Disclaimer: I am not a geneticist. For those of you who are new here, this is basically a genetics fan blog. I am trying to learn about genetics, and you know what?
Genetics is complicated.
I fully admit that here’s a lot of stuff that I don’t know yet, nor fully understand.
Luckily for me, there are a few genetics basics that are easy enough to understand that even a middle school student can master them:
“Evolution” is the theory that species change over time due to some individuals within them being better at getting food, reproducing, etc., than other individuals, and thereby passing on their superior traits to their children.
“Genes,” (or “DNA,”) are the biological code for all life, and the physical mechanism by which traits are passed down from parent to child.
“Mendel squares” work for modeling the inheritance of simple traits
More complicated trait are modeled with more complicated math
Lamarckism doesn’t work.
Lamarck was a naturalist who, in the days before genes were discovered, theorized that creatures could pass on “acquired” characteristics. For example, an animal with a relatively normal neck in an area with tall trees might stretch its neck in order to reach the tastiest leaves, and then pass on this longer-neck to its children, who would also stretch their necks and then pass on the trait to their children, until you get giraffes.
A fellow with similar ideas, Lysenko, was a Soviet Scientist who thought he could make strains of cold-tolerant wheat simply by exposing wheat kernels to the cold.
We have the luxury of thinking that Lysenko’s ideas sound silly. The Soviet peasants had to actually try to grow his wheat, and scientists who pointed out that this was nonsense got sent to the gulag.
The problem with Lamarckism is that it doesn’t work. You can’t make wheat grow in Antarctica by sticking it in your freezer for a few months and animals don’t have taller babies just because you stretch their necks.
Pop science articles talk about epigenetics as if it were Lamarckism. Through the magic of epigenetic markers, acquired traits can supposedly be passed down to one’s children and grandchildren, infinitely.
Actual epigenetics, as scientists actually study it, is a real and interesting field. But the effects of epigenetic changes are not so large and permanent as to substantially change most of the way we model genetic inheritance.
Why?
Epigenetics is, in essence, part of how you learn. Suppose you play a disturbing noise every time a mouse smells cherries. Pretty soon, the mouse would learn to associate “fear” and “cherry smell,” and according to Wikipedia, this gets encoded at the epigenetic level. Great, the mouse has learned to be afraid of cherries.
If these epigenetic traits get passed on to the mouse’s children–I am not convinced this is possible but let’s assume it is–then those children can inherit their mother’s fear of cherries.
This is pretty neat, but people take it too far when they assume that as a result, the mouse’s fear will persist over many generations, and that you have essentially just bred a new, cherry-fearing strain of mice.
You, see, you learn new things all the time. So do mice. Your epigenetics therefore keep changing throughout your life. The older you are, the more your epigenetics have changed since you were born. This is why even identical twins differ in small ways from each other. Sooner or later, the young mice will figure out that there isn’t actually any reason to be afraid of cherries, and they’ll stop being afraid.
If people were actually the multi-generational heirs of their ancestors’ trauma, pretty much everyone in the world would be affected, because we all have at least one ancestor who endured some kind of horrors in their life. The entire continent of Europe should be a PTSD basket case due to WWI, WWII, and the Depression.
Thankfully, this is not what we see.
Epigenetics has some real and very interesting effects, but it’s not Lamarckism 2.0.
Hello! Today we are continuing with our discussion of Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, featuring the adventures of a family (or several families) of chimpanzees from The Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. Today’s focus is on social structure.
