Race and education are in the news again. No, not the nationwide racial violence and general mayhem caused by non-Asian minority (NAM) students. Just another made-up conspiracy theory blaming mythical white “racists” for everyone else’s failure.
From the Washington Post:
The disproportionately low number of black and Latino students admitted to Fairfax County’s prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology — long a subject of debate — has triggered a federal civil rights complaint.
[...]
The complaint alleges that black and Latino students, as well as students with disabilities, are being shut out of Thomas Jefferson long before they apply in eighth grade because of Fairfax County Public Schools’ systematic failure to identify them for gifted education programs that begin in elementary school.
[...]
Together, black and Latino students account for about 4 percent of the 480 students admitted to next year’s freshman class at Thomas Jefferson, or TJ. The two groups make up 32 percent of the county’s student population.
[...]
The complaint also faults the TJ admissions process itself for putting some students at a disadvantage.
One example, the complaint says, is the “student information sheet” used to assess a teen’s motivation and commitment to math and science education. A question asks students to “Describe in detail your most important out-of-school or after-school activity or interest.”
“For many black and Latino students, especially those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds,” the complaint says, “their most significant after school activity may well be babysitting their younger siblings while their parents work.”
Sure, they could be “babysitting their younger siblings while their parents work.” Or selling drugs while their parents collect welfare checks. Or vice versa. Or whatever.
Interestingly, the complaint chose not to emphasize (and the Post chose not to even mention) that Asians make up 20 percent of the county’s student population, but 64.2 percent of next year’s freshman class at TJ.
Indeed, Jared Taylor has calculated (from the figures cited in the complaint) that “whites are 4.8 times more likely than Hispanics to be admitted to TJ, and are 4.2 times more likely than blacks. Asians, however, are 5.4 times more likely than whites to be admitted” — bringing the standard “white privilege” narrative to a screeching halt. Those pesky Asians!
Of course, the complaint — filed with the Department of Education by the Fairfax chapter of the NAACP (National Association of We’re Black So Give Us Free Goodies or We’ll Burn Your Cities Down) and the “Coalition of The Silence,” a bizarrely named “advocacy group led by former county school board member Tina Hone” — is nothing more than the usual NAM griping based on what I call the fundamental fallacy of race relations (which happens to also be a typically insane Supreme Court ruling): that “disparate impact” (i.e., that NAMs fail, always and everywhere) somehow implies “disparate treatment” (i.e., white people are evil, die white man die, quick steal his shoes).
The reasoning is invalid because, of course, contrary to Marxist theory, the races of man were not created equal. Of course, if white people were allowed to notice that, white guilt would fade away and the handouts would dry up. It is therefore essential to our radical, anti-white elites that reality be ruled inadmissible and facts reclassified as “hate speech” on the compelling grounds of das racis’, you racis’, e’rybody racis’ all up in he’e:
“Look at any study of giftedness. It is equally distributed across humanity. God did not change that rule when he got to Fairfax County,” says former school board member Tina Hone.
To which one can only reply: Just how f*&%$#@ stupid are you, Miss Hone? One really would like to know.
Because if one actually took this fruitcake’s advice and looked at any study of giftedness, any study at all (e.g., Chuck’s illuminating graph from Gifted Child Quarterly), one would discover that high intelligence is about as far from being “equally distributed across humanity” as a crackhead is from winning a Fields Medal — though of course one cannot discount the possibility of a Nobel Peace Prize.
As the reader is no doubt well aware (zzz), race differences in intelligence guarantee that in any large population (e.g., the school-age children of Fairfax County), above any given threshold of intelligence (e.g., giftedness, often defined as an IQ of 130), there will be proportionally more Asians than whites, and more whites than either Hispanics or blacks. This hate-fact — the existence of so-called IQ gaps — is not in dispute (indeed, it is perfectly obvious from the state of our planet, now and at any other point in recorded history), and neither is our ability to reliably measure intelligence with IQ tests.
But as I say, in the interests of maintaining the “diversity racket” (i.e., free goodies for whiny minorities set to an endless chorus of kill whitey and take his stuff yo), such hateful hatred must be ushered into the gas chambers of political correctness.
I’m sorry, that was offensive. I meant to say the alleged gas chambers.
Since the perpetrators of that never-ending scam (“reparations,” “affirmative action,” “Civil Rights,” “End Apartheid,” etc., etc.), namely the cultural Marxists (or Progressives as they’ve styled themselves of late), are in charge of the government, the media, and the education system (three sides to the same polygon), egalitarian nonsense of the Tina Hone “Look at Any Study!!!” school is ubiquitous in all three.
