Do Schools Matter?

There has been a great deal of nature/nurture discussion on this blog lately. I propose to kick off a week-long discussion topic regarding the heritability of IQ, the intractibility of socio-economic status, and how much schools can do. As a discussion starting point, here is an excerpt (pp 196-198) from Intelligence and How to Get It: Why schools and cultures count by Richard E. Nisbett, distinguished university professor at the University of Michigan. 

"The received opinion about the relationship between social class and intelligence is that intelligence, which is largely inherited, drives social class. Smarter people have better genes so they are destined to rise in society, whereas less smart people have worse genes so they are destined to fall. It is true that intelligence is partially heritable, and more intelligent people on average will be of a higher social class in virtue of their greater inherited intelligence. But I believe that the role of genetic inheritance in determining social class is fairly small. The difference between the average IQ of the children of the lower third of the socioeconomic status (SES) distribution and the average IQ of the children of the upper third is about 10 points. We know that some of this is due to biological but not genetic factors, including exercise, breast-feeding, and exposure to alcohol or cigarette smoke, as well as hazardous chemicals and pollution. And some of it is due to the disruption in schools of lower-SES children and to the fact that peers are pulling intelligence mostly in a down direction. We also know that socialization in lower-SES homes is not optimal for developing either IQ or school readiness. Moreover, a child born into roughly the bottom sixth of the SES distribution will have an IQ 12 to 18 points higher if raised by parents from roughly the top quarter of the SES distribution. All of this does not leave much room for genes in the social-class equation. I do not doubt that genes play a role, but I would be surprised to find that the differences in inherrent genetic potential of the social classes are very great. Certainly much if not most of the 10 points separating the average of the children of the lower third and the average of the children of the upper third is environmental in origin.

"For the race difference in IQ, we can be confident that genes play no role at all. Most of the evidence offered for a genetic component to the race difference is indirect and readilly refuted. Virtually all of the direct evidence, which is due mostly to the natural experiment resulting from the fact that American 'blacks' range from being completely African to largely European in heritage, indicates no genetic difference at all with respect to IQ. And the difference between the races in both IQ and academic achievement is being reduced ath the rate of about one-third of a standard deviation per generation. The IQ of the average black is now greater than that of the average white in 1950.

"The No Child Left Behind Act demands that the difference in academic achievement between the classes and between the races be erased in half a generation by the schools alone. This is absurd. It ignores the fact that class and race differences begin in early infancy and have as much to do with economic factors and neighborhood and cultural differences as with schools.

"That is the bad news about gap reduction. The good news is that big improvements in IQ and academic achievement for lower-SES and minority children are possible. And we know at least the outlines of what those improvements look like, Half-measures have been tried and are not going to make a lot of difference. We need intensive early childhood education for the poor, and we need home visitation to teach parents how to encourage intellectual development. Such efforts can produce huge immediate gains in IQ and enormous long-term gains in academic achievement and occupational attainment. Highly ambitious elementary, junior high, and high school programs can also produce massive gains in academic achievement. And a variety of simple, cost-free interventions, including, most notably, simply convincing students that their intelligence is under their control to a substantial extent, can make a big difference to academic achievement.

"Believing that intelligence is under your control - and having parents who demand achievement - can do wonders. At any rate that has been true for Asians and Jews. There is no reliable evidence of a genetic difference in intelligence between people of East Asian descent and people of European descent. In fact, there is little difference in intelligence between the two groups as measured by IQ tests. Some evidence indicates that East Asians start school with lower IQs than do white Americans. After a few years of school this difference seems to disappear. But the academic achievement of East Asians - especially in math and the sciences, where effort counts for a lot - is light-years beyond that of European Americans. Americans of East Asian extraction also differ lilttle in IQ from European Americans. In any case, the academic achievement and occupational attainment of Asian Americans exceed by a great amount what they 'should' be accomplishing given their IQs. The explanation for the Asian/Western gap lies in hard work and persistence."

SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Poor Math Teaching Helps Perpetuate Class Differences

December 09, 2013 by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) at 05:47 AM

GUEST BLOG BY TOM BEREND, SQE DIRECTOR

A commenter on this site blames the poor for dragging down school performance on standardized scores. In view of the recent PISA results, it is worth looking at this correlation the other way. Our failure at teaching math in school has probably baked in another generation of poverty - they WILL be poor because we didn't teach them math.

I graduated from engineering 35 years ago and followed an entrepreneurial path - my lifetime earnings put me in the top decile. My university classmates have also been extraordinarily successful, but those who went into finance and business law did even better. Entertainers might grab high-earner headlines, but bank executives earn more than most hockey players, and we have more of them.

Parents who can afford to send their kids to tutors do so for very good reasons. Top-earning jobs require strong math. Poor math skills lock students out of almost all professional career paths and stunt their ability to start a business - the traditional paths to the highest group of incomes. And today even middle-class jobs require math.

Manufacturing requires math to set up production runs, trouble-shoot machines, and requisition materials. Supervisory jobs involve manpower, budgets and results. Nurses calculate drug doses and chart patient outcomes. Firemen calculate foaming agent ratios, volumes and distances, and hydraulics. Non-retail salesmen negotiate on price, terms, and financing while tracking costs and margins. Banks and insurance companies are among the biggest employers in Canada, but every small business has someone doing the accounting. Even drug dealers need math.

Employers don't want poor math performers in full-time positions, not even for jobs that don't currently require math. After all, job requirements change, and today's entry-level employees are future supervisors. And so recruiters demand degrees for most full-time jobs knowing that applicants don't successfully navigate college without basic math skills.

Our ineptitude at teaching math has knee-capped students who can't afford tutoring. At Toronto's Nelson Mandela, barely a quarter of Grade 6 students passed the EQAO criterion. Some of those kids might escape poverty, perhaps through sports or the arts, but our failing schools have chained most of them to a lifetime of low earnings and marginal jobs.

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