The New York Times sends a reporter to Shanghai to discover what the secret is of Shanghai schools that makes their 15-year-old students do so well on the PISA tests:
... The five-story school building, which houses Grades eight and nine in a central district of Shanghai, is rather nondescript. Students wear rumpled school uniforms, classrooms are crowded and lunch is bused in every afternoon. But the school, which operates from 8:20 a.m. to 4 p.m. on most days, is considered one of the city’s best middle schools.
Oh ... so, that's the secret! Rumpled school uniforms. Or maybe busing in lunch every afternoon. Or could it be the nondescript school buildings? Well, it's got to be something.
Seriously, the article does point out that Shanghai students tend to behave in a more disciplined manner in the classroom than American students, which can't hurt.
The big, unmentioned story in American education is how institutional (i.e., outside-the-classroom) support for teachers in maintaining discipline in the classrooms has been undermined over the decades by disparate impact worries. The Obama Administration, for example, has only increased the persecution of schools that try to maintain order. From the New York Times earlier this year:
School Suspensions Lead to Legal Challenge
... poor black students are suspended at three times the rate of whites, a disparity not fully explained by differences in income or behavior. On March 8, the education secretary, Arne Duncan, lamented “schools that seem to suspend and discipline only young African-American boys” as he pledged stronger efforts to ensure racial equality in schooling.
Any time a student is sent out of the classroom to maintain order -- whether to the dean's office, to after school detention, to home for a suspension, or out the door on an expulsion -- can be counted and thus used as evidence in a disparate impact discrimination lawsuit against a deep-pocketed school district. Lawsuit settlements typically require that voluminous statistics then be maintained and published on disciplinary actions by race in order to facilitate future disparate impact lawsuits. For example, Los Angeles public schools publish online their expulsion and suspension data by race for each of the last five years. (Here's the disciplinary data by race for Chatsworth H.S. in the far northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley.)
In contrast, what the teacher does in the classroom to maintain order can't be counted.
Thus, the enormous emphasis in the conventional wisdom today on how we must use value-added statistics to identify good teachers and fire bad teachers: because disparate impact lawsuits undermine institutional support for discipline, we're down to needing to find teachers who can maintain order in their classrooms through sheer force of personality.
For example, Teach for America's model for who will make a good teacher is A) got into an exclusive college (i.e., smart), B) got good grades there (i.e., hard-working), and C) has a demonstrated track record of leadership accomplishment (i.e., charismatic alpha personality).
Thus, the enormous emphasis in the conventional wisdom today on how we must use value-added statistics to identify good teachers and fire bad teachers: because disparate impact lawsuits undermine institutional support for discipline, we're down to needing to find teachers who can maintain order in their classrooms through sheer force of personality.
For example, Teach for America's model for who will make a good teacher is A) got into an exclusive college (i.e., smart), B) got good grades there (i.e., hard-working), and C) has a demonstrated track record of leadership accomplishment (i.e., charismatic alpha personality).
That's swell, but smart, hard-working people with commanding personalities, such as Steve Jobs, James Cameron, Bill Belichik, Warren Buffett, Margaret Thatcher, and the like sometimes have better things to do than be schoolteachers. We need to be thinking instead about how our institutions can provide teachers who are not paragons with the support they need to do their jobs.
For example, it would be nice to be able to hire a person who both A) cares deeply about making The Great Gatsby come alive for today's youth and B) lives to put young punks in their places. Sometimes, you can find a person who is outstanding at both. Most of the time, however, it's easier to hire two people, one to teach English and the other to be Assistant Dean of Discipline and Offensive Line Coach, and then have them specialize in what they do best. But, that puts school districts in jeopardy of violating disparate impact norms. Hence, the current emphasis on finding Superman teachers and firing the non-Supermen.
In contrast, Pat Buchanan's new column takes a more realistic approach to what the PISA scores tell us:
For example, it would be nice to be able to hire a person who both A) cares deeply about making The Great Gatsby come alive for today's youth and B) lives to put young punks in their places. Sometimes, you can find a person who is outstanding at both. Most of the time, however, it's easier to hire two people, one to teach English and the other to be Assistant Dean of Discipline and Offensive Line Coach, and then have them specialize in what they do best. But, that puts school districts in jeopardy of violating disparate impact norms. Hence, the current emphasis on finding Superman teachers and firing the non-Supermen.
In contrast, Pat Buchanan's new column takes a more realistic approach to what the PISA scores tell us:
Among the OECD members, the most developed 34 nations on earth, Mexico, principal feeder nation for U.S. schools, came in dead last in reading.Steve Sailer of VDARE.com got the full list of 65 nations, broke down U.S. reading scores by race, then measured Americans with the countries and continents whence their families originated. What he found was surprising. [PISA Scores Show Demography Is Destiny In Education Too—But Washington Doesn’t Want You To Know, December 19, 2010]Asian-Americans outperform all Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese.
