Another possibility is they aren't willing to pay enough to get better reps. And all the coordinators are a way of trying to mitigate the low ability of the types of people willing to take the job at the wage offered.
The easiest way to manage is to just hire good people and let them do their jobs. The challenge comes when the recruiters are saying a good candidate is $110k and the max you're allowed to offer is $72,500. And that applies to managers as well. How much is a really talented director? $275k. What's the max we can pay? $175k.
My brother is a service rep for a tech company. He’s great at it (he’s kind and patient with the people who call) and has been promoted. But the people in the tier above him, who get paid more, get pissed off when he refers clients to them (because he’s exhausted the options in his purview). No idea why it’s so aggravating to the higher paid support res to…do their jobs.
Except then why are we failing our bottom quintile so much? As Freddie notes, it's not race, to get that bugaboo out of the way. What is the explanation for American's bottom quintile being behind everyone else?
I trust you're not saying that our bottom folk are just inherently less smart than other countries'. Though that would put an interesting spin on American exceptionalism.
As near as I can tell, that's not it. But I really don't know. You think that more funding gets better scores for the bottom quintile but not for anyone else? It's possible, but seems super duper ad hoc to me.
Because I think that being part of a community, or a society, entails shared responsibility for one another, especially youth. That's pretty much an ethical axiom of mine. You may disagree.
"I trust you're not saying that our bottom folk are just inherently less smart than other countries'. Though that would put an interesting spin on American exceptionalism."
All of the evidence - all of it - points precisely in this direction.
Inasmuch as we're failing them, it's because we place far too much emphasis on education, not just in economic terms but also the worth of a person. To be poorly educated is to be stupid, backward, ignorant, not worthy of consideration, hardly worthy of the vote. It requires a cultural change not to equate booksmarts with personal value.
"It is worth saying that the view of a struggling American public school student as an urban Black child is not really justified. Because of America’s white majority, a very large portion of struggling students are white, even though their proportion is smaller than in the country writ large."
So, since we can exclude race as THE factor here--what is the genetic flaw in Americans that causes us to be dumber, in your view?
You've made two statements that are untrue. The first is that you've decided that the quote you've lifted here coincides precisely with the bottom 20%. The second is that you have presupposed a diagnosable genetic cause to be both extant and cross-racial.
On the first: Freddie is talking about raw numbers and not per capita numbers or representative numbers. Much as when we talk about 'the poor' in America and people envision poor urban Black populations, this is a very important but only partial view. A plurality of the American poor is non-Hispanic White. Line up every poor person in the country and almost half will have White faces. To someone visiting from outer space, then, they would say, "gosh, we need to help the poor people - why are so many of them white?"
But the per capita figures tell a very, very different story. Black people are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than White people. Thus they are, despite being *numerically* smaller, *statistically* greater.
So too with representation in the bottom quintile of education. See my response to CB Miller about outliers. At the level of outliers, statistical differences become *more* apparent, not less. A bottom 20% comprises an outlier set. In this outlier set you will find more examples of a statistical phenomenon than you would a bottom 49.9%, for example. And to measure group impact in such a set, you must rely on per capita and not absolute numbers. Thus the existence of any number of White students in a bottom quintile matters only inasmuch as you can measure their percentage of the whole. (Or, to put it another way, the near-complete absence of students from Guam in this bottom 20% does not speak to the singular genius of the Guamanians; rather it speaks to the fact that there are virtually none of them compared to the total US population.)
On the second: Genetics have a clear and obvious role in educational attainment. That we don't understand the precise causal factors does not change this. It has been proven time and again. What has not been proven - and indeed never will be proven - is that this amounts to a "flaw", and that it has 100% explanatory factor. It is known that there are ways to increase IQ and that the most productive of these take place in early childhood: good nutrition and socialization are real multipliers here and must be considered, in any society that prizes intelligence as important (as ours does), basic rights. But I would reject the premise entirely - I don't think being unintelligent is a flaw any more than I think low lung capacity is a flaw. It would certainly set you at a disadvantage in a math contest, much as low lung capacity makes for a difficult career in mountaineering, but it is not something shameful. It is, instead, something that society should accommodate by making intelligence less determinative of life outcomes.
AA: I thought of that interpretation, but I think you should address where Freddie is going--even if Black youth is _overrepresented,_ which he concedes, and even if your premise is correct--do you think that's sufficient to explain the entirety of the gap?
Especially given that it's not at all obvious you're seeing that kind of gap in the state data.
I believe it sufficient to explain the meaningful majority of the gap. There are two reasons, in my experience, why people find such a take distasteful. The first is that it sounds racist. If you believe that every difference in racial outcomes is prima facie evidence of racism (as for example Ibram X. Kendi does) then yes, this is a racist standpoint. I can live with that.
The second is, in my view, more important: it's that people will then be tempted to say, "oh, there's a genetic component? Well, it's hopeless, then. These kids just suck, just leave them to rot, who cares, they're dumb." There is a tendency to write people off who don't attain educationally, and that's because our society fetishizes education. What would be better for all of us would instead to be to find meaningful ways for people to live without a GED, much less a college degree. Easier said than done, of course, but wouldn't it be nice to have a society where being in the bottom 20% of educational attainment is no more determinative of one's worth and status as being in the bottom 20% of video game players or sprinters?
At the risk of sounding like eugenicist there is sort of something like this. Americans, especially white Americans, have been sorting based on academic ability for several generations. There are many American families where people in the family have drastically different outcomes going back generations. Only one of several siblings who went to college for example, and then within each line there's similar divergence. What this means is that if academic ability is indeed largely genetic you're not gonna have much of those genes in a family line where generation after generation basically lived in a place where college was an option but nobody went to it. This is not the case at all in China and India or the Middle East. Random poor villagers had no opportunity ever, so it makes sense that there would be more high academically able people at the bottom.
I wonder what it looks like if you use some version of PPP dollars rather than nominal ones. Probably not all that different, though it might explain New York's high expenditure, for instance. In the city, some, at least, of that money is going towards higher real estate prices (schools need quite a lot of land) and compensating teachers for the higher cost of living, neither of which you would expect to convert into better teaching.
IIRC, if you measure salary relative to the state/district/territory mean, then DC has the lowest teacher's salaries in the US. This is because DC has so many well-paid people, not because their teachers are paid badly.
My bigger thought, though, is how much is more spending "pushing on a string". That is, there is an upper bound in school performance set by spending, but increasing spending does not push a school system that is not close to the upper bound forward at all, because that system doesn't know what it's doing when spending the money it has.
My assumption when writing this post was that half of the comments and almost all of the email will be attempts to insist that just a little more spending is necessary and will solve our problems. Education spending in the United States is like military adventurism - it can never fail, it can only be failed.
Yeah, I suspect that the problem isn't spending per se, it's that the money is not being well-spent. And, given the nature of government bureaucracies, the best run places are the ones that decide they don't need more money, so the highest-spending are not well run.
Look at the fourth graphic down, "Average learning outcomes by total education expenditure per capita." If we accept your DC point as being monocausal - low wages, compared to the fatcats all around them - how do you account for Puerto Rico? PR's PPP per capita is around half of that of the 50-state median, yet their per-student spending is a comparatively lavish 75% of the US value. It is fair to say their teachers are far from rich - but nor is the island in general, and in fact teachers earn slightly *more* than the median salary there. (New teachers earn very little but seniority has its benefits.) Amidst all this, PR does spend an embarrassing amount on 'administration' (and, doubtless, graft), leading to its having a truly vast per-student expenditure. Even if all of this was given to the teachers, is there any evidence that it moves the needle, given how much we're spending right now?
I wasn't intending to make the point that you appear to think I was. My point was that DC will look like an outlier if you just compare salaries to DC residents, but teachers can live in Maryland or Virginia just as well as anyone else, so a straight salary comparison (rather than a proper cost of living comparison) would be like comparing the pay of Manhattan teachers to the pay of Manhattan residents.
I agree that spending isn't particularly related to performance, but that PPP may be a reasonable explanation of spending variations rather than just differential waste.
One place spends more than another to get the same because things cost more, not because it's wasting money. They're all wasting money, though I fear the problem is like the apocryphal quote about advertising ("Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.")
If that's the point you're intending to make, you're making it badly: what applies to teachers applies well enough to everyone else. As anyone in NoVa can tell you, there is no shortage of DC swamp critters around; Maryland, meanwhile, while no means coming close to DC's wages, is firmly in the top 10 of wages, and that is allowing for the much poorer areas of the state; Montgomery County, right next to DC, is one of the richest in the nation, and PG is the richest majority-African American county in the nation. The geographical distinction here is largely meaningless. Okay, there are places where the effect is exaggerated - San Francisco and Manhattan, mostly - but where in the country are low earners *not* commuting in to ultra-high-earning areas? Janitors in Chicago don't live in the Loop either.
The point is that DC is the only place where there is a "state" boundary that splits the lower earners from the ultra-high earners, so a statistic that compares incomes of residents in the state with incomes of workers doing a particular job in the same state, which is usually fine because enough commuters into other cities live in the same state, but doesn't work out properly for DC.
Right, makes sense - but there is no reason why this would apply to teachers specifically and not to wage-earners in general; and while I take the point that DC is exaggeratedly rich, it is still surrounded by very affluent counties. (In fact, I'm no DC expert, but I would wager that there is a higher percentage of 'underclass' poverty in DC itself than in Montgomery County.)
I am curious how much the "what" could be the culprit here: anecdotally, my mother (who teaches in a wealthy district) and my roommates (who teach in a very poor district) spend approximately the same amount of money on school supplies each year, but what they buy varies a lot. My mom buys "fun" items: stickers, fidgets, different kinds of furniture so kids have options as to how they want to sit/stand, games, science experiment kits, etc. My roommates buy basic supplies their kids can't afford: pencils, notebooks, folders, etc. In poorer districts, is a lot of money being spent just to get kids to the same place their richer peers are? Does stuff like free lunches/breakfasts get accounted for? I'd imagine those are expensive programs. Throw in school districts chasing fads like iPads or anti-racism (my roommate's poor district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on DEI training), and you can easily get lots of variation in what is spent. Doesn't help you figure out what specifically is useful to spend on, as you noted, but it does seem to me like the most interesting variable.
I'm curious if the research has delved into potentially "invisible" money like how much parents and teachers spend out of pocket? If District A is spending $500,000 a year on tutoring and the _parents_ of District B are spending $500,000 on tutoring, District A might look like it's spending a lot more even though the spending per community is similar.
I would suggest that the "what" is the fundamentally broken assumption that educational outcomes are largely or solely the product of schooling inputs, when vast troves of data and anecdote demonstrate otherwise.
