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| Re: ARTICLE: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta (807412) | |||
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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 Sun Jul 10 11:41:38 2011, in response to Re: ARTICLE: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta, posted by Scorpio7 on Sun Jul 10 05:13:41 2011. Here's the next secret: while black and brown students are often already performing to the best of their ability in America, as you noted, there may be some leeway with the white students vis a vis Europe. But here's the trick: even if you cram a few more semesters of work into American students, you won't significant change their life outcomes (because, really, that's what we're interested in) since that is mostly affect by IQ, g in particular, and that is highly heritable.But then, the results of the PISA tests argue against the notion of how bad American students are doing vs Europe and even East Asia:  (clickable)American students outrank students of the same respective races in almost all other countries, including Belgium (but maybe your 8% non-European population is bringing down your total). (Cheating is not likely a factor in U.S. scores since the PISA is not a high-stakes test.) The fundamental crux of the argument is two things, whether American students are living up their full potential, which is highly debatable considering the evidence, and whether that matters—whether bringing (white) American students up another grade so they can be more like their European counterparts will make them better employees, get them better jobs, make them more competent people in society. I'm not going to deny there is all sort of things that can affect school performance one way or the other, such as the externalities you mentioned (which are indeed also partially heritable). Much of this falls under the "chance" umbrella I discussed (say an illness or accident that prevents you from doing well one semester and blows your chances at that elite college). Two studies—experiments—come to mind that shows that changing student attitudes can have modest effects on their performance. I would argue that this does so by encouraging them to work a bit harder and tough it out a bit longer, as indeed the personality traits that affect this are only partially heritable and are subject to environmental manipulation to a degree. Perhaps it is worthwhile to try to achieve such small gains for everyone. Perhaps it isn't. In America anyway, we already spending massive amounts money to try to boost student performance anyway (make no mistake, this is black and brown students), so what would it hurt to try something that actually had a chance of working. But Charlton argues that we could radically revamp the education system and make it far more efficient and arguably much less expensive. I can't say that I am fully on board with what he's advocating (yet), but I can't deny the logic of his argument. As it stands now, education is very much a long drawn out obstacle course designed to weed out the unintelligent and the lazy, and it's often not recognized as such. But then, we can do the same thing with shorter simpler tests (especially the intelligent part). Ergo, we could replace the Ivy League degree with an IQ and work ethic test. He's advocating that we instead focus education on content delivery and specialize earlier on, and in so doing we could accomplish the goal you're trying to accomplish and graduate some more doctors, lawyers and engineers earlier, instead of wasting their time with repetitive demonstrations of their intelligence throughout their educational career. |
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