The claims about Amistad's "success" with 8th grade math test scores are baloney.

The issue is whether black students, as a group, are able to perform math at a level equal to white or Asian students. Followers of Francis Galton recognize that there are ethnic differences in innate intelligence. Followers of Franz Boas believe that all ethnic groups have the same mental abilities. The point of Tough's post is to claim that black students, when given superb training as in charter schools such as Amistad, can perform at the level of white students. Tough insinuates that Amistad-trained black students are able to show higher math achievement than the children of Yale faculty at Worthington Hooker School. If this is true, then the fact that black students have an average IQ of 85 (compared to the white average of 100) would appear to be of little importance with regard to the racial gap in academic achievement. But perhaps Tough's claims are really not true.

Lets look at the actual data regarding 8th grade math scores on the Connecticut CMT test in years 2006, 2007, 2008. The following scores are the percent of each ethnic group that scores at the advanced level in 8th grade math exam for years 2006, 2007, 2008. The advanced level is the level at which students on track to be prospective applicants for good colleges would be expected to perform. In addition to Worthington Hooker School in New Haven, also scores from two upscale suburbs (Cheshire and Guilford where many Yale faculty live) are also posted.

State Asian: 44.1, 46.6, 47.8

State White: 30.7, 34.4, 34.0

State Black: 4.3, 5.2, 5.6

Amistad Black: 2.9, 12.5, 12.2

Worthington Hooker: 33.3, 33.3, 27.3

Cheshire: 40.5, 47.4, 50.6

Guilford: 49.3, 55.2, 60.9

Assuming that Amistad did not have their students cheat on the tests, what they managed to achieve was to get their black students to perform on the state 8th grade math test during years 2007, and 2008 at levels higher than most other blacks, but still far lower than the state white average, and very far lower than the level of Yale faculty children in the upscale suburbs.

You can check out the data yourself at this link:

Hints for accessing the data: Amistad is listed as a separate district. When you get into the tables click on "Scores" to get the percentage at advanced level.

The "proficiency" level that Tough might be refering to is so low that it is a joke. Just because some student of low IQ can be trained to the level of "proficient" does not mean the the student is actually smart enough to handle serious college work. If they really can score at the advanced level, then it actually means something. The limited success that Amistad achieved in increasing the performance of black students was probably a combination of selection (compared to lower IQ black students more higher IQ black students apply to Amistad and stick with their demanding curriculum) and more rigorous teaching. However, a jump in performance of whites and Asians would also no doubt result from a more rigorous approach.

"Followers" of Galton?? eesh...

So, what's the problem with closing the proficiency gap?

Admittedly, Tough and many others seem to avoid addressing the difference between closing the 'proficiency' gap and closing the 'achievement' gap. You almost, but don't quite, spell it out: it will be very hard indeed to engineer a school system in which the achievement gap is closed--that is the overall academic performance of each ethnic group is the same. It is a much more realistic proposition, however, to create a system in which each ethnic group achieves a minimum level of proficiency.

Originally I thought NCLB was intended to close the proficiency gap but it seems many people think it is intended to create schools in which each ethnicity scores the same on standardized tests. It is a pity that journalists like Tough don't seem to be free to make this distinction. If we were to focus on closing the proficiency gap, and not pretending that we are closing the achievement gap, I think everyone would be much happier.

Galtonian, your arguments about race and intelligence have already been roundly debunked. African immigrants to this country have the highest level of education attainment per capita of any immigrant group in this country, including Asians. Their children outperform whites and Asians, even into the third generation, and they hold more post-graduate degrees than any other group.

If there was any truth at all to your claims, this would not be true.

Now go back to the KKK rally and burn a cross or something.

Anse,

As countless efforts to increase the low IQ and low academic performance of blacks continue to result in abysmal failure, more and more persons who respect reason and evidence are recognizing the fallacy of the Boasian doctrine of ethnic equality in mental abilities. All the real world evidence is solidly supportive of the Galtonian/Jensenist position that ethnic differences in IQ-type intelligence are real and probably genetic. We Galtonians just appreciate ethnic diversity to a much greater degree than you Boasians.

