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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.
blah blah unions blah blah leftism blah blah
And this stupid attitude is the problem. The US is the most right wing Western country, and that is the reason why there is such inequality of opportunity - the unions, if anything, are too weak, not too strong.
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.
In school I did a report on parenting. A child's IQ is set by 3, largely from stimulation: holding them, talking to them, reading to them, etc. --- even though they don't yet know exactly what you're saying.
Aren't many poor families in America a young, single mother, working one or two jobs, and her children? Probably not the best upbringing.
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."
The experience of many, many other countries shows conclusively and overwhelmingly that society is better off with a good social system that supports the poor and underprivileged. It constantly amazes that Americans are SO insistent on their "every man for himself" mentality, in the face of the evidence. The countries ranked the best to live in are socialist societies, where the rich are compelled to help the poor rather than say "fuck it dude I got mine, so screw you". They have government run medical systems, and high taxes to support a well functioning society.
America has one of the biggest wealth disparities in the world, a poor education system, a health care system that is massively expensive but comes up far short of the best ones in results, has more murder, and a crumbling infrastructure. When will you all wake up and realize that your culture needs to be changed? It's OK. You can join the modern world. The rest of us will be happy to see you do well! We don't wish bad things for you. But you have to give up the cowboy attitude, in order to get there.
Could this be because the school systems in these other countries are funded in a way where the budget is less dependent on local taxes. If the money is region/nationalized you don't end up with the more prosperous cities having nicer schools because they have higher income from local property taxes.
Also -- college is cheaper/free in many European countries. Less of a financial barrier-to-entry for higher education means more poverty-sicken students get to go to school.
Then why don't blacks in the other countries pull down the averages in those other countries? Oh, right, because "Murikah, f*ck yeah!"
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Please, read the article. Each individual's IQ is mostly determined by genes, true. But there is little genetic difference between IQ of various populations. So each population will have individuals with high IQ and low IQ.
The problem is that the US system reinforces poverty - schools are funded from local sources and poor districts provide poor education. Add to this a high rate of de-facto segregation.
Or maybe Americans watch five hours of tv per day vs 2 hours for Sweden. The three hours difference is way more than I ever spent on homework.
Most teachers in the other countries are union members too. Thus this can't be the problem. It's the scapegoat.
who are just attributing this to the ethnic makeup of the US, you're missing the point. The study isn't saying that poor American blacks are not as smart as affluent American whites. It's saying that poor American blacks are less intelligent than affluent American blacks, and poor American whites are less intelligent than affluent American whites, and the same poor vs. affluent gap doesn't exist in other countries.
Here in the USA lead abatement in rentals is a thin coat of paint. Elsewhere they require the landlord to remove it ALL from the home.
And who lives in the shitty run down really old homes with lead paint in them? poor people.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They do: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Assuming that is accurate. There is also a reason why asians are considered for affirmative action: their average income is larger than whites (as well as average years of education if I recall correctly).Meh. Ghettos in the US I'd say probably does the correlation, old Chris Rock joke something like "Blacks are only in like 4 places, NY, Atlanta, Chicago (forget the other))". Not quite true but close enough to effect the trend I think. if inner city is poorer and where black people are and prejudice determines/d where the funding for schools or even where the good teachers choose to teach ...
We see the same "sorting" effect in Canada, where being the child of well-to-do parents is absolutely wonderful, and leads to success in business and industry, roughly commensurate with the sum of (intelligence && opportunity). Starting out the child of poor parents gets you no respect, and people assume you're stupid.
The smartest three people in my high schools were a poor kid with parents from the Ukraine, me, with mostly white middle-class parents and the son of a successful businessman. In business success over the years, the businessman's kid came first, then me, then the poor kid. We all did better than the merely not-dumb folks, and really really well by comparison to the dumb kids, with one exception...
Some immensely likeable dumb kids went into sales and did better than any of us (;-))
davecb@spamcop.net
Citations needed.
Rather gloomy. What makes you so convinced? All I found was talk of potentially dangerous ...
Relax, pal — a town spending less money on water-supply has more money left for public schools, has it not?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
a good 1/2 of my friends are teachers
every single one of them complains about how they are stopped from doing the right thing because of the unions
bad teachers cant be fired, and good teachers are pushed to the "good schools"
Well, if the data said we're stupid then that'd mean we're stupid -- even if we wouldn't like to accept that. But that's not the data is saying.
