* Bring back those low-skilled, labor-intensive industries we outsourced to China. Trump has the right idea here and I predict it will appeal to working class people of all races, who are bright enough to understand this much if explained to them at a fourth-grade level (which is exactly the level at which Trump explains it). A family-friendly six-hour day with double or even triple pay for overtime would also increase the demand for, as well as the hourly wages of, of low-skilled workers. These are old-fashioned remedies, tried and true, and there are no other remedies anywhere in sight.
* For high school, better than different degrees would be different tiers of graduation.
Basic: 8th grade proficiency in reading and math.
Standard: 10th grade proficiency in reading and math (say, algebra 1 & some geometry)
Two levels aren’t eligible for state funded universities or community colleges, only adult education, which could upgrade graduate tiers with additional study.
College 1: lexile 1000, algebra 2.
College 2: higher than that.
College 1 eligible for junior college, college 2 eligible for public universities. Or something like that.
Create graduation database for citizens only.
Then government could give employers incentives to hire from the database, and maybe give incentives for them to make management positions open only to Standard tier diplomas. This would give people an incentive to educate themselves (with tax credits or whatever).
This would functionally ban college remediation for all but private universities, and also give high schools incentives to teach students at the needed level.
But barring these reforms, any uptick in grad rates means, by definition, we’ve lowered standards. Twas ever thus. I’ve written about this several times.
* I’m simply curious as to the correspondence between IQ and grade level.
Does this sound about right to you?
Below 30 – illiterate
30 to 50 – 1st to 3rd grade
50 to 60 – 3rd to 6th grade
60 to 74 – 6th to 8th grade
74 to 89 – 8th to 12th grade
89 to 100 – 8th grade to 1-2 years of college
100 to 111 – 12th grade to bachelor’s degree
111 to 120 – Bachelor’s to master’s
120 to 125 – Bachelor’s to non-technical Ph.D.
125 to 132 – Any Ph.D. at 3rd-tier schools
Beyond 132 – No limitations
* First, that’s bizarrely granular. Second, many of you have absurdly off-base understanding of the cognitive ability required to even fake your way through high school.
I wrote here (https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/noahpinion-on-iq-or-maybe-just-no-knowledge/) about two actual, documented, below 90 IQ students I taught in algebra and geometry. One was in “special day” school, one had been misdiagnosed and should have been. In all but an all black high school, an IQ below 90 is going to put you in the special diploma category.
So if you don’t have an IQ above 90, you won’t be doing anything approaching high school level work. You will struggle to achieve 8th grade as whites and Asians define it.
Not much point in going through everything else that’s wrong. But as I wrote once, best not to get granular with IQ. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/09/21/the-available-pool/
Whoever said:
“The more I look at this issue, the more convinced I am that a quota system, with employers free to choose how to get the required number of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, etc. would be better than what we’ve got now.”
I don’t disagree, although I’m hesitant. But back then, universities would pick and choose their lower tier admits. Now they use grades, which basically means kids in all black or all Hispanic high school will get in over kids in diverse high schools, who often are much smarter.
“Based on anecdotal info, suspect B+ high school gpa in 1960′s corresponded to 100-110 IQ then, whereas today it is ~95.”
This is delusional. See above.
In general, people with IQs of 110 or higher are the only ones getting through college. The exception is blacks and Hispanics in particular degree programs where the program is highly motivated to get URMs through, or highly motivated blacks and Hispanics with IQs over 95, but that last is a small group.
The simple truth is there’s no sympathy for whites or Asians who “aren’t smart enough” for college, so they won’t be supported.
* The reason for keeping teaching algebra and testing it is that it acts as a proxy for general IQ in professions that want to sort out the sheep from the goats in terms of analytical ability.
* Suspect the collapse of American public education tracks closely with desegregation and affirmative action, main drivers being:
1) High school academic standards being watered down to ensure acceptable NAM graduation rates. Based on anecdotal info, suspect B+ high school gpa in 1960′s corresponded to 100-110 IQ then, whereas today it is ~95. Today’s low-level honors classes are likely reflective of typical high school work from previous decades, and not shockingly today’s AP and honors class demographics are comparably segregated.
2) The effects from 1 have swamped lower-tier universities, as enrollment has swelled in less-rigorous departments. Administrators, wanting the tuition dollars and not wanting to fail minorities, further lower the bar. Basically, outside of engineering degrees, related technical degrees ( computer science, math, and physics) , and Top 10 schools, the signaling component to an undergraduate degree is gone. Also suspect that the recent preference employers have for STEM grads is basically a non-discriminatory way of preferring 120+ IQ white and Asian candidates, likely from two-parent homes.
