Posted on 01/16/2007 6:19:46 AM PST by Pharmboy
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.
Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated. One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.
Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
I think his basic premise if fine. There's generally a limit on how far a person can progress with their intelligence. However, I believe very few people ever reach that limit. The average kid getting a D probably is not focusing much on school. if he tried VERY hard he'd be able to get an A. IMHO, intelligence is just one of many factors in how successful a person will be.
BTW-I do support though allowing each kid to go to their abilities. As in, create trade schools for those high schoolers who have no intention of going to college and create much harder schools for the high-achieving students. The top and bottom get woefully left out so both waste a lot of time and money being with the averahe kids.
Murray argues that schools are doing about as well as possible educating children of below average intelligence. He is wrong.
Point.
Murray argues that schools are doing about as well as possible educating children of below average intelligence. He is wrong.
Sort of. Some children need outside of school on the job training.
IQ tests do not test math ability.
For the WISC-IV, these are the test areas:
verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, processing speed.
For perceptual reasoning, the different areas are block design, picture concepts, matrix reasoning, picture completion.
For processing speed, it covers codign, symbol search, cancellation.
For verbal comprehension, it covers similarities, vocabulary, comprehension, information, word reasoning
For working memory, it covers digit span, letter-number sequencing, arithmetic. (When they say arithmetic in this test it means the ability to hear a number and do the math in your head. It does not mean do the math on a sheet of paper. My daughter is much higher when she sees math than when she hears it because her hearing is impaired.)
My daughter sucked on most of the IQ tests.
Then she was given the Woodcock-Johnson III math test and these were her percentile rank:
Calculation 93 %
Applied Problems 89%
Math Fluency 99.7 %
Broad Math 97%
In her California state testing, she usually scores near perfect/perfect (100%) scores in math and she still scores advanced on reading/language arts.
The other tests also had interesting results. On spelling and writing fluency she was in the 40%, but on writing sentences and paragraphs she was in the 98%.
She also gets all As/Bs in school.
People perform differently based on different IQ tests. There are some non-verbal IQ tests that people with language problems generally score a lot better on.
So you just can't use IQ as the only measure of how a child will do in school or in life. There are a lot of other factors to include.
Someone else has told me that. We will definitely have to look into it when she is older.
No one on this thread ever said that IQs are absolute in any respect; further, they are best used when making predictions about populations rather than individuals. There are always exceptions, but ingeneral, IQ tests (the Stanford-Binet, eg) are good predictors of school performance for populations.
The problem with saying that is that there are a lot of misconceptions about IQ and learning disabilities in our population, and certainly in our schools.
For example, the district would not provide a multi-sensory reading program for my daughter because she was "living up to her potential". It wasn't a matter of whether or not she would benefit from multi-sensory reading.
IQ tests should be used as a guideline for determining what areas a student needs help in and trying to provide that help.
Thank God, we can provide private education for my daughter, and she is excelling in it. She was thoroughly tested last year, and I wish we could afford to test her again to see how much she's gained this year. I can tell she has gained immensely since she's started in her new school. Her verbal and reading skills have improved a ton.
Just in case some people haven't seen this:
NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND: The Football Version
1. Each school is expected to exhibit the same level of talent in the sport of football; moreover all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If a team does not win the championship, it shall be on probation until it has done so; coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship their footballs, helmets, fields and equipment will be confiscated until they DO win the championship.
2. ALL players will be expected to achieve the same football skills at the same time even though it is acknowledged that some do not have the conditions or opportunities necessary to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for an absence of interest in football, coordination problems of any kind, or for a lack of desire to perform athletically. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL !
3. Talented players will be asked to play at the back of the field, on their own, without coaching. The coaches will devote all of their instructional time to athletes not interested in football or to those who have limited athletic ability.
4. A full season of games will be played, however statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th and 11th games.
This will create a New Age of Sports in which ALL teams will make the playoffs and where all teams will win the State Championship. This will bring the USA to world prominence in football by 2012.
I had never seen that.
You are misreading the graphic you misposted. Here's the graphic you meant, right? (Fortunately, mastery of HTML is not a valid proxy for IQ).
If you look at that graph, which looks like it came originally from a newspaper, you'll see that 84 IQ means that 16% of the people are at that point or lower (and by definition, then, over 80% are higher. (That both numbers, the IQ and the inverse of the percentile, are 84, is just a coincidence; percentiles are relaitive measures and IQ is absolute).
The midpoint of the graph - 50th percentile -- is a relative measure, too. Half of the group represented on the graph are above and half are below. This point, the median, is the important point that people usually mean when they talk about average. Psychometricians often divide populations into fifths or quintiles; to the extent there's an "average range," it's that center quintile; the 20% that sits in the middle, or about 90-109. By using the lines on this graph, you're defining "average" as "everybody between the top 16% and the bottom 16%," or 68% of the population.
That is, to say the least, a non-standard definition of average. WHat the lines on the chart actually show is one standard deviation from the mean, and what it bounds is probably more accurately called "normal" than "average."
