Posted on 07/07/2008 6:33:25 AM PDT by liberallarry
Asian American students will outnumber white classmates for the first time in the freshman class at the region's most prestigious public magnet school this fall, a milestone reached as the number of African Americans and Hispanics has remained low and the Fairfax County School Board prepares to review the school's admission policy.
The rising concentration of Asian Americans at T.J. mirrors demographic trends in other elite math and science magnet schools. In New York, the selective and specialized Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School have Asian American majorities, although about 10 percent of the metropolitan population is of Asian descent. In San Francisco, Asian Americans make up more than 60 percent of the students at selective Lowell High School and about a third of the city's population.
The demographic imbalance in top public magnet schools has become a sensitive issue, however. Black and Hispanic students often are vastly under-represented. Many of the schools struggle to reflect the diversity of the wider population while maintaining a transparent admissions process with uniformly high standards.
Jenny Tsai, a recent Harvard University graduate, wrote her thesis about what she perceived as a growing sentiment that "too many Asians" were at top magnet schools. She attended the selective Hunter College High School in New York, where she sensed "a certain level of anxiety" as the portion of Asian American students in the entering class grew from less than a third to more than half between 1997 and 2003. Tsai said some students felt a need to justify their admission or their contributions.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
But East Asians perform CONSISTANTLY at a superior level, as do Jews, over several generations and in many countries and cultures, statistics on athletic performance are clear, undeniable and can be explained only genetically, and twin and adoption studies pretty clearly support genetic explanations for intellectual differences.
The estimates I've seen place average Ashkenazi Jewish IQ at around 115, East Asian at 110-111, Caucasian 100, Hispanics I don't know, and black at 85-90. Make what you want of it.
I don't want to give the impression that the issue is settled. It isn't. I only present my reasons for my beliefs.
A lot of white Americans have adopted Asian babies. Some of these American families also have biological children. I see the possibility of a study that could shed a great deal of insight on this question, if any researcher would dare to do it. How do these adopted Asians perform academically compared to their white siblings?
Years ago there used to be complaints about a disproportionate number of Jews in prestigious academic openings.
Groups with high IQs create cultures that encourage hard work and accomplishment. People act as if culture is just something floating around in the air, like clouds. Asians lucked out and a good cultural cloud descended on them. Others weren’t so lucky and a bad cultural cloud descended on them.
In fact, the gaps in performance between racial groups in America is replicated everywhere. Is there a place on earth where East Asians are notorious for churning out large numbers of fatherless kids, ending up on welfare, and failing on college entrance exams? East Asians have a good culture because they created a good culture, and they created a good culture because they have high average IQs.
That aside, one can simply observe the differences and try to come up with alternate explanations. Granted, observing genes is no easy matter...but we're getting there.
That would not be a “controlled” study. Why?
Because of differing societal norms and memes for different ethnic groups. It might have been more of a controlled study had it been done in 1920.
Today’s societal norms teach that Asian kids excel which create. Whereas they teach that white kids are the decendents of savage slave owners and oppressors of the global population. (They have no common role models, heros to look up to and are villianized in mainstream media and academia.)
The end result is what’s called a self-fulfilling prophesy.
There have been such studies and they show that the adopted kids intellectually are much closer to their genetic parents than their adopted ones.
There isn’t a lot of explaining needed.
Asian kids, particularly immigrants, have 1) high expectations placed on them by parents, 2) come out of extremely competitive environments. In China & India, if you don’t get into high school, that is it - no remedial reading, no grade curves, no racial preference. Study hard or don’t move forward 3) Asian immigrant parents generally recognize the garbage that is thrown at young kids these days - promiscuity, gansta rap, etc... and in every case I have seen, they simply do not allow it.
IQ is set culturally at an early age . The more you read and work with your children at the earliest possible age the higher their IQ will be.
Similarity between Asian Americans and Jewish Americans is the way they teach their children to excel.
That sounds like the white kids from several GENERATIONS AGO.
White kids today are victims of leftist propaganda. As are their parents. I live in a conservative area and let me tell you the school curriculum is trying to instill guilt and a sense of feeling ashamed of oneself for being white. Plus they push how fantastic everyone else’s culture is except OURS. Put a white kid through 12 years of that plus college and out comes a guilt ridden, leftist who’ll sacrifice his kid’s college fund for some multi-cultural charity.
Look at white kids who’ve been homeschooled in a right-thinking Christian home and they consistently outperform their peers.
I’ve got to agree with both of you. Culture and opportunity no doubt contribute to disparities in real-world educational levels, income and general life success. But the substantial, consistent difference in IQ tests really can’t be written off to primarily cultural differences. As puroresu points out, the old correlation-causation confusion pertains.
Do people really think culture is the only difference between your typical valedictorian and those, on average, at the bottom of the class? That culture is the difference between the brightest and the least bright in the typical workplace?
The sooner we get over the sensitivities here, the sooner we will stop watering down education on all levels.
BINGO
You’ve got to take into account ...
—White kids are propagandized for 12 years in the school system (plus college) to feel guilt and shame for being white.
—Asian kids have no such handicap.
Yeah, like one I saw in church yesterday.
Hispanic kids are told they can not do advanced math.
(yes I know this because I was told this too even though my grandfather was a mathematician and so was his father )
If you allow the school to tell your children what they can and can not learn they are NOT going to learn. Quite frankly the education system in America royal sucks now because they keep lowering the standards. Leftist propaganda to create followers instead of leaders. If they make college free it will also be worthless.
I’m with you big time on the waste that is our public school system, and the sterling results of home schoolers highlights that beautifully. Part of the low standards and inefficiency of the public school systems, in my view, is actually designed to hold back what simply bright, not brilliant, students can achieve with a good education—thus somewhat leveling the field.
But IQ tests are something different. Smart kids of any ethnicity will consistently ace IQ tests and their proxies whether or not they receive tutoring, are pushed by their parents, or are even simply diligent. Likewise, especially hard working students of any ethnicity can compensate somewhat for the limits of their genes—and go farther in life than the less diligent.
One of my kids went to that school (TJ), and it was so refreshing. The principal would greet new admittees by saying ‘this is the closest thing you will ever experience to a meritocracy.’ Well, that was long ago and far away.
My highest regards to you for what you’ve done to support your kids. I am sure that your average public school short-changes Hispanic and black kids with the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. (And yes, Transformers, fills white kids’ heads with guilt-ridden claptrap as well.)
A lot of the squishy-liberal teaching methods that are intended to support kids they don’t expect to achieve at a high level are exactly what keeps too many kids back. Sowell couldn’t be more right on that.
I’m just about convinced that the job of schools nowadays isn’t to really teach but to indoctrinate leftist ideology into kids.
Think about those schools back in 1856 where children didn’t have millions pumped into them or computer centers or all kinds of sport programs and yet read the literature from back then. It’s loaded with multi-syallable words that most people today have never heard of.
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