No. As EE’s simplified example makes clear, the problem is that it’s possible for all black kids to be underfunded relative to white kids with the same education status, even the ones who aren’t special-needs.
This is because the proportion of special-needs to mainstream students isn’t the same in both populations. Your insistence on averaging-out the special-needs and mainstream groups obscures that fact.
Suppose you have a group of, say, ten dogs and five cows, and you feed them a healthy diet of, say two pounds of dog food per dog and 30 pounds of fodder per cow, for a total of 170 pounds of assorted foodstuffs per day.
And you have another group of, say, five dogs and ten cows, which you feed at the much less nutritious rate of one pound of dog food or 20 pounds of fodder per animal respectively, which would be a total of 205 pounds per day.
The average weight of food for each animal in the second group would be larger than that for each animal in the first group, but each animal in the second group would still be seriously underfed.
AFAICT you are completely misrepresenting the argument you’re disagreeing with. I don’t see anybody at all claiming that black children overall don’t present with a disproportionate amount of cognitive and developmental problems even before they come to school. Even though some schools do over-rely on special-needs ed for black children, there is AFAICT no dispute that the disproportion in special-needs requirements exists independently of school policy.
The point is that there’s currently no scientific reason to believe that the special-needs differences between black and white students are genetic in origin, just as there’s no scientific reason to believe that the acknowledged IQ-score differences between black and white students are genetic in origin.
Again, that’s like asking “Why should this second group of dogs-and-cows get an average of more than 205/15 pounds of food apiece, when the first group of dogs-and-cows does fine on an average of just 170/15 pounds of food apiece? How can you say the second group is being underfed, when on average they get significantly more per capita than the first group?”
The question of why the second group happens to have a higher cow/dog ratio than the first group is an interesting one in its own right, and deserves to be studied. But it doesn’t change the fact that given the composition of the second group, all its members are being seriously underfed on their allotted food rations, even though their total average food ration per animal is bigger than for the first group.
Only a willfully ignorant dummkopf would try to lump cows and dogs together for the sake of invoking the fundamentally useless concept of a combined dogs-and-cows average of food weight needs.
It isn’t circular. You have screwed up your attempted refutation by deliberately obfuscating the crucial facts of the difference in funding requirements between two distinct groups of students, and the difference in the proportion of those groups between two different racial populations.
Once again, you really need to stop trying to persuade yourself that when other people don’t agree with your patently flawed arguments, it must be because they’re just “too blinkered and stubborn” or “bending over backwards” to “avoid” the truth or “refusing to see” something that’s “right in front of them”.
You do not in fact have a valid point here, any more than someone would have a valid point if they thought that a group of ten cows and five dogs should require the same average weight of food per animal as a group of ten dogs and five cows.
You have repeatedly asserted “pushing out into a new frontier” with “unfamiliar flora and fauna” as a phenomenon that would be likely to select for increased intelligence. Are you now saying that this hypothesized effect somehow wouldn’t continue to operate in populations that kept pushing ever further into more new frontiers with more new flora and fauna? Why not?
If your argument is that moving out of your familiar environment to distant new stomping grounds makes you smarter (although goodness knows there’s plenty of unfamiliar environment available right there on the African continent as well, from the point of view of prehistoric peoples), then why wouldn’t continuing to move on to more distant new stomping grounds continue to make you smarter? (Not to mention, in the case of the Australian aboriginal ancestors mentioned above, that whole inventing-seafaring thing.)
:rolleyes: Ai yi yi. This is exactly why your genetic-basis hypothesis currently has no scientific validity as a theory. You don’t have any consistent scientific criteria for applying it; whenever you need to explain something, you just make up a just-so-story speculative narrative about some sort of hypothesized selective pressure on intelligence without troubling yourself about whether your speculations are consistent or empirically justified. Medieval theologians constructing metaphysical systems about the six levels of consciousness or whatever based on the six wings of the seraphim in Isaiah were operating at Michelson-Morley levels of empirical scrupulousness compared to you.
The same sort of infinite flexibility is seen in the arguments of climate skeptics who reject the idea of anthropogenic causes of global warming on the grounds that “the climate is always changing”. They don’t actually know what sort of changes are caused by periodic orbital fluctuations, or how much effect they have, or over what timescales. But they know the vague qualitative fact that the earth’s climate has changed over time, and their ignorance about its specifics allows them to invoke it, all-providing-wompom style, for any purpose they want.
Similarly, you don’t have any real scientific knowledge (and neither does anybody else) about whether intelligence actually does measurably differ between groups at the genetic-population level, or how to reliably test intelligence for its genetic components excluding its non-genetic ones, or how genetic determination of intelligence actually works, or what genes are actually involved in it, or how environmental selection pressure on intelligence genes would actually work, or whether it would be significantly different for different populations in different circumstances, or pretty much anything else about the mechanisms of intelligence. And it’s your vast and profound ignorance of how intelligence works and what makes it the way it is that enables you to invoke it so blithely to serve any and all rhetorical purposes indiscriminately.