Occupy Kindergarten: The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Education

http://www.theatlantic.com/business...oor-divide-starts-with-education/252914/


Very interesting little article. What is your take on this growing divide? Given the experiences I've seen on these boards, I think the sad truth is, that it often requires a lot of time and money to get a proper education for your children, especially if your child is gifted.

You could also take the tack that people with a higher IQ are more likely to become affluent, and marry other people with a high IQ and then produce children with a high IQ. And folks with a low IQ are likely to go in the opposite direction.

Yes, I've written a few posts along these lines. An implication relevant to this forum is that giftedness is not evenly distributed across income groups.

I suspect that there may be a correlation-without-causation issue here. I agree that smarter people are more likely to earn more and less likely to be poor. Some smart people are poor, but it's more likely that they won't be.

More women work now than did in the 1960s, and they have more career options. A two-earner family with two intelligent and educated earners will tend to earn a lot more than a two-earner family with only basic skills. The fact that more mothers work today could be one reason behind affluence of families with brighter parents today compared to 1962.

But the sad truth is that someone with an average IQ isn't super bright and that half the population is below that number. It's just a fact that some kids will not do super-well in an academic kindergarten environment. IMO, the kids aren't necessarily "failing." In at least some cases, the schools are failing to accept that some kids just need to go more slowly. But of course, respecting their abiliteis isn't allowed in a culture where everyone should go to college.

There will always be an achievement gap in life. It can't be closed. Some people are more talented than others. Some are luckier. Some have better connections. Etc. etc. The same is true in school. Some kids are just smarter. There's an achievement gap in sports, but no one seems to talk about closing it (presumably because most everyone admits that some kids just have more athletic talent).

I would prefer to put energy into being honest about people's abilities and helping them find jobs that fit with their talents, rather than pretending that we can just wish away differences in cognitive ability.

Do you think it may be more of a case of there being more opportunities for higher ability children than there were, meaning that those with the means are more able to have their kids identified and educated appropriately than was possible in 1962? This would mean that there are more of the higher achievers now than there were, but that they are still the richest kids out there? It seems that there is probably more pressure on wealthier families to have 'gifted' children so that they can keep up with the Joneses at the club.

Personally I find it very frustrating that I can't get the appropriate public education for my child, we are probably considered to be middle class and as with healthcare, it's up to us to either find money we don't have or have our kids go without. I realize that there are a lot of folks out there with considerably less than us, and I feel guilty sometimes complaining, because we do at least have an adequate public school. My kids will not be trying to choose between bullets and babies. But why does OK have to be enough?

The rich poor divide starts before kindergarten--the evidence is clear imo that quality pre-school makes a difference.

Let's be a little cautious about the correlation between socio-economic status and innate smarts. There are powerful situational factors that can supress innate talent, and that persist from generation to generation.

Growing up poor, with no books in the home, parents who are gone all the time because they work two jobs each, belonging to a racial minority that is expected by teachers to underperform, and maybe even having been exposed to drugs in utero, not to mention the damaging effects of chronic stress on the brain, can all result in an adult who's brain isn't wired to perform as well as it could have under different developmental conditions. And guess what's going to happen to that person's children?

Yes, there is surely some effect of smarts on upward and downward mobility, but overall, mobility between SES levels is really pretty limited. (Equally true at the other end, by the way. Spectacularly stupid people who are born into upper class families don't tend to be downwardly mobile.)

Charles Murray, in a recent article

Five myths about white people
Washington Post
February 10, 2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...-people/2012/01/20/gIQAmlu53Q_story.html

explains that little of the class difference in academic achievement is due to differences in school quality and lists as a myth that

"Elite colleges are bastions of white upper-middle-class privilege"

It’s common to assume that upper-middle-class white kids win more slots in top universities than middle-class or working-class students not because they’re smarter, but because their parents can afford to send them to the best grade schools and high schools, pay for SAT prep courses, or make hefty donations to colleges.

There are two problems with this logic. First, ever since the landmark Coleman Report on educational equality back in 1966, scholars have had a hard time demonstrating that attending fancy elementary and secondary schools raises students’ academic performance. And on average, those highly touted test-preparation courses boost students’ SAT scores by only a few dozen points — a finding consistent across rigorous studies of test-prep programs.

Second, educational attainment is correlated with intelligence. (The mean IQ of white Americans with just a high school diploma is about 99; the mean IQ of whites with a professional degree is about 125.) And children’s IQ is tied to that of their parents. How genes and environment conspire to produce these relationships is irrelevant; the relationships have been stable for decades. As a result, white parents with advanced educations — who are also generally affluent — inevitably account for a disproportionate number of the white kids with the highest SAT scores, best grades and other evidence of academic excellence.

If college admission were purely meritocratic — eliminating favoritism for the children of alumni, celebrities and big donors — upper-middle-class children would still be overrepresented. That’s because the applicants who would be accepted instead would also hail overwhelmingly from the upper middle class.



What is true about elite college admissions is also true of gifted program admissions.

True, but the "achievement gap" refers to group, not individual differences. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achievement_gap_in_the_United_States says the "[a]chievement gap refers to the observed disparity on a number of educational measures between the performance of groups of students, especially groups defined by gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status."

I think great deal also has to do with advocacy. The middle class and above mother as the knowledge, time, and resources to advocate for her child.

As a teacher who teaches in a low-income school, there are many factors at play. Many of the parents speak no English. Their main concern is to get food on the table. They think that the school is naturally doing what's best for their child. However, this is not always true. A child in this situation could have high potential but due to circumstances (limited sleep, limited exposure, ESL, food shortage, etc.) will score lower on assessment tests the district uses making it seem like he/she is below the gifted cutoff.

The curriculum and opportunities play a part as well. Higher income school districts have more staff, lower class sizes, more advanced courses, and gifted programs. While I am aware the quality of each is often lacking, I think we can agree that simply having a gifted program acknowledges a step in the right direction. Lower-income schools have no gifted program or limited advanced coursework. Textbook and Testing companies are also ravaging these schools. If they school low on assessments, curriculum is swapped for heavily scripted lessons. One district moved to a "Reading First" curriculum that had curriculum representatives force teachers to remove all their trade books and only use the supplied reading basal, because we all know that to increase reading we limit student reading interactions?! This creates a cycle where they score well enough on the matching assessment, but still do poorly enough to warrant the continued use of the company.

Long story short, I think advocacy plays a huge factor. For the most part, middle-class and above families know how to fight for their child's education.

