NPR:
Ford found that both Hispanic and black students are underrepresented in gifted programs and that black students are missing out the most. She also found that about half the seats in those programs go to higher-income students, even though the majority of the district is poor.
Ford calls it “a waste of a huge number of students’ gifts and talents.”
Ford says Houston’s entire process is laced with problems. She’s seen this in other districts and has ideas on how to improve it, starting with the test.
Houston uses an exam that some educators consider culturally biased, so it may fail to identify a student like Isaac as gifted.
Also, teacher recommendations carry a lot of weight, but can be subjective.
And Ford worries that because the whole selection process is point-based, some families can strategize to get their kids in the program. “Knowing the system, working the system, using that social capital, it does advantage you,” she says.
Comments to NPR:
* I liked that ‘along with Asians’ casually inserted in the course of the usual crude lumping together of all ‘white’ students. The obvious super-achieving of Asian-American kids is routinely ascribed to cultural values by that group. But the poor outcomes for African-American and Hispanic Americans (lumped together, again with crudity) are not. Must be ‘racism’.
The vacuity of this line of thinking is the catch-all ‘white’ category. A Jewish kid from Brooklyn is the same as a Cajun kid from Louisiana is the same as an Appalachian kid from eastern Kentucky is the same as a generically affluent Anglo-Saxon kid from the Chicago suburbs. And on and on. News coverage of ‘race’ seems to be almost willfully, stupefyingly ignorant of subtleties in language, habits, values, etc., that account for differing outcomes. Instead, they stick to a narrative that froze up around 1977, like classic rock radio formats, for cynical political reasons. When their social-engineering brainstorms don’t work, they blame ‘white racism’ and seek even more power from vain and foolish judges and bureaucrats.
* I attribute all of this to Asian and white privilege. I mean how dare those Asians parents teach their kids self discipline, personal responsibility, demand they study, demand they focus and work hard.
They are giving their kids unfair advantages. They should be required by law to teach their kids they are victims and oppressed.
* For a while my kids were at an 80% black school. The turnout at the parent-teacher meetings was 60% white.
* For one reason or another, some parents can’t or won’t prioritize their children’s education. Other factors which could potentially lead to this “underrepresentation” are environmental surroundings (e.g., growing up in economically deprived communities), lacking the drive for higher academic achievement, and – quite frankly (but only in my opinion) – genes. Some of us are just not born with or have access to the brain power to fly in upper academic strata. For those of us who don’t (myself included), we should make every effort to exploit our strengths, curiosities, passions, etc. to make our contribution to and our living from society.
* Entry into gifted programs is not based on educational achievement. It is based on IQ, which is something that blacks and latinos lack in the numbers necessary proportionally to be represented in gifted programs. You can’t teach someone to have a high IQ. Sorry.
* And these people claim they’re coming here for a “better life”. Just who did they think was gonna hand them that “better life”? Did they want it on a silver platter or a gold one?
* If you want to send your children to public schools that are filled with kids who will not or cannot do the work, one solution is to sort them into segregated classes inside the schools. Advanced Placement (AP) classes do that in high schools, when it is much clearer which students are superior. I doubt you will ever meet a first grader who isn’t “gifted,” if you ask his parents. Plus, we have the belief that all children can become gifted if we only expose them to excellent educational programs. Unfortunately, science tells us this isn’t true — most of what we call “giftedness” (where the hell did we get that term) is inherited.
* I posted an article from the Dallas Morning News a few days ago that detailed how poor illegals were flooding the Texas school system and straining it beyond its ability to cope. That article was from 2010 and it’s gotten even worse since then. It explained that forty percent of recent immigrants not only didn’t speak English, they were illiterate even in Spanish. In urban districts here in Texas where up to ninety five percent of the kids are non-English speaking Hispanics, that can cause real problems. We really, really wish we could hand some of that problem off to the states that complain about education in Texas.
