This is ignorant. Many districts–including mine–use very objective measures (e.g., the Naglieri Nonverbal Aptitude Test) to identify gifted kids, and test all kids. And the stats come out highly disproportionate in favor of white kids.
The fact is that our community has a history of intense racism, in which the educated African American population was deliberately and systematically disenfranchised, kicked out of their school, and their teachers fired. For decades, the power structures disproportionately rewarded smart white kids for success in school, compared to smart black kids.
Given this history, of course some smart black kids are going to show their intelligence through means not measured on normed achievement tests. A reasonable system that’s trying to identify smart kids is going to have to make allowances for this history and its modern ramifications.
This question is a major area of study for AIG educators. You’ve dismissed the issue entirely too quickly.
Where does this end? If those same kids later can’t perform well on their MCATs, are we just going to give them some side door to med school? Sounds like a good way to bring back the Knick-era tendency for people to get very nervous when they learn they have a black doctor.
I will fully admit a “bias” on this, in that (like, I’ll wager, a large proportion of Dopers–something I like about this place) I always aced these tests (to TNS levels, although I have never actually joined). And if you can’t ace them or at least score very high on them, it just seems to me you don’t have the necessary *academic *aptitude (again, I do believe in Gardner’s multiple intelligences, but this is *school *we are talking about, so it is academic aptitude that counts) to be gifted. You can be whip-smart without qualifying as gifted.
And you can have legitimately unfortunate disadvantages (from lead paint to unequal prenatal care to the disruption of culture caused by hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow) that hold kids back from being gifted…but they are still not in fact gifted. (If this same legacy had led to black kids being physically slower and weaker than white kids, would we still insist on starting them on the football or basketball teams because this inequality in ability was not their fault?)
Furthermore, if race is not even a scientifically valid classification, why would it suddenly become one to qualify a kid to jump the queue into a gifted program? (I suppose you could use SEC instead, but that privileges my kids, despite their father having grown up in a household of two college professors, including one who got his Ph.D. at Stanford and before that having gone to an elite New England boarding school.)
Polarizing topics like this is probably not going to lead to any solutions. If you want to complain, fine, complain, but don’t act like you want to solve anything when you are polarizing an issue.
I’m not sure it is fair to expect major issues to be “solved” on a message board. But yes: I am complaining that the whole paradigm of how inequity is expected to be solved is all kinds of fucked up. I don’t have any illusions that my saying so is going to stop all the “reformers” in their tracks, if that’s what you mean.
But you do recognize that inequity is not simply a matter of genetics, right? On a scale of 1 to 10 how much do you think genetics is responsible for inequity?
One option would be to end it once they recognize that the slippery slope fallacy is shitty argumentative tactic. Another option would be to end it once they’re no longer minors in a mandatory public school. A third option would be to end it once we’re no longer stacking the deck so heavily against minority children.
Shit, THOSE are the paltry scores you keep bragging about? 1450 on pre-1995 SATs? Fuck that minor league shit, dude, seriously, you’re embarrassing yourself.
Yes: I scored significantly above that. I was in our district’s self-contained gifted class. The difference is that I was a child at the time, and as an adult, I recognize that my admitted bias means my childhood experiences do not qualify me, by themselves, to yammer on about public policy.
That’s why I went to grad school to obtain my license to teach academically gifted students.
Gardner’s multiple intelligences are interesting, but not verified via rigorous experimental protocol. They’re just one of a variety of models of intelligence that are worth examining. One of the more interesting models distinguishes between gifts and talents and skills, suggesting that gifts are visible untrained, talents are visible only when trained, and skills are achievable by most folks to some level (I’m operating from memory here–I can pull out the textbook if that’d be helpful). If we’re looking for gifted students, we need to find all kids with a gift, not just those who have had it nurtured up to this point.
I am unaware of any professionals within the gifted educator community who so blithely dismiss this concern. Indeed, the National Association of Gifted Educator’s most recent position paper is on the crisis of the excellence gap:
Did you even read my posts immediately upthread, including (emphasis added):
?
