A "miracle" in Harlem? Not likely

I feel obligated to comment on the second-most-emailed NY Times article, a David Brooks op-ed entitled The Harlem Miracle.

The article is about a middle school in Harlem which allegedly achieves extraordinary results:

The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.

Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Don’t believe it. Someone is always trying to point to some educational “miracle” involving underprivileged black students, but the results are never replicable on a large scale.

Steve Sailer’s theory is that, if an enormous amount of resources where thrown at white students, their test scores would go up also:

If you stop and think, you'll notice that this experiment says less than David Brooks implies it says about the "black-white achievement gap" because there's no control group of white students in this study. Nobody bothered to check to see how much white students' scores would go up if a huge amount of money was given to a well-known superstar educator

Steve makes a very valid point. And how much money to we have to spend just to get poor black kids on par in math, and still below par in verbal skills? It’s not even clear that traditional public education is worth the money.

We also don’t know if the gains are permanent gains in g, or temporary gains resulting from intense coaching for specific tests which will fade away by the time the kids are high school graduates.

The school is also a charter school, which means attendance is optional. Allegedly the goal of the school is to recruit a random cross-section of a neighborhood in Harlem and not just the students of parents who are motivated to seek out something other than the default school, but the city didn’t force every student in the district to attend this school, so I’m sure there is still some selection bias.

A “miracle” is, by definition, something which is not subject to the scientific method. In other words, it’s not repeatable by other scientists. I wonder who named the column, David Brooks or some NY Times editorial page editor?

There is a good idea in the editorial, which is teaching children middle class values. According to David Brooks:

The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.

I have no idea what these schools do exactly. I strongly support teaching poor children my own idea of middle class values. But I do not expect that teaching middle class values will result in some “miracle” with respect to highly g-loaded measures like reading tests. The proper way to measure the success of teaching middle class values is whether or not the kids become criminals and single mothers collecting welfare.

Liberals are strongly opposed to the idea of teaching middle class values because it suggests that poor people have bad values and are thus to blame for their own poverty—god forbid we blame someone other than rich white Republicans for that.

Comments

[Independent Accountant]

I read this article. I have a simpler explanation: the test results were "fixed". I do not believe the story. I have seen 40 years of "miracles".

[Gil]

"Liberals are strongly opposed to the idea of teaching middle class values because it suggests that poor people have bad values and are thus to blame for their own poverty . . ."

I probably still won't get my Liberal Card saying this but "yes, when people are poor despite the fact there's nothing much keeping them poor then they must have poor values". For all of the problems of the West between 1930 and 1960 the was a noticable increase in the overall standard of living. Which is to say that the people enjoyed the increase in those 30 years had quality values that allowed them to create a better quality of life for themselves and their children. Other parts of the world haven't hardly changed in the past 50 years - not because anyone's 'holding them down' rather they have piss-poor values. It's interesting to hear the way those who escaped the poverty of the Great Depression talk of how "times were tough but everyone pitched in, helped out others, worked hard and had a generally positive attitude". Contrast this with the continuing poor parts of the world where fighting and killing others seems to be the only thing they seem to enjoy. Yep, a lot of poverty can be link to poor values. Or, yes, poor nations only have themselves to blame as other nations can lift themselves out of poverty in a generation or so.

[jay]

Drilling, rote memorization, long school days, lots of in class work, discipline, dress code, no summer break, etc. probably could get black kids to achieve more. The problem is that similar methods could also get whites to achieve more too, so equality remains unattained. Really other than East Asians (they study a lot), all ethnic groups would see some level of improvement.

I think I'd support this stuff anyway since more time in school means less time to get in trouble and cause problems. Also, given the abysmally low level of current academic achivement in the inner cities, raising up these people would increase their employability.

[Zylonet]

-We also don’t know if the gains are permanent gains in g, or temporary gains resulting from intense coaching for specific tests which will fade away by the time the kids are high school graduates.-

What evidence exists that would lead you to believe the plausibility of public school teachers increasing the "g" of students? It's all B.S. We already know the hereditarian hypothesis is likely true, and we already know that most people can be prodded to "achieve" when a teacher drills them to no end, and we also know that as soon as the stimulus is removed a gradual decline begins. The truth is obvious, we should not suffer the doubters.