California is having an even worse problem than Texas in trying to educate immigrant kids. They used to have one of the best primary educational reputations in the country but they’ve declined drastically in the last decade in the face of the onslaught.
* Flood the country with poor uneducated people and watch things like schools get harder and harder to find. The tax base in Houston to pay for the schools is too often these sprawling hives of low rent apartments that pump kids into the schools. It doesn’t work and then we own the failure and it makes the country worse off.
* Culturally or racially biased questions are the excuse almost universally given to explain the lower performance of blacks and latinos on IQ tests. The truth CANNOT be that there is a difference in IQ among the races, even though the science tells us quite clearly that there is.
* Well, it could not possibly be that there are genetic differences between different groups could it? Such a politically inexpedient fact is simply impossible, because after all, it is the world that must adapt to our expectations and not the other way around. And why is it that the wealthy people are “over-represented”? could it be the same reason why they are wealthy to begin with? The pains NPR took to avoid mentioning the Asian presence is adorable, as was the quick and mumbled cadence the one time it was mentioned. The lack of scientific rigor in these “debates” is getting too embarrassing to even look at.
* 30 years after Charles Murray’s book, The Bell Curve, a peer reviewed, statistically driven explanation of racial diversity. Is the earth flat NPR? We are a product of both nature and nurture. Each of us has our academic limits. If you’re going to follow statistics for climate change, then follow the statistics for everything, including things that may not fit the PC culture. People will be better served to hear the truth.
* “The Bell Curve” should be mandatory reading for all these people. Murray and his work are controversial exactly because the science CANNOT be correct, since the entire liberal world view would crumble if it were. The left only respects science when they think it supports their biases.
* Whites are underrepresented in the NBA and I blame it on not getting enough instruction on basketball fundamentals at home.
* Blacks represent about 17% of the population yet commit about 50% of the violent crime in America. Other groups of poor people don’t commit violence at this rate. In fact, NO other ethnic group commits violence at this rate. It’s a culture of violence not a result of poverty.
* I just heard this story on the radio. It was interesting that the radio hosts, through their vocal patterns, noticeably tried to downplay that ASIANS are also disproportionately represented in students identified as gifted and talented. Guess that doesn’t fit their racism narrative.
* Cultural Marxists need to explain to us three very glaring paradoxes in their victim ideology.
The first:
Black and Hispanic children from the wealthiest families have mean SAT scores lower than white children from families below the poverty line.
The second:
Black and Hispanic children of parents with graduate degrees have lower SAT scores than white children of parents with a high-school diploma or less.
The third:
Cultural Marxists have failed to disprove Spearman’s hypothesis.
* The story is a disgraceful example of the erosion of the meritocracy America was. In our current culture where everyone gets a trophy or as Garrison Keillor might say “everyone’s above average” we are dumbing down accomplishment. Stop with the racist whining. More and more NPR lends its megaphone to people who would destroy effort and accomplishment in the name of fairness.
* I can see how a test could be culturally biases against immigrants, but for children whose families have been in the US for more than one generation, they should have assimilated enough to be part of the general culture.
Also, in the mid-70s, my family sponsored a Vietnamese refugee family who came to the US not speaking English and with just the clothes on their back. By the end of the school year, the kids spoke English and were on the honor roll.
* Another example of NPR’s PC bias. Actually it goes beyond bias. It’s dogma. Educators have defined seven types of intelligence. NPR will occasionally acknowledge that Blacks excel disproportionately in musical intelligence and physical intelligence (athletics). They may even acknowledge that Asians excel disproportionately in math or verbal intelligence. But they are not willing to acknowledge that Blacks and Hispanics do not excel, as an aggregate and in proportion to their numbers, in intellectual abilities. Jensen and Shockley demonstrated this decades ago and for their trouble were drummed out of academia. Lysenkoism was not confined to the Stalin era USSR. It’s alive and well at NPR. NPR needs to have the fortitude to address facts and ideas and conclusions that some people – even designated victim-entitlement groups – may not want to hear.