Oh, I'm aware it's very, very un-PC to suggest it. But if you look at all the studies out there is becomes apparent that while there are folks who are "left behind" due to circumstance, by and large you cannot for account this gap. It's not due to early access to pre-school, it's not due to race, it's not due to time spent reading with small children, or other 'early literacy' activities. All of those things have been show to have very limited impact on a child's education.

IMO, we need to get away from all this political correctness. Political correctness is how we ended up with this silly idea that "every child is gifted in his/her own special way" and that every child can/should attend college! It's just ignoring basic human ability.

ETA: I disagree with your comment that "Spectacularly stupid people who are born into upper class families don't tend to be downwardly mobile." Of course they do. It's apparent when those idiot people have children. And when those kids have children. There are countless instances of stupid people squandering their inheritance and leaving their families broke.

YES. Thank you. Exactly.

Having money is clearly helpful for your child in terms of educational opportunities. To me, that is quite obvious.
That doesn't mean your child can't do well without money.
As some posters have mentioned- if both parents have to work long hours (or a single-parent family), that is less time available to supervise homework or do informal teaching at home for the child.
Our community college offers wonderful courses in the summer for rising gifted 5th graders. A one-week half-day course is $250; all day (until 3:30 pm) is $500. When my kids get to that age, we will enrol them- spending $3000 or more for them to take accelerated math, chemistry, etc. Plus we can drive them there and pick them up.
I bet there are many gifted kids whose parents can't afford those courses or take off work to drive them to and from the courses.
I'm sure many of you in your communities have similar types of activities.

Who mentioned un-PC? I'm talking about facts.

Could you cite your sources please? Because I believe you are misunderstanding the evidence, and I'd like to get specific.

There's actually a book that talks about this - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/04...89&creative=9325&creativeASIN=046501867X

And another - http://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assum..._1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302557891&sr=1-1

Studies -
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1520-iq-is-inherited-suggests-twin-study.html
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2011.02421.x/pdf


Of course, none of these suggest that a terrible home environment won't cause poor school performance. However, what we are seeing in the divide mentioned in the original article is more than can be explained by children in extreme environments, IMO. Most families in lower socio-economic situations have more stress, and probably more time out of the home, but most are not in abusive/destitute/horrific situations. Those situations are rather rare in the US. Here, a "poor" family will, more than likely, live in a single family apartment or home, own 1-2 cars, have more than one television, internet access, cable tv, cell phones, etc, etc, etc.

This is an interesting topic, but controversial.

I think the reality is that we are all personally responsible for educating our children- not the school system. Sme people do not think they have any personal responsibility in educating their children. We send them to school and we have to finish the job at home- starting before K. Those of us that know we have an important role start reading to our kids even bEfore they are born, we look at life as a teachable moment. We are constantly teaching. So they have 5 years advantage than the child who has not been taught a thing before entering K. It also does not stop at K just because they are " in school now". There are a number of people that think it is the schools job to completely educate our children- that is very far from the truth but it will provide a basic education to function in the lower level of our society with minimum wage jobs unless someone provides enrichment of some kind. I think that the middle and upper classes understand that and take the enrichment in to their own hands. If our kids are gifted- we have a greater responsibility in our part of the job in educating our children to challenge them- we are also lucky because our kids are hungry for it and receptive. However the parent of the underachiever has a similar responsibility to help their child keep up. It has never been only the public schools responsibility to educate our children to the manner that we see fit. They provide a basic education- period. The fact that we get any accomodation or help in teaching our gifted kids in public school- we should really be thankful. sad but true. We can supplement at home or pay for a private school- that's reality. I knew when my 3rd grader tested on standardized tests at a high high school level in science- there was NOTHING the school could do about it( the principal was shocked when we were in his 504 meeting for PANDAS) and took his supplementation in my own hands. We may or may not end up in a private school that accelerates. Right now he wants to stay with his friends-as that is really important as well- so he takes high school text books to school and reads them from time to time. Whether he learns high school Biology in 3rd grade or 5th or even 7th is not a detriment to his growth- there is plenty of time for moving him ahead in accelerated subjects inside a school. I believe it is more likely the middle to upper middle class knows how to enrich better than the lower classes and we know that we have to do more than the basics for our kids to succeed. We also innately understand that not all the education our child receives is from the school. The kids in lower sociology-economic groups may not understand that. We are a dual working house and spend a lot of time at work( definitely more than 40 hours a week each and could probably be compared to people that have more than one job) but our first priority is the kids as soon as we are off and their enrichment is a big part of that. I don't know if the lower socio-economic classes have the same distinctions or have been taught they need to do more to change the patterns. 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 totally agree with bgbarnes. However, they do have time for special ed. (I'm just sayin'.) I have butted heads until I am tired. The principal/teacher/superintendent says that I am making a wrong decision by placing her in courses from the community college, but she does well in them.

Many years ago, I worked in a pilot family literacy program funded through Even Start and Head Start targeting low-income families where the parent(s) were receiving welfare benefits and did not have high school diplomas. Our program was designed to help improve educational and economic outcomes not only for our students, but for their children. Many of my students (the parents of young children) walked into my classroom nearly totally illiterate, unable to read books fluently at even the first or second grade level. Naturally, they didn't read to their young children, and they didn't help their older children with homework. How could they?

One of the most rewarding parts of my job was hearing students tell how they were so proud and happy because they had been able to read a story to their toddler for the first time in their lives, or how good it felt to be able to help their fourth grader with his multiplication homework. Some of my students had very low IQs, to be sure - I have some heartbreaking memories of a few students who were clearly incapable of holding down any kind of job, let alone earning a high school diploma, but who were denied SSI because they scored two or three points too high (so, an FSIQ of 72 or 73) on an IQ test - but many of my students had average intelligence but significant learning disabilities, and most were not only the children of illiterate parents themselves, but were also the victims of the rural Florida school system in the 1960s and 1970s. The majority had never had any phonics instruction in their lives. Most had not been given remedial instruction in school, but had been given passing marks and advanced from grade to grade until they were old enough to drop out.

