@mom2and - I like this short article, worth thinking about (there is a huge literature on these questions): http://www.aei.org/publication/intelligence-in-the-classroom/
See what you think.
@SatchelSF the issue with race-based ideas of IQ, as put forth by Charles Murray and Linda Gottfredson, is that race itself is a social construct much more so than the authors pretend it is. These authors neglect to address the many studies that counter their ideas. For example, there are studies that show that test stats are lower on average for people with darker skin within the same race. How can that be? That only makes sense if you factor in how society perceives people with lighter and darker skin (and then how that person perceives him or herself as a result). Another study that people like Murray and gottfredson do little or nothing to counter are the multiple studies by Claude Steele. He was able to reverse the gap in test scores. The gap is understood by Murray and G as usually the darker-skinned person performing about 10 points lower (or whatever the number is) compared with the lighter skinned person. Steele was able to reverse that gap consistently. How he did it was by priming the lighter-skinned candidates with racial stereotypes of lighter-skinned people before they took the test. He for example told them that people who golf more tend to do badly on X test. And people who eat mayonaise (Iâm making the details up but you get the idea). The racial stereotypes of light-skinned people priming them before taking tests, predictably dropped scores by the same gap that darker skinned people experience. The term for this is âstereotype threat.â When you feel threatened by stereotypes, you do poorly â or at least less well than when youâre not threatened. Itâs inescapable to understand from these and other well-documented and replicated studies that IQ tests and tests in general canât help but factor in negative stereotypes about intelligenceâand when that happens, that affects how people perform regardless of color.
@Dustyfeathers - Who is saying anything about race? Thatâs not germane to the discussion here.
About stereotype threat, Steeleâs work hasnât been taken seriously in specialist academic circles in quite some time. Probably the most prominent expert on stereotype threat today is Lee Jussim. Here is a short article that debunks what was always very sloppy work: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201512/is-stereotype-threat-overcooked-overstated-and-oversold
There is not a lot of honesty in the academic or public debates over the question of how to help kids (of any race or income) reach their full potential, and plenty of room to demagogue and demonize. Meanwhile, of course, after 50 or 60 years of astounding increases in education spending, outcomes seem stuck.
BTW, I am always amazed at the number of people who think public spending on primary education has gone down appreciably. Take a look at the numbers in constant dollars over the last 100 years: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_236.10.asp
Quite a lot larger than school age population increase, no? In any event, there is no pot of money waiting to be invested in education. Thankfully, those days are over. I say âthankfullyâ because it is time to try some out of the box approaches. Necessity is the mother of invention. 
@SatchelSF This is the last I will comment on this, because debate is not allowed, but Murray and Gottfriedson are best known for their race-based ideas of IQ and since you brought them up, it seemed important to mention opposing research.
Also, may I point out that I personally wouldnât rely on a blog in Psychology Today as a good way to debunk any peer-reviewed, multiple study, over multiple year, data-based research based out of Stanford University, Columbia University and elsewhere, but thatâs just me.
If you could read this article which is behind a pay wall (ACT Scores Show Drop in College Readiness, Especially in Math https://www.wsj.com/articles/act-scores-show-drop-in-college-readiness-especially-in-math-1539768600), you would get a better idea on the root cause of the problem:
@Dustyfeathers - Fair enough about the point on debate, and I will desist here too!
Just FYI, here is a list of some of Professor Jussimâs peer-reviewed articles and books, including more than 20 on stereotype accuracy and threat: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/papers.html. I would never rely on a blog - I just thought it would be more accessible to someone who doesnât have a background in the subject.
@jym626 , I agree. He had to start at lower because OCS is for those entering with a BS/BA degree.
The article you posted gives general examples but nowhere does it say that 15% of the population is incapable of learning to read for information purposes. The point of that article seems to be that anyone below the 50th percentile is not capable of learning and thus schools should not be expected to educate them. Nothing about how LDs may impact IQ score.
Not to say that there is no difference in likely educational outcomes between a kid with a below average IQ who has no specific LDs that can be âfixedâ and a kid with an above average IQ, just that there are multiple factors that go into learning and reading readiness that can be fixed for the vast majority of kids. Murray sets the percentile fairly high at kids he is willing to write off.
This seems like absolute nonsense, and Iâd like to see a cite for it.
On the other hand, it is easy to discover that elementary teachers have not been taught to use well-documented strategies to teach children who are struggling with reading. Lots of schools, even now, donât have reading programs that include phonics, let alone phonemic awareness programs for dyslexics, yet we know those strategies work.