The NAACP in my community seems to understand that more referrals are written and more suspensions are levied on males than females--they seem to understand HBD in this regard and have no problem with it.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, they aren't surprised that more males than females engage in physical altercations than do females. They seem to understand HBD in this regard and have no problem with it.
And they aren't suprised that Chinese, Japanese, Korean-Americans are rarely ever cited for disruptions of any sort. They seem to understand HBD in this regard and have no problem with it.
They just can't fathom why the black kids get so many referrals and suspensions; they conclude it's Whitey being Whitey. No HBD involved at all, of course.
Well, the question I ask myself is what percent of the American population doesn't really deep down believe that HBD is probably a substantial factor in all these sorts of things...
ReplyDeleteTen percent? Five percent? One percent? Zero percent?
The floor is open for people's guesses...
Steve, middle class Chinese kids typically go to a cram school for a whole afternoon after regular school. I don't know if that makes a difference, but my guess is that it must. Otherwise, parentes aren't going to spend such a significant amount of money on sending their kids there.
ReplyDeleteAll the major east Asian countries have widespread cram school education and very little recreational time for kids. India has an equivalent of this as well, for the middle and upper classes. The same academic pressure cooker that produces high East Asian test scores also helps India churn out tons of programmers. So this goes further than most people think.
This is a common complaint in China. Educators say an emphasis on standardized tests is partly to blame for the shortage of innovative start-ups in China. And executives at global companies operating here say they have difficulty finding middle managers who can think creatively and solve problems.
Life experience might play a role, as kids that study a lot don't get that much exposure and are less prepared to think on their feet. The upside is that high test scores are helping a lot of Chinese and Indian students get into grad schools in the U.S.
Public school students in Shanghai often remain at school until 4 p.m., watch very little television and are restricted by Chinese law from working before the age of 16.
That eliminates the working and lower class kids, as their families usually need their labor in the field or need them to generate some income.
While the quality of schools varies greatly in China (rural schools often lack sufficient money, and dropout rates can be high), schools in major cities typically produce students with strong math and science skills.
Shanghai is believed to have the nation’s best school system, and many students here gain admission to America’s most selective colleges and universities
Which might not be surprising when you consider that China explicity economically segregates the upper classes in the city. A good question is how well the rural areas will do once they get the funding they need.
As of now, urban students are 6 times better represented in the elite universities, compared to the rural kids, due to their higher standardized test scores on the GaoKao. Their overall university representation is quite a bit higher too. For rural kids, they lag really far behind the urbanites, in test scores, as early as preschool.
Yet, from what I know, urban China is almost first world, while rural China is a backwater. So I think the rural kids have a pretty far way to go before they max out their potential.
“Discipline is rarely a problem,” said Ding Yi, vice principal at the middle school affiliated with Jing’An Teachers’ College. “The biggest challenge is a student who chronically fails to do his homework.”
Better discipline would help in the U.S. classrooms, but my guess is that Chinese students have more docile, low-testosterone peronsonality type, so getting them to behave and study hard is not too difficult. Chinese kids in Shanghai behave themselves, but so do Chinese kids in San Francisco.
Take a bunch of low-testosterone, diligent, industrious kids and put them in any decent quality school - and they're going to do well. Put them in a study-until-you-drop Chinese or Indian or Korean pressure cooker, and they're going to do really well. Take the more elite section of them and put them in Shanghai or Silicon valley, and they're going to top the exams.
With their work habits and discipline, even the low IQ Chinese/Indian/Asian kids are a step above the rowdy NAM masses that dominate urban U.S. public schools. Sure a rural Chinese or Indian school isn't going to have high standards and the dropout rate is substanial, but the violence and promiscuity aren't there at all. So at least something gets absorbed and the teacher isn't devoured by the students.
It gets better. BECAUSE Black and Hispanic kids get suspended all the time, we have "Zero Tolerance." Where school officials look to randomly punish and suspend and expel White kids to balance that of Black and Hispanic kids.
ReplyDeleteThus the White girl who is a model honors student, athlete, suspended for a year, charged with weapons possession ... for a paring knife in a lunch box, for an apple.
What people need to do, is draw explicit conclusions. Let White parents know their kids are randomly selected for punishment (and ruining their college chances) to appease Black and Hispanic parents and ward off disparate impact lawsuits.