About 50% of my students went on to pass the GED and earn a Florida state high school diploma. Nearly 80% of my students who remained in the program for six months or more improved their reading and math scores on the TABE by more than 4 grade levels. These gains had a significant impact on their families in terms of their income and, more importantly for this discussion, in terms of the level of academic support they were able to provide for their children. There is an extraordinarily close relationship between parental literacy level and child academic achievement. The U.S. Department of Education reports that the single strongest predictor of a child's academic achievement is the mother's literacy level. I guess this post is primarily to point out that while there is certainly a strong correlation between IQ and literacy level, neither literacy nor income is a perfect proxy for IQ, or my students would not have been able to make such dramatic changes in both in such a short time. It is also to point out that it is both cruel and unreasonable to blame low income parents who may be functionally illiterate for not doing a better job educating their children at home.

One of the key factors in the success of our program was that, at the time, Florida allowed welfare recipients to count educational activities as hours engaged in a "work activity", so they could attend school and still retain their welfare benefits. Those rules changed in the mid-90s to exclude education from the definition of "work activities", which, in my opinion, helped radically reduce the potential for upward economic mobility and helped ensure that the inter-generational cycle of poverty would continue.

Some interesting reading:

http://www.proliteracy.org/NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=18

http://www.air.org/files/The20Literacy20of20Americas20College20Students_final20report.pdf

http://www.ascd.org/publications/newsletters/policy-priorities/fall06/num47/toc.aspx

Maybe some people just don't know enough to educate their children in subjects like math and science and English.


Seriously?


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.

OK, I have to take very strong issue with the claim that "all of those things have been shown to have very limited impact on a child's education."

Quality pre-school has been overwhelmingly shown to have a positive and lasting impact on a child's education. I am not going to google now for the studies, but they are there and I have read them. Just one example, out of many:
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-imp...-role-in-later-reading-math-achievement/
"Using information from the longitudinal Study of Early Care and Youth Development, which was carried out under the auspices of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, they discovered that children who spent more time in high-quality (that is, above-average) child care in the first five years of their lives had better reading and math scores. This was especially true for low-income children; in fact, their scores were similar to those of affluent children, even after taking into account a variety of family factors, including parents’ education and intelligence."

Deacongirl - I am on the iPad, so I'll have to try and find it later, but I've seen another study like what you mentioned, but it also showed that by high school the gains in the low income students had basically been erased, and they performed the same as their peers who had not attended preschool.

There are clearly a lot of factors that influence success in school - innate scholastic ability, available funds for tutoring/outside learning, parental support and expectations, and so on.

ETA- Here's one article about the success, or lack there of, in Head Start programs http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2005/jun/8/20050608-112533-9016r/

I've seen the criticisms of Head Start before--it seemed clear to me that the quality of the education was not sustained beyond pre-school. To me the take away wasn't that pre-school had no long-term impact--it was that appropriate interventions needed to continue beyond pre-school (see Harlem Children's Zone--yes, I am familiar with the criticisms of this one too...)

Val-I am on my iPad so I am not great with pasting and copying so sorry if it gets muddled .
I am not great at math but I know how to teach my kids how to learn. I am also resourceful and will find ways to help them when I am out of my comfort zone. I know I will get there sooner vs later with ds9. Yes I am well educated - formally and informally( parents) so I have a leg up on understanding how to find the resources- today Khan academy and others gives everyone access to additional coaching.
I also did not start reading in utero- however I know numbers of friends who did. I did read to them every day after they were born and start identifying numbers, letters, colors etc.... As early as I thought was right for each kid.

I agree that lower income pass on their education traditions too- that has a great impact on what happens to the kids. I understand what you are saying about how can they help their kids with work they don't understand- but the school is not responsible- if they get extra guidance then it is wonderful and an extra not an expectation. Most communities have options to get the extra help- but you have to want it.
There are a number of stories we have all heard about that demonstrates that kids can grow out of the lower economic strata but it generally has a background of a parent who was willing to do whatever it took to get the best for their kid. They understand the culture of educating their kids outside of the traditional basic education.

Ellipses- it totally frustrates me that special Ed gets more attention than gifted too but I can see how the schools have their hands tied right now and we have to be the resourceful ones- right or wrong. So I get the most I can for my kid at school and find outside sources for the rest. When he is ready to just do the accelerated classes instead of going to a normal school with his friends he will. I suspect around middle school when his quirks will not be so overlooked by his peers- until then we have a healthy balance. I think he will probably enter college early at the rate he is going- by a few years but he also wants to be a kid while he can- so I accept the schools for their limitations and spend countless hours researching, buying books and reading this site for options for him.

Yes, that's exactly it. Preschool is an important and necessary part of addressing the disparities, but we can't stop there.

Are you aware that not "everyone" has access to the internet at home or after school? That many poor students don't have an iPad or even an old desktop at home? And that many poor schools don't have enough computers available for their students to use them individually on a regular basis?

Relevant


Actually,the school *is* responsible. That was supposed to be the whole point of NCLB, which happens to now be the law of the land, as much as the methods chosen to measure and enforce that message may be flawed. Accessing "extra help" independently requires having the resources to take advantage of it (access to and money for transportation, time off work, ability to read the flyers advertising the extra help, ability to fill out the registration forms...). It is more of a challenge for some families at the bottom of the economic and literacy range to make things like this happen than many people from more comfortable circumstances appreciate. There is a reason why we hear stories about extraordinary parents and children who were able to escape these kinds of circumstances and excel: they are notable because they are rare.

My vision is of a nation where all children, including the highly and profoundly gifted, will be able to receive a "free and appropriate public education". I think it is important that we recognize the reasons why the current system is not working for everyone, so we can make changes that will benefit all children, including the gifted.

[quote=aculadyMy vision is of a nation where all children, including the highly and profoundly gifted, will be able to receive a "free and appropriate public education". I think it is important that we recognize the reasons why the current system is not working for everyone, so we can make changes that will benefit all children, including the gifted.
[/quote]

AMEN!

[This is in reply to epoh (#122832, today at 07:47 AM). Apologies to all for the length, but I think the role of evidence here is extremely important.]

It will help if we get clear on the claims we're arguing about.

Claim 1: Genetics has a strong influence on intelligence. I have not heard anyone here dispute this.

Claim 2: All other things equal, smart people will tend to be more upwardly mobile than less smart people. This also seems fairly uncontroversial. What is being disputed is how much influence this actually has in sorting people into socio-economic levels.

Claim 3: Factors that have nothing to do with a person's innate intelligence can exert a strong influence on the adult phenotype, resulting in people with low coping skills who will remain poor. This can occur even in people who might have a genetic predisposition to high intelligence. This is the claim I am making, and that you seem to be disagreeing with.

Okay, now let's look at the evidence.

