I grew up in Indianapolis which has a higher per capita murder rate than Chicago (that’s from 2021, our per capita rate has never been great despite sleepy depictions of midwestern cities.) The new school choice movement isn’t bad, but it wont have the significant impact that many proponets insist it will. I can tell you from first-hand experience that the ONLY thing that can make a significant difference is two-parent homes. Period. I know it sounds like an over-simplification of a complex problem but I can assure you it is not. I am a child raised by a single mother whom I love and respect, but women CANNOT do it all, and more importantly, they should not have to.
I don’t disagree with anything you said, but I want to point out that the purpose of school choice for these kids is mostly triage.
One badly behaved kid can keep every other kid in the classroom from learning anything. They aren’t going to learn anything either way in that state, all they can do is keep all the other kids from learning.
Allowing schools to sort by need, and kick out kids that are unmanageable, is a sad but necessary step to help the kids that can be helped.
A wise person pointed out that the desirability of two-parent families is evidenced by one key fact: that compassionate well educated people who will defend both single parent homes and the public policies that make them more common will themselves make great sacrifices to marry and stay married to assure their own children's success.
Parents vote with their feet. I live in a mid-sized city in the rust belt. When my oldest reached kindergarten age we asked to visit some public schools. One look at the classroom chaos at a local public school (and a "magnet school" at that!) was enough to make me say to my wife that our kids would be better off sitting at home watching television all day than going there.
A private school in SF has an unwritten policy to not accept public school transfers after the 4th grade. “They are spoiled” by that time and will destroy the learning dynamic of the class.
A few years back the school district in San Francisco started an initiative to transfer kids "with learning problems," from their school to another one (a magnet school) on the other side of town. Needless to say, the effect was disastrous. Guess what, there was no theoretical "trickle down" of intelligence and discipline. The good students got beat up and the teachers harassed. And, the school district went full ballistic on the entire community saying we were not accepting enough. I wonder how long it takes the teachers union/school district to come up with these genius ideas.
Allowing schools to sort by need rather than just kick out the unmanageable is totally unnecessary and far more expensive. Choice is a moronic way to sort out the kids who want to learn.
That opinion is hardly realist. The article is evidence for the need to separate out the unmanageable. You provide no evidence nor logic for your opinion. Now THAT’s what a moron does.
Choice is a moronic way? Please, please explain that logic if you can.
School choice and homeschooling are the only ways parents who are not ideologically bound to the failed ideology of the education establishment - administrators, university education departments, and teachers' unions combined can get their children out of that awful system. I speak as 27 year veteran teacher in public schools, including 22 in the Los Angeles Unified School District with 5 years experience as my school's union rep. What's your experience?
My experience is similar. I’m extremely grateful that, after my parents’ sad, acrimonious, doomed marriage was finally concluded in court my mom and her parents sacrificed a great deal so my sister and I could attend a good suburban school district (this was not a marriage which could’ve been salvaged; my dad was a severe alcoholic and heavy smoker who had major mood swings and outbursts of anger and violence, and was, I was told later, a deeply-closeted gay or bisexual man, who was likely simply trying to do his best to fit the role and live the life expected of someone born in a small, socially conservative, Midcentury town).
Materially and in family support and status we definitely felt “less-than”. We were probably easily in the bottom five percent or lower of families in the district in income and so-called wealth. We seemed to be virtually the only single-parent family. The very, very few families in which the parents had divorced or one parent had been lost to a tragic illness appeared to have almost instantly generated a new parent and sealed up hermetically again into financially comfortable, high-functioning units. My mom never really risked dating, let alone remarried, in large part because she’d been so burned, the consequences for us of introducing another unstable personality or someone with less than pure motives into our lives was so high, and mostly because she simply didn’t have the time or energy or focus to do more than work full-time at the local library and care for us. I never had a good answer for all the kids (and parents) who asked me: “So what does your dad do?” I didn’t really know. The last I’d seen him, at ten, an already fraught custody visit had deteriorated into a half-hearted kidnapping from which a family friend had to negotiate our release. We didn’t find out he’d died until receiving the obligatory letter from his sisters’ lawyer, after the fact. There was nothing left to us, not even some old mementos from our childhood.
We missed out on a lot of what our classmates seemed to take as given. Both materially and in terms of connections and opportunities, but also in terms of having any kind of a male role model virtually at all. The hard-charging father of one high school friend whose family significantly supported the debate team on which we were both active (and for which I depended on scholarships to be able to attend the Summer camps hosted by a major university) went out of his way to make it clear he considered me - less confident, unsure how to “play the game” - a loser it was better to avoid.
But those sacrifices my mom and her parents made meant we attended safe schools full of kids with highly-credentialed, high-achieving parents who expected them to excel. We attended classes with kids who mostly had no interest or even idea how to get into serious trouble. For the most part, they really wanted to learn, which was all we really wanted, too. Aside from occasional and relatively mild bullying, I didn’t have to fear being at or going to and from school. We were wildly naive about the behind the scenes machinations some more ambitious parents engaged in to further advantage their kids. But, as hard as it was socially and emotionally to grow up with virtually only a single mom straining to provide all family support and structure, I appreciate the relative stability of our little three-person family pod.
What’s undoubtedly true, nonetheless, is that we only received one kind of parenting: the mom role. And that’s not remotely a knock on the mom who would do her best to “pitch” me tennis balls in our little front yard. She was the only adult who ever did. We still had an enormous hole in our family, in our young, developing lives, in our idea of what a responsible, committed, competent, but caring man was even like. I’ve read that for a boy, especially, growing up without a dad is a little like trying to navigate a long and challenging course without any kind of map. You simply don’t know how to do certain things, how to carry yourself, and you have no one to ask.
But I’ll echo the final point above: Single moms who sacrifice their own free time and leisure interests to do as much as they can possibly manage for their kids, to provide for, and comfort, and parent and guide their kids, are absolute heroes.
But we’re asking far too much, and now in far too many families, from one often badly-strained, burdened parent who is being asked to perform two complimentary, balanced roles.
I wish there were books compiling stories like your own. And maybe offering advice for how to speak about these things in a culture so beaten down by virtue signaling.
I'm sorry about your experience-being one of the only single-parent families where you grew up. My sister, brother, and I were “lucky” to have other people who didn't know/only heard from their dads on Christmas or birthdays. Out of curiosity, did you happen to have grandparents who were involved? My mom tried her best, but the pressure of providing for a family of four and helping my cousin and aunts with their kids, who were also single moms.
Hi Andy, I’m glad you did have a peer group like that to commiserate and support each other a little bit. For some reason, the friends I had/have whose parents got divorced tended to go through that more around college age. Like: the parents had gradually grown apart and their kids being in college became an acceptable time to move on. What’s interesting is multiple among them ended up remarrying old boyfriends/girlfriends. It didn’t seem like anyone I know of who got divorced at that stage did so to escape a truly toxic situation - it was more like starting a new (or old, again) chapter with someone more suitable.
Helping out other single moms in the family sounds both like a comforting form of mutual support - and further exhausting. Having a larger family can cut both ways. I know my mom (an only child, whose dad was an only child and whose mom was the only one of three to make it to adulthood and have a child) missed having a sibling or close cousin. As a teenager, I tried to “reassure her” that more family could as easily have meant more trouble. But as sometimes large families beget more larger families, I think my most of my recent ancestors had a real ambivalence about forming families, or perhaps even about their own existence. On one hand, even two generations of parents having a kid(a) later in life meant my mom’s parents were well-past retirement age by the time I was born. On the other hand, having come from very little and having lived through the Great Depression and WWII, they were frugal, cautious people who were just able to help steer their one child and two grandkids to a softer landing than might’ve been the case. We qualified for federally subsidized school lunches for a few years, but we never actually went hungry or worried about being homeless. I still wish they’d lived longer so I could’ve known them better and learned more from them - but also so I could’ve done more to help them in return.
Thanks for adding this focus to an already compelling article. I know it’s natural to ask: But what can we do to reverse this dynamic? Just women (and men, too) in dangerously dysfunctional marriages isn’t the answer. For better and worse, as a civil society, we’re lacking those “ties that bind”. Where are the extended family and religious and other community institutions which can help prepare couples for responsible, stable family formation and help keep them on course when things get challenging? We also need to stop scapegoating men and portraying all forms of masculinity as malign. The message has become almost that we want men to at most act as a sort of a deferential secondary supplement to women - where and when desired - but we don’t particularly need them. It’s apparent a lot of men are opting out of (or are less competitive for or are less desired in) professional roles remunerative enough to support a family. It’s become very tricky to even broach the whys and wherefores of the dearth of marriageable men, without almost entirely centering women and blaming men for the entirety of their own struggles. On two occasions in the past few months, I’ve diplomatically begun to mention Richard Reeves research and writing - and both times I was cut off and excoriated by people who assumed this was no more than “MRM talking points”. Women want and need more marriageable men - and more men need some sort of new bargain in which their sacrifice and commitment are more valued, viable, and constructive re: family formation.
There are very different outcomes for the children of widows vs "single mothers". That makes it less likely the the two-parent angle is causal rather than merely correlated.
Right! Your comment is unusual in citing directly relevant evidence that goes against the easy explanations for complex phenomena that are usually suggested. We have trouble dealing with the fact that some people are better parents than others, and that there's not a whole lot that society can do about it.
Doesn’t sound like an oversimplification at all. It is of course true and almost everyone with eyes to see, or who has actually raised kids, knows this to be true.
It will actually have an extremely significant impact. On the White students who will get beaten raped and robbed, not to mention their classrooms being thrown into chaos and all resources being diverted to the blacks.
But on a positive note maybe it will cut down on the production of delusional cowards who always find some form of cope.
Oh, because white people never rape, beat, or rob anyone? I went to a very diverse school, and asides from my family, nearly all of my close friends are black, and the one thing I learned from it is that people are people; there are good ones and bad ones, regardless of immutable characteristics. Skin color has little impact on various approaches to conflict when one controls for income. Lower-income people, regardless of skin color, tend to use their fists, while upper-class people tend to use their lawyers and therapists.
White people do not rape at anywhere near the rates that blacks do. Same goes for all other violent crimes. Furthermore, Prince George's County Maryland is one of the richest, blackest, and most violent counties in the country. So your statement about less violence with wealthy people is factually incorrect
Side note: If this is any consolation, I took a metal stool to a girl in high school, and although there are areas of my life I can certainly improve, I’d say I turned out well, asides from a few speeding tickets-my record is clean. Maybe old habits die hard, but I can't say I disagree with the parents who felt strongly about their kids sticking up for themselves.
Good. As was noted, enforcement of discipline in schools is often spotty at best. That can be true in places other than the inner-city.As a veteran teacher - and parent - I’ve had a close view of the situation for awhile now. One of my biggest regrets as a father was that I trusted my principal to adequately handle the bullying of my own son in the small-town school he attended and I worked in; disaster is not too strong a word for the result. I wish I’d told my boy to hit the JD in the face, stay with it, and take his lumps. He’d feel better about it today and so would I.
Every time I see someone make this ridiculous statement, I think about all the women and men with children who live in abusive relationships. Which clearly those making the statement never do, because given it's established children learn by example more than they learn by being preached at and punished they're literally advocating for people living in an atmosphere of violence.
Sounds great, but the reality is, we don't have them, and getting them would be harder than fixing schools. So what's the plan then? Given that there is little incentive to keep two-parent homes...
Those programs did indeed break-up families. It's because the only way to politically justify them was providing aid to children and their mothers. (aid to able- bodied men was too far).
What we now see is that we should have been giving aid to families.
But to think that the solution now is to just cut it off and expect families to snap back into place is at best questionable. It could also just make things much worse.
We are here now. We can't undo what has been done, and we should work toward reforms that incentivize intact families. It wouldn't take drastic change, just modification of eligibility rules.
No, they won't, and for the safety of the partners and children in violent and abusive relationships (which aren't always necessarily the same) they shouldn't be.
I love how all the smug, well-off people who engage in this kind of discussion invariably and inevitably "blame the parents" instead of the system that has these and other children growing up in abject poverty, even when they HAVE two parents at home. Or rather whom they live with, because those parents likely spend most of their awake time working two jobs to make ends meet, if possible.
I would argue that the overall misery index was far lower in the 50s and 60s, before the Great Society welfare state legitimized illegitimacy. Women being paid to have babies without having to plan for their support or their future devalues fatherhood, and men. This is to say nothing of the hopeless chaos it has created, as described in the above article.
Unfortunately, your assessment could not be further from the truth. I am sad to say that nearly every woman in my family endured some type of domestic violence. My sister, who is two years older, is my best friend and has cared for me more than any parent aside from my grandmother spent years in a violent and destructive relationship. My cousin, also one of my closest friends, had to live in a woman's shelter when her significant other put an iron on her belly while nine months pregnant. My Grandma, born in 1928, fled Oklahoma in fear for her life with three children in tow. She was in her mid-twenties when there were fewer options and significant social stigma. Despite their tragic experiences with domestic violence, none of them are advocates for divorce and feel strongly that those with children should avoid it by all means necessary. Advocating for two-parent homes does not translate to supporting domestic violence; quite the contrary considering those raised in non-abusive two-parent homes are significantly less likely to be a perpetrator OR a victim of abuse.
Furthermore, research suggests that over half of all domestic violence occurs between intimate partners or ex-partners who are not and have not married. More concerningly, children raised in single-parent homes are significantly more likely to be subject to physical and sexual abuse. No one should remain in an unsafe environment. Period. And no one should experience shame for removing their children from a dangerous environment; if anything, they should be applauded.
Our society is wealthy enough and there are enough jobs for women that a single mother can afford to raise a child. That wasn't really the case in the Malthusian era, where our older cultural norms were forged. I don't think they will come back that easily (even if such a change might marginally slow down our drift).
A single parent cannot replace the security children feel and what they learn from being in a home with 2 adults legally tied together and committed to their family. The future can look stressful if the 2 adults that made the children can't stick together and support each other and their children. Another huge contributor to the stress in our lives, imo, is the increasing job changes people go through. The lack of continuity and commitment between adults in the home and in the workplace is the fuel for social problems.
My eyeballs can see and quack theories in a book can't interfere with what my eyeballs can see and my ears can hear. The author states peers have a much greater influence than parents. Well duh, if children spend very little time with parents and are in a free-for-all with peers all day.
Society may be wealthy enough for a single mum to raise a child, but never to the same level as she could have in a two income household and the added discipline and role model of a father. So we are stuck in the middle - between having no child at all and raising one well enough.
No I haven't heard of that one - I'm checking it out as a result of your mention, thank you. My own reading interests have been validated by seeing Rob Henderson recently review When Men Behave Badly by David Buss.
At least they should be able to sort the students and send the violent ones to another building. The good children should not be forced to endure those beyond saving.
I grew up in Indianapolis as well. Graduated from Tech in 1982 , spent 5 years away in the military, returned and worked in the construction trades for the next 25 years. I left Indy for Lafayette in 2015 and looking back, I have no regrets leaving Indy for Lafayette. Fast forward, and the same demographics that destroyed Indy is moving into Lafayette from Chicago and Gary. Needless to say, rapes, thefts, robberies, murder, have skyrocketed. Sometimes I wonder if blacks will ever thrive or be able to function in a civilized society.
Former school-based therapist in urban Midwest for 20 years. This is a real snapshot of what it’s like in our public schools. No one knows it unless you see it for yourself & it has just gotten worse. The debate about IQ in the comments is not even relevant, imo. Average learning-especially new learning, is extremely compromised by even average students when you consider the chaos & emergency room-like atmosphere in these classrooms. Majority of pre-K & K students arrive with few daily living skills of children 40 years ago (social, hygiene, bathroom, communication). The past 5 years or so I noticed school districts started bringing in “trauma-based” training for teachers; they finally realized regular teaching & management models were inadequate for the majority of students. What does that say about our society, that so many of our school children are living in homes, neighborhoods which are traumatizing them?? As we know from an abundance of research & data over many decades we know that the traumatized & abused don’t do well themselves but also often do the same to others, and not just to other children, as this young man experienced. Like most failures in our society, there is a vast amount of funding for education in this country. Unfortunately the bulk of which goes to the huge administrative body which never see the inside of a classroom.
It won’t change until the community wants it to change. How many more white liberals and race pimps yelling about white supremacy which kids pick up on and then use to their advantage. Not to improve their future but to get away with whatever they want which isn’t any different than any other child. Every child pushes the boundaries and it is up to adults to draw the line.
So I grew up working class in NYC, live in the NYC metro area; I take public transit regularly, go to parks, go to libraries, see PLENTY of young children - where are these children you describe hiding? Do their parents just keep them in the home all day? They aren't in supermarkets, in playgrounds, walking down the street, riding the bus? Or are they perhaps behaving differently in the classroom than they are in their community...?
Remember that institutional schooling is a highly unnatural environment, especially in urban areas, and it's not surprising to me that young children would respond to it as a threat. Pre-K is not an evidence-based practice. In some intervention studies, like a recent one out of Tennessee, it's an intervention that demonstrably, itself, made the students worse. Packing a bunch of young children like sardines into a fluorescent room all day is going to bring out, let's say, not their BEST behavior?
I teach in a school environment not far off from what the author described. One of the reasons you don't see "those children he described" in local parks and libraries is most likely because they just don't go. Many if not all of my students have never been to the city library. When asked what they do over the weekend, the reply is stayed home and watched TV. They experience very little beyond their homes. It saddens me beyond measure that as dysfunctional as the school environment is, many of students see school as a refuge and highlight of their lives. What does that say of their home life?
Those children are all around me, everywhere, where I live.
You won’t accept that, I suspect. You have decided that “that’s not real.” You expect to be believed that YOU never see them (therefore that means they’re not real, that is your conscious implication). But you will not return that, will you?
I’m not telling the truth, am I? It’s not true that, in my very liberal state and region, these children are everywhere.
I mean, I'm from working class Brooklyn. I feel like I might have noticed some things. I see subway crime, litter, car theft, all the usual suspects. But I am baffled by the idea a literal 4 year old should be expected to "behave" in what's effectively a fluorescent lit box for God knows how.many hours a day. It's obviously a ridiculous expectation and is going to elicit antisocial behavior in a certain context. Out of school is different. I don't see the breakdown. I'm pretty moderate and have no skin in this game, but I mistrust these histrionics.
Right. As I expected. "What you're saying is not real, you're not seeing what you're seeing, and what you're saying is histrionic."
You're incredibly dismissive and disrespectful. You'd not like that returned to you. But you don't owe anyone a fair hearing. Liz knows Liz's experience, and people who have different experiences are lying to Liz.
Liz: I noticed you ignoring my direct question about whether you believe I am not seeing what I see in my region. You know that you ignored it, and you know that that was a dishonest move.
Well it seems like the majority of the population did just fine in those "fluorescent lit boxes". Decades upon, decades of us turned out just fine. What I see as a 53 year old are the attitudes of parents. When I did something wrong in school the first words out of my parents mouths were "What did you do?" not "Oh it wasn't you baby it must be the teacher." Then the discipline in the school. Very few fights and disruptions in class. Those kids that did were sent to detention, suspended, or expelled. Apparently the schools don't do that anymore. Even if you beat up a teacher. 2 parents in the household is also an aberration now when compared with the 70's and 80's. Get rid of "restorative justice" and return to the 1950's way of teaching and I bet a whole lot will change. Justin would have been sent to a special school for behavioral problems and a vocational school in the 70's/80's. Maybe then he would be a contributing member of society. Now he's sitting in jail after shooting 2 people. The current "progressive" way of running schools has obviously failed at a spectacular level. Time return to the old school method. Preferably with nuns.
Plenty of schools all across the nation are able to get their students to behave in fluorescent boxes, because those students aren't being raised in broken homes and a culture with no respect for education or honest achievement.
There is no "working class" Brooklyn anymore. It is wealthy and public housing. I have lived in Brooklyn public housing, and it is really nice compared to Chicago public housing, but nothing like private housing in Brooklyn.
You can't take generational ignorance, violence and neglect and expect to turn it around in the classroom. Kids mirror behaviors they see and experience. Their parents are undoubtedly illiterate, why else beat your child in the hallway rather than take him home and coach him? I had a student who 2 years after graduation was arrested for baseball batting homeless people to death on the street in the middle of the night. I would have never seen that in him.
This may come as a shock to you but slapping your own child is not child abuse nor is it “beating” him. This mother was called at the request of the teacher to discipline her child for disrespecting an adult, and she disciplined him the best way she knew how. You may not agree with this form of discipline but calling it child abuse and likening it to “beating” is hyperbolic and inflammatory. This mom showing up and slapping her child across the face is her way of demonstrating an interest in her son's education and showing the teacher she has his back as well as the rest of the class. I'd wager that if all of these kids had moms who did that when the teacher called you would see a much different classroom and it's a shame that the teacher's own lack of understanding prevented him from calling parents in the future.
The shutdowns for covid only served to increase the gap. 2nd graders in my home town had to learn the social skills taught in kg when full time, in-person school resumed last year. 😢
I have heard the same from all my friends who teach young kids. It was a huge setback. The very young had no idea how to follow /pay attention to an authority figure who was not a parent
I was always amazed by Holocaust survivors and their resilience. Always thought they were a special group to come through such a horrific experience with seemingly little issues. But that's not the case. They handled it differently (mostly by not talking about it to their kids, putting on a brave face and moving on for the sake of survival in a new land), but the trauma definitely showed up and still does.
You can't tell me that a kid who's being abused at home is not going to act out in some way in school. And then, as this article clearly points out (if you bothered to read the whole thing), they in turn abuse other kids and their teachers. Teachers then suffer trauma. Why do you think there is such a teacher shortage now in this country? Teachers are sick of being disrespected and traumatized by students and also being expected to wear many hats (trauma therapist being one) in the classroom when they should be solely focused on academics. Why don't you take up teaching at an infamously troubled school and see what it's like for yourself?
We need a civil war which crushes the entire system. Kids and parents need to know what it is to live off of rat meat and corpses. The generations that emerge from such barbarity after 100 years may have a shot of a better life.
Ken is exaggerating, but there is an important grain of truth in what he says. We are ruled by a highly irresponsible, profoundly immoral faction which has been convinced that the iron girders of hidden violence, custom and shame that hold a successful society together, are no longer necessary.
They are wrong, utterly wrong, but it may well be that they need to experience the dire consequences personally, before they are prepared to change course. And some of them are so utterly brainwashed, that they are irredeemable; for those, the rest of us cannot live in dignity until their power is completely stripped away. It doesn't help at all, that the consequences of their moral abdication, will fall first on a class of people that they already despise. In their eyes, the suffering of those people is a feature, not a bug.
"convinced that the iron girders of hidden violence, custom and shame that hold a successful society together"
Hidden violence holds a society together? Care to explain what you mean by that? Because one reason why a lot of kids are acting out in school is precisely because of the "hidden violence" that takes place in their homes.
The fact that you even asked that question, smh. You are the problem.
“Hidden violence” is what law and order used to imply before “restorative justice” and “catch and release.” Commit a crime, and suffer real consequences, including violence.
I think he means both legal policing as well as the neighborhood protection of old, not to mention communities "handling their own." I still live in what is often called an "ethnic white" community, although most of the residents are Asian and Spanish now, but we often "handle" problems outside of legal channels. Asian communities do this in a big way (successfully).
The problems with African-Americans in the North did not start until social welfare. This brought displaced people from the rural South into dense, public housing with broken families. After two generations, all hell broke loose, but no one cared. Those who defended these structures are as guilty as the bigots who ran Jim Crow in the South.
The failures you speak of are a product of the low average IQ. Someone with an IQ of 85 cannot be taught to perform even the most menial job, nor learn even basic literacy or numeracy. Given the average African American IQ is 85, it means half will fall below the minimum level need to function in society.
This is the root cause of the problem and denying it solves nothing.
I live in the UK, we have the exact same problems you do with African Americans with the Caribbean population and certain segments of the African population - mainly those that come here claiming asylum. Africans from certain countries like Kenya tend to do better, probably because the visa system.
