This is absolutely correct. I used these figures because they illustrated the disparity between black, Asian, and white scores at the top end of the scoring scale. It is from these top scorers that scientists tend to be drawn. The pool is not limited to those who take the ACT, of course; some people take the SAT, but the breakdown is about the same.
We can go deeper into the numbers, but the dearth of potential black scientists is the same. At the ACT score level of 30 or above, in 2013 there were 1,266 blacks, 5,508 Hispanics, 12,401 Asians, and 96,799 whites and others. There is some level of ACT score at which one can fairly say a person simply isn’t brainy enough to be a scientist.
At any rate, we can look at the ACT scores and determine that somewhere between one-half of one percent to 1.50 percent of scientists should be black. Anything more or less suggest racial discrimination is at work.
The racial discrimination is not at the college level, though. It occurs at the neighborhood K-12 level where poor black kids are trapped in failing public schools. You can thank the teachers unions for that.
I, too, live in a district where upper income parents of all races and ethnicities eschew private schools for the high-quality “union” public system. Go figure. It’s also amazing how some districts continue to pass school levies year after year including capital improvement and technology levies while others don’t.
Actually, I think some charters DO deal with those problems better, and at near-suburban success rates. But they often depend on bringing substantial additional dollars into the system, in the form of charitable donations from their rich supporters, as well as work practices that no union would stand for. Merely saying “Market!” and “Competition!” as if they were magic words doesn’t work.
The union work-rules issue is not as easy as the few charter success stories make it look. It’s one thing to start a school, or a handful of schools, staff them with Teach For America twentysomethings, and tell them they have to work twelve hours a day six days a week. People have made that work. But it’s unlikely that you could run a whole district that way, or retain more than a handful of decent teachers for more than three years. The best charters are very good, but they haven’t yet shown that they are truly scalable, both in terms of total number of students educated and in terms of consistency over decades, not just a few years.
The term “scientist” must be poorly defined. Some people are acting as if it’s anyone who gets near a lab or has a “Science” major.
In any case, the higher you set the bar, the more discriminatory it will appear to be. Folks are accustomed to thinking about things linearly. Many people have a really hard time thinking about things which include logarithms or exponents. Like Gaussians, for example.
I think you can thank the republican controlled legislatures that inadequately fund schools for the failing schools. Why is it someone who makes phone apps makes three times what someone who teaches our kids? Maybe if we got our priorities straight there would be more black scientists
Why is it that we can’t get away from the cliche of “poor” black kids in “failing” public schools? It exists in the BEST scenarios, in good neighborhoods, in good school systems. Black kids, especially boys, have to be off-the-charts Einsteins before they’re tracked into a high-academics path in school.
They should seriously do a study on how many black 8th graders are encouraged by guidance counselors to plan an aggressive AP-path going into high school. I’m talking about the kind of strategies CC is full of, to aim for elite college admissions. And one that DOESN’T rely on excelling in sports.
As for black kids not studying for or “gaming” the ACT/SAT system, the message is simply not getting to them. Case and point, we have a family friend whose son was an exceptional baseball player. His father, a really good man, spent a lot of time and money making sure that his son had all the baseball opportunities because he’d been told over and over again that this was the way his son was going to be able to go to college. No one had ever told him about ACT/SAT scores or the kind of information so many of us take for granted. During the boy’s senior year, they were confused why schools weren’t knocking on their door. We asked about his grades, scores and it turned out that he’d taken the ACT once because it was given at school, and had scored somewhere in the teens. No one had told him to prep or even what the test would be like. We gave them some info and convinced him to re-take the ACT; he improved by 5 points with little prep.
I can’t help wonder how different his school career, college choices and, ultimately, life choices would have been if someone had paid attention when he was just starting high school, or even earlier. It’s easy to point fingers at the parents but they have no experience to draw from and the people who are giving them “advice” really know nothing more. Guidance counselors and teachers along the way just kept praising him for his baseball skills, appreciated that he was a “good” kid with nice parents, and never mentioned bigger possibilities. What happened had nothing to do with being poor or living in tough urban neighborhoods. They live in a college town known for it’s great public school system.
Too late for the study; need to start much earlier, say 5th grade. And I realize that the focus of this thread is on black kids, but the same is true for poor income folks of all colors. They start to get off track in middle school.
(tbf, some of the the same occurs in middle income 'hoods. I remember nice, middle-upper class parents asking to drop their kids into the regular middle school track (from honors) bcos the hw interfered with their after-school activities.)
Of course, for those middle/upper incomes, it was just a lifestyle choice to eschew advanced math. For the low income – of all colors – it can be more of a survival choice.
fwiw: the middle school sorting hat is why all the millions that Gates and Zuckerberg have spent on high school education was a total waste.
The NYT reported yesterday that nationwide test scores in math for 4th and 8th graders declined for the first time since 1990. Some of the blame was put on Common Core for emphasizing depth over breadth, as the NAEP tests seem to emphasize the latter. But I think the overall problem has been the decline in rigor in elementary school math.
More than any subject, math requires rigor from an early age to gain proficiency. By the time kids get to 4th or 5th grade, if they are still struggling with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division or memorizing the times table, they are in trouble. Few kids can get back on track to keep up, and by 7th/8th grade when algebra begins, they are toast. The old drill and kill is still the best and only way to master math at all levels. Science ability is closely linked to math ability, especially at the HS level. Biology is the only natural science discipline that relies more on memory than math ability. Not everyone is born with the ability to be an engineer.
The problem with blacks lagging in STEM is manifold. In addition to perhaps a natural lack of aptitude and drive for some as with segments of all other groups, many black parents also bought into the concept of sports “helping” to keep kids in school, and sports as the path to riches, and would rather have their kids drill sports than math. Black kids who are good in math and science are probably derided and picked on in school by all the jocks and dunderheads. More should be done to identify and cull these kids from toxic education environments in elementary school, move these kids to good elementary schools so they can go on to succeed in STEM.
Why do black students deride academic achievement as “acting white”? I was really hopeful that the role model of a black man as Leader of the Free World would have dispelled the poisonous taunts.
You can’t dispel the notion of “us” vs. “them” in a single administration. After all, it’s been a powerful social and selection factor for tens of thousands of years.
Y’all may be overstating the effects of SAT/ACT prep. SAT prep has been found to raise scores by an average of 30 points. Not much. I don’t know what the ACT equivalent of that would be. But if a kid is scoring in the teens, all the prep in the world is not going to get him to 30+.
The cake is already baked by early environment. Test prep is just icing on the cake.