[White Whale]

It's sounds like teaching middle-class values is akin to behavioral modification therapy. Essentially, what you are saying is that in these ghetto schools, you don't prepare people for college (as suburban schools do) by teaching math, science, history, etc., but have classes that teach "proper behavior". The fact is, in middle-class communities, if there is a problem student, they'll send him to a special school for troubled kids. Trust me; having grown up i a suburban area, the school system is almost over-vigilant in treating problem cases. That's why there are so many kids on Ritalin, mostly in middle-class areas. Of course, these troubled kids are in the distinct minority, so treating them doesn't overburden the school system and the community.

An inner-city school has many more problem cases, which will overburden the system. Most regions just give up, so you have these dysfunctional schools. The problem you are proposing can only be efficiently solved by taking over entire schools and putting them into this behavioral boot-camp. That's a hard sell, since the educational system looks at individuals, rather than groups.

[dan kurt]

re:A "miracle" in Harlem? Not likely

Ancedote. Time circa 1974-75. My wife with a newly minted Ivy League Doctorate was teaching at a junior college while I was in my first job in a corporation after two post docs. She told me stories that I found incredulous--they could not be that stupid.

Well one day she was ill and I offered to teach the class. I went to the college and encountered circa 150-200 students telling them that my wife was too ill to come to class. I told them that I had my doctorate in a different field but that I could help them with questions in Math and Chemistry that touched the subject matter she was teaching.

I will never forget the bovine reaction of the class. No questions came, only blank stares. I started asking elementary questions to the class on background concepts. I remember discussing pH with them and exponents. I brought up the subject of covalent bonds and hydrogen bonds. It was as if I was from outer space. No one in a audience seemed to remember anything. At that point, probably for the first time in my life I understood what the left side of the IQ curve meant.

Years later, seeing Jay Leno interviewing the "man in the street" I saw that class.

It is hopeless, believe me.

Dan Kurt

[Ivy]

"we already know that most people can be prodded to "achieve" when a teacher drills them to no end, and we also know that as soon as the stimulus is removed a gradual decline begins."

Since it's likely these results do not imply an increase in g, I'd be curious to see their performance on a related scholastic exam. I think it's pretty clear that the administrators and teachers tailored the curriculum around one specific examination. How about giving them another state's 8th grade exam? Or some other related, but not identical, test to ensure these results aren't biased towards this one exam?

How much you want to bet they won't do that? And how much you want to bet if they did, the results would go right back to the familiar 0.2 standard deviation increase.

[BrunoBrazil]

Today, the teenagers are too uninterested in studying. That is why I left k-12 education.

What I actually observe is that middle class teenagers are getting the bad values of poor people, because of the extreme permissiveness of society.

I taught in a rich kids school. They had BMW´s, but did drugs, street raced their cars and the 5% interested in studying are considered nerds and bullied.

Our society is so hostile to studying that we created the nerd stereotype discourse. If you study, you become a weird person that doesn´t get attraction for the opposite sex and use pocket protectors. So, don´t study or you get unpopular.

There are nerds, but it is too absurd to label the majority that gets good grades as people who use pocket protectors, have weird behaviors, use strange glasses and are obssessed with Star Trek.

Which teen wants to study if doing so means being considered weirdo?

[Ivy]

@ BurnoBrazil:

But the leftists think this aversion to studying is exclusive to lower class NAMs, especially blacks afraid of being perceived as "acting white". This social phenomenon amongst middle and upper class whites is almost as destructive as the negative attitudes amongst ghetto blacks (I wouldn't equate them, but it sure is a problem). Yet the leftists would never broach this stigma amongst whites because doing so would eliminate a primary aspect of explaining the environmental cause of the racial gap.

[BrunoBrazil]

Middle class values can and must be taught to poor people. It will alleviate
part of their hardships, but it won´t do a big change, because it is not the fundamental cause of poverty.

The fundamental couse of poverty is that most jobs offered at any given moment pay less than US$ 10 per hour. You can´t get a better standard of living if a big group of people is always earning a low salary.

Education? It can work in an individual sense, but not in a collective sense. Jane can get educated in a useful qualification and escape Wal-Mart, but Joe will take former Jane´s place. If most jobs pay crap, someone always has to do the crap job. And education has a limited marginal effect in a society that is highly educated like the US. Education could do a far better effect in an African country with high illiteracy.

But, if you we assume that lots of people are condemned to low wages, which is undeniable, we can make a little improvement in their lives with better values.

Jane is condemned to McDonalds job, but at least, if she doesn´t have a child as still a teenager, she can have a better standard of living by having one child or no children at all than her peers who had 3 and need welfare and not getting bankrupt except difficult situations.