Your first two sources are popularizations. If there are particular peer-reviewed studies cited in those books that you think speak to your claims, I'd be happy to take a look at them.

Your third source merely addresses Claim 1, which is not at issue here.

Your fourth source primarily shows that a chaotic family environment negatively affects school performance, which supports Claim 3. (It also has a secondary finding that there is a genetic predisposition that makes some people more vulnerable to that chaos.)

I'm not seeing any evidence in these sources for your claims that "it's not due to early access to pre-school, it's not due to race, it's not due to time spent reading with small children, or other 'early literacy' activities. All of those things have been show to have very limited impact on a child's education."

---------------

Now it's my turn. Evidence for Claim 3 includes the following. (I'm not going to do dig out all my references this evening, but please just ask if you'd like to see sources on any of these.)

- One of the strongest predictors of vocabulary in children is the complexity of the vocabulary that is addressed to them by adults before they reach school age. Unsurprisingly, that complexity of vocabulary of the adults varies dramatically by socio-economic status.

- Children who are expected by the teacher to improve a lot actually end up improving a lot, even when the teacher's expectations were experimentally manipulated (i.e. the experimenters lied to the teachers). And children they expect to stagnate end up stagnating.

- Racial stereotypes influence teachers' expectations of children. Stereotypes about SES influences teachers' expectations of children. (Don't think that's true? Just look at this thread.)

- There is a phenomenon called stereotype threat, where if you draw attention to a particular stereotype (women aren't good at math, black kids aren't good at academics, old people have poor memory), members of that group actually start performing worse than they otherwise would. Members of certain groups spend their whole lives being subtly and not so subtly disadvantaged by this phenomenon.

- Good nutrition in childhood not only affects body development, but also brain development. Even without actual food insecurity (which is more common that you might think) poorer children get poorer nutrition. Poor families often live in "food deserts," urban areas where there are no decent grocery stores for miles.

- Chronic stress has long-lasting negative effects on the brain.

- Serious levels of poverty are widespread in the United States. And yes, these are extremely stressful circumstances to grow up in.

- Less extreme poverty also has its hidden stressors. A family may have two cars (junkers, inherited from family members) that are neccessary to get the parents to their jobs, a cheapo pre-paid cell phone so they can contact their latchkey kids in case of emergency, and still get their electricity turned off on a regular basis because there's not enough money for the bills, and be one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.

(I hope I wouldn't need to provide evidence that school quality varies strongly by SES, or that low SES kids are more likely to be exposed to alcohol or drugs in utero, or that alcohol and drug exposure damages the developing brain, or that schools in poor neighborhoods have more violence which creates more stress.)

In short: smart genotype plus developmental disadvantages equals less-smart phenotype. Thus, smart genotype people may well remain in poverty generation after generation.

Especially if those smart people are at all 2e

Head Start is not far-reaching enough. Look into the results from the Perry Preschool project or the Abecedarian project.

This is a very interesting website:

http://evidencebasedprograms.org/wordpress/?page_id=11

"This site seeks to identify those social interventions shown in rigorous studies to produce sizable, sustained benefits to participants and/or society. The purpose is to enable policymakers and practitioners to readily distinguish the few interventions that are truly backed by rigorous evidence from the many that claim to be, so that they can use such knowledge to improve the lives of the people they serve. Although we support many types of research to develop and identify promising interventions, this site’s discussion is limited to the results of well-conducted randomized controlled trials, consistent with a recent National Academy of Sciences recommendation that evidence of effectiveness generally cannot be considered definitive without ultimate confirmation in such trials."

The problem is not that we have no idea how to improve things. The problem is that we lack the political will and don't want to spend the money.

My brother-in-law psychiatrist characterizes a lot of what he sees in his rural-ish poverity-ish as "piss-poor coping skills".

I've met people with IQs below 70 who were able to hold down jobs quite well (with very nice earnings records). It depends on the level of skills training. I've met illiterates with significantly higher IQs.

And it's not "poverty" per-se in the United States, which tends to have relatively wealthy poor. It's more social-emotional environment. For example, abused children don't do well as adults.

Yup. This.

I am currently reading the book "Coming Apart" by Charles Murray, who was mentioned by another posting in this thread.

In the part of the book I am currently reading, he is outlining the reasons for the increasing economic gap among whites from the 1960s to the present.

One of the reasons listed is that the elite schools have become more selective over time (in 1960, the average IQ of students in the Ivy League wasn't much different from other schools, but just 10 years later it was much different).

He calls this the "college sorting machine" and per his statistics, the top tier (~50 colleges) absorb almost 80% of the top students (numbers are approximate, as I don't have the book in front of me).

He couples this statement with three others: (1) There has been an increasing reward for high IQ, and (2) Many college students find their mates among other college students at the same college (or at least same academic tier), and (3) IQ is significantly inheritable. The last reason is particularly important, as it suggests that the advantage can last across many generations.

To summarize what I have read so far, the rich-poor divide starts with talent. I have heard that later parts of the book are more controversial, and I will provide an update as I read further.

Sing it, sister. I agree 100%.

DeeDee

It seems to me that it has so much more to do with how the "adults" in the home value education. If getting your children the best education possible is not a priority, the children learn education has no value.

In working with a title 1 school, I have witnessed teachers actually going out and meeting parents at ballgames, bowling alleys, etc, in order to give parents progress reports and to discuss ways they can help their child be successful. I have also listened to teachers lamenting that parents didn't show up or didn't follow through or seemed in some way disinterested.

I don't know what the answer to parent apathy is...

This thread has talked a lot about the correlation of high IQs and wealth without pointing out something we're all too aware of in this community... that the HG-PG community is extremely vulnerable to downward mobility due to poor social outcomes. EQ plays an even bigger role in the acquisition of wealth than IQ does, so the person who is brighter than normal and extremely charming will generally acquire wealth far more successfully than the emotionally-intense PG adult whom people regard as rather odd.

The median IQ of the wealthy may be 125, but it's also tightly clustered there.

The statistics on IQ and wealth will never accurately capture the outliers... those HG who as children are misdiagnosed with learning disabilities or attitude problems, never offered an appropriate education, who drop out and turn to drugs and alcohol, and can never maintain a career because they're too frustrated at the stupidity of their bosses.

Mamabear, I also have taught in a Title I middle school. Parents are concerned only when their childrens' grades don't allow them to play sports. I can hardly get the parents off of sports when (and if) they show up for a conference. Yet, they attend every game.