Social status:
“I began to suspect that Goliath might be the highest-ranking male chimpanzee in the area–and later I found that this was in reality the case. If William and Goliath started to move toward the same banana at the same time, it was William who gave way and Goliath who took the fruit. If Goliath met another adult male along a narrow forest track, he continued–the other stepped aside. Goliath was nearly always the first to be greeted when a newcomer climbed into a fig tree to join a feeding group of chimpanzees. One day I actually saw him driving another chimp from her nest to take it for himself. …
“William, with his long scarred upper lip and drooping lower lip, was one of the more subordinate males in his relationships with other chimpanzees. If another adult male made signs of aggression toward him, William was quick to approach with gestures of appeasement and submission, reaching out to lay his hands on the other, crouching with soft panting grunts in front of the higher-ranking individuals. … When I offered him a banana in my hand for the first time, he stared at it for several moments, gently shook a branch in his frustration, and then sat uttering soft whimpering sounds until I relented and put the fruit on the ground. …
“Even in those days, Flo looked very old. … We soon found out that her character by no means matched her appearance: she was aggressive, tough as nails, and easily the most dominant of all the females at that time.
“Flo’s personality will become more vivid if I contrast it with that of another old female, Olly … was remarkably different. Flo for the most part was relaxed in her relations with the adult males; often I saw her grooming in a close group with with two or three males out in the forest, and in camp she showed no hesitation in joining David or Goliath to beg for a share of cardboard or bananas. Olly, on the other hand, was tense and nervous in her relations with others of her kind. She was particularly apprehensive when in close proximity to adult males, and her hoarse, frenzied pant-grunts rose to near hysteria if high-ranking Goliath approached her. …
“Olly tended to avoid large groups of chimps and often wandered around with only her two year old daughter Gilka for company.
EvX: Gilka eventually became so lonely and isolated that she made friends with a baboon:
“One day when Gilka was again waiting while Olly fished for termites, I heard a baboon bark further down the valley. At the sound Gilka’s whole attitude underwent and immediate change. [from her previously depresesed state.] …
“A moment later I saw Gilka move out from the trees, and at almost the same time a small baboon detached itself from the troop and cantered toward her. … the two ran up to each other, and for a moment I saw their faces very close together. Each had one arm around the other. The next moment they were playing, wrestling, and patting each other. Goblina went around behind Gilka and, reaching forward, seemed to tickle the chimpanzee in the ribs. Gilka, leaning back, pushed at Goblina’s hands, her mouth open in a wide smile. …
“I watched Gilka and Goblina playing for ten minutes, and all the time they were amazingly gentle. Then the baboon troop started to move on and Goblina scampered after it.”
EvX: Olly may have been avoiding other chimps because she was lower status, and being around people of higher status than oneself is often unpleasant.
“Often, too, Olly and Flo traveled about together in the forests, and all four children were playmates of long standing. For the most part, the relationship between Olly and Flo was peaceful enough, but if there was a single banana lying on the ground between them the relative social status of each was made clear: Flo had only to put a few of her moth-eaten hairs on end for Olly to retreat, pant-grunting and grinning in submission. …
“The adult females of the chimpanzee community are almost always submissive to the adult males, and and to many of the older adolescent males. But they have their own dominance hierarchy, of which Flo was for many years supreme. … Flo was exceptionally aggressive toward her own sex, and she would tolerate no insubordination from young adolescent males. Much of her confidence no doubt resulted from the fact that he was so often accompanied by her two eldest sons,and with the aggressive Fifi as well, the family was formidable indeed.”
EvX: Flo and Olly once they teamed up and literally beat the shit out of a strange female who had ventured into their territory. Perhaps not coincidentally, Flo was the most sexually popular female in the group.
As Jane observed the chimps over the decades, most of them received names that started with the same letter as their mothers. (It is usually difficult to know which chimp was an infant’s father.) So Flo is the matriarch of the “F-family.” According to Wikipedia:
The F-family has produced at least four alpha males for the community, and the matriarch, Flo, played a particularly important role in acknowledging Dr Goodall’s acceptance as a human observer by the community. The G-family has produced at least one alpha male, and also the birth of several twins, which are rare among chimpanzees. There are other families as well which include the T-family and S-family (which has produced one alpha male).
In other words, Flo’s children and grandchildren did very well for themselves. If you were a male chimp in the Gombe, you would want to mate with Flo.