There are some other ways to define the "average" group but none of them encompasses more than 2/3 of the population. Some are brights, some are dulls.
Consider the life choices that an 84IQ individual can make. The professions are out; even college is out (absent luck with athletic ability or affirmative action; and either way, the student will find himself in bottom-tier classes). The armed services are probably out (Only in rare circumstances will recruits from the bottom 16% be taken).
This doesn't mean one can't be a good and productive, even admirable, person, at IQ 84; and it doesn't mean that our society can neglect people functioning at that level. that 16% adds up to almost fifty million of us!
And while there's a lot of evidence that IQ correlates with behaviours, there's no evidence I know of that IQ correlates with worthy character. (I'm not sure how you'd measure that).
In closing, let me at least offer you an explanation of IQ that seems unbiased at first skim, and that definitely offers a much more detailed and accurate example of the graph you posted. I hope you find it informative.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
My daughter has a low average IQ, and she will definitely be going to college.
My daughter is already doing algebra, and I know she will be able to master all of the math needed to get a degree in at least accounting.
I was good at math (I have a degree in computer science), and she is better than me. She already writes better than I do.
However, she has severe short term memory problems and speech problems. Thank God, she can hire someone to take notes for her in college. I'm hoping by the time she gets to college she'll be able to record the lectures and then just have the computer format into a document she can read.
If you met my daughter, you would not think she was dull.
My 10 year old daughter currently is learning Spanish. She can't say the Spanish words, but she can read them and she can tell what the English word is.
Isn't the point, however, that schools are ill serving low IQ folks, and it might be valuable to better serve those folks, so that they can maximize their potential with what they have?
I would agree. Murray is wrong. In his article, he claims however, that the educational quality for the dumb, and perhaps average, has slowly increased over the past century. I would be interested in the support he has for that claim.
I agree with torie, ie., I think he is saying that EVERYONE is ill-served by the current approach that the edumacashun establishment takes: the below average kids are just danced through bthe system and little is expected; the middle-grounders are not pushed and the top-tier kids do fine on their own, but their experience is not optimized.
Thanks for posting the article. As Murray mentions that it is the first installment of the three, would you please post the other two when they appear?
no disrespect to your daughter is intended. The problem with talking about statistics, which are about populations and are only "true" in that sense, is that people inevitably try to apply the statistical to individuals. As your personal experience tells you, it does not compute.
If she's doing algebra at Age 10, your daughter is probably not around 84, I would guess; low average is 90-something. College has been eased "downslope" throughout the twentieth century, to the point where a BA now may not indicate the level of a HS diploma of 1957.
"If you met my daughter, you would not think she was dull."
I'm probably better than average at assessing people in normal interaction, but that still means I can't tell how bright people are (articulate may or may not come with bright, as everybody has probably experienced). Only a formal test, or seeing the person perform on a highly g-loaded task, will tell.
By the way, some employers have found that in general an upper bound on IQ on even g-loaded tasks gets them better employees; airlines for instance, find that 110-IQ captains work out better than 140-IQ ones do. Many police departments put an upper bound on the IQs that they will take, which the courts have found legal.
Yes, it is possible for an individual to "punch above his weight" mentally through hard work and discipline -- at least, to a point. You seem to have a good grasp of this in your personal setting, and again, I have to stress along with Dr Murray, that half of the world is below average and we need the talents and wits of those people too! 150 million Americans are below average, after all; they're our friends and family members, cops and firefighters, good people and hard workers.
Finally, to all, I said that an IQ-84 candidate would not be accepted by the Armed Services. I am credibly informed that this is not true... that males high-school graduates at GT 84 (the military subscore that is a marker for IQ) will be accepted by the Army for clerical and ammunition handling jobs (the Army's lowest-GT tasks), and by the Marines for infantry (the USMC's least-common-denominator; the Marine cutoff is 80). Females are held to higher standards; in general the services try to avoid drawing from the bottom 31%. I do not know why the standards are where they are, but would speculate that there is a balance that they set, between need and the lessons of experience.
Sorry to any "dumb" grunts or jarheads I insulted, and thanks for serving! It's never a dumb decision to sign up.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
I've had the idea for a while that IQ in large part just means how *long* it takes for someone to learn something, or how much work is required. I realized hard work, persistence, and self-discipline was every bit as valuable as IQ, if not moreso. Of course, there will always be those areas some people can not 'get' no matter how hard they try. I think that very often (usually), it's more a matter of deciding it's not worth the extra effort involved in learning a thing rather than some inherent inability to do so. Persistence overcomes this.
Congratulations, you have just redefined 'Average.' How can you do this? Frankly, I would have a hard, hard time going up against Dr. Charles Murray. But you.... Tsk tsk.
Man, I hate posting on these Charles Murray threads as I am so easily out-gunned. But in this case, I have to say it, your definition describes the mean, not the average. You can work it out for yourself and I suggest you do, the difference is quite important.
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