* James Watson, the twentieth century’s most important biologist, was also drummed out of academics a few years ago for the same observation. We will continue to tie ourselves into knots over racial disparities until we finally face up to what the data have been saying for decades – on average, different ethnic groups have quite different cognitive abilities. Which is not to say that any individuals should be prejudged, but we must recognize reality and stop expecting equal outcomes.
* The big problem here with this news piece is it ASSUMES that the gifted rate should be equal for all racial groups. Until such is PROVEN (and I expect that the results are probably pretty close to equal among racial groups when tested via mechanisms where cultural dynamics are excluded) the authors need to stop making such base statements as they are making regarding the assumed racism.
* “I think it’s a clear case of segregation, gifted education being segregated by race and income.”
If you’re a cultural marxist, that is a religious belief. But it’s simply not true.
At least four major studies have been conducted with remarkably consistent results. They find about 70% of the variance in IQ is associated with genetic variation. Bouchard et al, Science, Oct 12, 1990, present an excellent review of these studies. We can look to the clever experiment of Charles Murray (Income Inequality and IQ, AEI Press, 1998). Murray studied biological sibling pairs selected such that the siblings in each pair differed significantly in IQ, but were reared in the same home by the same parents. Controlling thus for environmental factors, Murray found earnings stratified conspicuously by IQ.
There is much more, but two nails are sufficient to fix the direction of a one-way sign. The arrow of cause points from IQ to income, and not the other way round.
* Houston is swimming in poor immigrants many of whom have parents with minimal education. Over 90% of district students are “Title I”, 80% get free lunch and 30% have limited English skills. Just paying for the schools is a challenge with so many parents producing so little in taxes from their slum apartments (which is where you live when your 8th grade education lands you a job washing dishes). So, combine ultra low sophistication parents with a funding crisis brought on by immigration and there you have it. Yeah, a real shocker.
* U.S. IQ:
Asian 104
White 99
Latino 87
Black 85
End of story.
* Attention NPR: “Hispanic” is not a racial category; it is a cultural-linguistic category, so why are you juxtaposing it with the terms “Asian,” “white,” and “African-American” which denote ancestry? There are white Hispanics (e.g., Ted Cruz and Cameron Diaz), black Hispanics (e.g., Sammy Sosa) and even Asian Hispanics (e.g., former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori).
The word you’re looking for here is “mestizo.”
“Houston uses an exam that some educators consider culturally biased…”
The leftists at NPR are so committed to a certain egalitarian view of human ability (often referred to as “cultural Marxism”) that they lack the cognitive tools to think clearly about and to discuss honestly racial differences. They think that all talents and abilities are equally distributed across the various branches of the human family even though the scientific evidence tells us that that simply is not the case. The evidence gathered from more than 100 years of psychometrics shows quite clearly that the average African-American IQ is one standard deviation below the average European-American IQ. NPR’s response? The tests – all of them – must be “culturally biased” against blacks and mestizos since the data conflict with their dogma. Are those very same tests somehow biased in favor of Asians since their average score is higher than whites? Is there some invisible “Asian privilege”?
People afraid of science will fabricate excuses all day long in order to stay in denial, but the truth is out there despite the best efforts by the forces of political correctness to squelch an honest discussion.
See J.P. Rushton and A.R.Jensen, “Thirty Years Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability,” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235–294.
* See also “Scientists identify gene linking brain structure to intelligence,” 11/02/2014, Kings College of London.
* The president is black, the attorneys general is black, a supreme justice is black, a senator from the south is black, many congressmen and women are black, there was just a black governor of Massachusetts, there are black big city mayors, heads of Fortune 500 companies are black, brain surgeons are black. The list goes on and on, being black is not an excuse anymore- anyone can do anything in this country.
