Wow! Commonsense: 1/2 Children Are Below Average

[Annie]

That's where NCLB causes a problem:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009531&mod=RSS_Opinion_Journal&ojrss=frontpage

Intelligence in the Classroom
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.

BY CHARLES MURRAY
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.

One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.

Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon...

...Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is the first in a three-part series, concluding on Thursday.

 

[ErikViking]

Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence.

Has this changed? Were there only a few extremly unintelligent before that drove down the average?

Or has a few got extremly intelligent lately, driving the average up?

In a normally distributed curve, half is to be excpected, isn't it?

EDIT:
"Wow! Commonsense: 1/2 Children Are Below Average "
Okey... I get it. Irony. Damn I'm stupid.

 

[Annie]

Has this changed? Were there only a few extremly unintelligent before that drove down the average?

Or has a few got extremly intelligent lately, driving the average up?

In a normally distributed curve, half is to be excpected, isn't it?

EDIT:
"Wow! Commonsense: 1/2 Children Are Below Average "
Okey... I get it. Irony. Damn I'm stupid.

Nah, it's the language thing! LOL!

 

[ErikViking]

[/B]

Nah, it's the language thing! LOL!

Okay, thanks for letting me slip through this time!

 

[trobinett]

So, is this the old, the glass is half empty, or half full dilemma?

 

[ScreamingEagle]

So, is this the old, the glass is half empty, or half full dilemma?

It appears half of our kids are half empty or only half full in the intelligence department.

Are vocational schools the answer to the failed education system? Should grade school children be placed in slow track/fast track learning groups or different schools according to their IQ levels? Would this help solve some of the problems in the schools?

 

[glockmail]

Has this changed? Were there only a few extremly unintelligent before that drove down the average?

Or has a few got extremly intelligent lately, driving the average up?

In a normally distributed curve, half is to be excpected, isn't it?

EDIT:
"Wow! Commonsense: 1/2 Children Are Below Average "
Okey... I get it. Irony. Damn I'm stupid.

As we say round here: for everyone with an IQ in the 130-140 range, there are 3 or 4 at 90, so we are outnumbered, but not out gunned!

 

[Hamiltonian]

Kathianne, you are a teacher so you might know more about this than I do. What I've heard is the government goes child by child in elementary school, and then creates a projection of their future grades through high school. Then schools are graded on whether the children in their system are scoring above or below their expected score.

The article mentions this briefly, but aren't we looking too much at standardized test scores? By the way, I would recommend reading the book Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins. This whole assessment seems to be a big waste of money, which should be diverted to paying teacher salaries. To make our schools better, we ought to make being a teacher economically reasonable, and eliminate the requirement for a teaching degree. We should instead allow for a degree in the field a person will teach. We should concentrate more on letting someone learn how to apply their knowledge than memorizing things they will not know how to apply and forget before long anyway.

 

[Annie]

So, is this the old, the glass is half empty, or half full dilemma?

This is the fact that to obtain an 'average', half fall above, half fall below. There are plenty of ways to deal with underachievers, but only so much can be done with those that fall below. If a teacher is good, the kid is working, the parents help, a child with a 100 IQ can reasonably be expected to achieve a 'C'. A child with 110 a B and those with greater than that A. What NCLB does not address is the quandry of those that fall below 100. (In actuality, forget the testing, etc.)

 

[manu1959]

just remember this 50% of all doctors finished in the bottom half of their class

 

[Annie]

just remember this 50% of all doctors finished in the bottom half of their class

Yes, it depends upon the 'class.' LOL! Never mind the IQ with this one!

 

[glockmail]

just remember this 50% of all doctors finished in the bottom half of their class

But 100% of them graduated undergrad in the top 10% (approximately).

 

[manu1959]

But 100% of them graduated undergrad in the top 10% (approximately).

so you would be ok with a vasectomy from someone that finished in the top 10 in pre med and the bottom 10 in surgery?

 

[manu1959]

Yes, it depends upon the 'class.' LOL! Never mind the IQ with this one!

first questions i ask

where did you go to med school
where did you finish
where did you intern and do your residency
how many have you done
how many with complications
how many deaths

then i ask them to prove it in writing then i get a comparative

 

[glockmail]

so you would be ok with a vasectomy from someone that finished in the top 10 in pre med and the bottom 10 in surgery?

Sure. I never checked the academic performance of the doc that fixed me, and I'm still shooting blanks.

 

[manu1959]

Sure. I never checked the academic performance of the doc that fixed me, and I'm still shooting blanks.

i guess blind trust with a knife at your twig and berries is reasonable

 

[glockmail]

i guess blind trust with a knife at your twig and berries is reasonable

That's beans and franks for me. I'm no vegetarian.

 

[Deornwulf]

I once had an administrator tell the faculty that we needed to get the children scoring in the bottom three percentiles out of that range, resulting in all of our students scoring in the top 6 percentiles.

(Percentiles are created by measuring the test scores of all who take that test against themselves. There must always be 9 percentiles unless everyone gets the exact same score. It's like a Bell Curve.)

 

[Annie]

I once had an administrator tell the faculty that we needed to get the children scoring in the bottom three percentiles out of that range, resulting in all of our students scoring in the top 6 percentiles.

(Percentiles are created by measuring the test scores of all who take that test against themselves. There must always be 9 percentiles unless everyone gets the exact same score. It's like a Bell Curve.)

Not all schools grade on the curve. It's one of those things to 'hide teacher's flaws or make the kids 'feel good.'

 

[Hobbit]

This is what my mom has been saying for years. No matter how much encouragement or education a person is given, only a very small portion of our population can be rocket scientists. It's time we accept that and move from there, rather than labor under the delusion that a person with an IQ of 80 can learn to make microchips.