When will "reformers" learn that you can't blame "failing schools" for low test scores?

The BBQ Pit
1

(This is not prefaced “RO” because my wife is a special education teacher, who is hardworking and does a great job, but who is constantly being implicitly blamed by all this “failing schools” talk, as her students do not have the inherent capability to dramatically raise their test scores no matter what she does.)

There are a number of pieces out recently like this one in the Atlantic, bemoaning the “failure” of the high-profile reform effort in Newark, N.J., which included a $100 million gift from Mark Zuckerberg. Guess who was not shocked? Me. For years I have been gritting my teeth and enduring nonsense like the movie Waiting for Superman, which despite being made by and trumpeted by liberals, actually throws teachers and their unions under the bus.

I can only hope they are finally seeing evidence that their goals are just not feasible, and that maybe the extant school administrations and teachers were doing a good job all along. Unfortunately, I suspect it’s more likely they will just continue to miss what’s right in front of their faces, assuming they must have just gone about it the wrong way and if they just try a different “disruptive” approach, it will finally work. :smack:

And what is it I’m saying is right in front of them, but which illustrates that “there are none so blind as those who will not see”? It’s not complicated, and boils down to another old adage: “You can’t get blood from a turnip.” The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart demonstrated unambiguously that intellectual aptitude is highly heritable. Most kids in so-called “failing schools” are the offspring of parents with low IQs, and they have inherited those mental faculties. You can demonize teacher unions and build all the expensive charter schools you like, but those essential facts will not change.

Problem is, the academic fields that fuel these movements don’t even consider this possibility. Their ideological cornerstone is what Steven Pinker snarkily refers to as the “blank slate” paradigm: that everyone is born essentially equal (in ability, that is: we are and should be all equal before the law), and from there it’s all about “nurture”. This is simply wrong, but they proceed from an axiomatic certainty that it is correct. And as long as policymakers keep listening to them, we as a society will keep bashing our collective heads against this wall while making scapegoats of the teachers and school administrators who work hard for relatively little money to serve these disadvantaged populations. :mad:

2

Paging Mr. Juke. Paging Mr. Kallikak.

OK, so we accept that some component of IQ is inherited. Now separate that out from environment, and convince people to separate it out from wealth and race. Because there’s always that sly smirking grin, that quick wink, that aside glance and a whisper ("Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you all along! You can’t trust Those People… ") and it all starts back up. (“Let them rot in their poor districts. There’s Reasons They’re poor. You know that, it’s solid science. They’ll never amount to anything. Waste of time to try.”)

All of that, all of the above and foregoing, is going to be brought up and screamed over, just because you can’t see a single step between “It’s all the teachers’ fault” and “It’s genetics”; nope, two options, no waiting. Good Job!

3

It’s a strange and incredibly coldhearted attitude to decide that because someone can’t help having a low IQ, this is reason enough to “let them rot”. That is a leap of logic I find mystifying and appalling.

4

I think most would at least pretend to blame poverty culture or poor parenting or unions or something before diving right into thinly veiled race realism.

They should be well compensated in this case, though it does sound like the money was mishandled in some hilarious ways.

5

I suggest you actually study it, because it does nothing of the sort. It simply tries to determine which cognitive characteristics can be attributed to nurture vs. genetics, without making any headway whatsoever on the specifics of *which *genetics we’re talking about (nor does it purport to). That shit’s a bit more complicated to assess than eye colour, you see.

Furthermore, even within this narrow scope of study, “genetics” is hardly topping the charts across the board.

6

It’s just hard for me to see how anyone is helped by endless disruption or even destruction of schools in a quixotic quest to achieve the impossible.

7

We don’t need to learn anything specific about DNA to determine that intelligence, like height, is heritable (in its potential: good nutrition and other nurture factors obviously play a key role in allowing someone to reach their full potential).

8

First : no, it’s not. Not wholly so, not by a long shot. Your own damn cite shows as much.
Second : we don’t exactly, but the degree to which it is remains unanswered.

You seem to be asserting that dumb parents = dumb kids to go with them and complete the set ; which is how straight it tends to be with simple traits like eye or skin colour (and even then, you’ve got the odd black kid popping up from white parents of white grandparents because someone somewhere up the chain, on either side, had The Sex with a non-white person. Same with randomly “odd” eye colours).

With something as complex as a brain, you have to deal with the random mix-and-matching of probably thousands of separate genes, presumably across multiple chromosomes, each with fuck knows how many possible alleles. And as many opportunities for mutations. This for each sprog.