But the effects are too limited, because it means you would tell the poor people that are probable welfare users to not to have children at all for them not to worsen their condition.

I challenge you to make 30% or 40% of americans not to have children at all because they can´t afford them except living on welfare or in great hardships.

Beyond it, I doubt that their love relationships can be made more stable. These are households in permanent money problems and difficulty to pay the bills. I doubt someone can stand decades living in a house with permanent conflicts about money. And all other developed countries have high divorce rates. The best you can do is to make the divorce rate fall from the actual 50% to be 30% or 40%, like we have on European countries.

[guuy]

How can one escape poverty if there aren't any jobs available? And if there are ones available, odds are they probably pay no more than $8.50 an hour. This is the whole "whatever happens to you, it's because of what you did and didn't do" line of thinking that is associated with right-wing people. That way of thinking isn't totally outside of reality, but it's definitely not an absolute truth.

[Underachiever]

guuy, i completely agree.

[Stopped Clock]

If middle class values includes spending thousands of dollars on useless antique furniture and lawn ornaments and getting into status symbol wars then I dont support teaching middle class values to poor people.

OTOH I find that a lot of poor people are just as wasteful of what little money they have and as materialistic as the worst of the middle and upper class. I guess I'm opposed to pretty much everybody except those few people who actually live frugally and spend money on their children instead of themselves. After all, if everybody thought like me, the movie industry would probably consist entirely of children's films or maybe not exist at all, and TV would just be educational shows and news channels.

[JewishAtheist]

"The school is also a charter school, which means attendance is optional. Allegedly the goal of the school is to recruit a random cross-section of a neighborhood in Harlem and not just the students of parents who are motivated to seek out something other than the default school, but the city didn’t force every student in the district to attend this school, so I’m sure there is still some selection bias."

You're either a very bad reader or extremely dishonest. The article includes this sentence:

"They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, but weren’t selected."

So no selection bias w/r/t the latter group.

Steve Sailer's hypothesis, on the other hand, is a good one. He's a lot more careful than you on the science.

[Sheila Tone]

HS wrote: "Steve Sailer’s theory is that, if an enormous amount of resources where thrown at white students, their test scores would go up also: "

Fine, but so what? The point is whether or not the testing group is salvagable as productive members of society. If they can improve their academic scores, they're probably also capable of passing their classes, graduating from school, and finding a decent job.

I work with people at the bottom. Sadly, I don't see how our middle-class values would help a lot of them. They're unlikely to be rewarded by the system no matter how they behave. Frankly, they're not people you'd look at and think, "Too bad all that potential is going to waste because they're so lazy."

The idea is very intriguing that early, intense intervention could have turned them into someone with more to contribute. I'd rather pay for that than for the social services and criminal justice services they need later.

Bruno wrote: "I challenge you to make 30% or 40% of americans not to have children at all because they can´t afford them except living on welfare or in great hardships."

Hence, my idea of government payments to *not* have children. In the ideal situation, certain low achievers could be offered lifetime payments at an early age if they undergo sterilization. That would not only remove the financial incentive to have children (it's the best paying gig they can get), but provide a counterincentive.

In the non-genetic version less likely to scare the public, we target people from the lower economic groups with payments that are higher than welfare so long as they don't give birth. We could call it something like the Economic Advancement Incentive Program to make it warm and fuzzy.

[BrunoBrazil]

"Bruno wrote: "I challenge you to make 30% or 40% of americans not to have children at all because they can´t afford them except living on welfare or in great hardships."

Hence, my idea of government payments to *not* have children. In the ideal situation, certain low achievers could be offered lifetime payments at an early age if they undergo sterilization. That would not only remove the financial incentive to have children (it's the best paying gig they can get), but provide a counterincentive.

In the non-genetic version less likely to scare the public, we target people from the lower economic groups with payments that are higher than welfare so long as they don't give birth. We could call it something like the Economic Advancement Incentive Program to make it warm and fuzzy".

The day such idea took place is the day where Americans will have the lowest ferility rate ever recorded, probably less than 1 child per woman.

If you earn a very low wage, it is absolutely irrational to have children: your situation, that is already bad, will be far worsened. I think that, if we had a birth strike (nobody having children because it means misery) it would be the only way to make companies pay a higher wage.

[Stopped Clock]

I suspect that being poor and childless is incomparably more miserable than being even poorer but having at least one child to bring up. It still boggles my mind how anybody can seriously talk about sterilizing the poor. If such attitudes were common among right-wingers then I would become a liberal.

