Originally Posted by Catalana
Bostonian,

I am offended by your comments regarding race and IQ, so I need to speak up. There is no evidence (despite what the Bell Curve claims) that IQ differences between racial groups have a genetic basis. That theory has been debunked repeatedly.

I don't agree. I'll quote parts of a relatively recent (2005) review paper by psychologists Jensen and Rushton, "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability"

p240:
"Racial-group differences in IQ appear early. For example, the Black and the White 3-year-old children in the standardization sample of the Stanford�Binet IV show a 1 standard deviation mean difference after being matched on gender, birth order, and maternal education (Peoples, Fagan, & Drotar, 1995).
Similarly, the Black and the White 21⁄2- to 6-year-old children in the U.S. standardization sample of the Differential Aptitude Scale have a 1 standard deviation mean difference. No data are available for East Asian children at the youngest ages. On the Differential Aptitude Battery, by age 6, however, the average IQ of East Asian children is 107,
compared with 103 for White children and 89 for Black children (Lynn, 1996). The size of the average Black�White difference does not change significantly over the developmental period from 3 years of age and beyond (see Jensen, 1974,
1998b)."

...

p258:
The Scarr-Weinberg transracial adoption study is discussed. By age 17, the IQ's of the children with two white biological parents is 106, vs. 89 for those with two black biological parents. At age 7 the gap was only slightly smaller. All the children were adopted by white parents.

The paper is at http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf and discusses much other research.

Intensive efforts, such as Head Start, have been made to close the black-white academic achievement gap, but it is quite persistent. No one can prove definitively that there is or is not a genetic basis for the gap, but it seems likely to me that genes do explain a substantial part of it. Educational policy such as NCLB based on the assumption that we KNOW there are no innate difference and that schools MUST close the gap or be shut down do harm by misallocating educational resources and causing states to water down their standards of "proficiency".



"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." - George Orwell