Education, IQ, the Flynn Effect, and political correctness

View 703 Tuesday, November 29, 2011

· The Texas/Wisconsin Education Paradox

· The Flynn Effect and Raising IQ

Teach your child to read

The Texas/Wisconsin Education Paradox

For about a week I have been running this as a teaser:

I will give you one fact to ponder over the weekend.

Some Teachers Unions have pointed out that the average grade and high school performances in Wisconsin, which has teachers unions, are higher than the corresponding averages in Texas, which is a right to work state. This is true. The average student performance in Wisconsin is higher than the average student performance in Texas.

It is also true that the average black student performance in Texas is higher than black student performance in Wisconsin. The average Hispanic student performance in Texas is higher than the average Hispanic student performance in Wisconsin. The average white (non-Latino) student performance in Texas is higher than the average white (non-Latino) student performance in Wisconsin. The three classes are collectively exhaustive.

These facts are true, and they are not contradictory although they may appear to be. We’ll talk more about this next week, but if you are moved to comment I’m listening.

It’s time and past time to resolve this. It’s not really a paradox, and there are no contradictions. The resolution is simple but politically incorrect, and if one brings up this subject one ought also to discuss some of the implications.

The correct conclusion here is that Texas does a better job at grade through high school education than Wisconsin, but there are inequalities in the performances of the three groups; one of the groups scores higher than the other two; and there are more of the high-scoring group in Wisconsin than in Texas, and fewer of the low scoring groups in Wisconsin than in Texas. Thus, no matter your group, you will (on average) get a better education in Texas than in Wisconsin, and the hypothesis that the unionization in Wisconsin improves the performance of the schools is falsified. You will, on average, be better off in Texas when it comes to education of yourself or your children. We can infer all that without knowing the actual numbers of either group performance or group numbers; we need one set of those numbers only if we want to identify which group has the better performance. Given the locations of Texas and Wisconsin we probably have a reasonable hypothesis as to which states have the highest numbers of each group, and thus an inference as to which group has the highest average scores.

The problem is that it’s fairly obvious which group has the highest average, but if anyone admits knowing it that person is subject to an automatic charge of racism; indeed the charge is likely to be certain and there will be a very high probability that the person making the charge will be unable to understand the argument, and will insist that the whole outcome is racist. Worse, that person will very likely be a public figure featured as a leader of one or another of the ethnic groups. Of course what I just said will be called racist. This is a subject that one opens at peril. I confess I have been avoiding it because it will probably open a firestorm. It usually does.

Note that the teachers unions are not ashamed to take advantage of the situation. They’re the ones who brought up the better average performances in unionized Wisconsin over right to work Texas. They made a true statement; they just avoided alternate hypotheses over the superiority of unionized schools.

To remove any lingering ambiguity: if you rank order the states by grade and high school performance you will have one list. If you rank order them by percentage of non-Latino White and all the others you will get another list. Compare lists and they will be nearly identical. If you want to refine it more, put in Asians. If you want to refine it even more, segregate the Asians, and segregate the Whites by extracting the Ashkenazy Jews into a separate category. Now compute averages for all the racial groups.

When you finish fiddling with this you will find in general there is a rank order of averages more or less predictable by race. The best average will be Ashkenazy Jews; then Asians; then White; then Latino; then Black. Note we are talking about averages. We can also look at grade averages by IQ ignoring race, and that will turn out to do an even better job of predicting grades. The highest IQ’s will get the highest grades, and the correlations will be about as good as you are going to get in dealing with the social sciences. Moreover, if you use IQ, this will be fairly stable over many years: that is, if you have the IQ at age 6, you have a reasonable prediction of high school grade average and a very good prediction of IQ at the time of high school graduation. Of course it won’t be perfect. There are a lot of ways to lower one’s IQ and a lot of ways to make ones grades go down. There are also social factors: lower IQ working hard will often out-perform high IQ taking it easy. I doubt any of this is new to anyone.

The problem here has plagued education planners for a very long time. At onset it would seem to be obvious that education in abstract thinking is costly, and largely wasted on those who aren’t going to learn it in the first place. This used to be accepted knowledge: for those school districts that could afford it, there was a college prep track, a technical education track, and a general education track. In Memphis where I grew up the bright young public school pupils went to Central High and all took the college prep program; those not interested in a college education but fairly good at technical skills went to Memphis Tech, which taught draughtsmanship, technical math, and a whole host of shop skills. Everyone else went to a neighborhood high school where they had a general curriculum that included college prep courses, but they didn’t have to take the college prep courses and most didn’t. Meanwhile the University of Tennessee was set up to admit all the actual graduates of the college prep programs. Those included at least 2 years of a foreign language, algebra and analytical geometry if not calculus, plane and spherical geometry, 4 years of English, chemistry, physics, and biology. Get through all that and you were automatically admitted to either the University of Tennessee or one of the State Colleges. Tuition was nominal. I have friends who went to Memphis State right out of Central High; they lived at home and it essentially cost them nothing. By that time most of the Tennessee State Teachers Colleges and Normal Schools had been upgraded to State College level. Now, of course, they are all various State Universities, the faculties are paid a lot more, and even though there are a lot more of them it’s too expensive to take in all the qualified high school graduates without charging huge tuitions and fees. That’s a good deal for the faculty and administrators. Not so much for the students.

