Todd C. Frankel and David Hunn, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 26, 2009
The academic achievement gap between black and white public school students in St. Louis and St. Louis County remains stubbornly wide, according to a study released Sunday.
At 25 school districts, black students again scored lower than white students on last year’s state standardized tests, says the fourth-annual report from the St. Louis Black Leadership Roundtable, which aims to eliminate the disparity between black and white student achievement.
The gap generally widened among elementary and high school students from 2007 to 2008. The gap shrunk only in middle schools.
But among all students, an annual index for measuring the gap grew by less than 1 percent.
Charles R. Saulsberry, vice chairman of the roundtable, said he was encouraged that the overall achievement gap seems to have stabilized.
{snip}
The report examined Missouri Assessment Program scores in mathematics and communication arts. It broke out scores among whites and blacks, but not other racial groups.
Another sign of stabilization came in the elementary and middle school scores, where the gap has increased or decreased by just a few points over the past three years. And among middle school communication arts scores, the gap shrunk by more than 10 percent since the 2006 test.
High school scores, however, were not as rosy in this year’s study. The gap in communication arts scores increased by 14 percent from the prior year. Math increased by 11 percent.
Also, the study listed some of the most respected area districts—Webster Groves, Kirkwood, Brentwood, Parkway, Clayton—as having some of the widest gaps between scores.
{snip}
The study is called the “2008 Regional Report Card: Eliminating the African American Academic Achievement Gap.”
Tony Thompson, president of Kwame Building Group, said the local achievement gap is part of a broader problem involving how American students are falling behind students in other countries.
{snip}
Original article
Email
Todd C. Frankel
at tfrankel@post-dispatch.com .
(Posted on January 30, 2009)
Comments
Ho hum. This persistent discussion of the white-black performance gap in the schools is really nonsensical without acknowledgement of the white-black mean IQ gap this is thoroughly measured, widely known and forbidden to discussion. We can’t ever expect equal performance from individuals having significantly disparate IQs!
We use Special Ed. to manage, more or less, students that exhibit low IQs (in the 70 and below range or severely maladjusted) and do this regardless of color or culture. Perhaps we need to be serious about Vocational Ed. or Manual Ed. for students that exhibit mid-low IQs ( say 85 and below or are totally disinterested in learning) and do this regardless of color or culture.
St. Louis City and St. Louis County are more famous for the interdistrict desegregation program they once had (and technically still do, but it’s slowly ending). Advocates claimed that black students needed a better environment, but a study ordered by the Federal court overseeing and ordering the program, the Lisset Study (?) stated that blacks bussed out to the suburban schools improved less than black students who remained in the city.
There are 2 issues that are important to note here.
The first is that black kids know they don’t have to do well in school because the law will always demand they be hired or promoted regardless of performance. Why should they try? Just read some prior AMREN articles that shows the success of those corrupt legal shenanigans where the blacks are given affirmative action promotions.
The other is that even when promoted to higher positions or accepted in prestigious schools via affirmative action programs, they are not expected to achieve and commonly given a pass on their pathetic performances.
As an example of the academic permissiveness with blacks; a friend of mine teaches at Harvard and Boston College, and while he is still struggling to stay a liberal, reality is chipping away at him. Regarding blacks in his classes he simply says, “they’re dumb” without providing any additional commentary. Coming from him, that’s really saying something considering that at one time, he’d would have voted for Karl Marx if the latter were still alive.
Also, the study listed some of the most respected area districts—Webster Groves, Kirkwood, Brentwood, Parkway, Clayton—as having some of the widest gaps between scores
Of course! The more you teach, the more the teachable will learn.
“…St. Louis Black Leadership Roundtable, which aims to eliminate the disparity between black and white student achievement.”
“Charles R. Saulsberry, vice chairman of the roundtable, said he was encouraged that the overall achievement gap seems to have stabilized.”
This tells us nothing we don’t all know from past test results throughout the nation. One can quibble about standardized testing, whether it is an adequate evaluation of student performance in the “real world,” whether it should be abandoned so that teachers can concentrate on social skills and the “whole person,” etc. One thing is for certain: if there is ever a significant decrease in the test gap between white and black students, it will be trumpeted in the media and make the front page of every newspaper in America!! By the way, why doesn’t anyone mention the Asian/White gap? In mathematics, the Asians outperform Whites year in year out… I haven’t seen that discussed in the national media.
I guess “The Obama Effect” hasn’t reached St. Louis yet. Not to worry, just have the messiah give a speech in the troubled schools and all will be well. Test scores will equalize, blacks will become the scientists and philosophers they were born to be and pigs will grow wings and fly.