How much of that low IQ comes from poor parenting? I suspect that those children would do dramatically better if they were raised by sober, literate parents who cared about them and taught them before they got to school.
Almost none, there've been several studies on this. Black and East Asian children adopted by middle class families in the US (and Belgium in the case of Koreans) had average IQs by age 17 of 89 and 107 respectively.
If you match black and white children by SES the 11 to 15 point gap in average IQ and corresponding gap in educational attainment is consistent at all socioeconomic levels.
The gap in IQ is present from 3 years old, before parental influence and education has a chance to take hold.
Caribbeans and Africans in the UK also have an average IQ of 88 by the way. The Chinese here average 104 vs 105 in the US. So yes, the gaps are mostly genetic in origin.
Can you link to a couple of these? I had a US-only data set. Also, I assume the adopted African children were in Belgium, right? I thought adoptions of African children by white Americans was a banned or at least frowned upon thing. I have met many adopted Asian children and zero adopted Africans. I am shocked that they exist.
No the Belgian studies were on Koreans, adopted after the Korean war (i've edited my reply for clarity.) The same scores were found in the US as they were in Belgium.
This is heartbreaking. My husband taught in an alternative high school in Detroit for awhile, and the experience sounds similar. He was expected to be part security guard, but fortunately he has significant martial arts experience. When he had to confiscate a firearm from a student he started wearing a vest. Many of his students had been shot. They all had food insecurity and a lot of what they did eat was crap. One year he had two students graduate, which was a record for that school. Then the school had to eliminate the position due to budget cuts. My husband went on to graduate school and saw one of his former students on campus, so that really was a success story. However, the idea that teacher quality can control for severe poverty and violence is blatantly ridiculous. Most of these kids won't have a chance unless that environment can be changed.
PARDON ME SCUBA. I'M ONLY ALLOWED TO POST IN "REPLY".
Gang culture is prison culture. It is a value system that (like Marxist "woke" and the totalitarian financiers that support it) denigrates human worth and moral value and emphasizes the cold blooded application of power and the personal acquisition and control of resources at the expense of culture and society. If your rite of passage is based on how "stand up" you are doing "time" and your demonstrated willingness to "bust a cap in somebodies ass" is the prerequisite for personal safety you live in jungle land, be it Fallujah, or Chiraq.
Educators lamenting the disintegration of the Black community might consider the effects of the six decade corporate class war designed to gut American industry, destroy wages, destroy unions and loot the American economy. Detroit (Motown) is a good example. Its was a thriving industrial city where Blacks and Whites worked hard, owned homes and received good pay. It was rough but Black children weren't living on potato chips and it may have been a lower standard but the Black community had a way forward and, though struggling, was part of the American Middle Class. Then Nixon, needing a way to destroy popular progressive political opposition (Hippies and Blacks) started the "drug war" and the prison industrial complex was born. The CIA/FBI immediately saw the opportunity for big money, numbered accounts and a surveillance state and the toxic harpies of professional feminism (now the D.E.I. commissariat) pipelined corporate cash to destroy the family dynamic, fatherhood and education. Then the globalist DNC/CCP/WEF juggernaut decided (because it could) to bring the American Republic to its knees.
The disconnect here (Maryland is a D.C. suburb) is thinking that the illiterate, carjacking, Nordstrom looting gang boy with a pistol in his waistband has nothing to do with the infrastructure crumbling, bridge collapsing, train wreck reality created by the band of D.C. thugs who, handed the greatest economy in the world, destroyed it. Black crime is simply psyop blowback weaponized by the well insulated, body guarded, totalitarian want-to-be's now proclaiming that American's need to "accept limited free speech". "Woke" DNC couldn't wait to conflate crime with revolution. Chaos, fear and anomie serves tyranny. It simply weaponized the disintegration of Black America and aimed it at you.
Black children born of poverty and want testing the moral strength of White teacher's in a classroom is metaphor for the cloaked in altruism hubris and narcissism of the sycophants holding a knife to the throat of American freedom. The intentional reduction of the American Black community to chaos and disintegration through assassination and manipulation by totalitarian finance is merely prelude.
I think an alternate explanation of the disintegration of northern industry and by extension the communities of blacks that migrated there was the marriage of socialist government redistribution and black power politics that played out in Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, Etc.
The Detroit Model cities program is a perfect example. Just flood the community with federal money just lead to local fraud and political infighting. The community organizer aspect of the War on Poverty gave way to unfettered progressive local governments that was, in reality, just black power political figures thieving their communities while idealistic whites and well meaning bureaucrats thought they were "fighting the power". Meanwhile there was constant pressure for black union members to fight, organize, etc. (in addition to the union as a whole who was putting management over a barrel). Ultimately labor became to expensive and migrated south, and these cities were left to dysfunctional progressive political machines that survive today.
By the time Nixon came into office in 68 Detroit was well on it's way to down the hole.
Nice take on the situation. And you are certainly correct on the dynamic. I was in and out of Detroit a few times in the 60's. It was a rough town but it wasn't the "war zone" it is today.
Your comment on the graft and looting of well intentioned tax dollars by a corrupt "political machine" and the willingness of community leaders to throw fellow citizens under the bus in order to line their pockets seems to be an apt illustration of American politics on the national level today. (Is that just the nature of the bureaucratic beast and the people attracted to it and is it a solvable problem) My "rant" and your comment both seem to agree on the inability of community to produce intelligent capable moral leadership. Even when ample resources are allocated to solve social problems and uplift the citizen.
One obvious elephant in the room is control of the American national dialogue. Self-interested "Race hustlers" are an obvious example but the Durham Report affirms the reality of an America forced to live inside a lie for the better part of a decade. Add the weaponization of the Covid pandemic and it is a people living inside a lie inside a lie. There is no question that capital made a conscious decision to weaken and disassemble the power of the American Middle Class decades ago. My personal best boil down today is the belief that capital (the Davos, DNC/CCP/WEF boy and girls) prepossessed by their own personal hubris and narcissism are funding and exploiting the ideological utopianism of Marxist "woke" as a way of undermining public institutions and creating a false narrative that is literally with the help of the MSM screaming over the top of the healthy national dialogue America needs. It is pathology not politics. I'm basing this on their willingness to allow the social/cultural disintegration we are all bearing witness too.
I continue to believe that The American Constitution and the Bill of Rights it contains is our only engine of survival and the only legitimate frame of reference for correcting this mess.Stay strong. Stay clear.
I think we are in agreement on mostly everything but I have a hard time buying into the grand scheme/design or intentional coordinated plot on the side "capital", the illuminati, the elites, or whatever the group is. I think there are some incredibly powerful people pulling incredibly powerful strings here and there, but I don't know that there is the outright collusion that I often hear about. Things happen naturally through evolution one piece at a time. Over many years it looks like a plan or a plot of some sort of creator, but I see it more as all birds knowing how to hunt/migrate together without some massive bird leader teaching/telling them how to do it. Incentives drive similar human behavior across markets, countries, cultures, etc. Behavior of public housing residents in Glasgow is markedly similar to that of Chicago or St. Louis but no one was telling them to do that...it just happens through incentive and cultural reinforcement. I actually believe that many leftist policy makers actually believe their ideas will work. Walter Ruther certainly did, and today you can find so many intelligent left thinkers suggesting ideas that a street smart 8 year old could tell you was BS (open the prisons, etc.).
Absolutely!! I'm sure you're not overlooking the fact that capitalist psychology thinks internationally, self-interested elected American political leadership allowed it to rig American economics and that (player's aside) the social/cultural disintegration we're witnessing is the result. It's a story as old as time. Isn't the exercise of the will to power necessary to create a hyperreality pretense of moral superiority and environmental concern as a cover for what really amounts to greed, the exploitation of labor and the desire for access to natural resources without consequence the problem? Hubris and narcissism has always defined oligarch's. And ideological utopian's are always ready to bury their fellow citizen's in the grave of the ideal. It's a perfect storm. Is it politic's or the same mass psychosis that swallowed Germany, China and Russia in the 20th Century. It's all too retro. After all, the "bomb" is back on the table.
Maybe the simple explanation is the jump in tech/communication scared the bejeezus out of the financial elite because it made their economic/political rigged game transparent to reality. And, fully aware that they'd destroyed the economic system that brought them to power decided to go for the brass ring of world domination.The French economist Thomas Piketty won the Nobel Prize for his book CAPITAL by explaining the ascent of a new world monarchy and the reduction of the general populace to serfdom. The Davos/EU/WEF is already hip deep in creating a CCP style Europe and Canada. Here in the American Constitutional Republic the American Middle Class and the Constitution stand squarely in their way. That's you and me.
Coleman Young was the man but he wasn't elected until 1974. White flight had begun in the 60s. Young was the ultimate result of what I'm talking about and ran the city into the ground until 1994 with outright corruption and unabashed moral authority. Unfortunately his style is now pretty common for blue cities. Studying Detroit from the beginning of the war on poverty to then end of Young's run would be enough to support multiple Ph.D. programs.
Warning, pet peeves and rant. I do not think that word (communism) means what you think it means.
A number of American cities had been run by members of the actual American Socialist Party pre World War One. They were destroyed by the federal government by the 1920s.
The three real socialist or communist parties that existed in the Great Depression were essentially crushed by the federal government after 1947 starting with Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt and the blacklists. Also, the Progressive Party of the Progressive Era, which ended during the First World War, modern “progressives,” communism, and socialism are four distinct things.
Finally, Classical Liberalism, twentieth century American Liberalism, and the current Neoliberal are also three separate ideologies with the current neoliberalism having precious little to do with even twentieth century liberalism.
The misuse of these categories not only bothers me personally as a child of parents of liberals during the Free Speech Movement whose family was and is nothing like the caricatures after used, the confabulation of the different periods, parties, and ideologies helps the powerful. If we don’t know our past or use the correct terms in the right way, and the confabulations ensures this, just how can we fight those who benefitfrom the corruption and the breakdown of everything? The Wokesters, the very wealthy, the Professional Managerial Class that serves them?
They all benefit from the confusion that comes from conflating everything. Kinda like mixing social constructs like gender with biological facts or categories like sex. Many societies have had more than two genders, sometimes a lot more, but pretty much all of them just had two biological sexes. Then there is our modern civilization.
Honestly, having people being labeled as “liberals” who decry what liberals I grew up with believed in such as free speech, civil rights, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law, all of which comes from the Enlightenment thinkers or the foundations of American political philosophy which also comes directly from it, as Whiteness or some other goofiness is painful.
See Stan Evans' Blacklisted by History for full details of the depth of the infiltration and subversion of the US government and culture by international communists.
McCarthy’s witch-hunt? Surely you jest. The magnificent Joseph McCarthy merely asked why the federal government employed so many communists. Communists being the all time tyrants and killers of the last century and anyone adhering to that rancid system of political control being enemies of the American republic and common decency, it was a very reasonable question.
The magnificent Joseph McCarthy? Honestly, that is the first time I have heard of the word "magnificent" being used to describe the man.
Regardless of the threat of the Soviet Union to the United States, that threat was used as justification to destroy the lives of thousands of Americans for merely holding left of center economic beliefs; they conflated differing beliefs in economics with active spying for a foreign, hostile power.
Then there was the immediate, and I do mean immediate, pivoting of the anti-communist crusade into witch hunting for homosexual employees of the government using the same resources at the same time.
Also, the economic warfare of Europe and the United States for centuries has also killed millions. Slavery, colonialism, multiple mass famines, invasions, coups often justified with "the white man's burden" or even the threat of communism. Either way we have mass murder by all sides regardless of justification or ideology.
"...that threat was used as justification to destroy the lives of thousands of Americans for merely holding left of center economic beliefs; they conflated differing beliefs in economics with active spying for a foreign, hostile power."
You're regurgitating the PC-Prog lies you've been fed about McCarthy and the infiltration of international communism in the US government, and society.
Stan Evans' book, Blacklisted by History, is a finely detailed, meticulously sourced demolition of the PC-Prog distortion of McCarthy.
McCarthy's biggest mistake (besides being unattractive) was that he UNDER-estimated the extent of the infiltration and subversion.
"The book's premise is that a vast Soviet conspiracy infiltrated the Roosevelt and Truman administrations to create a foreign policy that advanced the spread of world Communism, including the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe and the fall of Nationalist China, which McCarthy exposed, only to have his efforts undermined by political opponents with a vested interest in allowing the conspiracy to continue.[1][2]
"The book exhaustively examines, chronicles, and documents the oft-disputed claim that Communist spies, sympathizers and fellow travelers, who were aided and instigated by the Soviet Union and Communist China, infiltrated the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, to aid in the expansion of Communism throughout the world during the Cold War.
"The book's footnotes and the references provide links to the documents located in the National Archives and the records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other sources. Evans documents the fact that the National Archives copy of at least one of the most critical documents McCarthy submitted to the Congressional boards has been ripped out of its binder and stolen by persons unknown. Evans was able to track down another copy in the private papers of one of the Congressmen involved in the hearings. Much of the information that is cited by Evans was previously classified and unavailable to researchers, but it has now been declassified and is now available publicly.
"Claims of Communist infiltration and spies within the federal government were further verified by the release of the Venona decrypts and records released by the former Soviet Union's KGB in recent years."
Unlike you I don’t think this is an organized op, but rather a particularly tragic example of the law of unexpected consequences. For example, DEI makes sense if you already believe it but the way it is taught and enforced to us rubes guarantees that few will associate it with efficiency, happiness, or any other positive outcome.
Agreed. Most of it is simple graft and greed but there is (seems to me) a method behind the madness. I like the old JFK line who replied to a reporters "where there's smoke there's fire" comment "that possibly someone has a smoke making machine". The capture and control of the narrative around issues of American moral social/cultural concern, and the willingness to create, defend and impose lies of the magnitude we're witnessing, against the backdrop of the human damage, social disintegration and chaos surrounding us, alongside say, the recent Congressional Taibbi/Shellenberger hearings and its Davos/EU style push to quell free speech and silence truth speakers, tells me that somebody's got an agenda. I suspect that what we both have in common here is the gut feeling that the inhabitants of the Marxist "woke"/DNC/CCP/WEF biosphere are self-interested poseurs.
Well sure, everyone is self interested. And people who claim (and might actually be) interested in the welfare of all humanity surely include themselves as human. All we can monitor for are the most blatant, transactional, corrupt forms of self interest.
As for silencing truth speakers, I doubt that's the point for many. It's much more likely, to my way of thinking, that there is an attempt to silence bullshit. The problems are that your bullshit might be my fundamental reality and vice versa, so we don't agree on terms, and that conspicuous censorship actually attracts attention, so that silencing is somewhat self defeating. This leaves me as a default free speech-ist (fettered by the traditional litigation limits of fraud, spreading false news, harassment, defamation, inciting panic and so on).
Regarding the capture of the narrative, I see two forces. One is that within our recent history, homophobia and racism have been quite rightly banned, proving that social change is possible and that appeals to religion/tradition are insufficient authorities in common law countries. It's possible that some people might have misread this lesson as "everything that conservatives believe is actually wrong" and so we're in kind of a Wild West of behavioral free for all.
Second, there's money to be made! "Get woke, go broke" is not a truism. "Get woke, expand our market, and also avoid lawsuits and cancellation" seems perfectly valid to me.
To all this, and sorry this is so long winded, I think that ultimately ideas are sustainable because they are of widespread utility, and that the most corrosive and lousy ideas tend to fall. It sure takes a while though.
My problem with a lot of DEI initiatives is that they aren't specific enough. For instance, people use the term "structural racism," but what does it mean and how do you correct it? It's different to say something like, there is an element of racial discrimination in drug sentencing (for instance). Then you can put forth specific ideas for how to fix that. Also, most (but not all) racial disparities wash out when you control for socio-economic status and class, so we should be paying more attention to that.
Who is against diversity, equity, or inclusion? Not me. But yeah depending on how the terms are defined, we could be talking about almost anything. And clearly we are only talking about race when as you say socioeconomic factors seem quite relevant at least in common sense terms. Hence you have the combination of bad methodology linked with narrow focus.
I do wonder if that is a feature and not a bug. People in power use identity politics to avoid criticism and cast blame. Want to call Janet Yellen out on corruption? You're a misogynist. Don't like Kamala Harris' record as a prosecutor? You're a racist AND a misogynist. When you take wealth and class out of the conversation, you get a lot of rich people who publicly whine a lot, like Meghan Markle.
Yes. The greater the corruption, incompetence, and poverty the more cries of racism, sexism, bigotry, and hatred are shouted to deflect from the corruption, incompetence, and poverty.
The constant crying of wolf means that the awful lot of hatred and bigotry can be denied when it is seen. I believe that the denial of biology, history, and plain sight is also another way to deflect from the failures of our leadership.
It is also a fantastic way to avoid talking about our class system here in America.
I am against equity. Instead we need to return the country’s original foundational goal of Equality of Opportunity.
Equity, As it attempt s to backward engineer equal results is unrealistic, e.g. it assumes all people and cultures will distribute proportionally. If that were true only 12% of NBA players should be black.
“Equity” seekers impose racism as the cause of inequity. “Equal Opportunity” requires reforming away the opportunity inequalities and focusing on the behavioral and cultural changes needed to achieve fulfillment. Individual desires, abilities, efforts, and values mean Equity’s goal of proportion results won’t be achieved but WILL be used by it’s proponents to bully scapegoats into the proponents’ ideology. Experience is demonstrating Equity proponents are drunk for that power.
So you as well don't believe it's an op but you just can't wrap your head around why there are nebulous terms used to describe problems that when sorted through do not exist.
A lot of what you are saying doesn't match the facts. See FRED series (LES1252881600Q) (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q). Real wages appear to have increased of late, not decreased.
Reality I hear argued is the "real purchasing power" of the Dollar. Fiat currency vs. the gold standard. The decline in secure Union jobs, pensions and health care. The moving of industry over sea's without regard to its effect on communities. The switch to a debt economy from one built on cash and savings. The subversion and politicization of classical education. De-Platforming and the assault on free speech and idea's. The rise of a politicized surveillance state. Calls by the DNC "left" to amend the 1st and 2nd Amendment's and do away with the electoral college. The shrinking American Middle Class. The funding and manipulation of elected American political leadership by Davos/WEF sycophants and the complicity of D.C. in allowing it to happen. The willingness of the MSM to openly lie and its reduction to a propagandist arm of the CIA/FBI. The willingness of the DNC to openly lie to the American people and shrug it off when caught.
My personal view is that capitalism destroyed capitalism in the name of capitalism and created a rigged game wasteland and is moving to destroy the American Constitution and the American Middle Class because American's will not allow or accept the fascist tyranny now being imposed on citizens of the EU and Canada. Am I a little extreme and hyperbolic. Yep. But six decades of watching the cultural/social disintegration of my country makes me believe that criminal finance is capable of anything. So far I've never been wrong.
No, real wages have only increased at the top and only in fields like law, medicine, and business administration. Engineering and manufacturing salaries have been stagnant for years. Many manufacturing jobs that paid well have gone off shore. Technicians fields that you used to be able to get with a two year apprenticeship have all but disappeared.
"No, real wages have only increased at the top and only in fields like law, medicine, and business administration". Sorry, but I deliberately looked at median (not average) wages. Has manufacturing employment gone down. Yes, it has.
It does if you understand that bad social and economic policy causes human damage. A community subsumed by the values of a carceral state is bound for crime and violence. How do you teach initiative, motivation and belief in opportunity and forward motion to a child living in a reality whose values represent the exact opposite of those things. Kindness is weakness and suckers die. An obviously recognizable portion of the Black community now lives in an American hyperreality entirely separate from the rest of us. Crime/drugs is a trillion dollar industry that supports entire Black economies and profits corporate investment in prison's, bullet proof vests, guns, mace, chains, probation officers, bail bondsmen, surveillance tech and cops on the street. It's a money maker. In both instances the money flows upward to the numbered accounts of a select elite.
Globalist capital gutted and looted America and other than the tax dollars its swilling down doesn't give a f'k about America Black or White. The collapse of the Black community into violence and anomie is the canary in the American coal mine.
You're semi delusional about the state of black America prior to deindutrialization but to the extent that you are correct you're just banging your head against the wall by spewing out the same tired old boomer speech that's been spoken to death over the last six decades to which you referred.
Right down to the inanity of blaming Nixon, who apparently was working with the tribe that "weaponized the disintegration of the black community and aimed it at you" despite him being on tape stating they are a subversive threat to America. And them getting him impeached for it.
You essentially admit there's a war on White people and blacks are one group that is used as a golem to wage that war but it seems extremely unlikely you will ever acknowledge who the perpetrators of that war are.
I know that in the 60's, despite severe poverty and discrimination, and being preyed on by the worst elements of municipal graft and criminality, Black America was a hard working Christian and family based community capable of organizing and throwing up leaders like Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. That Black's I encountered were open, talented and intelligent people with core values matching my own. Then as now we knew, that the enemy we faced, Black or White, was narrow minded ignorance and societal manipulation by a venal self-interested elite. Nixon staffers have admitted that the "war on drugs" was a conscious decision to open the doorway to mass prosecution, the silencing of dissent about Vietnam, and to quell
the movement for Civil Right's. Then, as today, when the reality of American civil liberty and human moral reason threatens power and control the corrupt install political marionettes to seize and subvert the American narrative and prevent the truth/fact based conversation we all deserve. JFK, Fred Hampton and today's object lessons Assange and Snowden tell the story. Meanwhile the noose tightens.
The look the other way weaponization and conflation of crime and violence with revolution by deep state operatives is not limited to their use of the tragic disintegration happening in the Black community. It's just convenient. Antifa, the show trials of the "woke" commissariat, forced mass immigration, homelessness, Fentanyl, shit stained streets and violent subway's, a mercenary propagandist MSM, all serve to create the necessary chaos. The war isn't on White's it's on the Republic, the Constitution and the Bill of Right's it contains.
If ‘whiteness’ was the real problem, we would expect schools in Haiti to be thriving (no white people around). They are not. Of course, schools in Vietnam, China, and Singapore are thriving (no white people around). Maybe kids (and parents) really make the difference? This theory has actually been tested.
A generation ago Scientific American published a study showing that the children of poor Vietnamese immigrants were thriving in the same schools where black and Hispanic children were failing. See Nathan Caplan, Marcella Choy, and John K. Whitmore, “Indochinese Refugee Families and Academic Achievement,” Scientific American (1992), 36-42. Quote
"The scholastic success of Asian children is well recognized. Their stunning performance—particularly in the realm of science and mathematics—has prompted American educators to visit Japanese and Taiwanese schools in an effort to unearth the foundations of these achievements. Experts recommend that American schools adopt aspects of their Asian counter-parts, such as a longer school year or more rigorous tasks, in order to raise the scholastic level of US. students. Yet there is no need to go abroad to understand why these children do so well. The achievement of Asian-American students indicates that much may be learned about the origins of their triumph within the American school system itself.
More specifically, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, devastating political and economic circumstances forced many Vietnamese, Lao and Chinese-Vietnamese families to seek a new life in the US. This resettlement of boat people from Indochina offered a rare opportunity to examine the academic achievement of their children. These young refugees had lost months, even years of forma schooling while living in relocation camps. Like their parents, they suffered disruption and trauma as they escaped from Southeast Asia. Despite their hardships and with little knowledge of English, the children quickly adapted to their new schools and began to excel."
“I did not process these things as the byproducts of America’s system of funding schools through property taxes.” In reality this is BS. Urban schools are overflowing with money and it doesn’t come from property taxes. See NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) table 235.10.
As for poverty, my guess is that, in dollars, the slums of Baltimore have far more money than Vietnam (where the schools are vastly better). What does Vietnam have (that Baltimore lacks)? How about two-parent families.
When Dan Quayle attacked Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock, all right-thinking people criticized him. Of course, he was right.
"Whiteness" and the trendy opposition to it, is not any kind of real coherent argument it's just a luxury belief and a way for upscale whites to (virtue) signal that they're not one of the Bad Whites aka Deplorables over there, but that they're moral and compassionate bc they self-flagellate in public.
It is the Original Sin of the Social Justice religion, so you must confess it now to get ahead or to maintain your exalted status.
