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Houston's Gifted Education Program Biased Against Blacks and Latinos
tiberus sends an NPR report investigating the fairness of gifted and talented programs in Houston schools. Analysts believe black and hispanic students are at put at a disadvantage because of the way in which the program is run. Quoting:
Donna Ford, at Vanderbilt University, thinks that put Isaac at a disadvantage. She's been researching gifted education for decades, and when it comes to Houston's program she says, "I think it's a clear case of segregation, gifted education being segregated by race and income." Houston school leaders asked Ford to take a close look at their enrollment in the program, and she gave it a failing grade. "Racial bias has to be operating, inequities are rampant. Discrimination does exist whether intentional or unintentional," she told the school board in May of this year. Ford found that both Hispanic and black students are underrepresented in gifted programs and that black students are missing out the most. She also found that about half the seats in those programs go to higher-income students, even though the majority of the district is poor.
If the tests are too easy, the kids aren't "gifted."
If they don't pass the test, then they aren't "gifted."
If the test uses words they don't understand, then what words would the researcher suggest the tests use that aren't "culturally biased?" Using three letter words well isn't a sign of ability.
In other words she is so full of crap. Maybe the kids that are in the program are better than other kids because of things like their parents care enough to insure the kid is doing their homework, is responsible etc.
This whole institutional racism crap is just that crap. If she had evidence that a school or teacher blatantly excluded kids of a minority group that would be different but what she is spouting is SJW at its finest.
There is no way coming from a higher income home that can provide a healthy environment and extracurricular education tools and opportunites could have a bearing on the ability of the child to rate higher than those coming from poor households.
How is it unfair or racist by default if you only look at the demographic data. Only the test scores should matter.
Donna Ford immediately leaps to the conclusion that the issue is racism. More probing would probably indicate that the majority of the minority households in that area are probably single parent households, possibly with parents working low paying jobs, and\or working more than one job to make ends meet. This means that the parent is not fully invested in the upbringing of their child - probably not for lack of caring, but for lack of time or understanding about what education means to advancing yourself in society. The result is that the kid spends more time with friends and is heavily influenced by the dumb-assed decisions that all kids make.
The underlying assumption of this, and of "tech employee representation" being that any given subgroup retains all the demographics and characteristics of the larger group and any deviation from that is an anomaly.
Get back to me when there is outrage that men are only 10% of the population in teaching and nursing careers. Why aren't we channeling funding to make teaching and nursing careers appealing to male students? Oh, because male students get to choose careers while minorities and female students are weak and unable to pursue the repressed interests that statistics say they must secretly harbor.
If you have a gifted child, one that is naturally smart, but can't pass these tests it probably shows a lack a parental involvement. Throwing them in a gifted program without that same support structure of the family would be pointless.
The article does not provide sufficient information to support meaningful discussion or criticism. The article does not provide justification or data, only high-level conclusions. Those conclusions only apply to a particular implementation of a program in a particular state, so no generalizations are made. It does not provide any links to information about he program or the research. Unless someone wants to do that research and provide it in the summary, there is simply nothing to see here.
But real IQ tests (not some goofy "online IQ test") just test kids with abstract tasks like organizing larger shapes out of smaller shapes, or predicting the next step in a pattern. It's all abstract. The language doesn't even matter, never mind "cultural knowledge".
Obviously all the questions you posed are culturally biased because they all ask for knowledge (partially even of cultural norms).
IQ test do not ask for knowledge but the ability to process knowledge. I.e. they normally provide all the information you need. See e.g. http://www.intelligencetest.co... .
Surely, one can train to be good at such test (simply doing them once or twice will probably enormously help as one then has some basic understanding on how they work). So there will be a bias towards parents who care enough to run their child through them at least once, which tend to be the middle-class and up.
But it has nothing to do with your made up questions.
Look up Donna Ford's bio at Vanderbilt and you get this as her "Research Area":
Gifted with emphasis on minority children and youth; recruitment and retention of diverse students in gifted education; underachievement among diverse students; equity issues in testing and assessment; multicultural education; issues in urban education.
