Each year, we teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are excitedly told about “breakthroughs” in “new” teaching methods that are “brain-based,” “research-based,” “data-based,” and/or “standards-based” and that will, once and for all, close the achievement gaps between blacks and Hispanics, and Asians and whites...
I don’t know a single teacher who does not dread and despise these so-called “PD-days.” At the first meeting in September we are invariably told that the teaching methods we learned the previous year aren’t working. Test scores have not improved, so we are to “toss out any and all manuals” we may have lying around, and to get ready for everything to change...
In these PC-heavy sessions, any mention of IQ or racial differences would be heresy. Educational dogma requires that we must never question the following:
1. IQ is meaningless. (I would note that IQ testing has been banned in California schools since the 1970s because blacks score badly on them. Therefore, there are no objective measures for who should be in gifted or special-education classes.)...
3. There are no racial differences in behavior, focus, or drive. Students are never to blame if they misbehave, fail to study, or can’t understand the curriculum.
4. Unequal outcomes and low test scores are strictly the fault of teachers and schools. This is why more money must be “invested” in teacher training and “professional development.”...
Some of these tried-and-failed schemes have been recycled, given new names, and reintroduced as the latest innovation. Teachers whisper to each other, “We’ve already tried that and it didn’t work.”
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In her much longer essay Mary Morrison explains that nothing works.
In his 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review Berkeley Professor Arthur Jensen predicted that nothing would work. Why do we keep wasting teachers' time and tax payers' money on delusions about intrinsic individual and average racial intellectual equality?
When has a method ever been developed that turns children who score poorly on IQ tests into competent scholars who can be trained to be managers and professionals?
I don’t know a single teacher who does not dread and despise these so-called “PD-days.” At the first meeting in September we are invariably told that the teaching methods we learned the previous year aren’t working. Test scores have not improved, so we are to “toss out any and all manuals” we may have lying around, and to get ready for everything to change...
In these PC-heavy sessions, any mention of IQ or racial differences would be heresy. Educational dogma requires that we must never question the following:
1. IQ is meaningless. (I would note that IQ testing has been banned in California schools since the 1970s because blacks score badly on them. Therefore, there are no objective measures for who should be in gifted or special-education classes.)...
3. There are no racial differences in behavior, focus, or drive. Students are never to blame if they misbehave, fail to study, or can’t understand the curriculum.
4. Unequal outcomes and low test scores are strictly the fault of teachers and schools. This is why more money must be “invested” in teacher training and “professional development.”...
Some of these tried-and-failed schemes have been recycled, given new names, and reintroduced as the latest innovation. Teachers whisper to each other, “We’ve already tried that and it didn’t work.”
-----------
In her much longer essay Mary Morrison explains that nothing works.
In his 1969 article in The Harvard Educational Review Berkeley Professor Arthur Jensen predicted that nothing would work. Why do we keep wasting teachers' time and tax payers' money on delusions about intrinsic individual and average racial intellectual equality?
When has a method ever been developed that turns children who score poorly on IQ tests into competent scholars who can be trained to be managers and professionals?
