Math Forum, or Political Correctness Prison?
Paul F.Tanner, III, in a futile exercise to learn all about Gaussian Distribution, infamously wrote:
Quote: [from Wikipedia] "This curve lies entirely above the
horizontal axis, and that axis is an asymptote in both horizontal directions
(i.e. as x grows large and positive or large
and negative, the curve approaches arbitrarily close to the axis, but never
reaches it)."
This is a Feminist Ph.D.'s Brain on Drugs
This is a Frenchman's Slightly More Aggressive Attempt to Reach the Truth
And These Are The Latest 2007 TIMSS Results in Math
And GRE Scores
And IQ Scores
http://mathforum.org/kb/editwatches!default.jspa
More than half of the following posts to
They deserve NO public f
Update: September 6, 2011
Update: September 6, 2011
Now we know that the answer to the following question about why the
District of Columbia was the *only* " one of 11 urban systems tested that
made significant gains in math at both grade levels from 2007 to 2009" is
because of CHEATING by educators like Michelle Rhee and Beverly Hall
http://mathforum.org/kb/post!reply.jspa?threadID=2274672
http://mathforum.org/kb/post!reply.jspa?threadID=2274672
It is claimed that Washington, DC, is the only one of 11
urban school districts to show improvement in NAEP test scores: "The National
Assessment of Educational
Progress, given to fourth- and eighth-graders every two years, showed that the
D.C. public school system was the only one of 11 urban systems tested that made
significant gains in math at both grade levels from 2007 to 2009".
What exactly were those gains, where did they come from, and are our current
crop of educators capable of even understanding what this statement means?
How could it possibly be that "The fourth-grade score rose from 203 in 2003 to
217 in 2009. The eighth-grade score, 256, was up from 250 in 2005" in a "state"
where,
for every dime we increase the cost of education, the Black/White race gap jumps
up another notch? Just a SMALL increase in the percent of Whites taking NAEP in
a
"state" where the percent of Blacks dropped from 82% to less than 50% over the
last two decades would cause a MUCH larger increase in these scores than that.
So the
ENTIRE reason for this increase might not be related at all to Michelle Rhee's
excellent efforts, or any other type of improvement in anything in the sewer by
the
Potomac.
BUT, while this gap is represented in all other states, and for most years in DC
prior to this, it suddenly goes missing, at precisely when all eyes are on the
ball.
So now we must do some rational deduction by observing where the gap WOULD have
gone had the increase just continued as normal. While they tout that the NAEP
score of
Blacks in DC increased from 231 in 2000 to 245 in 2007, they DO show that the
gap between Whites and Blacks also increased, from 69 in 2000 to 76 in 2005
(with no
scores for Whites shown in 2007). Simply a straight line continuation of that
gap to 2009 would have left it at 81.6.
There are several explanations, other than any effect Rhee's reforms (or
attempts at reforms) might have had, for DC being the "only one of 11 urban
systems" to show
any kind of improvement:
The percent of Black students decreased from 88.2% to 80.3% and the Gap remained
constant:
Black = 241
White = 317
X = percent White
(1 - X ) = percent Black
241 x (1 - X) + 317X = 250
241 -241X + 317X = 250
76X = 9
X = 11.8% = percent of White 8th graders in 2005
1 - X = 88.2% = percent of Black 8th graders in 2005
241 x (1 - X) + 317X = 256
241 -241X + 317X = 256
76X = 15
X = 19.7% = percent of White 8th graders in 2007
1 - X = 80.3% = percent of Black 8th graders in 2007
Gap increased from 76 to 81 in 2007 and the percent of Black students decreased
from 88.2% to 75.3%
241 x (1 - X) + 317X = 250
241 -241X + 317X = 250
76X = 9
X = 11.8% = percent of White 8th graders in 2005
1 - X = 88.2% = percent of Black 8th graders in 2005
236 x (1 - X) + 317X = 256
236 -236X + 317X = 256
81X = 20
X = 24.7% = percent of White 8th graders in 2007
1 - X = 75.3% = percent of Black 8th graders in 2007
DO NOT MOVE "Quote: 'This curve lies entirely above the horizontal axis, and that axis is an asymptote in both horizontal directions (i.e. as x grows large and positive or large and negative, the curve approaches arbitrarily close to the axis, but never reaches it).'" http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7523669&tstart=0 Re: You Can Count On This: Math Ability Is Inborn Posted: Aug 19, 2011 2:36 PM Plain Text Reply Robert Hansen Posted: Aug 19, 2011 4:36 PM > I really don't like responding to you, but this... Robert, I feel the only proper response to JK is a note to Richard Tchen, something like this: Richard, If you feel there is a rule of the Math Forum that compels you to allow the submissions of JK, perhaps it is time to revisit that rule. Unlike Robert, I do not object to JK because he is wrong. I do not even object to him because of his digusting opinions. In the words of Wolfgang Pauli, I object to JK's opinions because they are "not good enough to be wrong". Haim Shovel ready? What shovel ready? DO NOT MOVE Korea yes no Dishwasher 552 545 Textbooks 552 489 Computer 549 499 Quiet study 552 525 Software 561 526 Literature 554 515 Father home 551 529 Mother home 550 499 Own room 552 531 Netherlands yes no Dishwasher 552 545 Textbooks 552 489 Computer 549 499 Quiet study 552 525 Software 561 526 Literature 554 515 Father home 551 529 Mother home 550 499 Own room 552 531 shortage of computer software in school Not at all Very little to some exetent a lot Luxembourg 485 474 527 474 Lithuania 501 497 473 430 Netherlands 529 522 525 531 Norway 498 498 498 476 Sweden 506 498 484 469 Taipei 543 553 532 543 >In general, to reply to the rest of Haim's message, we >see why Haim and other conservatives who do not want to >see the real world in any classroom - mathematics >classrooms and all other classrooms... What Paul calls the real world, and the REAL world, are exact opposites. It looks like emphasizing social injustice over math education is what got us dead last on so many standardized international math tests in the first place. The IQ of nations as listed in "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", Lynn and Vanhanen, which is called "controversial" by Wikipedia, tracks amazingly close to PISA math scores for the 44 countries who participated. Where he places Hong Kong at 107, Hong Kong's PISA score of 549 is right on target on this correlation. At the other end of the spectrum is Qatar, with an IQ of 78 and a PISA math score of 318. To achieve perfect linearity, the IQ of nations were adjusted to come up with a "PISA IQ". There was no adjustment required for ten countries; Hong Kong, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Spain, the US, Thailand, Jordan, Tunisia, and Qatar. An adjustment of only one point was required for six countries: Korea (up 1 point), Japan (down 1 point), Poland, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Turkey. An adjustment of 2 points was required for six countries: France, Lithuania, Norway, Russia (up 2 points), Mexico, and Indonesia. The largest (and most surprising) adjustments were for Argentina and Kyrgyzstan (down 10 points), Canada ,Croatia, and Ireland (up 8 points), and Italy (down 6 points). So I don't see anything at all controversial about this, and in fact can think of all kinds of explanations for all the discreprancies. For example, when you consider that the authors are British, and remember the long history of conflict between them and the Irish, it would be completely reasonable for them to claim that the IQ of the Irish is 7 points lower than their own, even though they scored 6 points higher than the British on this particular test. It's probably news to them, just as it's news to most of the world, that the Koreans have slightly higher IQ's than the Japanese, explaining this adjustment perfectly. It's amazing that war torn countries like Croatia manage to maintain an education system where children score just as high, if not higher, than our own, suggesting they'r smarter than the British give them credit for. The six point downward adjustment for Italy is a bit puzzling, since Italy now always scores at the bottom (in Europe) on all these standardized tests, indicating that their IQ of 102 is a relic of the past. The 7 point upward adjustment for Canada is the inverse case from Italy. For these reasons and others, these countries could easily be removed as outliers, making the IQ of nations an almost perfect fit with PISA math scores. How can this simple and verifiable fact be considered controversial, unless it just doesn't fit someone's preconceived notion of what social justice ought