Now in my time the system was legally segregated, and the only debates on racism involved whether there ought to be quotas on Jews getting admission to the University of Tennessee; that is, no one questioned that they were welcome to the state college system, but there needed to be a quota at UT. I left the state while that debate was going on, and I haven’t been back (except for brief visits and conventions) since desegregation. Of course the system was unfair and the “separate but equal” argument was a sham (although Boss Ed Crump of Memphis did make a sincere effort to upgrade Booker T. Washington High School to “equal” Central High in facilities and faculty pay; he said it was just fair, others said it was to avoid Federal desegregation). The point here, though, is that charges of “racism” didn’t enter the picture of this rather neat system of differentiation between college prep, technical, and general high school education. It was manifestly racial so there wasn’t anything to debate.

Incidentally, in those days I was considered a hopeless radical because I thought the law ought to be color blind. I didn’t have any close friends who were black, but then I didn’t have a lot of close friends at all, being as nerdy stuck up an intellectual as you were likely to find. (That’s why I went out for boxing in high school. I read in a Leslie Charteris Saint story about the effectiveness of “scientific boxing”, there being no “martial arts” in those days. Boxing actually worked pretty well, although what I learned was probably less effective than the training to get into shape…) In any event I didn’t hang out much the way high schoolers do now, but when I did I was happy enough to find anyone smart enough to talk to, and that sometimes included black kids. Of course it was illegal for us to sit together in drug stores, thus the origin of my “law ought to be color blind”; it was all purely personal. But that too is another story.

The point of all this ramble is that from my experience it’s always a very good idea to structure a school system on the theory that this isn’t Lake Wobegon. Half the children will be below average, and of those above average a lot of them will neither want nor need a college prep education. Some will do well with what they called a technical school education, and a great number of them will do well with a general high school education that includes home economics, hygiene, enough math to do your income tax, and practice in reading and writing. Those who want more can try for more. There are junior colleges – that’s what we used to call “Community Colleges” for those who want skills. The University and College system is for those trying to enter the professions.

All very idyllic, but it worked pretty well in those times, and would probably work now – except that no matter what means you use to sort students into the groups “college prep”, “technical”, and “the rest”, you will find a disproportionate high number of Whites in the college prep group, and a disproportionate high number of Blacks in “the rest”. And that will happen even if you sort the groups at random and weed out the failures, so long as your college prep group is actually getting a quality prep education. About the only socially acceptable remedy is some form of affirmative action coupled with changing the standards of success.

Does this mean that I think blacks are stupid? No. I do think that the proportion of blacks who want and need a university prep education is lower than the proportion of whites, and that it is no favor to any pupils, black, white, striped, or purple, to put them in classes that are routinely too hard for them and in which they see no relevance to their future lives. No favor is a euphemism. Meanwhile, putting the bright kids in groups where what is being taught is obvious from the first words (or often from last night’s homework) is to build a living hell for them. I was spared that, but I have many friends who were not, and a novelist has to have  empathy for such things.

It isn’t as if this is new information. They were debating these points when I was an undergraduate in the 1950’s. Indeed, the State of Illinois tried to prohibit the publication of any scientific journal that “degraded the intelligence” of any race, whatever the heck that means; it was applied to some of the early stories correlating race and IQ. Yet for over 50 years study after study has shown the same effective correlations of race and IQ. There have been frantic and very expensive attempts to make “culture free” IQ tests, and “eliminate racial bias” from IQ tests, and though they were sincerely intended they all failed. The one-sigma difference between black and white IQ remains pretty steady.

The next attempt, and one I very much approved of, was Head Start which was intended to take children from inner city schools and give them an educational head start so that when they got to Kindergarten or First Grade they would be culturally and educationally even with their classmates. I don’t know of anyone who disapproves of Head Start (indeed I tried to get it expanded to teach the beginnings of phonics reading in the Head Start program although the NEA insists that they children are not “ready” to learn reading at that age and continue to forbid it; but that’s another story). Head Start funding is seldom debated. Everyone I know desperately hopes it will succeed, because, among other things, it will make it a lot easier to reform the general school system and start giving appropriate education to students according to their abilities. Everyone I know would cheer mightily if by magic the average IQ of blacks suddenly rose to equal that of whites.