None of the bolded items have anything to do with genetics. Which is not to say that genes don’t also play a role: clearly they do. But my agenda is not to jump up and down and taunt any group of people for congenital (or even environmental) deficiencies. It is to point out what should be obvious: that we can’t make those deficiencies/disparities go away by pretending they don’t exist, “Emperor’s New Clothes” style. And we certainly can’t (to go back to the original topic of the thread) insist that teachers and school administrators magically erase the deficiencies/disparities, or be charged with operating “failing” schools.
Of course not: within the field of education, most everyone has either drunk the same Kool-Aid you and the sociologists have, or they know better than to commit professional hara-kiri by saying otherwise.
Look, we are having a problem here, It is the political nature of the topic itself. The undercurrent here, regardless of whether you intended it or not, is a correlation of race and IQ. As far as I know that data is not straightforward not is their a satisfactory objective answer. I tend much much closer to the liberal ideal of equality and egalitarianism, but, I am willing to contemplate that some races may be inherently more talented at certain things than others. I don’t necessarily believe that but I recognize it could be a topic for conversation.
The other side of the coin is environmental factors. In short, we will not fix or problems with our schools until we fix our problems with poverty.
The two sides of this conversation are very far apart… so perhaps I can ask, what step or steps do you think is most important for improving failing schools.
:rolleyes: What do the professionals know, eh? Let’s listen to a loud manchild on the Internet instead, who thinks that paying attention to research is equivalent to mass cult suicide!
Listen, I know you’re proud of those test scores, but as someone who beat your ass on those scores, please believe me when I tell you that test scores don’t matter that much, and that you’re a cretin.
THEY’RE NOT IMPRESSIVE! Jesus, the fact that I took a test back in high school and got big numbers on it is not something I’d ever talk about, except that Slacker won’t shut the fuck up about it, and I hope that maybe this might work to get him when all else has failed.
If people’s take-away from this is that I’m as big a douchebag manchild as he is, I’m gonna be horribly embarrassed.
Dorkness, since you keep harping on this point: yes, I absolutely believe you beat my score (which was BTW a 1480, obtained with only one try at the test, at age 16, with no tutoring or Kaplanesque prep class). You’re plenty brainsy, no question, despite your personality deficits. And I have said repeatedly that there are many Dopers who could lap me–something I very much appreciate about the SDMB.
But I wonder if you stopped to consider how much collateral damage is inherent in your scattershot (and silly) “minor league” jibe. I can’t imagine dismissing someone with a pre-1995 1400, or 1350, or 1300, as bush league. Anyone in that ballpark is welcome in a gifted program as far as I’m concerned.
I appreciated your thoughtful take…until you got to that last sentence, premised on the notion I fundamentally reject, of “failing schools” being a given. Ask me a different, non-loaded question, and I’ll be happy to answer.
ETA: Is there anything more cringeworthy than the humblebrag “well, sure, my scores were at the far right end of the bell curve, but pshaw–that’s no big thang”?
Shut the fuck up about your test scores now and for all time. They impress nobody. Your attempts to turn this back on me are just more examples of how test scores do not reliably correlate to any sort of useful intelligence.
I don’t think you’re being a manchild; it’s just that both of achieved scores that are better than I would be capable of doing. What can be extrapolated from those scores? Shit if I know - I still think it indicates that both of you have abilities I simply do not have. Maybe it means you are better people maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it means I deserve to dig ditches my whole life, I can accept that.
Ultimately though, the truth is that both of your scores are significantly better than what the vast majority of the population could achieve.
I agree with you though that it’s not something people should talk about if they want to be taken seriously.
I wasn’t trying to ask a “trick” question. You are the one who started a thread about failing schools and not blaming the teachers… I’m giving you the opportunity to clarify your position.
I’m not saying you were being intentionally weaselly. It’s just that you (like most people) take as a given the very premise that I rejected in the OP: that the schools are “failing” at all. I can’t offer an opinion as to why they are failing if I don’t believe they are failing, KWIM?
well, I think there are some problems but I’m too tired and too ignornat in general of the situation to comment about it now. Perhaps we can chat later…
And I have said repeatedly that there are many Dopers who could lap me–something I very much appreciate about the SDMB.