Rich parents, partly because of their wealth, and partly because of their own better educations (which are causative of their wealth) are able to offer a vastly superior educational experience to their children, regardless of the school the child attends.
Another question is how much does the quality of someone's education depend on the other people in their class? The Ivies certainly believe it does, which is why they select their incoming classes so carefully.
But neither of those have anything to do with schooling inputs.
In a similar vein, we fund "programs", "systems", "departments", etc. Funding is disconnected from outcomes just as much as outcome is disconnected from output. Then, add in the idea that it is likely that outcomes will require much more discrete (localized?) funding appropriate to a local population/environment than our large one-size-fits-all approach to funding.
Arnold Kling writes about the null hypothesis in education - that most interventions fail. This seems to include increased spending. You had a post a while back about all the things that don’t work, that schools and education largely don’t work. What does? Surely there are studies that show something somewhere works some of the time, right?
Let’s say you’re walking into a brand new semester teaching future teachers. What do you tell them? What’s going to help them do a good job educating future generations?
Do everything you can to make your classroom a safe, healthy, emotionally and socially nurturing space in which every student can explore their own inherent intellectual gifts and advance to a place in the performance spectrum that makes the most of those gifts. Try to counsel their parents to accept their kids for what they are as full-fledged human beings and not just busy little school machines. Agitate for a more humane and redistributive economic system that reduces the punishment our society inflicts on those who are not predisposed to academic success as traditionally understood.
I'm a novice to all this. I live in Philadelphia, don't have kids and don't plan to, but of course I hear all the time about the dismal quality of our public schools. I've always thought (probably due to it being conventional wisdom or something) that if we simply brought spending up to parity with wealthier school districts we would have much better outcomes, and despite PA as a *state* funding being higher than other states, we have a large gap in funding between rich and poor schools (https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/local/20150314_Pa__s_school-spending_gap_widest_in_nation.html and https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/local/20150314_Pa__s_school-spending_gap_widest_in_nation.html). I'm just wondering if I'm interpreting this incorrectly - it'd be news to me to know that we spend more money on poorer schools.
Once you compare like-to-like in terms of "student quality" there is zero compelling evidence that school choice matters at all in terms of educational outcomes.
This shouldn't be surprising TBH. Any system which tries to incentivize teachers to "perform well" has the issue that students are not widgets, and teaching is not factory work. Students come into the classroom with different aptitudes, and incentive systems tend to treat them more as empty sponges who will gain knowledge based upon the skill of the teacher. The person who needs to be incentivized is the student, not the teacher.
Not to mention that even if it were the case that teacher quality actually improved student outcomes, slashing teacher pay and destroying job protections would make being a teacher less desirable, which would in turn mean an overall lower quality of job applicants. If anything we'd want to go the Finnish model - trying to recruit the highest-achieving individuals into the profession. I don't know if it would work to improve outcomes mind you, but raising living standards for teachers should result in a greater supply of teachers, which in turn would allow districts to be choosier regarding applicants.
It's possible that poorer schools receive more funding nationwide and that the funding disparity runs the opposite direction within specific states.
Put another way - suppose there were a lot of poor, low-performing schools in Chicago and LA that received a ton of funding. And then there were also a lot of middle-of-the-road performing schools in the suburbs of Minneapolis and Atlanta that didn't get as much funding. This would set us up for a situation where performance is inversely correlated with funding at the national level, even if there were a few high-performing, very-highly-funded schools in Evanston and Orange County.
Anyway I'm going to check the study Freddie linked but I wouldn't be surprised if this is what it said.
Philly teacher here. I can't dispute or support any per-student spending numbers, but Freddie's right about this not being the magic bullet for success. PSD's real shame is its facilities: dozens of buildings over sixty years old are still serving thousands of students. Asbestos everywhere. Lead in the water pipes. Every attempt to fix is behind schedule and overbudget. A few hundred dollars per student per year isn't remotely enough to fix the infrastructure.
"Personally, I’m affronted by the fact that there are American schools that, thanks to faddishness and the influence of profiteering, have state-of-the-art computer classrooms but rotting walls full of asbestos. (This school district spent more than a billion dollars on iPads.)"
Even wealthy school districts fall prey to this temptation somewhat.
My parents bought a house they couldn't really afford to get their kids a perch in a prestigious school district that includes a superzip within its boundaries. We kids were ill-served enough by the district that we were well into adulthood before we realized that, however poorly the district's actual education may have fit us, the prestige of the district had probably served us well for college anyhow.
During one college break I found out two things about the district high school: The east wing had been renovated to become some sort of extremely tech-happy "science zone", while the west wing ceiling was leaking, and there was no plan to repair it. Why? Because state money was available for the tech renovation, but local money would have to pay for the roof repair. This, in a district where property taxes are themselves through the roof, allegedly to pay for such great education. If any district could afford to pay for its own roof repair, it was this one, and yet it hadn't.
I believe they eventually fixed the roof. At least, the west wing never collapsed. Science education at the high school didn't need tech to be excellent. It already was, as long as the admins gave the science teachers enough free rein.
I kind of hate how "tech" is defined anyway. Just because people are doing things on computer's doesn't mean it's tech. A lot of apps are just worse versions of things that humans can do, see deBoer's article on Zipcar.
“The key assumption is that the exact timing of events is as good as random.” (Lafortune et al) Hah. My advisor would have drawn a big X on that.
There are so many “quasi” experiments in education. I wish some of these zillions of dollars had been spent on true experiments with actual random assignment. I know it’s hard to convince policymakers to allocate money in this way, but we’d know a lot more.
If education policy doesn’t impact outcomes, the difference must be what happens outside of school. Economic security, less trauma, parents helping with homework (having the time and skills). Selection, because parents with good jobs and resources GTFO of “bad” school districts. (All of my overeducated friends left the city for the suburbs when their kids turned 5.)
I thought the linked post from 2017 (where small-group tutoring has the biggest impact) was interesting. Perhaps this is the best way to compensate for lack of parental involvement. The other interventions with bigger effects (feedback and progress monitoring; small-group instruction) also seem to point to individual attention. I can imagine this having a greater impact than small class size, which still leaves a teacher with about 20 students.
" Selection, because parents with good jobs and resources GTFO of “bad” school districts. "
In our economic system academic ability correlates with income. Academic ability is highly heritable. It's not that the schools are "better" in wealthier districts - it's that the kids have a high level of innate academic ability.
The standard liberal line is that zoning keeps kids out of the best performing schools, so they perform poorly. It's much more likely that the best performing schools perform best precisely because they exclude the poorest performing students.
And even if you go to the next level and adopt kids out of poor families into wealthy families at birth, their level of academic ability is far closer to their birth parents than their adoptive parents. If even that level of intervention barely moves the needle, what chance does a school have?
Yes, and education spending will never stop parents from leaving districts with crime and poverty.
I used to live in a mixed-income city neighborhood with high crime and gang violence. 15 year olds carry guns and sell drugs. Multiple students are shot every year. I have liberal guilt, but not enough to send my child into that environment when I can easily move elsewhere. And those problems will persist regardless of school spending.
At the same time, if you're a well-educated parent who likes city living and lives in an area with safe but mediocre schools, you can rest safe knowing that the schools will not harm your kids academically at all.
I mean, I'm talking about myself here. Both my wife and myself have graduate degrees, and we decided not to decamp into the suburbs upon having kids of school age (though we did opt for the magnet system). Daughter is entering 7th grade, son is entering 2nd grade, and although there have been some challenges (most notably due to COVID and online schooling more recently), there's nothing that would make me want to leave here for somewhere I'd need a car for everything.
Yes, the difference is safety. I would send my kid to a safe, mediocre school before I’d send him to an unsafe school with great teaching and resources (which you might get after showering funds on a school in a poor area).
Yep. It's glib, but when discussing this in real life I just say - "there's no such thing as a good school. There are good students, and they may happen to congregate in the same building."
"despite decades of data from armies of researchers, no one really knows what kind of spending actually is strategic"
Surely no one seriously suggests that if we put more spending into armies of administrative bureaucrats, instead of the classrooms, we will get better results . . . ? Yet anecdotal evidence from discussions with current and former teachers suggests to me this is exactly where the increased spending is going (and of course, to jobs for the boys, which explains all those iPads).
Throwing more money at the "front lines" is everyone's go-to for three reasons. First, nobody likes bureaucrats, not even bureaucrats. Second, it's easy. Third, nobody ever disagrees with it.
Somewhere along the line people forgot the obvious: if there was such a dearth of teachers and such a bloated bureaucratic army getting in the way of teaching, why are these effects not being seen across the board? Why are they only afflicting "bad schools"? Why is there no clamor to shrink the administrative army of Bellmont Public Schools in Massachusetts?
Parental involvement and resources. My mother in law was an excellent public school teacher. She taught at low income and high income schools. The high income parents were all up on her nuts constantly. They demand a higher level of teacher and administration performance that lower income families don’t have the time or energy or politics wherewithal to squeeze out of their institutions.
A healthy person can survive a parasite load that would kill a sickly person. Maybe something similar happens in organizations--the districts in the better neighborhoods can afford the waste of lots of admin personnel, but the districts in the poor neighborhoods can't.
1. Regardless of the underlying cause there is a consistent and statistically significant disparity in IQ scores between different races. If you think that IQ naturally correlates with test scores/grades then it would be expected to see a disparity there as well.
2. "Culture" may be difficult to quantify but is it unreasonable to believe that models such as tiger parenting have an impact? In S. Korea or Japan it's not unusual for students to head off to cram school after regular schools hours for a further five or six hours worth of study before calling it a day.
1. Even if “Bell Curve” author Douglas Murray were right about what his studies show (I don’t think he is), I don’t believe that subtle difference in “race” IQ correlates to the size of the gap in the real world. (Correct me if I’m wrong). If I’m right, then it must be something else.
2. I think the “culture” hypothesis holds more water. But of course that’s almost as much of a third rail as “race” IQ.
Although more “race mixing” would help. Both genetically & culturally. That’s just my personal dream world. That we fuck the myth of race into oblivion.
Murray never suggested that there was a genetic explanation for IQ disparities. And in terms of the disparities themselves they are large uncontroversial.
Since the disparity in IQ scores is statistically significant it seems reasonable to expect there would be some statistically significant disparity in grades and test scores as well. I doubt it's the only factor though so I don't expect it to account for the totality of that disparity.
My guess is that genetics plays some role. How could it not? WRT Murray from what I recall he correctly points out that the state of the current science doesn't allow you to quantify genetic contributions with any reasonable certainty.