The problem is that increasingly frantic attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of Head Start have been unable to find any meaningful distinction between Head Start and non Head Start children three or more years after they leave Head Start. The program is costly; but if it worked, if it could produce larger numbers of blacks who wanted and needed college prep education, it would arguably be one of the most cost/effective programs in history. I don’t know anyone who would not cheer.

But that never happened.

The result is that we continue to have the silliness we have in the public school system, which is rapidly creating a rigid class system: those wealthy enough to send their children to good schools, and the rest who have no choice but to turn their children over to the tender mercies of a disastrous public school system, which operates chiefly to the benefit of the teacher unions. And note that the Teachers Unions are the ones who started this fight.

For those interesting in following any of this up, or in data sources, I call your attention to one of my favorite public intellectuals: Why I Love the Internet and Am Proud to Be from Iowa, by Charles Murray. Murray will lead you to two articles that discuss the Texas/Wisconsin paradox in more detail. I’ll also include some of the mail I have received on this in my next mailbag.

The Flynn Effect and Raising IQ

And, by sheer coincidence, today’s Wall Street Journal has an article “Ways to Inflate Your IQ” (link) which offers what may be a ray of hope, and suggests ways of restructuring Head Start (although the article doesn’t mention that).

All those who study race and IQ are, or really should be, aware of the Flynn Effect. There’s a decent introduction to it (at least the opening sections are decent; I didn’t read it all) on Wikipedia. The Flynn effect was named by Charles Murray and his collaborator in The Bell Curve, but I’d heard of it well before that book was published. In a nutshell it says that everyone in the world is getting smarter, and that the lower IQ racial IQ averages are going up faster than the higher. It’s important to note that these are averages; the proportion of true geniuses to the rest of the population doesn’t seem to be any higher. There is also debate about the magnitude of the effect, and just what it is doing. This excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on “race and IQ” should illustrate the controversy:

A 2006 study by Dickens and Flynn estimated that the black-white gap closed by about 5 or 6 IQ points between 1972 and 2002,^[66] which would be a reduction by about one-third. However this was challenged by Rushton & Jensen who claim the gap remains stable.^[67] Murray in a 2006 study agree with Dickens and Flynn that there has been a narrowing of the gap, "Dickens’ and Flynn’s estimate of 3–6 IQ points from a base of about 16–18 points is a useful, though provisional, starting point". But he argues that this has stalled and that there has been no further narrowing for people born after the late 1970s.^[68] He found similar results in a 2007 study.^[69]

How this folds in with the physiological results reported in this Wall Street Journal article isn’t clear, but they certainly are related.

On the other hand, waiting for the Flynn effect or improved Head Start before we improve – actually drastically restructure – our failed public school system is not a viable option for a real civilization. If we let political correctness rob us of another generation – if we waste the bright students by forcing them into a watered down curriculum just so that every child gets the “world class university prep education” that Bill Gates says everyone deserves; if we condemn the normal and dull normal students to the confusion of a real university prep education they don’t need and can’t fathom; if we confine real university prep education to private schools and a few fortunate oases in the public school wastelands; we will pay for it with much more unemployment and many wasted minds.

I rejoice that there may be ways to raise IQ and I certainly hope there is decent but not lavish funding for converting these observations into practical education programs. I am also certain that it’s going to take a while for that to happen; and just now the world is in a crisis. We can’t afford to waste smart people because of political correctness – and we aren’t doing anything to help achieve equality by condemning a lot of kids to an “education” they can’t use.

We have let political correctness and good intentions get us crosswise to reality; and it is costing us. It has already cost a significant fraction of a generation. How many more will we feed into this maw?

Teach Your Child To Read

Probably the best preparation you can give kids for the current education system is to make sure they can read – and by read I mean read, not just controlled vocabulary books, but “big words” like Constantinople and Timbuktu, and polyethylene and oxygendihydride – before the school system gets hold of them. My wife long ago developed a program, originally for DOS, that does that in 70 1/2 hour lessons. It works. If you’re interested go to http://www.readingtlc.com/ and see. Of course good readers do not “sound out” words once they have learned them; but they need the ability when they encounter words they have never seen before, particularly if they have already had the word read to them in stories. But you knew that.

My thanks to all who have subscribed or renewed in the past several weeks. I have a large number of those I haven’t processed; I’m dancing as fast as I can and I clean up a pile of them each day. It’s work I do when I run out of creative energy. Apologies, and again, thanks: your subscriptions not only make this place possible, but let me work on important matters.

Lynn Margulis, RIP   http://www.chelseagreen.com/content/lynn-margulis/ 

I did not know her well, and I doubt she would remember me, but I did a few reports on her lectures back when I did general science reporting and was science editor of Galaxy. She was an absolutely first class lecturer, and it was always a pleasure to interview her. I once signed a book for her, which I was greatly flattered to do. By the time I met her she was no longer married to Carl Sagan. I haven’t seen her for twenty years. May she rest in peace. She sure could do lectures!