So, yanno, it’s probably not all that linear a determination.
You’d need a whole lot more than a passel of twins to study that kind of stuff - and the “nurture” factor would be so much harder to separate in the kind of sampled population required, too.

I’ll also note that your seminal assertion (i.e. that people living or raised in poor neighbourhoods have low IQs) is, um, let’s go with “disputable and unsubstantiated” so’s not to have to belt you in the gob. Then we might move on to the whole *slew *of issues with IQ as a measure of general cognitive aptitude…

9

Hah ! Just checked out of idle curiosity, and as it turns out since the days I took high school bio eye colour itself has turned out to not be all that simple to predict either :

[QUOTE=Wiki]
So far, as many as 15 genes have been associated with eye color inheritance. […] The earlier belief that blue eye color is a simple recessive trait has been shown to be incorrect. The genetics of eye color are so complex that almost any parent-child combination of eye colors can occur
[/QUOTE]

(emphasis mine)
So, with that said, I bid you good luck selling your particular brand of all new and improved pop eugenics :slight_smile:

10

That height is heritable does not mean that the children of really tall people are going to be shoo-ins for the NBA.
Perhaps we should stop looking for simplistic solutions. Teachers are important, as are parents, social environment, money for the schools, and administration. Twiddling one of these knobs is unlikely to solve any problems.

11

Look: one of my best friends, a guy I met 20 years ago in my sophomore year of college and remain good friends with to this day, was raised by a single mom, a diner waitress, in a poor neighborhood of a poor city. And he’s one of the smartest people I know: scored something like a 32 composite on his ACT, all that jazz.

So yes: I’m aware that there are poor people who are really smart. If anyone thought I was arguing that every individual from a poor family, or even from a demonstrably low-IQ family, should be assumed a priori to be of low aptitude, let me disabuse you of that notion.

But we are not talking about individuals. We are talking about groups. Schools are not declared to be “failing” (or “succeeding” for that matter) based on individuals but based on the aggregate performance of their students on standardized tests. And as much as I agree with the idea behind Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” theory, a strong aptitude in the bodily-kinesthetic or naturalistic realms is not going to help you do any better on those tests.

So what I’m saying, which should not be controversial (at least not in a purely logical and scientific sense), is that a school located in an affluent suburb, where kids’ parents nearly all have college degrees including many graduate degrees, represents a gene pool with more aggregate, innate ability to succeed on those standardized tests.

Which BTW illustrates the flip side of my point: just as schools in poor areas get far too much blame for their students’ low test scores, the schools professionals’ children attend get too much credit for their high scores. And this is also why it’s so annoying that affluent people often think it’s desperately important to find the best school (public or private) for their little darlings. Their kids are mostly going to do great no matter where they go! Conversely, you could ship all the kids from “failing” schools out to the supposedly great schools, and you wouldn’t see them rise to the national average, much less to the level of those schools’ typical student bodies.

Am I saying poor schools don’t need more funding? No: some of them, probably most of them, absolutely do. For one thing, they tend to have a very high proportion of students who are in “sped”, which is very expensive and labor-intensive. But there shouldn’t be an expectation that this extra funding is going to get these poor schools’ test scores up to the level of non-poor schools, any more than someone should expect that the amount of money people spend in Minneapolis on insulation and snow removal is going to magically turn the city into a facsimile of Miami. You just do what you need to do to help people as best as you can, and don’t expect teachers and administrators to perform miracles, and then punish or even dissolve their schools when they don’t.

12

I’ve worked in “urban” education my whole career; I’ve never worked in a school that was less than 65% low-SES.

The question isn’t “should schools in poor areas be performing like schools in wealthy areas?”. The question is “are students in poor schools getting the best education possible, given their context?”. If you think the answer to that is “sure”, I think you are selling those kids incredibly short.

Think about girl’s sports. While it’s true that in any given year, girls are never going to perform as well as boys because boys have some undeniable physical advantages, the best girls today are performing better than the best boys a generation ago because we set high expectations and developed better training techniques. The same is absolutely possible in urban education. We could be doing better.

And you’re crazy if you don’t think the school makes much difference for any kids anywhere, that it’s all down to genes and family environment. Right now I’m at a competitive magnet in an urban system, which means I know all of our area middle school, public and private, very well. I also know every good high school, public and private. You can tell where the kids came from because of what they know how to do, and it’s a stronger effect than selection bias can explain.