What the data says is that growing up poor in the US limits your intellectual development in a way it doesn't other countries. Since this is based on siblings-raised-apart data this excludes the explanation that poor people in America are poor because they're inherently stupider than people who are wealthier. Since this discrepancy between siblings raised apart doesn't happen in similarly advanced countries, it is not something that is inherent in poverty, either.
Provided that the data stand up to scrutiny, this indicates that America squanders at least some of its intellectual potential.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Depends on which country you're talking about.
-jcr
I'm talking about all of them. Are there any in which government schools aren't shit? If so, for each of those countries, what are they doing differently that makes their schools not shit?
Your comment is excessively extreme. Flint is an outlier...admittedly not as much of an outlier as one would wish. And many rich children are also poisoning themselves, admittedly usually by choice and in different ways.
I, personally, suspect that poorer US citizens feed their children more junk food than wealthier ones do. That would probably be sufficient environmental degradation to explain most of the statistics.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Far more likely, the poor in the US live in high density highly polluted environments ie inner suburbs where loaded up with lead from traffic jams and those environments remain polluted. This in conjunction with poor diets, dominated by cheap junk food, results in double the impact. This added to cut backs in planned parent hood and you have the recipe for failure.
Theoretical intelligence is theoretical outcome and when it comes to reality, the environment in which people live will dramatically subvert genetics. America, stop blaming the victims, of pollution and junk food, they are what you have turned them into.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Is it? I wonder, why TFA — which you made me read — does not even have the word "excercise" in it...
It is. It's not in TFA, though.
Or, maybe, they are smart — and leave the safe-but-low-paying academia jobs for the much more rewarding private sector?
Most academics eventually make it into private industry.
Most people who put up those kinds of TV numbers don't actually watch it for five hours. The TV is just always on while they're home and doing other things.
I live in London, England and my daughter is the only white English girl in her class at an outstanding school. There are lots and lots of people of African descent living in England, they are as bright as the rest of us, if not brighter. The parent post is just racist twaddle.
There isn't much genuine "poverty" in the US anymore. Hasn't been for a couple generations.
Go watch hood fight videos on WSHH or Darien Long patrolling an Atlanta mall on Youtube. We certainly have ghettos. But the people in them are not suffering grinding "poverty." They're all fat, equipped with cell phones and cars and spend their disposable income on status symbols and various vices. The kids they make are fed good meals in public schools and junk food at home till they're fat. Aside from the pencil whipping "education" they get in government funded schools they're raised by Nintendo and TV.
This is gross neglect, not "poverty." And more benefits and deficits aren't going to make good parents out of the denizens of our proto-idiocracy.
No, I don't have a solution either. At least none that doesn't involve pretty serious compromises of civil rights. And we all know the subjects of such attention would rather the stunted IQs than suffer any impositions.
No, that is bullshit. Unions exist for the purpose of their constituents, not the schools. Schools without unions (private schools, whose teachers also get paid less) have students who do better than average.
Ever notice how politician's kids go to private schools?
It couldn't possibly be because they've systematically done everything they could to destroy the public schools could it?
Nah.
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).
Wonder why Wisconsin Democrats when absolutely ape shit when Walker got rid of that mandatory union membership and the funneling of those dues to Democrats?
Yes, where did Saint Walker send all that money instead? Where indeed?
Hint: To his own supporters.
But hey, maybe he can teach Rick Perry to remember a list of more than three names!
Oh wait, Rick's out, and we've got Trump left.
Huh, I wonder who he'll feed?
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.
"The enormous benefits given to the very wealthy, the privileges for the very wealthy here, are way beyond those of other comparable societies and are part of the ongoing class war. Take a look at CEO salaries. CEOs are no more productive or brilliant here than they are in Europe, but the pay, bonuses, and enormous power they get here are out of sight. They’re probably a drain on the economy, and they become even more powerful when they are able to gain control of policy decisions." -- Noam Chomsky
In the USA it is considered completely normal for the big end of town to finance and control policy decisions, either through legitimate channels, or with "hooker and blow" deals. The moment another grassroots group, like a Union, has coordination or funding to present a defensible point of view, it is considered a travesty.
All these other countries in the study also have healthcare, public transport, and so forth. The USA is the lone wolf. I live in a third world country and the similarities to the USA are striking. Here we have powerful elite can do what they want, there's a tiny middle class and most people get shit on. Of course a missing middle class means a missing consumer base, so the business interests of the elite are mostly export oriented, just like the USA with its IT services. And IT products/services is arguably the only thing currently keeping the USA afloat.
