Lowering The Bar

[O Really]

Pay attention. Nobody is saying that any individual within a demographic group CAN'T learn. Nobody is saying that a demographic group as a whole can't improve over time. But if a person is in a demographic that has under performed in the past, they won't be measured against someone in a different demographic that has performed better. Again, I'm not defending the program, just saying it has some rationality and isn't ridiculous on its face.

So you are saying to have special rules for each induvidual group! This is the same as saying blacks are stupier than whites. Is this another way for iberals to justify their racist views?

I've re-considered. You're right. Everyone should always be held to the same fixed and arbitrary standard no matter what. So while we're at it, let's make Little Leaguers play on a standard field and swing away with standard bats. We can get rid of weight classes in wrestling, and make everyone tee off from the pro tees, getting rid of the handicapping system while we're at it. Build just one set of jumps and let the weiner dogs jump with the Border Collies. No more "student" version Jeopardy or womens' basketball.

[billy.pilgrim]

no fair for the weiner dogs



speaking of weiners, this one required special attention, but turdius was driving and he demanded it fit in the garage just like all the rest of the cars

[Tertius]

...[/color]

I do not follow anyone’s play book.

I worked for years with a black man who grew up in Africa. He lived in a different culture, he was impoverished and lived in a tribal village. He broke not only those barriers but the language barrier also. He is educated and a successful manager of quality control in a US company.

You are not going to sell me on the poverty or poor environment the cause of poor achievement.

It sounds to me you are using this poor performance of black Americans to justify socialism.

The root cause is poor parenting and low expectations i.e. affirmative action. For the most part children do what is expected of them. If you just expect them to pass they will make D’s. Expect them to do their best and you will get above average grades.

[O Really]

The root cause is poor parenting and low expectations i.e. affirmative action. For the most part children do what is expected of them. If you just expect them to pass they will make D’s. Expect them to do their best and you will get above average grades.

Wow, who would have thought it would be so simple. I'm surprised nobody thought of that before. Works just like clicking your heels and being somewhere else or using Lotto for a retirement fund. Brilliant! BTW, I'm ignorant as to how affirmative action is applied in public high school. Enlighten us?

[Stinger]

...[/color]

I do not follow anyone’s play book. Good for you.

I worked for years with a black man who grew up in Africa. He lived in a different culture, he was impoverished and lived in a tribal village. He broke not only those barriers but the language barrier also. He is educated and a successful manager of quality control in a US company. Good for him.

You are not going to sell me on the poverty or poor environment the cause of poor achievement.

I never intended to. I rightly assumed that your ideology was too firmly entrenched to be affected by credible information and cold, hard data from those who study these issues and actually know what they're talking about.

It sounds to me you are using this poor performance of black Americans to justify socialism.

Maybe that's because you can't read simple English and your blind ideology lures you into asinine assumptions.

The root cause is poor parenting and low expectations i.e. affirmative action.

Thank you, Mr. Ignore-the-facts-and-post-your-biased-opinion-as-fact. Pardon me if I stick with reality and don't fall for your nonsense.

For the most part children do what is expected of them. If you just expect them to pass they will make D’s. Expect them to do their best and you will get above average grades.

I can tell you really are particularly clueless. If it's that easy, why don't you get a job teaching in an inner city school? The thrill of helping your country and turning around thousands of lives would be incredible.

[Stinger]

After 50 years black parents have had the same education opportunities as white parents. The same can be said for poverty. Students today are the third generation. Black poor performance cannot be blamed on income or parental or grand parent education both had the same opportunities as the general population.

Your imaginary world works only if all students show up for kindergarten equally prepared.

Here are a few more facts for you to ignore.

Access and exposure to books is critical to a child's cognitive development:

The more types of reading materials there are in the home, the stronger the reading proficiency of students who live there. (Educational Testing Service. America's Smallest School: The Family, 1999)

States where homes have more reading materials generally have higher average reading proficiency. (Educational Testing Service. America's Smallest School: The Family, 1999)

Children living in poverty are more at risk for language delays:

61% of low-income children have no age-appropriate books in their homes.