Choosing an example at random, iGifted School, the well staffed “Online Debate & Math Club For Gifted Students,” declares:
Modern research indicates that the gifted are equally distributed among all races, sexes and economic segments of society.
At once, without so much as a glance at the “modern research,” we know this is wrong. “All economic segments of society”? If intelligence is heritable at all (it’s quite heritable, as every parent ought to know) and correlates at all with income (it correlates quite well with both income and educational attainment, as every college graduate ought to know), then giftedness will not be equally distributed “among all economic segments of society,” which indeed it isn’t. It is also, of course, not “equally distributed among all races.”
The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign proclaims:
Identification of gifted and talented students is comparative within similar age groups, experience and environments, that is, every group of students — rich, poor, Black, White, those with highly educated parents, those whose parents are not highly educated — should have approximately equal proportions of gifted and talented students.
“Identification… is comparative”? I’m fairly certain that doesn’t actually mean anything. I have already noted that “those with highly educated parents” will have a higher proportion of gifted students than “those whose parents are not highly educated” — whether they “should” or not — because intelligence is heritable and correlates with educational attainment.
TeachingExpertise.com insists:
Ability is evenly distributed within the population; achievement is not.
“Progressives” don’t just believe demonstrably false claims — like giftedness is equally distributed across humanity, let alone any study will show you that giftedness is equally distributed across humanity — that can be debunked in under a minute by anyone with a working Internet connection. They have actually built their entire belief system/political ideology/mass psychosis upon that stinking heap of garbage. The Left has made axioms of fairy tales.
Dick Kantenberger (“Education, Giftedness, Gifted and Talented Education, Senior Issues”) hallucinates (together with EducationNews.org):
it has been known for over 200 years that potential giftedness is equally distributed among all races and cultures.
I must admit I was unable to imagine how even a Marxist education theorist (redundant, I know) could convince himself that this particular falsehood “has been known for over 200 years,” until I read this by the same author:
If we do not want to believe what Thomas Jefferson wrote about this (see part 2) in 1772, the modern research indicates that the gifted are equally distributed among all races, sexes and economic segments of society.
Oh, I see. It is because “we do not want to believe what Thomas Jefferson” — a WHITE MAN who had SLAVES and HATED WOMEN and is from THE SAME RACE AS HITLER — wrote about giftedness (?) in 1772, which was indeed over 200 years ago.
I leave it to the reader to wade through “Race, Class, and Whiteness in Gifted and Talented Identification: A Case Study” (Berkeley Review of Education), by far the most sophisticated and therefore infuriating and depressing example I have found of a stupid theory about smart kids. It so takes for granted its impossible assumptions about race and intelligence, it doesn’t bother even to state them.
No, on second thought, I take that back: a brief excerpt should suffice for even the most masochistic of readers.
Our critique of these practices is based on Cheryl Harris’ (1993) argument that in the American legal system, and broadly in the culture, “whiteness” is a form of property that perpetuates inequality [...] dating back to the ownership of persons as slaves and the usurpation of Native American land rights. [...]
Harris (1993) argues that because of their “racial and cultural otherness,” Native Americans and blacks were unable to assert rights in land and their very selves (p. 1721). [...]
Returning to the origin of white property rights, Harris (1993) points out that whites profited from the labor of slaves and the use of land that was not theirs. Similarly, a disproportionate number of white students identified as “gifted” claim educational opportunities mandated by law and paid for by state funds.
Translation: “Die, white man. Just f*&%$#@ die” (Harris, 1993).
Appendix
It is worth pointing out that nine years ago, on the basis of racist white supremacist Nazi trickery, also known as statistics, a law professor, Lloyd Cohen, “filed a federal civil rights complaint alleging racial discrimination in admissions”:
Cohen contended that it was white students who were losing out, the deck stacked against them as the school system sought to boost black enrollment at the high-flying school.
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Cohen’s complaint was distilled from a long article he wrote in 2003 for the Albany Law Review, in which he used statistical tools and other information to analyze TJ admissions decisions made in 2002.
That year, 11 black students made it into a pool of about 800 semifinalists based on the strength of their grades and scores on a math admissions test. Ten of them — including some who scored lower than white students who were rejected — were admitted after teacher recommendations and essays were considered.
According to Cohen’s analysis, black students were substantially more likely to be admitted than white students with similar credentials. Hispanic and Asian students also had an advantage over their white counterparts, he wrote, although a smaller one.
“The true purpose of the current admissions regime is to engage in invidious racial discrimination,” Cohen wrote.
Well, never mind that. Don’t you know there are white students profiting from the labors of gifted black slaves and stealing all the land from genius Indians?
… Or something.