In all reality only the pig part has a chance of actually coming true.
Does poverty cause stupidity, or does stupidity cause poverty?
If poverty causes stupidity, then one would expect the poor to be stupid.
If stupidity causes poverty, then one would expect the poor to be stupid.
Why is it, then, that while both environmental behaviorism — poverty causing stupidity — and hereditary behaviorism — stupidity causing poverty — present an arrangement of the world in which the stupid are poor, the stupid being poor is always held somehow to distinguish between the two and be evidence to the validity of environmental behaviorism?
I write this because, though the article mentions nothing directly about poverty being the reason for poor performance (stupidity), in the course of talking about its subject matter such an idea must always come up, due to the excellent correlation between the two that must exist, and does because stupidity causes poverty .
Or perhaps I am mistaken? And the flaws of finding poverty the source of the disparity of achievement have become too obvious for it to see standard use, and they’re now on to other fantasies, like the subconscious disheartening and oppressive effect of institutionalized racism or something similar?
Well, what I HAVEN’T seen stated here is that the “black roundtable” isn’t really interested in seeing blacks IMPROVE. Their only interest is in “narrowing the gap”. The disparity that stubbornly won’t go away, is that white students are continuing to grasp the subject matter.
Since I firmly believe that the downfall of the U.S. BEGAN with Brown v. the Board of Education, it’s probably only a matter of a generation or two before the gap begins to narrow. (But not because blacks all of a sudden got smarter). “No child left behind” ring any bells…?
In articles such as this, “poverty” or “racism” are always reified as malign, independent variables mysteriously singling out some races more than others for unfair outcomes.
No liberal writer would ask why South Asian refugees who arrive in the USA unable to speak English are soon outscoring all blacks and not a few whites on math tests.
Instead we have these occult abstractions flying around, picking oon the poor Af-Ams to ensure that a black who grows up richer and with more opportunities than any blacks in the rest of the world strikes out.
“Poverty” made him fail, see? And the only way it can be exorcized is by ever-larger infusions of cash from the successful.
Most schools in the USA are extremely dumbed down, to the point where anyone with an IQ over 110 is going to be pretty bored.
The good schools are the ones who don’t dumb down, and so you see a population straight out of “IQ and the wealth of nations”: North Asians and Northwestern Europeans.
Does poverty cause stupidity, or does stupidity cause poverty?
If poverty causes stupidity, then one would expect the poor to be stupid.
If stupidity causes poverty, then one would expect the poor to be stupid.
Why is it, then, that while both environmental behaviorism — poverty causing stupidity — and hereditary behaviorism — stupidity causing poverty — present an arrangement of the world in which the stupid are poor, the stupid being poor is always held somehow to distinguish between the two and be evidence to the validity of environmental behaviorism?
No matter what there will always be poverty in America. If the whole world were white then there would still be poverty. We need people to do manual labor in this country (the poor). Stop trying to down size the black community. My dad had many friends in military who went in with ivy league college degrees and when they got out they lived with their parents. Some of my friends were in ivy league colleges and now they live with their parents.
“At 25 school districts, black students again scored lower than white students on last year’s state standardized tests, says the fourth-annual report from the St. Louis Black Leadership Roundtable, which aims to eliminate the disparity between black and white student achievement.”
Why don’t they want to reduce the gap between blacks and Hispanics? Or Asians? Or Middle Easterners? Or Indians? Or southeast Asians?
I mean, they’re behind all of those groups. Why are they so fanatically obsessed with whites?
And Why doesn’t the MSM ever point out the disparities between blacks and other groups?
Blacks don’t get high scores because they don’t put in much effort not because they lack ability. I saw many blacks in high school who were very smart in math but didn’t try hard so they fell behind and later dropped out of the class.
In black school most teachers are careless and don’t teach well or in some cases don’t teach at all.
This is a problem hopefully the next generation won’t face. What they don’t talk about is blacks improvement in Florida. That’s important because the Florida education system is poor. Blacks are improving.
Today I asked a black female from Chicago who said she was starting college in 3 weeks about the Impeached Governor of Illinois, she said she never heard of him or knew what his name was. And this is about as smart as THEY seem to get? Bet she has her eye on a top government job when she graduates?
I suspect it is well understood nearly by all that the decade after decade racial academic achievement gap is due to the genetic based average IQ gap but it’s not just that educationists don’t want to admit it, it’s that there is a racial-gap industry going on to make a living off of with pats on the back for your noble efforts.