[BrunoBrazil]

How can one escape poverty if there aren't any jobs available? And if there are ones available, odds are they probably pay no more than $8.50 an hour. This is the whole "whatever happens to you, it's because of what you did and didn't do" line of thinking that is associated with right-wing people. That way of thinking isn't totally outside of reality, but it's definitely not an absolute truth.

I agree. There are lots of irresponsible people, but, even if everyone was responsible, most people would still be earning 10 per hour or less.

US economy tanked in 2008 because of an unsustainable idea: paying salaries far less than your european and japanese counterparts (less expense) and expecting them to consume a lot (more income). The "little problem" in it?

That the same people that earn a pittance to engage a consumerist lifestyle (necessary to keep the economy going) can only do it using money he/she doesn´t have: debt. So, americans have a debt industry, a Ponzi scheme, because it made people consume with income that they didn´t have and couldn´t repay. When banks could not give money that the american can´t repay anymore, the banks failed so we have the debacles: Citi, Bank of America, UBS et coetera.

[Peter]

It's not some miraculous level of progress, but it's still progress. Writing off the program as useless just because it doesn't turn all of the kids into geniuses is not the way to go.

[Sheila Tone]

Stopped Clock wrote: "It still boggles my mind how anybody can seriously talk about sterilizing the poor. If such attitudes were common among right-wingers then I would become a liberal."

Then you'd be in my camp. Sorry to boggle you, SC, but in Los Angeles County, nearly a fifth of the residents are on some type of welfare (not counting unemployment benefits or retired people on Social Security). That's way too high. It means something is wrong with the system.

We need to find a humane way to discourage people with low abilities and criminal tendencies from reproducing. Right now, welfare provides an incentive. Why scrape by at aminimum wage job (if you're even capable of that, which a lot of poor people aren't) when you can have a better lifestyle raising babies and collecting welfare? Offering financial counterincentives is a humane response.

[Sheila Tone]

Bruno wrote: "The day such idea took place is the day where Americans will have the lowest ferility rate ever recorded, probably less than 1 child per woman."

Would that be worse than the current situation?

I'm open to an argument that children of welfare recipients are a contribution to society. So far, the evidence I've seen indicates otherwise. That's in totality, of course -- there are exceptions.

[BrunoBrazil]

"Sorry to boggle you, SC, but in Los Angeles County, nearly a fifth of the residents are on some type of welfare (not counting unemployment benefits or retired people on Social Security). That's way too high. It means something is wrong with the system".

A group of useless people is a part of every capitalist economy. It is the "industrial reserve of labor", workers that are able to do a job, but the companies don´t hire in order to create downward pressure on the salaries they already employ.

Is it possible to give them work? Yes, with extremely low interest rates and lots of subsidies to production. But employing them would cause a rise of inflation so big business just doesn´t want the conditions that would let them get hired (that are macroeconomic, not of personal attitudes). Unemployment would be below its "natural rate" (a concept invented by the uberconservative Milton Friedman).

[Sheila Tone]

Bruno wrote: "A group of useless people is a part of every capitalist economy. It is the "industrial reserve of labor", workers that are able to do a job, but the companies don´t hire in order to create downward pressure on the salaries they already employ.

Is it possible to give them work? Yes, with extremely low interest rates and lots of subsidies to production. "

Bruno, what percentage of the welfare rolls do you think fit this description? I doubt you're arguing that there are *no* unemployable people, or that there are *no* people whose laziness or violence makes them useless. That would be a ridiculous argument.

I wonder if anyone on this board besides myself deals regularly with welfare recipients. There is a substantial number who seem eager to work for pay. I wouldn't say a majority, though.

Particularly with women, there seems to be an ingrained belief that they are fulfilling their duty to society simply by being mothers. They believe it is their right to be supported by *someone* so that they can have children and care for them.

[Linda]

It's now well established that educating people increases their performance on IQ tests, by about 2 points per year (in high school) and probably even more in elementary school. We don't know however whether these school induced gains involve g or just test sophistication. Jensen believed that g was a biological variable influenced mostly by genes; to the extent it could be shaped by the environment, it was the biological environment (i.e. prenatal conditions) that was relevant. However the cultural environment, education, & psychological stimulation did not seem to affect g. But newer research is showing that psychological stimulation (i.e. the n back test) may be able to lift the level of g. If so, it raises the possibility that education also stimulates the brain and lifts g.