If virtue signaling (HT Ron Henderson) was just an affectation, I would be inclined to entirely agree. However, virtue signaling has impacted real policy. Note that the number of universities that are either 'test optional' or have banned the ACT/SAT altogether.
oh for sure, "virtue signalling" doesnt even scratch the surface, it's just one of the many aspects of the political-religious takeover we're living through. but there are few implementers or orchestrators, many more tribal cheerleaders.
That was literally to sell seats to donars. It will not continue, but I would discount the graduates of elite universities classes of 2024, 2025, and 2026. I suspect all corporate recruiters will ask for SAT scores.
It also pushes the Good Whites to seek Justice camouflage by readily agreeing to other dogmas no matter how inane or even obviously unreasonable and probably dangerous
to be a member in good standing of Team Good Whites you must sign up for a package deal on dogma (BLM, DEI, Jan 6, Ukraine etc etc) and assent to it all.
don't wanna be labeled an apostate or heretic, that may kill your career.
The real issue is: why do so many upscale whites believe that denigrating their own people and culture is moral? Who taught them this bizarre, self-evidently absurd viewpoint, and what were the actual motives of the people who taught it to them?
No it's a way to dehumanize, a way to unthing and it has origins that can be traced back to specific people that all share specific traits.
It is one weapon in the conquest of a people, a different group than the people who invented it, through shame and guilt.
But you delude yourself into believing it is some sort of upper crust trend when the reality is those people use it as a way to deflect and project their own self loathing forced upon them through demonization by said group.
Went to kindergarten in Takoradi-Sekondi in Ghana, West Africa. The classroom was very strict. I was the only "white" kid in the class. In terms of ability, the kids in the class were as good or better than the first grade class I attended in Vancouver, British Columbia, when my family returned to Canada.
Families in Ghana are highly structured and there is an amazing work ethic. Children and childhood are held as sacred.
What has broken down in the US in many cities is in part, the family structure. But families are breaking down because there are no working class jobs. Gang culture and drugs don't help.
But we also pulled away a back stop for struggling families when we destroyed welfare in the 1990s.
Regarding your comment about the slums of Vietnam versus the slums of Baltimore, I would say that comment is not correct. The Vietnamese are not starving, and even if they are poor, the extended family structure means that children are well fed compared to the poor in Baltimore.
A small number of Democrats oppose Open Borders and recognize the impact of Open Borders on America's own poor people. They are in the minority. The dominant Democratic position is "No one is illegal". Biden is only following the mainstream in his own party.
It's not just family structure that's broken down. It the social and economic structure, and the cause of that is NOT the breakdown of family structure. That is a symptom of the larger societal breakdown. The empire is in unstoppable decline. Get out if you can.
At the time I was in kindergarten in Ghana (mid 1960s) there were no government funded K-12 schools. The school I attended did require a modest fee. Most of the parents of the kids at the school I attended were middle or upper middle class Ghanaians (doctors, teachers, merchants) but not wealthy. The reason we went to Ghana is so that my Dad could teach forestry at a post-secondary college in Takoradi-Sekondi.
In the last twenty years or so, Ghana has implemented a government school system:
Today, about 90% of school age children in Ghana are enrolled in school. The literacy rate of males and females aged 15–24 in Ghana is about 80% (in 2010.)
There are multiple languages spoken Ghana: three Akan languages (Akuapem Twi, Asante Twi and Fante) and two Mole-Dagbani ethnic languages (Dagaare and Dagbanli). The others are Ewe, Dangme, Ga, Nzema, Gonja, and Kasem.
Most people speak English as well as their own Ghanaian language.
Interestingly, Ghanaians do not classify non-Ghanaians by the color of their skin. Non-Ghanaians are simply Oburoni: Those who come from over the horizon.
Yes, culture and expectations does matter quite a lot. I sacrificed quite a few movie nights to do homework and excel in my studies.
The newer "progressive" educational policies keep everyone infantilized with low expectations. I expect we'll also eventually start seeing a drop in Asian achievement (in fact I think I read somewhere that the differences even out and disappear once you hit second or third generation of immigrants).
I actually taught quite a few East Asian students who had adopted the newer, "progressive and Western" attitudes toward learning. They were not typically very high achievers and did not amount to what their parents had expected upon graduation. So I would personally say that there is a pretty strong cultural component.
They teach two languages: Fante and English, as well as history, arithmetic, social arts, and three other subjects.
Regarding Dan Quayle, I think it is quite irrelevant when so many marriages are failing due to lack of jobs and drugs. Most kids end up without two functioning parents not because they were born "out of wedlock."
In my immediate neighborhood in San Francisco, in the last ten years, at least three highly traditional Catholic families with four or more children have divorced. (I'm not Catholic, but I live in a Catholic neighborhood.) In one case, the mother became addicted to meth. In another, they lost their house during the financial crisis when they became over leveraged on their mortgage. In a third, their corner store business failed during covid and the parents divorced. In that family, one of the children recently became addicted to drugs and was killed in a shoot out with the police a few days ago.
So, no, I don't buy the argument that this is all caused by "out of wedlock" births.
The black illegitimacy rate is 70-80%. The white illegitimacy rate has also soared. Just the facts. You don't have to like them. Check out "family" (https://www.pbs.org/fmc/book/4family10.htm). Is America's "only" problem "out of wedlock" births. No, but it is a big one.
Well all those kids are no longer locked under their parents’ marriages. So maybe it’s not just out of wedlock births but also out of wedlock lives. Of the children. Easy access to hardcore drugs—liberalization. Overleveraged mortgage—promoted by liberal borrowing polices and their own feckless decision; lockdown to COVID—again liberal Democrat policies. I see a pattern here. Liberal policies induce divorce and cause instability among the young ones leading to maladaptive strategies for coping.
The success of Asian-Americans in American life isn’t a ‘story’, it is a fact. Asian-Americans have better (better than whites) SAT scores, ACT scores, years of education, grades, arrest rates, imprisonment rates, murder rates, household income, personal income, family income, obesity rates, life-expectancy, illegitimacy rates, family stability, etc. What does the word ‘fact’ mean to you? I know, “an inconvenient truth that I can ignore whenever it conflicts with my PC religion”. But facts are part of what is real. What does ‘real’ mean to you. Clearly, nothing related to reality. I get that AA success makes the PC religion of ‘racism’, ‘structural racism’, etc. look sort of lame. Get over it.
Asian Americans had to score 140 points higher than white students to have the same chance of admission to private schools in a Princeton University study.
“The second study — co-authored by Princeton researcher Thomas Espenshade, in 2009 — found that Asian American students needed, on average, SAT scores 140 points higher than white applicants’ scores in order to get into elite colleges.”
You obviously know little about finance and go straight to tech.
Asians and Asian Americans still face discrimination in the tech workforce despite their education and testing.
“Government investigations into the question of whether tech companies discriminate against Asian Americans have led to divergent outcomes. “In 2016 the U.S. Department of Labor found that Palantir Technologies Inc., the defense contractor and data mining firm, received more than 130 applications for a quality assurance engineer job. About 73% were from Asian people, yet the company hired just four Asian applicants and 17 non-Asian. The department filed suit, alleging discrimination. “The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion,” a complaint read. A year later, Palantir agreed to pay a $1.66 million settlement but didn’t admit any liability. In February, Google paid $3.8 million to settle a Labor Department lawsuit that in part alleged it had discriminated against Asian applicants for software engineering jobs. But last year, Oracle Corp. prevailed in a similar suit.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-06/why-silicon-valley-s-asian-americans-still-feel-like-a-minority
I’m waiting for when the conservatives white people posting all over Wesley’s piece start arguing white IQ and test scores versus Asian Americans.
Yes, Thomas Espenshade has found discrimination against Asians. So has Peter Arcidiacono. See "Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions" (https://www.nber.org/papers/w27068). The abstract reads
"Detecting racial discrimination using observational data is challenging because of the presence of unobservables that may be correlated with race. Using data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard case, we estimate discrimination in a setting where this concern is mitigated. Namely, we show that there is a substantial penalty against Asian Americans in admissions with limited scope for omitted variables to overturn the result. This is because (i) Asian Americans are substantially stronger than whites on the observables associated with admissions and (ii) the richness of the data yields a model that predicts admissions extremely well. Our preferred model shows that Asian Americans would be admitted at a rate 19% higher absent this penalty. Controlling for one of the primary channels through which Asian American applicants are discriminated against--the personal rating--cuts the Asian American penalty by less than half, still leaving a substantial penalty. "
Racism is OK as long as it is 'good' racism (anti-white, anti-Asian). Otherwise it is 'bad' racism.
Of course, the number of Asian-Americans at the top is relatively low. It takes decades to reach the top of any organization. That includes finance. That includes Congress. Jews (who have been in the US considerably longer) are over-represented.
Now the excuses for low representation despite outstanding achievement come from an underperforming yet over represented group. Decades? Asian Americans have been in the USA for more than a century. How many more decades is reasonable to tolerate a glass ceiling?
You have sunk to a new low (which is somewhat amazing). In 1910, the Asian-American population was just 147,000. In 1960, it was 980,000. In 2019, it was 22.4 million. Keep on digging a bigger hole. Keep on digging. Never give up.
Yes, white liberals / leftists do discriminate against Asian-Americans. They don't discriminate on behalf of themselves. They do it because they have to (to maintain AA).
According to your “facts” the elite universities and top notch finance jobs should be dominated by Asian Americans. They aren’t. There goes your argument. Thanks for dropping the old school terms “PC” and “Asian-American”.
Yes, it is a fact that elite universities are (strongly) biased against Asians (including Asian-Americans). Perhaps you have never heard of the Harvard and UNC cases. Let me give you a quote (you won't like it, but it is real).
“Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.”
Racism is very real in the USA. Your preferred kind of racism.
As for finance, Asian (including Asian-Americans) go into other fields. Perhaps I should mention that Caltech is 44% Asian. MIT is 'only' 32% Asian.
Well, he is discussing facts. Vietnamese refugees really did do well in school, and countries such as Taiwan have better educational systems than we do. I lived in Taiwan. We could learn a lot from them.
Peter Shaeffer, the problem with Haiti is the two centuries of naval blockades, coups, invasions, assassinations, and support of dictatorships including their death squads by France and the United States to extract wealth from the Haitians. This was often done at the behest of wealthy individuals and corporations. The history of this is easy to find online and from some good books.
The last significant ‘naval blockade’ of Haiti was 210 years ago. You do know what a century is? Clue it is 100 years. In 1991, that elected government of Haiti was overthrown by a domestic military coup. The US sent troops to restore the elected government. Hardly an invasion. In 1994, the UN authorized the use of force to restore the elected government of Haiti. Quote from “Intervention in Haiti, 1994–1995” (https://history.state.gov/milestones/1993-2000/haiti).
“General Hugh Shelton, commander of the invasion force, was transformed enroute to Haiti from commander to diplomat, charged with working out a peaceful transition of power. Shelton and Cedras met on September 20, 1994, to begin the process, and Aristide returned to Haiti on October 15”.
From 1915 to 1934, the US maintained troops in Haiti. The US sent troops to Haiti, in response to recurring instability in that country. The period of US control was one of stability and prosperity. The US built roads, while we controlled Haiti. Predictably, the roads collapsed after the US left.
How about a country that was invaded and had the worst famine in world history. The same country then waged war on its own institutions of higher education. That would be the country with the highest PISA scores in the world.
How about a country that was invaded by at least two armies, one of which still occupies the country. This country has no natural resources and very rugged terrain. The country lives in a bad part of the world with very hostile neighbors. Should I mention that this country was ruled by military until 1988 (off and on). This much beleaguered country has some of the best schools in the world.
I can think of a country that has been successfully invaded. Been recently subjected to a long (and successful) naval blockade. Had all of it major cities burned to ground. Nuked twice. Had military coups. Of course, this country has huge storms and is seismically quite active and has large active volcanoes.
This country also has great schools (some of the highest PISA scores in the world). Which makes your excuses for Haiti look ridiculous.
After helping it to re-industrialize by deliberately shipping American industry to it and using it as a giant depot during the Korean War, Japan did great economically didn't it?
(Taking a long breath) After clear cutting its forest to pay France off for the lost of its "property" or slaves and only paying France off after the Second World War under constant threat of blockade, being actively denied investment by the American government from the revolt at the behest of the Southern elites because of their being black, having its gold reserves stolen, several military invasions, multiple American instigated coups including the last, and active support of dictators like François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Haiti has done not well like Japan. The country, unlike Japan, has never been able to fight off occupation and economic exploitation.
The Korean war was in the late 40s / early 50s. Japan's great growth came later. In real life (not your fantasy world), Haiti debt to France was tiny ($11.5 or around $5-6 per-capita).
The real problem with Haiti’s debt wasn’t the magnitude (which was trivial, even by the standards of the day) but Haiti’s inability to pay it. Why? Because Haiti’s money economy more or less disappeared after independence. Stated differently, Haiti abandoned its formal (export oriented) economy and reverted to subsistence agriculture. Subsistence agriculture doesn’t produce hard currency exports.
Japan's great growth happened because of the base created by the Korean War and the country only has had to endure one invasion.
After a horrific revolution fought to free themselves from slavery from which France demanded reparations for its lost property, which was the Haitians them selves, Haiti then enjoy almost routine economic and government disruption for two centuries by the United States and France.
As for exports, sugarcane growing is so hard, they imported enslaved Africans to do the work. I am sure why this is so hard to see.
I looked this up. Japan's literacy rate in 1945 was greater than Haiti today. I think 1945 is before the Korean war. Does math and history work differently for you? The economic growth or Japan before WWII and after WWII has been extensively studied. Strangely enough the Korean war doesn't show up in the actual numbers. See "Lessons from the Japanese Miracle: Building the Foundations for a New Growth Paradigm" (https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a04003/).
Haiti is the richest nation in the world... At least measured by excuses and foreign apologists.
How about a country that was invaded by at least two armies, one of which still occupies the country. This country has no natural resources and very rugged terrain. The country lives in a bad part of the world with very hostile neighbors. Should I mention that this country was ruled by military until 1988 (off and on). This much beleaguered country has some of the best schools in the world.
Haiti is a rough case. When the US entered, there were no protests and people ate better. Say what you will about Papa Doc, but people could build houses and earn money to feed their children.
The worst crime against Haiti was the imposition of democracy before they were ready. The US needs to give that shit up before it kills them. Be happy to fix your own country, but with Haiti, blame the US a little until the 1990's.
US interventions were worse in Panama, but they had a social fabric upon which to build. Haiti is a really complex setup, and most histories are just sad anti-American, racist garbage that treats Haitians like children.
I don't think Haitians (Africans) and French (Europeans) mixed a great deal before (or after) the revolution (unlike the one-way mixing of America slaves and their white owners). Therefore, present-day Haitians could be expected to have mean IQs pretty much in line with their African progenitors. Somewhere in the 70-75 range wouldn't surprise me, whereas 85—the mean IQ of American blacks at approx. 20% white admixture—would be highly unexpected (unless I've got my history wrong).
Correct. What is it with white europeans that are obsessed with thinking that all people are created equal and there are no racial differences? I know many americans were conned and lied to and told we are all equal, but I think some percentage of people would think that way even if we werent indoctrinated with the lie. Other countries and races can see the truth and believe other races are different in IQ, what is it about westerns who can't see the obvious?
If it was accepted that genes play a critical role in group outcomes, then the vast gravy train of left-wing activism built on the false claim that only the environment matters, would come to a stop. And very powerful interest groups in Western societies will NEVER allow this.
Not only does this not challenge anything that I said, it could be suggested that two centuries of economic warfare against a society might produce bad health outcomes; I would also suggest that you state where you got such a figure since such an average level of intelligence would mean that a large number of Haitians would not only be incapable of taking care of themselves, many would be incapable of talking or basic hygiene.
Don't think so. I quoted an IQ number for Haiti with which you were outraged—so was I when I first learned of it—and you then challenged me to source my data. I refuse to divulge that info as I'm loath to engage in the tiresome "Mismeasure of Man" debunking that would then be necessary to address your sputtering rage and incoherence.
The good news is that I'm fully in agreement with you that Haitians, due to their extremely low average IQ, are totally unable to take care of themselves as they've amply demonstrated over the last, what, 223 years. Of course, things could turn around tomorrow, they could learn to speak English, and showers and baths might become a thing...I just wouldn't bet on it.
studies showing democracy only really works with a population with an average IQ over 90, Average IQ in Haiti is around 67. Maybe all of those reasons you stated were propaganda. You should study IQ and genetics too and then decide which one is the contributing factor.
How about a country that was invaded and had the worst famine in world history? The same country then waged war on its own institutions of higher education. That would be the country with the highest PISA scores in the world.
This is a profoundly thought-provoking and candidly written essay. It simply lays bare what all teachers know. The issue, of course, is not about race. It's about culture. For instance:
"When ‘Black’ & ‘Hispanic’ Students Outscore ‘Asian’ & ‘White’ Students on the ACT, Nobody Notices"
As a lifelong teacher (special ed., high school, and college), I can attest to the fact that milder and less violent versions of these incidents occur even in well-funded suburban schools, and in selective liberal arts colleges. It's a matter of degree, not kind. In the end, teaching is a two-way street. Half of the responsibility for success (or failure) belongs to the student. The best teacher in the world cannot force information into the brain of a student who is ill prepared — intellectually, emotionally, or behaviorally — to learn. Conversely, students who want to learn will not be stymied by a poor teacher.
Thank you for this very important essay. Sincerely, Frederick
It is definitely culture. Africans and West Indians and their children absolutely demolish non-immigrant Black Americans when it comes to education. If it was about genetics like those “race scientists” say, it would be the other way around. The majority of Black Ivy Leaguers are immigrants and their descendants, despite them only being a small part of Black Americans.
I don't follow the logic of this. Couldn't African immigrants just be brighter by virtue of self-selection i.e. brighter people are more likely to emigrate or to be let in?
What I think you'll find as a common denominator in these families that do well in school is that they are generally two-parent families, regardless of how "smart" they are, and regardless of the reasons that they immigrated here.
This is true, but then their children, who are born here, still maintain this academic excellence. This success is generational and fasts far longer than just the original wave of immigration.
Which might support a biological component to intelligence is what friendlybombs was suggesting ie intelligence is (partially) heritable. This is of course unknowable solely by looking at the situation we see currently. You can't disentangle cultural from biological impacts. The self selecting within the African and West Indian populations for emigration if it is based on intelligence, could be culturally based or biologically based or both.
It's not culture, it is selection bias, and black immigrant Americans are still significantly lower as a group than white Americans, much less Asians. Pretty sure their average IQ is significantly less, too.
I write a lot regarding discipline and changes to the discipline policies here at our schools in Evanston IL. One major thing that has changed the last few years is the administration absolving themselves of any responsibility when it comes to this. Even in the IL legislature they passed SB10 designed to keep kids in the classroom, no matter what. At this point, teachers cant kick out kids unless the child is literally doing arson. Its a big issue designed to protect politically connected admins, at the cost of teachers and kids. All done in the name of “social justice”. Parents here have given up on the admin and just call the cops at this point...
Example: here in Evanston we had a kid at the middle school who tricked another kid into eating an edible. The victim ended up in the hospital. The next day, the offending student was back in the classroom because the paperwork required to suspend a student ensures that no students are suspended ever. We went from 138 suspensions to 2 in a span of two years. Those two involved students bringing firearms. Neither was expelled. The Administration all takes the win for solving discipline issues but teachers and parents are left with no recourse but to *call the cops*
“Social justice” means eliminating disparate outcomes. So, what used to be regarded as essential practices until about ten minutes ago such as standardized tests, meritocratic criteria, and effective *school discipline* are made to disappear. You see, disciplining students, including expelling them when necessary to preserve a learning environment, affects blacks disproportionately. The “school to prison pipeline”, we can’t have that you see. What an odd, perverted sense of “justice” is social justice.
The tricky part of admitting the real problem is explaining why they’ve wasted so many years and billions of dollars on solutions that obviously weren’t working and they should have known weren’t going to work.
The whole K-12 education consultant industry would fall apart overnight.
Note almost all the consultants are rich white ladies, often married to very powerful white men. They have been looting urban schools for two decades. It is beyond any concept of evil. These monsters brag about how they "dedicate their lives to the children" when they fly private jets from city to city giving seminars and selling videos. I had the misfortune of knowing one. Her husband was cool (and insanely wealthy), but he told me she used her money "for clothes and travel." She made close to eight figures off of urban school districts. Yikes. Anyone moderately in Hillary Clinton's sphere of influence knows who I mean.
The number of patients I saw in medical school and residency who were barely literate -- often elementary school level -- was shocking. It really is tragic.
Meanwhile, I taught English at a public school in rural Thailand right after college. In absolute terms, the students must have been more impoverished than the students in this piece. The school definitely expended far fewer dollars per child compared to American schools, probably by orders of magnitude. But the kids were absolutely lovely and respectful, both to me and to each other. There was some naughtiness, sure, but I never saw physical violence of any kind aside from the occasional wack from a teacher’s ruler (note, this was around 16+ years ago, so social media, and screens in general, had not yet poisoned their minds. Things may be worse now).
The kids who put in the effort were getting a decent enough education and going to college. Others dropped out, but that’s better than forcing disruptive, uninterested students to stay in the classroom. They generally would go on to farming, factories, warehouses, etc., and would be more or less fine.
Not sure what the takeaway from this anecdote is, other than: it’s the culture, stupid. How do you repair a broken culture? Unfortunately, for all of our societal wealth and education and technology, we have no good answer to that question. So we choose not to ask it.
Facts about Thailand can be easily found. It is a typical middle-income country. Not that poor and not that rich. Thailand has a gini coefficient of 34.9 (comparable to France), which is lower than the US. Life expectancy is 79.3 year which is relatively high. Unemployment is very low. A good way of understanding Thailand is 50% (per-capita) of France.
“The analysis also finds that with an income Gini coefficient of 43.3 percent in 2019, Thailand has the highest income inequality rate in the East Asia and Pacific region. For rural households, the average monthly income was only around 68 percent of urban households. Rural households also continue to suffer from low education, a large number of dependents, and difficult living conditions.”
“A 2016 study from Thammasat University concluded that 80 per cent of the land is owned by the richest 5 per cent, while Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report showed that more than two-thirds of the country’s assets is controlled by the richest 1 per cent. On top of this, inequality in Thailand, like in many countries, has been exacerbated by climate change and technological transformation. Increasing incidents of floods and droughts have destroyed crops and depressed the income of farmers, while looming disruptions in various industries have led to factories shutting down and workers losing their jobs.”
If you are going to make stuff up, try to be a bit more clever about it. Here is what the World Bank actually said about Thailand
"BANGKOK, October 21, 2022 – Thailand has made remarkable progress in reducing poverty from 58 percent in 1990 to 6.8 percent in 2020 driven by high growth rates and structural transformation, however 79 percent of the poor remain in rural areas and mainly in agricultural households, according to a Rural Income Diagnostic launched by the World Bank today."
Of course, you are wrong about Thailand's Gini coefficient as well. FRED series SIPOVGINITHA shows a fall from 45.3 in 1990 to 35.1 in 2021. Let me quote 'facts don't care about your feelings'.
Maybe you should try facts (which would be hard for you). The Asian Development Bank shows that rural poverty fell from over 70% in 1988 to well under 10% in 2019. See "Predicting Poverty Using Geospatial Data" (https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/666711/ewp-630-predicting-poverty-geospatial-data-thailand.pdf) Figure 1. Remember two things. First, facts are real things even if you don't like them. Second, facts don't care about your feelings.