My wife, who is usually pretty open-minded, having grown up in a house without basic amenities like running water, was shocked when we visited San Francisco. There was one particular street made entirely of shit - people just shitting all over the road everywhere. Not at all what was expected, after having visited some other first world nations, previously. The expectation was the the USA would be like these, and yet given its wealth and image, even better. Nope. Streets made of human shit.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
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.
Ah yes, 'Psychological Science' ... that's akin to 'Military Intelligence' and 'Astrological Science'.
When I studied psickology in 1959, and then again in 1969, I couldn't help noticing that the field had changed about as much as the runways of Paris fashion. Since then many more dynamic changes; each generation displacing the previous and 'outing' their theories.
Sorry to demean them, and in fact I believe there is some truth in this observation. I also assume that as their peers and others review this work we will see different conclusions drawn from the same data.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Schools without unions are private, meaning they get lots more money than public schools, and this directly correlates to how well students do. Private school teachers are paid more than public school teachers, and they also get respect rather than being accused of being the one and only cause of school declines. Private schools have funds to maintain the buildings, keep around additional classes like art and music that contribute to learning, they can afford to have up to date school books, they don't have cafeterias with budgets cut to the bare bone so that ketchup has to be considered a vegetable to meet standards, etc. Private schools have never had to deal with white flight, they never have a mass migration of parents worried that their kids are associating with the wrong sort, and they don't have to deal with lobbying groups asking for vouchers so that their kids can be taught elsewhere.
There is a breakdown in schools and it is primarily caused by the citizens abandoning the schools and insisting that education is not a right but a privilege that has to be paid for by something other than tax dollars.
Unions do good and bad things. The question is do you throw it all out because of the bad things, then let the teachers work for near poverty wages? Which is not hyperbole, the school boards are always trying to cut back anywhere they can.
I grew up with teachers. My family was pretty conservative and anti-union. But when it came time for contract negotations my anti-union father was out there on the picket lines when they were being shafted by the board. And that's because the unions are the only thing we have in any form that protects rights of workers and that can balance the power of the employers. For every bad thing a union has done there are even more bad things the employers and governments do.
And if you get rid of the unions then what protection do teachers have left? Remember that the school boards, administrators, and politicians do not care about the interests of the kids either. If they could put 60 students in one classroom they would because it would save the cost of one underpaid teacher.
Private schools and teachers get paid more than public? WTF are you talking about?
My wife, who is usually pretty open-minded, having grown up in a house without basic amenities like running water, was shocked when we visited San Francisco. There was one particular street made entirely of shit - people just shitting all over the road everywhere. Not at all what was expected, after having visited some other first world nations, previously. The expectation was the the USA would be like these, and yet given its wealth and image, even better. Nope. Streets made of human shit.
Lucky you! You got there just in time for the annual Shit Festival.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Good thing there aren't any teachers' unions in Europe. Oh, wait...
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
False. My wife is a teacher. She interviewed at several private schools. The pay is awful, and the facilities are often not as nice as public schools. Don't confuse expensive school with high teacher pay. Parental involvement is what matters most.
The TV is just always on while they're home and doing other things.
I was listening to NPR, and the interviewee mentioned that her research showed that for 40% of American children, the TV was on, and visible, during all three meals.
So, yes, Americans watch a lot of TV, but is there any evidence that watching TV lowers IQ? I would suspect that the causation is the other way around.
Family emphasis on scholastics outweigh anything else.
Several studies, described in Freakonomics and elsewhere, found that this is not true. Parental attitudes make surprisingly little difference. Who the parents are, makes far more difference that what the parents do. Family income, and the IQ of the biological parents (but not adoptive parents) makes much more difference than reading to your kids, helping them with homework, etc.
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.
Lets compare the US to socialist countries in areas that it supposedly doesn't do as well in, and then make poorly causated links between success and levels of applied socialism. It is never that simple. The US spends more money per student than just about every other country in the world. The problem isn't money or access.
Yet another academic propaganda post implying socialism as the answer. I am sick of these.
it is not something that is inherent in poverty, either.
No that is the exact opposite conclusion actually. It has EVERYTHING to do with REAL poverty.
