“The Coleman Report even found that Black scores averaged below those of American Indians, despite that group scoring lower on most socioeconomic indicators.”
by Professor J. Philippe Rushton
In my last VDARE article, I critically examined Richard Nisbett’s book, Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count. Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, [email him,received the most favorable reviews, not only in the media, but academia as well, for arguing that there has been a 35% Black gain relative to Whites in average IQ test scores and tests of educational achievement. Moreover, Nisbett asserted (incorrectly, it turned out) that cultural factors alone could explain all the Black-White gaps—which he also claimed could be eliminated altogether through educational and social interventions.
All of which was just what the huge sector of the Education Industry devoted to closing the racial “Achievement Gap” wanted to hear. But it was wrong.
(My article was based on a longer academic review [PDF that Arthur Jensen and I contributed to The Open Psychology Review).
Now I want to focus these allegedly improving Black scores in more detail. This article too is based on an academic journal essay by Arthur Jensen and myself: in the March 2010 issue of Intelligence, The rise and fall of the Flynn Effect as a reason to expect a narrowing of the Black-White IQ gap.
When Jensen and I reviewed Nisbett’s book, we noted that his claims of Black IQ gains relative to whites were far too high. But, in common with other race realist scientists, we tended to assume there must have been some improvement.
However, our new analysis finds that from 1954 to 2008 Black 17-year-olds consistently scored at the level of White 14-year-olds on tests of mathematics and reading—i.e. in more than fifty years, there had been no significant change at all.
As I will explain below, a 3+ year gap between Blacks and Whites at age 17 is equal to an IQ for Black 17-year-olds of about 85, the same as that found using standardized IQ tests.
Jensen and I began our analysis with the 1975 to 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long term assessment tests. These are often referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card” because they are based on nationally representative samples of over 26,000 students. They comprise the gold standard for educational achievement tests, provide the empirical basis for No Child Left Behind. They assess Mathematics and Reading skills every three or four years for White, Black, and Hispanic 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds.
Figure 1 (below) shows the combined mathematics and reading scores for White, Hispanic, and Black 17-year-olds, along with those for White 13-year-olds. We combined the mathematics and reading scores into composites and focused mainly on 17- year- olds. As can be seen, Black 17-year-olds have not closed the gap on Hispanic 17-year-olds (for many of whom English is a second language), and barely closed it on White 13-year-olds. Black 17-year-olds lag White 17-year olds by over three years.
http://www.vdare.com/100723_nisbett.htm