“In a study published recently, researchers from ADB extended the conventional small area poverty estimation framework by tapping geospatial data extracted from daytime and nighttime imagery through machine learning algorithms to create granular poverty maps of the Philippines and Thailand (ADB 2020, Hofer et al. 2020). The adopted method was inspired specifically by Jean et al. (2016) which was further used and/or enhanced in subsequent studies (e.g., Babenko et al. 2017; Tingzon et al. 2019; Heitmann and Buri 2019; Yeh et al. 2020). These studies fall under the strand of literature that broadly aim to explore applications of artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques for estimating poverty. However, as hinted earlier, this methodology has several technical issues. First, validating aberrant or unexpected predictions becomes challenging because of the fact that the features being used to correlate poverty are abstract. Second, instead of directly predicting poverty, the method employs an intermediate step wherein an algorithm is first trained to predict the intensity of night lights. The intermediate step is necessary in this context because sources of night light data, particularly satellite imagery, are readily accessible and can cost-effectively provide large volumes of labelled images on which to train a computer vision algorithm, something that cannot be easily done if we were to predict poverty outright since readily available poverty data are not quite granular. Using data on night lights as a proxy for poverty during the intermediate step is arguably valid if it is assumed that places that are brighter at night are less poor than those places that are less well lit. However, if there are places that are equally lit but show varying levels of poverty on the ground, such an intermediate step could potentially lead to loss of vital information by not predicting poverty outright.”
Having lived there and in China and in Taiwan, the worst inequality is in China, by a mile. The most equal countries in my opinion are Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Thailand probably looks bad because the rest of East Asia have shit statistics outside of Singapore and Malaysia. Laos, Cambodia and Burma -- no one has a clue. Even with Vietnam it is hard to trust their data. I would believe Malaysian data, and Northeast Asian data is better than US.
I would say Thailand was better than the US, but worse than somewhere like Taiwan or Korea.
they also have an old, strong Buddhist culture. I spent time there and my wife is from there. I converted to Buddhism. There is still a massive corruption problem, but whoa could their children run circles around ours.
Thailand is way less violent than inner city America, and they execute bad guys. The police also tend to kill instead of put cuffs on. It is a really nice place.
I was also in TFA, significantly earlier than you, 1997-1999 teaching 3rd & 5th grade innercity Houston TX. It is creepy how similar my experience was. I would sit in my car absolutely dreading getting out and starting the day. My 5th grade class was 33 large fifth graders and of course as a new teacher i had all the kids the two other veteran teachers didnt want. (There were three fifth grade classes, one gifted class, one ESL class - well behaved kids of immigrants, and i got the leftovers) What made me feel the absolutely shittiest was the one or two students from stable families who really wanted to learn but i was too busy stopping kids from fighting to pay them much attention. That crushed me inside. I think i've actually blocked out much of my time with those 5th graders. At the end of my two years (I still cant believe i made it, but to be fair my 3rd graders were slightly less traumatizing) I learned simply how little the teacher mattered. Like you I could write a long essay about how naive some of ideas behind TFA were.
I also did TFA 97-99. Trained in Houston then went to Cali. l had a similar first year. Teaching in these environments are more like the starfish on the beach story. Realistically, a teacher can make a difference with a few students each year. I’m still teaching 26 years later.
TFA and similar programs like Citizen schools are led by either wilfully ignorant people or naive fools.
I remember and ex girlfriend was in Citizen schools and on her first week or teaching in inner city Houston a ~11 year old boy commented on her "nice ass Ms. Teacher"
Year Zero is terrifying. I’m a big proponent of choice and parental rights, but stories like this underscore how futile these efforts are.
In lily-white suburban suburban CT parents have willingly handed to public schools all responsibility for educating kids. I’ve talk to upper-middle class parents who think schools should provide their kids free breakfast and lunch because they’re too busy to make it. I talked to a grandma who lamented her third grade grandchild can’t read. She surmises that even though she’s given the child a library’s worth of beginner Dr. Suess books, her son has never read to his child.
And then there’s this. Yesterday I was in our local FedEx. A late-teen early twenty something guy came in to ship a blank box. No address. When the attendant asked for the recipient and address, the kid asked why she needed that information. The contents? A gender reveal test for the baby he and his girlfriend were having.
I don’t know what the answer is, but we’d better come up with one quickly.
My son was a TFA teacher. My son is not a white man. His experience in the DC public schools was 100% like that described above. The rules and regulations of TFA made it impossible to actually reach and teach these children.
These classrooms are not teaching platforms, but breeding grounds for the Lord of the Flies culture that progressives want, so that they can present themselves as the saviors of the oppressed (the great white hopes).
The single most important reform would be to bring back routine expulsion. Remove the Justins of this world, and learning becomes possible. The problem is that those expelled would be disproportionately from certain demographics and nobody wants to face the consequences (political, economic and social) of doing what is needed. It is a particularly painful irony that those who screech the loudest about helping minorities, are the same ones keeping the troublemakers in classrooms, that are totally ruining the prospects of the 90% of kids who are actually educable, even in the bleakest environments.
"There are plenty of negative things I could say about Mrs. Holmes as a teacher. I honestly doubt her kids learned much more than mine, despite the relative tranquility of her classroom. Still, for two years, she was my savior. I can’t even remember the number of times she had abandoned her classroom and come to my rescue, appearing suddenly at the back of the class and silencing the storm with a mere “Excuse me!”."
She sounds pretty cool tbh. I hope she convinced you to convert to Christianity.
Imagine what it might take to gain enough control over these classrooms to actually teach something to these kids. Probably talking about extreme measures like classroom police, authority to discipline these children in ways the author would find very uncomfortable: running the school like a prison, low tolerance for disruptive behavior, forgetting about concerns surrounding "disparate treatment", ignoring parent's complaints about "picking on my kid" (also happens in white schools btw). Sounds harsh right? But allowing the wild and terrible environment described by the author seems like a much greater evil perpetrated on these kids.
Instead we'll hire coordinators and curriculum directors and bloated state make-work officers to play with numbers and propose useless programs because we can't stomach what is necessary.
Don't know why they can't grab the kid by the ear and drag him down to the principal's office for a sound paddling. Boys, I mean; don't know what you do with seriously disruptive girls, but in my day (I'm 82, from a small town in Oklahoma) they didn't seem to exist. Received two paddlings in high school, both times for not stowing my gym shoes properly. On the whole a good thing. Learned it was important to pay attention and follow the gym teacher's instructions. Don't know any boy of my place and generation that, in retrospect, objected to a little physical discipline. We weren't all bright and of an angelic nature, by any means, but there was order in the classroom. Of course, one mantra from most parents: You get in trouble with the teachers at school, you are in bigger trouble once you get home.
I don't think this is necessarily true, I think you also have to consider culture.
I come from a family of Sicilian immigrants and I doubt any of them would have blown the roof off an IQ test.
But they came from a culture with pretty rigid rules and roles: EVERYONE worked, saved, supported their families, obeyed standard behavioral norms, took one small step at a time up the ladder to the nice middle-class existence they passed down to their children and grandchildren.
Modern Americans are so deracinated that they forget the vital importance of ROOTS, and how people rooted in stable famiies and communities can usually create decent lives for themselves, as long as they're guided and supported by others.
And back then discrimination against Italians wasn't just hypothetical. A good example, is the life of Mario M. Cuomo. He graduated first in his class from law school and couldn't get a job with any New York City firm. Of course, he did become Governor of the State of New York (1983-1995).
I really question this. I have not experience law, but I worked in finance, and they only care about intelligence and drive. Men I respect told me the Anglo/Jew firm thing was gone by the 1950's. The men telling me this were Irish and Italian Catholics who grew up in New York (old and rich). I want to say both graduated from Columbia University in NYC.
My original source (for discrimination against Italian-Americans in the 1950s) was ‘National Review’. The NR article was about something entirely different. See “‘Fredo’ Is Not an Ethnic Slur” in the NR. The Wikipedia article for Mario Cuomo has the following words. Quote
“After his recovery, Cuomo gave up baseball and returned to St. John's University, earning his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1953. Deciding on a legal career, Cuomo attended St. John's University School of Law and graduated tied for first in his class in 1956. Cuomo clerked for Judge Adrian P. Burke of the New York Court of Appeals. Despite having been a top student, the ethnic prejudice of the time led to his rejection by more than 50 law firms before he was hired by a small but established office in Brooklyn.”
My original source (for discrimination against Italian-Americans in the 1950s) was ‘National Review’. The NR article was about something entirely different. See “‘Fredo’ Is Not an Ethnic Slur” in the NR. The Wikipedia article for Mario Cuomo has the following words. Quote
“After his recovery, Cuomo gave up baseball and returned to St. John's University, earning his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1953. Deciding on a legal career, Cuomo attended St. John's University School of Law and graduated tied for first in his class in 1956. Cuomo clerked for Judge Adrian P. Burke of the New York Court of Appeals. Despite having been a top student, the ethnic prejudice of the time led to his rejection by more than 50 law firms before he was hired by a small but established office in Brooklyn.”
Well, he attended a third-rate law school. Of course he would have trouble finding work. Even back then one needed to attend a prominent law school to obtain a good job out of school. This is not discrimination. He simply had bad credentials and needed to prove himself before anyone would hire him. The same is true today.
I would not describe St. John’s Law School as ‘third-rate’. It’s current rankings are well above average (68 out of 196) and it is quite expensive ($71K+). Graduating tied for first in his class is hardly a ‘bad credential’. As it turns out, I have read biographies of Richard Feynman. He encountered some discrimination against Jews in that period. To put this perspective, Yale only dropped it Jewish quota in the 1960s. Of course, now we have (pre-SC) quotas for Asians.
Human intelligence is the most studied subject in all of psychology, and IQ is the most empirically supported psychometric measurement there is.
It has its limitations, but it's not bunk. Not liking the results of the research has no bearing on the validity of the test or whether or not the results are true.
I am trashing psychology as a field. I am not a practitioner, but I use a bit of probability and statistics pretty frequently (more like daily twenty years ago). The papers I read are often just plain wrong conclusions, or they do very bad things that make their correlations super suspect.
I would agree that IQ stuff is the best in terms of conclusions, but I genuinely question the field of psychology. I have simply seen too much BS, and even when I helped friends working on a PhD, their idiot advisers told them to do incorrect analysis. I questioned myself and brought examples to guys whom I trust (tenured professors in math and a math genius in finance), and they confirmed what I had done, and upon my explanation simply rolled their eyes and said "leave social science alone." Okay, another guy said the same but specifically excluded economists because "some of them know what they are doing." I am no so sure about that last one, but it has an impact on me.
That just hit me like a ton a bricks. I tried to get more into it, but anything that looked solid was old (like 1960's). So many recent papers were really bad. I mean really, really bad. I just discount the entire field.
Also, if IQ is solid, it seems like there has been not that much research into drivers. I can see genetic inheritance (and I read one study about the impact (or non-impact) of schooling that was actually quite good). I feel like one could make a pretty strong case for IQ inheritability, but I would still trash psychology as a field, with IQ being an intelligent subject a few of those people stumbled upon in the dark.
It might be because a psychologist killed my father when I was a child.
IQ is relevant, but I doubt it was purely his IQ that drove Justin to commit murder.
These kids probably would have managed to not murder other people as adults if they had not had such living conditions in the first place. Perhaps only a very small % of them would have ended up at with a post-secondary education (or not--who knows?), but that's hardly needed to be at least moderately successful (as in having consistent employment of some kind and managing oneself without turning to a life of crime).
I can also tell you that my own family is an immigrant one, and we were not exactly a family of geniuses. But we're doing just fine because our culture values family, education, law, and order.
It does not require a genius level IQ to do fine. Simply an average IQ (you can do ok with an IQ of 95-100). What happens, however, when 50% of a population have an IQ < 85 or 25% of a population < 75? This is the severity of the problem at hand.
Criminals tend not to be high IQ, because IQ has a great deal to do with pattern recognition. A low-IQ person simply doesn't have the cognitive power to draw conclusions or connect cause with effect.
Compound that with frustration that they are constantly -tragically- being asked to do things (read, write, compute) of which they are simply not capable; the reasons for explosions in the classroom aren't hard to individuate. I wish I had a penny for every wasted word and delusional report shared amongst so-called educators on this score.
People simply refuse to acknowledge the importance of this variable or the magnitude of the differences among human populations.
In addition to intelligence, there's also other average personality, temperamental, physiological, and hormonal differences that almost certainly contribute to differences in outcomes and behavior among groups. Seriously, the expectation that we would see equitable outcomes among various groups has ALWAYS been a fantasy. It's ironic that the loudest advocates for diversity also want to claim that all groups are exactly the same. If we're all the same, what is it exactly that makes us diverse?
You would be as bad off as those kids if you grew up in those circumstances and in that neighborhood. Thinking there’s some magical “IQ” test taking ability that causes this is total bullshit.
Maybe not total BS, there may be a biological component to intelligence contrary to the "Blank Slate" proponents. However how you can disentangle the cultural and the biological components from the situation we see in impoverished communities is beyond me. What is clear is that these children are not reaching anywhere near their own full potential regardless of what their innate abilities might be, and are in fact so far below what they could accomplish it is a terrible loss to society.
It is a proven fact that the extraordinary success of Kenyan and Ethiopian distance runners is a due to a genetic predisposition.
If we can acknowledge that certain groups of people can run faster than others groups of people, why can we not acknowledge that certain groups of people can think faster than others groups of people?
No one is saying we can't acknowledge that intelligence may be (partially) heritable. What I am saying is that in the situation we are observing you can't disentangle what is biological and what is cultural, since both are operating here.
Actually, you are wrong. Forget heritability. On the left, many (most? all?) folks deny that intelligence even exists. Sadly, this is far from an extreme, hypothetical position. The California Department of Education has stated "We Reject Ideas of Natural Gifts and Talents". How crazy is that? Very crazy? It is also public policy.
Perhaps the cultural dysfunction is a result of the biological.
Since President Johnson's Great Society, untold billions have been spent trying to fix the problem....to no avail. Could it be a different approach is needed?
There are declines in gains when it comes to IQ and raw processing power, too, you know. It's not the be all, end all of outcomes though modern society does seem to underestimate the biological impacts. That doesn't mean it's "correct" to swing all the way in the opposite direction.
The only way you'd know is if you managed to uplift the living conditions to see what results. That's not going to happen without some pretty authoritarian controls in place, though, so it's probably a moot question. But it may be more fruitful to wonder if America should stop shipping low-level jobs overseas and keep them for their own citizens, as a start.
Actually, you're wrong about that. It's undeniably true that Kenyan and Ethiopian runners, as a group, do extraordinarily well in the world of competitive distance running. (The all-time fastest lists in distance events testify to this.) But it's also true that a specific subgroup of Kenyans, the Kalenjin, are responsible for most of Kenyan running greatness; the "average" Kenyan runner, not of that tribe, rates somewhat lower. I have seen no research that actually pinpoints a "great runner" gene in Kenyans or Ethiopians--and I've been looking. Please share this research, if you're able. Finally, it's indisputable that Kenyan and Ethiopian predominance in distance running events has a great deal to do with running culture in those two countries. The same thing is true with table tennis in China. (I'm a competitor in both sports.) The Chinese domination of elite level table tennis is as overwhelming as Kenyan/Ethiopian dominance in distance running. Nobody has suggested that the Chinese benefit from a table tennis gene.
Someone with a name of Greenberg advocating to acknowledge certain ethnic groups of people are genetically predisposed to _____ wasn’t on my bingo card.
Consider that the children Mr.Evans was attempting to teach are now long out of school. What are they up to now, capable of, what can they be doing beside perpetuating the cycle that trapped them before birth?
Recent studies have shown that regarding developed countries, you can predict a population/ethnic groups IQ to 93-98% accuracy from approximately 1,200 gene alleles. See:
"Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data" https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/5
The gaps in average IQ in developed countries is down to genetics, not environment. In developing countries part of it is environmental due to living conditions, as those populations have not gone through the Flynn effect.
I think if you wanted to find one common denominator between all these kids, it would be single-parent homes (or just generally fractured family situations) to a large extent. And I sincerely doubt that being born with the capacity for a high IQ would save any of them in that situation - but it may make them better criminals.
So in that sense, it's definitely cultural. Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm in the '60s when he saw that 24% of black families were fatherless. Well now it's more like 75% and we can see that no one listened to him then.
That 75% stat is across all blacks, including the wealthy black suburbs of Atlanta and other cities. Urban cores all over the USA, however, show rates of black illegitimacy routinely approaching 100%.
That's a good point. The 25% of black kids that live with both of their parents are likely never a problem in the schools. In fact, they're probably the ones in university and in professional and management positions.
Problem is that it’s not true. Psychometric scores are not central or determinative of human potential in the way you are suggesting. And your implicit claim about the genetic inferiority of black people is also not supported.
There are plenty of exceptions, but they require the adult(s) in your life to put the wellbeing of their children & determination to better their circumstances ahead of everything else.
We aren't even close to hitting genetic limits on intelligence in most schools. This is like looking at two fields of corn, noting that one is taller and assuming that field had better seed stock, when they were both the same seeds, but the farmer only had enough fertilizer for one field.
Just an FYI. Baltimore Public Schools spends about $16k/student. In 2022, 93% of 3rd-8th graders could not do math at grade level. Out of the 150 public schools in Baltimore, 23 of those schools did not have a single student proficient in math. ZERO STUDENTS out of 23 schools. An additional 20 schools only had 1 or 2 students proficient in math. 41% of Baltimore public high school students earned below a 1.0 GPA.
The average number of students in a Baltimore school is 500 students. 43 schools at $16k/student comes to about $345 million. So, for $345m in taxpayer funds, Baltimore Public Schools produces about 30 students who can do grade level math in nearly 1/3 of all of their schools.
"BALTIMORE (WBFF) — Baltimore City Schools will be spending about $21,000 per student this year, thanks to a massive education funding increase. Maryland lawmakers passed the bill, known as Kirwan, two years ago. Now that funding is kicking in, the question is whether more taxpayer money will result in better student outcomes.
For this coming school year, City Schools’ budget has ballooned to $1,620,788,542. That’s nearly $230 million more than the previous year’s budget of $1,393,777,695. It amounts to about a 16 percent increase. Enrollment in City Schools is going down and has been for years. So, that’s a lot more money for fewer students."
It's really kind of hilarious that anyone thinks "City X spends Y thousands per student and only x% can read" is somehow a failure of cause and effect.
They are spending the money because they are required to, not becuase they signed a paper saying "and with this money we'll teach them how to read."
But you consider it a waste of money because in your opinion, the kids aren't learning. What if the scores would be much lower if the money weren't spent?
Sure, but you don't know where the money is spent because, as I said, schools aren't given the money to improve test scores. So you might start there. Once you find out that we're spending $50-100K on some kids for federal requirements, and spending millions on refuge and immigrant kids dumped on the k-12 system whether or not they've ever been educated before, you could definitely see ways that we could save money but it would require unspooling a ton of federal law.
I'm curious how much money is spent on those schools despite how disfunctional they are. Where is it going? If kids are really going hungry it seems like the first thing to be done is to feed them a decent breakfast and lunch.
Yeah I would like to find some people who've done some investigations. But the schools are paypigs for political clients and there's always ample money for consultants and training while the basics are not present and student outcomes don't matter at all.
May 21, 2023·edited May 21, 2023Liked by Wesley Yang
My husband taught elementary school for 18 years and was fired from his job because he broke up a fight. The school district has made sure that he can't get back into teaching anywhere. His job was actually taken out from under him. It's a pity because he taught Kindergarten through Third grade. By the end of his time there, at this one particular school, it had been through three principals and almost a complete turn over of faculty. He was demoted until they found a way to oust him. They fired him just before Christmas with no investigation in 2018. His specialty was teaching reading in the lower grades.
The school was eventually shut down because of corruption.
It's pretty well documented the kids throw the food away unless it's junk food. And these high poverty schools don't as a rule get a bunch of money for consultants. That money comes when a superintendent has decided on a school improvement plan.
And there's literally tons of research on this topic.
It’s an excellent thing to do, get some actual food into these kids that if not the sleep, quiet study place, and pro social attitudes that are associated with good education
I grew up in Indianapolis which has a higher per capita murder rate than Chicago (that’s from 2021, our per capita rate has never been great despite sleepy depictions of midwestern cities.) The new school choice movement isn’t bad, but it wont have the significant impact that many proponets insist it will. I can tell you from first-hand experience that the ONLY thing that can make a significant difference is two-parent homes. Period. I know it sounds like an over-simplification of a complex problem but I can assure you it is not. I am a child raised by a single mother whom I love and respect, but women CANNOT do it all, and more importantly, they should not have to.
I don’t disagree with anything you said, but I want to point out that the purpose of school choice for these kids is mostly triage.
One badly behaved kid can keep every other kid in the classroom from learning anything. They aren’t going to learn anything either way in that state, all they can do is keep all the other kids from learning.
Allowing schools to sort by need, and kick out kids that are unmanageable, is a sad but necessary step to help the kids that can be helped.
A wise person pointed out that the desirability of two-parent families is evidenced by one key fact: that compassionate well educated people who will defend both single parent homes and the public policies that make them more common will themselves make great sacrifices to marry and stay married to assure their own children's success.
Parents vote with their feet. I live in a mid-sized city in the rust belt. When my oldest reached kindergarten age we asked to visit some public schools. One look at the classroom chaos at a local public school (and a "magnet school" at that!) was enough to make me say to my wife that our kids would be better off sitting at home watching television all day than going there.
A private school in SF has an unwritten policy to not accept public school transfers after the 4th grade. “They are spoiled” by that time and will destroy the learning dynamic of the class.
A few years back the school district in San Francisco started an initiative to transfer kids "with learning problems," from their school to another one (a magnet school) on the other side of town. Needless to say, the effect was disastrous. Guess what, there was no theoretical "trickle down" of intelligence and discipline. The good students got beat up and the teachers harassed. And, the school district went full ballistic on the entire community saying we were not accepting enough. I wonder how long it takes the teachers union/school district to come up with these genius ideas.
Allowing schools to sort by need rather than just kick out the unmanageable is totally unnecessary and far more expensive. Choice is a moronic way to sort out the kids who want to learn.
It's a moronic way, and also the only way.
That opinion is hardly realist. The article is evidence for the need to separate out the unmanageable. You provide no evidence nor logic for your opinion. Now THAT’s what a moron does.
Choice is a moronic way? Please, please explain that logic if you can.
School choice and homeschooling are the only ways parents who are not ideologically bound to the failed ideology of the education establishment - administrators, university education departments, and teachers' unions combined can get their children out of that awful system. I speak as 27 year veteran teacher in public schools, including 22 in the Los Angeles Unified School District with 5 years experience as my school's union rep. What's your experience?
My experience is similar. I’m extremely grateful that, after my parents’ sad, acrimonious, doomed marriage was finally concluded in court my mom and her parents sacrificed a great deal so my sister and I could attend a good suburban school district (this was not a marriage which could’ve been salvaged; my dad was a severe alcoholic and heavy smoker who had major mood swings and outbursts of anger and violence, and was, I was told later, a deeply-closeted gay or bisexual man, who was likely simply trying to do his best to fit the role and live the life expected of someone born in a small, socially conservative, Midcentury town).
Materially and in family support and status we definitely felt “less-than”. We were probably easily in the bottom five percent or lower of families in the district in income and so-called wealth. We seemed to be virtually the only single-parent family. The very, very few families in which the parents had divorced or one parent had been lost to a tragic illness appeared to have almost instantly generated a new parent and sealed up hermetically again into financially comfortable, high-functioning units. My mom never really risked dating, let alone remarried, in large part because she’d been so burned, the consequences for us of introducing another unstable personality or someone with less than pure motives into our lives was so high, and mostly because she simply didn’t have the time or energy or focus to do more than work full-time at the local library and care for us. I never had a good answer for all the kids (and parents) who asked me: “So what does your dad do?” I didn’t really know. The last I’d seen him, at ten, an already fraught custody visit had deteriorated into a half-hearted kidnapping from which a family friend had to negotiate our release. We didn’t find out he’d died until receiving the obligatory letter from his sisters’ lawyer, after the fact. There was nothing left to us, not even some old mementos from our childhood.
We missed out on a lot of what our classmates seemed to take as given. Both materially and in terms of connections and opportunities, but also in terms of having any kind of a male role model virtually at all. The hard-charging father of one high school friend whose family significantly supported the debate team on which we were both active (and for which I depended on scholarships to be able to attend the Summer camps hosted by a major university) went out of his way to make it clear he considered me - less confident, unsure how to “play the game” - a loser it was better to avoid.