to be? "The person I mentioned in the post below (and in some earlier posts, two of which I give URLs for in the post below) scored just under 800 (780 or 790, I don't know for sure), got a 5 on the calculus-BC AP test as a Junior, aced a university linear algebra course his Senior year, got early admission to MIT, and he's an American Black." This is not impossible. As pointed out in the statistical analysis, the odds of one American Black scoring higher than 719 are one in a billion. That doesn't mean he can't score 780 or 790. AND he could even score 800, even though the odds drop to one out of 1 quadrillion as the score approaches 816. Without about a billion Blacks on the planet, you might be referring to the ONE out of a billion who DID score that high. But it IS impossible for TWO of them to score that high, much less 24 of them. Conversely, about 0.2% of American Asians, and 4% of Japanese, or Koreans, or Chinese, would be expected to score that high. Of the 166,064 American Asians who took SAT, 232 of them actually DID score that high. It would be expected that about 2.4 million Koreans, 4.8 million Japanese, and 48 million Chinese, would score higher than your ONE high scoring American Black student. And this is only IF liars and cheaters like Beverly Hall and Michelle Rhee had nothing to do with these scores (which I personally believe is most likely the case). Almost all of Mr. Jefferson's writings were transcribed to computer format, and the computer onto which they were transcribed was the very one for which I wrote the plotter package, the interface from this $4 million mainframe to the $1 million plotter which enabled us to print out our files. I have all of these transcriptions in a single file which makes it very easy to search for exactly what he said or wrote, and what he did not say. The main reason I believe he could not have said or written "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not" is that he never used either phrase "the democracy" or even "democracy". And the only time he ever used the words "democratic", "democratical", or "democrats" was in one single letter, and in fact in one single paragraph of one single letter: "The denunciation of the democratic societies is one of the extraordinary acts of boldness of which we have seen so many from the fraction of monocrats. It is wonderful indeed, that the President should have permitted himself to be the organ of such an attack on the freedom of discussion, the freedom of writing, printing & publishing. It must be a matter of rare curiosity to get at the modifications of these rights proposed by them, and to see what line their ingenuity would draw between democratical societies, whose avowed object is the nourishment of the republican principles of our constitution, and the society of the Cincinnati, a self-created one, carving out for itself hereditary distinctions, lowering over our Constitution eternally, meeting together in all parts of the Union, periodically, with closed doors, accumulating a capital in their separate treasury, corresponding secretly & regularly, & of which society the very persons denouncing the democrats are themselves the fathers, founders, & high officers. Their sight must be perfectly dazzled by the glittering of crowns & coronets, not to see the extravagance of the proposition to suppress the friends of general freedom, while those who wish to confine that freedom to the few, are permitted to go on in their principles & practices. I here put out of sight the persons whose misbehavior has been taken advantage of to slander the friends of popular rights; and I am happy to observe, that as far as the circle of my observation & information extends, everybody has lost sight of them, and views the abstract attempt on their natural & constitutional rights in all it's nakedness." So, no, he could not possibly have ever written anything about a "democracy". posted again, Thursday, 11:32 am, September 1, 2011 This was already posted, but it appears to have been censored. If it appears twice, this is why. "Do you not realize that the percentage of those who teach a field and have degrees in that field - like college professors - and who utterly reject the anti-science and anti-fact propaganda put forth by such political or religious conservatives as Fox News commentators, right-wing talk radio commentators, and you is greater than the percentage of those who presently teach secondary k12 - including private schools - and who utterly reject the same?" Let's accept your theory, Paul, which seems to be that the vast majority of our educators reject "conservative" thoughts or ideas. Well then, guess what? The VAST majority of Americans REJECT you, in your entirety, and all you little educators (like Beverly Hall who belong in PRISON) who think that teaching our children communism is just another snivel right: Per Gallup Polls and Infoplease Almanac: 94% believe in God or a higher power. 95.2% are Christians. 91% favor repatriation of Blacks to Africa. 90% pray regularly. 87% (versus 45% of scientists) believe God created life. 86% believe in God. 85% are members of churches. 84% favor laws against sodomy, or "homosexuality". 83% of Europeans believe the US, not Saddam, and not Osama, is world's biggest threat. 83% favor prayers at graduation ceremonies. 81% want creation to be taught in public schools. 80% of Republicans favor school prayer. 78% favor after hours use of public schools by religious groups. 74% want the Ten Commandments to be displayed. 71% favor using the Holy Bible in public school classes. 70% favor spoken Christian prayers in public schools. 58% to 68% blame Israel for attack on WTC. 68% favor teaching creation in public schools. 53% believe race mixing is a sin. 40% believe it was not a sin for Solomon to marry an Egyptian. 29% oppose spoken daily prayer in public schools. 28% want teaching of the theory of evolution to be required. 24% oppose the display of the Ten Commandments. 17% oppose prayers at graduation ceremonies.. 9% believe in the "theory of evolution". That is REAL America. Your theory about how America ought to be is a PROVEN FAILURE, all around the world. You have no right to impose communism on our children, and we have every right (and as Haim points out, OBLIGATION) to protect them from you and yours: "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?" 2 Corinthians 6:14 "I did not apply to any ivy league universities, in part, because they seem to buy into the very lies that you mentioned. Nevertheless, I think there is room to question the types of things we measure, and whether they are accurate predictors of success. My understanding is that the GRE only accurately predicts 10 to 12 percent of success in graduate school. Additionally, do IQ tests that are accepted as “standard IQ tests” highly predict success? No, not highly." Agreed about these so-called ivy league schools--they are all full of complete BS. After all, the smartest Mexican on the planet, Alberto Gonzalez, managed to get Harvard to give him a law degree without even asking if he had a second grade understanding of the US Constitution, which of course Congress and 100% of his classmates agreed he did NOT have. However, as La Carrefor points out, there IS a strong correlation between IQ and GRE verbal scores. I've done similar correlations and found pretty much the same thing, except that the correlation between IQ and GRE math scores is even stronger. Other racial and gender traits track more closely with GRE math than with IQ, particularly those influenced by Wechsler (which seems to be most of them). The main thing that throws GRE math off are the large number of affirmative action students, which causes females to be two thirds of those who take the GRE even though they're only one third of those with SAT scores high enough to be admitted to universities without special dispensation. Here's what the so-called smartest Black on the planet really believes: "In 1997, 110,462 black students took the SAT. 43 students scored a perfect 800 on the verbal, 24 scored a perfect 800 on the math and 3 scored a perfect 800 on both." The odds that an American Black would score 719, which is six standard deviations higher than the national average of 428 for blacks, are one in a billion. The odds that he would score 816, which is eight standard deviations higher than the average, is a millionth of that, or one in 1 quadrillion. To estimate the odds that TWO American Blacks would score 800, you must multiply these two figures together, which gives you one in 1 in 1E+30, which is a 1 followed by 30 zeros. Thus, the odds of FOUR Blacks scoring 8 standard deviations above the average are 1 in 1E+60, of ten doing