• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

Education in the USA

Mike

Well-known member
Wall Street Journal
Intelligence in the Classroom
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.

BY CHARLES MURRAY
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

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.





Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.

How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability--"g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.

There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.

Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."

This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.





To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones--for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.
While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.

That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.

Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is the first in a three-part series, concluding on Thursday.
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
Mike said:
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.
I disagree Mike. Schools have them for 12 years, 7 hours per day; if they can't educate them, change the system. Our nation educated it's kids better in the 1700s and 1800's than they do today on less money (adjusted for inflation) when schooling was controlled locally or was done at home.
 

IL Rancher

Well-known member
Sure... Half of children are below average and half are above.. Average is the middle after all...

I don't know.. Some kids are probably plain unteachable when it comes to certain things.. God knows I knew a few folks that were low IQ when going to school.. Anytimes a Freshman in Highschool asks someone how many Equators there are and believes the guy when he tells her 2 just leaves me surprised that she can breath. Who failed her? Parents, teachers, society or is just not all that bright? The biggest thing in highschool that I saw as teachers/parents not being able to get the kids to pay attention and to try. It just wasn't important to them... I think your average might go up if you got people to actually engage their minds a bit but that will take parents holding their kids accountable when they fail and working with the education system (Or taking them out and teaching them themselves).. But 50% of kids are still going to be at average or below average when compared to their contemperaries.
 

Work Hard and Study Hard

Well-known member
Red Robin said:
Mike said:
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.
I disagree Mike. Schools have them for 12 years, 7 hours per day; if they can't educate them, change the system. Our nation educated it's kids better in the 1700s and 1800's than they do today on less money (adjusted for inflation) when schooling was controlled locally or was done at home.

I agree, however the parent to student ratio was a hell of a lot higher in the 1700's than it is now and that has a lot to do with it. The problem with our school system is that we have things like no child left behind. We need a more socialized school system like Germany where kids are either sent to trade schools or on to higher eduction during highschool. Some kids will never get anything out of school no matter how good the teachers are, they become bored and they give up. These kids don't need trig and calc, they need basic algebra and then off to learn a trade such as carpentry, welding, well drilling, mechanics and so on. The only thing we accomplish with no child left behind is we hold the gifted students back while treading water with the kids who don't want to be there.
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
Work Hard and Study Hard said:
Red Robin said:
Mike said:
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.
I disagree Mike. Schools have them for 12 years, 7 hours per day; if they can't educate them, change the system. Our nation educated it's kids better in the 1700s and 1800's than they do today on less money (adjusted for inflation) when schooling was controlled locally or was done at home.

We need a more socialized school system like Germany where kids are either sent to trade schools or on to higher eduction during highschool. .
Where do you think we got our model from? It was Germany. The broken periods, the kids progressing at an even pace with the slow kids rushed through and the fast kids held back, the federal govt. oversight, these were imported here from Germany , including the compulsory attendance. It's a failed model. Let it go back to private pay instead of taxpayer funded and it'll eventually work out.
 

Work Hard and Study Hard

Well-known member
Red Robin said:
Work Hard and Study Hard said:
Red Robin said:
I disagree Mike. Schools have them for 12 years, 7 hours per day; if they can't educate them, change the system. Our nation educated it's kids better in the 1700s and 1800's than they do today on less money (adjusted for inflation) when schooling was controlled locally or was done at home.

We need a more socialized school system like Germany where kids are either sent to trade schools or on to higher eduction during highschool. .
The broken periods, the kids progressing at an even pace with the slow kids rushed through and the fast kids held back, .

I'm not sure I get you here, the smarter kids weren't held back unless you call college that. I would send my kids to private schools if I lived in a metropolitan area but since I'm a farmer I don't have that luxury. Heck I would be happy to send them to Catholic school but our parish can't sustain that anymore either.
 

IL Rancher

Well-known member
Or keep it funded and let people pick where their kids go so the schools actualy have to, horrors, compete for their students, thus compete for their funding.. Like the dutch system of today. Funding follows the student.
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
Work Hard and Study Hard said:
Red Robin said:
Work Hard and Study Hard said:
We need a more socialized school system like Germany where kids are either sent to trade schools or on to higher eduction during highschool. .
The broken periods, the kids progressing at an even pace with the slow kids rushed through and the fast kids held back, .

