Professor Dee was one of the authors of some excellent research regarding SFUSD’s math detracting experiment: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/san-francisco-insis...
But nobody can actually say this. Instead we have to pretend like this isn't the case. Just look at math Olympiad teams. I coached one years ago. My entire team was Asian except for two alternates. One who was Russian, and the other Indian.
Yes, environment can change outcomes ... but maybe it can't change outcomes to a point where everyone is going to perform the same. Are we going to try to get everyone's 100M sprint into the same range too? People are different.
We should give every individual the same shot at opportunities but I don't think we are ever going to make Asian kids perform at the level of other kids in math or vice versa. Its not environment. Every one of us that has taught an engineering or math course knows this. Even if we don't talk about it.
> But nobody can actually say this.
“Asian kids in the US are, on average, better at math and, furthermore, this effect is stronger the fewer generations removed from immigration they are, and is in large part due to well-established general familial impacts on performance and the selective filter of immigration.”
Race is not a useful scientific guideline for any kind of scientific study. For example: there is as much biological diversity in sub Saharan Africa as the rest of the world, but racially, the best we can do is "Black", or "African". It's a useless, dated concept that we, as species, find it difficult to work past because our brains are categorical engines.
I'm as politically "leftist" as anyone you'll ever meet, but we have to be able to do better than "Asians are good at math" to make effective decisions about education, amongst other problems. This is of course impossible with the current world and thinking. Even though I know race isn't real, I still see it. It still has an impact on my day to day actions, because my stupid brain is all too happy to categorize people on how they appear.
Taking another route: to say that Asians are good at math is categorical error. The word "Asians" represents something abstract, and abstract things cannot take action. Categorical error is basically the starting point for the various "isms" like misogyny, misandry, racism, etc.
You, I and everyone else are stuck in this way of thinking because we've been so thoroughly indoctrinated into a system of white supremacy which permeates the entirety of Western culture, it isn't even noticeable, like we're in the Matrix. It persists because it's useful for keeping the power centers that benefit from it entrenched, and everyone else divided.
We can move on from it, but I think the first thing we need to do is recognize that it isn't inevitable.
Do you think Asian people would have not come to the same conclusion, even if white peoples hadn’t said so first? I tend to think it was somewhat inevitable that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people think of themselves as having more in common with each other than with French or Mexican people.
And even in a single location, if you look back in time, you can see how people got categorized shifting. People used to insist Italians weren't white here in the US.
Tell that to prostate cancer researchers.
To say race "isn't important" is completely ignorant.
On the surface of it this sounds absurd, because (unless adopted) people do not determine their ancestry by looking at photos of themselves. I can see getting proximal affiliations wrong, confusing or missidentifying oneself as being half Italian when they're actually half Iberian, or or confusing turkic ancestry with Persian. But I don't think people are going to not know whether they are primarily of say East asian, african, or european ancestry.
>The mapping is very noisy.
>"race" as such isn't important
Sounds like quite the leap to reach the conclusion that you're trying to make.
You could easily have a genetic predisposition to prostate cancer without being a certain race, even though that "race" may have a higher propensity for that genetic trait.
Not really, everyone knows that an albino African is still an African. Physical traits are just the most visible aspect of genetics. And your second point is just explaining outliers, it doesn't say anything.
Race is entirely a social construct. You can't do a genetic test and with certainty determine someone's race. Certain genetic traits are common among what we call races, but not exclusive.
Take a look at services like 23andMe or other services, the genetic components of race are entirely based on self-reporting, that is, we call certain genes "Asian" because people who identify as Asian had those.
It's entirely tautological.
The pairing between shapes & suits will of course be tautological because the names of the suits are cultural artifacts, but the shapes would still be distinct regardless.
> Race is entirely a social construct. You can't do a genetic test and with certainty determine someone's race. Certain genetic traits are common among what we call races, but not exclusive.
This seems confusing and contradictory. If traits are common in certain groups and not in others (needn’t be exclusive), then by Bayes rule these traits should identify groups with high probability (especially when combining multiple traits)
I'll end with a question - competitive cycling requires the same abilities as marathon running, that is, optimal oxygen intake and usage, and great endurance in the buttock, leg, and foot muscles. Why are Ethiopians not dominant there?
Also, to present a possible answer to your rhetorical question: cycling is a sport for rich people. A good bicycle, that a kid that wants to pursue the sport must get early in their life, is very expensive.
The most important factor in either sport in any case isn't the muscles, it's oxygen intake and use efficiency.
As far as your argument, by effect of selection, doesn't that meant that top runners are more likely to come from poorer countries? You also don't really need a good bicycle to train, just to compete, but even that's pretty expensive so I take your point.
If race isn’t real, then as a white person, my bone marrow should be just as compatible for transplant at the same probability for blacks, asians, and “mixed race” people as it is for other whites, right?
I totally agree that monitoring every single human being on the planet, and recording and analyzing their individual DNA and second by second logs of their biomarkers and external environment from womb to death would definitely be “ideal”. But we aren’t there. Yet.
In the context of trying to manage finite resources and time, broad messy abstractions have been and will continue to be crucially important, despite not being pure. Trying to erase things like race with an ideological handwave is harmful.
edit: also, note, you've said a lot of stuff about categories. But categories can blend into each other and cause ambiguity at the margins. But that doesn't remove the validity of there being categories. When I look at the kids who come in to competitive math programs, and these are kids who are more than a standard deviations above the mean in performance, I see a lot of uniformity. One can try to construct various explanations for this, but you can't tell me that there were NO kids from underrepresented ethnicities that had two professional parents and good exposure to mathematics early. We have plenty of racial diversity in the early math programs. And in the Bay Area there are plenty of professionals sending their kids to these programs from all ethnicities. And still, ten years later its the Chinese and Taiwanese American kids that are in the Olympiad team. And even at a lower level, say SAT math, we see the performance skewed by race in the same way. I am ethnically Indian. And Indians are as interested in math as Chinese. We all send our kids to math tutoring. We are mostly engineers in the Bay Area. And even so, at the very top of the distribution, there are some Indian kids ... but far more Chinese American and Taiwanese kids. These are just facts. I don't take it as a slam against my ethnicity that we don't do as well in math as the Chinese. There's more to life than math after all.
This is a classic case of a misplaced assumption of transferable expertise.
Mostly because of who immigrates to the US. Those Asian and Russian kids you mention probably have software engineers as parents. The Hispanic kids probably do not.
If we got the poorest and least educated immigrants from the same places, we'd be seeing rather different results.
Once you hit a certain point, sure. There will simply be people who's brains work differently and efficiently, similar to runners who have different pique physiques for their respective category (I don't think we even tap into half of that in classical public teaching but I digress). But it's a much bigger sale to say that some people simply can't pass high school level acedemics and use that against them.