Isn't med school a solution to the problem of downward mobility?

Right. So a rich-poor divide exists. The author of the article states: "even more discouraging: The differences start early in a child's life, then linger." But why is that "discouraging" in the first place? Should it be otherwise? If the rich are illegally victimizing the poor, they should be brought to justice. If the rich are legally victimizing the poor, then our laws need updating. If the poor are not victims at all, (or only victims in their own minds) then why focus on divides? Why not focus instead on helping all students?

If the most cost effective way to improve academic performance for the next generation is to develop web-based teaching tools, then we shouldn't allow our fetish for helping those at the greatest risk to cloud our judgment. People on this forum have plenty of experience with the difficulty of advocating for those (gifted children) who others don't consider to be in need of help.

Those who focus on divides tend to want to reduce them. There are those that see any divide as evidence of systemic wrong-doing. I have often heard "solutions" proposed that effectively create systemic wrongdoing against those previously advantaged groups, bringing us toward a Harrison Bergeron level of "fairness".

I lament every missed opportunity that results in a child falling short of their potential.

For a handful of profoundly gifted kids who want to be doctors, it probably is.

My sister, by the way, is a successful MD and director of the medical residency program in her specialty at a teaching hospital. She did not make the cut for the gifted class in middle school, but she did learn how to work hard in school and enjoyed dissecting things.

She also says that you just don't get the same quality of people going into medicine now that you can't make medical residents work more than 100 hours a week.

We've been asked not to give internet-based homework at my school without an alternative for students who do not have internet at home. At least two of my students have not had electricity at home this semester.

And as far as using computers for schoolwork, our computer labs are largely filled up with classes taking the monthly benchmark tests from our restructuring consultants and the up-to-three-times a year state assessments for math, reading, and science. That reminds me. I need to try to find a computer lab slot for our research project. Wish me luck!

I would agree with that. As a physician, I can see that. Something like 50% of medical residencies are held by physicians who graduated from foreign medical schools. I DO NOT mean to imply that foreign medical grads are not as good as American medical grads.
My point is simply that lots of bright kids who could be doctors choose not to go that route anymore. None of my doctor friends have kids who want or have gone into medicine. They actually limit the hours residents can work, which they never did for me "back in the day." My kids do say they want to be doctors (since I've brainwashed them) and they can "eat lunch with mommy at the hospital." I don't know obviously if they will really become doctors.
I think having a good work ethic is very important for gifted (and non-gifted) children. Otherwise, it's like having an expensive car in your driveway without an engine. It's not going to go anywhere.

I'm just saying that when faced with the choice between downward economic mobility and medicine, if you have a very high IQ, you should be able to get yourself into a med school and go that route, regardless of an actual interest in or desire to practice medicine.

1) The kind of overexcitabilities that make some gifted kids cry because the tags in the backs of their shirts are uncomfortable would make medical school rather horrifying--for all concerned--if they were not intensely interested in medicine.

2) Profoundly gifted kids, especially if they have not been accelerated, especially if their parents are not academically motivated, often are not used to striving for things. They may come to that knack rather later in life, when they finally find a subject that does not bore them. By that time, they probably don't have the GPA to get into medical school.

3) Poor or minority profoundly gifted kids may grow up with the belief that grades are not any kind of reflection of their ability or effort, that they are, in fact, meaningless. As a result, they often underachieve in school.

4) Overexcitabilities and a profoundly developed moral sense may mean that profoundly gifted kids who grew up in an underprivileged environment may choose professions with just as big an impact on people's lives, but without the healthy compensation of medicine or law.

5) I'm a profoundly gifted kid who grew up poor in Appalachia, whose parents had not graduated from college when I left home (my mom graduated at the age of 53). I went to graduate school for six years before becoming a teacher in a Title I public middle-school. Your mileage may vary.

I don't think it's a great idea to take on a demanding job where people's lives hang in the balance if you don't have any interest in it. Most of the smart but directionless people I know either became corporate lawyers or IT people.

FWIW, my husband and I are downwardly mobile compared to our families of origin and are at about average for annual family income in the US, though I only work part-time. Technically, I think we may qualify for reduced-price school lunch. We both work in our chosen fields, neither of which pays much at all. (I used to earn much more, but I hated the work and quit.) I know quite a few bright people whose situations are similar to ours. High IQ and good educations do not automatically equate to high income. I always wonder if anyone is tracking kids like ours, who have a great deal of social capital but are technically middle-class or below.

I'm talking about downward mobility (worse off than parents).

Transitioning from poor to a teacher is upward mobility.

What matters is career track.

Corporate law was ravaged by the last recession and you need a massive book of business. Medicine allows you to be connected to the federal debt origination system.

I guess IT is a good solution, but it doesn't pay as much as a good medical specialty. If you are faced with the choice of being an internist/GP and going into IT, the economic choice that makes sense would be IT, so that gives medicine some of law's lottery element.

I think you're missing her point.

1) Her PG status resulted in a top education, which typically opens up tons of opportunities, and resulted in a career that pays, for that level of educational attainment, relatively badly.

Which brings up another point that has yet to be addressed... the pursuit of wealth is widely regarded as pointless among the highly gifted.

2) Giftedness is related to genetics, so her parents were likely gifted despite being uneducated and poor.

Engineering is another field that can pay quite well, particularly for exceptional programmers, and does not require strong social skills.

Maybe they had poor school experiences themselves, are overwhelmed with other things in their lives (e.g. keeping food on the table and paying the rent), and/or aren't very smart.

Forty or fifty years ago, the US offered lots of manufacturing jobs that paid a living wage, and people who weren't bright enough to be lawyers or engineers or whatever (or who couldn't afford college) could find a decent job.

Now we've outsourced a lot of these jobs, and we've decided that everyone should just go to college and become a knowledge worker. IMO, this is insane. You can't make people smarter by wishing it so, and the results are predictable. People with college degrees end up working as security guards, at Starbucks, and in other low-skill jobs (but they have huge loans to pay off). We're building an entire economy around a fantasy.

On top of this, we put so much effort into average and below-average students, we forget about the bright students who actually have the talent to be high-caliber knowledge workers. This happens through a combination of ignoring them in elementary school and then watering down math, science, and English courses in middle school and beyond.

And then everyone wonders why things don't improve. We hear that the real problem is that we need to throw more money at the issue, while ignoring how we spend the money and the fact that the US education expenditures are above average among OECD countries. We even spend more than the much-vaunted Finland as a percentage of overall public expenditure.

