Reply to How to help MCPS' lowest performing students?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's pretty disheartening that so many commenters are just resigning poor kids to poor achievement as if being poor just means you must be genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability. Aren't we past thinking there's a moral implication when you come from a low income family?

It's not true that there is no research on what helps cost these gaps. Really it comes down to wraparound/community services and early intervention. Helping people rise out of poverty essentially, which obviously should not fall on schools to fix. Society needs to care more if we really value bettering all kid's lives.

https://issues.org/beatty/[/quote]

Try reading The Cult of the Smart. It covers this. There is a bell curve of[b] nature ability[/b] within groups and no amount of schooling is going to dramatically change the percentile that most kids find themselves in because any intervention only helps absolute performance, not relative performance. So unless we start using the worst methods on the best kids and the best methods on the worst kids, then I’m sorry, but you’re not going to close the gap because the high achievers are also improving. The gap is based on relative performance, not absolute performance. That’s what colleges and companies care about. Do I think improving absolute performance is a noble goal? Absolutely. We should be building a meaningful life and goals aimed at more than the highest achievers but that’s another topic entirely. [/quote]

Huh? You know that race, income and wealth are social, not biological categories, right?[/quote]

Sorry that should say natural ability. I also didn’t say race and I didn’t speak to poverty either. I said natural ability which persists within groups. Some think this may be intelligence but I’m not calling it that. There is a reason that children’s performance and relative percentile is predictive. How they do in 3rd grade strongly predicts to how they do in 8th and how they do in college and who gets a post-graduate education. There is also plenty of evidence that early childhood interventions fade over time, which shouldn’t be surprising because they bump up against each individual’s natural ability relative to others. And yes, there are exceptional cases where someone succeeds out of proportion to their starting point, which some of you will gladly point out, however, across groups it’s startlingly rare and most children’s percentile is relatively stable. The idea that the bottom 20% is going to move to the 20% if we just had the will, the money or the right teachers or teaching methods defies all evidence to the contrary.

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But when we look at the poorest performing groups,  we're talking about Black, FARMS and EML kids. You are asserting that Black, FARMS and EML kids have less "natural ability" than White, non-poor and English proficient kids. You can deny it but that's a very obvious conclusion from what you are saying. Don't be shy - defend why you think Black kids in every MCPS school perform so poorly.[/quote]

Black people in the US have an average IQ of 85; one standard deviation lower than whites in the US.  Asians score 3-4 points better than whites.  Hispanics score somewhere in the middle.  [/quote]
IQ does not measure intelligence. It is a group's conception of what they think intelligence. From personal experience, I have met the most stupid people with high IQs.[/quote]

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