People are making money getting grants to produce worthless papers with “Eliminating the achievement gap” in the title. Tax payer funding galore flows into programs for “Eliminating the achievement gap” that, of course do nothing of the sort, but that’s just generates more calls for more funding, year after year. Admit the true cause and they’ll call you a “racist” and the money goes away. It’s a no-brainer for educators.
“Blacks don’t get high scores because they don’t put in much effort not because they lack ability. I saw many blacks in high school who were very smart in math but didn’t try hard so they fell behind and later dropped out of the class.”
With all the experience we have revealing to us exactly the opposite of what you say, and all the hard data available verifying black incompetence and low test and I.Q. scores, do you really think you’re going to fool anybody here by these preposterous, unsupported assertions you make?
Blacks can’t cut it here, in Africa, or anywhere in the world, and no amount of generalized assertions you make is going to change that fact nor will it change people’s view of black ability. I don’t know why you keep trying.
What amazes me is how these liberal academics actually believe that Blacks have the ability to compete with whites intellectually. Most of these people are by all accounts very bright. For instance, this guy Jonathan Kozol went to Harvard and was a Rhodes scholar, yet he continues to believe that the achievement gap can be decreased with better schools. Do these guys really beleive this, or are they putting on a show?
When I started college as a naive 17 yr old, it took me all of 6 months to realize that Blacks can’t compete with whites. No matter how much they studied, or how many tutoring sessions they went to, it didnt amount to beans.
Many(not all) of the blacks I went to college with were totally unprepared for the rigors of college mathematics or writing. The SAT, which does strongly correlate with success-this is why Nobel prize producing Harvard has near perfect SAT average while Local State U has a much lower average. SAT is also highly g loaded-lets take a look at SAT-IQ of high schoolers by race.
2005
White-Black difference- 22 IQ points(!)
So there you have.http://www.blackexcel.org/06-sat-act-scores-by-race-ethnicity.htm http://www.braingle.com/mind/iq/convert.php
Really same old tune-blacks don’t perform as well. I could have seen this article ten times rehashed by MSM every year.
Meanwhile another front has opened up in the racial education-employment battle. Mass immigration of Asians-especially South Asians will push white men out of top jobs in IT, medicine, academia, law, finance, etc.
Rushton argued that the best of the brightest South Asians will leave their war stricken, dirty, poor less intelligent peer behind and move west. Even though the average IQ is lower, the ones here are smart smart smart. Indeed the best performing kids in top colleges are not white or e. asian but these diaspora Indians.
“does poverty cause stupidity or does stupidity cause poverty”,,
It naturally makes sense that low-I.Q. people are going to create a bleak and wanting environment for themselves.
“I saw many blacks in high school who were very smart in math but didn’t try hard so they fell behind and later dropped out of the class.”
You got to be kidding; if they were “very smart” in math they wouldn’t need to try hard. I know, I went to an inner city Chicago Public HS.
Here in the UK we have had the same problems with black literacy, lack of qualifications and poor educational achievement.
“Blacks don’t get high scores because they don’t put in much effort not because they lack ability.”
Oh, ok. Working hard in school so you can get a good job and earn a decent living is a white thing. Here’s a news flash. Blacks ‘don’t put in much effort’ on the job either.
- Realist in Atlanta
This gap will always remain because blacks are fundamentally lazy and this reflects in everything they do. They hold their collective hands out and expect to be taken care of by the state or others. If you have ever seen black kids in class then you will understand why they cannot learn and achieve like whites or asians. Blacks are suited for bureaucratic type jobs where the output is well defined and no imagination is required.
Here is and insightful fact (reported recently) about the “IQ gap” between the chimps and humans:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5627359.ece
If baby chimps are more intelligent then human children, and if the “politically correct” theory that “nurture not nature” determines adults’ IQ, then let the “Liberal” social engineers cloese the gap between adult chimps and humans. (Be my guest!)
It’s amazing how long the “nurture not nature” nonsense is being push down our throats, just like “socialism is working peoples’ paradise” nonsense was imposed on Russians and East Europeans during the Soviet Union era for some 3/4 of century.
Which brings this question: is there a connection between the above two similar absurdities and mass post-WWII immigration from SU and E. Europe into the US?
What amazes me is how these liberal academics actually believe that Blacks have the ability to compete with whites intellectually.
Posted by jayfresh at 8:09 PM on January 31
I can tell you how they arrive at that absurd conclusion.
First, they assume the “all people as equal” axiom as undisputable truth, calling “racists” all those who question it, or invoking the “all people are created equal” of the Declaration of Independence as if it were a law of physics or biology and not just a political postulate.