I'm not sure I get you here, the smarter kids weren't held back unless you call college that. I would send my kids to private schools if I lived in a metropolitan area but since I'm a farmer I don't have that luxury. Heck I would be happy to send them to Catholic school but our parish can't sustain that anymore either.
If your math class is a year long then you move from 8th to 9th grade, you are held back if you had the ability to learn 8th grade math in 2mos. Conversely, a student that required 2 years to really get a grasp on it and then be able to understand the next level , gets pushed ahead before he or she is ready.
 

Mike

Well-known member
Vouchers might be the way to go with the school systems. At least the ones who want their kids to go to a better school will have the opportunity.

No choice in most places now.

Plus the fact that vouchers will create competition for students and teachers will have to produce or lose them.


2 counties over from me they have a high ratio (95%) of black students. They initiated a 12 month school year a few years back so that parents would not have day care in the summer. Grades have since bottomed out. More time in school makes bored students, it seems.

Parents need to be more involved instead of leaving it all up to the teachers.
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
The best approach to any problem is get the federal govt out of it! Give me the tax money back (not in the form of a voucher or the govt will have criteria to be met) and let me educate my kids as I see fit.
 

Work Hard and Study Hard

Well-known member
Red Robin said:
The best approach to any problem is get the federal govt out of it! Give me the tax money back (not in the form of a voucher or the govt will have criteria to be met) and let me educate my kids as I see fit.

I agree but you are talking about an education system overhaul that will never be allowed to happen on either side of the aisle.
 

Mike

Well-known member
Red Robin said:
The best approach to any problem is get the federal govt out of it! Give me the tax money back (not in the form of a voucher or the govt will have criteria to be met) and let me educate my kids as I see fit.

Of course you're right, but we both know that that ain't gonna happen.

Remember when GW first took office and a leak came out that he wanted to completely terminate and do away with the US Dept of Education???????

All hell broke loose from the liberals.

There's your problem. :mad:
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
Work Hard and Study Hard said:
Red Robin said:
The best approach to any problem is get the federal govt out of it! Give me the tax money back (not in the form of a voucher or the govt will have criteria to be met) and let me educate my kids as I see fit.

I agree but you are talking about an education system overhaul that will never be allowed to happen on either side of the aisle.
Why? It's our money and our kids? Why wouldn't we want what's best for them and us? Could it be that there is an elite class of people who want good citizens instead of intelligent people; that was what the german model we patterned off of wanted. If we don't do something in the next 10 or 15 years ...actually it's probably already too late.
 

IL Rancher

Well-known member
From K-5 I went to a Montessori school.. I like to think of it as homeschool in mass as you flat out went at your own pace for almost every subject you were in.. It was great to be honest, when I left and went to a more traditional school for junior high I was "learning" thinngs in 8th grade that I had been taught/ larned in 4th but they were so inflexible they still made you do it "their" way.. Drove me nuts...

Out here in the "sticks" we don't have the private or parochial schools to work with. A couple catholic schools stil exist but I am not going to send my kids to one.. Some private ones an hour away but 4 hours in the car a day is not my cup of tea... Right now we are looking at homeschooling.. There are so many programs around here for the kids to get together and interact with other kids that are doing it that the socialization issue is becoming a non starter to me.
 

Red Robin

Well-known member
Mike said:
Red Robin said:
The best approach to any problem is get the federal govt out of it! Give me the tax money back (not in the form of a voucher or the govt will have criteria to be met) and let me educate my kids as I see fit.

Of course you're right, but we both know that that ain't gonna happen.

Remember when GW first took office and a leak came out that he wanted to completely terminate and do away with the US Dept of Education???????

All hell broke loose from the liberals.

There's your problem. :mad:
It's a two headed dragon Mike. There is also the conservative element that places a respect on a "professional" education . The emphisis on actually knowing something lost entirely. We have highschool graduates that can't make change . My grandmother had an 8th grade education and better grammer, penmanship, geography, and english than most. We've fell in a deep pit with few willing to admit it , much less do something about it.
 

aplusmnt

Well-known member
Stupid in America
Why your kids are probably dumber than Belgians.


For "Stupid in America," a special report ABC will air Friday, we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid."

We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for America.

The American boy who got the highest score told me: "I'm shocked, 'cause it just shows how advanced they are compared to us."

The Belgians did better because their schools are better. At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education.