[BrunoBrazil]

doubt you're arguing that there are *no* unemployable people, or that there are *no* people whose laziness or violence makes them useless. That would be a ridiculous argument.

Not a ridiculous argument. What do you think that are the requirements for most menial jobs? Even unqualified people can perform most duties with some quick trainig.

If someone is not disabled and doesn´t have a mental disorder that might put the boss on gunpoint is able to work for 6 per hour. 98% of people

[BrunoBrazil]

We need to find a humane way to discourage people with low abilities and criminal tendencies from reproducing. Right now, welfare provides an incentive

In Brazil, there is very little welfare and the people that are prone to be social problems also have the highest fertility. They beg on the streets, that is what happens. The typical image here of a poor mom is a woman panhandler desperate and lots of children begging at a traffic light and running loose.

[BrunoBrazil]

The big difficulty about disincentiving a poor woman about having children is her own environment. She looks at her peers and her mom.

The mothers raised children in extremely difficulty conditions, lived on welfare, low paying jobs, were evicted from apartments, went hungry. But survived. She thinks: if my mom raised me and my friends raise children in this tough environment and they survive and become another generation of people, I can also do it. In hardship and welfare, of course.

" still boggles my mind how anybody can seriously talk about sterilizing the poor. If such attitudes were common among right-wingers then I would become a liberal"

Well, become a liberal. The conservative dream is: everybody working hard and being able to raise a child in her/his two feet. But you can never do it if you are condemned to earning 8 per hour, as are in a big group of the jobs offered. It is never having children or being even poorer and having children.

That is probably a very big suffering. I am poor and I can´t have children or I will suffer even more.

[BrunoBrazil]

Hence, my idea of government payments to *not* have children. In the ideal situation, certain low achievers could be offered lifetime payments at an early age if they undergo sterilization.

I agree with the sterilization idea. If you don´t have children, even if you are rich and willing to pay top dollar for it, you have a lot of difficulty to perform a vasectomy.

One untold thing: wouldn´t it help a lot to make the poor not having children through a comprehensive reproductive health program, so they have less unwanted babies.

I mean: free doctor visits, high quality contraceptive pills, free IUD´s (an IUD is very effective. It is easy for a middle class woman but not for a poor woman, because it costs some hundreds of bucks), teenagers have access to contraceptives no matter their age (I think you shouldn´t have sex before 16. But if people do it, at least let´s reduce the damages. Teens have, it is inevitable and at least let´s not worsen it. Contraceptives don´t motivate more sex) and morning after pills (let´s not be hypocrites).

Perhaps abortion, at least in very early stages where they can be done on misoprostol and milfepristone and there is less ethical questioning about what life is. Personally, better a dead foetus than a social problem.

[Gil]

"I taught in a rich kids school. They had BMW´s, but did drugs, street raced their cars and the 5% interested in studying are considered nerds and bullied." - BrunoBrazil

Thanks for the depressing news. Is there any way to see well-off societies to go backwards than to discourage education? Admittedly for those who are born into the upper crust rich wouldn't care if society went from hi-tech to Medieval-tech as they'd still get their sex, drugs and rock&roll but the everyone else would cringe at the thought of going back to farming with hand tools (except for Greenies, maybe).

[Turambar]

HS your negativity and cynicism has destroyed the country. I weep etc. etc. You are probably the worst thing in the history of the world. You are the reason the Pharaoh took the Israelites in bondage into Egypt.

You cynically ignored the information in the article- Brooks *told* you he received this in his email (where I get all my important information) from Roland Fryer who is "meticulous". Who are you to cross examine a meticulous Harvard researcher! The study "changed his life as a scientist". Obviously if you had any reading skilled at all you would know from the article:
- Harvard guy, so no need to double check like if he was from Arizona State.
- "meticulous", so even if details had been supplied they would check out
- "changed his life"" Super important. What could be more Hopeful than Change?

Also "Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment...". What kind of an assessment? A 'rigorous' one, you negative nancy. Rather than hiding their light under a barrel and publishing in one of those fuddy duddy peer reviewed journals, as soon as they finish they email it to a reporter. Which is the final step of the Scientific Method.

Also important are the Knowledge New York Times Commentors weighing in. The first item under Editors choice is from "dbg25, NM".
"Wonderful to know we can actually do something about poor education levels. We need to if we are to remain competitive globally. One good thing Obama has done is put significant funds into education."

