re: Can teachers really close the "achievement gap?"

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Everything has become about "college readiness"

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Even worse than that in public schools everything has become about "test readiness" because if students aren't taught to the test then funding gets cut.

This is from 1998, but could be worth a read:

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FRICAN AMERICANS currently score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and mathematics tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. This gap appears before children enter kindergarten (figure 1-1), and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 1970, but the typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites on most standardized tests. On some tests the typical American black scores below more than 85 percent of whites?

The black-white test score gap does not appear to be an inevitable fact of nature. It is true that the gap shrinks only a little when black and white children attend the same schools. It is also true that the gap shrinks only a little when black and white families have the same amount of schooling, the same income, and the same wealth. But despite endless speculation, no one has found genetic evidence indicating that blacks have less innate intellectual ability than whites. Thus while it is clear that eliminating the test score gap would require enormous effort by both blacks and whites and would probably take more than one generation, we believe it can be done.

This conviction rests mainly on three facts:

--When black or mixed-race children are raised in white rather than black homes, their preadolescent test scores rise dramatically. Black adoptees' scores seem to fall in adolescence, but this is what we would expect if, as seems likely, their social and cultural environment comes to resemble that of other black adolescents and becomes less like that of the average white adolescent.

--Even nonverbal IQ scores are sensitive to environmental change. Scores on nonverbal IQ tests have risen dramatically throughout the world since the 1930s. The average white scored higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1978 than 82 percent of whites who took the test in 1932. Such findings reinforce the implications of adoption studies: large environmental changes can have a large impact on test performance.

--Black-white differences in academic achievement have also narrowed throughout the twentieth century. The best trend data come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which has been testing seventeen-year-olds since 1971 and has repeated many of the same items year after year. Figure 1-2 shows that the black-white reading gap narrowed from 1.25 standard deviations in 1971 to 0.69 standard deviations in 1996. The math gap fell from 1.33 to 0.89 standard deviations. When Min-Hsiung Huang and Robert Hauser analyzed vocabulary scores for adults born between 1909 and 1969, the black-white gap also narrowed by half.

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LINK

Several studied suggest they have, on average, significantly lower IQs.

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To my knowledge, yes, it is. There is no genetic ability or inability that explains why one race would be anymore intellectual than the other.

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Then you should expand your knowledge, you willful ignorance doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

For what are public schools educating children?

Does anybody know? Does anyone ask the question?

What's the point of a person's life? We can't even discuss such questions anymore. It's too judgmental.

So we focus on test scores and achievement gaps, ignoring the fact that we are burdening children with longer hours of schoolwork to prepare them for more years of schooling that ultimately will in most cases prepare them for nothing more than sitting at a desk for 40 years battling anxiety and depression.

To answer the OP's question, of course not. Genetics rule to a great extent. My 7 and 9 year olds haven't set foot in a traditional school in years, but they read and write far above their grade level. They get 3 hours of instruction 3 days a week yet score 90+ percentile on standardized tests. I'm not bragging, because it's not due to anything I've done. They just have better genetics for school performance.

Traditional (so-called, even though these prison-like schools are a modern invention) schools are a failed model. We are wasting money and worse, wasting childhoods.

There are genetic physiological and mental differences between races. I'm sorry this makes you uncomfortable. If you don't think AAs are more athletic, have greater VO2 capacity and more fast twitch muscle fibers than European whites, then I don't know what to tell you. To think the same doesn't apply to mental capacity is to give in to political correctness.

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There are thousands showing race and IQ distribution, are you an idiot?

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Which are easily explained by environmental factors from birth.

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Which are easily explained by environmental factors from birth.

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How do environments happen?

Asians kids aren't necessarily smarter than white kids. They do have very strong work ethic that is developed from the nuclear households that many come from. They value education, and it translates to the college level and perform with high marks at the Professional level. It goes to show, that if you work hard and WANT education, positive results will transpire.