Our inability to quantify it nor to even demarcate the precise genetic component with certainty does not come close to excluding genetics as a major causal factor. The role of genetics in autism was corrected surmised by - and, as with intelligence, that there is a genetic component to autism does not exclude in any way environmental factors and 'triggers' in life that lead to certain neurodevelopmental paths culminating in autism. (Or: someone with particularly low innate intelligence will still have their intelligence improved through good nutrition and socialization in infancy; someone with relatively high innate intelligence may suffer cognitive difficulties through poor nutrition, poor socialization, head trauma etc.)
I would agree that genetics are likely to be a major factor. From what I understand when social scientists see a large discrepancy that persists across populations/cultures they automatically suspect biology as the culprit.
The difference between racial IQ and the US is anything but subtle - it is slightly less than one standard deviation between White and Black. Yes, the definitions of these two categories is fuzzy, but it remains startlingly apparent when you look at median cases and don't go grasping for outliers.
For reference, a 1 sd difference means the median black kid is at about the 16th percentile among whites. That's not a subtle difference, and it seems like it economically explains most of the performance gap in education.
It would be relatively expensive in terms of infrastructure, but expunging lead from the soil in urban areas would cause a substantial drop in the IQ/test score gap. At least, once a new generation of children was born and reached school age.
From what I understand the disparity is seen at a global level, so any correlation between US populations that see higher minority residence in urban areas (if that is indeed true) is not relevant.
Elevated lead levels absolutely do cause permeant drops in IQ, and there's consistently been a higher percentage of black children with clinically significant lead exposure than white children, which means that it does contribute to the IQ gap. It might be a relatively small amount (1-5 IQ points) but in terms of bang for the buck, lead remediation would have more of a tangible effect than what we currently spend attempting to close the gap.
Another example is fetal alcohol syndrome. In the U.S. all mothers are advised to totally abstain from alcohol during pregnancy, even though in Europe doctors say drinking in moderation is fine. The reason for this difference is because moderate alcohol consumption is associated with fetal alcohol syndrome in Native American and black mothers, but not in people of European descent. Rather than actually having different medical advice based upon race, doctors in the U.S. decided to act as if it was equally dangerous for everyone. Regardless, to the extent black mothers do drink during pregnancy (in general, black Americans drink less than white Americans) it's very likely to lead to permanently lower intelligence in their children. Though this is a lot harder to solve societally than lead remediation.
My point is that the discrepancy in IQ scores is found not only in the US but also globally. Elevated lead levels in kids in the US cannot be the culprit for lower test scores in Africa and the rest of the world.
This is of course true, but there have to be other environmental factors to account for this. I mean, the average tested IQ in many African countries is in the 60s - which is way below the African-American range of 85-88. A few points of divergence could - if you were a hardcore HBDer - be explained by admixture. But 20-25 points cannot. Thus I think it's fair to say you simply cannot come to the conclusion that IQs can be compared between developed and undeveloped nations.
I would expect that in terms of IQ, as with every other human characteristic, that both nature and nurture play a role. Environment is significant of course but so is genetics. And you can certainly compare IQ between undeveloped nations.
I am deeply skeptical think we learn much from the IQ comparisons between first world and very poor third world countries. Give two American kids who speak English at home an IQ test and their scores probably mean the same thing; give one to an American kid and another to a Liberian kid and I'm not at all sure the scores mean the same thing. Hell, the Flynn effect means scores now don't even mean quite the same thing as scores 30 years ago.
I don't think there is that much space between Murray and Freddie, and that is mostly because Murray is a much more responsible guy that his caricature.
1. Pretty much everyone who has taken a look at this issue--including both Murray and Freddie--understand that IQ is extremely heritable. That is not controversial. What is controversial is the question of whether there are genetic differences associated with IQ that apply to populations rather than just families/individuals. There again Murray and Freddie are in perfect agreement: nobody really knows. The state of the science just doesn't allow us to say. Now, would it really surprise anybody if it turns out that IQ is correlated with race? My guess is that it probably is to at least some extent. But the real question is "Who cares"?
2. The real issue is this: a bunch of your fellow citizens are on the lower spectrum of the IQ distribution. Their skin color, their country of origin, their religion: all of those are completely irrelevant. Does the "why" really matter compared to the fact that they are living in a society that increasingly presumes that only "creative" professions matter and that blue collar workers should go hang? The question of a genetic contribution, at the family or the population level, is irrelevant compared to the question of what kind of policy would give them some dignity and financial security. That is pretty much the question that Freddie examines in _The Cult of Smart_ and that is exactly the question that Murray also addresses in the last chapter of _The Bell Curve_.
I would say the answer to "who cares" is white supremacists. B/c of the all the comments about Murray, I took a look at some of his interviews and tweets and reviews of The Bell Curve. From what I've seen (not including his books which I haven't read), he strikes me as profoundly racist, and I believe this is why white nationalists like him.
Again, nobody is disputing the disparity in IQ test scores. Murray was speaking specifically to grade inflation and affirmative action at colleges and universities. If you know that blacks on average score worse on IQ tests than whites or Asians then how do you select for the black candidates who do pass intellectual muster? Normally a college degree or certificate would be useful but when universities pass minorities on regardless of actual academic performance the their function to certify achievement is broken. So a policy which is probably designed with the best of intentions ends up backfiring and actually harming qualified black candidates in addition to doing nothing for the marginal black students who graduate due to social promotion.
Here's what we know: Texas does best of the large states on graduation rates and test scores for all 3 buckets: Whites, Blacks and Hispanics.
They do that bc there are no teacher unions, and the teachers are all afraid for their jobs.
It's pretty simple, even with public schools, if you don't fire teachers the same way you fire employees in the private sector, that equates to worse outcomes for students.
The classic example is charter school where union job protections are far weaker or non-existent. They look good when they attract the most able students - as one would expect. But if kids are just randomly assigned to them then the improvement vanishes. The primary takeaway is that "good schools" reflect the quality of the students not the quality of the pedagogy.
This is ALSO non-responsove, we are talking about large sovereign state approaches to public education.
And the results are better where they spend FAR LESS MONEY and that is achieved bc the teachers aren't unionized and like everyone else in their states, is AT WILL employment.
This offends your preference, but it is a giant glaring fact.
I get it, I do. You want teachers to be higher status and have a bigger say and their personal interests to matter.
I couldn't give a fuck about them. I know teachers are the dumbest college graduates we have. I know that teaching isn't really that important. Half of what they do is babysit so both parents can work.
So me stating that States that think about teachers my way get better outcomes REALLY BUGS YOU.
And you should let it go.
The things is Freddie gets this. What really matters is that our top 20% of kids are challenged HARD given as much self-directed edu as possible, that they not get mixed up with the bottom 50% of kids who should be getting on job training in trades and blue collar stuff from 15...
So your entire point rests on including 12m population IL but ignoring 7m population Massachusetts. That’s awfully convenient for making your point - is it not?
What are you a high school debater? Glib little responses just make you look weak. The smart response is: I had no idea the big states that spent the least WIN
MA is a tiny little state. IL is basically the city of Chicago.
AND STILL TX beats MA on black and Hispanic graduation rates
I agree that genetic is a factor. But can you back up your claim that it's the *main* factor?
Here in NYC there was an uproar because something like literally 8 black students got into the top high school where there were hundreds of slots. This is in a city that has a 45% black/latino population.
My point is that those numbers (I'm not sure the above is super accurate but it's the ballpark) they are *much* more severe than the most "Douglas Murray" calculations for the genetic gap, aren't they?
And if I'm right in the above paragraph, doesn't that point to something other than "genetics" as the *main* factor in the disparity?
You keep saying Douglas Murray. His name is Charles Murray.
Statistical differences become more apparent at the level of outliers. This is why East Asians and certain Europeans are vastly overrepresented in Fields Medal winners and why certain East African populations are vastly overrepresented at distance running success. The *more* exclusive the criterion, the *more* likely that the dominant "race" dominate. If this doesn't make intuitive sense, consider the following: if a high school accepted literally everyone in the city, it would necessarily accept the exact racial breakdown of that city. If the high school then excluded the lowest 20% performers, you would start to see some racial stratification take place - one group would be more represented among that lowest 20%, and as such their representation in the 80% would reduce; the higher performers would increase in representation accordingly. Now remove 95% of that remaining 80%. You are left with top outliers. With a smaller pre-existing pool of lower performers to pull from, the "new" lower performers will coincide largely with the percentages that remain.
Whoops! Thanks. I'm getting my Sam Harris guests confused. Ha! Yeah, I of course meant Charles, not Douglas. Thanks.
Your stats stuff seems to make sense. I'm no math wiz but I get your main point I think. Again, I don't think it will ever be "perfectly equitable" as the WOKESTERS want. But I don't think your numbers conflict with my main point that there must be some "social" (i.e. "racial" as in "due to the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow") explanation as part of the equation. No?
I think any respectable scientist would argue that it's always a mix of nature and nurture. Those who argue that it's one or the other exclusively are professionally incompetent. Those who attempt to paint their opponents arguments as deriving solely from one or the other are usually arguing in bad faith and are essentially resorting to ad hominem attacks.
I would never exclude environmental factors. We know of several that have moved the needling, often startlingly so: nutrition in infancy first and foremost. What is also true, and what Freddie's argument laid out in the first few paragraphs, is that even when you correct or even overcompensate for these factors, the gaps persist. Were this article about the legacy of Jim Crow, I guarantee you that people would be in the comments saying "but don't schools in rich white neighborhoods get more funding?", to which Freddie has already shown, no, they don't. So then the question becomes, "but is the funding going to the right place?" and so on and so forth until we're back down the rabbit hole, anything to avoid the inconvenient truth of race.
Short answer: yes, of course racial differences are not 100%, to the absolute letter, genetically caused and immutable. What they are, however, is real. Predictive. Stubborn. And absolutely undeniable.
Well, again, it's an IQ score gap. There is probably some genetic contribution but to claim that it's entirely due to genetics is not really supportable.
Murray never claimed that there was a genetic explanation. Personally I expect that the difference in IQ scores is due to a mix of both nature and nurture since that is true of just about every other characteristic of human beings.
What the exact mix is: who know? In the future we will probably have a better grasp on that question. But isn't the most salient point with regards to policy the fact that the gap exists and is significant? In fact with regards to policy the cause of that gap should be irrelevant.
The gap in IQ test scores or in public school graduation rates, grades, college attendance, etc.?
Because I would argue that the latter issues implies that colleges and white collar careers should not be the preferred mechanism for erasing racial disparities in wealth/income. Adolf Reed (I believe) argues that a large chunk of the wealth gap between blacks and whites comes down to the accelerating gap between white and blue collar labor. A college education may be a wonderful means for individuals to escape from poverty but populations? I don't believe so and that is a large part of the reason I pay for Freddie's posts.
