The relative performance of black students is even bleaker than generally known, the New York Times reports:
Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.
The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, “A Call for Change,” is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.
A call for change? A call to change what, exactly?
The report shows that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. Black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are twice as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a job. In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower. In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008.
[...]
“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”
The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors.
Clearly a lack of money and mentors is the problem.
You can talk to black babies all you want, but if their average IQ lags 10-20 points below that of the whites, or even further behind east Asians, the results will not be much different from what we are experiencing today. The evolutionary paths took us in different directions, and the best we can do is to recognize that and make the proper arrangements. Segregation worked fairly well in the past, and with a few improvements it might be a solution for the future. Whatever we do, let’s just stop arguing with Nature by fantasizing about ever getting the black population to be like the white folk.
Segregation worked fairly well in the past?
Well, it is certainly true that in the days of segregation, the black family was far more functional than presently. I believe the black illegitimacy rate in those days was smaller than the white illegitimacy rate presently. Also, if I’m not mistaken, there were a lot more black entreprenuers and a lot less black people working for the government as a percentage.
Are those arguments for segregation or against welfare?
Isn’t segregation happening naturally (informally) without the intervention of government mandating integration? Where I live, the younger and more affluent (mainly white, but includes all races) live in the suburbs or rural areas, leaving behind an underclass (poverty and parental education level, or elderly without children in school). In the case of Detroit, wasn’t it the plan of the first black mayor (Young) to push whites out, in effect desiring segregation?
Welfare is really bad for the functionality of black families. But I won’t pretend that’s my primary reason for opposing it. My main motivation for being against welfare is that it is bad for the fundamental interest of my group (demographic hegemony) because it represents a transfer of fertility between groups. Within groups, it is a fertility transfer between the solid provider types and the types favored for short term relationships and flings, because it reduces the cost to women for gratifying that side of their nature.
Diversity is a bad thing, it destroys community and it makes shared norms pretty much impossible. Even in areas like my own that have very little of the type of diversity that is actively dangerous (i.e., lots of NAMs), it still sucks because it creates neighborhoods that are nothing like the communities where most of us grew up — they aren’t even neighborhoods, just collections of atomized nuclear families. Walk around outside sometime, and count the number of people that you see out and about in such a neighborhood. Then compare what google’s stats will tell you about how many people actually live there. Even a significantly introverted person like myself is bothered by this, it isn’t the way that human beings are designed to live. Putnam’s work has the same observation if you prefer not to trust your own lying eyes or mine.