Education needs to be a private, non-public, (as much home-school as possible) affair for Whites and Asians. To undermine and destroy the public support for education (which would be just for Black and Hispanic kids as a "Future Felon of America" warehouse). And of course, make beta males more valuable (no homeschooling for single moms, your kid in public school can have his/her life ruined to make the NAACP happy).
People don't realize that U.S. public schools were never that good. Test scores, drop out rates, and standards were never that amazing. Discipline was better in some respects, but that can be attributed to fewer NAMs and more spanking in the schools. Compared to Shanghai or Tokyo, we've always been far behind. We just didn't know this back in the 1950s, when we dominated the world.
ReplyDeleteThey also don't realize that native born Chinese-American and Japanese-American kids have been owning everyone else, academically, since at least the 1950s. Professor Flynn found they had a lot higher rates of graduation, SAT participation, and college attendance, in spite of no higher IQ scores. From this, we can conclude that Asians would probably outdo us no matter what we did to our schools, but personality and family factors (not IQ) are at play.
If we put web cameras in classrooms we could document incidents of student misbehavior and these issues of racial disparity would not arise: a documented incident is a documented incident is a documented incident. If there are documented incidents of misbehavior that are not punished, they could be brought to light, as could undocumented incidents that were punished. Hard evidence should decide, not he said/she said.
ReplyDeleteAfrican-American kids would have outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African country that took the test (none did) and did outperform the only black country to participate, Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.
ReplyDeleteThey also outscored the students from some all- or mostly all-white countries: Albania, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, mostly white-but-Latin Argentina and Uruguay, and sort-of-white Azerbaijan.
Peter
Disparate impact lawsuits compel schools to enforce unequal standards of discipline, so whites are suspended at the same rate as blacks and Hispanics. Two recent cases:
ReplyDeleteA white kid in an Oklahoma Middle School gets arrested and suspended after his morbidly obese loser math teacher turns him in for bringing a permanent magic marker to school,
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/bizarre/boy-13-busted-illegal-marker-possession
Why was he reported and dealt with so harshly? Answer: disparate impact; they needed to expel a black or Mexican student for huffing, assault, or smoking dope. They needed to cancel this out by snagging some white kid for a chicken shit offense under some broadly worded zero tolerance policy.
A female senior at Southern Lee HS in North Carolina (school demographics: Hispanics + Blacks 50% whites= 50%.) gets expelled in the beginning of the year when she accidentally brings a paring knife in a lunch box.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/12/29/nc-high-school-senior-suspended-charged-possesion-small-knife-lunchbox/?test=latestnews
Her box got searched during a general sweep for drugs. Gimmee a break. The kid is an honor student and a soccer star. So 1) why did they search her lunch box in the first place? Answer: disparate impact; they really needed to go through hand bags and lockers owned by blacks and Mexicans so they had to search some white kids too. 2) When they found a simple paring knife, why didn't they accept her explanation that she and her father, who have identical lunch boxes, accidentally swapped, so she ended up with her dad's apple and paring knife? Answer: disparate impact; the school had to expel some Mexican gang banger or Brotha who showed up at school with a gun or was dealing heroin to some jelly brains in the 7th grade.
When I first read these two stories in a single week they seemed rather bizarre and arbitrary, but after reading Steve's post, here, it all suddenly made sense.
Welcome to majority minority America. Enjoy the tyranny, Whitey.
Steve, Wouldn't it make more sense for a teacher to expel all the good students and teach them in the hallway? Voila.....no disparate impact
ReplyDeleteDan in DC
I get the idea that Steve is very soon going to hit the big time. His Vdare article on the PISA test results, extensively quoted by Pat Buchanan, is a virtually unassailable case for ending the importation of low value third world human capital. That, and the statistic from FAIR that, whereas America gained 13 million legal immigrants in the past decade, it lost a net 1 million jobs.
ReplyDeleteI mean, really, at least there was always the pretense for immigration enthusiasts that immigrants came to America to fill a hole in the job market. Now there is conclusive evidence that they just come here either to live parasitically off the American tax payers or to displace citizens from jobs.
I don't know much about Latinos, so someone tell me how much misbehavior they engage in at school. From what I heard, I thought they were docile people. Maybe I was wrong.
ReplyDeleteAre there any differences among Latinos? Are Puerto Ricans and Dominicans any worse than Mexicans? What about Cubans and other Latin Americans?
Asians are too disciplined and well behaved -- teachers there should try to make them more ornery, not less.
ReplyDeleteTest scores are a nice way to measure who's smarter than who else, but we have much better ways to measure who's made a better society than who else. And despite our lower average IQs, everyone wants to live in our societies, not in Asian societies -- including Japan or the predominantly Asian neighborhoods within white countries.
