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Poverty Stunts IQ In the US But Not In Other Developed Countries (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: New research published in the journal Psychological Science (abstract) found that children who grow up in poverty within the United States tend to have lower IQs than peers from other socioeconomic brackets. Previous studies have shown a complex relationship between a child's genetics, his environment, and his IQ. Your genes can't pinpoint your IQ, but they can indicate a rough range of values within which your IQ is quite likely to fall. For kids in poverty, they seem to consistently end up on the low end of that window. Interestingly, this effect was not seen for any of the other countries hosting kids within the study, which included Australia, Germany, England, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The study authors speculate that "inequalities in educational and medical access in the U.S." may be the root of the differences, though another researcher is planning to study the effect of school environments as well.
The study accounted for genes. Genes predict the window, but only in USA, socioeconomic factors predict where in the window you're likely to be.
the unions, if anything, are too weak, not too strong.
Bullshit. The unions fight tooth and nail against any improvements in public schooling.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If you a member of a union in Germany, of course you have to pay a due. And of course the unions are closely associated with a party. Moreso, each party has their own union, and the leading union members are also high ranking party officials. For instance, in Germany, there is one teacher's union, the GEW, which is associated with the Social Democrats, and another one, the Philologenverband, which has close connections to the right leaning CDU (the party of Chancellor Merkel).
Twelve of the thirteen states with the greatest poverty are solid red states where the teachers unions have been curbed or eliminated. These are also twelve of the thirteen states with the worst schools.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This doesn't happen as much as hysteria claims. Teachers are a part of the union and teachers *do* want the best for the children. No teacher would take such a lousy low paying job like this if they didn't care about the children. Yes, the unions have problems but the unions are also vital because the school boards often try their hardest to ruin things even more.
The biggest problem I see is white flight. All the rich and upper middle class people have moved their kids out of public schools. Maybe they want better schools, maybe they think all those poorer kids get in fights too much, whatever, but there is a huge migration. This leaves the public school system damaged, they can't get better teachers, they can't fix the schools, there is no money left. The only public schools that do well are those in richer neighborhoods, and there is no equality of schools across even a single school district. The worse it gets the more people leave, and it's a vicious cycle. Fix the schools and no one would come back, people at work look at me like I'm insane if I suggest going to a public school instead of spending most of their income on private schools, and then they whine about how they have to be interviewed in order to have the kids accepted at a kindergarten.
Private schools and teachers get paid more than public? WTF are you talking about?
was that United States poverty actually means extreme poverty where money, education, healthcare, nuturement, homes, cars, transporation, day care, special needs services and all that is completely denied.
and the comparison countries "Germany, UK, Australia,.." are all actually really rich countries with more of a socialism style to their economic systems. In those countries they have completely free healthcare, free college educations, better school systems (although I have no studied each country, I have looked at countries such as Germany which has completely free college education even for people who go there from out of the country, and Finland has a revolutionary system with three teachers per class and 20 student caps, France puts more money into kids and "fixing" life problems, etc).
I grew up in Oregon and as such I was denied all school after the 6th grade, and I had no health insurance and therefore could not see a dentist, psychologist, PCP, or any other type of doctor growing up. Until the year 2011 when Affordable Health Care Act kicked in, there were hundreds of thousands of uninsured children in Oregon .. meaning when they had a health problem, they were denied medical care most of the time.
Oregon just so happens to also have the worst graduation rates .. 70% of disabled kids drop out of school because the services push them out and don't have services for them, and 40% of regular kids drop out.
Compare that to Finland with 95% graduation rate!
In America they also prefer to "drug" kids with medications for mental disorders they don't have, rather than to fix the underlining cause of their problems, which is often times rooted in their homes, poverty, and lack of services and infrastructure for them to succeed in.
Those medications cause IQ drops, autism, brain damage, and prevent learning and fail to actually correct kids/adults problems.
In most of those European countries they also have social housing programs (for example, housing is free in Germany and you also get free basic income, health care, plus education as mentioned before). In America, if you can't afford the sky high rent, you're probably going to be homeless and completely desolate, stressed out wondering the streets or if you're lucky in a bed bug infested ghetto homeless shelter with crap food and dirty insides (they serve people expired food at most of these places).
So the author missed one thing. It does appear the problem is linked to poverty. Because America and those other countries have vastly different systems. Poverty means way different things in America compared to European countries. In America they expect you to "pay for everything out of pocket" but if you cannot do that, you do not get free service drop ins. The rich therefore are the only ones who can afford to properly raise their children in America because they have the money for private schools, private services, tutors, private doctors, private lawyers, leisure, exploration, etc; everyone else suffers and rots. But in Europe, basic services and living needs are free to the poor.
The only way to fix this is to adopt a new United States constitution perhaps based on the one from South Africa, as some US Supreme Court justices indicated was a model replacement for our own. Other countries are already built with better constitutions, as after World War II President Roosevelt sent aids to European/foreign countries and helped build in economic rights into their new constitutions. The United States was to get a new Bill of Rights 2 with economic rights, but when Roosevelt died prematurely, his work was successfully subverted in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The problem with the United States is purely it's shitty geared for the wealthy and rich constitution.
We don't even have the right to live in dignity, as other nations have. We have no right to basic income. No right to medica
Schools without unions are private, meaning they get lots more money than public schools
Charter schools are seldom unionized. They are publicly funded, and often receive less per student than public schools. They also are not allowed to select their students, and must take anyone who applies, ether on a first-applied-first-admitted basis, or by lottery.
Private school teachers are paid more than public school teachers
Nonsense. Most private school teachers are paid significantly less than public school teachers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Posting AC so as to not undo my mod-points, one of which was very well spent in knocking this particular bit off bullshit down.
It's actually mathematically impossible for Africans in the US or worldwide to be IQ 75. IQ 75 is the fifth percentile. In the US they're 15-20% of the population, worldwide it's 10-15%, which makes it rather difficult for them to average (statistically speaking) 75ish IQ.