This century's winner of the Darwin Award for Philosophical Tail Chasing. 
Posted on 04/18/2004 8:59:51 AM PDT by 68skylark
Edited on 04/23/2004 12:06:46 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
People do badly on tests for different reasons. Some do badly because they're anxious or fear failure, others because they don't know how to answer the questions. How important are these factors? When it comes to the long-observed patterns of black-white differences on a range of academic measures, social science purports to know the answer. Journals and textbooks of psychology will tell you that the principal cause of black students' poor performance on tests is something called "stereotype threat." Black test-takers fall short because they're afraid that the results will be used to confirm negative views about their group's abilities. It follows that if some way can be found to dispel this "threat," group differences in scores will disappear.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Luckily, most normal people have a pretty good bulls*** detector. I think they know, even without articles like this one, that social scientists mostly lie.
Most public schools are mediocre at best, and schools with high minority populations are often criminally bad. It breaks my heart. These kids are American citizens -- they deserve better from their country, their state and their town.
In the meantime, I've got to really admire parents who sacrifice so their kids can get a better education outside of the normal public school system.
This century's winner of the Darwin Award for Philosophical Tail Chasing.
...but the vast majority do poorly because of either ignorance re: the subject being tested, or general academic apathy. A condition found in all races but most prevalent among minority students.
Yup, lies and groupthink. This sentence from the article above says more than the rest of all that gobbledegook.
Why is it that when Asian immigrants go to these "failing schools" (before their families make enough money to move to the suburbs, that is), they end up as National Merit Scholars? Answer: their parents are married to each other; they make their kids do their homework, and they are from a culture that values education.
Basically, if your parents don't inculcate the right values and attitudes in you by the time you're 5 or 6, it doesn't matter *what* school you go to. In fact, you will bring your problems with you to whatever private school lets you in (funded by taxpayers' money.) It's the family situation and parenting, period. No parenting - no secure family life - no school performance.
I don't work in education, so I can't really say that I agree or disagree with what you've written.
I guess I'd agree that the culture are home makes a huge difference. I guess I wouldn't agree that the culture at school can't have much effect.
I'd be willing to bet substantial amounts of my tax money on the idea that a good school can make some meaningful difference in educational achievement.
(Cool screen name, by the way.)
Conservatives do this also -- I know I do it! But I really think those of us on the right are a little more comfortqable with ambiguity.
For example, most of us would probably never say we know the very best way to run a school. On the contrary, we'd say that no one really knows for certain about the best way to run a school, so we need thousands of experiments to go on around the country and let parents have the freedom to choose the best.
Liberals think they know everything, and anyone who isn't blinded by their brilliance must be a knuckle-dragging moron. They just want to stuff their ideas down the craw of an unwilling public.
What racial group actually scores best on standardized tests? Would you answer that question, whites? Wrong, try again. Asian-Americans score best on standardized tests.
Why? Because within their culture and families, education is highly prized.
What racial group scores worst on such tests? Blacks.
Why? Because within their culture and families, education is scorned as "acting white."
Or in the immortal words of Forrest Gump, "Stupid is as stupid does."
Did I miss anything?
Congressman Billybob
But I'd strongly disagree with anyone who says the effect of culture is so strong that it can't be at least partially overcome by a good school.
A good school can produce better results than a bad school, even with kids from the same culture. I refuse to believe anything else. Because if I don't believe schools have an effect I'm basically giving up on these kids, and I will not do that.
It seems to me that the best way to eliminate that "stereotype" would be to study hard, get parental help and obtain better results on the tests.
I do believe that we could increase school funding a thousandfold tomorrow, and those students who currently are not performing, still wouldn't....... and, if we completely defunded and disbanded public education tomorrow, those students who want an education would still find a way to get educated.
Most prevalent among some minority students. You don't hear "social scientists" making excuses for poor Asian or Jewish test scores. Somehow "stereotype threat" doesn't affect them at all.
The Wall Street Journal has a graph showing how real school spending (i.e. after adjusting for inflation) has tripled in the last 40 years, and educational success has gone nowhere. It's a national disgrace -- one which the unions only wish to increase.
There certainly are some pretty bad public schools, but, as I see it, the essence of the problem is that kids fall through the cracks far too easily in the better public schools.
When I was in high school (I graduated in 2000), the classes were challenging, and they prepared me well for college. I went to a public high school that ranged somewhere between average to good. But a lot of my classmates there didn't benefit from that public school education. There were a host of factors: my parents were involved in my education from the start, and I was placed in the difficult Honors and AP track where the teachers were reasonable to very good. That, I think, is the key: those students that pursue a rigorous college-prep course will do well in college; those that do not have an unfortunate barrier in the way that they must overcome.
IMHO, AP English, for instance, should be mandatory for college entrance. I know a girl here at UB who, quite frankly, doesn't belong in college yet. She can't write a simple essay, but she has a high school diploma. Her senior year, all they did was write "journal responses" about how they felt; my senior year, we were analyzing British literature. (Personally, I'd have preferred less of a focus on obscure old literature, and added a major research project, but that's just me.) More useful were the essays we had to write under a time limit. We learned how to write coherently on the fly. (FR taught me that as well.)
Our schools biggest failure is that we give people a high school diploma that is worthless. The schools are equipped to do a darn good job, and in a sizable minority of cases, they perform admirably. But far too many of the high school graduates have a diploma that is basically a certification of attendance.
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