Low-income children hear on average 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers before the age of 4, leading to a language deficit and low literacy. (Hart & Risley, 1995)

A child from a low-income family enters kindergarten with a listening vocabulary of 3,000 words, while a child of a middle-income family enters school with a listening vocabulary of 20,000 words. (Hart & Risley, 1995) Start out behind and get behinder. Of course, your world says poverty and parental education have nothing to do with it. The facts disagree with you.

The average middle-income 5-year-old recognizes 22 letters of the alphabet, while the average low-income 5-year-old recognizes only 9 letters of the alphabet. (Worden and Boettcher, 1990; Ehri and Roberts, 2006)

Reading failure can lead to failure later in life:

The consequences of a slow start in reading become monumental as they accumulate exponentially over time. (Torgesen, 1998)

More than one-third of U.S. children enter kindergarten without the basic language skills they'll need to learn to read (i.e. knowing the words on a page move from left to right, or recognizing the letters of the alphabet).

If a child is a poor reader in first grade, there is an 88% probability that the child will be a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade. (Juel, 1988)

Three-quarters of students who are poor readers in third grade will remain poor readers in high school.

85% of juvenile offenders are illiterate.

[Tertius]

After 50 years black parents have had the same education opportunities as white parents. The same can be said for poverty. Students today are the third generation. Black poor performance cannot be blamed on income or parental or grand parent education both had the same opportunities as the general population.

Your imaginary world works only if all students show up for kindergarten equally prepared.

No in the real world the best that can be hoped for is everyone is free to prepare their children. Some will do nothing except feed, clothe, and house their children. Others will provide development opportunities, read to, and play reasoning games.

There is zero need for separate standards. Separate standards only reinforce under achievement. There is a place for accelerated and advanced education. But to say as a race group less is expected is bigoted.

When it comes to athletics we don't set different competition standards by race. We don't have separate 100m dashes for those that have trained and those that have not trained. We don't expect black doctors to just give pain pills for a broken arm but expect white doctors to set the arm and treat for pain.

There should be one grade level standard for all. There should be no affirmative action for rewarding achievement that includes college acceptance.

[lessthantolerant]

Pay attention. Nobody is saying that any individual within a demographic group CAN'T learn. Nobody is saying that a demographic group as a whole can't improve over time. But if a person is in a demographic that has under performed in the past, they won't be measured against someone in a different demographic that has performed better. Again, I'm not defending the program, just saying it has some rationality and isn't ridiculous on its face.

So you are saying to have special rules for each induvidual group! This is the same as saying blacks are stupier than whites. Is this another way for iberals to justify their racist views?

I've re-considered. You're right. Everyone should always be held to the same fixed and arbitrary standard no matter what. So while we're at it, let's make Little Leaguers play on a standard field and swing away with standard bats. We can get rid of weight classes in wrestling, and make everyone tee off from the pro tees, getting rid of the handicapping system while we're at it. Build just one set of jumps and let the weiner dogs jump with the Border Collies. No more "student" version Jeopardy or womens' basketball.

Your analogy is illogical and meant to be infantile to appeal to other agrieved liberals. Please argue like an adult.

[O Really]

Your analogy is illogical and meant to be infantile to appeal to other agrieved liberals. Please argue like an adult.

It is not illogical, although it is unrealistic. But at least I read what the education board actually did. And again, I'm not saying it's a good idea. They did not set up different performance standards for individual students based on race. The percent at grade level goal is actually a goal for the school and school system, not for students. Assuming - and it's a big assumption - that the standards set for being "at grade level" are reasonable standards, they are measuring the percentage of students in various demographic groups who achieve those standards. Same standard, all kids. But, if they find that historically a much larger number of asian kids have achieved those standards than black kids, they're setting goals for improvement, starting where each group is. If historically 70% of black students have achieved grade level (against the same standard as everyone), and you can get 80% to achieve it, then you've made progress. Striving for 100% for everybody is a nice aspiration, but not so much a practical short-term goal. Either way, individual students, regardless of demographic group, are measured against the same grade-level standard. Groups' achievement is measured by percent of change. Again - I am not defending the idea itself, but it's not discriminatory nor racist, and certainly doesn't imply one group is "smarter" than others.

