[quote=joec][quote=CA renter]As for the bolded part of your quote, guess what the schools/classrooms would look like if we segregated by IQ? It would be segregated by race, color, and background/SES. That is why we legally cannot track students by IQ…and why teachers have to teach to the middle of the class. It is against the law to track by IQ.[/quote]
I thought IQ tests were not really academic tests and more how you think/reason, etc?
I think my IQ is very average having mostly gotten just “Satisfactory” throughout all my elementary school years.
I just studied a lot, even when I hear/read that other people didn’t really have to in High School…which I did have to.
I disagree that someone of a certain race/color/background at a young age has a lower IQ than someone of the other, more academic (considered) races.
You can call it the poor kid who doesn’t have a safe home to study and bad friends would be a bad influence, but I don’t think that’s called IQ.[/quote]
IQ is supposed to assess some basic knowledge, memory, logic, visual processing, and reasoning skills, among other things. You’re correct that people can overcome natural IQ deficiencies if they work harder (sometimes, much harder), but many people believe that IQ is heritable — a very contentious subject because of the implications, BTW.
No matter how one wants to define it, or what one believes are the causes of different IQ scores, if you were to segregate the classes by IQ/educational aptitude, they would be largely segregated by race, SES, and other demographic factors. Just look at where the “poor” schools are concentrated, and look at where the “good” schools are concentrated. It will clearly show that race/class/SES are very highly correlated to where these schools end up on the spectrum. Teachers, themselves, have relatively little effect on where schools place based on standardized test scores.
The reason I keep prodding EconProf for some kind of evidence to show that teachers’ unions have a negative effect on student outcomes is because he cannot find any evidence to back up his claim once race, SES, and other demographic influences are taken into consideration. If anything, studies show that schools with unions have better outcomes for students once these other factors are taken into consideration. Anyone who studies our education system knows this, which is why you will never see the anti-union Privatization Movement folks citing any of the actual facts and research.