Your cynicism doesnt let you see the importance of Obama's education levels going back in time and changing the performance of the 6th graders who would be tested two years later in this rigorous study.

I hope this important issue will be covered more responsibly on ObamaGirl's blog.

[GreySwan]

Well my school was filled with Rich kids, and they drove BMWs's, and did drugs. However, they also played sports, did their homework, and went to good colleges afterwords. On the other hand, it may not be a good sample since 11/80 kids in my grade were in the 'gifted program' which required an IQ of at least 140.

[Rob]

I have advocated a plan of forced sterilization of everyone with an IQ less than average on a test administered at age 13 (and any children born to under 13s also automatically sterilized), but I could go with the payment plan.

[J.L.]

This is going to sound a little harsh, but doesnt it always seem that reports are always coming out about some "miracle" that supposedly "uplifts" the black community. There is always some new school program or some new social service project that somehow is "managing" to bring something or other to the African-American comminity which it lacked beforehand: either better educational performance, or success in business, or less chaotic family planning. The tone of all these stories, although they dont come right out and say it, seems to be: "Look, the black community isn't as hopeless and you think. See This program can work better than all the other programs that came before." Ironically, the subtle reality that is present, the "elephant in the room," which can be revealed by reading between the lines, is that there indeed is something about the African-American comminity that chronically needs helping. After all, a patient is not repeatedly taken to the emergency room unless there is some chronic physical problem there: that emergency room visits have happened repeately is not usually a coincidence.

It is not a coincidence that the black comminity repeatedly finds itself in need of some new, creative, program that promises to work a "miracle." (Whereas, I would note, there are no reports of such programs needed to help, say, the Asian-American community or its kids.) Perhaps it would be helpful if there were more recognition of that "elephant in the room": that I.Q. and cognitive skills vary accross various branches of the human family, and that this variation is bound to continue regardless of how much effort is spent on improving the performance of any given community.

[Turambar]

"It is not a coincidence that the black comminity repeatedly finds itself in need of some new, creative, program that promises to work a "miracle." "

Fortunately there is one!

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/labnotes/archive/2009/01/23/an-obama-effect-on-blacks-test-scores.aspx

"Will [Obama], for instance, goad black students to higher achievement, since he is living proof that working hard can pay off? One intriguing hint of what researchers led by Ray Friedman of the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management calls the “Obama Effect” suggests that maybe, just maybe, Obama will do more for the scholastic achievement of African-Americans than anything since Brown v. Board of Education."

Also Mishawna Moore:
http://www.fitsnews.com/2008/09/12/pact-scam-rocks-education-establishment/
"It was supposed to be one of the State Department of Education’s greatest success stories - an innovative principal taking on one of South Carolina’s most impoverished, under-performing schools and turning it into a model for the status quo’s definition of “reform.”

And for a long time that’s exactly what Sanders-Clyde Elementary school in Charleston, S.C. was - until one industrious reporter started asking questions, anyway.

She was praised as a “miracle worker” by the Charleston Post and Courier, showered with praise by state and federal officials and was actually given charge of another school to “turn around” by former district Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson.

...

After receiving reports that “something fishy” was going on in MiShawna Moore’s schools, Charleston Post and Courier education reporter Diette Courrege started doing some digging.
...
In fact, some students who had been rated proficient in reading showed up at other schools unable to read. In many other cases, kids who scored advanced (which is higher than proficient)‚ in English and math were struggling not to fail those same subjects at different schools.

Shortly after Courrege© began her investigation this spring, principal MiShawna Moore abruptly resigned from her Charleston positions and took a job with a North Carolina school district.

...
The potential publicity from her investigation prompted Charleston school district officials to start monitoring the administration of the PACT at Moore’s schools, and this week the “myth of the miracle worker” was officially exploded.

At Sanders-Clyde, after three years of steady and at times astronomical “progress,” students’ test scores this year plummeted by an average of 31 percentage points - or three times the typical year-to-year fluctuation."

[Stopped Clock]

//Well, become a liberal. The conservative dream is: everybody working hard and being able to raise a child in her/his two feet. But you can never do it if you are condemned to earning 8 per hour, as are in a big group of the jobs offered. It is never having children or being even poorer and having children.//

What's wrong with $8 an hour? I've seen people raise large families on less than that (even adjusted for inflation); surely it should be enough for an average family of four so long as the money isn't being wasted on drugs, alcohol, gambling, adult entertainment, or any of many various other wasteful activities. In such cases, giving the family more money by raising the minimum wage isn't really going to help much; it would also do seriously harm to the economy since many workers would be vastly overpaid and companies would have a greater incentive to seek other means of getting their work done (mechanization, hiring illegal immigrants, moving overseas), thus leading to increased unemployment.

