Posted on 08/26/2009 4:00:48 PM PDT by Bob017
Edited on 09/26/2009 9:37:13 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
High-school students' performance last year on the SAT college-entrance exam fell slightly, and the score gap generally widened between lower-performing minority groups and white and Asian-American students, raising questions about the effectiveness of national education reform efforts.
Average scores for the class of 2009 in critical reading dropped to 501 from 502, in writing to 493 from 494 and held steady in math, at 515. The combined scores are the lowest this decade and reflect stalled performance over the past three years. The reading scores are the worst since 1994.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Mr. Whitehurst, a senior fellow and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, says the U.S. has done "a decent job" educating the fast-growing population of Hispanic families. But he says the SAT results show a need to improve writing and reading instruction.
I see two possible solutions: other groups emulate whatever the Asians do to achieve such high scores, or the other groups scream that the tests are unfair and/or push for quotas favoring others at the expense of the high-scorin g groups.
No one needs to tell me which “solution” will be proposed.
If there was an “Inconvenient Truth” section, I am sure the USA would score better. Thank you NEA.
This friend,BTW,isn't Asian but she is Jewish (if that matters to anyone).
When I was at the University of Chicago, I was in a minority as a white gentile. Didn’t mind it a bit as all of my classmates were brilliant (despite some unfortunate politics).
“...Asian-American students appeared to do better at all income levels....because they tend to take more Advanced Placement and other rigorous courses, and their families place a strong value on success in education...”
The Gov’t can dump all the money it wants on schools and teachers’ unions, but it isn’t going to change the most important element - family attitudes.
Agreed!
Again, though, instead of trying to emulate those who do best, all energy will be focused on tearing them down.
Without full command of the primary language in a country a child will be doomed to live at the bottom of the wage scale.
Anyone who grew up speaking Gullah or Geechi in the late 1800s could tell you that.
"Aqui es tu broma y aqui es tu futuro."
Good point! English is the gateway to success in America.
But having a dependent, resentful underclass is the Democrats’ preferred road to electoral victory.
This could be resolved by getting rid of the unions which have been part and parcel of this administration’s and the trail leading back to the ‘50’s to dumb down the population. After the unions are gone, slap the slackers upside the head and let them know that we’re paying a lot for their education and they’d better start cracking the books. Too many Pell Grant students aren’t worth a crap either so that whole program needs revamping but if the first idea is implemented there would be no need for Pell Grants.
Sometimes just a graph is all you need.
See
http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-AR294D_SATju_NS_20090825200414.gif
From article:
“Asian-American students showed the most dramatic gains. In math they scored an average of 587 — 72 points better than the general population. Since 2008, their average math score has climbed six points.”
- -
This dramatic gain is undoubtedly the result of the intensive and expensive inner-city before and after government school programs created specifically by Democrats for the troubled Asian yoots. Were it not for these programs, who knows where those Asians would be scoring?
I think part of the differences are genetic although politicians will never admit it!
- Transracial Adoption study results show that malnourished Asian adoptees perform above average even when raised in white households. Black adoptees also perform as well as their biological peers not their adoptive parents (see Scarr’s Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study).
- There is considerable psychometric evidence of group differences consistent with the recent neurological changes (Ashkenazi Jews consitently average 2/3 of a std deviation above Europeans. East Asians have a group average of about 103, Europeans 100) Rushton, J.P. and Jensen, A.R. (2005). Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235-294. www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf -
- There are physiological differences which show up from an early age. Rushton, J. P., & Ankney, C. D. (2009). Whole-brain size and general mental ability: A review. International Journal of Neuroscience, 119, 691-731.
Didn’t they change this test during the 1990’s to make it easier?
I’m working with some insanely smart Asians.
They are impressive.
By 2023, half of the children 18 and under will be minorities as defined by the USG. And 87% of the 1.2 million LEGAL IMMIGRANTS who enter annually are minorities. Could this have some influence on school performance tests?
They imagine the servants will murder them last. Ask Nat Turner about that one.
And the Finns beat them all. BTW, the Europeans and the Chinese drive from the same basic stock ~ as do the Finns.
The gender gap continues to widened too. Smart women are having fewer babies. Female intelligence is a self-limiting trait.
It is because liberals fight for mediocrity and teach to the lowest level. I could go on and on, but what it boils down to is the leftist bigotry of low expectations.
Exactly. NCLB is another abortion of a "Bipartisan" bill from the idiot center-left. Bush and Ted Kennedy waste another half a trillion dollars and Johnny still can't read.
We shouldn't be surprised though, forty years of research has confirmed identical findings, from the worthlessness of Head Start on through "race norming" and every other halfbaked scheme hatched in the incompetent Dept/Ed.
And this is after the SAT was significantly dumbed down from the previous generation.
Kids from disadvantaged homes need to be educated **differently**! They need the option of attending highly structured schools that attempt to duplicate in the institution what would normally happen at home in a functional family. George Will calls these schools “paternalistic” schools. KIPP schools are an example.