You claim that African immigrants' "children outperform whites and Asians, even into the third generation,..." Can you provide some references and documentation of this claim? I am aware that African immigrants to the USA are probably from the most intelligent 1% of the African countries from which they came. But because of a population genetics phenomenon called "regression to the mean" I doubt that the Africans' children outperform white children, and I really really doubt that they outperform Asian children, at least on academic test scores. In terms of admission to prestigious colleges maybe you are right but probably only because of Affirmative Action.

With regard to your claim that I am a racist, perhaps I am if "racist" means believing in the reality of ethnic differences in IQ. We Galtonians tend to regard ourselves as race realists, or racialists. Many of us hold no hatred toward lower IQ ethnic groups, and we recognize that high IQ people are found in all ethnic groups, its just that some ethnic groups have much higher frequencies of high IQ individuals and some ethnic groups have much higher frequencies of low IQ individuals. Some of us Galtonians (e.g. Nobelist James Watson and myself) are supporting Obama in the current presidential race. Any rational observer can recognize that Obama (son of a Harvard educated Kenyan and a Unitarian raised mother who earned a PhD in Anthropology) is more intelligent than McCain (graduated at the bottom of his Naval Academy class) and far more intelligent than Palin.

I am sure that if you are an astute person, that in your private inner mind you recognize that some ethnic groups (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews and Han Chinese) tend to be more intelligent than general whites, and much more intelligent than blacks. Just like most modern Christians do not really believe in a magical God in the sky with a white beard, most Boasians do not really believe that ethnic groups are really the same in cognitive ability. They just recite the doctrinal statements--"Oh, yes, blacks are just as intelligent as whites, if only blacks could attend better schools (with someone else's children of course because we do not want the property values in our suburban school system to plummet) I am sure that they would perform on the math tests just as well as whites. In regard to the success of Asians and Jews, oh it must be those pushy mothers that get those Asian and Jewish children to study so hard, it just is not possible that they are smarter than other people"--in order to avoid being heretics. But most intelligent free-thinking people are Galtonians in their heart of hearts, they merely maintain the pretense of Boasian beliefs in order to be Politically Correct.

Also, science has shown us through the wonders of phrenology that the common negroid lacks the necessary anterior suborbital ridge structures that are necessarily associated with civilized behaviors such as table etiquette, colonialism, and accepting the Lord Jesus Christ as one's personal savior. According to the school of thought espoused by P. Phineas Talbot III, while proper training may allow a Hottentot to successfully mimic the behaviors of a Anglo-European man, such behavior does not truly stem from rational thought, which requires a proper animus (or soul) known only to be possessed by the White Man.

Ha Ha, Hey Bortimus, according to your logic we should not believe in modern neuroscience, human genetics, and psychology because of prior pseudosciences such as phrenology and some primitive theories of anthropology.

By your logic we should ignore chemistry because once there was alchemy.

By your logic we should ignore astronomy because once there was astrology.

Galtonian, since you seem to be the resident expert on IQ statistics, I'm sure you are familiar with the "Flynn effect."

Since we seem to be stuck on genetics (rather than considering environmental factors), I'm sure you can explain how the genetically inferior black race has been able to see its average IQ scores increase with each decade, and how this trend is true of populations all over the world.

Of course average scores for whites are still higher (and also increasing), but it appears that today's African-Americans are considerably more intelligent than white folks of 50 years ago, which presents a bit of a problem with your assumptions: if IQ can change over time, how can you ignore environmental factors and focus entirely on heredity? Or maybe the black dude who wrote this has some nefarious ulterior motive going on here (which is curious, since black people are not really capable of pulling off sinister master plans, being inferior and all):

This important fact has been inadvertently concealed by the practice of changing the norms on IQ tests, so that the average number of correctly answered questions remains by definition an IQ of 100. Only by painstakingly going back and recalculating IQs, based on the initial norms, was Professor Flynn able to discover that whole nations had, in effect, had their IQs rising over the decades by about 20 points.

Since the black-white difference in IQ is 15 points, this means that an even larger IQ difference has existed between different generations of the same race, making it no longer necessary to attribute IQ differences of this magnitude to genetics. In the half century between 1945 and 1995, black Americans' raw test scores rose by the equivalent of 16 IQ points.

In other words, black Americans' test score results in 1995 would have given them an average IQ just over 100 in 1945. Only the repeated renorming of IQ tests upward created the illusion that blacks had made no progress, but were stuck at an IQ of 85. But we would never have known this if some researchers had not defied the taboo on studying race and IQ imposed by black "leaders" and white "friends."

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