[Fox]

This piece by Thomas Sowell may be worth looking into:

“...there are schools where low-income and minority students do in fact score well on standardized tests. These students are like the bumblebees who supposedly should not be able to fly, according to the theories of aerodynamics, but who fly anyway, in disregard of those theories.
While there are examples of schools where this happens in our own time-- both public and private, secular and religious-- we can also go back nearly a hundred years and find the same phenomenon. Back in 1899, in Washington, D. C., there were four academic public high schools-- one black and three white.1 In standardized tests given that year, students in the black high school averaged higher test scores than students in two of the three white high schools.2
This was not a fluke. It so happens that I have followed 85 years of the history of this black high school-- from 1870 to 1955 --and found it repeatedly equalling or exceeding national norms on standardized tests.3 In the 1890s, it was called The M Street School and after 1916 it was renamed Dunbar High School but its academic performances on standardized tests remained good on into the mid-1950s….
But the history of this black high school in Washington likewise shows a pay-off for solid academic preparation and the test scores that result from it. Over the entire 85-year history of academic success of this school, from 1870 to 1955, most of its 12,000 graduates went on to higher education.7 This was very unusual for either black or white high-school graduates during this era. Because these were low-income students, most went to a local free teachers college but significant numbers won scholarships to leading colleges and universities elsewhere.8
Some M Street School graduates began going to Harvard and other academically elite colleges in the early twentieth century. As of 1916, there were nine black students, from the entire country, attending Amherst College. Six were from the M Street School. During the period from 1918 to 1923, graduates of this school went on to earn 25 degrees from Ivy League colleges, Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan. Over the period from 1892 to 1954, Amherst admitted 34 graduates of the M Street School and Dunbar. Of these, 74 percent graduated and more than one-fourth of these graduates were Phi Beta Kappas.9
No systematic study has been made of the later careers of the graduates of this school. However, when the late black educator Horace Mann Bond studied the backgrounds of blacks with Ph.D.s, he discovered that more of them had graduated from M Street-Dunbar than from any other black high school in the country.”

http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html

[HS: I presume it was a selective admissions high school, and only the best black students in DC attended. Nothing wrong with a school like that, but hardly miraculous or even surprising.]

[sabril]

epicycle # 23,147: The minimum wage is too low so blacks aren't incentivized to work.

"This is going to sound a little harsh, but doesnt it always seem that reports are always coming out about some 'miracle' that supposedly 'uplifts' the black community"

I agree and it's just like reports of religious miracles. They make people happy, but upon closer inspection, they don't stand up to scrutiny.

[sabril]

Just to add to my last comment, I would say that fundamentally, this is no different from reports of weeping statues of the virgin mary.

[Joshua Holmes]

***HS: I presume it was a selective admissions high school, and only the best black students in DC attended.***

And you're wrong. From the article:

During the later period, for which I collected data, there were far more children whose mothers were maids than there were whose fathers were doctors. For many years, there was only one academic high school for blacks in the District of Columbia and, as late as 1948, one-third of all black youngsters attending high school in Washington attended Dunbar High School. So this was not a "selective" school in the sense in which we normally use that term-- there were no tests to take to get in, for example-- even though there was undoubtedly self-selection in the sense that students who were serious went to Dunbar and those who were not had other places where they could while[sic] away their time, without having to meet high academic standards. (A vocational high school for blacks was opened in Washington in 1902).

[HS: It was still, obviously, a case of self-selection where the top third of the district's black students went to this high school.]

[silly girl]

Plenty of immigrants move to the US and make low wages and live with many members of their family in one household. They all pull together, granny babysits, adults and teens work and within ten years or so the older kids are graduating college and they can buy a modest house. I know these people. Some have come as refugees with nothing but the shirt on their back, but too proud for welfare. They are not afraid of really hard work, or two or three jobs or sleeping on the sofa because they only have one bedroom. They do not waste money, or go out to eat. They think this is the greatest country on earth. They are poor in dollars not values and before you know it, they join the middle class. They cannot understand the lazy "welfare" class here and find them disgusting and immoral.

[Truth(er)]

The poor will never agree to sterilization in exchange for cash because the poor do not see themselves as trash.

