Sme people do not think they have any personal responsibility in educating their children.
Maybe some people just don't know enough to educate their children in subjects like math and science and English.
Those of us that know we have an important role start reading to our kids even bEfore they are born....
Seriously?
So beyond the likely higher IQ levels in then middle and upper classes the culture that has been taught may also be part of the equation if they don't know they have any responsibility in educating their kids too. We pass our education tradition down to our kids.
I'm not completely sure what you meant here, but maybe people with low IQs are passing their educational tradition to their kids too.
It's possible that part of the problem is expecting low-IQ people to be able to help their kids with homework after a certain point. How realistic is this idea? Is it reasonable to believe that a person with a low IQ who's barely used math in 15 years will
really be able to help his child with dividing fractions or relatively complex long division problems?
People here are open about the idea that some people are smarter than others. Yet whenever a topic touches on the other side of the coin --- the idea that a lot of people aren't very smart --- many here suddenly seem to get uncomfortable and the discussion on the subject turns to vague factors other than cognitive abilities.
Most of the population isn't very smart. Almost 73% have
an IQ below 110, and roughly half are below 100. Then throw in average household incomes (
a bit over $49,000 in 2010 ). It seems to me that, simply because of arithmetic, low IQ must influence the difference in school performance among economic groups.
I'm not making judgments about how the IQ differences got there to begin with or that IQ is pre-determined in the next generation of a population. It's possible that better access to healthcare and high-nutrient foods would raise IQs among poorer people. But I think that raising the IQ by even a few points would have to occur over generations. I also think that this would require policies related to healthcare, farming (ie corn and soybean subsidies), and other things that are far more humane than what we have now.
But none of that previous paragraph changes the idea that some people are just not as smart and that arithmetic dictates (to me anyway) a big part (not all of it) of the achievement gap.
