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Comment on: Ed Wars

How We Fix The Public Schools

2 Comments

the reason for their low performance.

Schools perform poorly for two major reasons:

[1] Many of the students do not have sufficient cognitive skills to pass high school.

[2] The teachers are more interested in training left-liberal citizens than teaching much of substance,

Metrics to Judge the Obama ‘Change’ Movement. We Shall See Soon.
http://rycksrationalizations.blogtownhall.com/2009/01/28/me trics_to_judge_the_obama_%E2%80%98change%E2%80%99_movement_ we_shall_see_soon.thtml

"Johnson asked the academic community for an answer as to why his programs failed and Arthur Jensen of University of California at Berkeley assessed the reason as being related to low cognitive skills of African-Americans. His article: “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” caused a political fire storm and was instantly refuted by ignoring and making excuses for the standardized test results. The data were reinvestigated and reanalyzed at Harvard and further substantiated in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life , which was also ‘refuted’ with emotion and political action. The attack on the authors was actually an attack on legitimacy of the testing data, known well since 1905 and discussed in a book entitled The Measurement Of Intelligence by Lewis M Terman. Nobody had questioned the facts about cognitive differences among races until it became a hot political issue. Thus, the refutation of hard scientific facts such as IQ testing now follows by strident political mechanisms as we see in the phony Global Warming Follies and other political nostrums. If the truth from sound scientific data violates some leftist political tenet then they must be lies and some counter process is needed to ‘correct’ the political view."

rycK

Fixing Public Schools

Ryck's point [2} is the whole reason for my book THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happened to American Education.

Ryck's [1] is more moot for me. I want to see what happens when we eliminate dumbing down and try to take each child as far as possible. Schools deliberately don't teach the most basic stuff. So how do we know how smart anyone is? In fact, my view is that it's the kids with the low cognitive skills who present the most exciting opportunity.