From that they derive that “Blacks ought to be every bit as capable as whites”, from which, by virtue of the idealist’s fallacy (concluding is from ought ), they conclude that “Blacks are every bit as capable as whites”.
Some will go one step further in order to “experimentally” verify that claim. They collect a “random” sample of whites and blacks, that mostly consists of the brightest blacks and the dumbest whites (but still college-admissible) and find out, based on that sample, that actually blacks exceed whites in academic achievement. (This “fact” is further used as a “proof” of the “white privilege” that means that whites fare better than blacks because of pro-white favorism).
That is, basically, all that is to it.
The problem is more complicated than who has and who has not a SSN.
Untold number of illegals (hundreds of thousands or more, I presume) do have SSNs that were either stolen or belong to the deceised people. Knowing the impotence of federal bureaucracy (that, to large extent, is self-inflicted in order to not appear “racist”), many of those will claim “their” stimuli, collect them, and disappear.
Unless E-Verify (or a better measure) is used to check the eligibility of the claimant, expect billions to end up in pockets of Mexican illegals, and then being sent “back” to Mexico.
And I doubt if the political dictators (a.k.a. “leadership”) of both parties have any problems with that.
There is only one way to “fix” that gap…it is called STUDYING HARD AND WORKING FOR A CHANGE….works wonders!
How smart can these creatures be? NOT TOO smart is my conclusion. In Kenya yesterday a gasoline truck turned over and all the gasoline spilled onto the street. These idiots (while smoking cigarettes) were trying to gather up some FREE fuel(In Open Topped Buckets). All they need to see is FREE and they are on it> THEN — POOF the gasoline was ignited, burning some of these fools quite severely. They are No Smarter than that in America. Turn a truck of fuel over in Detroit and they would do the exact same thing.. I feel much of what we spend to educate blacks is totally wasted?
The idea that certain races or species of man can be more intelligent than another is not some bizarre esoteric concept. I remember reading a National Geographic article on pre-homo sapien neanderthals in Europe and their ability to create a culture. Researchers have concluded that the cranial capacity of neanderthals is superior to that of modern humans and therefore can be asserted that this subspecie was probably as intelligent or more intelligent than us.
Did evolution abruptly stop once the first homosapiens left Africa?
How smart can these creatures be? NOT TOO smart is my conclusion. In Kenya yesterday a gasoline truck turned over and all the gasoline spilled onto the street. These idiots (while smoking cigarettes) were trying to gather up some FREE fuel(In Open Topped Buckets). All they need to see is FREE and they are on it> THEN — POOF the gasoline was ignited, burning some of these fools quite severely. They are No Smarter than that in America. Turn a truck of fuel over in Detroit and they would do the exact same thing.. I feel much of what we spend to educate blacks is totally wasted?
Wow okay so using your analogy when some sees Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, O.j.’s wife, Bill Clinton, or JFK. They are to assume white people are easy for sex. When me and 2 of my black friends went to Europe for vaction, most white women they talked to was aggresive, flirty, dressed provatively, and wanted nothing more than a one night stand.
It is completely okay for non whites to sterotype white women as sexually promiscusous. After all they do it in Europe.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1090612/Now-Britain-leading-world—promiscuity.html
“Wow okay so using your analogy when some sees Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, O.j.’s wife, Bill Clinton, or JFK.”
@”rational Thinker”
Paris Hilton came out with a book about a year ago and I looked through it at Barnes and Noble. A bright pink cover and lots of pictures and blurbs of her acting silly. This is marketing tool to get her profits and the lascivious behavior makes her popular with trash magazines. The Hiltons are a multibillionaire family. If Paris Hilton’s kin were as intelligent Kenyans she would not be in this situation.
“When me and 2 of my black friends went to Europe for vaction, most white women they talked to was aggresive, flirty, dressed provatively, and wanted nothing more than a one night stand. It is completely okay for non whites to sterotype white women as sexually promiscusous. After all they do it in Europe.”
Of course, totally irrelevant to the article and comments. What does this have to do with the achievement gap between black and white pupils? Absolutely nothing, however lets divert attention away and focus on sex. After all, this is probably the only concept that “rational thinker’s” kind can comprehend.
Once again the problem of black failure in school is ignored, but this is fine b/c non-whites are satisfied as long as they think they’ve hurt white people somehow.
I think that we can do a much better job teaching minority children mathematics. I believe that the family plays a major role in shaping a child’s desire to learn and that no child develops a value for that which his family and the surrounding community places little value on. If parents take an active role in their child’s education stressing the importance of mathematics that child will respond with achievement. Parents must show that they place a high value on education. Americans spend far too much time being entertained.