[Stinger]

After 50 years black parents have had the same education opportunities as white parents. The same can be said for poverty. Students today are the third generation. Black poor performance cannot be blamed on income or parental or grand parent education both had the same opportunities as the general population.

Your imaginary world works only if all students show up for kindergarten equally prepared.

No in the real world the best that can be hoped for is everyone is free to prepare their children.

No, in the real world, many parents prepare their children to the best of their abilities. It's just that those abilities vary greatly.

What happens to the child of a parent who reads at an eighth grade level versus the the child of a med school graduate? They start school with vastly different vocabularies and reading levels no matter how much each parent tried.

No matter how many facts you deny, there's nothing equal in that scenario. Nothing you say alters the fact that the education gap between children in affluence and children in poverty is twice the gap between blacks and whites.

I never argued that there should be double standards. I argued with your misinformed opinion that 50 years of school integration should magically wipe out the inequities in our country.

As study after study after study proves, the largest predictors of educational success remain the economic level of the family and the education level of the parent.

Deny away.

[Stinger]

Your analogy is illogical and meant to be infantile to appeal to other agrieved liberals. Please argue like an adult.

It is not illogical, although it is unrealistic. But at least I read what the education board actually did. And again, I'm not saying it's a good idea. They did not set up different performance standards for individual students based on race. The percent at grade level goal is actually a goal for the school and school system, not for students. Assuming - and it's a big assumption - that the standards set for being "at grade level" are reasonable standards, they are measuring the percentage of students in various demographic groups who achieve those standards. Same standard, all kids. But, if they find that historically a much larger number of asian kids have achieved those standards than black kids, they're setting goals for improvement, starting where each group is. If historically 70% of black students have achieved grade level (against the same standard as everyone), and you can get 80% to achieve it, then you've made progress. Striving for 100% for everybody is a nice aspiration, but not so much a practical short-term goal. Either way, individual students, regardless of demographic group, are measured against the same grade-level standard. Groups' achievement is measured by percent of change. Again - I am not defending the idea itself, but it's not discriminatory nor racist, and certainly doesn't imply one group is "smarter" than others.

That's an excellentl explanation of the reasoning behind the goals, but it still comes across wrong. The goals are data-driven, as far from racist as you can get, . . . but, I think there is still an implication.

Some of the insanity with this goal-setting comes from the government initiatives -- No Child Left Behind, now being supplanted by Race to the Top. NCLB mandated that every child read and do math at grade level by 2014, I think. I remember meeting an eight grader at a middle school who asked me if the two nickels she had were enough to buy a fifty-cents soda from a machine (back when they had soda machines on campuses).

If a fourteen-year-old kid doesn't know that two nickels aren't fifty cents, it's not the school's fault, and no amount of schooling in the world is going to get her to grade level on reading and math.

[Tertius]

So deprived children before preschool education should be put in classes where less is expected of them.

[O Really]

[quote="Tertius"]So deprived children before preschool education should be put in classes where less is expected

Read my lips - or at least the actual article. Nothing less is expected of any individual kid. All kids are expected to meet grade level standards - equally applicable to all. The goals apply to collective improvement within demographic groups.

[Stinger]

So deprived children before preschool education should be put in classes where less is expected of them.

Can't keep up factually, so you start attacking the imaginary straw man. No one said anything like that. No one has supported the goals.

I think those who start school behind should be put in intensive classes to try to make up for what they missed. Maybe even make longer school days and longer school years for those behind.

That may still prove to be impossible. The studies tend to show that the gap remains or widens. The better solution would be to consistently and constantly expose preschoolers to more books and higher vocabularies. How do we do that?

Unfortunately, Republicans want to cut educational funding and send the surviving funds to charter schools and church schools that have proven not to be any better than public schools.

We need more, and we get less.

