motown owner Berry Gordy and Quincy Jones are both probably at least 120 IQ-but the majority of black musicians I have met and talked to are probably less intelligent overall than the average white person in America. For that matter, of course, many famous white performers are on the backside of the Bell Curve.
Can one enjoy blacks’ composition and performance of music-and for that matter their athletic achievements-and still recognize that the same people can’t run a functioning society? That they can’t organize amongst themselves to accomplish anything taking long term planning, that they can’t keep from eating the seed corn and butchering the milk cow for an immediate feast, that the instruments they often play so deftly would never exist if it weren’t for outside forces?