Very few people are willing to admit that we're suffering under a failed educational philosophy. Call me a cynic, but I don't think meaningful improvements will happen unless there are some huge systemwide earthquakes.

And notice how quickly the goalposts have moved. We're no longer talking about giftedness and the wealthy, we're now talking about the white-collar middle-class.

It's probably worth pointing out at this juncture that IT and engineering managers require strong social skills, and in fact those ranks are more often those with higher social skills, with technical skills that are lower than average among their peers.

This is partly because management roles self-select for the lesser performers, because the really great technical people would consider a middle-management role to be like death from a thousand paper cuts.

That's because college is essentially high school now.

And we're not building the entire economy around a fantasy.

We're generating a massive amount of debt that we're never, ever going to actually pay back in non-inflated dollars. All the pollution has been outsourced to China. Knowledge working is clean. Manufacturing iPad's isn't.

And the underpaid college grads are never going to actually pay back their loans, either, because they can't.

So, it's more like fraud than fantasy. Although the college students are kind of like marks.

Actually, there are a lot of paths these kids (the low achieving ones) could be encourage to take that are better than the current 'everyone should go to college!' one. They could be trained in HVAC repair, welding, plumbing, electrician, etc. There is a very, very serious shortage of properly trained, competent folks in those professions. A certified welder with a little bit of experience can easily earn $40k a year. The problem is that we, as a society, look down on these 'blue collar' jobs and no longer offer this path to our students. So now they are left with one 'acceptable' solution, even though it's probably in appropriate for a large number of them.

Yes, I agree completely with you on this.

Suppose it takes an IQ of about 115 to study at the college level for a B.A., so that only 15% of the population qualifies.
The careers you suggested are reasonable for people with IQ of say 100-115, but they DO require smarts that not everyone has. Do you think someone with IQ of 85 can become an electrician? After people stop pretending that everyone is smart enough to go to college, the next step is to stop pretending that everyone is smart enough for the skilled trades. Many people cannot be trained to find jobs paying much above the minimum wage.

Suppose it takes an IQ of 95 or so to be a plumber or a welder. Roughly 2/3 of the population would be able to do a job like these.

Your claim that most people can't be trained to do better than minimum-wage jobs is false. Waiters and waitresses earn more than minimum wage. Factory jobs (mailing rooms, manufacturing, etc.) pay more than minimum wage. But we've outsourced many of these jobs. The other side of the education/jobs coin in the United States is that we think it's a good idea for corporations to put too much emphasis on profits and too little emphasis on the people who help them make those profits.

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx

Your facts do not match your assertion, because the Times graphic indicates that the US has less mobility than other OECD countries, and that mobility has been on the decline. Moreover, the latest update on mobility they show measures it from the 80s to 90s, and we know from other sources that mobility has been on a sharp decline since the end of the 90s.

Furthermore, the Times graphic was published in 2005, shortly before a major economic event that ripped the guts out of the middle class.

I'm going to jump in with some thoughts about EQ.


How much does "EQ" depend on the IQs of the people who are interacting? I've read that communication (especially work-related communication) can be very difficult between people with cognitive gaps of ~30 IQ points or more. My interpretation of what I've read is that the smarter person is seeing things in a much more complex way and that he may come across negatively as a result. By "negative," I mean rude, pushy, arrogant, difficult, or any other similar attribute.

People with DYS kids (and the DITD itself) frequently say that one benefit of the DITD programs is to allow people of very high cognitive ability to interact with others like them. Organizations like the Prometheus Society exist in part so that members can meet people who think like they do (read this article to see what I mean).

Part of me wonders if a large part of the high-IQ-social-skills-problem is simply a natural result of extreme differences in cognitive ability. If a bunch of people with IQs between 140 and 170 (and clustering in the 150s) were tossed into a room, I wonder how many would feel socially awkward and have trouble communicating.

And I wonder, if a few people with IQs around 100-110 were tossed into a company with >200 people whose IQs were in the 70-80 range, how well would the former group fit in? Let us assume that only one or two of the higher-IQ group is in a leadership role, and that the CEO is in the lower-IQ group.

This article explains why mobility may be declining. Reducing legal and and illegal immigration of the unskilled would result in less inequality within the U.S. One reason gifted programs are being gutted in California is that so many resources are being devoted to closing the "achievement gap", to little avail.

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_1_california-demographics.html

HEATHER MAC DONALD
California’s Demographic Revolution:
If the upward mobility of the impending Hispanic majority doesn’t improve, the state’s economic future is in peril.
City Journal
Winter 2012

California is in the middle of a far-reaching demographic shift: Hispanics, who already constitute a majority of the state’s schoolchildren, will be a majority of its workforce and of its population in a few decades. This is an even more momentous development than it seems. Unless Hispanics’ upward mobility improves, the state risks becoming more polarized economically and more reliant on a large government safety net. And as California goes, so goes the nation, whose own Hispanic population shift is just a generation or two behind.

The scale and speed of the Golden State’s ethnic transformation are unprecedented. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the most Anglo-Saxon of the nation’s ten largest cities; today, Latinos make up nearly half of the county’s residents and one-third of its voting-age population. A full 55 percent of Los Angeles County’s child population has immigrant parents. California’s schools have the nation’s largest concentration of “English learners,” students from homes where a language other than English is regularly spoken. From 2000 to 2010, the state’s Hispanic population grew 28 percent, to reach 37.6 percent of all residents, almost equal to the shrinking white population’s 40 percent. Nearly half of all California births today are Hispanic. The signs of the change are everywhere—from the commercial strips throughout the state catering to Spanish-speaking customers, to the flea markets and illegal vendors in such areas as MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, to the growing reach of the Spanish-language media.

The poor Mexican immigrants who have fueled the transformation—84 percent of the state’s Hispanics have Mexican origins—bring an admirable work ethic and a respect for authority too often lacking in America’s native-born population. Many of their children and grandchildren have started thriving businesses and assumed positions of civic and economic leadership. But a sizable portion of Mexican, as well as Central American, immigrants, however hardworking, lack the social capital to inoculate their children reliably against America’s contagious underclass culture. The resulting dysfunction is holding them back and may hold California back as well.

I absolutely agree that too much immigration of unskilled people who are also not thriving in schools is going to contribute to declining mobility.