The Asian underperformance (given their IQ and work ethic) in creating and innovating is due to their overly cautious approach to testing the limits: "don't even go there." Well OK, then someone else will.
Part of growing up is learning where the boundaries are and how far the rules can be bent. Since it's not something that can be taught like the alphabet, a kid can only figure that out by trial and error, and observation of others doing some trial and error of their own.
So, a healthy amount of rambunctiousness should be allowed. American teachers put up with and even smirk at a certain level of smart-alecking -- at least we know the kid isn't a total wuss, and that's the first step toward accomplishment.
They only try to clamp down when the kid gets overly ambitious, the way that a drill sergeant would favor a patriotic go-getter but kick his butt if he became a foolhardy war-monger who would endanger the rest of the group just to show off and feel badass.
I know that most of the Chinese do-gooders were born that way, but there still must be 1% or so of them who have enough disregard for authority as the average white American does. The Chinese schools should identify these ones and give them the American-style treatment -- not too harsh but not passive either -- or fund them to go to an American high school.
Shoot, even if it's only 1 in a million who are boundary-pushing enough to accomplish something, that's still over 1000 people in the country who need that side nurtured when they go through school.
We need to drop the illusion that if we just point out the obvious causes of American educational decline, then somehow policy will be reversed.
ReplyDeleteDo you really think Obama, and the Education Department factotums are ready to accept inherent gaps in cognitive ability between races? Do you really think that, when the alternative is to do the Santa Claus act and distribute billions of dollars of the unborn generations' money?
To quote Col. Jessup: 'You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!'
What the PISA scores seem to indicate is the triumph of an effeminate educational system. It seems that, in such a system, the Asian male thrives very well. Comparatively low testosterone means that he will put up with all of the nonsense busy work that school marms throw at him, with the expected results on standardized tests that we see.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, the Asian male, still being male, is able to outperform most females on the exact same tests and other forms of busywork due to the slight IQ advantage that men have, on average, over women. Thus, the Asian male is the new superstar student.
Yet, despite all of these academic achievements, Asian civilization has produced only a small sliver of the inventions and innovations of the modern world. In fact, if Asian civilization disappeared a thousand years ago, it would barely be missed.
This, in fact, reflects the effeminate character of the Asian male mind, where Asian civilization collective accomplishments matches that of the world female population: small to none.
Truth calls east-Asian men effeminate because quiet/passive; I've previously seen other commenters call African-American men effeminate because emotional/uncontrolled.
ReplyDeleteLooking at eg crime rates Truth's comparison seems more accurate, but overall I don't think there's much point in racial/gender comparisons. If there was a simple continuum of masculinity then black women would be similar to east-Asian men; they're not.
VDH recently detailed anarcho-tyranny in CA.And now FEDGOV is imposing anarcho-tyranny on the public school system.
ReplyDeleteSam Francis was a real prophet.
Well, the question I ask myself is what percent of the American population doesn't really deep down believe that HBD is probably a substantial factor in all these sorts of things...
ReplyDeleteTen percent? Five percent? One percent? Zero percent?
The floor is open for people's guesses...
IIRC, some blogger (probably Inductivist or Audacious Epigone) used the GSS to study that question, and the answer seemed to be that the majority of Americans are HBD-deniers. I can't find the posting at the moment, but the question was probably something like "is the achievement gap due to innate differences between races?".
"Yet, despite all of these academic achievements, Asian civilization has produced only a small sliver of the inventions and innovations of the modern world. In fact, if Asian civilization disappeared a thousand years ago, it would barely be missed.
ReplyDeleteThis, in fact, reflects the effeminate character of the Asian male mind, where Asian civilization collective accomplishments matches that of the world female population: small to none.
"
Uh, I think you really need to brush up on your history there pal. Sour grapes mingled with ignorance is not a favourable combination.
I can tell from Arne Duncan's glazed eye and frantic presentation, that he has really drunk the Koolade. He must, there is no other way. A prophet for Equality! We simply must equalize students, at all cost!
ReplyDeleteWhen you see that look in your superintendents and school trustees, you know all is lost. They caught it at the last national convention..it's not going away.
Even in Whiteopia, all students must perform, all must graduate, all must go to college, all must get a degree, all must win a prize.
poor black students are suspended at three times the rate of whites, a disparity not fully explained by differences in income or behavior.
ReplyDeleteSo, suspension is not related to behavior? Surely suspensions are a proxy for behavior? Does the author explain how they know that these students are in fact well behaved but suspended anyway?
Uh, I think you really need to brush up on your history there pal. Sour grapes mingled with ignorance is not a favourable combination.