The Wikipedia also tells us about the lives of some of the chimps born after the book ends, such as Frodo, Flo’s grandson:
Frodo (June 30, 1976 – November 10, 2013) was Fifi’s second oldest son.[39] His father was the relatively low-ranking male Sherry. Even from a young age, Frodo was large and aggressive. He learned to throw rocks as a juvenile, sometimes throwing them at and hitting and bruising his human observers.[40] As an adult, he was one of the largest chimpanzees ever observed in the community, at about 113 pounds (51 kg) and remained aggressive.[37][39] He also became an excellent hunter of red colobus monkeys, and was also able to intimidate other chimpanzees into sharing their kills with him if he was unsuccessful.[22][41] His large size and aggressive nature allowed him to attain high status…
As alpha male, Frodo maintained his position largely through intimidation.[22][37][41] He rarely groomed other males, and often demanded that other males groom him.[22][37][41] Frodo maintained his alpha position until becoming ill himself in 2002.[22][33][41][42] He was then defeated by a coalition of several males and spent most of the next two years on his own recovering from his wounds and illness.[22][33][41][42] …
Frodo’s aggression was not limited to Colobus monkeys and other chimpanzees. In May 2002, he killed a 14-month-old human baby that the niece of a member of the research team had carried into his territory.[43] … In 1988, he attacked cartoonist Gary Larson, leaving him bruised and scratched.[43] In 1989, he attacked Goodall, beating her head to the point of nearly breaking her neck.[43]
Frodo fathered at least eight infants, second most of any group male (Wilkie fathered ten).
Perhaps if Frodo’s father had been high-status, he could have solidified his position via grooming and social coalition rather than violence, and thus perhaps avoided being violently deposed.
The entry on Wilkie notes his very different approach to dominance:
In 1989 Wilkie defeated Goblin and attained the alpha position.[53] Wilkie, attained this position despite being one of the smallest males in the community, at 37 kilograms (82 lb).[85] According to researchers at the University of Minnesota‘s Jane Goodall Institute Center for Primate Studies, Wilkie attained his position primarily by becoming popular by obsessively grooming other males.[79][85] Unlike most males, Wilkie also groomed females.[85] Wilkie also made effective use of charging displays.[79]
Mike’s rise:
“Mike‘s rise to the number-one spot in the chimpanzee hierarchy was both interesting and spectacular. In 1963, Mike had ranked almost bottom in the adult male dominance hierarchy. He… had been threatened and actually attacked by almost every other adult male. …
“A group of five adult males, including to-ranking Goliath, David Graybeard, and the huge Rodolf, were grooming each other. The session had been going on for some twenty minutes. Mike was sitting about thirty yards apart from them, frequently staring toward the group, occasionally idly grooming himself.
“All at once, Mike calmly walked over to our tent and picked up an empty kerosene can by the handle. Then he picked up a second can and, walking upright, returned to the place where he had been sitting. … After a few minutes he began to rock from side to side. … his hair slowly began to stand erect, and then, softly at first, he began a series of pant-hoots. … suddenly he was off, charging toward the group of males, hitting the two cans ahead of him. The cans, along with Mike’s crescendo of hooting, made the most appaling racket: no wonder the erstwhile peaceful males rushed out of the way. …
“Mike set off again, but he made straight for Goliath–and even he hastened out of the way like the others. Then mike stopped and sat, all his hair on end, breathing hard. …
“Rodolf was the first of the males to approach Mike, uttering soft pant-grunts of submission, crouching low and pressing his lips to Mike’s thigh. Next he began to groom Mike. … Finally David Greybeard went over to Mike, laid one hand on his groin, and joined in the grooming. Only Goliath kept away, sitting alone and staring toward Mike.”
EvX: So Mike becomes dominant.
“… it was fully another year before Mike seemed to feel quite secure in his position. He continued to display very frequently and vigorously, and lower-ranking chimps had increasing reason to fear him, since often he would attack a female or youngster viciously at the slightest provocation.”