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don't like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

In New York City, it's "just about impossible" to fire a bad teacher, says schools chancellor Joel Klein. The new union contract offers slight relief, but it's still about 200 pages of bureaucracy. "We tolerate mediocrity," said Klein, because "people get paid the same, whether they're outstanding, average, or way below average." One teacher sent sexually oriented emails to "Cutie 101," his sixteen year old student. Klein couldn't fire him for years, "He hasn't taught, but we have had to pay him, because that's what's required under the contract."

They've paid him more than $300,000, and only after 6 years of litigation were they able to fire him. Klein employs dozens of teachers who he's afraid to let near the kids, so he has them sit in what they call "rubber rooms." This year he will spend twenty million dollars to warehouse teachers in five rubber rooms. It's an alternative to firing them. In the last four years, only two teachers out of 80,000 were fired for incompetence.

When I confronted Union president Randi Weingarten about that, she said, "they [the NYC school board] just don't want to do the work that's entailed." But the "work that's entailed" is so onerous that most principals just give up, or get bad teachers to transfer to another school. They even have a name for it: "the dance of the lemons."

The inability to fire the bad and reward the good is the biggest reason schools fail the kids. Lack of money is often cited the reason schools fail, but America doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years. Test scores and graduation rates stayed flat. New York City now spends an extraordinary $11,000 per student. That's $220,000 for a classroom of twenty kids. Couldn't you hire two or three excellent teachers and do a better job with $220,000?

Only a monopoly can spend that much money and still fail the kids.

The U.S. Postal Service couldn't get it there overnight. But once others were allowed to compete, Federal Express, United Parcel, and others suddenly could get it there overnight. Now even the post office does it (sometimes). Competition inspires people to do what we didn't think we could do.

If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. There could soon be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.

This already happens overseas. In Belgium, for example, the government funds education—at any school—but if the school can't attract students, it goes out of business. Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents. "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the teaching, "You can't afford ten teachers out of 160 that don't do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you again."

"That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S."

Last week, Florida's Supreme Court shut down "opportunity scholarships," Florida's small attempt at competition. Public money can't be spent on private schools, said the court, because the state constitution commands the funding only of "uniform, . . . high-quality" schools. But government schools are neither uniform nor high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child Left Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well.

A Gallup Poll survey shows 76 percent of Americans are either completely or somewhat satisfied with their kids' public school, but that's only because they don't know what their kids are missing. Without competition, unlike Belgian parents, they don't know what their kids might have had.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/33014.html
 

the chief

Well-known member
NOw if 60% of the kids in America were below average, I would then think that someone was playing with their numbers.

AVERAGE, you minions, MEANS THE CENTER. Half are above. Half are below. What school did you attend? :lol:
 

andybob

Well-known member
Is there any 'grading' of students in American schools?
Our private schools were all high academic schools, government subsidised schools had levels to suit the ability of the individual student.
A and B stream classes were purely academic but at different rate of learning, B1 and C streams were a mixture of academic and technical subjects, the technical classes were basically trade schools, training students to a standard where they could take up apprenticeships.
On the farms, we did the first four years at home signed up on school on the air, thereafter, we boarded away from home, so could attend the school considered appropriate by our parents.
Top students in 'lower' streams could transfer to higher streams if their exam results were high enough to warrent the promotion, 'late bloomers' were often able to reach their full potential as a result.
This system may not pass the 'politically correct' test of today, but it built an advanced society in a backward continent.
 

aplusmnt

Well-known member
the chief said:
NOw if 60% of the kids in America were below average, I would then think that someone was playing with their numbers.

AVERAGE, you minions, MEANS THE CENTER. Half are above. Half are below. What school did you attend? :lol:

Not so sure that is what it means.

Lets say they take test scores of 10 kids 3 of the kids score 100% and 7 kids score 30% the average score figured for the test would be a 51% but since 7 of the ten kids scored a 30% then it would be accurate to say that 70% of the kids scored below average and 30% scored above Average.

For the Record I went to school in Quapaw Oklahoma :wink:
 

Texan

Well-known member
the chief said:
AVERAGE, you minions, MEANS THE CENTER. Half are above. Half are below. What school did you attend? :lol:
AVERAGE, Dr. Einstein, MEANS THE SUM OF SEVERAL QUANTITIES DIVIDED BY THE NUMBER OF QUANTITIES. Perhaps you are thinking of the MEDIAN or the MEAN?

coarse, us dum old conservative "minions" aint got as gooda skoolin as what you book learnt intelijunt libs has got
 
Top