Race and academic preformance

http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas- ... liefs.html


..."Depressing news about black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so. But both may have to do some rethinking, in light of radically different news from England.

The November 9th-15th issue of the distinguished British magazine "The Economist" reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England's schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the time — as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50 percent of the time.

At the bottom, among those children who are all from families with low enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time.

"The Economist" points out that, in one borough of London, white students scored lower than black students in any London borough.

These data might seem to be some kind of fluke, but they confirm the observations in a book titled "Life at the Bottom" by British physician Theodore Dalrymple. He said that, among the patients he treated in a hospital near a low-income housing project, he could not recall any white 16-year-old who could multiply nine by seven. Some could not even do three times seven.

What jolts us is not only that this phenomenon is so different from what we are used to seeing in the United States, but also that it fits neither the genetic nor the environmental explanation of black-white educational differences here.

These white students in England come from the same race that produced Shakespeare and the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton, among other world class intellects over the centuries. But today many young whites in England are barely literate, and have trouble with simple arithmetic. Nor are these white students the victims of racial discrimination, much less the descendants of slaves.

With the two main explanations for low performances on school tests obviously not applicable in England, there must be some other explanation."...

IMHO, Educational performance is not based on race. There may be a genetic influence on intelligence based on the structure of the brain, but I don't believe that's ever been shown to follow common racial boundaries.

No, the major factor is culture.

A culture that values education and intelligence breeds kids that value education - so they try harder. A culture that doesn't value education, or even views education as a bad thing will breed kids that don't do well on tests.

Race should be a non-issue. In education, the teacher needs to look no further than the parent's attitude towards their child's education to detect the kids that will need additional support.

And in America, recent immigrants and even second generation kids do better than natives. Part of it is that foreign families encourage education more than US born parents. And both US and Brits are growing up with a entitlement mindset and many don't have good role models at home as record numbers are now on the dole.

Sounds like Charles Murray part 2 (Murray - from the American Enterprise Institute - wrote Losing Ground - and The Bell Curve ).

I'd be hard-pressed to think even for a half-second that performance is DETERMINED by race. As someone involved in the education profession - I'd have to confess that one of our fundamental convictions in our business is that anyone can learn anything.

Race tends to act as a proxy variable ---- i.e. --- race is easy observable --- while various powerful socio-economic factors are less observable.

If you look at the economics of being a Native American

---

it stinks. You're going to have schools that are run by the cumbersome BIA with little, if any quality. Chances are, family members haven't been to college (let alone graduated from High School) --- and they don't understand why you'd want to leave home to learn Shakespeare. That's what's behind your crappy ACT Scores ---- not the color of your skin.

So the question becomes ---- whose responsibility is it to overcome the role of lousy economics?

The liberal aims to shoulder the responsibility ---- often (not always) out of self-hate. Thing is - if you're motivated by self anything --- you're not really helping the problem (I've met more than one northeast elitists who think they're God's answer to Native America).

The conservatives usually figure it's not their problem. Occasionally - that conclusion is driven by xenophobic tendencies. That's not really a helpful response, either.