The problem with comparing the US to other advanced countries is that with the social services and money that is spent on them in those countries, even when you are born into a poor family in Sweden lets say, you are immediately and profoundly more wealthy than your American counterpart. This wealth isn't judged in dollars, cents and purchasing power however in excellent public transportation, strong workers rights, disability programs, top notch education for all, excellent first world healthcare, retirement benefits and more.
Societal wealth makes all the difference here. A better comparison to America would be a country like Saudi Arabia. You have a handful of disgustingly wealthy people who control almost all of the actionable power and wealth in society, a single digit percentage of REAL middle class (and I mean the real definition of middle class not this bogus American definition that was created for political expediency). If you are REALLY middle class then you are afforded modern conveniences and a level of financial, retirement, educational and healthcare security to where you don't have to frequently worry too hard about being poor in the near or long term future.
Also just like Saudi Arabia, the rest of the society is so broke they're broken, so poor they can't even pay attention.
Each charter school is different though. The point is they get to make up their own charter. They aren't required to follow the same rules as public schools, though they do remain public schools. I suppose they could have a union if they wanted, though I doubt the school boards would like that.
If private schools pay less then it's different than when my family were teachers. But either way it's not a lot of pay and you don't take the job for the money. And definitely not for the lousy retirement plan (though many public unions did negotiate good benefit deals when the economy was zooming which is what has led to all the union backlash today when the economy sucks).
Ah . . . the soap-box had gone to my head a little by that point in the speech.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
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So there is a correlation between low IQ and poverty, more so in the USA than elsewhere. But which is the cause and which the resulting effect?
In countries without a mobile class structure, high or low IQ has much less effect on an individuals than in the USA. Your destiny depends on your ancestry and inherited position. In the USA, people are free to rise or sink to an economic level defined by their individual capabilities. The smart become wealthy, the stupid sink into poverty. The end result gives the same correlation between poverty and IQ, but for widely different reasons.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Hmmm... True. But consider this: Freakonomics was talking about overall IQ, where genetics dominates. But this article is saying that, taking into account the genetics, poverty puts them at the low-end of the IQ window. So taking into account the genetics, within that IQ window, perhaps family emphasis on scholastics does outweight anything else. To know this, we would need to correlate family emphasis on scholastics, poverty, and IQ while controlling for for genetics.
The US is the first empire to go from rise to decline without an intervening period of civilisation.
I've lived it dude. I came from poverty in the EU. I went to bad schools because that's what we could afford. I walked and later biked to school because we couldn't afford the bus and we maintained chickens for food. And yes we had government support for food and housing. Electric was only paid up to 100W/h during the day and 500W/h at night (dual metering is standard there). Gas subsidy was calculated to maintain 18C in the house.
In the US families on government support have at least 1 working car, a decent sized house and a TV and can keep the heat and electric on and food on the table just on government support which simply requires you not being a criminal.
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From your own link, Mr. Deepshit:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's rather bizarre. How do you know which union you have to pay dues to? Do you get to choose the union? In the US, you can only be a member of the union that is associated with your company (unless all the workers choose a different one).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm not even sure unions exist to serve their constituents. It seems they exist to take money from their members, to be used to increase the power of the union leadership, who only care about themselves.
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Well then. That settles it. Your anecdote from some random webpage swayed me. All teachers must not give a shit about the children they teach.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
and how do you blame someone for making a better life for themselves or their kids? thats low
It's not the fault of the individual parents who make rational choices. It's the fault of our elected leaders for setting up an environment where such choices become rational.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I'm not sure European unions operate the same way American ones do. For one thing much of Europe doesn't have a political system where influence is correlated to forking over cash to politicians. Not nearly to the same extent anyway. Meaning they get to spend contributions toward collective bargaining.
Having said that, I guess some of the above posts are just reflexive "unions baad" bleats.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
In Belgium there are three large unions. I can join any union I desire anf they represend roughly the political ideas of some large parties.
You need to pay a due (and some companies even pay back that dues). Hoevere ther is never an obligation to join a union. If there are more than 50 employees, a union representative is enforced by law, so basically all comapnies are unionized.
You can be part of a union or not and nobody cares. I have no idea who is in a union and who is not. Management does not care either as all people are treated equally (some exceptions of the union reps).
Sometimes they go on strike and I hate that. But in general they are the people that can stand up to companies and say no, where you would be out of luck.
And companies use this as well. At one company that was in a reorginisation, they included the unions and when I asked the CEO if he was not pissed off that it now too longer, his answer was:
It might have taken longer, but we anticipated that, so there is no real delay. Also now the unions are ok with it, we can go on as expected and the changes they brought up were well founded and implemented most of the time.