The observance of human customs:
“Christmas that year at the Gombe Stream was a day to remember. I bought an extra large supply of bananas and put them around a small tree I had decorated with silver paper and absorbent cotton. Goliath and William arrived together on Christmas morning and gave loud screams of excitement when they saw the huge pile of fruit. They flung their arms around one another and Goliath kept patting William on his wide open screaming mouth while William laid one arm over Goliath’s back. Finally they calmed down and began their feast, still uttering small squeaks and grunts of pleasure.”
Friendship:
“Firm friendships, like that between Goliath and David Graybeard, seem to be particularly prevalent among male chimpanzees. Mike and the irascible, testy old J.B. traveled about in the same group very frequently. … The only two adult females we know of who enjoyed this kind of friendship were almost certainly sisters.”
EvX: J.B. uses his relationship with newly ascended Mike to raise his own social status and get more bananas.
Illness and Death:
“Shortly after Christmas, I had to leave the Gombe stream myself for another term at Cambridge. My last two weeks were sad, for William fell ill. … When he climbed down in the morning I saw that every few moments his body shook with violent spasms of shivering. … One morning, two days before I had to leave, William stole a blanket from Dominic’s tent. [Dominic was the camp cook.] He had been sitting chewing on it for a while when David Greybeard arrived and, after eating some bananas, joined William at the blanket. For half an hour or so the two sat peacefully side by side, each sucking noisily and contentedly on different corners. Then William, like the clown he so often appeared to be, put part of the blanket right over his head and made groping movements with his hands as he tried to touch David from within the strange darkness he had created. … Presently the two wandered off into the forest together, leaving me with the echo of a dry, hacking cough and the blanket lying on the ground. I never saw William again. …
“Blacks are great!” they proclaim. “I just don’t want my kids to ever interact with one.”
Today we’re talking about school myths:
1. The schools are failing.
“The schools are failing” is a political talking point, a scare tactic designed to drum up votes. It bears little relation to reality.
If you are reading this, then chances are someone taught you to read, and that person was probably a public school teacher.
People come from all over the world to study at American universities; few Americans scatter abroad to study at other countries’ universities.
Our economy has, for the past century or so, been among the most advanced in the world. We’ve created or contributed significantly to the development of cars, airplanes, atomic bombs, computers, vaccines, etc. Oh, and we PUT A MAN ON THE MOON.
And everyone who worked on space program (immigrants excluded) started attending US schools back around 1910-1940. (I suspect our schools have gotten better since then.)
People make a big deal out of US students not scoring #1 in the world in international-comparison tests. What of it? There are lots of countries with smart people in them, and we can’t all be first.
But even granting this, the reports of American under-performance are massively overstated. Let’s compare the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading scores for the US and 64 other countries (graph thanks to Steve Sailer, who spent two days combing through PISA data to make it):
Counting only countries that are actually countries (ie not Shanghai,) the US comes in #14. We scored better than 24 European countries, and significantly better than all of the Muslim, Latin American, and “other” countries in the data set.
“Above average among first world countries,” is a perfectly respectable place for a first world school system.
But you may have noticed the red bars in our graph. Yes, the US data is broken down by race, because the US is a significantly more diverse country than, say, Finland. Or Japan.
Asian Americans outscore Asians in Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. (and Taipei and Macao.) The only people on earth who are scoring better than our Asians are Shanghai’s Asians.
European Americans outscore Japan and every European country but Finland.
Latino Americans outscore every single Latino country in the dataset.
No African countries are represented in the dataset (though I hear Trinidad is half black,) probably due to the severe poverty of African countries. Nevertheless, just as African Americans outscore Trinidadians, I am confident that they would also outscore continental Africans were they concluded–there’s a pretty clear correlation here between development level and PISA scores.
In other words, whenever someone says, “American schools are failing,” what they really mean is “American blacks and Hispanics score worse than Europeans.”