Now, people that think the solution is all about firing teachers because obviously lazy and stupid are completely wrong headed–both because what makes a good school is greater than that, and because firing the stupid and lazy teachers doesn’t help if you have to hire new stupid and lazy teachers to replace them. But I also get pretty fucking tired of teachers in low-performing environments who wave their hands and blame genetics/parents/society and declare that they are doing the best they possibly can, considering. We could do a lot better. Everyday I wake up and try, and I do not any patience for people who do not.

13

What if they are trying? What if they are already doing the best they possibly can? I know that’s what my wife is doing, and she is a dedicated, hard worker who could have done other more lucrative things (she was Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and has two master’s degrees from prestigious universities). And she teaches at a school that’s a little “richer” than yours (and rural rather than urban), but not much: it’s right around 60% eligible for reduced or free lunch (which is what I assume you’re using as a yardstick for low SES).

Not every one of her colleagues is aces, but that’s true in any workplace. Why should we expect all teachers at all times to be at the level of the Teacher of the Year? That’s not realistic. Does every military grunt have to be up to the level of Seal Team Six, or be thrown in the brig for daring to be anything less?

And again: I don’t believe for a second that the teachers and administrators in the affluent schools with the high test scores are of any higher quality than the ones in the poor schools with the bad scores. They have their mix of great, good, mediocre, and bad teachers like any other school.

You accuse me of saying teachers and schools don’t make any difference. That’s not it at all. I just think the vast majority are already doing a good job. Diane Ravitch used to be one of the premier figures in the school reform movement, but she has to her eternal credit changed her mind as she gathered more evidence that, hey, maybe schools are doing well after all and ought to be left alone:

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Yes, but it does not necessarily follow that this means that there are differences in genetic intelligence (or genetic potential for intelligence, or similar) between races or other population groups. There is no genetic evidence (which would consist of finding the genes responsible for high and low intelligence and finding their prevalence in different populations) that some races or other groups on average are more or less likely to have high or low intelligence. Further, there is specific research that indicates that, within self-identified black people, greater amounts of African genetic admixture do not correlate to lower scores on intelligence tests. This suggests that if one self-identifies as “black”, how much actual African ancestry one has has no correlation to one’s intelligence test scores.

15

Whoa, Nelly! I never said anything about race, which is not even a valid biological taxonomic classification. The points I made about the test scores of children of college-educated professionals (which are basically the yardstick everyone else is expected to live up to) would apply perfectly well to a school whose PTA meets at the local Jack and Jill club.

16

Whether or not IQ is heritable is a canard. Other than perhaps trigonometry and calculus, there is nothing covered in any standard high school course that requires even an average IQ to master. Even the dumbest kids can become proficient readers. Sure, low-IQ kids will produce low scores on things like the verbal and math SATs, but there’s no reason they can’t excel on knowledge-based testing.

It’s especially ironic when IQ is brought into this sort of discussion because Alfred Binet’s thesis (which turned out to be correct) was that there were plenty of intelligent kids in poor rural environments who appeared to be stupid simply because they received little or no schooling. Before he published, it was generally accepted that poor people were stupid and would have poor, stupid children.

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But we have much more of a meritocracy than in Binet’s day. Note that, for instance, by 1998 African Americans with IQs at the white median level or higher had incomes that were 96% as high as their white counterparts. (That link, a paper from the Brookings think tank and published by the NYT, has a lot of interesting data and food for thought; I’d love to see an update to learn if the numbers have moved even more.)

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That piece seems to directly conflict with your OP. I mean, you can’t change the students, so what else are you going to change other than schools?

19

Before we can even talk about genes, we need to control for the environment.

Urban air pollution lowers children’s IQs.

Lead paint continues to poison poor children
Stress + pollution = health risks (including neurological) on low-income children

If we want to talk about genes, let’s talk about the fact that childhood exposure to pollutants can trigger epigenetic effects–which could be transmitted to one’s offspring.

Let’s talk about the fact that the poor and racial minorities are much more likely to be exposed to the pollution that we all contribute to than the wealthy and the white.

Fixating on “inferior” genes is so early-20th century, people. All genes are inferior when they are subjected to a toxic environment.

20

Do you really think that piece has one single unifying agenda? It struck me as open-mindedly exploring a number of issues and looking at the sometimes contradictory evidence.

And yes, monstro: I should indeed have raised the issue of lead paint as well. That has had a huge debilitating impact on inner city children. We need to raise the alarm and take much more drastic steps to ameliorate this. But it still has exactly fuck-all to do with “failing schools”!