Posted on 11/26/2006 3:40:47 AM PST by shrinkermd
...But there was good news, the president concluded: “I’m proud to report the achievement gap between white kids and minority students is closing... United States.”
This contention — that the achievement gap is on its way to the dustbin of history — is one that Bush and Spellings have expressed frequently in the past year. And the gap better be closing: the law is coming up on its fifth anniversary. In just seven more years, if the promise of No Child Left Behind is going to be kept, the performances of white and black students have to be indistinguishable.
But despite the glowing reports from the White House and the Education Department, the most recent iteration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test of fourth- and eighth-grade students commonly referred to as the nation’s report card, is not reassuring. In 2002, when No Child Left Behind went into effect, 13 percent of the nation’s black eighth-grade students were “proficient” in reading, the assessment’s standard measure of grade-level competence. By 2005 (the latest data), that number had dropped to 12 percent. (Reading proficiency among white eighth-grade students dropped to 39 percent, from 41 percent.) The gap between economic classes isn’t disappearing, either: in 2002, 17 percent of poor eighth-grade students...in reading; in 2005, that number fell to 15 percent...
The most promising indications...could be found in the fourth-grade math results, in which the percentage of poor students at the proficient level jumped to 19 percent in 2005, from 8 percent in 2000; for black students, the number jumped to 13 percent, from 5 percent. This was a significant increase, but it was still far short of the proficiency figure for white students, which rose to 47 percent in 2005, and it was a long way from 100 percent....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Most claims of changes in educational achievment are a function of statistical artifact so brilliantly and completely elucidated in the above citation. Basically, White and Black test-score distributions are Gaussian and on successive administrations of a standardized test, the difference between the mean scores of blacks and whites remains constant.
What is more there is an ever increasing disparity between inner city and exurban school performance based on intelligence.
Actually, the problem for the inner cities is much worse. An example is a study on Baltimore and its suburbs of which the summary is:
"...Baltimore is typical of many Midwestern and Northern cities, whose demographics were forever changed by the great black migration of the twentieth century. Not unexpectedly we found a cognitive discontinuity at the city line. Surprising, however, was its magnitude. Whereas suburban mean IQs (86 for blacks, 99 for whites) conform more or less to national norms, city IQs are dreadfully low. With a mean IQ of 76, inner-city blacks fall about 0.6 SD below the African American average nationally. More than a third have death-penalty immunity on grounds of mental retardation. The inner-city white mean of 86 is nearly a full standard deviation below the national white average. By this measure, whites fared worse than blacks. Both groups are seriously deficient in human capital. Neither is very employable. To compound matters, we almost certainly have overstated urban IQs. City residents constitute a low-IQ group extracted from a more cognitively representative population. Their kids, whose test scores we analyzed, should have regressed toward their racial means, i.e., toward higher IQs. That is, inner city kids are smarter than their parents. Accordingly, our estimates of inner-city IQs are best regarded as upper bounds to adult values...
The URL for this effort is here: http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/city.htm
I fully expect some to see both of these studies as implied racism; however, without an understanding of the problem there is no possible solution. What is needed to advance the success rate of inner city children (both Black and White) is an educational effort that includes pre-John Dewey direct moral tuition as well as increasing efforts at rote memory to provide a definite base of knowledge regardless mental ability.
The President is wrong in his assumptions as is society in general. The nature of the problem is awaiting someone or some group to recognize what it is and what can be done. In the meantime we will all assume that the path to Harvard Medical School is dependent on middle class mores and upper class wealth.
Looks like the tides are about to give King Canute a lesson.
There are endless groups with endless prescriptions to solve education. The majority are nondeterministic, that is, plant seeds and observe how they grow.
Your observations are begging for determinism. I agree with you. The first several years should be about learning to learn through rote lessons. Then you can turn them loose with more objective material so that they might find their niche.
Don't look for the national media to pick up on this anytime soon. They live in the world they create, and this kind of news isn't part of it.