ReplyDeleteAnon, the part of your comment where you explained all these crucial asian accomplishments that my western white nation depends upon seems to have been lost by blogger. You'll need to repost that. It must have been quite long.
A brief din of ululation spearheaded by namecalling then a return to former placidity.
ReplyDeleteIn looking around at comments it appears the most to be learned is just how awful this unknown Sailer person really is as many are happy to inform.
Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
E. B. White
When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have neither, holler.
Al Gore
When blithe to argument I come,
Though armed with facts, and merry,
May Providence protect me from
The fool as adversary,
Whose mind to him a kingdom is
Where reason lacks dominion,
Who calls conviction prejudice
And prejudice opinion.
Phyllis McGinley
Disparate impact needs to be abolished as a concept post haste. Let's start with the EEOC.
ReplyDeleteIt makes the absurd assumption that there are no racial differences in ability or orderliness and self disciple (regardless of how they arose, i.e. the relative contributions of genetics/heritability and ethnic culture) of various kinds, and that therefor all differences in actual performance "must" be due to discrimination.
This assumption has never been demonstrated by evidence. It's entirely a political/ideological concept grounded in "not being racist".
You don't have to be all that smart to teach public school. With all these vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, why not make some kind of program where they're intensively taught a subject for 6 months and then given a 5 year contract to teach in a public school? Teachers unions be damned.
ReplyDeleteA couple months ago you ran a wonderful piece on that new super expensive high school in LA. This is the essence of the problem. We want to buy our way out of bad student performance with pricey architecture.
ReplyDeleteThis isn't a new phenomenon. When I was a graduate student in the seventies a won a Mellon Fellowship to do "good" for the people of Washington DC. One of the other fellows was charged with fixing the new public library. They had closed the old Carnegie library and erected in the downtown black area a new library by Mies Van der Rohe. At the time it was the most expensive public building in the US. It looked just like the first three floors of the Seagram Building.
But alas no one used it. Personally I approved. It was like my own personal library - almost completely empty. It was like the last reel of "On the Beach".
Every week at our seminar we discussed this problem. The suburban libraries were over crowded - so that wasn't it. The polite response was to be dumbfounded. Certainly race could not be mentioned.
Finally the guy charged with fixing the problem presented his solution. We wanted to show movies in the basement. This was doubly funny because the vast empty library was near F street which had been the center of the great movie houses in the nation's capitol. These movie palaces had gone into sharp decline with the Martin Luther King riots. Nice people just stopped going down town.
Albertosaurus
There seems to be a new phenomenon every week that is easily explained from a HBD perspective but the public chooses to embrace ever more fanciful notions of discrimination and prejudice.
ReplyDeleteThe reason which no one will dare mention or even allow themselves to think, is simply that the world doesn't need black people. Every US city would be better off if there were no black people in it. Crime statistics are largely black prevalence statistics. A well performing school is simply a school with few blacks.
A lot of decent people are afraid that if that simple fact were recognized then some bad man during some bad period would be tempted to act on it.
It isn't that the media and academia are slow witted. No, they think fast. They rush past any HBD explanation and all too soon arrive at genocide. They don't want to be Nazis so they nip off any HBD idea at the bud.
Albertosaurus
"Uh, I think you really need to brush up on your history there pal. Sour grapes mingled with ignorance is not a favourable combination."
ReplyDeleteI'm not interested in the manufactured histories that left-wing academics concoct to create comparative civilization courses. And I do not want to hear another lecture on how the Asians invented gunpowder.
The reality of the matter is that the Asian world has contributed little to civilization, especially the civilization of the Western world. While almost everything Asia is today is really transmitted to them by the generosity of the West, there is almost nothing in Western civilization that has been transmitted to us from the East. The world that the white, male European built today was almost entirely built by him from whole cloth. The same cannot be said for the Asian.
http://perec.studio360.org/americanicons/episodes/2007/04/06
ReplyDeleteWhite guy trying to teach Gatsby/moral lessons to black kids in "AP" English class in Brooklyn...
Gatsby Gets Schooled
Students in Garth Wolkoff’s English class in Brooklyn admire Gatsby, and find Daisy suspiciously "chillax."
The East Asians have strong visuospatial and math skills, which are highly masculine traits.
ReplyDeleteEffeminate is the wrong term for Asians. They have masculine minds, but very low levels of testosterone. So taking a lot of crap, studying hard, conforming, following directions, etc. isn't so bad. They are the ideal kids to teach. The downside is that they are less likely to take a risk or push the boundaries, which Westerners do a lot of.
Indians are low T also and they ave a pretty intense academic culture, even in the rural villages.
Its almost depressing reading some comments by Agnostic, Whiskey and Truther.
