Group A has 2 mainstream students, who each receive $1.50 of funding (the minimum necessary for the students to learn). They also have 1 special education student, who receives $3.50 in funding (the minimum amount of funding necessary for the student to learn)
Group B has 1 mainstream student, who receives $1 of funding, and two special education students, who each receive $3 of funding.
Now, Group B receives more total money ($7 vs. $6.50), but all of their students are receiving insufficient funding. The mainstream student is receiving only $1, compared to the $1.50 needed to provide a minimum education, and the special education students are receiving $3, less than the $3.50 needed to provide a minimum education.
If you still don’t understand it at this point there’s no help for you. To be honest, every time I talk with you I find myself increasingly incredulous that you did well on an IQ test–understanding the above isn’t really a high-IQ task, and you failed it.
Still not sure I understand what SlackerInc’s objection was getting at, but at least in that analogy, the fact that the Group B students get more money overall does not make it a logical fallacy to argue that they are underfunded on a per-student basis in each of their funding categories.
I’ve still got a backlog to catch up on, and I will. Promise! But since we’re currently kicking this around, let me weigh in on this first.
I can go find the relevant posts if this narrative is challenged, but despite the significant disagreement in interpretation, I think there are some basic facts that aren’t in dispute (and which Kimstu may have missed, dipping in and out):
(1) I have consistently said, throughout this thread and in others, that I’m in favor of significantly increasing spending for educating black kids in public schools. So this is not about any normative argument for equalizing spending between or among races, or even maintaining the status quo.
(2) Still, it’s worth considering just how astonishing a fact it is—as no one seems to dispute—that the taxpayers of America, still a mostly white group, pay more per capita to educate black kids than they do to educate their own children. That would have been unimaginable when my mother was a schoolchild. We have argued about colonial policies before: can you imagine a colonial government in Africa or India spending more per child on a typical school largely attended by the indigenous people of the country in question than a typical school of similar size attended by the colonizers’ own children? Anyone attempting a policy like that would be drummed out of office. So this is a huge policy change, and transfer of resources from “haves” to “have-nots”, within living memory.
(3) There are disputes among civil rights activists as to whether there are too many black kids in special education, or too few. So we can’t be at all sure who “should” be in what funding category. Unless we think the schools are getting this categorizaton exactly right (meaning both camps of complainers are wrong) but simply systematically underfunding black kids vis-a-vis white kids in each category? If you know anything about the way school funding is allocated and the regulations therein (and I do), you’ll know that this would be the most byzantine, unwieldy way possible to conspire to underfund black kids’ education. It would be MUCH easier to put a thumb on the scale here and there to put all the borderline white kids in SpEd, and all the borderline black kids in reg ed.
Otherwise, districts are required to fund schools on a formula based on how many reg ed kids and how many SpEd kids are in the school—without regard to race, although schools that have a poorer student body (usually defined by a threshold percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) do get extra help from the federal government, which further adds to the imbalance of funding toward inner city schools, which are much more likely to surpass this threshold. [This whole argument started because I made an offhand remark about black kids getting more funding than white kids in public schools, and Evil Economist insisted this couldn’t be true, then passed on a ridiculous cite that excluded special education, federal spending, Title 1, nutrition programs, preschool, you name it.]
(4) The counterargument, that schools are still underfunding black students relative to white students and are therefore dragging them down and lowering their IQ scores, goes something like this:
(a) White kids get, on average, F$ per capita funding in school (including all sources of money, and regardless of the category they are in).
(b) Black kids get, on average, (F+X) per capita funding in school.
(c) But black kids come to school with nX (n being whatever multiple of X you’d argue for) in greater needs than white kids do.
(d) Therefore, they are underserved by the racist school system to the tune of (n-1)X$ per student.
That’s about the size of it, right?
So then someone like me says “Hmmm…but weren’t you arguing there’s nothing inherently limited about black kids’ aptitude before they come to school? That the gap is the fault of schools for failing to sufficiently educate the black student population?”
EE and that lot replies: “Yes, indeed: that deficit of (n-1)X$ per student is the smoking gun that proves these schools are failing their black students and causing the achievement gap.”
