Amelia
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Thomas Sowell: A Challenge to Our Beliefs | RealClearPolitics
Something to chew on for the guys who keep posting over and over about how genetics must be the explanation for low test scores of blacks.
Something to chew on for the guys who keep posting over and over about how genetics must be the explanation for low test scores of blacks.
Depressing news about black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so. But both may have to do some rethinking, in light of radically different news from England.
The November 9th-15th issue of the distinguished British magazine "The Economist" reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England's schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the time -- as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50 percent of the time.
At the bottom, among those children who are all from families with low enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time.
"The Economist" points out that, in one borough of London, white students scored lower than black students in any London borough.
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The American left uses race and the British left uses class, but the British left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people.
In both countries, immigrants enter a supposedly closed society that refuses to let anyone rise -- and they nevertheless rise, while the native-born at the bottom remain at the bottom.
Those who promote an ideology of victimhood may imagine that they are helping those at the bottom, when in fact they are harming them, more so than the society that the left is denouncing.
We in America have gotten used to vast gaps between blacks and whites on test scores. But this was not always the case, in places where there was anything like comparable education.
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