ReplyDeleteLogic based on opinion and unverified and weak poofs.
"Steve, middle class Chinese kids typically go to a cram school for a whole afternoon after regular school. I don't know if that makes a difference, but my guess is that it must. Otherwise, parentes aren't going to spend such a significant amount of money on sending their kids there."
ReplyDeleteEh, the old SATs are just a measure of SES because high SES kids can get the right coaching?
Sorry, Meta-analyses have consistently found that cram school has a limited affect of about ~ 15 pts. See, for example, Domingue and Briggs, 2009. (12 pts Math; 7 points verbal)
http://dirwww.colorado.edu/education/faculty/derekbriggs/Docs/Domingue_Briggs_Using%20Propensity%20Score%20Matching.pdf
Its almost depressing reading some comments by Agnostic, Whiskey and Truther.
ReplyDeleteAnd you anon, your comment, where you explain the crucial asian input into our society, its been lost by blogger too. Please repost.
"The reality of the matter is that the Asian world has contributed little to civilization, especially the civilization of the Western world. While almost everything Asia is today is really transmitted to them by the generosity of the West, there is almost nothing in Western civilization that has been transmitted to us from the East. The world that the white, male European built today was almost entirely built by him from whole cloth. The same cannot be said for the Asian."
ReplyDeleteSeriously? Gunpowder aside for a second - paper and the compass. Read Needham - he's not right about many things with regard to Chinese history or culture, but he's a sound chronicler for the most part of its pre-modern technological accomplishments - the a slew of maritime and agricultural technologies crucial to the Age of Discovery and Europe's coming of age were imported from China.
I hate to sound condescending but your brash mixture of conceit and faulty knowledge is not doing you any favours - maybe if you read more book a few people around you would at least start to take your opinions seriously, and you could quit being so damned resentful and jealous towards people who are can help being naturally smarter than you..
My two cents pal.
Whiskey: BECAUSE Black and Hispanic kids get suspended all the time, we have "Zero Tolerance." Where school officials look to randomly punish and suspend and expel White kids to balance that of Black and Hispanic kids.
ReplyDeleteWell, just because our old friend "Whiskey" is a notoriously pathological liar about everything doesn't necessarily mean he's always incorrect. So I clicked the link Steve had provided for the displinary data on Chatsworth H.S. in the San Fernando Valley, and here's what I found:
Suspensions by race for most recent year (2008/9):
White: 48/738 = 6.5%; Hispanic: 134/1548 = 8.7; Black: 49/302 = 16.2%; Asian: 10/480 = 2.1%.
Now the most recent Hispanic suspension rate (8.7%) is somewhat higher than the white one (6.5%), but they're actually pretty close to each other at least compared to either the black (16.2%) or Asian (2.1%) figures. The gap is admittedly wider if we average over the last five years:
Suspensions by race over past five years: (2004-2009):
White: 302/3816 = 7.9%; Hispanic: 1032/7601 = 13.6%; Black: 405/1466 = 28%; Asian: 92/2376 = 3.9%.
Now I have no idea whether or not these figures are representative of LAUSD overall, but perhaps "certain people" should actually bother clicking Steve's link before making all sorts of ridiculous, wild claims...
"If short-term preparation (i.e., coaching ) can be linked
ReplyDeleteto substantial score increases, then the claim that the SAT measures knowledge that is developed
gradually over years of schooling becomes equivocal."
Chuck, short-term usually means a few sessions a week, over the course of about 6 weeks. Even then, we're talking a 19 point improvement, which isn't bad for a few weeks.
East Asians send their kids to cram school for 6 days a week, from preschool through high school. Imagine the impact of that....
There are sources that indicate that coaching can raise scores by more than 19 points.
"Commercial coaching courses that train students to take standardized tests can raise scores significantly, according to a new report, and give students who can afford such courses an advantage over poorer students in getting into college or receiving a scholarship.
The report by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a not-for-profit group in Cambridge, Mass., that also goes by the name FairTest, asserts that studies done over the last 20 years prove that coaching courses can raise a student's score by 100 points on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, a multiple choice examination with a top score of 1600 that many colleges and universities use in making admission decisions. A similar test, the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, is used to award some competitive scholarships."
Some coaching is short term and some coaching is long term. Assuming you can raise a score by 19 points in six weeks, a year or two of coaching could plausibly produce a 100 point rise. The first study looked at short term coaching, specifically.
"College Board officials said a rigorous academic background was the best long-term preparation for taking the test. In the short run, they encourage study of a booklet with sample questions prepared by the College Board and distributed to every test taker. Taking the test a second time also generally improves scores by about 30 to 40 points."