[Stinger]

So deprived children before preschool education should be put in classes where less is expected

Read my lips - or at least the actual article. Nothing less is expected of any individual kid. All kids are expected to meet grade level standards - equally applicable to all. The goals apply to collective improvement within demographic groups.

Man has no concept of statistical analysis and data-driven goal-setting.

[Tertius]

So deprived children before preschool education should be put in classes where less is expected

Read my lips - or at least the actual article. Nothing less is expected of any individual kid. All kids are expected to meet grade level standards - equally applicable to all. The goals apply to collective improvement within demographic groups.

Man has no concept of statistical analysis and data-driven goal-setting.

I'll match my spastically analyses against your's any time. The issue is the contradiction. I can remember when it was illegal to collect such data by race. A year or so later the government wanted to see how blind collection of data was working. So they demanded to see the data by race.

I know it is common to move the average of the population by focusing differently on the root causes of the different subsets. I am just shocked a school board would open the race door for second guessing.

[Stinger]

I'll match my spastically analyses against your's any time. So the guy who dismisses statistical analyses out of hand in favor of his beliefs actually knows about statistics and how they work? Do tell. The issue is the contradiction. I can remember when it was illegal to collect such data by race. A year or so later the government wanted to see how blind collection of data was working. So they demanded to see the data by race.

I know it is common to move the average of the population by focusing differently on the root causes of the different subsets. I am just shocked a school board would open the race door for second guessing.

Then how did you come up with the "put in a class where less is expected"?

[Tertius]

So lets see where we are. Three generations after integration of schools, work place equal rights, neighborhoods, all done by affirmative action not natural melding we still must separate by race on order to improve student performance. Additionally contrary to all these environmental alleged issues when people from any race come to this country. Having grown up or spent formative years under worse conditions with a language barrier they do perform with or better than average.

Granted the addressing of the problem by individual schools using race as sub sets may boost the average of the total population. That is because attention to a problem almost always demonstrates improvement. It certainly guarantees jobs for those doing the study.

However can you really say when the study ends the improvement will hold or continue? It seems to me the case for affirmative action may have been valid to jump start change. The change has long since been accepted. Now is the time to treat everyone equally.

Intended or not lower standards by race tells people for some reason they cannot compete equally. Affirmative action engravings in impressionable minds they are different. Not only different but different in substandard ways.

I disagree with that strategy.

[Stinger]

So lets see where we are. Three generations after integration of schools, work place equal rights, neighborhoods, all done by affirmative action not natural melding we still must separate by race on order to improve student performance.

As has been explained several times, no one is being separated by race. Every student has to improve performance equally.

Additionally contrary to all these environmental alleged issues when people from any race come to this country. Having grown up or spent formative years under worse conditions with a language barrier they do perform with or better than average.

Environmentally alleged issues?

Are you still trying to deny that the biggest predictors of student achievement are the family's income and the parents' education level?

Is the great statistician still trying to deny the data compiled in all those studies?

How do you explain the education gap between rich and poor growing to the point that it doubles the black/white educational gap?

Or do you just ignore facts that don't fit your preconceived notions?

BINGO!!!!! I win.

Granted the addressing of the problem by individual schools using race as sub sets may boost the average of the total population. That is because attention to a problem almost always demonstrates improvement. It certainly guarantees jobs for those doing the study.

No one's addressing individuals by race. They're setting goals by race. They're teaching classes of kids. They're not taking the black kids out in the hall for special instruction or anything.

[Tertius]

It is parenting, parenting, parenting. Income, neighborhoods, parental education, are all symptomatic of being a good parent. And, good parents have good students.

Correlation does not prove cause and effect. Correlation only proves commonality.

It is the exceptions that prove the cause. Look at the good student from the poor home; the good student from the bad neighborhood; the good student from the uneducated parents. That is where you will find the cause. Then verify that with the reverse. Look at all the low scoring students from high income, good neighborhoods, highly educated parents.

That is how you separate correlation from cause and effect. You must identify the "special cause." The special cause of good students is good parenting.