so, 1 in 1E+150, of 15 doing so is 1 in 1E+225, of 20 doing so is 1 in 1E+300. Needless to say, the odds of TWENTY FOUR AMERICAN BLACKS all scoring 800 in SAT math is a number so low that spreadsheets can't even handle it. Do you think the smartest Black on the planet has bothered to update his web site to reflect that? Is that smart, or real stupid? To put this in perspective, the lifetime odds of: Being killed by a snake are 1 in 268,153 Being hit by lightning are 1 in 55,333 Being killed by fireworks are 1 in 387,332 Being killed by bees are 1 in 1 in 77,466 So you are 12,908 TIMES more likely in your lifetime to be killed by a bee than for ONE American Black to score (in ONE year) 800 in SAT math, and 7.7 x 1E+297 times more likely than for 24 Blacks to score 800. We now know that the human genome is a trillion or a quadrillion or more complex than a Pentium computer. Yet designing and manufacturing and producing and marketing Pentium computers takes the combined efforts of millions of our most educated and brilliant engineers, scientists, executives, and marketing people. If you believe it was evolution which produced the human genome, then you MUST believe that in the process of billions of years of evolution, that every place you find sand, you will find Pentium computers which just evolved on their own. Seen any lately? PISA math 15 year olds 2009 note that math scores in most other countries increase dramatically between 15 to 18 years, while ours decrease just as dramatically: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011004 Table 7 Shanghai 600 Singapore 562 Hong Kong 555 Chinese Taipei 543 Liechenstein 536 Macao 525 Korea 546 Finland 541 Switzerland 534 Japan 529 Canada 527 Netherlands 526 New Zealand 519 Belgium 515 Australia 514 Germany 513 (note that this includes 9% of the population who are Turks) Estonia 512 Iceland 507 Denmark 503 Slovenia 501 Norway 498 (by 12th grade, scores increase one standard deviation) France 497 Slovak Republic 497 Austria 496 Poland 495 Sweden 494 Czech Republic 493 United Kingdom 492 Hungary 490 Luxembourg 489 United States 487 (note that our scores decrease by a standard deviation by 12th grade) US literacy scores by race Asian 541 White 525 Hispanic 466 Black 441 "> Is Finland the only country in the world that exceeds the > US in the minimum number of years of education, high school > and college, required?" Clearly there's something far more wrong with the US "education" system than this. And most of us KNOW what that problem IS! But on this "math" forum, such comments are CENSORED, so you may never know, Paul. mathforum August 16, 2011 at 12:10 pm Paul, you are not a socialist, you are a communist. And as a communist, nobody expects you to grasp the significance of the following FACTS. US personal savings rate is negative: http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/30/news/economy/personal_savings_decline.fortune/ind ex.htm US GNI is about half that of Norway ($47,140 vs. $85,380): http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GNIPC.pdf And the last time "Bottom Line" from Asiaweek was available here in the US, Norway's personal savings rate was 32%, which is INFINITELY higher than ours! OECD data base http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx Math? "Not to women" "But then they'll be the type of people who know math"? "Math? No. I do not believe in math, and I don't think we should encourage it" "we live in America, not Russia" "Oh, ok, this is a really heard one. umm, there are really two sides of this story" "Children have the right to learn anything they want to learn, alchemy, scientology, gymnastics ... how to make basic mixed drinks, heavens gate people" "We really don't know what the squre root of 16 is. No one does" "Math? I'm sorry. Is this a joke"? "There are numbers everywhere--on houses, on phones, on ... microwaves" "Numbers are great--but they should also learn colors, smells, .... vibrations, "All 7 year olds should have the right to decide for themselves if math is scientific fact" "I think that people should be as knowledged as they can" "Math should be just left *out* of the equation" "I don't like believe in math" "I guess that if other people want to learn math, they should be able to" "Math is a theory ... and it's not at all what the bible tells us" "Back to arsenic, where do we get the best scientific data on which these extrapolations are made? The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley. Internationally funded deep wells in Bangladesh to avoid the use of horribly polluted surface water and/or shallow wells. Seems that there is a deep well arsenic problem in that region that somehow got missed. They range from below 50 ppb to over 1000. Somewhere in there, 2-300 ppb if I remember correctly, you don't even have to measure it. The blackness of the bare feet do the job." Our genius liberal scientists are also the very same people who claim it's ok to dump fluoride [read: nuclear waste] into our water supply to such a degree that it exceeds the level in a region of China which is full of mongoloid idiots as a result. The REST of the world, including all of Europe, OUTLAWED this practice, and now their dental caries rate [the BACTERIA which causes tooth decay] is one tenth to one hundredth of ours. For example, Norway's dental caries rate is 8% while ours is at least 89%. While we talk about the Gold Standard, Blacks in DC, the most coddled Blacks on the face of the planet, the absolutely richest Blacks on the planet, the ones whose children cost more than $25,000 each to educate (more than four times greater than students in Korea and Japan and North Dakota and Iowa who score MUCH higher), might be viewed as the Black Standard. They enjoy the strictest gun control laws in the nation, the strictest drug control laws, the most police per capita (with five separate police forces), and still manage to maintain our nation's capitol's status quo as the Murder Capitol [sic] of the World. Their SAT math score of 393 is 35 points lower than the national average for Blacks, and 60 points lower than Mississippi Blacks who have gained world fame for being neglected and discriminated against and in such sad shape because they're direct descendants of slaves. How is it that all this attention and education and control left them almost a standard deviation lower than Mississipp Blacks in intellect? Could it really be true that the more time they spend in our schools, the worse they get? If we somehow were able to borrow even more money from Japan or China or Saudia Arabia (who we are already hopelessly indebted to, thanks more than a $trillion per year to subsidize Blacks), could we give every Black in the nation the same federal benefits they get in DC, and drive their score down 35 points, to 393? Is it possible that, rather than a score of 800 being a mere EIGHT STANDARD DEVIATIONS higher than average Black scores, we could increase that to NINE STANDARD DEVIATIONS? ""When broken down by state, and assuming the most optimum case of a normal Gaussian Distribution, no Black in any state has ever scored higher than 600 in SAT math." This is a lie. Of course, "assuming the most optimum case of a normal Guassian Distribution" could mean anything." No, this is not a lie. This is exactly what their SAT scores tell us. You claiming that 24 Blacks aced the SAT (scored 800) IS a lie, and it's an easily proven lie. According to the College Board, this would be EIGHT STANDARD DEVIATIONS above their mean. Do you have any idea how improbable this is? The odds that someone would score six standard deviations higher than the mean are 1 in a billion. The odds that someone would score 8 standard deviations higher than the mean are one millionth of that. The odds that 24 Blacks would all score 8 standard deviations higher than the mean are that number to the 24th power. This is a very small number. It's smaller than 1 in (1 followed by more than 350 zeros). When I say that the "optimum case", I'm giving Blacks ALL the benefits of the doubt, which is that they would score as high as the College Board claims they do. TIMSS indicates that they score even lower than what the College Board claims their average score is. 12:00 Tuesday, August 30, 2011 The highest Scoring Whites in SAT math are in Iowa (831 students who scored 613 with an SD of 104) and North Dakota (241 students scored 610 with an SD of 90). but none of these students scored 800 in SAT math in 2008, with one student in Iowa scoring 769 and 4 students in North Dakota scoring 700. Yet we are supposed to believe that 24 Blacks (whose AVERAGE SAT math score of 428 is TWO STANDARD DEVIATIONS LOWER than the average for these Whites) scored a perfect 800??!! Tuesday, 10:36 am, August 30, 2011 "Do you not realize that the percentage of those who teach a field and have degrees in that field - like college professors - and who utterly reject the anti-science and anti-fact propaganda put forth by such political or religious conservatives as Fox News commentators, right-wing talk radio commentators, and you is greater than the percentage of those who presently teach secondary k12 - including private schools - and who utterly reject the same?" Let's accept your theory, Paul, which seems to be that the vast majority of our educators reject "conservative" thoughts or ideas. Well then, guess what? The VAST majority of Americans REJECT you, in your entirety, and all you little educators (like Beverly Hall who belongs in PRISON) who think that teaching our children communism is just another snivel right: Per Gallup Polls and Infoplease Almanac: 94% believe in God or a higher power. 