re: Some thoughts on IQ

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Would you consider Stephen King to be a creative genius?

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It is believed that creative output requires a minimum IQ of 120.

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I set this within a historical context in which African Americans—beginning from exclusion, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, widespread discrimination—are actually diminished in terms of the development of our competitive and productive capacities. Education was not equal in 1930 for blacks and whites, nor in 1950, nor in 1970 for that matter. There are all kinds of negative consequences of discrimination in employment, residential location, segregation, and so on that impede development within the African American population of the latent potential capacities to perform. Given such a history, one can’t expect at day one that there’s going to be equality of, say, test scores because the background condition is one of unequal opportunity to develop human skills. So that’s the status quo ante. That’s the baseline from which we are attempting to move towards something that’s more equal.

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E.g., Andy Warhol had an IQ of 86.

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I just want things to be fair for them

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I'm surprised with your interests in education, you'd be unaware of that.
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This is what I meant when I said you've been grumpy lately.

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Define fair.

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African Americans score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and math tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. The gap appears before children enter kindergarten and it persists into adulthood...

Closing the black-white test score gap would probably do more to promote racial equality in the United States than any other strategy now under serious discussion...

Explaining the Gap

Traditional explanations for the black-white test score gap have not stood up well to the test of time. During the 1960s, most liberals blamed the gap on some combination of black poverty, racial segregation, and inadequate funding of black schools. Since then, the number of affluent black families has grown dramatically, but their children’s test scores still lag far behind those of white children from equally affluent families. School desegregation may have played some role in reducing the black-white test score gap in the South, but school desegregation also seems to have costs for blacks, and when we compare initially similar students in today’s schools, those who attend desegregated schools learn only slightly more than those in segregated schools.

Recent evidence suggests that disparities in school resources do affect achievement, but resource disparities between black and white children have shrunk steadily over time. The average black child now attends school in a district that spends as much per pupil as the average white child’s district. Black children’s schools also have about the same number of teachers per pupil as white schools. Predominantly white schools seem to attract more skilled teachers than black schools, but while black students who attend predominantly white schools probably benefit from having better teachers, this advantage seems to be offset by the social costs of being in an overwhelmingly white environment. In any event, schools cannot be the main reason for the black-white test score gap, because it appears before children enter school and persists even when black and white children attend the same schools. If schools play an important role in perpetuating the gap, either desegregated schools must be treating black and white children very differently or else black and white children must react very differently to the same treatment.

The three most common “conservative” explanations for the black-white gap-genes, the culture of poverty, and single motherhood-are also hard to reconcile with the available evidence. There is no direct genetic evidence for or against the theory that the black-white gap is innate, because we have not yet identified the genes that affect skills like reading, math, and abstract reasoning. Studies of mixed-race children and black children adopted by white parents suggest, however, that racial differences in test performance are largely if not entirely environmental in origin.

Cultural differences associated with chronic poverty may account for some of the black-white test score gap, but they cannot be the main explanation, since the gap persists among affluent children. And while children raised by single mothers score lower on most standardized tests than children raised by married couples, this difference almost disappears once we take account of the fact that women who become single mothers come from less advantaged families, have lower test scores, and complete less schooling than women with husbands.

New Directions

We suspect that successful new explanations for the test score gap will differ from their predecessors in several ways.

First, instead of emphasizing the kinds of racial differences that economists and sociologists usually study (parents’ economic resources, parents’ position in the occupational hierarchy, parents’ exposure to formal education, and parents’ living arrangements), successful theories will take more account of the factors that psychologists have traditionally emphasized (the way family members interact with one another and with the outside world, for example). A good explanation of why white five-year-olds have bigger vocabularies than black five-year-olds is likely to focus on how much the parents talk to their children, how they deal with their children’s questions, and how they react when their children either learn or fail to learn something, not on how much money the parents have.

Second, instead of looking mainly for resource differences between predominantly black and predominantly white schools, successful theories will probably have to look more carefully at the way black and white children respond to the same classroom experiences, such as being in a smaller classroom, having a more competent teacher, having a teacher of their own race, or having a teacher with high expectations for those who perform below the norm for their age group.

Successful theories will therefore have to pay more attention to psychological and cultural influences, which are much harder to measure than income, education, and living arrangements. Collecting accurate data on black and white parents’ habits, values, behavior, and ideas is not easy, and it would take time. It might well require an investment of time and effort comparable to the effort that went into developing cognitive tests during the first half of the 20th century. But without such work, we are in constant danger of seeing black-white differences as an inevitable byproduct of people’s genes or of “cultural” factors that nobody can change.

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