Asians, Aptitude, and Achievement: a Positive Sum Reform Proposal
2nd October 2011
Steve Sailer keeps trying to fix what’s wrong with the country. I admire his optimism.
However, there have long been complaints about the SAT. The most fashionable involved The Gap. Whites averaged higher scores than blacks. This posed a major PR problem for the academic establishment. The SAT (and ACT) is essential for their continued thriving, but saying that blacks are less intelligent than whites on average is The Worst Thing in the Whole World. But that’s what the SAT says. And the SAT is the cornerstone of academic elitism, which has made American academia globally the envy of the academic world.
Thus, over the last half century or so, there have been anguished discussions between the front men for the academic world and the psychometricians at ETS about how to Close the Gap, without throwing the baby of predictive power out with the bathwater.
So much for the ‘reality-based community’. Unfortunately, the delusions of the upper classes have deleterious effects on us all.
But white parents still tend to assume that SAT stands for Scholastic Aptitude Test. It’s not an achievement test in their heads. The College Board says there is no point in studying extra hard for the SAT, and why would a prestigious not-for-profit institution spin the truth? If you can’t trust the College Board, who can you trust? And signing your child up for intensive test prepping would be unfair to poor blacks who can’t afford all that tutoring and drilling. Plus, prepping for years would be a lot of work for little Taylor, so just let him have his fun.
Meanwhile, lots of people from Fujian are showing up in America whose merchant ancestors ascended to mandarin status by spending their mercantile profits at Confucian literature cram schools for their sons. The assumptions about the SAT flitting around in white people’s heads would never occur to them. “Test prep is unfair to poor blacks? Huh? You crack me up! I like you! You are very funny!”
Somebody (was it John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia? I forrget) once wrote that there wasn’t anything wrong with any major American city that dumping about a million ethnic Chinese on it couldn’t fix. That sounds about right. Look at Singapore.
Not surprisingly, we see vast amounts of white upper middle class rage directed at Amy Chua.
In America today, 98% of the thinking devoted to college admissions goes to figuring out how your own kid can claw his way to the top, and the other 2% goes to airy handwaving theorizing about Closing The Gap. That leaves 0% devoted to thinking about improving the system overall.
October 2nd, 2011 at 21:01
In Ann ARbor there was a movement around the turn of the millenium that strove to Close The Gap in the AA school system. Predictably, there was an annual report which demonstrated that we hadn’t done it yet. The flap died down in a couple of years, and I haven’t heard much about it since then.
One of the more interesting things I noticed at the time and mentioned to everyone I knew was that the achievement gap between white students and black students was approximately the same as that between white students and Asian students. My question at the time was, “Instead of asking what’s going wrong for black students, why don’t we look at what’s going right for Asian students, and then apply that across the board? Blacks and whites would both benefit.”
The answer, of course, is home culture. And nobody wanted–or wants–to touch that. So they continue to agonize and wring their hands over something which they cannot control and seek to implement fixes in the schools to solve a problem which does not reside in the schools and which cannot be fixed there.
Some good ol’ “engineering root-cause analysis” would go a long way around here…
October 3rd, 2011 at 11:41
As much as I hate to agree with Dennis, I’ve observed the same relationship between home culture and achievement. A company I worked for a few years back would sometimes have us ‘volunteer’ to help at inner city schools. It was interesting on many levels. One of the teachers – a black woman – told me that when they had parent-teacher night, some of the Hispanic parents came, most of the white parents came, all of the Asian parents came (every time), and only rarely did a black student’s parent show up. (The singular ‘parent’ is intentional.)
Sadly, there isn’t much you can do to fix those cultural issues.
The worst possible choice to address the ‘gap’ is to dumb everything down so that the lowest achievers become “average”, yet that is exactly the choice that has been made.
October 3rd, 2011 at 12:37
No Child Left Behind means No Child Gets Ahead.