This pisses me off.
National SAT averages drop, College Board blames diversityThe fact that kids are getting slightly dumber only irks me. The SAT isn't a great test of intelligence anyways.
What really pissed me off was the College Board's (and assorted school systems') explanation: that the decline was due to greater diversity among the tesk-takers. I.e. more black and Latino kids, which means a proportionally smaller number of white and Asian kids.
So....are you saying that black and Latino kids are just flat-out dumber? Cause I don't think you meant to say that. While it's demonstrable that black and Latino children do significantly worse on the test, how about let's look at why. Why is it that black kids do so much worse? Or is it even really a race thing as much as a socio-economic thing?
They don't provide breakdowns by household income, but they do by parental education which is a pretty good broad substitute for income bracket. 60% of kids whose parents had a college degree hit the "benchmark" score or higher. Only 15% of those whose parents didn't have a college education did so. Okay, so maybe it's not that there's more black and Latino kids, it's that there's more poor kids (and sadly, there's a strong correlation between minorities and lower socio-economic status) taking the test.
Again, why should this matter? Ideally, they should all be getting equal access to your fine educational systems, right? Or is this showing that despite all the rhetoric and the well-intentioned but horribly designed "No Child Left Behind", the lion's share of resources in US school systems still gets spent on
affluent white kids. Just like it did 30 years ago when I first went to school. So how 'bout instead of blaming the minority kids and the poor kids for your black eye, you come up with an explanation for why, after 30 years, you still can't figure out a way to provide a good education to ALL children?
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Topic: Chill and Relaxed Progressive Irritation and Annoyance Thread (Read 879073 times)