Can we do better for our blacks and Hispanics? Perhaps, but any set of reforms that start out based on the notion that “the schools are failing” is highly unlikely to solve the problem of “blacks score worse than whites.”
2. We don’t spend enough on education.
(With thanks to reason.com for the charts.) 3. But we’d do even better if we spent more.
“Actual” in this graph means what it sounds like: the actual amount of money districts spent per student.
“Multivariate Cost- and Need-Adjusted” controls for factors like the number of ESL and special ed. students in a district, (who are counted as multiple students because they cost more to educate;) local cost-of-educating differences, (eg, land for building a school on is more expensive in urban districts than rural ones;) and SES, (so that poor blacks are compared to equally poor whites.)
The authors summarize their findings:
More money is spent in districts with the highest percentages of minority students compared to districts with the lowest percentages of minority students ($4,514 versus $3,920). Although minority students in poverty are often viewed as those least served by current systems of public education funding, these findings suggest that while inequalities may remain for students in poverty, they do not appear to be driven by minority status. …
The distribution of public education resources is substantially more nearly equal than wealth measured by housing values, and somewhat less varied than wealth measured by household income.
State public education allocation systems are the primary equalizing factors of education resources, with some additional equalization resulting from the various federal funding programs. …
When socioeconomic status is measured by cost-adjusted median household income, however, and all other factors are held constant, the expenditures per student between the highest and lowest income groups differ by only $186 ($4,382 versus $4,196). …
Controlling for other school district characteristics, only school districts in the category with the fewest children in poverty spend substantially more per student.
But this is all very abstract. Let’s get a little more specific, with the Kansas City, Missouri (yes there is a “Kansas City” in Missouri,) inner-city school district:
To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil–more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The project ran from roughly 1985 through 1997. The article gives more details on everything they tried:
Once Clark decided for the plaintiffs, he didn’t ask them to do things on the cheap. When it came time to fill in the plan’s specifics, he invited them to “dream”(15)–to use their imaginations, push the envelope, try anything that would both achieve integration and raise student scores. The idea was that Kansas City would be a demonstration project in which the best and most modern educational thinking would for once be combined with the judicial will and the financial resources to do the job right. No longer would children go to schools with broken toilets, leaky roofs, tattered books, and inadequate curricula. The schools would use the most modern teaching techniques; have the best facilities and the most motivated teachers; and, on top of everything else, be thoroughly integrated, too. Kansas City would show what could be done if a school district had both the money and the will. …
By the time he recused himself from the case in March 1997, Clark had approved dozens of increases, bringing the total cost of the plan to over $2 billion–$1.5 billion from the state and $600 million from the school district (largely from increased property taxes).
With that money, the district built 15 new schools and renovated 54 others. Included were nearly five dozen magnet schools, which concentrated on such things as computer science, foreign languages, environmental science, and classical Greek athletics. Those schools featured such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room; a robotics lab; professional quality recording, television, and animation studios; theaters; a planetarium; an arboretum, a zoo, and a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary; a two-floor library, art gallery, and film studio; a mock court with a judge’s chamber and jury deliberation room; and a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability.
To entice white students to come to Kansas City, the district had set aside $900,000 for advertising, including TV ads, brochures, and videocassettes. If a suburban student needed a ride, Kansas City had a special $6.4 million transportation budget for busing. If the student didn’t live on a bus route, the district would send a taxi. Once the students got to Kansas City, they could take courses in garment design, ceramics, and Suzuki violin. The computer magnet at Central High had 900 interconnected computers, one for every student in the school. In the performing arts school, students studied ballet, drama, and theater production. …
For students in the classical Greek athletic program, there were weight rooms, racquetball courts, and a six-lane indoor running track better than those found in many colleges. The high school fencing team, coached by the former Soviet Olympic fencing coach, took field trips to Senegal and Mexico.(18)
The ratio of students to instructional staff was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.(19) There was $25,000 worth of beads, blocks, cubes, weights, balls, flags, and other manipulatives in every Montessori-style elementary school classroom. Younger children took midday naps listening to everything from chamber music to “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” For working parents the district provided all-day kindergarten for youngsters and before- and after-school programs for older students.