But those sacrifices my mom and her parents made meant we attended safe schools full of kids with highly-credentialed, high-achieving parents who expected them to excel. We attended classes with kids who mostly had no interest or even idea how to get into serious trouble. For the most part, they really wanted to learn, which was all we really wanted, too. Aside from occasional and relatively mild bullying, I didn’t have to fear being at or going to and from school. We were wildly naive about the behind the scenes machinations some more ambitious parents engaged in to further advantage their kids. But, as hard as it was socially and emotionally to grow up with virtually only a single mom straining to provide all family support and structure, I appreciate the relative stability of our little three-person family pod.
What’s undoubtedly true, nonetheless, is that we only received one kind of parenting: the mom role. And that’s not remotely a knock on the mom who would do her best to “pitch” me tennis balls in our little front yard. She was the only adult who ever did. We still had an enormous hole in our family, in our young, developing lives, in our idea of what a responsible, committed, competent, but caring man was even like. I’ve read that for a boy, especially, growing up without a dad is a little like trying to navigate a long and challenging course without any kind of map. You simply don’t know how to do certain things, how to carry yourself, and you have no one to ask.
But I’ll echo the final point above: Single moms who sacrifice their own free time and leisure interests to do as much as they can possibly manage for their kids, to provide for, and comfort, and parent and guide their kids, are absolute heroes.
But we’re asking far too much, and now in far too many families, from one often badly-strained, burdened parent who is being asked to perform two complimentary, balanced roles.
I wish there were books compiling stories like your own. And maybe offering advice for how to speak about these things in a culture so beaten down by virtue signaling.
Stories about how abusive and traumatic divorce is? There is exactly that book!
You can buy Primal Loss on Amazon, but she also makes it free via pdf: https://www.leilamiller.net/primallosspdf
I'm sorry about your experience-being one of the only single-parent families where you grew up. My sister, brother, and I were “lucky” to have other people who didn't know/only heard from their dads on Christmas or birthdays. Out of curiosity, did you happen to have grandparents who were involved? My mom tried her best, but the pressure of providing for a family of four and helping my cousin and aunts with their kids, who were also single moms.
Hi Andy, I’m glad you did have a peer group like that to commiserate and support each other a little bit. For some reason, the friends I had/have whose parents got divorced tended to go through that more around college age. Like: the parents had gradually grown apart and their kids being in college became an acceptable time to move on. What’s interesting is multiple among them ended up remarrying old boyfriends/girlfriends. It didn’t seem like anyone I know of who got divorced at that stage did so to escape a truly toxic situation - it was more like starting a new (or old, again) chapter with someone more suitable.
Helping out other single moms in the family sounds both like a comforting form of mutual support - and further exhausting. Having a larger family can cut both ways. I know my mom (an only child, whose dad was an only child and whose mom was the only one of three to make it to adulthood and have a child) missed having a sibling or close cousin. As a teenager, I tried to “reassure her” that more family could as easily have meant more trouble. But as sometimes large families beget more larger families, I think my most of my recent ancestors had a real ambivalence about forming families, or perhaps even about their own existence. On one hand, even two generations of parents having a kid(a) later in life meant my mom’s parents were well-past retirement age by the time I was born. On the other hand, having come from very little and having lived through the Great Depression and WWII, they were frugal, cautious people who were just able to help steer their one child and two grandkids to a softer landing than might’ve been the case. We qualified for federally subsidized school lunches for a few years, but we never actually went hungry or worried about being homeless. I still wish they’d lived longer so I could’ve known them better and learned more from them - but also so I could’ve done more to help them in return.
Thanks for adding this focus to an already compelling article. I know it’s natural to ask: But what can we do to reverse this dynamic? Just women (and men, too) in dangerously dysfunctional marriages isn’t the answer. For better and worse, as a civil society, we’re lacking those “ties that bind”. Where are the extended family and religious and other community institutions which can help prepare couples for responsible, stable family formation and help keep them on course when things get challenging? We also need to stop scapegoating men and portraying all forms of masculinity as malign. The message has become almost that we want men to at most act as a sort of a deferential secondary supplement to women - where and when desired - but we don’t particularly need them. It’s apparent a lot of men are opting out of (or are less competitive for or are less desired in) professional roles remunerative enough to support a family. It’s become very tricky to even broach the whys and wherefores of the dearth of marriageable men, without almost entirely centering women and blaming men for the entirety of their own struggles. On two occasions in the past few months, I’ve diplomatically begun to mention Richard Reeves research and writing - and both times I was cut off and excoriated by people who assumed this was no more than “MRM talking points”. Women want and need more marriageable men - and more men need some sort of new bargain in which their sacrifice and commitment are more valued, viable, and constructive re: family formation.
Your father sounds like a narcissist.
There are very different outcomes for the children of widows vs "single mothers". That makes it less likely the the two-parent angle is causal rather than merely correlated.
Apparently among other fun facts, daughters of widows menstruate later then daughters of absent fathers.
Right! Your comment is unusual in citing directly relevant evidence that goes against the easy explanations for complex phenomena that are usually suggested. We have trouble dealing with the fact that some people are better parents than others, and that there's not a whole lot that society can do about it.
Doesn’t sound like an oversimplification at all. It is of course true and almost everyone with eyes to see, or who has actually raised kids, knows this to be true.
It will actually have an extremely significant impact. On the White students who will get beaten raped and robbed, not to mention their classrooms being thrown into chaos and all resources being diverted to the blacks.
But on a positive note maybe it will cut down on the production of delusional cowards who always find some form of cope.
Oh, because white people never rape, beat, or rob anyone? I went to a very diverse school, and asides from my family, nearly all of my close friends are black, and the one thing I learned from it is that people are people; there are good ones and bad ones, regardless of immutable characteristics. Skin color has little impact on various approaches to conflict when one controls for income. Lower-income people, regardless of skin color, tend to use their fists, while upper-class people tend to use their lawyers and therapists.
White people do not rape at anywhere near the rates that blacks do. Same goes for all other violent crimes. Furthermore, Prince George's County Maryland is one of the richest, blackest, and most violent counties in the country. So your statement about less violence with wealthy people is factually incorrect
Side note: If this is any consolation, I took a metal stool to a girl in high school, and although there are areas of my life I can certainly improve, I’d say I turned out well, asides from a few speeding tickets-my record is clean. Maybe old habits die hard, but I can't say I disagree with the parents who felt strongly about their kids sticking up for themselves.
Good. As was noted, enforcement of discipline in schools is often spotty at best. That can be true in places other than the inner-city.As a veteran teacher - and parent - I’ve had a close view of the situation for awhile now. One of my biggest regrets as a father was that I trusted my principal to adequately handle the bullying of my own son in the small-town school he attended and I worked in; disaster is not too strong a word for the result. I wish I’d told my boy to hit the JD in the face, stay with it, and take his lumps. He’d feel better about it today and so would I.
Every time I see someone make this ridiculous statement, I think about all the women and men with children who live in abusive relationships. Which clearly those making the statement never do, because given it's established children learn by example more than they learn by being preached at and punished they're literally advocating for people living in an atmosphere of violence.
Sounds great, but the reality is, we don't have them, and getting them would be harder than fixing schools. So what's the plan then? Given that there is little incentive to keep two-parent homes...
eliminate all the goverment social welfare programs and two parent homes will return
Those programs did indeed break-up families. It's because the only way to politically justify them was providing aid to children and their mothers. (aid to able- bodied men was too far).
What we now see is that we should have been giving aid to families.
But to think that the solution now is to just cut it off and expect families to snap back into place is at best questionable. It could also just make things much worse.
We are here now. We can't undo what has been done, and we should work toward reforms that incentivize intact families. It wouldn't take drastic change, just modification of eligibility rules.
It has to come from within the community. Outsiders like TFA can not begin to make societal changes to the family dynamic.
Fingers drumming...
No, they won't, and for the safety of the partners and children in violent and abusive relationships (which aren't always necessarily the same) they shouldn't be.
I love how all the smug, well-off people who engage in this kind of discussion invariably and inevitably "blame the parents" instead of the system that has these and other children growing up in abject poverty, even when they HAVE two parents at home. Or rather whom they live with, because those parents likely spend most of their awake time working two jobs to make ends meet, if possible.
I would argue that the overall misery index was far lower in the 50s and 60s, before the Great Society welfare state legitimized illegitimacy. Women being paid to have babies without having to plan for their support or their future devalues fatherhood, and men. This is to say nothing of the hopeless chaos it has created, as described in the above article.
Unfortunately, your assessment could not be further from the truth. I am sad to say that nearly every woman in my family endured some type of domestic violence. My sister, who is two years older, is my best friend and has cared for me more than any parent aside from my grandmother spent years in a violent and destructive relationship. My cousin, also one of my closest friends, had to live in a woman's shelter when her significant other put an iron on her belly while nine months pregnant. My Grandma, born in 1928, fled Oklahoma in fear for her life with three children in tow. She was in her mid-twenties when there were fewer options and significant social stigma. Despite their tragic experiences with domestic violence, none of them are advocates for divorce and feel strongly that those with children should avoid it by all means necessary. Advocating for two-parent homes does not translate to supporting domestic violence; quite the contrary considering those raised in non-abusive two-parent homes are significantly less likely to be a perpetrator OR a victim of abuse.
Furthermore, research suggests that over half of all domestic violence occurs between intimate partners or ex-partners who are not and have not married. More concerningly, children raised in single-parent homes are significantly more likely to be subject to physical and sexual abuse. No one should remain in an unsafe environment. Period. And no one should experience shame for removing their children from a dangerous environment; if anything, they should be applauded.
Our society is wealthy enough and there are enough jobs for women that a single mother can afford to raise a child. That wasn't really the case in the Malthusian era, where our older cultural norms were forged. I don't think they will come back that easily (even if such a change might marginally slow down our drift).
A single parent cannot replace the security children feel and what they learn from being in a home with 2 adults legally tied together and committed to their family. The future can look stressful if the 2 adults that made the children can't stick together and support each other and their children. Another huge contributor to the stress in our lives, imo, is the increasing job changes people go through. The lack of continuity and commitment between adults in the home and in the workplace is the fuel for social problems.
I suggest you read "The Nurture Assumption". And check out the outcomes for the children of widows vs otherwise single mothers.
My eyeballs can see and quack theories in a book can't interfere with what my eyeballs can see and my ears can hear. The author states peers have a much greater influence than parents. Well duh, if children spend very little time with parents and are in a free-for-all with peers all day.
Society may be wealthy enough for a single mum to raise a child, but never to the same level as she could have in a two income household and the added discipline and role model of a father. So we are stuck in the middle - between having no child at all and raising one well enough.
Have you read "The Nurture Assumption"?
No I haven't heard of that one - I'm checking it out as a result of your mention, thank you. My own reading interests have been validated by seeing Rob Henderson recently review When Men Behave Badly by David Buss.
At least they should be able to sort the students and send the violent ones to another building. The good children should not be forced to endure those beyond saving.
I grew up in Indianapolis as well. Graduated from Tech in 1982 , spent 5 years away in the military, returned and worked in the construction trades for the next 25 years. I left Indy for Lafayette in 2015 and looking back, I have no regrets leaving Indy for Lafayette. Fast forward, and the same demographics that destroyed Indy is moving into Lafayette from Chicago and Gary. Needless to say, rapes, thefts, robberies, murder, have skyrocketed. Sometimes I wonder if blacks will ever thrive or be able to function in a civilized society.
Would there be some debate between the two parents over who should apply the hot curling iron to the child's feet?
The answer is birth control in the water supply. No child deserves to be born into such a dysfunctional culture.
Former school-based therapist in urban Midwest for 20 years. This is a real snapshot of what it’s like in our public schools. No one knows it unless you see it for yourself & it has just gotten worse. The debate about IQ in the comments is not even relevant, imo. Average learning-especially new learning, is extremely compromised by even average students when you consider the chaos & emergency room-like atmosphere in these classrooms. Majority of pre-K & K students arrive with few daily living skills of children 40 years ago (social, hygiene, bathroom, communication). The past 5 years or so I noticed school districts started bringing in “trauma-based” training for teachers; they finally realized regular teaching & management models were inadequate for the majority of students. What does that say about our society, that so many of our school children are living in homes, neighborhoods which are traumatizing them?? As we know from an abundance of research & data over many decades we know that the traumatized & abused don’t do well themselves but also often do the same to others, and not just to other children, as this young man experienced. Like most failures in our society, there is a vast amount of funding for education in this country. Unfortunately the bulk of which goes to the huge administrative body which never see the inside of a classroom.
It won’t change until the community wants it to change. How many more white liberals and race pimps yelling about white supremacy which kids pick up on and then use to their advantage. Not to improve their future but to get away with whatever they want which isn’t any different than any other child. Every child pushes the boundaries and it is up to adults to draw the line.
So I grew up working class in NYC, live in the NYC metro area; I take public transit regularly, go to parks, go to libraries, see PLENTY of young children - where are these children you describe hiding? Do their parents just keep them in the home all day? They aren't in supermarkets, in playgrounds, walking down the street, riding the bus? Or are they perhaps behaving differently in the classroom than they are in their community...?
Remember that institutional schooling is a highly unnatural environment, especially in urban areas, and it's not surprising to me that young children would respond to it as a threat. Pre-K is not an evidence-based practice. In some intervention studies, like a recent one out of Tennessee, it's an intervention that demonstrably, itself, made the students worse. Packing a bunch of young children like sardines into a fluorescent room all day is going to bring out, let's say, not their BEST behavior?
I teach in a school environment not far off from what the author described. One of the reasons you don't see "those children he described" in local parks and libraries is most likely because they just don't go. Many if not all of my students have never been to the city library. When asked what they do over the weekend, the reply is stayed home and watched TV. They experience very little beyond their homes. It saddens me beyond measure that as dysfunctional as the school environment is, many of students see school as a refuge and highlight of their lives. What does that say of their home life?
Those children are all around me, everywhere, where I live.
You won’t accept that, I suspect. You have decided that “that’s not real.” You expect to be believed that YOU never see them (therefore that means they’re not real, that is your conscious implication). But you will not return that, will you?
I’m not telling the truth, am I? It’s not true that, in my very liberal state and region, these children are everywhere.
Right? They’re not real, correct?
I mean, I'm from working class Brooklyn. I feel like I might have noticed some things. I see subway crime, litter, car theft, all the usual suspects. But I am baffled by the idea a literal 4 year old should be expected to "behave" in what's effectively a fluorescent lit box for God knows how.many hours a day. It's obviously a ridiculous expectation and is going to elicit antisocial behavior in a certain context. Out of school is different. I don't see the breakdown. I'm pretty moderate and have no skin in this game, but I mistrust these histrionics.
Right. As I expected. "What you're saying is not real, you're not seeing what you're seeing, and what you're saying is histrionic."
You're incredibly dismissive and disrespectful. You'd not like that returned to you. But you don't owe anyone a fair hearing. Liz knows Liz's experience, and people who have different experiences are lying to Liz.
Liz: I noticed you ignoring my direct question about whether you believe I am not seeing what I see in my region. You know that you ignored it, and you know that that was a dishonest move.
I believe you see what you see. Then again, people often lie on the internet for effect.
Well it seems like the majority of the population did just fine in those "fluorescent lit boxes". Decades upon, decades of us turned out just fine. What I see as a 53 year old are the attitudes of parents. When I did something wrong in school the first words out of my parents mouths were "What did you do?" not "Oh it wasn't you baby it must be the teacher." Then the discipline in the school. Very few fights and disruptions in class. Those kids that did were sent to detention, suspended, or expelled. Apparently the schools don't do that anymore. Even if you beat up a teacher. 2 parents in the household is also an aberration now when compared with the 70's and 80's. Get rid of "restorative justice" and return to the 1950's way of teaching and I bet a whole lot will change. Justin would have been sent to a special school for behavioral problems and a vocational school in the 70's/80's. Maybe then he would be a contributing member of society. Now he's sitting in jail after shooting 2 people. The current "progressive" way of running schools has obviously failed at a spectacular level. Time return to the old school method. Preferably with nuns.
Where I'm from four year olds are able to hack it in Pre-K.
Plenty of schools all across the nation are able to get their students to behave in fluorescent boxes, because those students aren't being raised in broken homes and a culture with no respect for education or honest achievement.
What context is that
There is no "working class" Brooklyn anymore. It is wealthy and public housing. I have lived in Brooklyn public housing, and it is really nice compared to Chicago public housing, but nothing like private housing in Brooklyn.
You’ve not taught in a metro school, right?
You can't take generational ignorance, violence and neglect and expect to turn it around in the classroom. Kids mirror behaviors they see and experience. Their parents are undoubtedly illiterate, why else beat your child in the hallway rather than take him home and coach him? I had a student who 2 years after graduation was arrested for baseball batting homeless people to death on the street in the middle of the night. I would have never seen that in him.
This may come as a shock to you but slapping your own child is not child abuse nor is it “beating” him. This mother was called at the request of the teacher to discipline her child for disrespecting an adult, and she disciplined him the best way she knew how. You may not agree with this form of discipline but calling it child abuse and likening it to “beating” is hyperbolic and inflammatory. This mom showing up and slapping her child across the face is her way of demonstrating an interest in her son's education and showing the teacher she has his back as well as the rest of the class. I'd wager that if all of these kids had moms who did that when the teacher called you would see a much different classroom and it's a shame that the teacher's own lack of understanding prevented him from calling parents in the future.
The shutdowns for covid only served to increase the gap. 2nd graders in my home town had to learn the social skills taught in kg when full time, in-person school resumed last year. 😢
I have heard the same from all my friends who teach young kids. It was a huge setback. The very young had no idea how to follow /pay attention to an authority figure who was not a parent
What's happened is "concept creep" for terms like "trauma".
Explain what you mean please.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_creep
Trauma applies here tho. Many of these kids come from backgrounds of abuse, neglect, extreme violence.
Plenty of Holocaust survivors did fine in school afterward, and twin-adoption studies show little effect of "shared environment".
I was always amazed by Holocaust survivors and their resilience. Always thought they were a special group to come through such a horrific experience with seemingly little issues. But that's not the case. They handled it differently (mostly by not talking about it to their kids, putting on a brave face and moving on for the sake of survival in a new land), but the trauma definitely showed up and still does.
You can't tell me that a kid who's being abused at home is not going to act out in some way in school. And then, as this article clearly points out (if you bothered to read the whole thing), they in turn abuse other kids and their teachers. Teachers then suffer trauma. Why do you think there is such a teacher shortage now in this country? Teachers are sick of being disrespected and traumatized by students and also being expected to wear many hats (trauma therapist being one) in the classroom when they should be solely focused on academics. Why don't you take up teaching at an infamously troubled school and see what it's like for yourself?
We need a civil war which crushes the entire system. Kids and parents need to know what it is to live off of rat meat and corpses. The generations that emerge from such barbarity after 100 years may have a shot of a better life.
Ken is exaggerating, but there is an important grain of truth in what he says. We are ruled by a highly irresponsible, profoundly immoral faction which has been convinced that the iron girders of hidden violence, custom and shame that hold a successful society together, are no longer necessary.
They are wrong, utterly wrong, but it may well be that they need to experience the dire consequences personally, before they are prepared to change course. And some of them are so utterly brainwashed, that they are irredeemable; for those, the rest of us cannot live in dignity until their power is completely stripped away. It doesn't help at all, that the consequences of their moral abdication, will fall first on a class of people that they already despise. In their eyes, the suffering of those people is a feature, not a bug.
"convinced that the iron girders of hidden violence, custom and shame that hold a successful society together"
Hidden violence holds a society together? Care to explain what you mean by that? Because one reason why a lot of kids are acting out in school is precisely because of the "hidden violence" that takes place in their homes.
The fact that you even asked that question, smh. You are the problem.
“Hidden violence” is what law and order used to imply before “restorative justice” and “catch and release.” Commit a crime, and suffer real consequences, including violence.
I think he means both legal policing as well as the neighborhood protection of old, not to mention communities "handling their own." I still live in what is often called an "ethnic white" community, although most of the residents are Asian and Spanish now, but we often "handle" problems outside of legal channels. Asian communities do this in a big way (successfully).
The problems with African-Americans in the North did not start until social welfare. This brought displaced people from the rural South into dense, public housing with broken families. After two generations, all hell broke loose, but no one cared. Those who defended these structures are as guilty as the bigots who ran Jim Crow in the South.
Uh, I'm not really up for that. Do you have an alternative...without the rat meat?
Hot chicks and fast cars.
Can't keep up with either...got anything like pickleball or Top Golf (with sofas) left on the shelf...?
Die tryin’ ✌️
The failures you speak of are a product of the low average IQ. Someone with an IQ of 85 cannot be taught to perform even the most menial job, nor learn even basic literacy or numeracy. Given the average African American IQ is 85, it means half will fall below the minimum level need to function in society.
This is the root cause of the problem and denying it solves nothing.
I live in the UK, we have the exact same problems you do with African Americans with the Caribbean population and certain segments of the African population - mainly those that come here claiming asylum. Africans from certain countries like Kenya tend to do better, probably because the visa system.
How much of that low IQ comes from poor parenting? I suspect that those children would do dramatically better if they were raised by sober, literate parents who cared about them and taught them before they got to school.
Almost none, there've been several studies on this. Black and East Asian children adopted by middle class families in the US (and Belgium in the case of Koreans) had average IQs by age 17 of 89 and 107 respectively.
If you match black and white children by SES the 11 to 15 point gap in average IQ and corresponding gap in educational attainment is consistent at all socioeconomic levels.
The gap in IQ is present from 3 years old, before parental influence and education has a chance to take hold.
Caribbeans and Africans in the UK also have an average IQ of 88 by the way. The Chinese here average 104 vs 105 in the US. So yes, the gaps are mostly genetic in origin.
Can you link to a couple of these? I had a US-only data set. Also, I assume the adopted African children were in Belgium, right? I thought adoptions of African children by white Americans was a banned or at least frowned upon thing. I have met many adopted Asian children and zero adopted Africans. I am shocked that they exist.
No the Belgian studies were on Koreans, adopted after the Korean war (i've edited my reply for clarity.) The same scores were found in the US as they were in Belgium.
This is heartbreaking. My husband taught in an alternative high school in Detroit for awhile, and the experience sounds similar. He was expected to be part security guard, but fortunately he has significant martial arts experience. When he had to confiscate a firearm from a student he started wearing a vest. Many of his students had been shot. They all had food insecurity and a lot of what they did eat was crap. One year he had two students graduate, which was a record for that school. Then the school had to eliminate the position due to budget cuts. My husband went on to graduate school and saw one of his former students on campus, so that really was a success story. However, the idea that teacher quality can control for severe poverty and violence is blatantly ridiculous. Most of these kids won't have a chance unless that environment can be changed.
PARDON ME SCUBA. I'M ONLY ALLOWED TO POST IN "REPLY".
Gang culture is prison culture. It is a value system that (like Marxist "woke" and the totalitarian financiers that support it) denigrates human worth and moral value and emphasizes the cold blooded application of power and the personal acquisition and control of resources at the expense of culture and society. If your rite of passage is based on how "stand up" you are doing "time" and your demonstrated willingness to "bust a cap in somebodies ass" is the prerequisite for personal safety you live in jungle land, be it Fallujah, or Chiraq.
Educators lamenting the disintegration of the Black community might consider the effects of the six decade corporate class war designed to gut American industry, destroy wages, destroy unions and loot the American economy. Detroit (Motown) is a good example. Its was a thriving industrial city where Blacks and Whites worked hard, owned homes and received good pay. It was rough but Black children weren't living on potato chips and it may have been a lower standard but the Black community had a way forward and, though struggling, was part of the American Middle Class. Then Nixon, needing a way to destroy popular progressive political opposition (Hippies and Blacks) started the "drug war" and the prison industrial complex was born. The CIA/FBI immediately saw the opportunity for big money, numbered accounts and a surveillance state and the toxic harpies of professional feminism (now the D.E.I. commissariat) pipelined corporate cash to destroy the family dynamic, fatherhood and education. Then the globalist DNC/CCP/WEF juggernaut decided (because it could) to bring the American Republic to its knees.