To be clear, I'm talking about the opportunity gap, not the IQ gap or the work "equity of outcome" gap. Meaning, if grade school kids can't even get into the better (smarter) high schools and universities, then they literally won't have a chance to move up the wealth later.
It's a Catch 22, but you can't deny that kids who don't even get a chance to at least *try* to become doctors, lawyers, programers etc. will just end up in the same cycle of poverty.
To be clear, I *don't* think the cure is to eliminate the tests like the AOC's of the world want to. But you seem to be suggesting that just "let them be happy in blue collar jobs" is the answer. I don't. Those jobs are gonna' dry up soon anyway.
Regardless, while we'll never have perfect "equity", we really *can* prepare younger kids better. I just don't believe the gap is just genetic. Culture, parenting, environment all must be factors too. Especially for younger kids. BEFORE high school.
There must be a way to make that fairer. Maybe Freddie is right and it's not about money. But I refuse to believe it's about "race" either. (I think race is a construct even though I know genetics is real).
Here's a thought. Segregation. SOCIAL segregation. (Which includes "racial" segregation). There's no way that's not a factor in these gaps. No?
Fetishizing white collar professions and dreaming of the death of manual work is precisely why we have these hand-wringing conversations. Rather than trying to redefine cognitive ability to fit our economic model, why not change our economic model to fit around the facts of clear and obvious differences in cognitive ability? There is no reason why we should pretend everyone should have the opportunity to be a doctor simply because that's what success looks like. (Will you volunteer to go under the knife of a 75-IQ doctor? If not, why not?) Instead we should tie much less of someone's worth to their innate intelligence and much more to their character.
There are countries where blue collar work isn't seem as backward and shameful and *everyone* benefits from it.
What I find ironic (and distasteful) is the white collar professionals who do dream of the death of manual labor. Ironic because it's economically illiterate. Distasteful because it really does embody the "punching down" syndrome that the woke love to talk about.
As for the devaluation of blue collar labor that is also directly relevant to the last chapter of _The Bell Curve_ and Freddie's _The Cult of Smart_.
Again, I'm not pushing for "low - IQ" doctors. In fact, is there data that correlates low SAT scores with low IQ? I'm sure it's related but it can't be 1-1, can it?
There must be young, inner-city kids who are naturally gifted but due to many factors including poverty, culture and yes, bad education, just don't learn the mat by the time they're sorted into the high schools that lead to those colleges and those white collar careers, right?
No, we don't need to lower test scores. No, we don't need low IQ surgeons. No we don't need perfect "equity".
But to suggest that the playing field really is level can't be right either.
Additionally, social segregation is a byproduct of education - assortive mating. See Murray's "Coming Apart" (2012.) Within racial groups, by *far* the greatest predictive variable in social stratification is educational attainment. Nothing else comes close.
I suppose if"I refuse to believe" is the only reponse to facts, then facts don't actually matter. The only thing that matters to an "I refuse to belive" outlook is to have pretty thoughts.
At this point, anyone trying to accuse Freddie of secretly advancing race realist arguments is either (a) incredibly cavalier about making such accusations (presumably, this person hasn't read any of deBoer's work except this one post) or (b) a liar (if this person has read, say, _The Cult of Smart_).
That said, I would like to see more from Freddie about why he is so confident that race realist explanations of differential academic performance are not only wrong, but so clearly wrong that the best explanation for why their adherents advance them is that they are racists. But at the end of the day, *I* barely give a shit about what I want, so I'm not sure why deBoer should care.
If white genes were the special sauce to make people smart, you'd think that Black people with higher recent European heritage %s would have consistently better academic outcomes than those with lower, but in the limited data we have that certainly doesn't appear to be the case. (See, for example, Nigeria and its outcomes.) But unfortunately this topic is so toxic that people avoid doing that research like the plague and probably couldn't get it published if they wanted to. Maybe I'll write about it soon, we'll see.
Self-identified Nigerian Americans - distinct from African Americans who have a genetic background in what is now the country Nigeria - are similar to Caribbean-Americans and Indian-Americans in that they are outliers. They are vastly more likely to hold graduate degrees than the average Nigerian (or Antigua or Keralan) and as such are outliers both in their home populations and the American population. Nobody would contend that Nigerians in America are in any way representative of Nigerians in Nigeria - even in terms of ethnic composition, much less cognitive ability, educational attainment, and income. (Nor would anyone - anyone in their right mind, at least - say that absent any other information, European admixture increases intelligence. It is a useful indicator but in isolation it's not predictive at all as it depends on the rest of the admixture, not to mention which European population we refer to.)
For the record, I don't believe in a race-IQ connection, but I do believe in an ancestry-IQ connection. Do you think that's unsustainable by the data? I mean, you know a helluva lot more about this than I do, so if you do, I'd take that very seriously.
See "Human Diversity" (2000) by Charles Murray. In short, race is of course fuzzy and imprecise and constructed, but in terms of measurable achievement it's surprisingly accurate.
The work of Jonathan Kozol over the years has framed the public sphere of educational funding starting with his __Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools__ (1967). He is still active: https://www.jonathankozol.com/about
I read his work in one of my Ed classes in college. We then toured a school in rural Iowa that was getting less funding than any of those less-performing schools in _Savage Inequalities_ and yet was doing much better.
This was in the mid-90s, and I've been a skeptic of the "fund more" proposals ever since.
I remember reading _Savage Inequalities_ years ago. Regardless of test scores or anything else I don't think there are many people who would argue with spending enough money to ensure that children can attend schools that are not infested with vermin. Or that anybody studying programming should have access to a real computer as compared to typing out programs on paper with a typewriter.
But with regards to Freddie's piece doesn't that just get you to the point of diminishing returns?
Pretty much off-topic, but I wonder what Freddie makes of this remark from Richard Hanania, which was kind of thrown off in a recent article of his:
"As of 2018, China had the highest reading, math, and science scores in the world, while the U.S. was in 13th place.[Endnote 34] Chinese scores only came from the four major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, so they are not representative of the country. Nonetheless, in 2015, the Chinese score in mathematics was higher than that of Massachusetts, which has been shown by domestic assessments to be the top performing American state, while science scores were about equal.[Endnote 35] The four Chinese cities represented in PISA have a total population of 180 million, compared to fewer than 7 million for Massachusetts, implying that the numbers from that state may represent more of an elite fraction of the national population than the Chinese sample. As one analyst put it, the math difference between Shanghai and Massachusetts in 2012 was similar to that between Massachusetts and Mexico.[Endnote 36]"
1. Hundreds of millions of impoverished Chinese living in rural areas are systematically and intentionally left out of that data, as Hanania well knows.
2. American-born Asian students outperform all Asian students in PISA results except against Chinese data which, as I note in the caption here, simply cannot be trusted given the Chinese government's willingness to commit fraud.
Re: 1: he knows that, but he's saying that if the children of 180 million Chinese people outscore the children of our highest-scoring state's 7 million people, then it's silly to pretend like that's not a big deal.
Re: 2: of course if the Chinese government is committing fraud, then their PISA scores tell us nothing. I don't know how we'd know if they're committing fraud or not; maybe we should look at how the Chinese diaspora does on tests? If they're doing a bit better than the Chinese students in China, then I think this is *some* evidence that the Chinese data is not mainly the result of fraud. I confess, though, that the Chinese PISA scores being so much higher than all the other countries, including Japan, South Korea, and Finland, raises my eyebrows. That said, Singapore also outscores those countries, and since Singapore is 74.3% Chinese, maybe there's something about Chinese educational traditions that helps to explain their outsized success?
Also, I have a question about your 2: "American-born Asian students outperform all Asian students in PISA results except against Chinese data". I take it this is lumping Vietnamese, Thai, Indians, Indonesians, Chinese, South Koreans, etc., into the "Asian" category? And even after doing this, United States "Asians" score better on PISA than South Korean South Koreans do? If so, that's pretty wild!
How does the hukou system work in terms of the ability to attend university? If the top 10% of students in rural areas are allowed to go to university and then get jobs in major cities that would explain a lot.
As always, take these figures as you will, but if you assume both good faith in reporting and the accuracy of the underlying PISA test, these may be instructive.
Another possibility is they aren't willing to pay enough to get better reps. And all the coordinators are a way of trying to mitigate the low ability of the types of people willing to take the job at the wage offered.
The easiest way to manage is to just hire good people and let them do their jobs. The challenge comes when the recruiters are saying a good candidate is $110k and the max you're allowed to offer is $72,500. And that applies to managers as well. How much is a really talented director? $275k. What's the max we can pay? $175k.
My brother is a service rep for a tech company. He’s great at it (he’s kind and patient with the people who call) and has been promoted. But the people in the tier above him, who get paid more, get pissed off when he refers clients to them (because he’s exhausted the options in his purview). No idea why it’s so aggravating to the higher paid support res to…do their jobs.
*reps
do you make a product people will buy no matter how angry/frustrated at the product they are?
It’s almost as if academic ability is innate and can not be meaningfully improved.
Except then why are we failing our bottom quintile so much? As Freddie notes, it's not race, to get that bugaboo out of the way. What is the explanation for American's bottom quintile being behind everyone else?
I trust you're not saying that our bottom folk are just inherently less smart than other countries'. Though that would put an interesting spin on American exceptionalism.
"Except then why are we failing our bottom quintile so much?"
Because we don't spend enough money educating the bottom quintile? Do other countries spend more on their bottom quintile?
As near as I can tell, that's not it. But I really don't know. You think that more funding gets better scores for the bottom quintile but not for anyone else? It's possible, but seems super duper ad hoc to me.
Why is it that "we" are failing them?
Because I think that being part of a community, or a society, entails shared responsibility for one another, especially youth. That's pretty much an ethical axiom of mine. You may disagree.
"I trust you're not saying that our bottom folk are just inherently less smart than other countries'. Though that would put an interesting spin on American exceptionalism."
All of the evidence - all of it - points precisely in this direction.
Inasmuch as we're failing them, it's because we place far too much emphasis on education, not just in economic terms but also the worth of a person. To be poorly educated is to be stupid, backward, ignorant, not worthy of consideration, hardly worthy of the vote. It requires a cultural change not to equate booksmarts with personal value.
I'd note Freddie's footnote here, though:
"It is worth saying that the view of a struggling American public school student as an urban Black child is not really justified. Because of America’s white majority, a very large portion of struggling students are white, even though their proportion is smaller than in the country writ large."
So, since we can exclude race as THE factor here--what is the genetic flaw in Americans that causes us to be dumber, in your view?