Now you know why my parents thought it was a great idea to send me to a ghetto school. One year was more than enough.
It was more than the district could handle. District expenditures took quantum leaps from $125 million in fiscal year 1985 to $233 million in FY88 to $432 million in FY92.(21) There were too much largesse, too many resources, and too little security. A woman in the Finance Department went to jail for writing checks to her own account. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and supplies were lost to “rampant theft” every year.(22) …
Perhaps the worst problem for what one school board president called the district’s “modestly qualified” administrators was the sheer volume of paperwork.(24) When the judge started building schools and inviting school principals to order whatever they wanted, purchase orders flooded into the central administrative office at the rate of 12,000 a month. Clerks were overwhelmed, devastated, and too ashamed to admit they couldn’t handle the crush. The system just collapsed.(25)
In other words, ghetto districts with falling-apart schools get that way because they have incompetent ghetto administrators who take the money for themselves instead of investing it in school maintenance. Giving them more money does not suddenly make them realize that stealing from little kids is immoral; it just means they steal more money.
And the honest ones among them were too dumb to run a school district to start with.
To outsiders, it appeared that the KCMSD had gone on a spending binge. At $400 million, Kansas City’s school budget was two to three times the size of those of similar districts elsewhere in the country. The Springfield, Missouri, school district, for instance, had 25,000 students, making it two-thirds as big as the KCMSD. Yet Springfield’s budget ($101 million) was only one-quarter to one-third the size of Kansas City’s ($432 million at its peak).(27)
Everything cost more in Kansas City.(28) Whereas nearby districts were routinely building 500-student elementary schools for around $3 million, in Kansas City comparably sized schools cost $5 million to $6 million. Whereas the nearby Blue Valley district built a 1,600-student high school at a cost of $20.5 million, including furniture and equipment, in Kansas City the 1,200-student Central High cost $33 million (it came with a field house larger than those of many colleges, ubiquitous computers, and an Olympic-sized swimming pool).(29) …
With some 600 employees for a district of 36,000 students, the KCMSD had a central administration that was three to five times larger than the administrations of other comparably sized public school districts. It was also 150 times larger than the administration of the city’s Catholic school system, in which four people–one superintendent, two assistant superintendents, and a part-time marketing manager–ran a school district of 14,000 students.(32) The KCMSD was so top-heavy that a 1991 audit discovered that 54 percent of the district’s budget never made it to the classroom; rather, it was used for food service, transportation, and, most of all, central administration.(33)
…44 percent of the entire state budget for elementary and secondary education was going to just the 9 percent of the state’s students who lived in Kansas City and St. Louis.(34)
So how did the schools do? Did test scores go up?
But despite a $900,000 television advertising budget and a $6.4 million special budget for door-to-door transportation of suburban students, the district did not attract the 5,000 to 10,000 white suburban students the designers of the desegregation plan had envisioned. The largest number it ever enrolled was 1,500, and most white students returned to their old suburban schools or to local private schools after one year … By the 1996-97 school year, only 387 suburban students were still attending school in the KCMSD.(71) … the cost of attracting those suburban students was half a million dollars per year per child.
Genuine question: Why even bother trying to attract white students? Why not just focus on making a great, outstanding school for the black kids? There is nothing special about sitting next to a white kid in class that makes black kids suddenly get better test scores. We don’t exude magic education rays. The best you can hope for is either 1. The districts’ test scores go up because they now have more high-scoring white students, which seems rather beside the point if your goal is to help black kids get better test scores, or 2. The white students help the black kids with their schoolwork, in which case the district is exploiting children as unpaid teachers.