So basically Ford's entire area of expertise depends on FINDING bias in these programs. Perhaps she should acquaint herself with Confirmation Bias. If you look hard enough for anything, you'll find it whether it's there or not.
Further, the bias is explained by Ford as a fault of the gifted program, but she completely neglects CULTURAL FACTORS that also bias gifted involvement. There is, generally speaking, a cultural bias in the black community AGAINST academic excellence. It even has a name: "acting white." Blacks who use proper spelling and grammar are called "Oreo's," a derogatory term indicating they're "black on the outside but white on the inside." This is especially bad in poorer neighborhoods where "leaving the hood" is considered akin to being a racial traitor. Act like a thug, dress like a thug, eschew education in favor of "hanging out" and you're accepted. Anything else and you're ostracized.
Don't believe it? Ask around. It's common knowledge. Nobody wants to say it but everyone knows it's going on.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you're not asking the "Why" question, you're only creating more bias.
I'll tell you the "why" part of that question. Asians, who have been slaved in America, had intern camps etc etc have had biases against them, and overcame those biases. WHY? Because they applied themselves and did well in society, becoming a value.
The counterpoint to this is watch what happens when a Black person becomes successful, how their own community shuns them (Uncle Tom, "acting white" etc). The reality is, that blacks are still slaves, to their own cultural biases. And they won't succeed until they leave the plantation and masters that continue to tell them they are still slaves.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
> For a gifted kid from poor minority parents it usually takes exceptionally dedicated parents.
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>For a gifted kid from rich white parents it usually takes mildly dedicated parents.
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> That's how institutional racism works,
THAT is not "racism". That's bleeding hearts making excuses for people and ultimately robbing them of any pride or free will.
Pretending that these people are somehow "incapable" for whatever lame ass reason. THAT's racism.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm Asian and my parents neither pushed nor helped me in schooling. In fact, they were downright unhelpful. By the complaints of people saying that programs are racist, I should have been an underperformer in school. I was not. Without even trying, I was put into the gifted programs and such.
Why can't people just acknowledge that intelligence is very heavily influenced by heredity (hence the preponderance of Ashkenazy Jews in most fields) instead of playing the tiresome racist card?
At least with blacks, I can see how they could have a legitimate claim of generational racism. But Hispanics? Are Asians somehow "whiter" than Hispanics despite the fact that Hispanics (meaning from the Ibernian peninsula) have European blood in them? Why didn't the racist policies of this country put Asians at the bottom of the economic and academic ladder?
They are not at all legitimate. While they may be the result of past "sins", they are nothing that can't be overcome with the desire to do so. For blacks in particular, they have to worry less about "racism" and more about a culture that treats success as selling out.
I did respond directly to what you said. The WORST thing you can do to a person is treat them as if they are a victim. It doesn't matter if they're actually a victim or not.
It's far worse than burning a flag in their yard.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
While what you say is quite nice in the abstract, the nurture aspect is very strong in this concrete case.
If kids go hungry, if shots are fired next door each day, if they have to travel hours to get to a school that can only hire teachers that have failed to get jobs elsewhere, then "nature" doesn't even have a chance of entering the door, it's all nurture. You have to be extremely motivated and disciplined in such an environment to even stand a chance of gaining a normal education, let alone enroll in a gifted program.
Another point I'd like to make is that the tests aren't all that capable of predicting success.
In The Netherlands, the disparity in living conditions is much lower - our "slums" are suburbs compared to a lot of other countries. The tests correlate much better with real ability - and even there we see a rather unnerving percentage of kids where the tests actually go off by a wide margin, so much so that it is now the law (new since last year) that the advice from the kids teachers is the one that has to be followed, and tests can only cause a lower advice to be changed to a higher one, not a high advice to be lowered. The main reason for this was that the teachers advice was correlating much better with academic success than the IQ tests.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)