But at the same time, there is a culture in the US that focuses very much on putting profits first, and this policy has gutted the middle class. It's a very complex problem and the solution will not be easy to find. But the loss of semi-skilled jobs in manufacturing may boost profits, but it's also playing a role in the everyone must go to college mentality. This mentality, in turn is creating an underclass of indebted people who aren't getting those wonderful jobs they were promised and who won't pay off their student loans for 25 years and who won't be buying houses and other things because they're too broke. And it all takes tax dollars away from states and the federal government. It's a downward spiral IMO.

And it works at the lower end of the pay scale too. Paying cash to illegal immigrants instead of paying legal workers by payroll check takes tax dollars out of the system.

How many billions of tax dollars are we losing because of this system?

Lots of quite legal people don't have what they call "public jobs" here.

"Public job" meaning one upon which you pay taxes to the public.

That's a problem come social security disability time.

I think the middle class started to retreat through the recession of the 70s, when the Japanese started eating up our automobile industry.

Muliplier affect of the autos was 1:8. So if you look in your driveway and see a non US car, you contributed to the decline of the middle class.

Yes, clearly the middle-class shopper is to blame for Detroit's hubris.

Folks... how about you all just let this thread die, instead of making Mark come over with his big stick?

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/dail...shoring-made-america-back-221759270.html

How is a link to the president's hope for bringing back middle class jobs related to not making Mark the moderator bring his big stick?  I don't see how mentioning politicians & their big ideas relates to gifted education.  The kids we're here to support are not old enough to vote and the rest of us already have our own ideas about how to vote & what's happening now.  
Now, how the education system could provide for different classes of education without being elitist, segregation, not segregation, what I mean to say is setting up certain kids to be wealthy and certain kids to be poor... That's the point to NCLB and all the resistance to letting kids shine.  That's the thinking that falsely justifies intentionally hindering advanced students & "teaching them a lesson" rather than teaching them appropriate classwork.

It's obviously the "correlation is not causation" everybody here always says. It's also not fair to hinder bright kids in an effort to bring fairness to the chaotic grown up problems.

It was technically a response to the "dying thread" aspect of the sentence, not the "big stick" aspect.

I don't know how much farmshoring is going on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmshoring

I thought we were also talking about the need for jobs in between "investment banker" and "burger-flipper".

If you don't have mid-range jobs, you end up with rich or poor and nothing in between.

The rich-poor divide is becoming a moral and intellectual divide.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html
For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage
By JASON DePARLE and SABRINA TAVERNISE
New York Times
February 17, 2012

LORAIN, Ohio — It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

The last sentence above is inconsistent with some other evidence. Looking, for example, at the report "Historical View of Subgroup Performance Differences on the SAT" at http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/pdf/06-1868%20RDCBR06-5_070105.pdf , the differences in academic achievement between blacks and others in Figure 2 are generally larger than the differences between low-income students and others in Figure 8.

I'll point out that the SAT uses a definition of "low income" that is perhaps overly broad for accurately assessing the impact of poverty on achievement: they define "low income" as having a family income less than $30,000/year, and that limits its usefulness. It may be a relatively good proxy threshold for the presence or absence of a parent with a college degree, but it wouldn't be a good line to choose as definition of poverty, or as a proxy to demarcate the presence or absence of a functionally literate parent with a high school diploma: that line would fall closer to about $15,000 or $16,000 dollars/year, which happens to be right around the Federal poverty threshold for a family of three in 2006.

In 2006, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, nearly 25% of black families had family incomes below $15,000, with only a little less than 12% of white families and a little more than 16% of Hispanic families falling into that range. 6.6% of black families made less than $5000/year, triple the rate for whites and nearly double the rate for Hispanics. The bulk of whites and Hispanics who had family incomes below $30,000/year had incomes above $15,000/year, while most blacks who had family incomes below $30,000/year had incomes below $15,000/year. It is worth noting that the median income of all black families in 2006 barely crossed the $30,000 "low income" threshold, at $31,969. Because of the fact that whites and Hispanics together make up a much greater share of the population than blacks, the scores of the "low income" group are drawn primarily from the scores of white and Hispanic children whose families are making between $15,000 and $30,000, and this leads to the impression that the lower scores of blacks are not adequately accounted for by their low income, when in fact the question of income has not been adequately addressed by the data collection and analysis methods.

My rural-ish psychiatrist brother-in-law uses $40,000/year as his informal cutoff below which he expects an increase in psychological problems due to lack of money.

I won't argue that financial stress goes up below that threshold. I think it's fairly obvious. But it doesn't negate my point, that the SAT data lumps disparate income groups together in ways that may distort the relationship of poverty and race to test scores.

I read this entire thread and went off down every rabbit hole link provided (nice article about the problems gifted people deal with, btw)...but I have nothing to add, because there isn't anything to even say.

Everything said here was correct, pretty much. The situation is too complex with too many factors to consider. The economy, cost of college, dumbing down of college coursework, lack of jobs, debt, illiterate parents, politically correct policies where everyone is expected to have equal cognitive abilities when they don't, etc...

I'm going to go read about the rise in unwed mothers, because that directly applies to my life since I'm in my 20s and a huge percentage of the moms I know are single mothers or live with boyfriends.

Race differences in SAT scores are are large even when accounting for income.

http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html
The Widening Racial Scoring Gap on the SAT College Admissions Test
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

...

There are a number of reasons that are being advanced to explain the continuing and growing black-white SAT scoring gap. Sharp differences in family incomes are a major factor. Always there has been a direct correlation between family income and SAT scores. For both blacks and whites, as income goes up, so do test scores. In 2005, 28 percent of all black SAT test takers were from families with annual incomes below $20,000. Only 5 percent of white test takers were from families with incomes below $20,000. At the other extreme, 7 percent of all black test takers were from families with incomes of more than $100,000. The comparable figure for white test takers is 27 percent.

But there is a major flaw in the thesis that income differences explain the racial gap. Consider these three observable facts from The College Board's 2005 data on the SAT:

• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 129 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.

• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 61 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.

• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000.

When comparing greatly different sample sizes, (such as the dramatically different numbers of whites and blacks making >$100,000/year in the SAT sample), and particularly when dealing with the extremes of data sets, one generally needs to do further statistical analysis to correct for statistical artifacts due to the sample structure. Do you know if this has been done with the SAT data you reference? It doesn't sound like it.