To which I ask, “But why then does n exist to begin with? Why should the proper, good, and right level of funding for the average black child be (F+nX), instead of just F as for the average white child?
EE: [thinking] “But this one goes to eleven.”
But seriously, now do you see the paradoxical nature of this kind of circular reasoning?
For all EE’s bluster and projection, I seriously doubt if s/he will be able to grok the above. But I have faith in Kimstu’s ability to follow it, along with a few others here. Whether you’re all too blinkered or stubborn to acknowledge that I have a point, remains to be seen.
This is, without a doubt, the most pathetic post I’ve seen on the Dope in years. “Hey, Kimstu? You seem to be able to kick my ass at this debate shit. I’ve no idea how to respond to this *other *guy’s argument, could you do me a solid?”
Aah, the wily Boreal mind, honed by the adversity of life on the outwash plain - it always finds a way around problems, yes! Even problems like “I don’t understand half of what you wrote because I’m semi-literate, and also I forget the start of a paragraph by the time I reach the end” are no match for its mind honed by the adversity of “seasons”
Ha!
Pathetic. “Let’s you and *him *fight!” is sad when it’s a bar fight. It’s just a savage indictment of the standards of Triple 9 when it’s an argument. You basically demonstrate the uselessness of IQ testing just by continuing to exist, SlackInIQ! Good job!
Gosh, Dibs, thanks ever so much for breaking the formatting of the screen with that wall of copy/pasted text (let’s hope it was copy/pasted, anyway: why do I have a sneaking suspicion you typed it all out, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining?).
I don’t recall saying anything specifically about distance traversed. If I did and don’t recall, please link me to that post.
But that’s interesting information. From your cite on Native American kids:
Questions that immediately come to mind:
—Just how low were those scores? Were they lower than white kids but still higher than black kids?
—What about if you adjust all three groups for those same psychosocial variables? How do the relative scores look then?
But let’s say those questions were answered, and the numbers came back as being the same or lower than black students. I might then hypothesize that the Native population before European colonization might have been a higher-IQ gene pool. But then the ravages of smallpox and other diseases may have been particularly hard on those whose intelligence made them most central to Native society: administrators, teachers, healers, etc., who would all see greater numbers of their fellow people on a daily basis. Or maybe the genes for having the physical robustness to survive disease don’t travel along with the ones for high intelligence. One might also imagine that this is true, sadly, of those who best adapted to being herded onto reservations (just as the “village dogs” who slowly became domesticated thousands of years ago were not as smart as their wolf cousins).
As for Australian aborigines, the key to my hypothesis was the smarts required to survive harsh winters, that humans simply cannot do without serious planning and engineering of clothing and shelter, maintenance of fire, food stores, etc. That doesn’t apply to them.
Not in my case. I was born in a specific part of East Africa (Nairobi, Kenya), and I studied African history in college. I am well aware of the distinctions, and have always been one to roll my eyes at the stereotypical and broad brush most Americans (including African Americans, BTW) paint Africa with in toto.
Again, not me. I credited xxandyxxx with an excellent find on the Tanzanian invention of carbon steel, a development that one could hardly dismiss as inconsequential. But I’d also point out that I have said all along that I’d expect there to be subpopulations (clades, if you prefer, rat avatar) of sub-Saharan Africans with better genes for intelligence than you’d find among Europeans or East Asians. They just haven’t reproduced as effectively and fanned out over a large geographic area, so they are overlooked. And this assumption, I would argue, is another way my form of “racialism” should be understood as quite different from most.
Let’s have it out then! What implications are you referring to? Be specific, please.
Kudos, once again, for manning up (or womanning up as the case may be) like that. I will await with interest your report as to what your revised analysis shows.
Whoa, whoa, whoa—hold on. You really think no one in this thread has denied that? Even early in the thread? You’ve admitted, I think, that you haven’t read it all. I submit that you’ve missed a very important tenor of this conversation, that has put me in the position where I’d consider it a perfectly reasonable compromise if indeed “nobody here is denying” what you put before the parenthetical caveat. If everyone here wants to cosign that, I’d be perfectly happy for us to deliver that conclusion as reported out of committee and leave all the other disputes TBD at a later date.
