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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

Subtitle: "Students who are currently enrolled in gifted and talented classes will not be affected. But the highly selective and racially segregated program will be replaced for incoming students."

The reasons can be debated, but it's a fact that on IQ tests, American blacks score about 1 standard deviation (15 points) below whites. A common threshold for a gifted program is an IQ of 130, 2SD above average. If you demand that all racial groups be proportionally represented, you cannot have a gifted program. You will not get proportional representation among FAANG programmers either. In general, America needs to make a choice between non-discrimination and government-enforced equal outcomes. Charles Murray's book "Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America" (2021) discusses this. He co-authored "The Bell Curve" (1994).

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It's also a fact that American blacks have several standard deviations less wealth than whites.

If wealth ultimately is the driver for such a disparity, and education is the gateway to said wealth, you're effectively trapping people.

> If wealth ultimately is the driver for such a disparity

Fortunately, we know it's not. Black Nigerian immigrants slightly outperform whites in many careers, and very likely start with substantially less wealth (because they're immigrants).

So one variable is constant (skin color), a few are "worse" (wealth, knowledge of English), a few might be better (motivation, IQ, work ethics, cultural expectations, ...).

A single counterexample doesn't invalidate a trend, lol. One could say Nigerian immigrants, coming from the richest country in Africa, would show better outcomes over other African immigrants. Oh wait, they do.

A single counterexample does invalidate a theory that poor Black American (not other black immigrants') performance is caused by poverty and/or racism.

OK, but I never said it's caused by poverty

> If wealth ultimately is the driver for such a disparity

My understanding of "IQ" (although there seem to be multiple definitions) is that is it supposed to be the purely physical (mental?) trait i.e. unaffected by environmental factors.

Although I suppose whether that is the case is an open question (for me at least, unless anyone familiar with the topic can comment?).

This is a hard fact that people ignore.

People are different and they have different skills.

but but "social economic" factors? Very little compared to genetics factors. One of the studies with adopted twins ->

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

I can train all I want . I will never be as good as Neymar on Soccer.

My school system works around this my having four different testing methods: 1) iq/gma test 2) school standardized tests, same across state 3) school creativity tests, same across state 4) teacher recommendation

I think there are still racial and income disparities but these methods somewhat reduce the penalty suffered as measured on these tests.

I think the intent is to find truly smart kids and give them additional tools to develop their intelligence and potential.

If a kid is smart, but doesn’t know vocabulary because their parents both work and can’t afford tutors, then the gifted program is an opportunity to detect and help those kids.

This, of course, assumes that not all kids have equal ability. And I think there is some truth that intelligence is inherited.

'A common threshold' - this is false. There's no such 'common threshold'.

There's far far too much ambiguity and selection issues in IQ for us to use it reliably for that much in the real world.

Kids from poorer area have much less good parenting, their vocabulary is as small as 1/3 of those of richer kids entering Kindergarten.

From K-10 at least, it's probably a good idea to just teach kids, at the later high school grades, offer accelerated learning classes to whoever wants to enrol.

>The Bell Curve

I see this book (un-)ironically mentioned on /lit/ from time to time. How boring is it for a 600-pages tome?

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