411–420 of 448 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ethnic groups with the highest incomes are the ones with the highest SAT scores.
So there is a correlation. What does this explain, and how?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes there is a way, you put kids in test prep and see if they do better. They generally do not improve much. The SAT is an IQ test, and IQ is mostly inherited from your parents.
There is no way the SAT is a purely IQ test, when i didn't get a hot score on my first SAT, i practiced for 1 week straight and substantially improved my scores (like 300 points range). The way i liken this to is if a MLB pitcher throws the same pitch at the same velocity and i know this ahead of time, i could practice for a year and when the time comes i could hit that ball. Does that mean i'm a major league level b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This paper found a 0.82 correlation between general mental ability g and SAT scores https://archive.org/details/ScholasticAssessmentOrG/page/n1/...
That’s relatively low considering what kind of test it is. Elementary school sees a 0.7 correlation between IQ and academic performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s relatively low considering what kind of test it is. Elementary school sees a 0.7 correlation between IQ and academic performance.
.82 is an insanely high correlation in any kind of social science
It’s like being shocked that resting heart rate and VO2 Max happen to correlate quite well relative to other health indicators. Yes they are testing different things, but not that different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.
Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Parents in these 34 most-affluent LAUSD elementaries donate an average of $876 per student, our analysis shows. That's like 1/5 of the gap between APS and the next highest school district. It looks like the wealthiest in LA are able to make up for the difference. But I am suspect of this article. The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and h…
> The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget > but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools. Where are you getting the 0.4% coming from? Parents don't generally donate directly to public school district budgets. They donate to school PTAs and school-affiliated non-profits. Perhaps you are referring to https://achieve.lausd.net/donorschoose but that's totally unrelat…
It's in the article:
>In 2018-19, PTAs and booster clubs at LAUSD schools brought in more than $36.9 million in revenues. Compared to LAUSD’s annual $9 billion operating budget, that’s not that much money
36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.
>The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.
>I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.
Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's reductive. My parents were white liberal hippies who didn't push me at all. I got C's in school and a perfect math SAT and SAT 2. To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it.
> To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it. Spending childhood doing things you enjoy and which also have economic utility is a secret power. Most people in the top 5th percentile of academic things also happened to spend a truly absurd amount of their youth obsessing over that academic thing. They may also be gifted, but spending all that free time in youth thinking about things i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The USA is home to the vast majority of leading universities, and no amount of PISA score dominance by Chinese children can change that. Those leadership placements are measured primarily by academic standards, and particularly research output. In CS, over 60% of PhD students -- the food soldiers of academia -- are here on student visas. Another huge fraction are first gen residents/citizens. I'd guess fewer than 2…
> If we get to the point where the USA depends on Chinese out migration in order to compete economically or militarily with China, China may well choose to turn off the spigot. America's biggest advantage over other nations is our immigration system, regardless of the myriad issues it has. The best and brightest are born all over the world, and they immigrate to America. Even if China stops immigration, we still have…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First you have to define a sensible racial grouping. Good luck.
Huh? Sensible racial grouping is trivial. The overwhelming majority of people on earth fall neatly into racial cateogies of white (European), black (African), Native American (American Indian), or Pacific Islander. Sure, the edges are fuzzy, (and good luck with the whole race/ethnicity thing vis-a-vis hispanics) but to pretend that makes it difficult to measuring population-level averages is just silly.
Handwave of the century
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jim Webb who was a Marine officer in Vietnam, a journalist, a novelist, and then a Democratic senator from Virginia saw standardized tests as his route to social mobility from a poor background in the rural south.
I've long thought that our intuitions about IQ tests are backwards; they are the most fair and least biased method we have to sort applicants for things. The more 'holistic' the process, the more that subjectivity (and therefore bias) creeps in. The only way around it is affirmative action, which leads to the current state of affairs.
Sure, a little bit of test prep will help many people, if you’ve never seen a standardized test before some familiarity is good for you. But some of these kids could not test their way out of a paper bag and the only hope for them is hire a ringer to take the test in their place.