It would be interesting to have more data on the parental literacy level and English proficiency and/or parental educational level, family status (two parent or one parent families, parent/grandparent/adoption/foster caregiver status of children), family size, and academic rigor of school attended for both black and white families, especially at the extremes of income in the SAT sample. "Income" clearly has its own impact on educational opportunity and family stress, but it would be interesting to examine whether there are really racial divides in the level of resilience and resistance to the negative educational effects of poverty as well as apparent resistance to the positive effects of wealth between families that are really very close in all other respects.

If we found, for example, that white families with very low incomes were much more likely to include a parent with proficient literacy skills, we wouldn't need to look much further to understand why their children had better educational outcomes. If we found that black children with family incomes higher than $100,000 had a much higher chance of having been adopted or fostered into the family, or to have been raised by relatives other than a parent, it might give us some insight into why the higher family income did not seem to provide the same benefit. We might, though, want to look at the reasons why those differences were there, and whether we as a society could eliminate or ameliorate some of the negative effects of the difference in circumstances and help identify and promote circumstances and behaviors that lead to great outcomes.

Certainly, IQ plays a role in achievement. IQ is highly heritable. This can lead to a certain fatalism regarding our ability to increase the level of literacy and educational achievement among lower income groups, and even to subtle and not-so-subtle racism and classism. There is, however, strong evidence that parental interaction style and language use in infancy and early childhood has a significant impact on IQ, particularly verbal IQ, and there is also evidence that parental interaction style and language use differs by both race and income level.

I think it is vitally important that we really examine this problem closely, because the economic drag and human impact of poverty and poor educational achievement on our society is staggering, and I believe that it is crucial that we recognize which factors are driving it, and which of those factors are within our power to change and which are not, so that we don't waste our resources on futile exercises, but we do take all the effective actions we can to deal with the issues that are under our control. Some of the apparent racial differences in achievement could be due to differences in family and educational circumstances that are not picked up by the data collection methods we are using. Others could be caused by real differences in IQ between racial and income groups that are nonetheless not due to genetic factors and that are open to change.

And the simple answer is "income is not the only factor."

The SAT has a large language component, and white kids have a natural advantage there, because even if they're ignorant of the fundamental rule of grammar that applies to what they're trying to accomplish, they can rely on what "sounds right." It's already established that there's a cultural bias in play.

As aculady has stated more thoroughly than I will, further statistical analysis is needed. We know that the educational levels of these selected groups will not match up. For example, with the black group making over $100k being so small in comparison to the corresponding white group, high-income individuals in industries like sports and entertainment, where education and success are not necessarily correlated, will have an outsized effect on the overall statistics for that group.

Therefore, it would be useful to break down these income groups further by educational level and/or profession, to see what disparities still exist.

.

Not quite what you are asking for, but statistics on 1995 SAT scores broken down by race and income are at http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm#APPENDIXB . The children of whites with only a high school diploma outscored the children of blacks with graduate degrees.

That data is pretty old. Is there anything newer?

Not that I know of, but I have spent not spent much time looking for such data.

On the topic of EQ versus IQ, here's a study that says these five personality attributes trump IQ on job performance: extroversion, conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness and openness to new experiences.

Full story

I'm concerned by the obvious ideological bias of the site Bostonian cites (http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/index.html). This is not a peer-reviewed academic journal by any stretch of the imagination.

As a doctor during internship, we used to say the key to being a great doctor were the three A's: Available, affable, and able. And Available was the most important.

LOL. What planet are you from?

Just about everyone I've hired the last few months makes that much or more. None are any good at sports, though. (And none are white or asian.) And the young physician I dated years ago made 200K.

This man is very bright. I am sure he makes middle six figures.

http://cobb.typepad.com/



A good manager can get all kinds of people to work together. In jobs requiring a high degree of problem solving ability, you will need smarter people. The affable people are the glue to bond everyone. The right mix is important. Managing egos is important too.

It depends on your geographic region, too.

For example, I'm from planet "never made six figures" and "costs $2,000 per month to raise a family of four" (not counting automobile replacement costs every 10-15 years).

Now, if I went to an actual metro area, say, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh (not to mention D.C. or NYC), that would be different. I would also have a mortgage. And a commute that was longer than 10 minutes.

I have financial problems. Specifically, my problem is "what do I do with my surplus cash so that it doesn't get eroded by inflation?"

The rich-poor divide has a geographic component.

I'm from a planet where people know how to read numbers, because:

"7 percent of all black test takers were from families with incomes of more than $100,000. The comparable figure for white test takers is 27 percent."

And since blacks only make up 18% of the US population, and a smaller percentage of blacks take the SAT than whites, it's not very hard to deduce that one of these groups is smaller than the other one.


Anecdotal evidence fail, we're talking about statistics.


A good manager can get all kinds of people to work together. In jobs requiring a high degree of problem solving ability, you will need smarter people. The affable people are the glue to bond everyone. The right mix is important. Managing egos is important too. [/quote]

In some jobs, yes, but what the article says is that the smarter people who also have those five attributes will perform better, and those who are not quite as smart but also have those five attributes will do better than someone smarter who does not.

The college board's income data is self-reported. How do we know that those kids are being honest about family income?

I was referring to the sports comment you made.

If you know numbers, then you know a handful of well compensated athletes are just noise in the numbers.

The the vast majority black kids doing well are the children of black professionals or stable black families in good school districts. The rest are smart kids who lucked into a high paying field. The latter tend to have personality issues - see below.


I do not agree.

As someone who manages a lot of abrasive and quirky people in a very intellectual field, I prefer abrasive know-it-alls (if they truly do know it all ) because they can get things done.

I can coach the skills part, but past teaching my cookbook methods, I cannot teach intrinsic reasoning ability.

I suggest you read it again, then, because I didn't make a sports comment, I made a statistics comment.


Ahem: http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs2011_total_group_report.pdf

At 7%, 15,107 test takers were from black families making over $100k

At 27%, 233,728 test takers were from white families making over $100k.

The white group is nearly 15.5 times larger. So if there are a few hundred test takers in each group whose families made their money in a field where IQ and income are not directly correlated, what's the magnitude of effect they have on the scores?

It starts in preschool. In my community we are limited with preschools for children. The only option is Head Start. If parents have been to college and both work it goes against the child's chances to get accepted. I don't understand how a government funded program will turn away children because of parents income and education. I think that ALL children should have the chance to go, not just what the government defines as "under privileged" The older my son gets the more I realize that the children who are not "under privileged" get left behind in the system.