Nothing in what you quoted contradicts what you “forced [me] to admit” (snort) on Friday. Try reading for comprehension.
Everything you wrote was stupid, but the above was the stupidest.
Look, you couldn’t figure out a simple logic problem, on an issue that you’ve been thinking about for years. Your brain couldn’t handle it, so you probably shouldn’t stress your little brain by thinking about complex things like intelligence, or understanding things that people have been patiently explaining to you.
For example, everything you wrote above is wrong. You simply, despite our best efforts, cannot understand the simple point we have been trying to make…for more than a year? Damn.
But you write a lot. Son, you need to learn: stupid + verbose = tedious.
Oh, we have a small piece of noisy data? Well, shit, **SlackerInc’s **going to use it as the basis for a lengthy, convoluted, just-so story that by an odd coincidence just so happens to check off all his pre-existing prejudices (surprise!). **SlackerInc **doesn’t need your facts, he’s got a story to tell. It’s like what science was like, back before they discovered the scientific method, or understood that it was a bad idea to make plumbing out of lead.
Is it broken for anyone else? It wraps quite nicely for me.
Naah, you gibbering idiot, it’s a literal transcript of my derisive laughter, courtesy of Google voicetyping. I love how it captured the exclamation marks so accurately.
Of course, I see you don’t even bother trying to defend your intellectual cowardice - but then, I’ve seen you throw your own parents and kid under the bus already in arguments, so no surprises there. Not taking ownership for your own failings - you’re setting a real shining example there, Pater.
Yeah, never mind that the data came from Kimstu and I was trying to give it the benefit of the doubt for the sake of argument, after expressing my reservations as regards how the numbers actually compare to other groups, and how controlling for other factors might change that. And as Kimstu understood but you don’t seem to, the data actually contradicted rather than reinforced my priors (“pre-existing prejudices”). Was this an experiment to see how many times, and to what degree, you could be wrong in the span of two sentences? If so, well done! ��
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.
I will respond in more detail later, but that is some serious bullshit to characterize SpEd and reg ed kids as being as different as dogs and cows. They are all kids, on a continuum, with a line arbitrarily drawn at one point. Kids on one side of that line are given a great deal more in resources, but the prevailing paradigm in SpEd is mainstreaming/LRE. Most people in SpEd would find that analogy offensive but also just very poor in descriptive terms. I anticipated someone taking a line like this and specifically tried to head it off in an earlier post. I didn’t think it would be you, though, Kimstu! Disappointing.
Would that this were true. That would mean no expectation that schools equalize test scores (which, yes, include the vast majority of SpEd kids: only the most severely intellectually disabled are granted waivers) between white and black kids. No NCLB, no “Waiting for Superman”, and no me engaging in this argument. I would be free to do what would be much more comfortable: wincing with distaste at anyone rubbing black peoples’ noses in their lower IQ scores.
I wasn’t drawing the analogy between the students as people, but between the relative sizes of the resources they require. I figured everybody would have the sense to recognize that I wasn’t trying to paint special-needs students as literally a different species from mainstreamed students.
I apologize for offending you. I would like to point out, though, that if you hadn’t been so obtusely resistant to EE’s more realistic scenario of the two separate categories of funding needs, I wouldn’t have ventured on that more imaginative analogy as a last resort to try to get that fundamental issue through your head.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. What I mean is that I don’t see anybody at all in this thread claiming that black children overall don’t present with a disproportionate amount of cognitive and developmental problems even before they come to school.
The path of a past poster that fell for the “pretty talk” of racists like Murray has been nothing sort of a big cautionary tale, first that poster started as a mild scientific racist, then a nativist, then a climate change denier, and finally in GD he came out as a proud Holocaust denier.
Really OP and buddies of Murray, you need to get better sources or friends, you are getting poisoned slowly, but surely.
It could be that Murray’s cadre is the gateway drug for racism, or it could be that it’s the type of racism that gets the most support so it’s the one they’ll cop to early.