The disconnect here (Maryland is a D.C. suburb) is thinking that the illiterate, carjacking, Nordstrom looting gang boy with a pistol in his waistband has nothing to do with the infrastructure crumbling, bridge collapsing, train wreck reality created by the band of D.C. thugs who, handed the greatest economy in the world, destroyed it. Black crime is simply psyop blowback weaponized by the well insulated, body guarded, totalitarian want-to-be's now proclaiming that American's need to "accept limited free speech". "Woke" DNC couldn't wait to conflate crime with revolution. Chaos, fear and anomie serves tyranny. It simply weaponized the disintegration of Black America and aimed it at you.
Black children born of poverty and want testing the moral strength of White teacher's in a classroom is metaphor for the cloaked in altruism hubris and narcissism of the sycophants holding a knife to the throat of American freedom. The intentional reduction of the American Black community to chaos and disintegration through assassination and manipulation by totalitarian finance is merely prelude.
I think an alternate explanation of the disintegration of northern industry and by extension the communities of blacks that migrated there was the marriage of socialist government redistribution and black power politics that played out in Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, Etc.
The Detroit Model cities program is a perfect example. Just flood the community with federal money just lead to local fraud and political infighting. The community organizer aspect of the War on Poverty gave way to unfettered progressive local governments that was, in reality, just black power political figures thieving their communities while idealistic whites and well meaning bureaucrats thought they were "fighting the power". Meanwhile there was constant pressure for black union members to fight, organize, etc. (in addition to the union as a whole who was putting management over a barrel). Ultimately labor became to expensive and migrated south, and these cities were left to dysfunctional progressive political machines that survive today.
By the time Nixon came into office in 68 Detroit was well on it's way to down the hole.
Nice take on the situation. And you are certainly correct on the dynamic. I was in and out of Detroit a few times in the 60's. It was a rough town but it wasn't the "war zone" it is today.
Your comment on the graft and looting of well intentioned tax dollars by a corrupt "political machine" and the willingness of community leaders to throw fellow citizens under the bus in order to line their pockets seems to be an apt illustration of American politics on the national level today. (Is that just the nature of the bureaucratic beast and the people attracted to it and is it a solvable problem) My "rant" and your comment both seem to agree on the inability of community to produce intelligent capable moral leadership. Even when ample resources are allocated to solve social problems and uplift the citizen.
One obvious elephant in the room is control of the American national dialogue. Self-interested "Race hustlers" are an obvious example but the Durham Report affirms the reality of an America forced to live inside a lie for the better part of a decade. Add the weaponization of the Covid pandemic and it is a people living inside a lie inside a lie. There is no question that capital made a conscious decision to weaken and disassemble the power of the American Middle Class decades ago. My personal best boil down today is the belief that capital (the Davos, DNC/CCP/WEF boy and girls) prepossessed by their own personal hubris and narcissism are funding and exploiting the ideological utopianism of Marxist "woke" as a way of undermining public institutions and creating a false narrative that is literally with the help of the MSM screaming over the top of the healthy national dialogue America needs. It is pathology not politics. I'm basing this on their willingness to allow the social/cultural disintegration we are all bearing witness too.
I continue to believe that The American Constitution and the Bill of Rights it contains is our only engine of survival and the only legitimate frame of reference for correcting this mess.Stay strong. Stay clear.
I think we are in agreement on mostly everything but I have a hard time buying into the grand scheme/design or intentional coordinated plot on the side "capital", the illuminati, the elites, or whatever the group is. I think there are some incredibly powerful people pulling incredibly powerful strings here and there, but I don't know that there is the outright collusion that I often hear about. Things happen naturally through evolution one piece at a time. Over many years it looks like a plan or a plot of some sort of creator, but I see it more as all birds knowing how to hunt/migrate together without some massive bird leader teaching/telling them how to do it. Incentives drive similar human behavior across markets, countries, cultures, etc. Behavior of public housing residents in Glasgow is markedly similar to that of Chicago or St. Louis but no one was telling them to do that...it just happens through incentive and cultural reinforcement. I actually believe that many leftist policy makers actually believe their ideas will work. Walter Ruther certainly did, and today you can find so many intelligent left thinkers suggesting ideas that a street smart 8 year old could tell you was BS (open the prisons, etc.).
Absolutely!! I'm sure you're not overlooking the fact that capitalist psychology thinks internationally, self-interested elected American political leadership allowed it to rig American economics and that (player's aside) the social/cultural disintegration we're witnessing is the result. It's a story as old as time. Isn't the exercise of the will to power necessary to create a hyperreality pretense of moral superiority and environmental concern as a cover for what really amounts to greed, the exploitation of labor and the desire for access to natural resources without consequence the problem? Hubris and narcissism has always defined oligarch's. And ideological utopian's are always ready to bury their fellow citizen's in the grave of the ideal. It's a perfect storm. Is it politic's or the same mass psychosis that swallowed Germany, China and Russia in the 20th Century. It's all too retro. After all, the "bomb" is back on the table.
Maybe the simple explanation is the jump in tech/communication scared the bejeezus out of the financial elite because it made their economic/political rigged game transparent to reality. And, fully aware that they'd destroyed the economic system that brought them to power decided to go for the brass ring of world domination.The French economist Thomas Piketty won the Nobel Prize for his book CAPITAL by explaining the ascent of a new world monarchy and the reduction of the general populace to serfdom. The Davos/EU/WEF is already hip deep in creating a CCP style Europe and Canada. Here in the American Constitutional Republic the American Middle Class and the Constitution stand squarely in their way. That's you and me.
Didn’t Detroit have a militant black mayor who stoked racial division and under whom white flight from the city turned into a rapid flood?
Coleman Young was the man but he wasn't elected until 1974. White flight had begun in the 60s. Young was the ultimate result of what I'm talking about and ran the city into the ground until 1994 with outright corruption and unabashed moral authority. Unfortunately his style is now pretty common for blue cities. Studying Detroit from the beginning of the war on poverty to then end of Young's run would be enough to support multiple Ph.D. programs.
Yes except there's no point in studying any of it since we have absolutely no intention of learning a thing from those experiences.
I think it's a compelling example of what NOT to do, and there's evidence that we are currently making the same mistakes on a much grander scale
Warning, pet peeves and rant. I do not think that word (communism) means what you think it means.
A number of American cities had been run by members of the actual American Socialist Party pre World War One. They were destroyed by the federal government by the 1920s.
The three real socialist or communist parties that existed in the Great Depression were essentially crushed by the federal government after 1947 starting with Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt and the blacklists. Also, the Progressive Party of the Progressive Era, which ended during the First World War, modern “progressives,” communism, and socialism are four distinct things.
Finally, Classical Liberalism, twentieth century American Liberalism, and the current Neoliberal are also three separate ideologies with the current neoliberalism having precious little to do with even twentieth century liberalism.
The misuse of these categories not only bothers me personally as a child of parents of liberals during the Free Speech Movement whose family was and is nothing like the caricatures after used, the confabulation of the different periods, parties, and ideologies helps the powerful. If we don’t know our past or use the correct terms in the right way, and the confabulations ensures this, just how can we fight those who benefitfrom the corruption and the breakdown of everything? The Wokesters, the very wealthy, the Professional Managerial Class that serves them?
They all benefit from the confusion that comes from conflating everything. Kinda like mixing social constructs like gender with biological facts or categories like sex. Many societies have had more than two genders, sometimes a lot more, but pretty much all of them just had two biological sexes. Then there is our modern civilization.
Honestly, having people being labeled as “liberals” who decry what liberals I grew up with believed in such as free speech, civil rights, the Bill of Rights, and the rule of law, all of which comes from the Enlightenment thinkers or the foundations of American political philosophy which also comes directly from it, as Whiteness or some other goofiness is painful.
Witch hunt? Was.anyone on Mccarthy's list not a communist?
See Stan Evans' Blacklisted by History for full details of the depth of the infiltration and subversion of the US government and culture by international communists.
https://www.amazon.com/Blacklisted-History-Senator-McCarthy-Americas/dp/1400081068
McCarthy’s witch-hunt? Surely you jest. The magnificent Joseph McCarthy merely asked why the federal government employed so many communists. Communists being the all time tyrants and killers of the last century and anyone adhering to that rancid system of political control being enemies of the American republic and common decency, it was a very reasonable question.
The magnificent Joseph McCarthy? Honestly, that is the first time I have heard of the word "magnificent" being used to describe the man.
Regardless of the threat of the Soviet Union to the United States, that threat was used as justification to destroy the lives of thousands of Americans for merely holding left of center economic beliefs; they conflated differing beliefs in economics with active spying for a foreign, hostile power.
Then there was the immediate, and I do mean immediate, pivoting of the anti-communist crusade into witch hunting for homosexual employees of the government using the same resources at the same time.
Also, the economic warfare of Europe and the United States for centuries has also killed millions. Slavery, colonialism, multiple mass famines, invasions, coups often justified with "the white man's burden" or even the threat of communism. Either way we have mass murder by all sides regardless of justification or ideology.
"...that threat was used as justification to destroy the lives of thousands of Americans for merely holding left of center economic beliefs; they conflated differing beliefs in economics with active spying for a foreign, hostile power."
You're regurgitating the PC-Prog lies you've been fed about McCarthy and the infiltration of international communism in the US government, and society.
Stan Evans' book, Blacklisted by History, is a finely detailed, meticulously sourced demolition of the PC-Prog distortion of McCarthy.
McCarthy's biggest mistake (besides being unattractive) was that he UNDER-estimated the extent of the infiltration and subversion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisted_by_History
"The book's premise is that a vast Soviet conspiracy infiltrated the Roosevelt and Truman administrations to create a foreign policy that advanced the spread of world Communism, including the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe and the fall of Nationalist China, which McCarthy exposed, only to have his efforts undermined by political opponents with a vested interest in allowing the conspiracy to continue.[1][2]
"The book exhaustively examines, chronicles, and documents the oft-disputed claim that Communist spies, sympathizers and fellow travelers, who were aided and instigated by the Soviet Union and Communist China, infiltrated the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, to aid in the expansion of Communism throughout the world during the Cold War.
"The book's footnotes and the references provide links to the documents located in the National Archives and the records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other sources. Evans documents the fact that the National Archives copy of at least one of the most critical documents McCarthy submitted to the Congressional boards has been ripped out of its binder and stolen by persons unknown. Evans was able to track down another copy in the private papers of one of the Congressmen involved in the hearings. Much of the information that is cited by Evans was previously classified and unavailable to researchers, but it has now been declassified and is now available publicly.
"Claims of Communist infiltration and spies within the federal government were further verified by the release of the Venona decrypts and records released by the former Soviet Union's KGB in recent years."
This is a flat out lie.
Unlike you I don’t think this is an organized op, but rather a particularly tragic example of the law of unexpected consequences. For example, DEI makes sense if you already believe it but the way it is taught and enforced to us rubes guarantees that few will associate it with efficiency, happiness, or any other positive outcome.
Agreed. Most of it is simple graft and greed but there is (seems to me) a method behind the madness. I like the old JFK line who replied to a reporters "where there's smoke there's fire" comment "that possibly someone has a smoke making machine". The capture and control of the narrative around issues of American moral social/cultural concern, and the willingness to create, defend and impose lies of the magnitude we're witnessing, against the backdrop of the human damage, social disintegration and chaos surrounding us, alongside say, the recent Congressional Taibbi/Shellenberger hearings and its Davos/EU style push to quell free speech and silence truth speakers, tells me that somebody's got an agenda. I suspect that what we both have in common here is the gut feeling that the inhabitants of the Marxist "woke"/DNC/CCP/WEF biosphere are self-interested poseurs.
Reading comments like this is reminiscent of looking at the painting of the 3 blind men trying to figure out what the elephant is.
Well sure, everyone is self interested. And people who claim (and might actually be) interested in the welfare of all humanity surely include themselves as human. All we can monitor for are the most blatant, transactional, corrupt forms of self interest.
As for silencing truth speakers, I doubt that's the point for many. It's much more likely, to my way of thinking, that there is an attempt to silence bullshit. The problems are that your bullshit might be my fundamental reality and vice versa, so we don't agree on terms, and that conspicuous censorship actually attracts attention, so that silencing is somewhat self defeating. This leaves me as a default free speech-ist (fettered by the traditional litigation limits of fraud, spreading false news, harassment, defamation, inciting panic and so on).
Regarding the capture of the narrative, I see two forces. One is that within our recent history, homophobia and racism have been quite rightly banned, proving that social change is possible and that appeals to religion/tradition are insufficient authorities in common law countries. It's possible that some people might have misread this lesson as "everything that conservatives believe is actually wrong" and so we're in kind of a Wild West of behavioral free for all.
Second, there's money to be made! "Get woke, go broke" is not a truism. "Get woke, expand our market, and also avoid lawsuits and cancellation" seems perfectly valid to me.
To all this, and sorry this is so long winded, I think that ultimately ideas are sustainable because they are of widespread utility, and that the most corrosive and lousy ideas tend to fall. It sure takes a while though.
My problem with a lot of DEI initiatives is that they aren't specific enough. For instance, people use the term "structural racism," but what does it mean and how do you correct it? It's different to say something like, there is an element of racial discrimination in drug sentencing (for instance). Then you can put forth specific ideas for how to fix that. Also, most (but not all) racial disparities wash out when you control for socio-economic status and class, so we should be paying more attention to that.
Who is against diversity, equity, or inclusion? Not me. But yeah depending on how the terms are defined, we could be talking about almost anything. And clearly we are only talking about race when as you say socioeconomic factors seem quite relevant at least in common sense terms. Hence you have the combination of bad methodology linked with narrow focus.
I do wonder if that is a feature and not a bug. People in power use identity politics to avoid criticism and cast blame. Want to call Janet Yellen out on corruption? You're a misogynist. Don't like Kamala Harris' record as a prosecutor? You're a racist AND a misogynist. When you take wealth and class out of the conversation, you get a lot of rich people who publicly whine a lot, like Meghan Markle.
Yes. The greater the corruption, incompetence, and poverty the more cries of racism, sexism, bigotry, and hatred are shouted to deflect from the corruption, incompetence, and poverty.
The constant crying of wolf means that the awful lot of hatred and bigotry can be denied when it is seen. I believe that the denial of biology, history, and plain sight is also another way to deflect from the failures of our leadership.
It is also a fantastic way to avoid talking about our class system here in America.
I am against equity. Instead we need to return the country’s original foundational goal of Equality of Opportunity.
Equity, As it attempt s to backward engineer equal results is unrealistic, e.g. it assumes all people and cultures will distribute proportionally. If that were true only 12% of NBA players should be black.
“Equity” seekers impose racism as the cause of inequity. “Equal Opportunity” requires reforming away the opportunity inequalities and focusing on the behavioral and cultural changes needed to achieve fulfillment. Individual desires, abilities, efforts, and values mean Equity’s goal of proportion results won’t be achieved but WILL be used by it’s proponents to bully scapegoats into the proponents’ ideology. Experience is demonstrating Equity proponents are drunk for that power.
So you as well don't believe it's an op but you just can't wrap your head around why there are nebulous terms used to describe problems that when sorted through do not exist.
Is that a fair summation?
A lot of what you are saying doesn't match the facts. See FRED series (LES1252881600Q) (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q). Real wages appear to have increased of late, not decreased.
Thanks. I'll take a look.
Reality I hear argued is the "real purchasing power" of the Dollar. Fiat currency vs. the gold standard. The decline in secure Union jobs, pensions and health care. The moving of industry over sea's without regard to its effect on communities. The switch to a debt economy from one built on cash and savings. The subversion and politicization of classical education. De-Platforming and the assault on free speech and idea's. The rise of a politicized surveillance state. Calls by the DNC "left" to amend the 1st and 2nd Amendment's and do away with the electoral college. The shrinking American Middle Class. The funding and manipulation of elected American political leadership by Davos/WEF sycophants and the complicity of D.C. in allowing it to happen. The willingness of the MSM to openly lie and its reduction to a propagandist arm of the CIA/FBI. The willingness of the DNC to openly lie to the American people and shrug it off when caught.
My personal view is that capitalism destroyed capitalism in the name of capitalism and created a rigged game wasteland and is moving to destroy the American Constitution and the American Middle Class because American's will not allow or accept the fascist tyranny now being imposed on citizens of the EU and Canada. Am I a little extreme and hyperbolic. Yep. But six decades of watching the cultural/social disintegration of my country makes me believe that criminal finance is capable of anything. So far I've never been wrong.
No, real wages have only increased at the top and only in fields like law, medicine, and business administration. Engineering and manufacturing salaries have been stagnant for years. Many manufacturing jobs that paid well have gone off shore. Technicians fields that you used to be able to get with a two year apprenticeship have all but disappeared.
"No, real wages have only increased at the top and only in fields like law, medicine, and business administration". Sorry, but I deliberately looked at median (not average) wages. Has manufacturing employment gone down. Yes, it has.
Nothing in this thread has anything to do with "Taught For America."
It does if you understand that bad social and economic policy causes human damage. A community subsumed by the values of a carceral state is bound for crime and violence. How do you teach initiative, motivation and belief in opportunity and forward motion to a child living in a reality whose values represent the exact opposite of those things. Kindness is weakness and suckers die. An obviously recognizable portion of the Black community now lives in an American hyperreality entirely separate from the rest of us. Crime/drugs is a trillion dollar industry that supports entire Black economies and profits corporate investment in prison's, bullet proof vests, guns, mace, chains, probation officers, bail bondsmen, surveillance tech and cops on the street. It's a money maker. In both instances the money flows upward to the numbered accounts of a select elite.
Globalist capital gutted and looted America and other than the tax dollars its swilling down doesn't give a f'k about America Black or White. The collapse of the Black community into violence and anomie is the canary in the American coal mine.
You're semi delusional about the state of black America prior to deindutrialization but to the extent that you are correct you're just banging your head against the wall by spewing out the same tired old boomer speech that's been spoken to death over the last six decades to which you referred.
Right down to the inanity of blaming Nixon, who apparently was working with the tribe that "weaponized the disintegration of the black community and aimed it at you" despite him being on tape stating they are a subversive threat to America. And them getting him impeached for it.
You essentially admit there's a war on White people and blacks are one group that is used as a golem to wage that war but it seems extremely unlikely you will ever acknowledge who the perpetrators of that war are.
I know that in the 60's, despite severe poverty and discrimination, and being preyed on by the worst elements of municipal graft and criminality, Black America was a hard working Christian and family based community capable of organizing and throwing up leaders like Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. That Black's I encountered were open, talented and intelligent people with core values matching my own. Then as now we knew, that the enemy we faced, Black or White, was narrow minded ignorance and societal manipulation by a venal self-interested elite. Nixon staffers have admitted that the "war on drugs" was a conscious decision to open the doorway to mass prosecution, the silencing of dissent about Vietnam, and to quell
the movement for Civil Right's. Then, as today, when the reality of American civil liberty and human moral reason threatens power and control the corrupt install political marionettes to seize and subvert the American narrative and prevent the truth/fact based conversation we all deserve. JFK, Fred Hampton and today's object lessons Assange and Snowden tell the story. Meanwhile the noose tightens.
The look the other way weaponization and conflation of crime and violence with revolution by deep state operatives is not limited to their use of the tragic disintegration happening in the Black community. It's just convenient. Antifa, the show trials of the "woke" commissariat, forced mass immigration, homelessness, Fentanyl, shit stained streets and violent subway's, a mercenary propagandist MSM, all serve to create the necessary chaos. The war isn't on White's it's on the Republic, the Constitution and the Bill of Right's it contains.
My god. This is gut-wrenching.
If ‘whiteness’ was the real problem, we would expect schools in Haiti to be thriving (no white people around). They are not. Of course, schools in Vietnam, China, and Singapore are thriving (no white people around). Maybe kids (and parents) really make the difference? This theory has actually been tested.
A generation ago Scientific American published a study showing that the children of poor Vietnamese immigrants were thriving in the same schools where black and Hispanic children were failing. See Nathan Caplan, Marcella Choy, and John K. Whitmore, “Indochinese Refugee Families and Academic Achievement,” Scientific American (1992), 36-42. Quote
"The scholastic success of Asian children is well recognized. Their stunning performance—particularly in the realm of science and mathematics—has prompted American educators to visit Japanese and Taiwanese schools in an effort to unearth the foundations of these achievements. Experts recommend that American schools adopt aspects of their Asian counter-parts, such as a longer school year or more rigorous tasks, in order to raise the scholastic level of US. students. Yet there is no need to go abroad to understand why these children do so well. The achievement of Asian-American students indicates that much may be learned about the origins of their triumph within the American school system itself.
More specifically, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, devastating political and economic circumstances forced many Vietnamese, Lao and Chinese-Vietnamese families to seek a new life in the US. This resettlement of boat people from Indochina offered a rare opportunity to examine the academic achievement of their children. These young refugees had lost months, even years of forma schooling while living in relocation camps. Like their parents, they suffered disruption and trauma as they escaped from Southeast Asia. Despite their hardships and with little knowledge of English, the children quickly adapted to their new schools and began to excel."
“I did not process these things as the byproducts of America’s system of funding schools through property taxes.” In reality this is BS. Urban schools are overflowing with money and it doesn’t come from property taxes. See NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) table 235.10.
As for poverty, my guess is that, in dollars, the slums of Baltimore have far more money than Vietnam (where the schools are vastly better). What does Vietnam have (that Baltimore lacks)? How about two-parent families.
When Dan Quayle attacked Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock, all right-thinking people criticized him. Of course, he was right.
"Whiteness" and the trendy opposition to it, is not any kind of real coherent argument it's just a luxury belief and a way for upscale whites to (virtue) signal that they're not one of the Bad Whites aka Deplorables over there, but that they're moral and compassionate bc they self-flagellate in public.
It is the Original Sin of the Social Justice religion, so you must confess it now to get ahead or to maintain your exalted status.
If virtue signaling (HT Ron Henderson) was just an affectation, I would be inclined to entirely agree. However, virtue signaling has impacted real policy. Note that the number of universities that are either 'test optional' or have banned the ACT/SAT altogether.
oh for sure, "virtue signalling" doesnt even scratch the surface, it's just one of the many aspects of the political-religious takeover we're living through. but there are few implementers or orchestrators, many more tribal cheerleaders.
"Virtue signaling" is a "white privilege."
That was literally to sell seats to donars. It will not continue, but I would discount the graduates of elite universities classes of 2024, 2025, and 2026. I suspect all corporate recruiters will ask for SAT scores.
It also pushes the Good Whites to seek Justice camouflage by readily agreeing to other dogmas no matter how inane or even obviously unreasonable and probably dangerous
yup, 100% class formation.
to be a member in good standing of Team Good Whites you must sign up for a package deal on dogma (BLM, DEI, Jan 6, Ukraine etc etc) and assent to it all.
don't wanna be labeled an apostate or heretic, that may kill your career.
The real issue is: why do so many upscale whites believe that denigrating their own people and culture is moral? Who taught them this bizarre, self-evidently absurd viewpoint, and what were the actual motives of the people who taught it to them?
Full details in Willing Accomplices: www.willingaccomplices.com
No it's a way to dehumanize, a way to unthing and it has origins that can be traced back to specific people that all share specific traits.
It is one weapon in the conquest of a people, a different group than the people who invented it, through shame and guilt.
But you delude yourself into believing it is some sort of upper crust trend when the reality is those people use it as a way to deflect and project their own self loathing forced upon them through demonization by said group.
Went to kindergarten in Takoradi-Sekondi in Ghana, West Africa. The classroom was very strict. I was the only "white" kid in the class. In terms of ability, the kids in the class were as good or better than the first grade class I attended in Vancouver, British Columbia, when my family returned to Canada.
Families in Ghana are highly structured and there is an amazing work ethic. Children and childhood are held as sacred.
What has broken down in the US in many cities is in part, the family structure. But families are breaking down because there are no working class jobs. Gang culture and drugs don't help.
But we also pulled away a back stop for struggling families when we destroyed welfare in the 1990s.