And having been one of those kids exploited as unpaid teachers, my opinion of that is best expressed in all caps cursing. Children are not teachers; making one kid teach their peers results in their peers hating them and increased bullying and violence toward the kid.
Don’t make little kids do your job for you just because you can’t.
Continuing on:
Year after year the test scores would come out, the achievement levels would be no higher than before, and the black-white gap (one-half a standard deviation on a standard bell curve) would be no smaller.(81) Although the initial gap was small, by the 12th grade, blacks’ scores on standardized tests were about three years behind those of whites (10.1 vs. 13.1).(82) At Central High School, which tended to attract suburban white computer hackers, white males were five years ahead of black males on standardized tests.(83) …
The average black student’s reading skills increased by only 1.1 grade equivalents in four years of high school.(89) At Central High, complained Clark, black males were actually scoring no higher on standardized tests when they graduated as seniors than they had when they enrolled as freshmen four years before.(90) …
In perhaps the biggest surprise, Armor’s studies found that black elementary students who go to magnet schools (which have the highest percentages of whites) score no better on standardized tests than do blacks who go to all-black nonmagnet schools.(97) In short, Armor found that, contrary to the notion on which the whole desegregation plan was founded–that going to school with middle-class whites would increase blacks’ achievement–the Kansas City experiment showed that “integration has no effect.”(98) …
Finally, the district had discovered that it was easier to meet the court’s 60/40 integration ratio by letting black students drop out than by convincing white students to move in. As a result, nothing was done in the early days of the desegregation plan about the district’s appalling high school dropout rate, which averaged about 56 percent in the early 1990s (when desegregation pressures were most intense) and went as high as 71 percent at some schools (for black males it was higher still).(109)…
Although Kansas City did increase teacher pay a total of 40 percent to an average of about $37,000 (maximum was $49,008 per year for Ph.D.s with 20 years experience), test scores for the district were consistently below state and national averages.(121) Parochial school teachers, in contrast, earned an average of $24,423, but their students’ test scores were consistently above state and national averages.(122)
In fact, the supposedly straightforward correspondence between student achievement and money spent, which educators had been insisting on for decades, didn’t seem to exist in the KCMSD. At the peak of spending in 1991-92, Kansas City was shelling out over $11,700 per student per year.(123) For the 1996-97 school year, the district’s cost per student was $9,407, an amount larger, on a cost-of-living-adjusted basis, than any of the country’s 280 largest school districts spent.(124) Missouri’s average cost per pupil, in contrast, was about $5,132 (excluding transportation and construction), and the per pupil cost in the Kansas City parochial system was a mere $2,884.(125)
Oh, does anyone remember that time Zuckerberg gave the Newark School District 100 million dollars in 2010, and it completely disappeared and did absolutely nothing?
As for the district schools forced — or incentivized — to compete with charters, those involved with the Newark effort point to green shoots of change. Graduation rates are up. More higher- rated teachers are staying than lower- performing ones. Still, on state tests of third- to eighth-graders, math and reading proficiency went down in all six grades between 2011 and 2014.
5. The teachers are incompetent.
This seems to be the conservatives’ favorite response to cases like Newark and Kansas City. Oh, if only we could just fire all of the teachers and replace them with different teachers, then test scores would go up! And we need some kind of standardized, “Common Core” taught in all of the schools so that incompetent teachers can’t get away with not teaching their students!
I find this attitude really hostile to teachers, the vast majority of whom are genuinely hard working and dedicated folks. I’ve attended plenty of schools, had a wide variety of teachers, and all of them did a perfectly good job of teaching. (I did have a couple I didn’t like personally, but I still learned from them.) Student performance has a lot more to do with the students than with the teachers:
In summary: teacher quality probably explains 10% of the variation in same-year test scores. A +1 SD better teacher might cause a +0.1 SD year-on-year improvement in test scores. This decays quickly with time and is probably disappears entirely after four or five years, though there may also be small lingering effects.