One thing that the Boston Globe article did not mention about the valedictorians from the Boston Public Schools that werenât exam schools - what were their SATs? If the kids who are doing very well academically mostly leave to go to the exam schools, or get scholarships to prep schools and other private schools, or go to suburban schools via Metco, then youâre left with the lower achieving kids in the plain vanilla Boston public high schools. I wouldnât be surprised if those valedictorians had SATs far, far below the average of the schools that they were admitted to, and given free rides to. Even kids with high SATs, who came out of highly competitive high schools, often struggle with the transition to college.
And becoming a parent while in college is almost always going to keep you from graduating. Likewise, having a mental health crisis.
Being admitted to a school that youâre not qualified for is a recipe for disaster. Iâll never forget a young AA man with whom I worked in a medical library before I went to medical school. He had gone to a very low-level, non-competitive college in the early 1980s - I think it was West Chester, which back then anyone could get into. From there, he got into Penn Med - one of the most competitive med schools in the country. I bet that Penn had never taken anyone from West Chester. But he just didnât have the innate ability to get through. The school gave him a lot of extra tutoring, let him repeat years, but after 4 years he had not been able to complete the first two years. He then got hired by the medical library I was working for. The top job in the underpaid intellectual basement sweat shop there was reading medical journals and abstracting and indexing them for drug companies. Most of the people doing it were women with BAs or MAs in science fields. He had a BA in a science field, and had had four years trying to get through the first two years at Penn Med, and yet he could not be trained to do that job - he just did not have the innate ability to understand a medical journal article, summarize it, and write down the most important topics covered in it. So they had him be a screener - his job was to screen articles for certain key words, and then send them to the abstractors to be analysed. He was the nicest guy, and he probably would have made a good physician - not a great one, but good enough. If he had gone to a low level med school, he probably would have gotten through. Being admitted to Penn Med was the worst thing that could have happened to him. He wasted four years, probably incurred a lot of debt, and didnât wind up with an MD.
Just because youâre the valedictorian in a noncompetitive high school, doesnât mean you have the innate ability to succeed at a highly competitive university. Iâm not saying that that applies to every one of those kids - they should be proud that they did the work to become valedictorians. But their inability to succeed in highly competitive college settings isnât necessarily a reflection of BPS schools. Most of the kids admitted to highly competitive colleges have top grades, a string of 5s on AP exams, and 99th % SATs. These valedictorians surely didnât have those AP and SAT grades, so how could you expect them to achieve at a college where 99th% achievement was the norm? And with most of the high achieving kids going to other schools, including BPS exam schools which DO provide a level of education that prepares kids for the most competitive universities, BPS public schoolsâ top classes were being run to meet the level of the kids in those classes. They had AP classes - but they had to go more slowly through the material, at the level and speed that the kids could absorb. What else could they do? Their mission is to teach the kids who are there in those schools, and thatâs as fast as those kids could learn college level material.
Itâs not necessarily the BPS school system that failed those valedictorians. Life isnât fair. Not everyone is born with the same abilities as everyone else. There are some steps that BPS could take to make sure that all kids who are able, are identified early for prep programs to get into the exam schools - and theyâre already taking some of them. But even if every child who is able to perform at the highest academic level is identified and steered into more challenging programs, that wonât change the fact that the top student at the regular BPS high school is not able to achieve at the most competitive colleges - in fact, it will make it less likely.
I only skimmed through the article. I prefer to look at the actual numbers. The stats mention 80% of the Boston valedictorians graduated from a 4-year college. Of those who attended college, 79% were the first generation in their family to attend a college. While the article mentions that a some students struggled in college and some transferred colleges, an 80% 4-year degree rate does not sound that bad to me when considering that the overwhelming majority are first in the family to attend a college. I also expect that students who attended highly competitive colleges were far more likely to be successful in college than the average, and as such likely had a far higher graduation rate than the overall. Highly selective colleges tend to have extremely high graduation rates, extremely generous FA, and excellent support networks including counseling. The article seems to highlight the apparent minority of students who struggled and had perceived negative outcomes, likely in an effort to increase readership.