95.2% are Christians. 91% favor repatriation of Blacks to Africa. 90% pray regularly. 87% (versus 45% of scientists) believe God created life. 86% believe in God. 85% are members of churches. 84% favor laws against sodomy, or "homosexuality". 83% of Europeans believe the US, not Saddam, and not Osama, is world's biggest threat. 83% favor prayers at graduation ceremonies. 81% want creation to be taught in public schools. 80% of Republicans favor school prayer. 78% favor after hours use of public schools by religious groups. 74% want the Ten Commandments to be displayed. 71% favor using the Holy Bible in public school classes. 70% favor spoken Christian prayers in public schools. 58% to 68% blame Israel for attack on WTC. 68% favor teaching creation in public schools. 53% believe race mixing is a sin. 40% believe it was not a sin for Solomon to marry an Egyptian. 29% oppose spoken daily prayer in public schools. 28% want teaching of the theory of evolution to be required. 24% oppose the display of the Ten Commandments. 17% oppose prayers at graduation ceremonies.. 9% believe in the "theory of evolution". That is REAL America. Your theory about how America ought to be is a PROVEN FAILURE, all around the world. "you don't want people to know is 'injecting socialist propaganda into the minds of impressionable young people'. " You're a communist, Paul, not a socialist. You want to be able to teach our children communism. NO American wants their children to be taught communism. It used to be a CRIME in this country, and it still ought to be. It IS a crime in many other countries, now even including Russia. And don't try to use this ploy again that nobody really knows how to define socialism or communism, because EVERYTHING out of your mouth is straight from the Communist Manifesto, not Thomas Jefferson. If only you were able to learn Economics 101 could you learn the error of your way. Just to set the record straight, Paul uses the phrase "science" as if though he doesn't understand the meaning, so let's resort to Webster to set him straight: "the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding" http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science What is the Holy Bible? Science. It is in fact the world's BEST science, the MOST TRUSTED science, the most widely accepted science, followed by 1 billion Catholics, 1 billion Protestants, and even 1.2 billion Muslims (as the Koran has very few differences with the official KJV). Plus almost 2 billion Asians who practice Buddhism or Shintoism live closer to our OWN Biblical commandments than we now do. >brainwashed by the anti-science and anti-fact propaganda >put forth by political or religious conservatism. What does religious conservatism in this country follow? Science. The world's most trusted science. The very science on which this putative Christian nation was founded. ALL of our branches of science (law, education, economics, commerce, and even our money: before it was converted to usury) are based on the Holy Bible. Without it, we would be living like the Central African Republic, or worse. No country which rejects (or can't understand) this science can be considered civilized, and every country which follows it IS civilized, almost as if though it's perfectly natural for them. I've traveled in Norway quite a bit and met many people waiting for operations, and all the people I met waited more than 6 months, and some as long as 2 years. Everyone there seems to be waiting for their free operation, whether it's a heart operation (the person waiting 2 years), or a hangnail operation (the one waiting six months). This is not to detract from Norway's economic success at all (which I believe is based on far more than just their amazingly profitable oil exports). Famous Norwegians, like their actors and athletes, are well known for getting their key operations in foreign countries so they don't have to wait so long, though there is some kind of an extra tax when they do that, which seems to be a lot of money. The fact that Norway is small and can afford a federally funded health care system, though, is not a good excuse for taking the risk that they will end up like Russia's system, which I've also seen quite a bit of. 9:13 AM, Saturday, 27 August, 2011 This is in reply to the thread "You Can Count On This: Math Ability Is Inborn". This reply is posted under this thread because the other one can't be accessed. "Author: Bishop, Wayne Subject: Re: You Can Count On This: Math Ability Is Inborn Thanks for the nice reminder as to why I do not even open his messages. Wayne" What Wayne is responding to is the following unsubstantiated, and actually provably false claim by Robert Hansen: >In 1997, 110,462 black students took the SAT. 43 students scored a >perfect 800 on the verbal, 24 scored a perfect 800 on the math and 3 >scored a perfect 800 on both. The College Board keeps very close track of all these statistics, and you will never see them agree with that statement. Instead you will see the following: http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/2010-total-group-profile- report-cbs.pdf IF scores this low follow a perfect Gaussian Distribution, and IF the relatively large standard deviation reported by the College Board is accurate, and IF only Blacks are represented in these test scores and don't include Whites pretending to be Blacks (in order to qualify for affirmative action admission), THEN, and only then, would the 429 SAT math score (SD 97) for the 196,961 Blacks who took the SAT in 2010 indicate that a grand total of 6 Black test takers would have scored 622. But IF only 100 of them were Whites pretending to be Blacks, then NO Black scored higher than 600. And IF the standard deviation is actually 80 like it is on other tests rather than 97, then NO Black scored higher than 600. And IF the Gaussian Distribution is more like a spike like it is for Black salaries, rather than the smooth curve you see for data which is closer to the median, THEN it's entirely possible that no Black actually scored higher than 500. In statistical terms, if ONE, or TEN, or even one HUNDRED Blacks, DID score 800, it would be such an obvious outlier that it must be removed for further research and examination (or prosecution, in the case of cheating like Beverly Hall). A score of 800 is more than two standard deviations higher than where ANY Black has ever scored since the beginning of the SAT, so, yes, Blacks ARE universally failing, and it's the very SAT math test you cite which PROVES it. To be more precise, of the 196,961 Blacks who took the SAT test in 2010, a maximum of six of them would have scored 622, IF, and only IF, scores this law fit a perfect Gaussian Distribution (which is actually not very likely). This is FOUR STANDARD deviations higher than the average SAT math score for Blacks of 428. Five standard deviations higher than that is 671, where even American educators can figure out for themselves that NO Black ever scored. A score of 719 is six standard deviations higher than their average, a score of 767 is seven standard deviations higher, and a score of 816 is EIGHT STANDARD DEVIATIONS higher than the average SAT math score for Blacks in 2010. NO member of ANY group ever falls six standard deviations out of their mean for ANY measurement, ANY time, ANY place on the planet, much less 7 SD, much less 8 SD. It's absolutely absurd for any educator to believe such bs. And it's CRIMINAL for Cal Tech to allow such a claim to be associated with their good name. Sunday, 7:38 pm, August 29, 2010 It would appear that all of the math experts on this math forum would prefer to believe an obscure, misleading, erroneus, and clearly inaccurate claim that 24 American Blacks scored 800 in SAT math, rather than determining for