You've made two statements that are untrue. The first is that you've decided that the quote you've lifted here coincides precisely with the bottom 20%. The second is that you have presupposed a diagnosable genetic cause to be both extant and cross-racial.
On the first: Freddie is talking about raw numbers and not per capita numbers or representative numbers. Much as when we talk about 'the poor' in America and people envision poor urban Black populations, this is a very important but only partial view. A plurality of the American poor is non-Hispanic White. Line up every poor person in the country and almost half will have White faces. To someone visiting from outer space, then, they would say, "gosh, we need to help the poor people - why are so many of them white?"
But the per capita figures tell a very, very different story. Black people are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than White people. Thus they are, despite being *numerically* smaller, *statistically* greater.
So too with representation in the bottom quintile of education. See my response to CB Miller about outliers. At the level of outliers, statistical differences become *more* apparent, not less. A bottom 20% comprises an outlier set. In this outlier set you will find more examples of a statistical phenomenon than you would a bottom 49.9%, for example. And to measure group impact in such a set, you must rely on per capita and not absolute numbers. Thus the existence of any number of White students in a bottom quintile matters only inasmuch as you can measure their percentage of the whole. (Or, to put it another way, the near-complete absence of students from Guam in this bottom 20% does not speak to the singular genius of the Guamanians; rather it speaks to the fact that there are virtually none of them compared to the total US population.)
On the second: Genetics have a clear and obvious role in educational attainment. That we don't understand the precise causal factors does not change this. It has been proven time and again. What has not been proven - and indeed never will be proven - is that this amounts to a "flaw", and that it has 100% explanatory factor. It is known that there are ways to increase IQ and that the most productive of these take place in early childhood: good nutrition and socialization are real multipliers here and must be considered, in any society that prizes intelligence as important (as ours does), basic rights. But I would reject the premise entirely - I don't think being unintelligent is a flaw any more than I think low lung capacity is a flaw. It would certainly set you at a disadvantage in a math contest, much as low lung capacity makes for a difficult career in mountaineering, but it is not something shameful. It is, instead, something that society should accommodate by making intelligence less determinative of life outcomes.
AA: I thought of that interpretation, but I think you should address where Freddie is going--even if Black youth is _overrepresented,_ which he concedes, and even if your premise is correct--do you think that's sufficient to explain the entirety of the gap?
Especially given that it's not at all obvious you're seeing that kind of gap in the state data.
I believe it sufficient to explain the meaningful majority of the gap. There are two reasons, in my experience, why people find such a take distasteful. The first is that it sounds racist. If you believe that every difference in racial outcomes is prima facie evidence of racism (as for example Ibram X. Kendi does) then yes, this is a racist standpoint. I can live with that.
The second is, in my view, more important: it's that people will then be tempted to say, "oh, there's a genetic component? Well, it's hopeless, then. These kids just suck, just leave them to rot, who cares, they're dumb." There is a tendency to write people off who don't attain educationally, and that's because our society fetishizes education. What would be better for all of us would instead to be to find meaningful ways for people to live without a GED, much less a college degree. Easier said than done, of course, but wouldn't it be nice to have a society where being in the bottom 20% of educational attainment is no more determinative of one's worth and status as being in the bottom 20% of video game players or sprinters?
At the risk of sounding like eugenicist there is sort of something like this. Americans, especially white Americans, have been sorting based on academic ability for several generations. There are many American families where people in the family have drastically different outcomes going back generations. Only one of several siblings who went to college for example, and then within each line there's similar divergence. What this means is that if academic ability is indeed largely genetic you're not gonna have much of those genes in a family line where generation after generation basically lived in a place where college was an option but nobody went to it. This is not the case at all in China and India or the Middle East. Random poor villagers had no opportunity ever, so it makes sense that there would be more high academically able people at the bottom.
I wonder what it looks like if you use some version of PPP dollars rather than nominal ones. Probably not all that different, though it might explain New York's high expenditure, for instance. In the city, some, at least, of that money is going towards higher real estate prices (schools need quite a lot of land) and compensating teachers for the higher cost of living, neither of which you would expect to convert into better teaching.
IIRC, if you measure salary relative to the state/district/territory mean, then DC has the lowest teacher's salaries in the US. This is because DC has so many well-paid people, not because their teachers are paid badly.
My bigger thought, though, is how much is more spending "pushing on a string". That is, there is an upper bound in school performance set by spending, but increasing spending does not push a school system that is not close to the upper bound forward at all, because that system doesn't know what it's doing when spending the money it has.
My assumption when writing this post was that half of the comments and almost all of the email will be attempts to insist that just a little more spending is necessary and will solve our problems. Education spending in the United States is like military adventurism - it can never fail, it can only be failed.
I wrote a whole book, man.... https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/disentangling-race-from-intelligence-and-genetics
Yeah, I suspect that the problem isn't spending per se, it's that the money is not being well-spent. And, given the nature of government bureaucracies, the best run places are the ones that decide they don't need more money, so the highest-spending are not well run.
Look at the fourth graphic down, "Average learning outcomes by total education expenditure per capita." If we accept your DC point as being monocausal - low wages, compared to the fatcats all around them - how do you account for Puerto Rico? PR's PPP per capita is around half of that of the 50-state median, yet their per-student spending is a comparatively lavish 75% of the US value. It is fair to say their teachers are far from rich - but nor is the island in general, and in fact teachers earn slightly *more* than the median salary there. (New teachers earn very little but seniority has its benefits.) Amidst all this, PR does spend an embarrassing amount on 'administration' (and, doubtless, graft), leading to its having a truly vast per-student expenditure. Even if all of this was given to the teachers, is there any evidence that it moves the needle, given how much we're spending right now?
I wasn't intending to make the point that you appear to think I was. My point was that DC will look like an outlier if you just compare salaries to DC residents, but teachers can live in Maryland or Virginia just as well as anyone else, so a straight salary comparison (rather than a proper cost of living comparison) would be like comparing the pay of Manhattan teachers to the pay of Manhattan residents.
I agree that spending isn't particularly related to performance, but that PPP may be a reasonable explanation of spending variations rather than just differential waste.
One place spends more than another to get the same because things cost more, not because it's wasting money. They're all wasting money, though I fear the problem is like the apocryphal quote about advertising ("Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.")
If that's the point you're intending to make, you're making it badly: what applies to teachers applies well enough to everyone else. As anyone in NoVa can tell you, there is no shortage of DC swamp critters around; Maryland, meanwhile, while no means coming close to DC's wages, is firmly in the top 10 of wages, and that is allowing for the much poorer areas of the state; Montgomery County, right next to DC, is one of the richest in the nation, and PG is the richest majority-African American county in the nation. The geographical distinction here is largely meaningless. Okay, there are places where the effect is exaggerated - San Francisco and Manhattan, mostly - but where in the country are low earners *not* commuting in to ultra-high-earning areas? Janitors in Chicago don't live in the Loop either.
Yes, I was making my point badly.
The point is that DC is the only place where there is a "state" boundary that splits the lower earners from the ultra-high earners, so a statistic that compares incomes of residents in the state with incomes of workers doing a particular job in the same state, which is usually fine because enough commuters into other cities live in the same state, but doesn't work out properly for DC.
Right, makes sense - but there is no reason why this would apply to teachers specifically and not to wage-earners in general; and while I take the point that DC is exaggeratedly rich, it is still surrounded by very affluent counties. (In fact, I'm no DC expert, but I would wager that there is a higher percentage of 'underclass' poverty in DC itself than in Montgomery County.)
I am curious how much the "what" could be the culprit here: anecdotally, my mother (who teaches in a wealthy district) and my roommates (who teach in a very poor district) spend approximately the same amount of money on school supplies each year, but what they buy varies a lot. My mom buys "fun" items: stickers, fidgets, different kinds of furniture so kids have options as to how they want to sit/stand, games, science experiment kits, etc. My roommates buy basic supplies their kids can't afford: pencils, notebooks, folders, etc. In poorer districts, is a lot of money being spent just to get kids to the same place their richer peers are? Does stuff like free lunches/breakfasts get accounted for? I'd imagine those are expensive programs. Throw in school districts chasing fads like iPads or anti-racism (my roommate's poor district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on DEI training), and you can easily get lots of variation in what is spent. Doesn't help you figure out what specifically is useful to spend on, as you noted, but it does seem to me like the most interesting variable.
I'm curious if the research has delved into potentially "invisible" money like how much parents and teachers spend out of pocket? If District A is spending $500,000 a year on tutoring and the _parents_ of District B are spending $500,000 on tutoring, District A might look like it's spending a lot more even though the spending per community is similar.
I would suggest that the "what" is the fundamentally broken assumption that educational outcomes are largely or solely the product of schooling inputs, when vast troves of data and anecdote demonstrate otherwise.
Rich parents, partly because of their wealth, and partly because of their own better educations (which are causative of their wealth) are able to offer a vastly superior educational experience to their children, regardless of the school the child attends.
Another question is how much does the quality of someone's education depend on the other people in their class? The Ivies certainly believe it does, which is why they select their incoming classes so carefully.
But neither of those have anything to do with schooling inputs.
" partly because of their own better educations"
It's mostly their better genes. Academic ability is highly heritable. There is no argument about that.
I'm assuming that any coherent measurement is a value-added one to get around the academic ability question.
I’ll happily argue that point.
See e.g. : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_in_Our_Genes
Also:
Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
Angela Saini,
Superior: The Return of Race Science
Aaron Panofsky,
Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics
1984? As in almost 40 years ago? There has been a ton of advances in genetics and almost all of it supports Freddie’s theory.
In a similar vein, we fund "programs", "systems", "departments", etc. Funding is disconnected from outcomes just as much as outcome is disconnected from output. Then, add in the idea that it is likely that outcomes will require much more discrete (localized?) funding appropriate to a local population/environment than our large one-size-fits-all approach to funding.
What are your thoughts on the heritability of cognitive ability and other traits as it relates to academic and career performance?
It's certainly a factor, but I struggle to believe it's the sole explanatory factor.
Arnold Kling writes about the null hypothesis in education - that most interventions fail. This seems to include increased spending. You had a post a while back about all the things that don’t work, that schools and education largely don’t work. What does? Surely there are studies that show something somewhere works some of the time, right?
Let’s say you’re walking into a brand new semester teaching future teachers. What do you tell them? What’s going to help them do a good job educating future generations?
Do everything you can to make your classroom a safe, healthy, emotionally and socially nurturing space in which every student can explore their own inherent intellectual gifts and advance to a place in the performance spectrum that makes the most of those gifts. Try to counsel their parents to accept their kids for what they are as full-fledged human beings and not just busy little school machines. Agitate for a more humane and redistributive economic system that reduces the punishment our society inflicts on those who are not predisposed to academic success as traditionally understood.