You see, there can be a gain if you look at your staff as psrtners and not as a cost.
Thanks to the unions I get payed extra if I do overtime and my boss tries to avoid it. Instead he rather hires more people. So instead of two people working 60 hours, 3 work 40 hours. I get 35 days holiday + sick days when I am sick. I get presents and bonusses and the company does well and is making money.
On the downside, the CEO has only two cars and no helicopters. So there's that, but he is not unhappy and still can take his holidays anywhere he likes, because he ALSO has 35 holdiays.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
No.... the IQ test as an intelligence test is biased in favor of people with certain experiences, showing lower IQs for Poverty, but only in certain regions, is more evidence against the validity of IQ tests as a measure of fluid intelligence.
This reminds me of a friend from Philly. He had a really smart kid who lost points on one of those standardized tests because he had no clue what a "fire hydrant" was. In Philly where he grew up, those were "fireplug"s. His kid had no chance on that. Basically, the "verbal" parts of those standardized tests are dialect tests. If your native dialect isn't American Midlands, your kids are at a disadvantage.
Note that the native dialects for people from particularly poverty-stricken places tend to be pretty dang different from American Midlands. For the two most poverty-stricken dialects, AAVE and Appalachian, American "verbal" tests often have questions specifically written to trick their speakers. So if you speak Midlands and are competing on test scores with kids from those backgrounds, the test writers have essentially spotted you a bunch of points for growing up in the right place.
I've ever seen. Private schools do well for two reasons:
1. They're mostly filled with upper class or rich kids who can afford tuition. These kids have private tutors, stay at home moms that drive them to school and make breakfast, clean, violence free living spaces, etc, etc. This is what people are referring to when they use the word "privileged".
2. The few low income kids that are there have behave like angles and keep their grades up or get booted out. Imagine how much better the public school's scores would be if ever time a kid acted up or his GPA dropped below a 3.0 they got permanently expelled. Imagine how much worse the the scores would be at the schools those kids ended up.
Studies show scores have been dropping in American Schools for 50+ years. These are often sited by Regressives (I refuse to call them "Conservatives", they're not, they're policies are Radical Regressions) as a reason to turn back the clock to the 1950s. Those folks conveniently ignore the other half of the study that shows the reason for the drops are that we don't kick lower income kids to the curb anymore. We've cut down on the dog eat dog sink or swim ideals because folks were sinking, and we got tired of watching them gasp their last painful breath while drowning. The Regressives didn't get tired of that, they seem to enjoy it...
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My opinions may not carry much currency because they're purely anecdotal. I still believe the US education system is one of the best in the world but at the same time I think our sometimes lack-luster education and performance results are far more culturally based than anyone gives it credit. Growing up as a US-born child of an immigrant family may give me a very biased perspective but I use it all the time nonetheless. My story is typical for many immigrants, it's practically a cliche. My parents didn't know English and came to the US with $400 in their pocket in the early 80s. Yes, we were on welfare, yes we collected food stamps, yes my family took terrible low skill and low earning jobs like cleaning, harvesting, and the like, yes we grew up in the inner city being the 1 of 2 Caucasian families in the entire neighborhood, yes we had 3 generations living in one household, and yes English was not my first language.
But we climbed the *#!@ out of there as fast as we could, because that's why we came to the US: to do well. We came with ambitions, with the belief that education was one thing the "man", whether it's a Soviet government or oppressive oligarchy, could not take away from you. Not doing well in school simply was not an option. My mother get her degree and my father got a decent job at a factory. While my parents certainly did well for themselves, the next generation, like myself, we did even better. I can say from my limited exposure to the education system, at least here in NY, is that very, very, very few of my classmates had the same ambitions. In fact, most would have seen me as being aggressively competitive but in my eyes and my parents I was only allowed to see myself as still not trying hard enough. I admit that half of my class mates were brighter than me, but I'm sorry to say that few of them tried half as hard nor did as well.
If every kid had that ambition you'd have to be scared of what the US could do instead of can't do. Unfortunately it's my observation that many kids *and* their adult parents here in the US lack any self control. They are far too wrapped up in finding the next source of entertainment than setting up a future for themselves, family, and country. Be it TV, alcohol, music, fame, partying, drugs, games, and sports (yes, I said sports, let your verbal abuse fly!). There's nothing wrong with any of those things are just fine per se, as long as they're done in moderation.