In Blackwellâs case, while he found college challenging, the article mentions primarily getting Bâs in freshman year, which is near the average freshman GPA at most other colleges with similar selectivity. The article doesnât imply that he failed to graduate because of a poor academic preparation or a poor SAT score. Instead his failure to graduate at BC seems to more relate to non-academic factors â working 70 hours per week to support his pregnant girlfriend and losing his scholarship due to not knowing/understanding the minimum enrollment rules. Spending many hours on the football team and his brother killing two of his friends also didnât help
The discussion seems to be moving towards SAT scores and IQ for some reason. GPA/rank/val, SAT score, and family income all have some degree of correlation with degree of success in college as measured by graduation rate, college GPA, or similar. All 3 also have some degree of correlation with each other. When separating the 3 from each other with controls, in general GPA/rank tends to be more predictive of college success than SAT score. However, the combination of these 3 criteria still only explains a small minority of variance in any measure of college success. Instead the vast majority of success in college instead depends on other factors, including factors like the ones Blackwood experienced â GF gets pregnant, canât pay for college, outside activities take too much time, family crisis, etc.
As a specific example, the study at https://cshe.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rops.geiser._sat_6.13.07.pdf compares how well combinations of these factors predict GPA and graduation rate among ~80k students in the UC system. It found the following. When also controlling for field of study, the variance explained was roughly similar. A variety of other studies found similar conclusions.
SAT I + Parents Education + Income + HS API â Explains 13.4% of variance in college GPA
HS GPA + Parents Education + Income + HS API â Explains 20.4% of variance in college GPA
SAT I + HS GPA + Parents Education + Income + HS API â Explains 24.7% of variance in GPA
SAT II + HS GPA + Parents Education + Income + HS API â Explains 26.3% of variance in GPA
SAT I + SAT II + HS GPA + Parents Education + Income + HS API â Explains 26.5% of variance in GPA
Just a reminder that Blackwood did graduate from college.
Chiming in a bit late here, but one of the things I found most interesting about the whole series of Globe articles is that 25% of Boston public school students attend a test/exam school, as compared with 5% in New York. It shouldnât really come as much of a surprise if you take a quarter of the brightest, most likely to achieve students of the mix, and leave the other three quarters to muddle along in less good schools, those kids donât later do as well. Being the parent of 3 teenagers, I can say with some assurance that having bright, motivated students around a teenager can be a significant factor in pulling up achievement. Thereâs something to the rising tide lifts all (or at least many) boats concept. The converse is also true â if students in non-exam schools have the perception that the school isnât for the smart kids, guess what happens? Perception becomes reality.
@soxmom Wow, 25% is a huge number. THatâs likely both kids with strong innate abilities and kids who are solid and work hard to study for the test. Thatâ group right there is what is needed in any school.
Though I donât believe that strong kids should remain in place for the sake of all others, itâs important to note, that if parentâs donât pursue it and kids donât get into those gateway schools, their trajectory changes forever. Thatâs sad to me.
Also, someone noted earlier that being #1 in a Boston school isnât even as solid as being #25 in some good suburban school. Public schools arenât equal. Not even close. And when you throw in private schools, the formula changes again. So being bright isnât good enough, itâs being bright and being strong enough to swim in a bigger pool of better candidates over and over. With each time, someone being left back.
According to https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/Page/6594, there are only 3 public exam schools â Boston Latin, Boston Latin Academy, and John D. OâBryant School of Math and Science. Also note that while taking the ISEE exam is required for admission, it is not the only admission criteria. GPA is still important.
Exactly. He graduated. I read the article and this is what I was referring to. The majority of college students, valedictiorian or not, low income or not, graduate in a similar fashion. It takes perseverance with family and work responsibilities and is a major accomplishment for anyone.
@aussiemom- I donât think that someone canât enlist as a NCO if they have a college degree. Why would that be the case? Not everyone is officer material. Even with a college degree. I think he probably finished his on line while in the army (they have remote education programs).
** Update: just looked it upâ People enlisting in the army with a college degree go in as a E4- the highest NCO ranking. They are still not commissioned. They are NCOs.
I think you mean E4 is the LOWEST NCO pay grade.
Itâs not at all unusual for enlisted personnel to have bachelorâs degrees. When i was in the navy as a commissioned officer, I got a masterâs degree from one of the many on-base degree programs (this was pre-internet). Probably about a quarter of the students in these graduate classes were enlisted service members (who had bachelorâs degrees).
@jym626 It could be the case then for the Army. DH was able to go straight to OCS (Air Force) after obtaining BS degree. Donât know the pay grade but having the bachelor degree enabled him to go in higher grade was my point.