Sunday, September 24, 2017



Despite Affirmative Action, the gaps remain

Steve Sailer details below something that will be zero surprise to anybody familiar with the IQ research.  The failure, despite all efforts, to close the gap in educational achievement between high and low IQ groups is in fact resounding validation that the tests are right.  The tests enabled accurate prophecies and nothing has been able to falsify those prophecies.  Good science enables accurate predictions so it is ironical that the IQ tests have been shown by their enemies to be good science


Affirmative action privileges for blacks and (to a lesser extent) Hispanics have been a near-universal feature of college admissions for what is now approaching a half century.

What have we learned since the late 1960s?

Perhaps the strangest result is that the biggest winners from racial quotas have turned out to be blacks who aren’t descended from victimized American slaves but are instead descended from the slave peddlers, or from whites, or, as in the case of Barack Obama, from both.

On the other hand, some of the early fears have proved to be overblown.

Neoconservative intellectuals in the 1970s, such as social scientist Nathan Glazer in his 1975 book Affirmative Discrimination, often suspected that racial quotas for blacks were in effect an anti-Semitic plot to roll back the huge gains Jewish students had made at elite colleges since the postwar lifting of the 1920s caps on the number of Jews admitted.

But it turned out that there were definite limits on how much affirmative action even the richest college could afford. In the 21st century, the bigger challenge to Jews in winning admissions has come not from affirmative-action-aided blacks, as the neocons feared, but from hardworking, high-scoring Asians.

By 1998, Glazer had recanted his opposition to affirmative action.

Why? The number of blacks capable of fitting in at a highbrow college had proved far more limited than had been expected during the civil rights era. As Glazer said in 1998:

Thirty years ago, with the passage of the great civil rights laws, one could have reasonably expected—as I did—that all would be set right by now.

It was widely assumed in the 1960s that the poor performance of blacks and Latinos must have been due to flaws biasing the admissions process. That blacks did worse on admissions tests was the fault of, say, culturally inappropriate vocabulary questions about the word “regatta.”

“The irony is that today a remarkable fraction of the black beneficiaries of affirmative action are not descended from American slaves.”

Sensitivity committees were hired to scour test questions for bias. Scoring was made easier on the SAT verbal test. Analogies were dumped. A writing test was added and then dropped.

And…nothing much happened. The gap between white and black test scores was slightly blunted, but persisted.

Similarly, it was hoped that race quotas would uncover numerous diamonds in the rough. But it turned out that students let in on racial quotas did about as badly as could be expected.

Harvard, the alpha dog of academia, performed numerous quantitative studies during the 1970s about how far it could push affirmative action, and discovered definite limits (summarized in Robert Klitgaard’s 1985 book Choosing Elites). In particular, black males from underclass backgrounds who had been admitted to Harvard had an alarming tendency to violently victimize their fellow students.

More hardheaded observers in the 1960s assumed that the race gaps were real but transient. Give blacks a generation under post–Jim Crow conditions and they would catch up.

A late example of that outdated optimism came in Sandra Day O’Connor’s controlling opinion in the Supreme Court’s 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger affirmative action case. O’Connor upheld racial privileges, but declared that they wouldn’t be needed in a quarter of a century:

The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable. The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.

In 2017, we are now over halfway to O’Connor’s 2028 end point, but nobody any longer believes that the world will be much different by then.

In fact, O’Connor’s decision concocted the perpetual-motion “diversity rationale” for racial privilege: You see, white students benefit from what quota kids bring to the classroom (such as racial resentment). Since nobody can actually measure the benefits of diversity except through faith, there is no end in sight for racial preferences.

But by 1998, it was clear to Glazer that if blacks had to win admission on their own merits, the top colleges would be only 1 or 2 percent black, instead of the 6 or 7 percent black seen with affirmative action.

Today, little has changed after Glazer’s second thoughts.

Consider an SAT score of 700, which is common for students at strong private universities such as USC or NYU. On the SAT exam in 2016, for instance, I estimate that only about 645 blacks in the country scored 700 or higher on the math portion, compared with 40,000 whites and an incredible 43,000 Asians.

On the reading section of the SAT, about 809 blacks reached the 700s versus 36,000 whites and 17,000 Asians.

At the Harvard-Stanford level of a 750 SAT score, whites outnumber blacks about 72 to 1 on reading and 107 to 1 on math.

Blacks have remained at about 6 percent of elite college freshmen since 1980. Considering the huge increase in Asians and Hispanics due to immigration, that steady state is much better than whites have done over the same time period.

The irony, however, is that today a remarkable fraction of the black beneficiaries of affirmative action are not descended from American slaves. Although quotas are often conceived of as reparations for slavery in America, a huge proportion of the beneficiaries of being black track ancestry either to a white parent or to non-American blacks (often to the triumphant tribes who sold fellow blacks into slavery).

In a 1999 survey by Douglas Massey of Princeton, 41 percent of black Ivy League freshmen had at least one foreign-born parent. At all private colleges, 27 percent of black freshmen were of immigrant background.

In 2011 at the Yale Law School, according to professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, only two of the eighteen students who joined the black students’ association were African-American on both parents’ sides.