"Surely there are studies that show something somewhere works some of the time, right?"
33 million Americans have an IQ below 80. That's not something that can be fixed and it's not the result of some systemic failure.
I'm sure that a prerequisite for spending money in the most strategically impactful way is to shovel it to consultants.
Does that initial chart include higher education spending, or is it K-12 only?
I'm a novice to all this. I live in Philadelphia, don't have kids and don't plan to, but of course I hear all the time about the dismal quality of our public schools. I've always thought (probably due to it being conventional wisdom or something) that if we simply brought spending up to parity with wealthier school districts we would have much better outcomes, and despite PA as a *state* funding being higher than other states, we have a large gap in funding between rich and poor schools (https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/local/20150314_Pa__s_school-spending_gap_widest_in_nation.html and https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/local/20150314_Pa__s_school-spending_gap_widest_in_nation.html). I'm just wondering if I'm interpreting this incorrectly - it'd be news to me to know that we spend more money on poorer schools.
We spend more money on poorer schools. Check the study I linked.
Do teachers unions & private
vs public make a difference?
Once you compare like-to-like in terms of "student quality" there is zero compelling evidence that school choice matters at all in terms of educational outcomes.
This shouldn't be surprising TBH. Any system which tries to incentivize teachers to "perform well" has the issue that students are not widgets, and teaching is not factory work. Students come into the classroom with different aptitudes, and incentive systems tend to treat them more as empty sponges who will gain knowledge based upon the skill of the teacher. The person who needs to be incentivized is the student, not the teacher.
Not to mention that even if it were the case that teacher quality actually improved student outcomes, slashing teacher pay and destroying job protections would make being a teacher less desirable, which would in turn mean an overall lower quality of job applicants. If anything we'd want to go the Finnish model - trying to recruit the highest-achieving individuals into the profession. I don't know if it would work to improve outcomes mind you, but raising living standards for teachers should result in a greater supply of teachers, which in turn would allow districts to be choosier regarding applicants.
It's possible that poorer schools receive more funding nationwide and that the funding disparity runs the opposite direction within specific states.
Put another way - suppose there were a lot of poor, low-performing schools in Chicago and LA that received a ton of funding. And then there were also a lot of middle-of-the-road performing schools in the suburbs of Minneapolis and Atlanta that didn't get as much funding. This would set us up for a situation where performance is inversely correlated with funding at the national level, even if there were a few high-performing, very-highly-funded schools in Evanston and Orange County.
Anyway I'm going to check the study Freddie linked but I wouldn't be surprised if this is what it said.
Philly teacher here. I can't dispute or support any per-student spending numbers, but Freddie's right about this not being the magic bullet for success. PSD's real shame is its facilities: dozens of buildings over sixty years old are still serving thousands of students. Asbestos everywhere. Lead in the water pipes. Every attempt to fix is behind schedule and overbudget. A few hundred dollars per student per year isn't remotely enough to fix the infrastructure.
"Personally, I’m affronted by the fact that there are American schools that, thanks to faddishness and the influence of profiteering, have state-of-the-art computer classrooms but rotting walls full of asbestos. (This school district spent more than a billion dollars on iPads.)"
Even wealthy school districts fall prey to this temptation somewhat.
My parents bought a house they couldn't really afford to get their kids a perch in a prestigious school district that includes a superzip within its boundaries. We kids were ill-served enough by the district that we were well into adulthood before we realized that, however poorly the district's actual education may have fit us, the prestige of the district had probably served us well for college anyhow.
During one college break I found out two things about the district high school: The east wing had been renovated to become some sort of extremely tech-happy "science zone", while the west wing ceiling was leaking, and there was no plan to repair it. Why? Because state money was available for the tech renovation, but local money would have to pay for the roof repair. This, in a district where property taxes are themselves through the roof, allegedly to pay for such great education. If any district could afford to pay for its own roof repair, it was this one, and yet it hadn't.
I believe they eventually fixed the roof. At least, the west wing never collapsed. Science education at the high school didn't need tech to be excellent. It already was, as long as the admins gave the science teachers enough free rein.
I kind of hate how "tech" is defined anyway. Just because people are doing things on computer's doesn't mean it's tech. A lot of apps are just worse versions of things that humans can do, see deBoer's article on Zipcar.
“The key assumption is that the exact timing of events is as good as random.” (Lafortune et al) Hah. My advisor would have drawn a big X on that.
There are so many “quasi” experiments in education. I wish some of these zillions of dollars had been spent on true experiments with actual random assignment. I know it’s hard to convince policymakers to allocate money in this way, but we’d know a lot more.
If education policy doesn’t impact outcomes, the difference must be what happens outside of school. Economic security, less trauma, parents helping with homework (having the time and skills). Selection, because parents with good jobs and resources GTFO of “bad” school districts. (All of my overeducated friends left the city for the suburbs when their kids turned 5.)
I thought the linked post from 2017 (where small-group tutoring has the biggest impact) was interesting. Perhaps this is the best way to compensate for lack of parental involvement. The other interventions with bigger effects (feedback and progress monitoring; small-group instruction) also seem to point to individual attention. I can imagine this having a greater impact than small class size, which still leaves a teacher with about 20 students.
" Selection, because parents with good jobs and resources GTFO of “bad” school districts. "
In our economic system academic ability correlates with income. Academic ability is highly heritable. It's not that the schools are "better" in wealthier districts - it's that the kids have a high level of innate academic ability.
The standard liberal line is that zoning keeps kids out of the best performing schools, so they perform poorly. It's much more likely that the best performing schools perform best precisely because they exclude the poorest performing students.
And even if you go to the next level and adopt kids out of poor families into wealthy families at birth, their level of academic ability is far closer to their birth parents than their adoptive parents. If even that level of intervention barely moves the needle, what chance does a school have?
Is that true about adoption? Are there links to that data? (Or just point me in the right direction. What do I search to find that info?)
The whole kinship data corpus. Summarized in my book!
Available at fine retailers everywhere:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250224491
Yes, and education spending will never stop parents from leaving districts with crime and poverty.
I used to live in a mixed-income city neighborhood with high crime and gang violence. 15 year olds carry guns and sell drugs. Multiple students are shot every year. I have liberal guilt, but not enough to send my child into that environment when I can easily move elsewhere. And those problems will persist regardless of school spending.
At the same time, if you're a well-educated parent who likes city living and lives in an area with safe but mediocre schools, you can rest safe knowing that the schools will not harm your kids academically at all.
I mean, I'm talking about myself here. Both my wife and myself have graduate degrees, and we decided not to decamp into the suburbs upon having kids of school age (though we did opt for the magnet system). Daughter is entering 7th grade, son is entering 2nd grade, and although there have been some challenges (most notably due to COVID and online schooling more recently), there's nothing that would make me want to leave here for somewhere I'd need a car for everything.
Yes, the difference is safety. I would send my kid to a safe, mediocre school before I’d send him to an unsafe school with great teaching and resources (which you might get after showering funds on a school in a poor area).
Yep. It's glib, but when discussing this in real life I just say - "there's no such thing as a good school. There are good students, and they may happen to congregate in the same building."
"despite decades of data from armies of researchers, no one really knows what kind of spending actually is strategic"
Surely no one seriously suggests that if we put more spending into armies of administrative bureaucrats, instead of the classrooms, we will get better results . . . ? Yet anecdotal evidence from discussions with current and former teachers suggests to me this is exactly where the increased spending is going (and of course, to jobs for the boys, which explains all those iPads).
Throwing more money at the "front lines" is everyone's go-to for three reasons. First, nobody likes bureaucrats, not even bureaucrats. Second, it's easy. Third, nobody ever disagrees with it.
Somewhere along the line people forgot the obvious: if there was such a dearth of teachers and such a bloated bureaucratic army getting in the way of teaching, why are these effects not being seen across the board? Why are they only afflicting "bad schools"? Why is there no clamor to shrink the administrative army of Bellmont Public Schools in Massachusetts?
Perhaps bad schools are bad schools partly because of how they allocate their resources (bureaucrats instead of the classroom).
There's no such thing as a bad school. There are "bad" (low-performing) students. They just happen to congregate in the same building.
Parental involvement and resources. My mother in law was an excellent public school teacher. She taught at low income and high income schools. The high income parents were all up on her nuts constantly. They demand a higher level of teacher and administration performance that lower income families don’t have the time or energy or politics wherewithal to squeeze out of their institutions.
A healthy person can survive a parasite load that would kill a sickly person. Maybe something similar happens in organizations--the districts in the better neighborhoods can afford the waste of lots of admin personnel, but the districts in the poor neighborhoods can't.
1. Regardless of the underlying cause there is a consistent and statistically significant disparity in IQ scores between different races. If you think that IQ naturally correlates with test scores/grades then it would be expected to see a disparity there as well.
2. "Culture" may be difficult to quantify but is it unreasonable to believe that models such as tiger parenting have an impact? In S. Korea or Japan it's not unusual for students to head off to cram school after regular schools hours for a further five or six hours worth of study before calling it a day.
1. Even if “Bell Curve” author Douglas Murray were right about what his studies show (I don’t think he is), I don’t believe that subtle difference in “race” IQ correlates to the size of the gap in the real world. (Correct me if I’m wrong). If I’m right, then it must be something else.
2. I think the “culture” hypothesis holds more water. But of course that’s almost as much of a third rail as “race” IQ.
I don’t know the answer.
Although more “race mixing” would help. Both genetically & culturally. That’s just my personal dream world. That we fuck the myth of race into oblivion.
its gonna happen eventually.
Murray never suggested that there was a genetic explanation for IQ disparities. And in terms of the disparities themselves they are large uncontroversial.
Since the disparity in IQ scores is statistically significant it seems reasonable to expect there would be some statistically significant disparity in grades and test scores as well. I doubt it's the only factor though so I don't expect it to account for the totality of that disparity.
Largely uncontroversial in the realm of academia I mean. Not the general public.
Murray's "Human Diversity" (2020) does posit some - admittedly uncertain - role for genetics in racial IQ differences.
My guess is that genetics plays some role. How could it not? WRT Murray from what I recall he correctly points out that the state of the current science doesn't allow you to quantify genetic contributions with any reasonable certainty.
Our inability to quantify it nor to even demarcate the precise genetic component with certainty does not come close to excluding genetics as a major causal factor. The role of genetics in autism was corrected surmised by - and, as with intelligence, that there is a genetic component to autism does not exclude in any way environmental factors and 'triggers' in life that lead to certain neurodevelopmental paths culminating in autism. (Or: someone with particularly low innate intelligence will still have their intelligence improved through good nutrition and socialization in infancy; someone with relatively high innate intelligence may suffer cognitive difficulties through poor nutrition, poor socialization, head trauma etc.)