A standardized test can be studied for through lots of preparation. East Asians are smart, but they drill hard also. If they slacked off as much as we did, their scores likely would be weaker.
I think you can make an argument that industrious, docile, low T, diligent Asian/Indian kids are the only people who can be made to study this hard. Put in this situation, whites and NAMs would probably zone out at their cram schools, or just drop out. Already so many kids drop out of high school, despite it being almost impossible to fail out of many high schools.
I'd say genes matter, but not just IQ genes. Genes for tenacity, diligence, conformity, testosterone, and other personality factors can influence things a lot. Assuming you get a lot of intensely hardworking Asians or Indians together, they'll probably set up a more rigorous educational system, which their kids will have the work/study habits to make it through.
Shanghai is like any other east Asian country, but the population skews more middle/upper class. A 600 math score reflects what happens when you take moderately bright, semi-selected middle class Asian pupils and put them through East Asian academic bootcamp. I bet if you looked at a middle class city in Taiwan or Japan, youi'd find similar scores, but maybe rural areas and poorer towns would be more like the western countries.
"Seriously? Gunpowder aside for a second - paper and the compass. Read Needham - he's not right about many things with regard to Chinese history or culture, but he's a sound chronicler for the most part of its pre-modern technological accomplishments - the a slew of maritime and agricultural technologies crucial to the Age of Discovery and Europe's coming of age were imported from China.'
ReplyDeleteWhat have they done the last 200 years? Do they have a lot of Nobels in the sciences?
...because disparate impact lawsuits undermine institutional support for discipline...
ReplyDelete...they are never used against gun-control laws.
What does that tell you about the civil rights movement? (Or, for that matter, the gun rights movement?)
What have they done the last 200 years? Do they have a lot of Nobels in the sciences?
ReplyDeleteLOL. Among the weaknesses of the West....short time horizon, no sense of history.
Breaking news: school full of Asians has performs well, full story at 11!
ReplyDeleteSeriously? Gunpowder aside for a second - paper and the compass.
ReplyDeleteGunpowder - your contention - that gunpowder is a soley, orginally a Chinese invention that was tramsmitted whole to the west is far from a done deal.
The compass - not a done deal either.
Printing - certainly a parallel invention. There is no evidence that white invention of printing in any way relied upon Chinese printing.
Paper - I might concede.
Sounds like this Needham guy is just telling white liberals what they want to hear.
Lets say I invent 99 things that contribute to a new machine and you invent one. Its very easy to construct a narrative that makes your one look like the deal breaker, the crucial winning proposition that made it all work and the other 99 look trivial. Really, on balance how likely is that?
"Seriously? Gunpowder aside for a second - paper and the compass. Read Needham - he's not right about many things with regard to Chinese history or culture, but he's a sound chronicler for the most part of its pre-modern technological accomplishments - the a slew of maritime and agricultural technologies crucial to the Age of Discovery and Europe's coming of age were imported from China."
ReplyDeleteHmmm...did you actually bother to read this paragraph before you posted it? The compass and paper invented in China that was then imported to Europe? Gee...imported how? Did Chinese explorers come to Europe to give us these wonderful technologies? Well...no. The Chinese were a famously isolationist people. Did European explorers come to China and get the technology?
Maybe...but how did they get there in the first place? Paper and compass are integral for map-making and navigation, technologies you need to get to China in the first place. What did the Euros use to get to China in the first place.
Oh...and then there's the Chinese contribution to "maritime" and "agriculture." Right. European circumnavigation of the globe depended on Chinese technologies that the Chinese themselves never used. And they somehow missed "cheese." It is beyond belief that anyone finds this credible.
No one seems to provide an answer to the #1 question: Why is there an incongruity between the history of Asian achievement and the Asian achievement on standardized tests? If these people are so smart, then why isn't their influence more widespread?
At best, the Asians managed a parallel development of rudimentary objects within their own territory. But what they developed would've been discovered by others anyway. So, my point still stands: if Asian civilization disappeared 1,500 years ago, nobody would have noticed.
"Effeminate is the wrong term for Asians. They have masculine minds, but very low levels of testosterone."
ReplyDeleteGeez...the lower the level of testosterone, the more effeminate. Again, go back to my post.
In an effeminate educational system, designed to educate women, the Asian male has a distinct advantage: low testosterone makes them docile enough to put up with the busy work the teacher assigns. At the same time, their male brains make them superior to their female peers. Thus, the Asian is the new superstar student.
It's too bad that building a civilization is not the same as acing a civil service exam.
The Chinese have invented a lot over time, but slowed in the last few centuries, which is when the West sprang from obscurity into dominance. I suppose the West has owned China in modern times, but historically the Chinese have been far ahead. As have the Indians.