* I teach a remedial class at a community college. My impression is that remedial classes work as an excellent pipeline of FAFSA funds from the federal government to the schools. These, often illiterate and innumerate students, wouldn’t be there if not for these classes so it’s money sitting on the table.
Oh and a lot of them want to be doctors and lawyers. To which the administration replies “Dream big, you can do anything!”
Your tax dollars at work.
A great area of research would be raising IQ and/or impulse control.
* A great deal of the problem from the standpoint of the employer is that they have considerable difficulty devising tests that separate potentially good from probably indifferent to bad employees. It’s not that such tests don’t exist, but they almost invariably lead to different results in different racial groups (disparate impact). Since the Griggs v. Duke Power Supreme Court decision, results like tht mean that employers have a lot of explaining to do. It’s possible to defend the test and its results, but it’s expensive and uncertain. It’s a perfectly reasonable employer course of action to let the “educational” system performing the sorting out process by requiring more and more of it, however unrelated to actual job requirements they might be.
The more I look at this issue, the more convinced I am that a quota system, with employers free to choose how to get the required number of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, etc. would be better than what we’ve got now.
* The conversion of the American public school from a place of learning to that of indoctrination is complete.
The biggest topic on my town’s message board is NOT the decline in test scores for the third straight year, but propaganda supporting the new LGBTXYZMSNBC Club being established in the middle school! Because no “gender-confused” 11-year old should feel uneasy.
* When I got my first computer in the early 80′s, I felt I had to hire a secretary who was familiar with the new technology. So I wound up hiring a part-time secretary who worked at night for a big D.C. law firm using a computer. (When she left me at 2 pm, she went to her main job from 3 to 12.) She was black, and, even though my computer was different from what she was used to, she was able to become acclimated to the new system fairly quickly. She was a pretty decent secretary. One day we were chatting, and she said something along the lines that she should like to get involved in computer programming, apparently having heard or read about the big bucks “computer programmers” were pulling down. Not that I was an expert about computers, but I asked her whether she had a good background in mathematics, which I assumed was essential to write computer programs. “Uh, no.” Then I replied, drily, that I always wanted to be a brain surgeon and could have been one if only I had taken pre-med courses in college and then gone to med school. I don’t know whether she got my humor or my point. But I was struck at how unreal her expectations were. She thought just because she was adept at typing on a computer keyboard and had a basic understanding of how computers worked she could easily become a computer programmer.
BTW I later had to go out of town for a 10-day business trip, and she quit without notice. When I got home, I decided I needed to master the computer because I had some correspondence to get out and interviewing for a new secretary would take too much time. After devoting the next several days to reading the material and experimenting with the computer, I was comfortable enough to get out some correspondence. Since I had taken a one semester course back in junior high and attained a speed of 30 wpm on old-fashioned typewriters, I had learned how to type with all fingers and both hands without looking at the keyboard. (That proved a godsend in college when I was able to stay up late at night and type a five-page essay that was due the next day.) Once I got the hang of using a computer, I discovered that it was much easier to compose documents directly on the computer instead of writing them out by hand. (For some reason, I never acquired the knack of composing on a mechanical typewriter, even though typing on a typewriter keyboard is essentially the same as typing on a computer keyboard, with two differences. With a computer, the return function when you reach the end of a sentence is automatic (I believe the IBM Selectric typewriter also had this function) and corrections to the text are a lot easier to make.) As a result, I was able to function largely without the aid of a secretary, once I eliminated the essential step of translating the text to the computer. Once the draft was prepared on a computer, the subsequent course of events was the same: you still had to read and revise the draft and make the changes to the final version. The last steps were easy and didn’t take a lot of time with a computer. When I heard Obama bemoaning the loss of bank teller jobs as a result of ATMs, I had to laugh at his lack of understanding. I’m sure the development of the personal computer has resulted in the loss of many high-paying secretarial jobs. Just as the development of self-fill has resulted in the loss of jobs for gas station attendants. It’s called efficiency. That’s why the U.S. at the beginning had nearly everybody working on a farm, and, now, we have about 1-2% of the population producing enough food to feed the entire nation and large parts of the world. (“In 1870, 70-80 percent of the US population was employed in agriculture.[16] As of 2008, less than 2 percent of the population is directly employed in agriculture.”)