I would agree that genetics are likely to be a major factor. From what I understand when social scientists see a large discrepancy that persists across populations/cultures they automatically suspect biology as the culprit.
The difference between racial IQ and the US is anything but subtle - it is slightly less than one standard deviation between White and Black. Yes, the definitions of these two categories is fuzzy, but it remains startlingly apparent when you look at median cases and don't go grasping for outliers.
For reference, a 1 sd difference means the median black kid is at about the 16th percentile among whites. That's not a subtle difference, and it seems like it economically explains most of the performance gap in education.
Charles Murray. It's Charles Murray.
Though Charles and Douglas seem to have similar outlooks.
It would be relatively expensive in terms of infrastructure, but expunging lead from the soil in urban areas would cause a substantial drop in the IQ/test score gap. At least, once a new generation of children was born and reached school age.
From what I understand the disparity is seen at a global level, so any correlation between US populations that see higher minority residence in urban areas (if that is indeed true) is not relevant.
It's like lead paint. The less of it there is, and the further in the past it was, the greater its explanatory power.
Elevated lead levels absolutely do cause permeant drops in IQ, and there's consistently been a higher percentage of black children with clinically significant lead exposure than white children, which means that it does contribute to the IQ gap. It might be a relatively small amount (1-5 IQ points) but in terms of bang for the buck, lead remediation would have more of a tangible effect than what we currently spend attempting to close the gap.
Another example is fetal alcohol syndrome. In the U.S. all mothers are advised to totally abstain from alcohol during pregnancy, even though in Europe doctors say drinking in moderation is fine. The reason for this difference is because moderate alcohol consumption is associated with fetal alcohol syndrome in Native American and black mothers, but not in people of European descent. Rather than actually having different medical advice based upon race, doctors in the U.S. decided to act as if it was equally dangerous for everyone. Regardless, to the extent black mothers do drink during pregnancy (in general, black Americans drink less than white Americans) it's very likely to lead to permanently lower intelligence in their children. Though this is a lot harder to solve societally than lead remediation.
My point is that the discrepancy in IQ scores is found not only in the US but also globally. Elevated lead levels in kids in the US cannot be the culprit for lower test scores in Africa and the rest of the world.
This is of course true, but there have to be other environmental factors to account for this. I mean, the average tested IQ in many African countries is in the 60s - which is way below the African-American range of 85-88. A few points of divergence could - if you were a hardcore HBDer - be explained by admixture. But 20-25 points cannot. Thus I think it's fair to say you simply cannot come to the conclusion that IQs can be compared between developed and undeveloped nations.
I would expect that in terms of IQ, as with every other human characteristic, that both nature and nurture play a role. Environment is significant of course but so is genetics. And you can certainly compare IQ between undeveloped nations.
I am deeply skeptical think we learn much from the IQ comparisons between first world and very poor third world countries. Give two American kids who speak English at home an IQ test and their scores probably mean the same thing; give one to an American kid and another to a Liberian kid and I'm not at all sure the scores mean the same thing. Hell, the Flynn effect means scores now don't even mean quite the same thing as scores 30 years ago.
Freddie has an article on this issue https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/disentangling-race-from-intelligence-and-genetics
I don't think there is that much space between Murray and Freddie, and that is mostly because Murray is a much more responsible guy that his caricature.
1. Pretty much everyone who has taken a look at this issue--including both Murray and Freddie--understand that IQ is extremely heritable. That is not controversial. What is controversial is the question of whether there are genetic differences associated with IQ that apply to populations rather than just families/individuals. There again Murray and Freddie are in perfect agreement: nobody really knows. The state of the science just doesn't allow us to say. Now, would it really surprise anybody if it turns out that IQ is correlated with race? My guess is that it probably is to at least some extent. But the real question is "Who cares"?
2. The real issue is this: a bunch of your fellow citizens are on the lower spectrum of the IQ distribution. Their skin color, their country of origin, their religion: all of those are completely irrelevant. Does the "why" really matter compared to the fact that they are living in a society that increasingly presumes that only "creative" professions matter and that blue collar workers should go hang? The question of a genetic contribution, at the family or the population level, is irrelevant compared to the question of what kind of policy would give them some dignity and financial security. That is pretty much the question that Freddie examines in _The Cult of Smart_ and that is exactly the question that Murray also addresses in the last chapter of _The Bell Curve_.
I would say the answer to "who cares" is white supremacists. B/c of the all the comments about Murray, I took a look at some of his interviews and tweets and reviews of The Bell Curve. From what I've seen (not including his books which I haven't read), he strikes me as profoundly racist, and I believe this is why white nationalists like him.
Based on what? The fact that blacks score lower on IQ tests than whites is not controversial and is widely accepted among academics in the field.
Plus Asians are at the top of the heap in terms of scores.
One recent example is that he tweeted that it's rational for companies to discriminate against black applicants b/c of racial IQ disparity.
Again, nobody is disputing the disparity in IQ test scores. Murray was speaking specifically to grade inflation and affirmative action at colleges and universities. If you know that blacks on average score worse on IQ tests than whites or Asians then how do you select for the black candidates who do pass intellectual muster? Normally a college degree or certificate would be useful but when universities pass minorities on regardless of actual academic performance the their function to certify achievement is broken. So a policy which is probably designed with the best of intentions ends up backfiring and actually harming qualified black candidates in addition to doing nothing for the marginal black students who graduate due to social promotion.
I'm going to ly out how iterative video (telescopic video) will take down the EDU system, later today.
But suffice to say right now, before this happens, TEACHER FEAR OF BEING FIRED BY PARENTS, NOT STUDENTS = better educational outcomes.
And by being fired I mean, no union to save them.
But of course when you randomly assign kids to both systems the impact is negligible.
Wut?
Here's what we know: Texas does best of the large states on graduation rates and test scores for all 3 buckets: Whites, Blacks and Hispanics.
They do that bc there are no teacher unions, and the teachers are all afraid for their jobs.
It's pretty simple, even with public schools, if you don't fire teachers the same way you fire employees in the private sector, that equates to worse outcomes for students.
Being afraid of being fired is required.
The classic example is charter school where union job protections are far weaker or non-existent. They look good when they attract the most able students - as one would expect. But if kids are just randomly assigned to them then the improvement vanishes. The primary takeaway is that "good schools" reflect the quality of the students not the quality of the pedagogy.
This is ALSO non-responsove, we are talking about large sovereign state approaches to public education.
And the results are better where they spend FAR LESS MONEY and that is achieved bc the teachers aren't unionized and like everyone else in their states, is AT WILL employment.
This offends your preference, but it is a giant glaring fact.
I get it, I do. You want teachers to be higher status and have a bigger say and their personal interests to matter.
I couldn't give a fuck about them. I know teachers are the dumbest college graduates we have. I know that teaching isn't really that important. Half of what they do is babysit so both parents can work.
So me stating that States that think about teachers my way get better outcomes REALLY BUGS YOU.
And you should let it go.
The things is Freddie gets this. What really matters is that our top 20% of kids are challenged HARD given as much self-directed edu as possible, that they not get mixed up with the bottom 50% of kids who should be getting on job training in trades and blue collar stuff from 15...
The use of all caps isn’t helping BTW.
It helps.
I spent 92-95 making a fortune writing junk mail, it 100% helps. Same for web writing.
It's about how the human eye scans through copy. With eye tracking you actually see them hit caps and go back a sentence and reread.
“ Here's what we know: Texas does best of the large states on graduation rates and test scores for all 3 buckets: Whites, Blacks and Hispanics.”
If you ignore the states that do better they do pretty well.
That's non-responsive. We judge large states bc they are facing a higher degree of difficulty in administration.
TX and FL best CA, NY, IL matching blacks to blacks, whites to whites etc.
It's that simple.
So your entire point rests on including 12m population IL but ignoring 7m population Massachusetts. That’s awfully convenient for making your point - is it not?
What are you a high school debater? Glib little responses just make you look weak. The smart response is: I had no idea the big states that spent the least WIN
MA is a tiny little state. IL is basically the city of Chicago.
AND STILL TX beats MA on black and Hispanic graduation rates
https://www.statista.com/statistics/260331/hispanic-high-school-graduation-rate-in-the-us-by-state/
Freddie, if I was trying to cancel you (I’m not), I’d say both your article and your responses below are “dog whistles” to “race realism” arguments.
Just to clear this up, your actual point seems to be that genetics *might* play a part in this gap, but clearly they can’t be the ONLY factor. Right?
Aren’t even Douglas Murray’s calculations about genetic differences among “races” much smaller than the real world outcome differences?
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work
Anyone who says genetics are the *only* factor is exaggerating their importance to the point of caricature.
Anyone who says genetics aren't the *main* factor is deluding themselves because they don't want to do a bad evil racism.
And anyone who wants to attribute all innate differences to racial genetics is simply trying to avoid the second point.
I agree that genetic is a factor. But can you back up your claim that it's the *main* factor?
Here in NYC there was an uproar because something like literally 8 black students got into the top high school where there were hundreds of slots. This is in a city that has a 45% black/latino population.
My point is that those numbers (I'm not sure the above is super accurate but it's the ballpark) they are *much* more severe than the most "Douglas Murray" calculations for the genetic gap, aren't they?
And if I'm right in the above paragraph, doesn't that point to something other than "genetics" as the *main* factor in the disparity?
You keep saying Douglas Murray. His name is Charles Murray.
Statistical differences become more apparent at the level of outliers. This is why East Asians and certain Europeans are vastly overrepresented in Fields Medal winners and why certain East African populations are vastly overrepresented at distance running success. The *more* exclusive the criterion, the *more* likely that the dominant "race" dominate. If this doesn't make intuitive sense, consider the following: if a high school accepted literally everyone in the city, it would necessarily accept the exact racial breakdown of that city. If the high school then excluded the lowest 20% performers, you would start to see some racial stratification take place - one group would be more represented among that lowest 20%, and as such their representation in the 80% would reduce; the higher performers would increase in representation accordingly. Now remove 95% of that remaining 80%. You are left with top outliers. With a smaller pre-existing pool of lower performers to pull from, the "new" lower performers will coincide largely with the percentages that remain.
Whoops! Thanks. I'm getting my Sam Harris guests confused. Ha! Yeah, I of course meant Charles, not Douglas. Thanks.
