An op-ed in the LA Times all but admits that it’s impossible to educate some kids.

There have been two features that regularly mark the history of U.S. public schools. Over the last century, our education system has been regularly captivated by a Big Idea -- a savant or an organization that promised a simple solution to the problems of our schools. The second is that there are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems.

Education is a slow, arduous process that requires the work of willing students, dedicated teachers and supportive families, as well as a coherent curriculum.

As an education historian, I have often warned against the seductive lure of grand ideas to reform education. Our national infatuation with education fads and reforms distracts us from the steady work that must be done.

Our era is no different. We now face a wave of education reforms based on the belief that school choice, test-driven accountability and the resulting competition will dramatically improve student achievement.

Once again, I find myself sounding the alarm that the latest vision of education reform is deeply flawed. But this time my warning carries a personal rebuke. For much of the last two decades, I was among those who jumped aboard the choice and accountability bandwagon. Choice and accountability, I believed, would offer a chance for poor children to escape failing schools. Testing and accountability, I thought, would cast sunshine on low-performing schools and lead to improvement. It all seemed to make sense, even if there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope.

Today there is empirical evidence, and it shows clearly that choice, competition and accountability as education reform levers are not working. But with confidence bordering on recklessness, the Obama administration is plunging ahead, pushing an aggressive program of school reform -- codified in its signature Race to the Top program -- that relies on the power of incentives and competition. This approach may well make schools worse, not better...

Like the grand plans of previous eras, they sound sensible but will leave education no better off. Charter schools are no panacea. The nation now has about 5,000 of them, and they vary in quality. Some are excellent, some terrible; most are in between. Most studies have found that charters, on average, are no better than public schools.

Maybe, but at least they can probably get their mediocre results for less money.

Imagine how much better off students would be if we just gave each one the $19,000 a year we spend per pupil.  Instead of twelve years of compulsory education, you’d get a check for $228,000 on your eighteenth birthday.  Or you could give parents a $6,600 per year voucher for private school and still save enough to give the kid $148,000 when he graduates.

The fact of the matter is, that for all the inefficiencies in the public school system, we’ve spent so much money that it’s done all that it can do for those with below average IQs.  Like North Korea which maintains one of the largest armies in the world while it’s population lives in abject poverty, we’ve brought down the living standard of the population in order to feel good about ourselves.  There’s at least a practical reason for North Korea’s defense spending as it’s still threatened by the American regime.  We get nothing from the bulk of the money wasted on education.

Public education in America is partly a story of liberal creationism and partly one of the evils of unionism and government spending.

In a paper in Intelligence, Rushton and Jensen take issue with those who think that the black/white IQ gap is narrowing, and thus may eventually disappear.

(Rushton & Jensen, 2005) and (Rushton & Jensen, 2010) maintain that the IQ gap between Blacks and Whites has remained at least 15- to 20-points (1.1 standard deviations) since the time of World War I (1917) when mass testing first began ([Roth et al., 2001] and [Shuey, 1966]). On the other hand, (Flynn, 1987b) and (Flynn, 1999b) argued that the mean difference has decreased from the Army Alpha of World War I (1917), to the Army General Classification Test of World War II (1946), to the Armed Forces Qualification Test of the Vietnam era (1968). More recently, Dickens and Flynn (2006) claimed that Blacks had closed the IQ gap by 5.5 points (35%) between 1970 and 1992. Over the same time period, Nisbett (2009) claimed that Blacks had narrowed the gap in educational achievement by a commensurate 35% on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. Nisbett also argued that educational interventions such as the Milwaukee project, the Abecedarian project, and the Infant Health and Development Program implied that the gap could be eliminated altogether.

To the contrary, we find there is little or no evidence of narrowing. The evidence presented in its favor rests mainly on insufficient sampling and selective reporting. For example, Rushton and Jensen (2006) calculated that the mean Black gain on the IQ tests discussed by Dickens and Flynn (2006) was only 2.1 points (14%) because these authors, for a variety of proffered methodological reasons, had excluded several tests showing small, nil, and negative gains, and also because they had used a projected trend line that exaggerated the gain. Nor was there any evidence of narrowing on other IQ tests over the 1970 to 1992 time period ([Murray, 2006] and [Murray, 2007]).

Nisbett's (2009) claim of a 35% Black improvement on the NAEP tests is also greatly exaggerated. Gottfredson (2005) estimated these gains were only about 20% and had ceased completely by 1990. In fact, her appraisal, as well as one by Herrnstein and Murray (1994) of a 20% Black gain may have been over-optimistic (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994, actually reported the results were mixed, with other tests showing an increasing distance between Blacks and Whites).

As the authors point out, just because IQ scores have been increasing (the Flynn Effect) over the previous several decades doesn’t give us any reason for assuming that blacks will catch up to whites, any more than the population increase in height should convince us that the male/female gap in that area will close.

I’ve always thought the real black-white gap would actually be larger if the money spent educating children was distributed by the tax contribution of parents (or if only private schools existed).  The Cato Institute reports that nationwide the US spends $19,000 per student with largely black cities like Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York City being some of the biggest spenders.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the US actually "invested" more per student on blacks than whites.  I’d like to see some numbers on tax burden by race vs. allocation per pupil.

And none of this considers the millions of blacks being born into better material circumstances than they would otherwise have thanks to affirmative action and government jobs.  Redistributionist policies should explain part of the reason why the average African American IQ is 15 points higher than that of their cousins in Africa.

As money becomes tighter and our increasing diversity makes whites more and more hostile to government spending, the next few decades should see an increase in racial disparities.

The problem with dealing honestly with race is that if you’re familiar with and talk about the science/common sense on group differences it’ll overshadow everything else you want to say. Imagine someone coming up to you and telling you he’s an environmentalist, creationist, neo-con and child molester. The last descriptive term is the only thing that you’re going to take away.  Everything else becomes irrelevant. So it is with the term “racist.” The term means little more than believing in the scientific method and rejecting the double standard which says Asian countries for Asians, African countries for Africans, Middle Eastern countries for Middle Easterners and white nations for everybody.

With that in mind, take a look at Frum Forum’s Tim Mak’s new article on Alternative Right.  See if you can find anything in there that would be out of place in a report put out by the SPLC.

A couple of people have asked about my comment “high IQ people are by and large easier to brainwash.”  Is it really true?  I think so, and will explain why.

Let’s take feminism, which along with Marxism and racial egalitarianism is one of the “big three” evils that have cursed the modern world.  How might a smart person be easier to brainwash in a women’s studies course?  We can look at some feminist material to see.