themselves how unlikely it is that any student of any race or sex would ever possibly score EIGHT STANDARD DEVIATIONS higher than the mean for their group. It does not take very much at all to figure out that this is an IMPROBABLE feat, but it explains perfectly why so many of our educators were unable to detect the absolute certainty that cheating was involved when test scores increase as dramatically as they did in Beverly Hall's district, Washington, DC, Pennsylvania, and now even with NAEP math. You have successfully buried your heads completely up your .ss, and you continue to keep them firmly buried up your .ss, when you whiiiiiiine and screeeeech racism to anyone who questions your holy [but evil] grail. There is NO CHANCE that any Black ANYWHERE on the planet could have scored EIGHT STANDARD DEVIATIONS HIGHER than their mean, not here, not in Botswana, and not in Ghana. The TIMSS math score of 364 (sD 77) of 11,590 Black students there, means that only 16 scored higher than 480 (4 SD), none scored higher than 518 (5 sd), and that to score 826 would require one to score 12 standard deviations (12 SD) higher than their mean. The TIMSS math score of 309 (SD 92) for 73,600 students in Ghana means that 2 scored higher than 493 (4 SD), none scored higher than 539 (5 SD), and to score 815 would require them to score eleven standard deviations (11 SD) higher than THEIR mean. I also would not believe such a claim for Whites, particularly those now educated in our defunct and amoral public schools. And indeed the College Board reports that they now score only 536, with a standard deviation of 102. So of the 838,235 White students who took the SAT in 2010, none of them scored five standard deviations higher than their mean, which is 791, and only 26 scored 740, which is four standard deviations higher than their mean. So if a White student claims they scored 800, there's a strong probability (no, it's inevitable) that it's based on bravado and not fact. Also, of the 112,254 White Hispanics who took the 2011 SAT math test, their score of 462 with a standard deviation of 104 means that only three of them scored 670 (SD = 4) and none of them scored 722 (SD = 5). To believe that 24 Black American students scored THREE STANDARD DEVIATIONS HIGHER than the higest scoring 3 Hispanic students is the height of absurdity, particularly since all races of Hispanics (Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans) score much higher than Blacks on ALL these standardized tests. Robert has argued that the low SAT math scores of Blacks is not proof that Blacks have failed. Just for the sake of the argument, I have accepted Robert's characterization. But the reality is that it's not Black children who have failed, but WHITE adults who don't seem to be able to come to grips with the depths of their failure: to wit, American students of ALL races scoring a standard deviation lower at the 12th grade level than at the 8th grade level in TIMSS math, while 12th graders of all races in most other countries score a standard deviation higher than their 8th graders. Pouring money into the Black community, in ALL its forms, has made the condition of American blacks MUCH worse than it already was: not the least of which is Black males of high school age being 400 TIMES as likely to be murderers, and 300 TIMES as likely to be murdered, than students all around the world, all the way from Ghana to Botswana to Saudi Arabia to Singapore to North Dakota. We already are the proud owners of FOUR of the murder capitals of the world (Washington, DC, Detroit, New Orleans, and lil' ole' Gary, Indiana) and don't need to add to that sad legacy by staying on the current course. On the other side of the coin, none of the 54,510 12th graders in Hong Kong whose TIMSS score is 607 (SD = 67), scored LOWER than 5 standard deviations lower than their mean, or 440, and only two scored lower than 4 standard deviations, or 473. So the lowest scoring Chinese student in Hong Kong scored higher than the highest scoring Black student in Botswana (at 426). So we know with certainty there is no overlap in test scores (and thus IQ) between these two different racial groups. Only 12 of the lowest scoring Chinese students in Hong Kong scored lower than the highest scoring Black students in Ghana. Paul, you are a communist, not a socialist, and certainly not an American. I would recommend that you move to Russia if you love communism so much, except that Russians rejected communisn with Glasnost in 1991. You would HATE Norway, because relative to them, and thanks to your type, we are already ten thousand times more communist than they could ever be even IF they continued to flirt with communism What you've proven is that those who cannot grasp free enterprise, economics 101, standard deviations, and Gaussian Distributions are doomed to be communists. The REST of us, like 99.9% of us, REJECT it in its entirety. "When selling the idea, the government referred to the similar American charter schools, saying that in New York they closed the gap separating inner-city students from those in the wealthiest suburbs by 86% in maths and 66% in English." You bet. This is just like NAEP scores in Massachusetts increasing as their SAT scores decreased dramatically, or Beverly Hall getting a national award for CHEATING which will most likely never be rescinded. The government can't capitalize on small mistakes. They must rely on HUGE mistakes in order to "succeed". NOT POSTED An example of how this is impossible is the Gaussian Distribution of the average height of 150 million American men (69.3" with an SD of 2.8") and 160 million American women (64" with an SD of 2.8"), where actual measured heights fit the Gaussian Distribution almost perfectly. Just as expected, 75 million men are shorter than 69.3", 3.4 million are taller than 72.1" (2 SD), 4,755 are taller than 74.9" (4 SD), 45 are taller than 76.3" (5 SD), and one taller than 77.7" (6 SD). Needless to say, none are taller than 79.1" (7 SD), and none are taller than 80.5" (8 SD). In all of history, only 11 Americans have been taller than 90 inches, mostly due to genetic defects, tumors, disease, or other health problems which caused them to die very young. If you WERE to believe some anonymous claim that there WERE 24 American men who were taller than 8 SD above their mean, you would clearly demand proof, namely, to SEE them. It's equally as likely as there were 24 American Blacks who scored 8 standard deviations above their mean in SAT math as there is that there are 24 American men who are 80.5" inches tall. Clearly, neither is true. The tallest man in the world is in China and he's only 93" tall, he's not an American, and very few even in China come even close to his height. NOT POSTED "Today, American high schools offer a sequence of algebra, geometry, more algebra, pre-calculus and calculus (or a "reform" version in which these top ics are interwoven). This has been codified by the Common Core State Standards, recently adopted by more than 40 states. This highly abstract curriculum is simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life." This is a patently false staement. While it might have been partially true half a century ago, American public high schools no longer offer calculus. The less than 5% who DO take REAL calculus are mostly if not exclusively those in very expensive private schools. And if the local high school here, which is touted as one of the best in California, is representative of the rest, then I know exactly why. In order for a high school student here to take calculus, they have to go off-campus to a local college. WHICH state, or WHICH school district, actually has a PROGRAM for completing calculus in high school, where it's incredibly important to complete it. Taking remedial classes in college is not the way to go, which is why ALL of our global economic competitors make sure that as many high school students as possible finish calculus in high school (99% in Japan and Korea, 90% in the Netherlands, etc.). I would not believe this claim about ANY race, not even Asians, if I didn't know a bit more about how Asians score. Of the 166,064 Asians who DID take the SAT in 2010, the only reason 71 of them DID score 800 is because of their large standard deviation of 125 (with a score of 591). Had their standard deviation been closer to the one typical for other groups, around 100, then only TWO Asians would have scored 800. To believe that 24 Blacks scored as high as these 71 Asians is like believing that Blacks can also be 28 feet high, solely because of some outlier on some obscure and vague caltech.pdf form. Saturday, 6:38 pm, August 28, 2010 "I responded to your above, I had such examples in