Regarding your comment about the slums of Vietnam versus the slums of Baltimore, I would say that comment is not correct. The Vietnamese are not starving, and even if they are poor, the extended family structure means that children are well fed compared to the poor in Baltimore.
"slums of Vietnam". I never commented on the slums of Vietnam (which I know little about). My guess is that the slums of Vietnam have better schools than Baltimore. Essentially no one in the US (particularly urban areas) is "starving". Checkout the obesity statistics if you doubt this. As for "no working class jobs" is that a joke or what? Perhaps you have never heard of illegal immigration. As for "when we destroyed welfare in the 1990s". Never happened. Check out https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/welfare_spending_history. Also check out "Public Welfare Expenditures" (https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/public-welfare-expenditures).
Starving versus malnourished?
As to immigration, the article didn't mention it, but:
https://www.newsweek.com/georgia-democrat-slams-own-party-choosing-migrants-black-children-1801648
A small number of Democrats oppose Open Borders and recognize the impact of Open Borders on America's own poor people. They are in the minority. The dominant Democratic position is "No one is illegal". Biden is only following the mainstream in his own party.
It's not just family structure that's broken down. It the social and economic structure, and the cause of that is NOT the breakdown of family structure. That is a symptom of the larger societal breakdown. The empire is in unstoppable decline. Get out if you can.
It was a private school you went to in Ghana wasn't it?
At the time I was in kindergarten in Ghana (mid 1960s) there were no government funded K-12 schools. The school I attended did require a modest fee. Most of the parents of the kids at the school I attended were middle or upper middle class Ghanaians (doctors, teachers, merchants) but not wealthy. The reason we went to Ghana is so that my Dad could teach forestry at a post-secondary college in Takoradi-Sekondi.
In the last twenty years or so, Ghana has implemented a government school system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7Z7YTcTblg
The school in the youtube video is quite similar to the school I attended in Takoradi-Sekondi and is in the same region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Ghana
Today, about 90% of school age children in Ghana are enrolled in school. The literacy rate of males and females aged 15–24 in Ghana is about 80% (in 2010.)
There are multiple languages spoken Ghana: three Akan languages (Akuapem Twi, Asante Twi and Fante) and two Mole-Dagbani ethnic languages (Dagaare and Dagbanli). The others are Ewe, Dangme, Ga, Nzema, Gonja, and Kasem.
Most people speak English as well as their own Ghanaian language.
Interestingly, Ghanaians do not classify non-Ghanaians by the color of their skin. Non-Ghanaians are simply Oburoni: Those who come from over the horizon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oburoni
Yes, culture and expectations does matter quite a lot. I sacrificed quite a few movie nights to do homework and excel in my studies.
The newer "progressive" educational policies keep everyone infantilized with low expectations. I expect we'll also eventually start seeing a drop in Asian achievement (in fact I think I read somewhere that the differences even out and disappear once you hit second or third generation of immigrants).
I actually taught quite a few East Asian students who had adopted the newer, "progressive and Western" attitudes toward learning. They were not typically very high achievers and did not amount to what their parents had expected upon graduation. So I would personally say that there is a pretty strong cultural component.
Public school in a rural community in Ghana, West Africa:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7Z7YTcTblg
They teach two languages: Fante and English, as well as history, arithmetic, social arts, and three other subjects.
Regarding Dan Quayle, I think it is quite irrelevant when so many marriages are failing due to lack of jobs and drugs. Most kids end up without two functioning parents not because they were born "out of wedlock."
In my immediate neighborhood in San Francisco, in the last ten years, at least three highly traditional Catholic families with four or more children have divorced. (I'm not Catholic, but I live in a Catholic neighborhood.) In one case, the mother became addicted to meth. In another, they lost their house during the financial crisis when they became over leveraged on their mortgage. In a third, their corner store business failed during covid and the parents divorced. In that family, one of the children recently became addicted to drugs and was killed in a shoot out with the police a few days ago.
So, no, I don't buy the argument that this is all caused by "out of wedlock" births.
The black illegitimacy rate is 70-80%. The white illegitimacy rate has also soared. Just the facts. You don't have to like them. Check out "family" (https://www.pbs.org/fmc/book/4family10.htm). Is America's "only" problem "out of wedlock" births. No, but it is a big one.
Well all those kids are no longer locked under their parents’ marriages. So maybe it’s not just out of wedlock births but also out of wedlock lives. Of the children. Easy access to hardcore drugs—liberalization. Overleveraged mortgage—promoted by liberal borrowing polices and their own feckless decision; lockdown to COVID—again liberal Democrat policies. I see a pattern here. Liberal policies induce divorce and cause instability among the young ones leading to maladaptive strategies for coping.
They also don’t have marijuana and other drugs ingested while growing fetus in utero.
Congrats you resurrected the “model minority” story.
The success of Asian-Americans in American life isn’t a ‘story’, it is a fact. Asian-Americans have better (better than whites) SAT scores, ACT scores, years of education, grades, arrest rates, imprisonment rates, murder rates, household income, personal income, family income, obesity rates, life-expectancy, illegitimacy rates, family stability, etc. What does the word ‘fact’ mean to you? I know, “an inconvenient truth that I can ignore whenever it conflicts with my PC religion”. But facts are part of what is real. What does ‘real’ mean to you. Clearly, nothing related to reality. I get that AA success makes the PC religion of ‘racism’, ‘structural racism’, etc. look sort of lame. Get over it.
Asian Americans had to score 140 points higher than white students to have the same chance of admission to private schools in a Princeton University study.
“The second study — co-authored by Princeton researcher Thomas Espenshade, in 2009 — found that Asian American students needed, on average, SAT scores 140 points higher than white applicants’ scores in order to get into elite colleges.”
You obviously know little about finance and go straight to tech.
“While Asian Americans make up one of the biggest minority groups in finance, comprising roughly 15% of the employees at the six biggest U.S. banks, few have made it to the operating committees of these institutions. Just one, former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, has led a top-tier bank.” https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/21/why-asian-americans-on-wall-street-are-breaking-their-silence.html
Asians and Asian Americans still face discrimination in the tech workforce despite their education and testing.
“Government investigations into the question of whether tech companies discriminate against Asian Americans have led to divergent outcomes. “In 2016 the U.S. Department of Labor found that Palantir Technologies Inc., the defense contractor and data mining firm, received more than 130 applications for a quality assurance engineer job. About 73% were from Asian people, yet the company hired just four Asian applicants and 17 non-Asian. The department filed suit, alleging discrimination. “The likelihood that this result occurred according to chance is approximately one in a billion,” a complaint read. A year later, Palantir agreed to pay a $1.66 million settlement but didn’t admit any liability. In February, Google paid $3.8 million to settle a Labor Department lawsuit that in part alleged it had discriminated against Asian applicants for software engineering jobs. But last year, Oracle Corp. prevailed in a similar suit.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-08-06/why-silicon-valley-s-asian-americans-still-feel-like-a-minority
I’m waiting for when the conservatives white people posting all over Wesley’s piece start arguing white IQ and test scores versus Asian Americans.
Yes, Thomas Espenshade has found discrimination against Asians. So has Peter Arcidiacono. See "Asian American Discrimination in Harvard Admissions" (https://www.nber.org/papers/w27068). The abstract reads
"Detecting racial discrimination using observational data is challenging because of the presence of unobservables that may be correlated with race. Using data made public in the SFFA v. Harvard case, we estimate discrimination in a setting where this concern is mitigated. Namely, we show that there is a substantial penalty against Asian Americans in admissions with limited scope for omitted variables to overturn the result. This is because (i) Asian Americans are substantially stronger than whites on the observables associated with admissions and (ii) the richness of the data yields a model that predicts admissions extremely well. Our preferred model shows that Asian Americans would be admitted at a rate 19% higher absent this penalty. Controlling for one of the primary channels through which Asian American applicants are discriminated against--the personal rating--cuts the Asian American penalty by less than half, still leaving a substantial penalty. "
Racism is OK as long as it is 'good' racism (anti-white, anti-Asian). Otherwise it is 'bad' racism.
Of course, the number of Asian-Americans at the top is relatively low. It takes decades to reach the top of any organization. That includes finance. That includes Congress. Jews (who have been in the US considerably longer) are over-represented.
Now the excuses for low representation despite outstanding achievement come from an underperforming yet over represented group. Decades? Asian Americans have been in the USA for more than a century. How many more decades is reasonable to tolerate a glass ceiling?
You have sunk to a new low (which is somewhat amazing). In 1910, the Asian-American population was just 147,000. In 1960, it was 980,000. In 2019, it was 22.4 million. Keep on digging a bigger hole. Keep on digging. Never give up.
“Racism is OK as long as it is 'good' racism (anti-white, anti-Asian). Otherwise it is 'bad' racism.”
LOL. Good racism perpetrated by white people on Asian Americans.
Yes, white liberals / leftists do discriminate against Asian-Americans. They don't discriminate on behalf of themselves. They do it because they have to (to maintain AA).
According to your “facts” the elite universities and top notch finance jobs should be dominated by Asian Americans. They aren’t. There goes your argument. Thanks for dropping the old school terms “PC” and “Asian-American”.
Yes, it is a fact that elite universities are (strongly) biased against Asians (including Asian-Americans). Perhaps you have never heard of the Harvard and UNC cases. Let me give you a quote (you won't like it, but it is real).
see “For Asian Americans, a changing landscape on college admissions” (https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html)
“Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.”
Racism is very real in the USA. Your preferred kind of racism.
As for finance, Asian (including Asian-Americans) go into other fields. Perhaps I should mention that Caltech is 44% Asian. MIT is 'only' 32% Asian.
Well, he is discussing facts. Vietnamese refugees really did do well in school, and countries such as Taiwan have better educational systems than we do. I lived in Taiwan. We could learn a lot from them.
Peter Shaeffer, the problem with Haiti is the two centuries of naval blockades, coups, invasions, assassinations, and support of dictatorships including their death squads by France and the United States to extract wealth from the Haitians. This was often done at the behest of wealthy individuals and corporations. The history of this is easy to find online and from some good books.
The last significant ‘naval blockade’ of Haiti was 210 years ago. You do know what a century is? Clue it is 100 years. In 1991, that elected government of Haiti was overthrown by a domestic military coup. The US sent troops to restore the elected government. Hardly an invasion. In 1994, the UN authorized the use of force to restore the elected government of Haiti. Quote from “Intervention in Haiti, 1994–1995” (https://history.state.gov/milestones/1993-2000/haiti).
“General Hugh Shelton, commander of the invasion force, was transformed enroute to Haiti from commander to diplomat, charged with working out a peaceful transition of power. Shelton and Cedras met on September 20, 1994, to begin the process, and Aristide returned to Haiti on October 15”.
From 1915 to 1934, the US maintained troops in Haiti. The US sent troops to Haiti, in response to recurring instability in that country. The period of US control was one of stability and prosperity. The US built roads, while we controlled Haiti. Predictably, the roads collapsed after the US left.
How about a country that was invaded and had the worst famine in world history. The same country then waged war on its own institutions of higher education. That would be the country with the highest PISA scores in the world.
How about a country that was invaded by at least two armies, one of which still occupies the country. This country has no natural resources and very rugged terrain. The country lives in a bad part of the world with very hostile neighbors. Should I mention that this country was ruled by military until 1988 (off and on). This much beleaguered country has some of the best schools in the world.
I can think of a country that has been successfully invaded. Been recently subjected to a long (and successful) naval blockade. Had all of it major cities burned to ground. Nuked twice. Had military coups. Of course, this country has huge storms and is seismically quite active and has large active volcanoes.
This country also has great schools (some of the highest PISA scores in the world). Which makes your excuses for Haiti look ridiculous.
Your analogy of Haiti to Japan is good.
A much better analogy, though, would be to Cuba.
Cuba has faced as many, nay, more, challenges than Haiti in its development since independence.
It's still laboring under a nominally communist dictatorship.
But how's things in Cuba, compared to Haiti?
After helping it to re-industrialize by deliberately shipping American industry to it and using it as a giant depot during the Korean War, Japan did great economically didn't it?
(Taking a long breath) After clear cutting its forest to pay France off for the lost of its "property" or slaves and only paying France off after the Second World War under constant threat of blockade, being actively denied investment by the American government from the revolt at the behest of the Southern elites because of their being black, having its gold reserves stolen, several military invasions, multiple American instigated coups including the last, and active support of dictators like François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, Haiti has done not well like Japan. The country, unlike Japan, has never been able to fight off occupation and economic exploitation.
The Korean war was in the late 40s / early 50s. Japan's great growth came later. In real life (not your fantasy world), Haiti debt to France was tiny ($11.5 or around $5-6 per-capita).
The real problem with Haiti’s debt wasn’t the magnitude (which was trivial, even by the standards of the day) but Haiti’s inability to pay it. Why? Because Haiti’s money economy more or less disappeared after independence. Stated differently, Haiti abandoned its formal (export oriented) economy and reverted to subsistence agriculture. Subsistence agriculture doesn’t produce hard currency exports.
Japan's great growth happened because of the base created by the Korean War and the country only has had to endure one invasion.
After a horrific revolution fought to free themselves from slavery from which France demanded reparations for its lost property, which was the Haitians them selves, Haiti then enjoy almost routine economic and government disruption for two centuries by the United States and France.
As for exports, sugarcane growing is so hard, they imported enslaved Africans to do the work. I am sure why this is so hard to see.
I looked this up. Japan's literacy rate in 1945 was greater than Haiti today. I think 1945 is before the Korean war. Does math and history work differently for you? The economic growth or Japan before WWII and after WWII has been extensively studied. Strangely enough the Korean war doesn't show up in the actual numbers. See "Lessons from the Japanese Miracle: Building the Foundations for a New Growth Paradigm" (https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a04003/).
Haiti is the richest nation in the world... At least measured by excuses and foreign apologists.
How about a country that was invaded by at least two armies, one of which still occupies the country. This country has no natural resources and very rugged terrain. The country lives in a bad part of the world with very hostile neighbors. Should I mention that this country was ruled by military until 1988 (off and on). This much beleaguered country has some of the best schools in the world.
Haiti is a rough case. When the US entered, there were no protests and people ate better. Say what you will about Papa Doc, but people could build houses and earn money to feed their children.
The worst crime against Haiti was the imposition of democracy before they were ready. The US needs to give that shit up before it kills them. Be happy to fix your own country, but with Haiti, blame the US a little until the 1990's.
US interventions were worse in Panama, but they had a social fabric upon which to build. Haiti is a really complex setup, and most histories are just sad anti-American, racist garbage that treats Haitians like children.
Not the average IQ of 67 of the people of Haiti (not counting the nice white ladies there working for NGOs)...?
Id suspect Haitians *actual* iq number is closer to the 85 of American blacks if the environment were to be improved
I don't think Haitians (Africans) and French (Europeans) mixed a great deal before (or after) the revolution (unlike the one-way mixing of America slaves and their white owners). Therefore, present-day Haitians could be expected to have mean IQs pretty much in line with their African progenitors. Somewhere in the 70-75 range wouldn't surprise me, whereas 85—the mean IQ of American blacks at approx. 20% white admixture—would be highly unexpected (unless I've got my history wrong).
Correct. What is it with white europeans that are obsessed with thinking that all people are created equal and there are no racial differences? I know many americans were conned and lied to and told we are all equal, but I think some percentage of people would think that way even if we werent indoctrinated with the lie. Other countries and races can see the truth and believe other races are different in IQ, what is it about westerns who can't see the obvious?
If it was accepted that genes play a critical role in group outcomes, then the vast gravy train of left-wing activism built on the false claim that only the environment matters, would come to a stop. And very powerful interest groups in Western societies will NEVER allow this.
Not only does this not challenge anything that I said, it could be suggested that two centuries of economic warfare against a society might produce bad health outcomes; I would also suggest that you state where you got such a figure since such an average level of intelligence would mean that a large number of Haitians would not only be incapable of taking care of themselves, many would be incapable of talking or basic hygiene.
Um...
My apologies. I was replying to Fred Evanston and my I was just a bit too fast with my responses.
Don't think so. I quoted an IQ number for Haiti with which you were outraged—so was I when I first learned of it—and you then challenged me to source my data. I refuse to divulge that info as I'm loath to engage in the tiresome "Mismeasure of Man" debunking that would then be necessary to address your sputtering rage and incoherence.
The good news is that I'm fully in agreement with you that Haitians, due to their extremely low average IQ, are totally unable to take care of themselves as they've amply demonstrated over the last, what, 223 years. Of course, things could turn around tomorrow, they could learn to speak English, and showers and baths might become a thing...I just wouldn't bet on it.
studies showing democracy only really works with a population with an average IQ over 90, Average IQ in Haiti is around 67. Maybe all of those reasons you stated were propaganda. You should study IQ and genetics too and then decide which one is the contributing factor.
How about a country that was invaded and had the worst famine in world history? The same country then waged war on its own institutions of higher education. That would be the country with the highest PISA scores in the world.
This is a profoundly thought-provoking and candidly written essay. It simply lays bare what all teachers know. The issue, of course, is not about race. It's about culture. For instance:
"When ‘Black’ & ‘Hispanic’ Students Outscore ‘Asian’ & ‘White’ Students on the ACT, Nobody Notices"
https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/when-black-and-hispanic-students
As a lifelong teacher (special ed., high school, and college), I can attest to the fact that milder and less violent versions of these incidents occur even in well-funded suburban schools, and in selective liberal arts colleges. It's a matter of degree, not kind. In the end, teaching is a two-way street. Half of the responsibility for success (or failure) belongs to the student. The best teacher in the world cannot force information into the brain of a student who is ill prepared — intellectually, emotionally, or behaviorally — to learn. Conversely, students who want to learn will not be stymied by a poor teacher.
Thank you for this very important essay. Sincerely, Frederick
It is definitely culture. Africans and West Indians and their children absolutely demolish non-immigrant Black Americans when it comes to education. If it was about genetics like those “race scientists” say, it would be the other way around. The majority of Black Ivy Leaguers are immigrants and their descendants, despite them only being a small part of Black Americans.
I don't follow the logic of this. Couldn't African immigrants just be brighter by virtue of self-selection i.e. brighter people are more likely to emigrate or to be let in?
What I think you'll find as a common denominator in these families that do well in school is that they are generally two-parent families, regardless of how "smart" they are, and regardless of the reasons that they immigrated here.
What I think you'll find is any cope you possibly can to deny the reality of biology.
What reality is that, Antonio?
This is true, but then their children, who are born here, still maintain this academic excellence. This success is generational and fasts far longer than just the original wave of immigration.
Which might support a biological component to intelligence is what friendlybombs was suggesting ie intelligence is (partially) heritable. This is of course unknowable solely by looking at the situation we see currently. You can't disentangle cultural from biological impacts. The self selecting within the African and West Indian populations for emigration if it is based on intelligence, could be culturally based or biologically based or both.
Said what I was going to say, but more coherently. *Applause*
It's not culture, it is selection bias, and black immigrant Americans are still significantly lower as a group than white Americans, much less Asians. Pretty sure their average IQ is significantly less, too.
African immigrants??? Not in data I have worked with.
Do you have any understanding of what a bell curve is?
I write a lot regarding discipline and changes to the discipline policies here at our schools in Evanston IL. One major thing that has changed the last few years is the administration absolving themselves of any responsibility when it comes to this. Even in the IL legislature they passed SB10 designed to keep kids in the classroom, no matter what. At this point, teachers cant kick out kids unless the child is literally doing arson. Its a big issue designed to protect politically connected admins, at the cost of teachers and kids. All done in the name of “social justice”. Parents here have given up on the admin and just call the cops at this point...
Example: here in Evanston we had a kid at the middle school who tricked another kid into eating an edible. The victim ended up in the hospital. The next day, the offending student was back in the classroom because the paperwork required to suspend a student ensures that no students are suspended ever. We went from 138 suspensions to 2 in a span of two years. Those two involved students bringing firearms. Neither was expelled. The Administration all takes the win for solving discipline issues but teachers and parents are left with no recourse but to *call the cops*
Obamas “Promise Program.”
Guys like him put their children in private school
“Social justice” means eliminating disparate outcomes. So, what used to be regarded as essential practices until about ten minutes ago such as standardized tests, meritocratic criteria, and effective *school discipline* are made to disappear. You see, disciplining students, including expelling them when necessary to preserve a learning environment, affects blacks disproportionately. The “school to prison pipeline”, we can’t have that you see. What an odd, perverted sense of “justice” is social justice.
The first step to solving a problem is to admit that there is a problem.
The tricky part of admitting the real problem is explaining why they’ve wasted so many years and billions of dollars on solutions that obviously weren’t working and they should have known weren’t going to work.
The whole K-12 education consultant industry would fall apart overnight.
It's not as of the consultants' fat checks would get clawed back.
Note almost all the consultants are rich white ladies, often married to very powerful white men. They have been looting urban schools for two decades. It is beyond any concept of evil. These monsters brag about how they "dedicate their lives to the children" when they fly private jets from city to city giving seminars and selling videos. I had the misfortune of knowing one. Her husband was cool (and insanely wealthy), but he told me she used her money "for clothes and travel." She made close to eight figures off of urban school districts. Yikes. Anyone moderately in Hillary Clinton's sphere of influence knows who I mean.
The number of patients I saw in medical school and residency who were barely literate -- often elementary school level -- was shocking. It really is tragic.
Meanwhile, I taught English at a public school in rural Thailand right after college. In absolute terms, the students must have been more impoverished than the students in this piece. The school definitely expended far fewer dollars per child compared to American schools, probably by orders of magnitude. But the kids were absolutely lovely and respectful, both to me and to each other. There was some naughtiness, sure, but I never saw physical violence of any kind aside from the occasional wack from a teacher’s ruler (note, this was around 16+ years ago, so social media, and screens in general, had not yet poisoned their minds. Things may be worse now).
The kids who put in the effort were getting a decent enough education and going to college. Others dropped out, but that’s better than forcing disruptive, uninterested students to stay in the classroom. They generally would go on to farming, factories, warehouses, etc., and would be more or less fine.
Not sure what the takeaway from this anecdote is, other than: it’s the culture, stupid. How do you repair a broken culture? Unfortunately, for all of our societal wealth and education and technology, we have no good answer to that question. So we choose not to ask it.
Facts about Thailand can be easily found. It is a typical middle-income country. Not that poor and not that rich. Thailand has a gini coefficient of 34.9 (comparable to France), which is lower than the US. Life expectancy is 79.3 year which is relatively high. Unemployment is very low. A good way of understanding Thailand is 50% (per-capita) of France.
It has the lowest GINI in East Asia.
“The analysis also finds that with an income Gini coefficient of 43.3 percent in 2019, Thailand has the highest income inequality rate in the East Asia and Pacific region. For rural households, the average monthly income was only around 68 percent of urban households. Rural households also continue to suffer from low education, a large number of dependents, and difficult living conditions.”
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/10/21/rural-thailand-faces-the-largest-poverty-challenges-with-high-income-inequality
“A 2016 study from Thammasat University concluded that 80 per cent of the land is owned by the richest 5 per cent, while Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report showed that more than two-thirds of the country’s assets is controlled by the richest 1 per cent. On top of this, inequality in Thailand, like in many countries, has been exacerbated by climate change and technological transformation. Increasing incidents of floods and droughts have destroyed crops and depressed the income of farmers, while looming disruptions in various industries have led to factories shutting down and workers losing their jobs.”
https://thailand.un.org/en/90303-thailand-economic-focus-building-more-equal-and-sustainable-thailand-after-covid-19-un
If you are going to make stuff up, try to be a bit more clever about it. Here is what the World Bank actually said about Thailand
"BANGKOK, October 21, 2022 – Thailand has made remarkable progress in reducing poverty from 58 percent in 1990 to 6.8 percent in 2020 driven by high growth rates and structural transformation, however 79 percent of the poor remain in rural areas and mainly in agricultural households, according to a Rural Income Diagnostic launched by the World Bank today."
Of course, you are wrong about Thailand's Gini coefficient as well. FRED series SIPOVGINITHA shows a fall from 45.3 in 1990 to 35.1 in 2021. Let me quote 'facts don't care about your feelings'.
