🚀 go-pugleaf

"ReXX" <rexx@dev.null> wrote in message
news:150992df6049fe3923750d5e0131a874@msgid.frell.theremailer.net...
>
> Salient excerpts from:
>
> http://www.vdare.com/sailer/no_excuses.htm
>
> October 26, 2003
>
> No Excuse For No Excuses
> By Steve Sailer
>
> Within the claustrophobic limitations imposed by its title phrase, the
> new book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by
> conservative Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom and his wife,
> Manhattan Institute think-tanker Abigail, contains much to praise. It
> offers detailed documentation of the size of the racial gap in school
> performance and of all the failed attempts to close it.
>
> As the Thernstroms summarize starkly:
>
>   ".  Blacks nearing the end of their high school education
>   perform a little worse than white eighth-graders in both
>   reading and U.S. history, and a lot worse in math and
>   geography. In math and geography, indeed, they know no more
>   than whites in the seventh grade. Hispanics do only a little
>   better than African-Americans. In reading and U.S. history,
>   their NAEP scores in their senior year of high school are a few
>   points above those of whites in eighth grade. In math and
>   geography, they are a few points lower."
>
> [...]
>
> The Thernstroms' excuse: black kids watch a huge amount of television.
> So presumably they are more likely to have the TV on while they are
> doing their homework.
>
> Maybe. But there's a much simpler explanation for why white kids spend
> no more time on their homework than black and Hispanic kids, yet score
> vastly higher on achievement tests: because they are, on average,
> according to every one of the hundreds of IQ studies, smarter.
>
> The Thernstroms don't want to touch that tar baby with a ten-foot
> pole. "The racial gap is not an IQ story; this is not a book about
> innate intelligence," they assert on p. 4. They never return to
> provide any evidence to back up this audacious claim.
>
> In fact, on pp. 130-132 (no doubt beyond where most reviewers read)
> the Thernstroms actually prove it is largely "an IQ story." They
> write:
>
>   "The racial gap in academic achievement appears very early in
>   life - a fact that we have not touched upon in earlier chapters.
>   But clear racial differences in intellectual development are
>   evident by the time children first set foot in school. For
>   example, black five- and six- year olds in the Children of the
>   National Longitudinal Survey of Youth . scored a full standard
>   deviation below their white peers on the Peabody Picture
>   Vocabulary Test, a standard gauge of intellectual development
>   for children before the age at which they can read. [O]nly one-
>   sixth of African Americans performed as well as or better than
>   the average white child."
>
> [...]
>
> Unfortunately, the Thernstroms don't tell us exactly how large the gap
> is between whites and American-born Hispanics. So let's do some rough
> math. We know the average gap for all Hispanics, immigrant and non-
> immigrant, is four grades. Let's say those born in America score 1.4
> grades better than immigrants--a generous reading of the Thernstroms'
> hint above about immigrants lagging "at least a full grade." And let's
> say half of Hispanics are immigrants and half are American-born. Then,
> the American-born Hispanics would still trail whites by 3.3 grade
> levels.
>
> That would be equal to two-thirds of the notorious white-black gap.
>
> Of course, it would be nice to close the racial gap in academic
> achievement. But nobody has any idea how to do it.
>
> **********************************
>
> Now for analysis of the article by VNN
> http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/
>
>
> As our own Jack Halliday put it, all these conservative-liberal
> arguments that racial differences are cultural are no less absurd than
> claiming that black skin itself is a result of social conditioning.
> Talking about testing gap as solvable problem makes as much sense as
> talking about skin-color gap as solvable problem -- exact same
> argument. Writing about "closing" the testing gap between blacks and
> whites is as absurd as writing about closing the speed gap between
> humans and cheetahs. Which, to be sure, it is not hard to imagine
> Harvard sociologists doing. Can't you see them out there, stopwatches
> on breast, picking through scrub and looking under rocks, trying to
> find the mysterious source of this land speed differential.
>
> Whites must repeat to themselves, over and over again: Whites are not
> guilty. Whites built the world. Whites must exist in their own White-
> controlled space, or they will disappear. The people denying them that
> existence are the jews.
>
> But really, isn't it amazing that someone could write a multiple-
> hundred-page book and utterly avoid the most obvious explanation, that
> blacks have genetically lower IQs? Only in AmeriKwa, where the truth
> doesn't pay. America has become a land that salutes the naked emperor
> and gibbers to its neighbors about his fine new clothes. AmeriKwa
> really ought to sue Chuck E. Cheese for stealing it's slogan: "Where a
> kid can be a kid." White Americans have forfeited through inaction the
> right to be adults in the land their forefathers created. The price of
> regaining that right is the elimination of the jews. Sailer's comments
> are intelligent, but as always, he's as afraid in his own way as the
> Thernstroms he criticizes. Fact is, Steve, we don't need niggers and
> Mexicans around at all. Fact is, as you know but would never write,
> Thomas Jefferson said overtly that niggers loosed on White America
> would end up destroying it, just as they destroyed Haiti when they got
> on top of the French back in his time.
>
I am surprised that there are still a few educators who believe that more
training, more teachers, etc, will actually make much differance as to the
racial gap in abilities. A friend of mine, a highly praised Prof. of
anthropology, said that serious scientists don't even find the subject worth
debating. The gap will remain.

Hank