ReplyDeleteWhen people start talking about high Asian IQs and how the east is going to dominate, they're off base.... but so are those that would see the Chinese as unoriginal grinds that never did anything. I think we need to be realistic about things.
I think it'd be realistic to say that the level of creativity and innovation is higher on the Western side, but the East, especially Japan, is more creative than people would think. They're also harder working, more dutiful, and more tenacious, as were their rice farmer ancestors. IQ is probably similar enough that I don't think it's a meaningful difference when looking at differences between the two regions.
Today, the Western economies are pretty strong, but so are Japan and South Korea. It's not evident that one group is clearly ahead overall, but each group has its own strengths.
Agnostic has a post that shows Japan is intermediate between West and the rest of East Asia, on conformity. Which might make sense, as Japan produces a lot of interesting stuff (Sony, Nintendo, Pokemon, Anime).
"Lawsuit settlements typically require that voluminous statistics then be maintained and published on disciplinary actions by race in order to facilitate future disparate impact lawsuits."
ReplyDeletePath to a solution: pass a law requiring schools to collect statistics estimating the costs of lawsuit compliance and prevention.
The Chinese invented pasta. Yum yum.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the West was never "obscure." It never rose from obscurity to dominate today. The West had maintained and ebb and flow of large, powerful civilizations for most of its history, except a brief period after the Roman Empire collapsed.
I'm not making the tired argument about creativity or innovation. I am commenting about the complete lack of any Asian influence within Western Civilization, vs. the obvious Western influence in almost everything that is Asian. These people have so essentially copied the West in almost every respect, that it's almost embarrassing how they maintain any level of ethnic chauvinism to begin with.
In other words, Western Man bestrides the world like a Colossus because He is Western Man, not some "stage" in the development of a civilization that everyone is bound to go through given enough time.
What distresses me about this thread is the willingness of commentators to "socialize" the achievements of Western civilization, all in an attempt to get liberals to accept "HBD." See, we're not racists. We acknowledge that Asians have higher IQ's than whites. See...look at the test scores. Look how well they do!!! We're not racists!!! We're not racists!!!
What are you going to say when the Left turns your argument against you and demands that we import only South and East Asians?
I mean, really, at least there was always the pretense for immigration enthusiasts that immigrants came to America to fill a hole in the job market.
ReplyDeleteWas? That pretense was created by the apparatus of public opinion formation, and that pretense will continue until that apparatus is dismantled or its operators decide the pretense no longer serves their purposes.
"The reality of the matter is that the Asian world has contributed little to civilization, especially the civilization of the Western world."
ReplyDeleteOy. You kid, right?
On net, Europe may have contributed more to culture, science and technology than Asia has, in relative or even absolute terms, but anyone who would underestimate or denigrate a group of people that is presently busy cleaning our clocks in our own countries would have to be an imbecile.
Never underestimate your competitors. Never, never, never, ever.
"Never underestimate your competitors. Never, never, never, ever."
ReplyDeleteYes...let's get rid of the "Most Favored Nation" trade status, easy immigration, and "Minority Disadvantaged Business" status and let see how well they "compete."
The Chinese invented pasta. Yum yum."
ReplyDeleteNo doubt the Chinese invented noodles; but those we now call Italians had a noodle food in ancient times, that they themselves invented. They did not have to wait for Marco Polio to enjoy this cuilinary delight. I think noodles in various forms can be found throughout the world.
"In an effeminate educational system, designed to educate women, the "
ReplyDeleteOh I don't know. One Kafka biographer wrote with some horror of the entirely male schools of 19th century Prague. Always remember they influenced the author of the "Castle."
The "system", I suppose, means students sitting in a room and keeping movement to a minimum for a number of hours while acquiring information, often by rote, sometimes by experimentation.
This "system" has been in place for thousands of years. School rooms in Sumeria and ancient Egypt were not a million miles away from a school room (san computers) in small-town Anywhere. Females were rarely students in schools until the 1700s, and rarely teachers until the mid-1800s. Even after that, most teachers were men in the European school system until later in the 20th century. Women did not "design" the system, but certainly in some ways they are more adaptable to it and have been the major influence in America since the early 1900s.
There was no Golden Age of male schools, at least not for children. St. Augustine, cica 450 A.D., speaking of school, observed that any man would rather die than repeat his childhood in school. I don't think anyone would describe that fifth century school as "effeminate" and it involved a 'sitting-still' of biblical proportions.
Not to complain overmuch, but I thought I'd check out Trinidad on wikipedia and it turns out that rather than being "a Black country" they're slightly more Indian (South Asian)...
ReplyDelete