Maybe you should read where Teacher in Thailand taught.
Maybe you should try facts (which would be hard for you). The Asian Development Bank shows that rural poverty fell from over 70% in 1988 to well under 10% in 2019. See "Predicting Poverty Using Geospatial Data" (https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/666711/ewp-630-predicting-poverty-geospatial-data-thailand.pdf) Figure 1. Remember two things. First, facts are real things even if you don't like them. Second, facts don't care about your feelings.
Keep on cherry picking your “bank studies”.
They used lights to predict poverty.
“In a study published recently, researchers from ADB extended the conventional small area poverty estimation framework by tapping geospatial data extracted from daytime and nighttime imagery through machine learning algorithms to create granular poverty maps of the Philippines and Thailand (ADB 2020, Hofer et al. 2020). The adopted method was inspired specifically by Jean et al. (2016) which was further used and/or enhanced in subsequent studies (e.g., Babenko et al. 2017; Tingzon et al. 2019; Heitmann and Buri 2019; Yeh et al. 2020). These studies fall under the strand of literature that broadly aim to explore applications of artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques for estimating poverty. However, as hinted earlier, this methodology has several technical issues. First, validating aberrant or unexpected predictions becomes challenging because of the fact that the features being used to correlate poverty are abstract. Second, instead of directly predicting poverty, the method employs an intermediate step wherein an algorithm is first trained to predict the intensity of night lights. The intermediate step is necessary in this context because sources of night light data, particularly satellite imagery, are readily accessible and can cost-effectively provide large volumes of labelled images on which to train a computer vision algorithm, something that cannot be easily done if we were to predict poverty outright since readily available poverty data are not quite granular. Using data on night lights as a proxy for poverty during the intermediate step is arguably valid if it is assumed that places that are brighter at night are less poor than those places that are less well lit. However, if there are places that are equally lit but show varying levels of poverty on the ground, such an intermediate step could potentially lead to loss of vital information by not predicting poverty outright.”
Having lived there and in China and in Taiwan, the worst inequality is in China, by a mile. The most equal countries in my opinion are Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Thailand probably looks bad because the rest of East Asia have shit statistics outside of Singapore and Malaysia. Laos, Cambodia and Burma -- no one has a clue. Even with Vietnam it is hard to trust their data. I would believe Malaysian data, and Northeast Asian data is better than US.
I would say Thailand was better than the US, but worse than somewhere like Taiwan or Korea.
Peter comforts himself by saying facts don’t care about feelings because attractive women don’t care about his.
Personal attacks bro ? Not cool.
Bruh, Peter couldn’t take what he dished out.
You're back to that nonsense? 😂 Tired.
they also have an old, strong Buddhist culture. I spent time there and my wife is from there. I converted to Buddhism. There is still a massive corruption problem, but whoa could their children run circles around ours.
Bruh, Thailand is very stratified society but a lot less violent than America. Most of your students didn’t escape the cycle of poverty.
You're sure of that? Bring facts.
Thailand is way less violent than inner city America, and they execute bad guys. The police also tend to kill instead of put cuffs on. It is a really nice place.
When you bring your own facts.
Did I make any assertions?
You’re challenging what I wrote so bring your own facts otherwise Google it.
You made a statement that was unsupported. I only called it out as unsupported. I am not going to do your work for you.
I was also in TFA, significantly earlier than you, 1997-1999 teaching 3rd & 5th grade innercity Houston TX. It is creepy how similar my experience was. I would sit in my car absolutely dreading getting out and starting the day. My 5th grade class was 33 large fifth graders and of course as a new teacher i had all the kids the two other veteran teachers didnt want. (There were three fifth grade classes, one gifted class, one ESL class - well behaved kids of immigrants, and i got the leftovers) What made me feel the absolutely shittiest was the one or two students from stable families who really wanted to learn but i was too busy stopping kids from fighting to pay them much attention. That crushed me inside. I think i've actually blocked out much of my time with those 5th graders. At the end of my two years (I still cant believe i made it, but to be fair my 3rd graders were slightly less traumatizing) I learned simply how little the teacher mattered. Like you I could write a long essay about how naive some of ideas behind TFA were.
I also did TFA 97-99. Trained in Houston then went to Cali. l had a similar first year. Teaching in these environments are more like the starfish on the beach story. Realistically, a teacher can make a difference with a few students each year. I’m still teaching 26 years later.
TFA and similar programs like Citizen schools are led by either wilfully ignorant people or naive fools.
I remember and ex girlfriend was in Citizen schools and on her first week or teaching in inner city Houston a ~11 year old boy commented on her "nice ass Ms. Teacher"
Year Zero is terrifying. I’m a big proponent of choice and parental rights, but stories like this underscore how futile these efforts are.
In lily-white suburban suburban CT parents have willingly handed to public schools all responsibility for educating kids. I’ve talk to upper-middle class parents who think schools should provide their kids free breakfast and lunch because they’re too busy to make it. I talked to a grandma who lamented her third grade grandchild can’t read. She surmises that even though she’s given the child a library’s worth of beginner Dr. Suess books, her son has never read to his child.
And then there’s this. Yesterday I was in our local FedEx. A late-teen early twenty something guy came in to ship a blank box. No address. When the attendant asked for the recipient and address, the kid asked why she needed that information. The contents? A gender reveal test for the baby he and his girlfriend were having.
I don’t know what the answer is, but we’d better come up with one quickly.
Now that is (tragically) funny
My son was a TFA teacher. My son is not a white man. His experience in the DC public schools was 100% like that described above. The rules and regulations of TFA made it impossible to actually reach and teach these children.
These classrooms are not teaching platforms, but breeding grounds for the Lord of the Flies culture that progressives want, so that they can present themselves as the saviors of the oppressed (the great white hopes).
The single most important reform would be to bring back routine expulsion. Remove the Justins of this world, and learning becomes possible. The problem is that those expelled would be disproportionately from certain demographics and nobody wants to face the consequences (political, economic and social) of doing what is needed. It is a particularly painful irony that those who screech the loudest about helping minorities, are the same ones keeping the troublemakers in classrooms, that are totally ruining the prospects of the 90% of kids who are actually educable, even in the bleakest environments.
"There are plenty of negative things I could say about Mrs. Holmes as a teacher. I honestly doubt her kids learned much more than mine, despite the relative tranquility of her classroom. Still, for two years, she was my savior. I can’t even remember the number of times she had abandoned her classroom and come to my rescue, appearing suddenly at the back of the class and silencing the storm with a mere “Excuse me!”."
She sounds pretty cool tbh. I hope she convinced you to convert to Christianity.
Imagine what it might take to gain enough control over these classrooms to actually teach something to these kids. Probably talking about extreme measures like classroom police, authority to discipline these children in ways the author would find very uncomfortable: running the school like a prison, low tolerance for disruptive behavior, forgetting about concerns surrounding "disparate treatment", ignoring parent's complaints about "picking on my kid" (also happens in white schools btw). Sounds harsh right? But allowing the wild and terrible environment described by the author seems like a much greater evil perpetrated on these kids.
Instead we'll hire coordinators and curriculum directors and bloated state make-work officers to play with numbers and propose useless programs because we can't stomach what is necessary.
Don't know why they can't grab the kid by the ear and drag him down to the principal's office for a sound paddling. Boys, I mean; don't know what you do with seriously disruptive girls, but in my day (I'm 82, from a small town in Oklahoma) they didn't seem to exist. Received two paddlings in high school, both times for not stowing my gym shoes properly. On the whole a good thing. Learned it was important to pay attention and follow the gym teacher's instructions. Don't know any boy of my place and generation that, in retrospect, objected to a little physical discipline. We weren't all bright and of an angelic nature, by any means, but there was order in the classroom. Of course, one mantra from most parents: You get in trouble with the teachers at school, you are in bigger trouble once you get home.
IQ is destiny.
I don't think this is necessarily true, I think you also have to consider culture.
I come from a family of Sicilian immigrants and I doubt any of them would have blown the roof off an IQ test.
But they came from a culture with pretty rigid rules and roles: EVERYONE worked, saved, supported their families, obeyed standard behavioral norms, took one small step at a time up the ladder to the nice middle-class existence they passed down to their children and grandchildren.
Modern Americans are so deracinated that they forget the vital importance of ROOTS, and how people rooted in stable famiies and communities can usually create decent lives for themselves, as long as they're guided and supported by others.
And back then discrimination against Italians wasn't just hypothetical. A good example, is the life of Mario M. Cuomo. He graduated first in his class from law school and couldn't get a job with any New York City firm. Of course, he did become Governor of the State of New York (1983-1995).
Hey, I'm from Queens so I know all about the Cuomos...Mario was a great guy and he did pretty well for someone with a vowel at the end of his name!
A Papist to boot!
I really question this. I have not experience law, but I worked in finance, and they only care about intelligence and drive. Men I respect told me the Anglo/Jew firm thing was gone by the 1950's. The men telling me this were Irish and Italian Catholics who grew up in New York (old and rich). I want to say both graduated from Columbia University in NYC.
My original source (for discrimination against Italian-Americans in the 1950s) was ‘National Review’. The NR article was about something entirely different. See “‘Fredo’ Is Not an Ethnic Slur” in the NR. The Wikipedia article for Mario Cuomo has the following words. Quote
“After his recovery, Cuomo gave up baseball and returned to St. John's University, earning his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1953. Deciding on a legal career, Cuomo attended St. John's University School of Law and graduated tied for first in his class in 1956. Cuomo clerked for Judge Adrian P. Burke of the New York Court of Appeals. Despite having been a top student, the ethnic prejudice of the time led to his rejection by more than 50 law firms before he was hired by a small but established office in Brooklyn.”
My original source (for discrimination against Italian-Americans in the 1950s) was ‘National Review’. The NR article was about something entirely different. See “‘Fredo’ Is Not an Ethnic Slur” in the NR. The Wikipedia article for Mario Cuomo has the following words. Quote
“After his recovery, Cuomo gave up baseball and returned to St. John's University, earning his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1953. Deciding on a legal career, Cuomo attended St. John's University School of Law and graduated tied for first in his class in 1956. Cuomo clerked for Judge Adrian P. Burke of the New York Court of Appeals. Despite having been a top student, the ethnic prejudice of the time led to his rejection by more than 50 law firms before he was hired by a small but established office in Brooklyn.”
Well, he attended a third-rate law school. Of course he would have trouble finding work. Even back then one needed to attend a prominent law school to obtain a good job out of school. This is not discrimination. He simply had bad credentials and needed to prove himself before anyone would hire him. The same is true today.
I would not describe St. John’s Law School as ‘third-rate’. It’s current rankings are well above average (68 out of 196) and it is quite expensive ($71K+). Graduating tied for first in his class is hardly a ‘bad credential’. As it turns out, I have read biographies of Richard Feynman. He encountered some discrimination against Jews in that period. To put this perspective, Yale only dropped it Jewish quota in the 1960s. Of course, now we have (pre-SC) quotas for Asians.
The average IQ of Italians is 100.
Most IQ stuff is made up garbage by the fake field of psychology. It is like astrology, but no one figured out the scam yet.
Human intelligence is the most studied subject in all of psychology, and IQ is the most empirically supported psychometric measurement there is.
It has its limitations, but it's not bunk. Not liking the results of the research has no bearing on the validity of the test or whether or not the results are true.
I am trashing psychology as a field. I am not a practitioner, but I use a bit of probability and statistics pretty frequently (more like daily twenty years ago). The papers I read are often just plain wrong conclusions, or they do very bad things that make their correlations super suspect.
I would agree that IQ stuff is the best in terms of conclusions, but I genuinely question the field of psychology. I have simply seen too much BS, and even when I helped friends working on a PhD, their idiot advisers told them to do incorrect analysis. I questioned myself and brought examples to guys whom I trust (tenured professors in math and a math genius in finance), and they confirmed what I had done, and upon my explanation simply rolled their eyes and said "leave social science alone." Okay, another guy said the same but specifically excluded economists because "some of them know what they are doing." I am no so sure about that last one, but it has an impact on me.
That just hit me like a ton a bricks. I tried to get more into it, but anything that looked solid was old (like 1960's). So many recent papers were really bad. I mean really, really bad. I just discount the entire field.
Also, if IQ is solid, it seems like there has been not that much research into drivers. I can see genetic inheritance (and I read one study about the impact (or non-impact) of schooling that was actually quite good). I feel like one could make a pretty strong case for IQ inheritability, but I would still trash psychology as a field, with IQ being an intelligent subject a few of those people stumbled upon in the dark.
It might be because a psychologist killed my father when I was a child.
Just kidding about that last sentence.
There are different fields of psychology, some more robust than others.
Psychometrics, evolutionary psychology, behavioural genetics and experimental psychology - those are the ones worth focusing on.
You are not allowed to think such things, let alone say them.
What a throwaway line.
IQ is relevant, but I doubt it was purely his IQ that drove Justin to commit murder.
These kids probably would have managed to not murder other people as adults if they had not had such living conditions in the first place. Perhaps only a very small % of them would have ended up at with a post-secondary education (or not--who knows?), but that's hardly needed to be at least moderately successful (as in having consistent employment of some kind and managing oneself without turning to a life of crime).
I can also tell you that my own family is an immigrant one, and we were not exactly a family of geniuses. But we're doing just fine because our culture values family, education, law, and order.
It does not require a genius level IQ to do fine. Simply an average IQ (you can do ok with an IQ of 95-100). What happens, however, when 50% of a population have an IQ < 85 or 25% of a population < 75? This is the severity of the problem at hand.
Criminals tend not to be high IQ, because IQ has a great deal to do with pattern recognition. A low-IQ person simply doesn't have the cognitive power to draw conclusions or connect cause with effect.
Compound that with frustration that they are constantly -tragically- being asked to do things (read, write, compute) of which they are simply not capable; the reasons for explosions in the classroom aren't hard to individuate. I wish I had a penny for every wasted word and delusional report shared amongst so-called educators on this score.
People simply refuse to acknowledge the importance of this variable or the magnitude of the differences among human populations.
In addition to intelligence, there's also other average personality, temperamental, physiological, and hormonal differences that almost certainly contribute to differences in outcomes and behavior among groups. Seriously, the expectation that we would see equitable outcomes among various groups has ALWAYS been a fantasy. It's ironic that the loudest advocates for diversity also want to claim that all groups are exactly the same. If we're all the same, what is it exactly that makes us diverse?
You would be as bad off as those kids if you grew up in those circumstances and in that neighborhood. Thinking there’s some magical “IQ” test taking ability that causes this is total bullshit.
In order to solve this hurtful problem, uncomfortable truths must be acknowledged.
Maybe not total BS, there may be a biological component to intelligence contrary to the "Blank Slate" proponents. However how you can disentangle the cultural and the biological components from the situation we see in impoverished communities is beyond me. What is clear is that these children are not reaching anywhere near their own full potential regardless of what their innate abilities might be, and are in fact so far below what they could accomplish it is a terrible loss to society.
It is a proven fact that the extraordinary success of Kenyan and Ethiopian distance runners is a due to a genetic predisposition.
If we can acknowledge that certain groups of people can run faster than others groups of people, why can we not acknowledge that certain groups of people can think faster than others groups of people?
No one is saying we can't acknowledge that intelligence may be (partially) heritable. What I am saying is that in the situation we are observing you can't disentangle what is biological and what is cultural, since both are operating here.
Actually, you are wrong. Forget heritability. On the left, many (most? all?) folks deny that intelligence even exists. Sadly, this is far from an extreme, hypothetical position. The California Department of Education has stated "We Reject Ideas of Natural Gifts and Talents". How crazy is that? Very crazy? It is also public policy.
Perhaps the cultural dysfunction is a result of the biological.
Since President Johnson's Great Society, untold billions have been spent trying to fix the problem....to no avail. Could it be a different approach is needed?
There are declines in gains when it comes to IQ and raw processing power, too, you know. It's not the be all, end all of outcomes though modern society does seem to underestimate the biological impacts. That doesn't mean it's "correct" to swing all the way in the opposite direction.
The only way you'd know is if you managed to uplift the living conditions to see what results. That's not going to happen without some pretty authoritarian controls in place, though, so it's probably a moot question. But it may be more fruitful to wonder if America should stop shipping low-level jobs overseas and keep them for their own citizens, as a start.
Actually, you're wrong about that. It's undeniably true that Kenyan and Ethiopian runners, as a group, do extraordinarily well in the world of competitive distance running. (The all-time fastest lists in distance events testify to this.) But it's also true that a specific subgroup of Kenyans, the Kalenjin, are responsible for most of Kenyan running greatness; the "average" Kenyan runner, not of that tribe, rates somewhat lower. I have seen no research that actually pinpoints a "great runner" gene in Kenyans or Ethiopians--and I've been looking. Please share this research, if you're able. Finally, it's indisputable that Kenyan and Ethiopian predominance in distance running events has a great deal to do with running culture in those two countries. The same thing is true with table tennis in China. (I'm a competitor in both sports.) The Chinese domination of elite level table tennis is as overwhelming as Kenyan/Ethiopian dominance in distance running. Nobody has suggested that the Chinese benefit from a table tennis gene.
"....But it's also true that a specific subgroup of Kenyans, the Kalenjin, are responsible for most of Kenyan running greatness...."
So you're saying because all Kenyans don't run fast that my statement is wrong? Please.
And you're actually comparing the physicality of running with hand eye coordination to make your point? Seriously?
Like I originally wrote, unless we can come to terms with some simple truths, we are never going to solve the problem.
Someone with a name of Greenberg advocating to acknowledge certain ethnic groups of people are genetically predisposed to _____ wasn’t on my bingo card.
Care to elaborate?
Didn't think so.
Consider that the children Mr.Evans was attempting to teach are now long out of school. What are they up to now, capable of, what can they be doing beside perpetuating the cycle that trapped them before birth?
Recent studies have shown that regarding developed countries, you can predict a population/ethnic groups IQ to 93-98% accuracy from approximately 1,200 gene alleles. See:
"Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data" https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/5
"The Wilson Effect: The Increase in Heritability of IQ With Age" https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/wilson-effect-the-increase-in-heritability-of-iq-with-age/FF406CC4CF286D78AF72C9E7EF9B5E3F
The gaps in average IQ in developed countries is down to genetics, not environment. In developing countries part of it is environmental due to living conditions, as those populations have not gone through the Flynn effect.
I think if you wanted to find one common denominator between all these kids, it would be single-parent homes (or just generally fractured family situations) to a large extent. And I sincerely doubt that being born with the capacity for a high IQ would save any of them in that situation - but it may make them better criminals.
So in that sense, it's definitely cultural. Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm in the '60s when he saw that 24% of black families were fatherless. Well now it's more like 75% and we can see that no one listened to him then.
That 75% stat is across all blacks, including the wealthy black suburbs of Atlanta and other cities. Urban cores all over the USA, however, show rates of black illegitimacy routinely approaching 100%.
That's a good point. The 25% of black kids that live with both of their parents are likely never a problem in the schools. In fact, they're probably the ones in university and in professional and management positions.
This
Problem is that it’s not true. Psychometric scores are not central or determinative of human potential in the way you are suggesting. And your implicit claim about the genetic inferiority of black people is also not supported.
"... And your implicit claim about the genetic inferiority of black people is also not supported...."
That's your interpretation, not mine.
Michael Greenberg should take a time a machine back to 1936 Europe and spout his rhetoric.
Ah, the "everyone who cites a fact I don't like is a Nazi" approach to political debate.
The Nazis also built highways, should we tear up the Interstate system to show how much we despise them?
There are plenty of exceptions, but they require the adult(s) in your life to put the wellbeing of their children & determination to better their circumstances ahead of everything else.
IQ is genetic - in developed countries 0.85 - 0.9 heritable.
I'm the product of a single mother, we were working class and poor. I have an IQ of roughly 130 and a masters degree however.
We aren't even close to hitting genetic limits on intelligence in most schools. This is like looking at two fields of corn, noting that one is taller and assuming that field had better seed stock, when they were both the same seeds, but the farmer only had enough fertilizer for one field.
Just an FYI. Baltimore Public Schools spends about $16k/student. In 2022, 93% of 3rd-8th graders could not do math at grade level. Out of the 150 public schools in Baltimore, 23 of those schools did not have a single student proficient in math. ZERO STUDENTS out of 23 schools. An additional 20 schools only had 1 or 2 students proficient in math. 41% of Baltimore public high school students earned below a 1.0 GPA.
The average number of students in a Baltimore school is 500 students. 43 schools at $16k/student comes to about $345 million. So, for $345m in taxpayer funds, Baltimore Public Schools produces about 30 students who can do grade level math in nearly 1/3 of all of their schools.
Looks like it's gone up:
"BALTIMORE (WBFF) — Baltimore City Schools will be spending about $21,000 per student this year, thanks to a massive education funding increase. Maryland lawmakers passed the bill, known as Kirwan, two years ago. Now that funding is kicking in, the question is whether more taxpayer money will result in better student outcomes.
For this coming school year, City Schools’ budget has ballooned to $1,620,788,542. That’s nearly $230 million more than the previous year’s budget of $1,393,777,695. It amounts to about a 16 percent increase. Enrollment in City Schools is going down and has been for years. So, that’s a lot more money for fewer students."
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-city-schools-spending-per-student-2022-enrollment-performance-kirwan-new-york-boston-washington
https://www.baltimorecityschools.org/kirwan
It's really kind of hilarious that anyone thinks "City X spends Y thousands per student and only x% can read" is somehow a failure of cause and effect.
They are spending the money because they are required to, not becuase they signed a paper saying "and with this money we'll teach them how to read."
I’m saying it’s a giant waste of money.
But you consider it a waste of money because in your opinion, the kids aren't learning. What if the scores would be much lower if the money weren't spent?
Children being unable to read is 100% a fault of the parents.
It's fair to ask if there is are alternatives that would produce the same result with less money or even better results with the same expenditures.
Sure, but you don't know where the money is spent because, as I said, schools aren't given the money to improve test scores. So you might start there. Once you find out that we're spending $50-100K on some kids for federal requirements, and spending millions on refuge and immigrant kids dumped on the k-12 system whether or not they've ever been educated before, you could definitely see ways that we could save money but it would require unspooling a ton of federal law.
Frankly I would first concentrate on converting some of the crazy numbers of support staff and administrators back into classroom teachers.
I'm curious how much money is spent on those schools despite how disfunctional they are. Where is it going? If kids are really going hungry it seems like the first thing to be done is to feed them a decent breakfast and lunch.
Yeah I would like to find some people who've done some investigations. But the schools are paypigs for political clients and there's always ample money for consultants and training while the basics are not present and student outcomes don't matter at all.
My husband taught elementary school for 18 years and was fired from his job because he broke up a fight. The school district has made sure that he can't get back into teaching anywhere. His job was actually taken out from under him. It's a pity because he taught Kindergarten through Third grade. By the end of his time there, at this one particular school, it had been through three principals and almost a complete turn over of faculty. He was demoted until they found a way to oust him. They fired him just before Christmas with no investigation in 2018. His specialty was teaching reading in the lower grades.
The school was eventually shut down because of corruption.
It's pretty well documented the kids throw the food away unless it's junk food. And these high poverty schools don't as a rule get a bunch of money for consultants. That money comes when a superintendent has decided on a school improvement plan.
And there's literally tons of research on this topic.
Really? A kid who throws away food is not a hungry kid. I smell a rat.
Rats are indeed what you get in the classroom when, to save time, schools send breakfast to the room to be served during classtime.
And yeah, a lot of the free lunch goes to kids who aren't hungry. That huge amounts of food is wasted is pretty well-established.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3788640/
Why don't they have at least a good free lunch like they have in San Francisco? I've heard over the years that Baltimore is very corrupt.
Baltimore Public Schools spend about $16k/student, some as high as $30k/student.
Money mostly going to administrative headcount, consultants, and pet projects
School District (and University) Administration jobs are largely patronage roles at this point.
Payoffs to the extortioners.
It’s an excellent thing to do, get some actual food into these kids that if not the sleep, quiet study place, and pro social attitudes that are associated with good education