Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, May 22, 2006
Race, tests and intelligence
Quick! Based on what you know about American test performance and the “achievement gap” among racial groups, answer this question:
Which racial subset tests significantly lower for mental functioning at age 8 to 12 months in a national study — white, black or Asian children?
The answer may surprise you.
The authors of the popular book Freakonomics, economists with a keen interest in education data, have a new take on race and intelligence in a forthcoming study. But on the Freakonomics blog, they give us an advanced look.
Here’s the abstract of the study:
On tests of intelligence, Blacks systematically score worse than Whites, whereas Asians frequently outperform Whites. Some have argued that genetic differences across races account for the gap. Using a newly available nationally representative data set that includes a test of mental function for children aged eight to twelve months, we find only minor racial differences in test outcomes (0.06 standard deviation units in the raw data) between Blacks and Whites that disappear with the inclusion of a limited set of controls. The only statistically significant racial difference is that Asian children score slightly worse than those of other races. To the extent that there are any genetically-driven racial differences in intelligence, these gaps must either emerge after the age of one, or operate along dimensions not captured by this early test of mental cognition.
OK, be honest. How many of you guessed Asian children would score lowest? Not too many, I’d wager, since Asians generally score well on standardized tests, often outperforming other groups at older ages.
The Freakonomics guys say the underperformance of infant Asians and the lack of a black-white achievement gap means one of two things — either the test for this young age is not reliable enough to draw conclusions, or differences among races they don’t emerge until kids get older.
Having looked at dubious tests created for four-year-olds, I can tell you right off the bat I would question data from any test of children under age seven.
But if you take for granted that tests of young children can be valid, then it seems rather curious that big gaps between black and white children are evident, according to the Freakonomics guys, at ages 2 and 3 but not at age 1. If black and white kids test about even at age 1 but white score much higher by age 5, what does that mean?
It could point to environmental factors, rather than native intelligence, as the primary driver of the test results. That also is consistent with many other studies that show strong correlations between factors like family income and parent educational attainment with where kids rank on standardized tests. And it fuels critic’s complaints that standardized tests are more of a measure of who you are (your family’s wealth and status) than of what you know.
What do you think are the implications of the Freakonomics findings?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Testing
Your classroom teacher, 20 years later
A few things have changed for the folks standing at the front of the classroom since I was in school. Are the changes good, or bad? Tell me what you think.
While I was looking over some new data out from the National Center for Education Statistics, I found this table describing the profile of public school teachers in 2001, compared to recent years. There were some interesting changes from 1981 when I was in seventh grade.
Overall, there are a lot more teachers, and teachers are older, but there are far fewer men in the classroom. Teachers are getting paid more and have less students per day, but they work more hours per week. And percent that say they would likely return to teaching is way up.
Here are the numbers:
- The percentage of male K-12 teachers has dropped from 33 to 21 percent.
- The total number of K-12 teachers has grown by more than a third to nearly 3 million.
- The average teacher has aged, up from 37 in 1981 to 46 now.
- The mean number of students taught per day has dropped from 118 to 86.
- The average hours worked per week on all teaching duties has crept up form 46 to 50 hours a week.
- The average annual salary, in today’s dollars, jumped from $17,209 to $43,262.
- The percentage of teachers who said they certainly or probably would teach again jumped from 46 percent to 60 percent.
OK, some of these I get. We know more new teachers are bailing out of the profession quickly and there’s a big chunk of baby boomer teachers nearing retirement. And we know that far more women are entering the profession than men. I suspect the pay increase is helping teachers who made it through the early years stick with the job and feel more satisfied.
But I can’t explain why there are so many more teachers than when I was in school, or why teachers are working more hours with less students.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on these numbers.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