mind as meteorologist Roy Spencer and mathematician William Dembski making fools of themselves when they venture out of their fields to "prove false" the facts of evolutionary biology. Unless and until you publicly retract your words above, what I wrote in my post above and what anyone writes in reply to your words above will continue to hold." Even the biased Gallup Poll shows that, even after decades of pushing this so- called "theory" of evolution [by the scientific definition, it is NOT a theory], only 16% of Americans, the DUMBEST 16%, believe in evolution and the others believe GOD did it. http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx The fact that this is up from 9% in 1980 should not give you any comfort, because Gallup changes the way they frame the question all the time, causing ups and downs which only make it APPEAR that evolution is gaining ground. Why do so few accept the "theory" of evolution after so many years of cramming it down our childrens' throats? We now know that the human genome is a trillion or a quadrillion or more complex than a Pentium computer. Yet designing and manufacturing and producing and marketing Pentium computers takes the combined efforts of millions of our most educated and brilliant engineers, scientists, executives, and marketing people. If you believe it was evolution which produced the human genome, then you MUST believe that in the process of billions of years of evolution, that every place you find sand, you will find Pentium computers which just evolved on their own. Seen any lately? 8:56 am Saturday, August 27, 2011 "Besides, competence is only a secondary point. My primary point is that the real reason---as evidenced by the curricular materials they actually use---Becker and his Education Mafia buddies want to teach the world in a math class (except math, it seems) is that they want to create the opportunity to inject socialist propaganda into the heads of impressionable children." There really is no other way to explain why it is that our 12th graders score a standard deviation lower than our 8th graders, while 12th graders in MOST other countries (and these scores exclude the much higher scoring Asian nations like Korea and Japan and Taiwan, as they didn't participate in the 12th grade test) score a standard deviation HIGHER. Those responsible for this must be punished even more severely than the Beverly Hall's of the world, because they clearly did it on PURPOSE, whereas Beverly et. al. MAY have done it accidentally. http://educationnext.org/merit-pay-international/ "But is there anything in the data the OECD has accumulated to give policymakers reason to believe that merit pay works? Do the countries that pay teachers based on their performance score higher on PISA tests? Based on my new analysis, the answer is yes. A little-used survey conducted by the OECD in 2005 makes it possible to identify the developed countries participating in PISA that appear to have some kind of performance pay plan. Linking that information to a country’s test performance, one finds that students in countries with performance pay perform at higher levels in math, science, and reading. Specifically, students in countries that permit teacher salaries to be adjusted for outstanding performance score approximately one-quarter of a standard deviation higher on the international math and reading tests, and about 15 percent higher on the science test, than students in countries without performance pay. These findings are obtained after adjustments for levels of economic development across countries, student background characteristics, and features of national school systems." http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=calculus+teacher&l1= These are the salaries of various races and professions: Mexican $50,000 Asian $54,000 White $71,000 Black $63,000 African American $57,000 Puerto Rican $56,000 Cuban $60,000 Hispanic $60,000 Jewish $40,000 Jew $46,000 Physicist $89,000 Protestant $54,000 Catholic $43,000 LVN Nurse $45,000 RN Nurse $79,000 Mormon $45,000 Rabbi $43,000 Teacher $57,000 Math Teacher $57,000 Calculus Teacher $52,000 Indian $58,000 White Hispanic $62,000 Danger pay Afghanistan $120,000 Speaks Pashto $195,000 Journalist $31,000 Web Designer AJAX $86,000 Ph.D. $95,000 Bachelor's $68,000 If we don't want our students to learn calculus, then paying calculus teachers $5,000 per year less than the average teacher is exactly what we need. "Jk, I don't think you have 110,462 individual SAT scores. If you do have this data please share it. Averages don't cut it. You are making universal statements that would require an examination of individual scores. Regarding TIMSS, I actually have the individual scores and will post them this evening. And the blacks that succeed on TIMSS succeed in the exact same manner as whites, asians and every other possible grouping." This is a totally confusing statement. What difference would it make to you whether or not you examine an individual who claims to have scored three or four standard deviations higher than the mean for their group, while ignoring millions of data points from thousands of different sources ("averages") which prove that, even if it WERE true, it must be excluded as an outlier? There's no human endeavor in which Blacks "succeed in the exact same manner as whites". Isn't this the entire reason for the Equal Pay Act and affirmative action? And even with all this artificial uplifting, they still feel discriminated against, right? It's not just test scores where Blacks have proven to be failures, but incomes, crime rates, marital fidelity, illegitimacy, and a whole host of other social pathologies. Of course you cannot measure or know this by looking at just one person's scores (one data point). It's only when you look at millions of data points (test scores) and see the pattern that you can understand that your statement "Blacks do not universally fail the SAT" is simply not true. Yes, of course these are universal statements. And they are statements of fact based on testing 800 million Blacks around the world in all kinds of ways, all of which reach the very same conclusion. "In a democracy, people have the right, indeed the obligation, to make decisions in their own lives, and they do not need your approval." Hear, Hear, haim. And we should add that the right of you and yours to force Blacks on me and mine will never exceed our religious right to free association with whom we please, to wit: "Now we command you, brethren, on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us", 2 Thessalonians 3:6 As you note, this is not simply a right, it's a religious obligation. IF scores this low follow a perfect Gaussian Distribution, and IF the relatively large standard deviation reported by the College Board is accurate, and IF only Blacks are represented in these test scores and don't include Whites pretending to be Blacks (in order to qualify for affirmative action admission), THEN, and only then, would the 429 SAT math score (SD 97) for the 196,961 Blacks who took the SAT in 2010 indicate that a grand total of 6 Black test takers would have scored 622. But IF only 100 of them were Whites pretending to be Blacks, then NO Black scored higher than 600. And IF the standard deviation is actually 80 like it is on other tests rather than 97, then NO Black scored higher than 600. And IF the Gaussian Distribution is more like a spike like it is for Black salaries, rather than the smooth curve you see for data which is closer to the median, THEN it's entirely possible that no Black actually scored higher than 500. In statistical terms, if ONE, or TEN, or even one HUNDRED Blacks, DID score 800, it would be such an obvious outlier that it must be removed for further research and examination. "http://www.latticetheory.net/media/pdf/caltech.pdf In 1997, 110,462 black students took the SAT. 43 students scored a perfect 800 on the verbal, 24 scored a perfect 800 on the math and 3 scored a perfect 800 on both. I don't have the numbers for scoring 600, but they would be higher than these numbers. Blacks do not universally fail the SAT. In fact some blacks score higher on the SAT than you did. Stop lying." I have the 1997 SAT math scores for Blacks directly from the NCES web site. I guarantee you that it's an absolute and verifiable and proven falsehood that ANY American black ever scored 800 in anything other than a test conducted by Beverly Hall et. al. Unlike the NAEP, the College Board does not condone cheating and lying, and would cause it to be published in every newspaper worldwide if they ever discovered a Black who even scored as high as 600 in SAT math. Do you know why they didn't? Because it never happened. And