If teacher quality explains 10% of the variation, then student quality (and random chance) explain 90% of the variation.
Some kids, when you hand them a standardized test, take one look at it and say, “NOPE.” Young boys, in particular, do not seem well suited to sitting still for long hours every day doing worksheets, reading books, or taking tests. Young girls, by contrast, are much better at simply being still and concentrating.
This is not the teachers’ fault.
Some kids get substantially more help at home than other kids. Homework help, tutoring help, breakfast, lead levels in their environment, etc. Regardless of what these things do to long-term outcomes, they certainly make a short-term difference on standardized tests in fourth grade.
This is not the teachers’ fault.
And some kids are just plain smarter or harder working than other kids.
This is also not the teachers’ fault.
I’m sure there are bad teachers; there may be significant impediments to firing them. But they are not some sort of massive, nation-wide problem that requires us to pour millions of dollars into dictating the curriculum, (which, ironically, prevents them from teaching “above grade level” material to students who would benefit from it,) and scrutinizing their every move like some sort of educational panopticon.
Remember, teachers back in 1910-1930 managed to educate their students well enough that they sent a man to the moon.
What about these findings of long-term financial gains from having a superior kindergarten teacher, or having three great teachers in a row vs. having three terrible teachers in a row?
I’m going with data is confounded all to hell.
Well-off parents buy outrageously expensive houses in all-white districts in order to send their kids to schools with other whites (and Asians.) “For the test scores,” of course. Since teacher quality is determined by test scores, which is in turn determined by the intelligence of the other kids in the class (or at least how much they’ve crammed for the test,) all this is telling us is that slightly dumb rich kids do well financially later in life because they come from well-off families.
The only kids who are enduring three of the worst teachers in a row are the absolute poorest kid whose parents either don’t give a shit about their educations or have zero ability to get them transferred to a different school or classroom. And after three years of bad teachers, I bet I’d stop bothering to fill out the standardized tests, either, and would just spend the time doodling dragons all over the paper. That kids with zero educational support and extremely impoverished backgrounds end up doing badly in life really shouldn’t surprise us.
But because we are talking about having three particularly good or bad teachers in a row, only 1/125 students fall into either category. The vast majority of students–over 99%–get a variety of different teachers, and most teachers are decent.
Could bad teachers be concentrated in ghetto school districts? Perhaps they are–though remember, these districts are still paying their teachers more than the average Catholic school, so I doubt teacher pay is really the problem. And I’ve yet to hear anyone espouse an explanation for why ghetto schools supposedly attract bad teachers besides “bad pay.”
To be clear: we’ve denigrated and cast all teachers under suspicion and greatly interfered with their ability to run their classrooms all because teachers in the ghettos can’t raise their students’ test scores.
If a particular teacher is a real problem, let the parents of the students in that teacher’s class present their troubles to the school board and let the board make a determination.
6. SAT scores are just a product of your parents’ income.
SAT scores by race and parental income
Sorry the graph is small. The Y axis is SAT scores and the X axis is parental income.
The top line, dark orange, is Asian math scores. Dark blue = white math. Light blue = white verbal. Dark red = Mexican math. Black = black math. Light orange = Asian verbal. Pink = Mexican verbal. Grey = black verbal.
The richest black kids in the country have worse math scores than the poorest whites and Asians. The richest Mexicans have math scores on par with the poorest Asians and only slightly above working class whites. On verbal scores, blacks at all income levels score worse than their similarly-monied peers for whom English is most likely a second language.
And as we’ve already seen district funding doesn’t actually vary that much with parental income. Rich people do indeed pay for more tutoring and better teachers for their kids, but this is heavily confounded by the fact that smart people tend to go to college, get degrees, go into high-paying professions, and then have kids who are also pretty smart, while dumb people drop out of highschool, get shitty jobs, make very little money, and end up with kids who are similarly dumb.
7. More education will jump-start the economy and solve all woes.