* Could this instead have correlation to IQ scores across the races? All reliable studies show that Latinos and Blacks as an aggregate score below Asians and Whites on IQ tests. And with a sizable Asian community in this country, wouldn’t the same test being blamed for “cultural biases” be culturally biased against Asians as well? We have to stop making excuses for different groups, we need to address the fundamental issues and not drag down the quality or thresholds for gifted programs for these programs benefit the truly gifted. Let us not lose sight of helping those that will be societies great contributors.
* Another typical race bait BS. It is GIFTED AND TALENTED PROGRAM! You don’t have the gift and talent, you don’t get it. Simple as that. Latinos and African Americans have the same equal rights to receive education (or more, by AA), but it doesn’t mean you can legislate GIFT AND TALENT. You can’t say Africans and Latinos don’t get a lot of Nobel prize because of racism. You can’t say NBA players are over 90% African American because of racism. Stupid is what stupid does. Not because of discrimination.
* Why do people assume that all racial groups must have equal outcomes? The very same people that slam the political right for being anti-science become religious zealots when they insist that all human population groups possess an equal proportion of talents. I wish Isaac well, I hope he becomes the next Neil Degrasse Tyson. But can we please let go of this progressive version of creationism. Disparate outcomes are not evidence of injustice.
* I’m black and Latino. As a child I was an extremely talented student. I started reading and writing before I started kindergarten. By the time I was in elementary school I was reading and writing at a “college level”, whatever that means. School work was usually review for me since I’d skip ahead whenever I finished my assignments and sat bored in class. When my test scores came back I was placed in the gifted program. My family moved to an all white suburb for a couple of years. Records don’t travel that fast. At least they didn’t 20 years ago. Assumptions were made. The teachers and administrators knew I was different, academically from the other students. They knew I shouldn’t be in the same class as the majority of other students. I was placed in remedial classes for all subjects. The teachers were insulting and openly racist to my face. My favorite teacher, the one who I thought was on my side, made jokes about me listening to gangsta rap and likened it to admiring serial killers. She randomly called me to her desk one day and asked what racial term I preferred to be called. I told her it’s best she call me by my name and walked away. I was proud to have been able to say something slightly witty and brave enough to do so to a teacher at 11 years old. I walked home that day crying the entire time. I took the long way home so I could get it all out. Eventually we moved back to the inner city, where failing schools and a different kind of racism awaited me.
* No kidding, flooding the schools with poor ESL students is a bad idea and creates obvious funding problems and poor outcomes. Shocking, huh?
* The U.S. Government has spent $23 TRILLION on anti-poverty programs since 1965 (more than the spending for all wars since the Revolutionary War). The poverty rate is the same today as it was in 1965.
SUCCESS!
* This entire article distills to one single fact and that is that liberals, progressives and Democrats will NEVER accept that genetics plays any role in determining an individuals intellectual acuity and of course that it is impossible that there could be any differences between racial groups. Liberals, progressives and Democrats “feel” that intelligence is solely due to the environment but the fact is that there is never equality, even after the moment of conception. Unfortunately for all of us this argument will never end no matter how much empirical and statistical evidence is amassed. To accept a role for genetics means that the Liberals, progressives and Democrats will have to abandon their quest for a utopia where everyone is equal. Detroit, Baltimore and Chicago are all perfect examples of the utopias that have come in to existence and collapsed under the thought control and management of these groups.
* For LAUSD, the criteria for gifted if different in “minority and lower income” children. This is a total discrimination to any other groups and income level families. Test should be fair and equal for all races and level of income.
I am tired of hearing “equality” when the means to get some of their ethnic groups to qualify gifted is not fair.
Asian is such a big and diverse group that it is to unfair to treat them as one. Indians and Hmong are two total different groups of people and cultures.
We should strive to provide quality teachers to all children. Those kids who are disruptive and have behavior problems should be provided help and counseling and placed at a level of education that they can handle.