Your stats stuff seems to make sense. I'm no math wiz but I get your main point I think. Again, I don't think it will ever be "perfectly equitable" as the WOKESTERS want. But I don't think your numbers conflict with my main point that there must be some "social" (i.e. "racial" as in "due to the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow") explanation as part of the equation. No?
I think any respectable scientist would argue that it's always a mix of nature and nurture. Those who argue that it's one or the other exclusively are professionally incompetent. Those who attempt to paint their opponents arguments as deriving solely from one or the other are usually arguing in bad faith and are essentially resorting to ad hominem attacks.
I would never exclude environmental factors. We know of several that have moved the needling, often startlingly so: nutrition in infancy first and foremost. What is also true, and what Freddie's argument laid out in the first few paragraphs, is that even when you correct or even overcompensate for these factors, the gaps persist. Were this article about the legacy of Jim Crow, I guarantee you that people would be in the comments saying "but don't schools in rich white neighborhoods get more funding?", to which Freddie has already shown, no, they don't. So then the question becomes, "but is the funding going to the right place?" and so on and so forth until we're back down the rabbit hole, anything to avoid the inconvenient truth of race.
Short answer: yes, of course racial differences are not 100%, to the absolute letter, genetically caused and immutable. What they are, however, is real. Predictive. Stubborn. And absolutely undeniable.
Well, again, it's an IQ score gap. There is probably some genetic contribution but to claim that it's entirely due to genetics is not really supportable.
Murray never claimed that there was a genetic explanation. Personally I expect that the difference in IQ scores is due to a mix of both nature and nurture since that is true of just about every other characteristic of human beings.
What the exact mix is: who know? In the future we will probably have a better grasp on that question. But isn't the most salient point with regards to policy the fact that the gap exists and is significant? In fact with regards to policy the cause of that gap should be irrelevant.
All fair points. But how do we cure the gap if we don't know the cause?
The gap in IQ test scores or in public school graduation rates, grades, college attendance, etc.?
Because I would argue that the latter issues implies that colleges and white collar careers should not be the preferred mechanism for erasing racial disparities in wealth/income. Adolf Reed (I believe) argues that a large chunk of the wealth gap between blacks and whites comes down to the accelerating gap between white and blue collar labor. A college education may be a wonderful means for individuals to escape from poverty but populations? I don't believe so and that is a large part of the reason I pay for Freddie's posts.
To be clear, I'm talking about the opportunity gap, not the IQ gap or the work "equity of outcome" gap. Meaning, if grade school kids can't even get into the better (smarter) high schools and universities, then they literally won't have a chance to move up the wealth later.
It's a Catch 22, but you can't deny that kids who don't even get a chance to at least *try* to become doctors, lawyers, programers etc. will just end up in the same cycle of poverty.
To be clear, I *don't* think the cure is to eliminate the tests like the AOC's of the world want to. But you seem to be suggesting that just "let them be happy in blue collar jobs" is the answer. I don't. Those jobs are gonna' dry up soon anyway.
Regardless, while we'll never have perfect "equity", we really *can* prepare younger kids better. I just don't believe the gap is just genetic. Culture, parenting, environment all must be factors too. Especially for younger kids. BEFORE high school.
There must be a way to make that fairer. Maybe Freddie is right and it's not about money. But I refuse to believe it's about "race" either. (I think race is a construct even though I know genetics is real).
Here's a thought. Segregation. SOCIAL segregation. (Which includes "racial" segregation). There's no way that's not a factor in these gaps. No?
Fetishizing white collar professions and dreaming of the death of manual work is precisely why we have these hand-wringing conversations. Rather than trying to redefine cognitive ability to fit our economic model, why not change our economic model to fit around the facts of clear and obvious differences in cognitive ability? There is no reason why we should pretend everyone should have the opportunity to be a doctor simply because that's what success looks like. (Will you volunteer to go under the knife of a 75-IQ doctor? If not, why not?) Instead we should tie much less of someone's worth to their innate intelligence and much more to their character.
There are countries where blue collar work isn't seem as backward and shameful and *everyone* benefits from it.
What I find ironic (and distasteful) is the white collar professionals who do dream of the death of manual labor. Ironic because it's economically illiterate. Distasteful because it really does embody the "punching down" syndrome that the woke love to talk about.
As for the devaluation of blue collar labor that is also directly relevant to the last chapter of _The Bell Curve_ and Freddie's _The Cult of Smart_.
Again, I'm not pushing for "low - IQ" doctors. In fact, is there data that correlates low SAT scores with low IQ? I'm sure it's related but it can't be 1-1, can it?
There must be young, inner-city kids who are naturally gifted but due to many factors including poverty, culture and yes, bad education, just don't learn the mat by the time they're sorted into the high schools that lead to those colleges and those white collar careers, right?
No, we don't need to lower test scores. No, we don't need low IQ surgeons. No we don't need perfect "equity".
But to suggest that the playing field really is level can't be right either.
I don't have the answer. It's complicated.
Additionally, social segregation is a byproduct of education - assortive mating. See Murray's "Coming Apart" (2012.) Within racial groups, by *far* the greatest predictive variable in social stratification is educational attainment. Nothing else comes close.
I suppose if"I refuse to believe" is the only reponse to facts, then facts don't actually matter. The only thing that matters to an "I refuse to belive" outlook is to have pretty thoughts.
At this point, anyone trying to accuse Freddie of secretly advancing race realist arguments is either (a) incredibly cavalier about making such accusations (presumably, this person hasn't read any of deBoer's work except this one post) or (b) a liar (if this person has read, say, _The Cult of Smart_).
That said, I would like to see more from Freddie about why he is so confident that race realist explanations of differential academic performance are not only wrong, but so clearly wrong that the best explanation for why their adherents advance them is that they are racists. But at the end of the day, *I* barely give a shit about what I want, so I'm not sure why deBoer should care.
If white genes were the special sauce to make people smart, you'd think that Black people with higher recent European heritage %s would have consistently better academic outcomes than those with lower, but in the limited data we have that certainly doesn't appear to be the case. (See, for example, Nigeria and its outcomes.) But unfortunately this topic is so toxic that people avoid doing that research like the plague and probably couldn't get it published if they wanted to. Maybe I'll write about it soon, we'll see.
Self-identified Nigerian Americans - distinct from African Americans who have a genetic background in what is now the country Nigeria - are similar to Caribbean-Americans and Indian-Americans in that they are outliers. They are vastly more likely to hold graduate degrees than the average Nigerian (or Antigua or Keralan) and as such are outliers both in their home populations and the American population. Nobody would contend that Nigerians in America are in any way representative of Nigerians in Nigeria - even in terms of ethnic composition, much less cognitive ability, educational attainment, and income. (Nor would anyone - anyone in their right mind, at least - say that absent any other information, European admixture increases intelligence. It is a useful indicator but in isolation it's not predictive at all as it depends on the rest of the admixture, not to mention which European population we refer to.)
For the record, I don't believe in a race-IQ connection, but I do believe in an ancestry-IQ connection. Do you think that's unsustainable by the data? I mean, you know a helluva lot more about this than I do, so if you do, I'd take that very seriously.
See "Human Diversity" (2000) by Charles Murray. In short, race is of course fuzzy and imprecise and constructed, but in terms of measurable achievement it's surprisingly accurate.
2020, sorry, not 2000.
The work of Jonathan Kozol over the years has framed the public sphere of educational funding starting with his __Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools__ (1967). He is still active: https://www.jonathankozol.com/about
I read his work in one of my Ed classes in college. We then toured a school in rural Iowa that was getting less funding than any of those less-performing schools in _Savage Inequalities_ and yet was doing much better.
This was in the mid-90s, and I've been a skeptic of the "fund more" proposals ever since.
I believe he was read by almost all teacher ed classes for many years and on the speaking circuit extensively.
I remember reading _Savage Inequalities_ years ago. Regardless of test scores or anything else I don't think there are many people who would argue with spending enough money to ensure that children can attend schools that are not infested with vermin. Or that anybody studying programming should have access to a real computer as compared to typing out programs on paper with a typewriter.
But with regards to Freddie's piece doesn't that just get you to the point of diminishing returns?
Pretty much off-topic, but I wonder what Freddie makes of this remark from Richard Hanania, which was kind of thrown off in a recent article of his:
"As of 2018, China had the highest reading, math, and science scores in the world, while the U.S. was in 13th place.[Endnote 34] Chinese scores only came from the four major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, so they are not representative of the country. Nonetheless, in 2015, the Chinese score in mathematics was higher than that of Massachusetts, which has been shown by domestic assessments to be the top performing American state, while science scores were about equal.[Endnote 35] The four Chinese cities represented in PISA have a total population of 180 million, compared to fewer than 7 million for Massachusetts, implying that the numbers from that state may represent more of an elite fraction of the national population than the Chinese sample. As one analyst put it, the math difference between Shanghai and Massachusetts in 2012 was similar to that between Massachusetts and Mexico.[Endnote 36]"
For the full piece, see here: https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/the-inevitable-rise-of-china
1. Hundreds of millions of impoverished Chinese living in rural areas are systematically and intentionally left out of that data, as Hanania well knows.
2. American-born Asian students outperform all Asian students in PISA results except against Chinese data which, as I note in the caption here, simply cannot be trusted given the Chinese government's willingness to commit fraud.
Re: 1: he knows that, but he's saying that if the children of 180 million Chinese people outscore the children of our highest-scoring state's 7 million people, then it's silly to pretend like that's not a big deal.
Re: 2: of course if the Chinese government is committing fraud, then their PISA scores tell us nothing. I don't know how we'd know if they're committing fraud or not; maybe we should look at how the Chinese diaspora does on tests? If they're doing a bit better than the Chinese students in China, then I think this is *some* evidence that the Chinese data is not mainly the result of fraud. I confess, though, that the Chinese PISA scores being so much higher than all the other countries, including Japan, South Korea, and Finland, raises my eyebrows. That said, Singapore also outscores those countries, and since Singapore is 74.3% Chinese, maybe there's something about Chinese educational traditions that helps to explain their outsized success?
Also, I have a question about your 2: "American-born Asian students outperform all Asian students in PISA results except against Chinese data". I take it this is lumping Vietnamese, Thai, Indians, Indonesians, Chinese, South Koreans, etc., into the "Asian" category? And even after doing this, United States "Asians" score better on PISA than South Korean South Koreans do? If so, that's pretty wild!
How does the hukou system work in terms of the ability to attend university? If the top 10% of students in rural areas are allowed to go to university and then get jobs in major cities that would explain a lot.
No idea! Good question.
2. Almost. Singapore outranks US Asians as well.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/
As always, take these figures as you will, but if you assume both good faith in reporting and the accuracy of the underlying PISA test, these may be instructive.