Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion NYT opinion: No (rich) child left behind

What a great point!


Bostonian, I think that the argument to be made re: Jewish and Asian immigrant parents revolves not around MONEY... but around educational attainment of the parents.

Immigrants who have poor educational attainment themselves tend to raise children who go on to also have fairly poor educational attainment, regardless of income.

Immigrants who have (on average) fairly high levels of educational attainment (such as modern Asian parents, or Jewish ones of the past) parent those children differently.

Yes-- and it shows in terms of outcomes.

But adoption studies? The problem is that there just aren't quite enough of those subjects to make a good study group, and records are probably not complete enough to go back and look at what happens to children who are adopted into high/low educational attainment families versus high/low SES ones... too bad, that.

The problem is that adoptions TEND to be into high SES and high EdAtt families, and that trend has only accelerated in the years since WWII.

Social Darwinism is a pejorative name for a political philosophy, coined by its opponents. To what extent SES and IQ are correlated is a scientific question. I don't think you should use "Social Darwinism" to describe informed views about science. I can think of a poster whose views about IQ overlap considerably with mine but whose politics are very different.

You can believe that the poor are poor largely because of their genes and
(1) Support anti-poverty programs because poverty is not their fault.
(2) Oppose anti-poverty program for Social Darwinist reasons.

Now that you mention it, your observations fit my own very closely. I hadn't thought about this.

50K is median HOUSEHOLD income, not median individual income. It includes the incomes of everyone in the household.

Dual-income households are more common than not in two-parent homes, but there are many, many single-parent households, and there are quite a lot of SAHMs and moms who work PT. Contrary to popular belief, SAHM-dom is not the province of the privileged, either.


This is actually talked about quite a bit in the academic literature. It may not make it to the popular press as much. There is certainly a correlation, but it's obviously not a perfect one. Programs like Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Baby College start with pregnant moms to try to rejigger parenting and discipline beliefs with all this in mind.

One thing to consider when thinking about cultural differences in childrearing is that for young men of color especially, life and limb can depend upon being correctly and swiftly responsive to commands from law enforcement figures. Parents therefore may be very interested in teaching children to obey at whatever cost, and to respect authority at whatever cost, a consideration that is unlikely to be a priority for parents of, for instance, wealthy white female children. I read a fascinating study about how different children approach or don't approach teachers for help. Wealthy/UMC children ask for help from teachers much more often and are much more assertive and persistent if they still don't "get it." Poorer children and children of color are less likely to ask for help and will say "okay" even if they don't understand.

That is true. My apologies for the use of the term.

HK, I suspect that those Chinese parents working in a coal mine and an apple orchard aren't highly educated.


Actually, there have been a lot of studies in that area. For example, look at this meta-analysis from 2005. It summarized 62 studies. The abstract says that adoption raised IQand improved school performance relative to unadopted BIOLOGICAL sibs:

Thank you, Val! That was what I was recalling, as well-- but what I meant by "small numbers" was actually something that I left out. Immigrant children who were adopted. That's a much smaller group. Presumably the same facts would hold true, but there is little way to evaluate the effect of SES versus educational attainment in adoptive households among particular immigrant groups, nevermind among groups with a known IQ range. To be fair, though-- the sibling meta-study above suggests that the effect is what I'd assume-- that environment matters a very great deal.

I think that is an important consideration if Bostonian (and others') premise is to be taken seriously and evaluated purely upon its own merits. Can you take a birth cohort which is normed for IQ, and determine outcomes on the basis of two different measures in adoptive homes? One for SES, and one for EdAtt? I would bet that the LATTER is the more robust effect, but I don't know.
The other thing that adoption studies cannot tease apart is the impact of "wanted" versus "unplanned" childrearing. It's a problem.


My point is that most immigrants of "successful" groups tend not to come from the lowest level working class, in terms of educational attainment.

Well, they do from Latin America. But not from overseas. The groups that do tend not to produce "highly successful" high SES children in large numbers.

I'm pretty sure that such a thing does NOT go to supporting the notion that lack of success is related to ethnic differences in intellect, however. Because WHO those immigrants are (culturally, educationally, in terms of SES) matters a great deal. It's a vastly different slice of the demographic when you look at war refugees versus those immigrating for purely SES reasons.

I think it's important to note, also, that "authoritarian" parenting is not at all the same thing as "authoritative" parenting, and that one leads to far better outcomes (in terms of crime, antisocial behaviors, etc) than the other.

The one instills respect for authority, and the other instills FEAR of it.

But parents who use authoritarian strategies believe in that parenting model for a reason.

With the way college tuition has increased by double-digits annually over the course of an entire generation, with wages stagnant over the same period, are SES and EdAtt still separable at this point?

Val took the words right out of my mouth.

Also, attempting to teach your child to fear police/authority is not always equivalent to succeeding in doing so. It doesn't mean you won't try.

And also, what HK said.