I believe the gap between black and white students is definitely closing. The whites are coming down to where the blacks are. Instead of blacks rising to meet white grades ,white grades are lowering to meet blacks. This gap has been closing for years as whites are wearing ghetto clothes and have forgotten how to wear a baseball cap. Listen to the rap music when kids pull up to the light next to you now. The car going Boom boom so loud your own car shakes. They are also going deaf.Yes the gap is closing, but not for the good, though I doubt anyone will officially note it.
Are you familiar with the work of, say, Bandura or Vygotsky?
You will find that in all cultures, the lower class children do not learn as quickly in school and do not appear as smart. Part of this may be due to inherent differences in intelligence, but part is also due to their environment in the home - they are exposed to less vocabulary, less conversation, less reading, and on the whole, less cognitive stimulation.
There are educational methods that work, but many good teachers don't want to work in inner city conditions, and frequently those districts don't have the money needed to implement extra instruction.
The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray, Free Press...
What rhetorical hoops are jumped to avoid the truth of racism, that genetics provides an implicit hierarchy of ability!
Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, with wits and guns. NRA KMA
Good article,unfortunately not very positive.Yrs ago i worked(during summer break)in a locked facility which housed delinquent males between 13 and 17 yrs old.All came from disadvantaged backgrounds.Parent(s)with extensive histories of drug and alcohol abuse.Anyways,some of the kids were bright and could handle HS level work.Some even finished HS in the program.One of the problems i saw was that many used their intelligence to "work" the system rather than learn anything usefull.5 to 1 teacher/student ratio,controlled environment...Minimal success.Decided a career with HRS was not for me.
The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. “See, that’s a good sign,” the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym.
He doesn't understand that they all say they're going to college. I had a student who scored 453 on the SAT claim s/he was going to college...
"but part is also due to their environment in the home - they are exposed to less vocabulary, less conversation, less reading, and on the whole, less cognitive stimulation."
I believe you are correct.
A human being deprived of all stimulation during childhood would no doubt test as a very low IQ person, at least as we define it and measure it.
Recent insight into how we learn things (neuron formation as a direct result of stimulation) suggests that lack of stimuli during early formation of the brain may well intelectually cripple the individual for the rest of his life.
The upside of this research is that it has been demonstrated that continuing stimulation can indeed preserve and sometimes increase our cognitive abilities as we age, in the absence of organic dysfunction.
very interesting!
be sure to read posts # 9 and 11
Your DC cost numbers are too low, and you have neglected to factor in the appalling graduation rate (can't remember the number, but it is less than 50%). Thus, your cost per profficient graduate is probably about five times what you calculated.
Sorry, the graduation rate (% of entering 8th graders recieving diplomas four years later) for DC is 59%.
http://www.torres4bpt.com/pdf/cr_baeo.pdf
Toll put it this way: “We want to change the conversation from ‘You can’t educate these kids’ to ‘You can only educate these kids if. ...’ ” And to a great extent, she and the other principals have done so. The message inherent in the success of their schools is that if poor students are going to catch up, they will require not the same education that middle-class children receive but one that is considerably better; they need more time in class than middle-class students, better-trained teachers and a curriculum that prepares them psychologically and emotionally, as well as intellectually, for the challenges ahead of them.The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way. We could also decide to create a different system, one that educates most (if not all) poor minority students to high levels of achievement. It is not yet entirely clear what that system might look like — it might include not only KIPP-like structures and practices but also high-quality early-childhood education, as well as incentives to bring the best teachers to the worst schools — but what is clear is that it is within reach.
"absolutely! i see this almost daily. i teach a small group of
special needs kdg. students. it is a very diverse group. the
differences in their background knowledge are remarkable."
Do you teach them about capital letters? ;>)
lol! of course. :)
That's an easy fix Amelia, we'll just eliminate the SAT, problem solved!
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