In 2004, black Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier pointed out that only about one-third of Harvard’s 530 black undergraduates were the descendants of four African-Americans. With the rise of Barack Obama later that year, however, Gates and Guinier prudently dummied up on this interesting question of why American institutions are granting racial privileges to individuals with no claim to be hereditary victims of slavery or Jim Crow.

It just doesn’t seem like the kind of question that occurs to white people in these increasingly racialized days. For example, Dana Goldstein’s “When Affirmative Action Isn’t Enough” in The New York Times on 9/17/17 focused on Elvis Kahoro, an illegal immigrant who was admitted to posh Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.:

To lure Mr. Kahoro, who was born in Kenya, Pomona went to extraordinary lengths. It flew him to campus during the fall of his senior year, paying for all his travel expenses. After he was accepted, financial aid covered close to the full cost of attendance, and he has never had to take out a loan; the college even gives him extra money for textbooks and cross-country trips to visit his family.

As with President Obama, Mr. Kahoro’s ancestors presumably sold many blacks into the slave trade. But that doesn’t matter in America in 2017: Elvis is racially entitled, even if recruiting him away from other colleges desperate for minimally qualified blacks is an expensive zero-sum game.

Here’s one important question that the superior performance of Africans and West Indians raises: Is something radically wrong with African-American culture? Why aren’t black Americans doing better than blacks from much poorer countries? Is our American culture of inculcating racial resentment causing African-Americans to lag behind their distant cousins from abroad? Should we stop allowing so many foreign blacks to immigrate?

Another relevant question: Do immigrants who get drafted into ameliorating American academia’s black lack eventually come down with the same bad habits as African-Americans?

Although the NYT article celebrates Pomona College for its costly success in attracting underrepresented minorities, Pomona and the other Claremont colleges, such as Claremont McKenna and Harvey Mudd, have suffered major nervous breakdowns in 2017 by black and Hispanic students who are thrown in over their heads. In August, the NYT profiled the spate of childish meltdowns in Claremont this year under the apt headline: “More Diversity Means More Demands.”

After a half century of America obsessing over theoretically overlooked blacks, where is the actual ignored talent?

Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard have been studying who are the high-potential high school students who don’t think about applying to, say, Stanford or Harvard.

These ignored students tend to be not the more fashionable ethnicities, because our society has been fixated upon recruiting blacks and Latinos for a half century now, but, typically, white boys in flyover states. The most disregarded students today are the same kind of people who got us to the moon in 1969.

SOURCE 






Scotland's education minister pledges to measure progress on school attainment gap

Why are Leftists always tilting at windmills?  The poor will ALWAYS show lower educational achievement.  The poor are DUMBER!  Charles Murray set out the IQ findings on that decades ago

John Swinney has pledged to devise a string of new measures to assess his success in closing the school attainment gap between rich and poor within a decade.

Scotland’s education secretary and deputy first minister said a consultation would be published within weeks, after he faced criticism for admitting he did not know how the government would be judged against what it has earmarked as its number one priority.

Speaking at the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow, he said the stubborn gap in academic achievement between those born into rich and poor families had blighted Scotland for his entire life and revealed that a series of criteria would be introduced to assess progress.

SOURCE 




Why Australia needs the Phonics Check

Jennifer Buckingham

The 'Simple View of Reading' conceptualises reading as having two key components -- word identification and language comprehension. Children need to know how to decipher the words on the page, and have a store of vocabulary, factual and conceptual knowledge to give the words meaning. A deficit in either one of these areas means that reading is difficult or impossible.

Pretty much all educators acknowledge that phonics is an essential element in learning to read and write. Phonics is both a body of knowledge and a skill: children need know which letters represent which sounds and vice versa -- and they need to be able to use that knowledge to read and spell.

All children can and should know how to use phonics to decode words. Unfortunately there is good reason to believe many children are not acquiring this fundamental knowledge and skill, thus hampering their ability to become proficient readers.

It was for this reason that the advisory panel I chaired recommended a Phonics Check for Year 1 students -- a simple, five minute, teacher-delivered assessment based on the Phonics Screening Check used in all primary schools in England since 2012. The Phonics Check would identify children who are struggling with decoding at this critical stage in learning to read, and provide schools and systems with immediate detailed data about strengths and weaknesses in phonics instruction that would allow them to respond accordingly.

Objections to the Phonics Check came in thick and fast when the advisory panel's report was released earlier this week, but many were misinformed about the nature of the assessment and the rationale underpinning it.

The loudest protestations against it have been that teachers are already assessing phonics and that 'another test' is unnecessary. However the panel found that -- while all state and territory government schools and all non-government schools are conducting literacy assessments to varying extents -- none of the systemic assessments had a strong phonics component. The phonics assessment items were either too few or were poorly designed. In some cases items listed as 'phonics' were measuring a different skill: phonemic awareness. The best assessment was in the Northern Territory, which is making significant in-roads in phonics.

It is now up to the state and territory education ministers to carefully consider the recommendations of the panel, without being unduly influenced by the teachers unions and a few professional associations that seem to be very worried about what a Phonics Check might reveal. If we can put politics aside and get phonics right in the early years, we may finally see a reduction in the number of children struggling with reading.

SOURCE


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