trying to debate this guy on the merits is absurd - he's not some misguided IQ guy but, as you'll see if you look at his other comments, a hardcore racist. blocking is the only productive thing you can do here
This is a discussion of science. Kindly take your partisan political posturing elsewhere.
The science on IQ shows that European Jews > far east Asians > Caucasians > Africans. There is still some uncertainty about the exact numbers and rankings, but there is zero controversy about the existence of the intelligence hierarchy.
In a few years we will resurrect the Neanderthals, who had larger brains than any living human race. It is entirely possible that in 50 years they will be winning all the physics Nobel prizes.
An extremely basic knowledge of statistics would show you that for a set of overlapping bell curves with a reasonably sized standard deviation, a difference of a few percent in the median is far too little to make a statement like "Group X > Group Y" on with a straight face. Most people you'd pick at random from any group will be fairly average, and geniuses are uncommon, but exist, in all the groups. Even differences of a standard deviation are fairly trivial compared to the differences that exist within each group; it's not like intelligence medians vary by 5 standard deviations between ethnic groups within one country...
Underprivileged students from minority backgrounds can do quite well at calculus - some teachers, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante , dedicated years to trying, with quite impressive results. This has been demonstrated again and again at schools with poor track records. Simply having a competent teacher and an environment that isn't entirely hostile to learning can do far more than many people tend to realize.
The original question was whether one-size-fits-all classrooms can work.
Most people you'd pick at random from any group will be fairly average, and geniuses are uncommon, but exist, in all the groups.
Our civilization has come this far by cultivating genius. A billion average people sweeping floors will never discover penicillin or invent the transistor. And geniuses are radically less common in some groups.
An extremely basic knowledge of statistics would show you that for a set of overlapping bell curves with a reasonably sized standard deviation, a difference of a few percent in the median is far too little to make a statement like "Group X > Group Y" on with a straight face.
Genius lies at the upper end of the spectrum, where the normal curve drops off steeply. A small difference between group averages becomes a huge difference at the top end, thanks to the steepness. It is basic statistics that the elites are dominated by whatever groups have a small advantage at the average. (This is why airlines are so paranoid about quality control. If a company lets its average slip a little, it will kill most of the people who die in air travel, which turns out to really hurt bookings even if their average is a zillion times safer than cars.)
So if you design classrooms to "leave no Group Y child behind"—as the U.S. has done—you will necessarily leave behind all Group X elites. Thus answering the original question of whether uniform education works.
Yes, there are African geniuses. The problem is that they are really, really rare. So rare that a typical school has zero of them.
Obviously, one size fits all classrooms don't work - but this must not be used as an excuse to further existing inequalities. I hear a lot more horror stories about people being discouraged from sufficiently challenging material than being pushed into it - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1lrvit/what_memor... has a lot of examples, to pick one random internet thread from this week. One thing that we can fully agree on is that NCLB is horrible policy. Uniform education, with no catering to the genuine interests and capacities, is stupid; only a few alternatives, like not educating the majority of people, or basing education on statistical arguments about amorphous groups rather than individual merit, are stupider.
Our civilizations, for the most part, don't cultivate genius, unfortunately. And geniuses aren't radically less common in some groups, unless you mean groups like "people who suffered severe childhood malnutrition". Normal schools aren't really set up to deal with people with IQs more than a standard deviation, or perhaps two standard deviations, from the norm.
If you define genius to be an IQ of 160+, and model it as a Gaussian with a standard deviation of 15, most schools have no geniuses of any race. If you take a more-reasonable fat-tailed distribution, many schools still don't.
My personal, anecdotal bias: the best school I went to was quite small, and had several geniuses - including a black one. There weren't many black kids, but the ones who were there were exceptional; I wouldn't be surprised if they had the highest average IQ of any ethnic group at the school (and yes, there were plenty of Asian and Jewish students, from several countries).
There are differences in average intelligence between groups, but not in the way I think you're claiming. First of all, the IQ delta between Jews in the US and other white people has collapsed since 1960, and the overrepresentation of Jews in highschool and college level academic competitions has also collapsed. This isn't due to Jews becoming less intelligent on average but rather the average white child becoming more intelligent thanks to the Flynn effect[1]. And you're grouping all white people together, but back in the day all the poor subsistence farmers immigrating from Ireland and Italy and Eastern Europe had IQs in the 80s too. Of course, their children born and raised in US cities had roughly the same IQs as other white people. And during the cold war the IQs of the people in West Germany pulled more than 10 points ahead of the people in East Germany, but with reunification IQs have converged again.
All of which is to say, we have strong evidence of differences in IQ between groups, but we have pretty much no evidence of genetic IQ differences between groups. We know that environmental factors[2] play a huge role in population level IQ and are quite sufficient to explain the differences we can observe. Could one group have a genetic advantage? Sure, but I don't feel I have any reason to believe it's white people who are naturally smarter than black people as opposed to vice versa.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[2]Well, there's vitamin D deficiency but that's so easily fixed by nutrition that I'm calling it an environmental factor despite the role genetics plays.
Thank you. I didn't go into these points in my post for fear of covering too much ground, but you have written them up well. Lead, nutrition, and environment are all big factors.
There is. They are one of the few parts of psychology that are based on hard data. University admissions test are, in fact, mostly tests of IQ. So are military recruiting tests. (The military is super serious about weeding out people dumb enough to crash a boondoggle.)