The choice for the poor is either being poor alone or being poor with a child. Since most do not want to be alone, the child becomes the option.

[Brian]

Interesting comment:

"But here’s the kicker. In the HCZ Annual Report for the 2007-08 school year submitted to the State Education Department, data are presented on not just the state ELA and math assessments, but also the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Those eighth-graders who kicked ass on the state math test? They didn’t do so well on the low-stakes Iowa Tests. Curiously, only 2 of the 77 eighth-graders were absent on the ITBS reading test day in June, 2008, but 20 of these 77 were absent for the ITBS math test. For the 57 students who did take the ITBS math test, HCZ reported an average Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE) score of 41, which failed to meet the school’s objective of an average NCE of 50 for a cohort of students who have completed at least two consecutive years at HCZ Promise Academy. In fact, this same cohort had a slightly higher average NCE of 42 in June, 2007.

Normal Curve Equivalents (NCE’s) range from 1 to 99, and are scaled to have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 21.06. An NCE of 41 corresponds to roughly the 33rd percentile of the reference distribution, which for the ITBS would likely be a national sample of on-grade test-takers. Scoring at the 33rd percentile is no great success story.

How are we to make sense of this? One possibility is that the HCZ students didn’t take the Iowa tests seriously, and that their performance on that test doesn’t reflect their true mastery of eighth-grade mathematics. The HCZ Annual Report doesn’t offer this as a possibility, perhaps because it would be embarrassing to admit that students didn’t take some aspect of their schoolwork and school accountability plan seriously. But the three explanations that are offered are not compelling: the Iowa test skills were not consistently aligned with the New York State Standards and the Harcourt Curriculum used in the school; the linkage of classroom instruction to the skills tested on the Iowa test wasn’t consistent across the school year, and Iowa test prep began in February, 2008; and school staff didn’t use 2007 Iowa test results to identify areas of weaknesses for individual students and design appropriate intervention.

If proficiency in English and math are to mean anything, these skills have to be able to generalize to contexts other than a particular high-stakes state test. No college or employer is ever going to look at the New York State ELA and math exams in making judgments about who has the skills to be successful in their school or workplace. I’m going to hold off labeling the HCZ schools as the “Harlem Miracle” until there’s some additional evidence supporting the claim that these schools have placed their students on a level academic playing field with white students in New York City."

http://gothamschools.org/2009/05/08/just-how-gullible-is-david-brooks/

[kathy]

There is a program sweeping the social worker/teacher world that points out the differences between povery and middle class patterns of behavior and attitude. It's called Bridges out of Poverty(social workers) or Frameworks of Poverty(for teachers)ahaprocesscom. People are taught(among other things) that each class has unwritten rules. Work and school are based on middle class rules,and expecting poverty kids to succeed there is like taking kids who are great soccer players and putting them on a golf course and telling them "Win!' It gives tools to teachers/social workers to teach those very things-and more. I'm amazed so many lefties love it. It works really well.

[White Whale]

I'm starting to realize more and more that being a non-Asian minority in the country or in any country can really suck.

[White Whale]

Aren't there reform schools that are supposed to do that, you know, teach kids how to behave? Also, with this teaching middle-class values, would it be a class or a program? You're going to run into trouble if you use it in only black schools. They'll start complaining that they're being selectively targeted. The one way I could see it work is if they use it in schools based on crime statistics (vandalism, robbery, theft). Introducing behavioral modification for problem schools; that might work.

[White Whale]

Something else that I'm curious about: could Ritalin/Adderall help? I've read stories about how ADD/ADHD is mostly thought of as a problem of the middle-class suburbs, and how white kids are more likely to be prescribed drugs, even thought these middle-class suburbs have comparatively few problems. It's mostly so these kids study and remember thing.

In these inner-city schools, would hyperactivity be a much bigger problem? I mean, kids aren't just jumping around; they're fighting, vandalizing, stealing, and worse. In a suburban school, kids who keep getting up from their desks will be sent to the school psychologist immediately.

[40oz of Hate]

"I mean, kids aren't just jumping around; they're fighting, vandalizing, stealing, and worse."

So are their parents...

[cjwynes]

I love how the usual reforms he cites as having been advocated in the past are "reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start". All things which just happen to improve salary and working conditions for teachers and create more jobs for dues-paying teachers. Hmmmmm. What big organization that masquerades as pro-education could have *those* actual goals as its real agenda...