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| Re: ARTICLE: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta (807115) | |||
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Re: ARTICLE: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta |
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Posted by JayMan on Sat Jul 9 16:24:01 2011, in response to Re: ARTICLE: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta, posted by Scorpio7 on Sat Jul 9 15:31:29 2011. Let us fully split this hair:"My contention is that the country's mean IQ with all races combined is not significant to the sophistication of the curriculum." Um, I'm not the one trying to claim that the reason for the difference in standards is because you have more dark people, and thus a lower average IQ. That's YOU. Yes, but what's relevant is the average of IQ of each race and their proportion in the population. This value loses its meaning to a degree if you combine all the different major groups to take an average because each has a distinct mean, i.e., America's total 96 is very different from, say Portugal's 95. "...then average IQ of the population is only partly responsible for the rigorousness of the curriculum." Finally, we're getting somewhere. Glad you agree with me. Next time, try not quoting me so flagrantly out-of-context. "The only way to do that is to modulate the difficulty of the material." Incorrect. Better teaching can do an awful lot. The American school system is made up in such a way that decent teaching is not encouraged: standards are too low, there is no competition between schools for students (and thus no incentive for schools or teachers to innovate), class groups are way too large (groups of 30 students or more per class is simply too much if you want to do your job well), etc. THAT is the main problem with American high schools, IMHO. Now we get to the crux of the issue, the fundamental error that in your beliefs that underlies your reasoning. Apparently you missed this article: http://www.subchat.com/otchat/read.asp?Id=806178 Indeed, all those things you mentioned have been studied and have found to not be effective in improving student performance. Nor should they, because the secret is, said succinctly, that education cannot make people smarter, it can only make people more knowledgeable. Student performance is directly related to heritable traits, including IQ, which is highly heritable (~80% heritable), and personality traits such as conscientiousness. Adjusting standards up or down has the sole effect of changing the pass/fail rate on any given population. Indeed, as Charlton argues, we could do away with much of the educational apparatus and still have much the same results. |
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