Next...We really need to study whether today's government school methods teach anybody anything at all! I contend that 99% of what a child in a functional home learns is due almost entirely to the **AFTERSCHOOLING** that the parents and child do in the home! The typical government school is merely sending home a curriculum for the parents and child to follow.
Finally,...If nearly all the learning a child acquires is due to afterschooling it is insanity to expect the typical government school to have any benefit for the disadvantaged child. Also, the typical government may actually be hurting the child from the functional family since it wastes hours up hours of the child's life that would be better off spent at home! The government school may be artificially retarding the academic and social progress of children who have functional families.
The very idea of typical government schooling needs to be examined and questioned. Government schools as structured today may very well be utterly ineffective in transmitting education to children both in functional and dysfunctional homes. The parents and child in functional homes may merely be compensating for the massive amount of wasted time by afterschooling.
They re-normed the test to set the mean (500) at a level of achievement lower than it was orginally. Scores had eroded drastically in the seventies. It was earlier than the '90's but, yes.
I'm married to an insanely smart Asian. She's also model level beautiful. I was impressed the day I met her. The girl has it all.
I’m married to an incredibly dumb Asian. She’s put up with me for nearly 31 years now, LOL! She did learn English and has managed to take a number of community college courses.
My sons were “assembled in the USA from foreign and domestic components”. Mama only spoke to them in English. The older one was a good writer and quite comfortable with science. Only case I know of where the SAT scores were the same in both verbal and math, and twice running. 600/600 and 670/670. Weird. He got stuck in AP classes and managed a scholarship to engineering school, but wasn’t a nerd. His joining the Marine Corps was a bit of a surprise.
Today the media has been talking about the wonderful Kennedy-GWB No Child Left Behind.
See how well it worked? Ain’t it grand? Now, all children are left behind.
Thank you Senate and GWB. You have created the perfect “Idiocracy”.
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Only in technological societies where smart women are given options beyond being a housewife. It could thus be said that technological societies are self-limiting, collapsing back into pre-tech barbarism when the percentage of intelligent people fall below the critical threshold.
I is perty smart and I is gonna have myself a hole gaggle of youngins. :)
Interesting, in that some scientists and statisticians might be more likely to come to these conclusions than, say, the Christian minister Martin Luther King, who said racial segregation was “sinfu,l” or the Founders who signed a Declaration stating that all men were created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
And what would Darwin’s theories say about variation among different groups of people after thousands of generations of separate evolutionary paths?
Isn’t it the Democrats who say we should rely on science and not religion? Is that really what they want?
I personally believe that we are (or should be) all given equal opportunities, and that people should not constantly be divided up by race.
All of a sudden homeschoolers aren't religious nuts anymore and vouchers are looking pretty good to some on the left.
Why should our black brothers hate whitey when their real competition is asians and orientals?
LOL!
I remember reading that, far more than race, income and other factors, fatherlessness accounts for most of the differences in success for kids.
And the Democrats mock “family values,” while riding the backs of the government-dependent poor to electoral victory. Coincidence? I think not.
I’d also point out that often parents see teachers as enemies and seek to “protect” their children from a teacher who dares to discipline them or give them a bad grade, rather than working with the teacher (the ones who do want to do their jobs) to educate their kids.
It’s a familiar story: when I was reprimanded by the teacher, I got it worse from my parents also for misbehaving, or not working. Nowadays it’s “how dare you say that about my perfect little genius?!”
Interesting point!
"What we have is cities and very rural areas that are the only place most black and Hispanics are allowed to live. Can you tell us how a black mother who is working 60 hours a week at two jobs in a noisy, filthy asthma-causing pollution, endless noise all day and night, to make ends meet has the same situation as some affluent white mother who can afford to stay home in a quiet, clean town where the people have enough money to give to schools all kinds of extras?"
Hmmm . . . I guess Asians don’t work hard, and DC schools are not the best-funded in the nation.
These dumbasses act like they’ve never heard of the “Bell Curve”.
“These dumbasses act like they’ve never heard of the “Bell Curve”.
They have but believe it has been debunked. In fact the findings keep getting replicated.
psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007391
Before affirmative action Jews were discriminated against in college admissions.
With affirmative action Jews are discriminated against in college admissions.
Yep. It takes schools, students and parents to make it work, though I guess schools and students could do it alone.
Our son just started at MSU this fall as a Freshman and because of his AP classes that he took in high school he starts college with 35 credits! He is in the Honors College with an assistant professorialship where he gets to work with one of the professors on a project. (plant genetics) This honor isn't usually granted to Freshman so our son feels very fortunate.
Students HAVE to be willing to learn, that is the first part of the equation.
Our schools use ACT scores instead of SAT. Does anyone know why some schools promote one over the other?
Our son scored 33 out of 36 on his ACT, but, I can’t say that I have ever heard him mention SAT and when I would ask him about the SAT he always corrected me by saying ACT.
Just curious.
I think it used to be that way, but, I think we are seeing a shift. More and more I see where minorities are sought out as a preference, so I think the 'bottom of the wage scale' is going to be left for the non-minorities (cough, cough) JMO
And that's as true in America as it is in China or Brazil.
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