you can PROVE this for yourself at the following url: http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/cb-seniors-2010 Ditto for TIMSS where Blacks all around the world follow the exact same pattern as American Blacks in math testing: http://timss.bc.edu/PDF/t03_download/T03TECHRPT.pdf fm = johnknight = jk@israeliteknight.com john = eajayu = urbinie@yahoo.com jacobisrael = cp = jk@israeliteidentity.com blackexile = ? = jk@blackexile.net. "There are people of all colors that score 50 points lower than what guessing would produce on the SAT. And there are blacks that have scored higher than you on the SAT." This statement is a provable, utter, falsehood, which tells us nothing about Blacks and everything about the inability of our educators to come to grips with some KEY facts. The College Board enables us to do an important, critical detailed analysis (by state) of the scores of Blacks which the mediots appear to have missed. When broken down by state, and assuming the most optimum case of a normal Gaussian Distribution, no Black in any state has ever scored higher than 600 in SAT math. For example, the 20,442 Blacks in Texas who took the SAT scored only 437 with a standard deviation of 93. Of those, 99 scored higher than 570, and none scored higher than 600. It's interesting that the states where you would expect Blacks to perform the best are where they performed the worst, and where you would expect them to perform worse than average is where they performed the best. For example, Blacks in Mississippi scored 453, which is 13 points higher than Blacks in Massachusetts (at 440) and 37 points higher than Blacks in New York (at 416). But even amongst these 206 higher scoring Blacks in Mississippi, only 6 of them scored higher than 550, and none scored higher than 570. And of the 23,035 Blacks in New York, 89 scored higher than 550, and none scored higher than 590. Of the 4,002 Blacks in Massachusetts, 48 scored higher than 550, 2 scored higher than 580, and none scored higher than 590. Of the 14,476 Blacks in California, 19 scored higher than 570 and none scored higher than 600. The 12,504 Blacks in NOrth Carolina scored 431, which is 15 points higher than Blacks in New York, but only 14 scored higher than 560 and none scored higher than 590. http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/cb-seniors-2010 This exact same pattern is repeated across the country, from state to state, until we get to the most coddled Blacks on the planet (where the cost to educate one child now exceeds $25,000, four times as much as in much higher states and countries), Washington, DC. Not only are their SAT scores the lowest for American Blacks (402 in SAT math), but so are their NAEP scores, and a crosslink study with IAEP scores shows they score even lower than Mozambique. Afer this unimaginable expenditure of time, dollars, and resources, of the 937 coddled Blacks in our nation's capitol who took the SAT test (the top of the lot), only 22 scored higher than 500 and one scored higher than 550. The average score for Whites in many states (like North Dakota and Iowa) exceeds 610 to 612, which means that less than 2% of them score as low as the utterly HIGHEST scoring Blacks, in ANY state, and in ANY country. If there's any place and any time in the world where this should have worked, this is the time and place. But for DECADES now,there has been ZERO improvement in their scores, and every attempt to prove otherwise has now been proven to have been based on LIES and CHEATING. OR--might it be based on the abject inability of our current crop of educators to even grasp the problem, much less discuss it properly, much less make our education system competitive again? "Would this long list of people straying outside their fields of expertise and making complete fools of themselves include all those political and/or religious conservatives who have some expertise in some fields but who are not evolutionary scientists but deny reputably published and peer-reviewed evolutionary science, who are not epidemiological scientists but deny reputably published and peer- reviewed epidemiological science, who are not climate scientists but deny reputably published and peer-reviewed climate science, and who are not economic scientists but deny reputably published and peer-reviewed economic science? " Being peer-reviewed by a bunch of clowns (read: students whose only qualification for admission is that they weren't White, and affirmative action hirees like Beverly Hall) is now less than meaningless in this country. Alberto Gonzalez got a Harvard law degree without even getting a second grade understanding of the US Constitution. Even after forcing evolution down our childrens' throats for half a century now, still 91% of Americans believe in creation and not evolution. The simple fact that only half our scientists reject evolution is proof only that affirmative action succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. Italy:US = 462/474 = .97 Netherlands:US = 531/474 = 1.12 In SAT math in 2008, Whites in Massachussets scored 537 and Blacks scored 431. But by 2010, Whites scored 539 and Blacks scored 434. Whites in Iowa acored 612 and Blacks scored 502, but by 2010 Whites scored 638 and Blacks scored 468. so in just two years, the SAT math point gap between Whites in Iowa and Whites in Massachusetts increased from 75 points to 99 points, while the gap for Blacks decreased from 71 to 34. In just two years, the TOTAL gap for all three portions of the SAT between Whites in Iowa and Whites in Massachusetts increased from 219 to 251 Math: 2008 Whites Iowa 612 Whites Massachusetts 537 Gap 75 2010 Whites Iowa 638 Whites Massachusetts 539 Gap 99 Critical reading: 2008 Whites Iowa 613 Whites Massachusetts 529 Gap 84 2010 Whites Iowa 618 Whites Massachusetts 529 Gap 89 Writing: 2008 Whites Iowa 588 Whites Massachusetts 528 Gap 60 points 2010 Whites Iowa 589 Whites Massachusetts 526 Gap 63 At a time when Massachusetts is proclaiming great strides in education (and claiming to have increased their performance in NAEP math from 37th place out of 50 states 2 decades ago to close to the top today), quiet, unassuming little Iowa (as well as a number of other states) managed to increase an already huge 219 SAT point lead over Massachusetts to a whopping 251 point lead, a gap which in each subject area is a standard deviation. This is consistent with Governor Perdue's inference that NAEP scores have also been tampered with. And raises serious questions about how honest they've been with their claims (conflicting claims) that "the gap" decreased. We gave Bevery Hall the world, and she chose a life of crime. The public concensus is that she belongs in prison, not a position of power, and especially not in our once enviable school system, or anywhere close to our children. Michelle Rhee could quickly become a member of this prison gang. why did they choose a life of crime rather than honoring their oaths and contracts? It's not sufficient that they merely go down in infamy as confirmed liars. It's not sufficient that any educator who sees the very low SAT verbal and SAT math and SAT critical reading scores of American Blacks and proclaims "If blacks were universally failing on the SAT ... but they are not" be held in the same low esteem. In every which way it can be measured, Blacks ARE failing in our education system, and scoring lower than if they'd just guessed on SAT tests (which they DO, in EVERY state) is just ONE indicator. How much influence do you think our educators have on American Black male youths when, according to the FBI, they are FOUR HUNDRED TIMES as likely to be murdered, and THREE HUNDRED TIMES MORE lilely to be murderers, than Black male youths in Mozambique, or Botswana, or Ghana? Have our educators saved even one life, or is their attempt to force unwilling Blacks into a White education mold precisely what causes the problem? Will they be allowed to escape because they're women? http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2011/08/naep_responds_to_atlanta_cheat. html NAEP Cheating in Atlanta 'Extremely Unlikely,' NCES Says By Catherine Gewertz on August 5, 2011 11:21 AM| No comments| No recommendations In the face of the widespread cheating that was discovered on state tests in Atlanta, top federal officials are defending NAEP results in that school district. The exploration of NAEP results in Atlanta came here in Washington today at the quarterly meeting of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the national test known as "the nation's report card." Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers and analyzes NAEP, reported the results of an NCES analysis of the possibility that NAEP scores in Atlanta could have been manipulated. The bottom line: Buckley told the board that it is "extremely unlikely" that cheating or any other kind of score manipulation occurred in Atlanta on the NAEP tests. His Power Point presentation is clear and straightforward, and completely captures his walk-through of all the theories of cheating—included one mentioned in EdWeek—and how NAEP protocols protected against such possibilities, so I won't repeat them all here. But an interesting thing happened after Buckley concluded his remarks. Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, who initiated the state probe that uncovered the Atlanta cheating, was here at the meeting in his role as a NAGB board member. In brief comments, he suggested none too subtly that his investigators had reason to wonder about the validity of NAEP results in Atlanta. He didn't provide details, saying only this: "Jack [Buckley] seems to be persuaded that the checks and balances are in there, [but] we had some evidence to the contrary." Perdue added: "If you all are comfortable with the processes of sampling, which I believe is the biggest risk there, then it's all well and good." Buckley said he would welcome any additional information, and Perdue responded that he was certain state investigators would be happy to share that with him. And they left it at that. It will be interesting to see if anything more comes of this. mathforum 4:04 pm, Thursday, August 25, 2011 Are ALL of this nation's educators CHEATERS and LIARS? This article suggests that even Michelle Rhee, who at least was brave enough to take on the unions, also LIED about the obvious cheating scandal that all her awards were based on, OR was way toooo STUPID to see the obvious: http://thewashingtonteacher.blogspot.com/ Why is Michelle Rhee Silent on the DC Cheating Scandal? Disclaimer: I am not writing in my official capacity as WTU General Vice President, but rather as an announced candidate in the 2013 WTU elections and WTU member. Candi Peterson Michelle Rhee is refusing to talk to USA Today reporters about the testing cheating scandal that occurred on her watch while she was DC Public Schools Chancellor (2007-10). Hmmmm inquiring minds want to know why Ms. Rhee, with her infamous gift of gab won't open up on this topic ? The article below, which was featured in the NY Times newspaper on August 21 is a 'must read' on the latest controversy surrounding Rhee and USA Today. By the way, someone sent me the featured photo of Rhee with students with tape over their mouths which is symbolic of the irony of this story. August 21, 2011 Eager for Spotlight, but Not if It Is on a Testing Scandal By MICHAEL WINERIP WASHINGTON — Why won’t Michelle Rhee talk to USA Today? "Ms. Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington public schools from 2007 to 2010, is the national symbol of the data-driven, take-no-prisoners education reform movement. It’s hard to find a media outlet, big or small, that she hasn’t talked to. She’s been interviewed by Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw and Oprah Winfrey. She’s been featured on a Time magazine cover holding a broom (to sweep away bad teachers). She was one of the stars of the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” These days, as director of an advocacy group she founded, StudentsFirst, she crisscrosses the country pushing her education politics: she’s for vouchers and charter schools, against tenure, for teachers, but against their unions. Always, she preens for the cameras. Early in her chancellorship, she was trailed for a story by the education correspondent of “PBS NewsHour,” John Merrow. At one point, Ms. Rhee asked if his crew wanted to watch her fire a principal. “We were totally stunned,” Mr. Merrow said. She let them set up the camera behind the principal and videotape the entire firing. “The principal seemed dazed,” said Mr. Merrow. “I’ve been reporting 35 years and never seen anything like it.” And yet, as voracious as she is for the media spotlight, Ms. Rhee will not talk to USA Today. At the end of March, three of the paper’s reporters — Marisol Bello, Jack Gillum and Greg Toppo — broke a story about the high rate of erasures and suspiciously high test-score gains at 41 Washington schools while Ms. Rhee was chancellor. At some schools, they found the odds that so many answers had been changed from wrong to right randomly were 1 in 100 billion. In a fourth-grade class at Stanton Elementary, 97 percent of the erasures were from wrong to right. Districtwide, the average number of erasures for seventh graders was fewer than one per child, but for a seventh-grade class at Noyes Elementary, it was 12.7 per student. At Noyes Elementary in 2008, 84 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, up from 22 percent in 2007. Ms. Rhee’s reputation has rested on her schools’ test scores. Suddenly, a USA Today headline was asking, “were the gains real?” In this era of high-pressure testing, Washington has become another in a growing list of cheating scandals that has included Atlanta, Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas. It took the USA Today reporters a year to finish their three-part series. So many people were afraid to speak that Ms. Bello had to interview dozens to find one willing to be quoted. She knocked on teachers’ doors at 9:30 at night and hunted parents at PTA meetings. She met people in coffee shops where they would not be recognized, and never called or e-mailed sources at their schools. Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for Ms. Rhee, said the reporters were “provided unprecedented time and access to report out their story,” including many meetings with senior staff members and the chief of data accountability. By last fall, Mr. Sevugan said, district officials’ patience was wearing thin. The deputy press secretary, Satiya Simmons, complained in an e-mail to a colleague, “Jack Gillum isn’t going away quietly, Uggh.” “Just stop answering his e-mails,” advised Anita Dunn, a consultant who had been the communications director for President Obama. The reporters made a dozen attempts to interview Ms. Rhee, directly and through her public relations representatives. Ms. Bello called Ms. Rhee’s cellphone daily, and finally got her on a Sunday. “She said she wasn’t going to talk with us,” Ms. Bello recalled. “Her understanding was we were writing about” district schools “and she is no longer chancellor.” On March 29, the day after the story came out, Ms. Rhee appeared on the PBS program “Tavis Smiley” and attacked USA Today. “Are you suggesting this story is much ado about nothing, that this is lacking integrity, this story in USA Today?” Mr. Smiley asked. “Absolutely,” Ms. Rhee said. “It absolutely lacks credibility.” Mr. Smiley asked if she was concerned that she had put too much pressure on teachers and principals to raise scores. “We want educators to feel that pressure,” she answered. Ms. Rhee emphasized that the district had hired a top security company, Caveon, to investigate in 2009, and was given a clean bill of health. The district released a statement from John Fremer, Caveon’s owner, saying, “The company did not find evidence of cheating at any of the schools.” However, in subsequent interviews with USA Today and this reporter, Mr. Fremer made it clear that the scope of his inquiry was limited, and that the district had not requested that he do more. Indeed, Caveon’s report, posted on USA Today’s Web site, was full of sentences like, “Redacted was interviewed at redacted.” Teachers described security as “excellent” and “very vigilant,” and investigators, for the most part, took their comments at face value. It did not take Ms. Rhee long to realize she had miscalculated. Three days later, she told Bloomberg Radio she was “100 percent supportive” of a broader inquiry. Still, she would not talk to USA Today. Mr. Sevugan gave no explanation, but pointed out that she had spoken with several other news outlets. The reporters did not give up. On April 26, Emily Lenzner, a spokeswoman, wrote Mr. Gillum, “Michelle is willing to do an interview, but we’d like to do this in person.” She asked if they could hold their story, and arranged for a meeting on May 3 at the StudentsFirst office in Washington. On May 2, another Rhee spokeswoman e-mailed to say the reporters were too interested in cheating and not enough in StudentsFirst. She said they could submit a list of questions. There were 21 questions; Ms. Rhee did not answer 10 of the 11 about cheating. Mr. Gillum, who recently took a job at The Associated Press, said he was surprised by how unresponsive Ms. Rhee has been. “She talks about how important data is, and our story is data driven,” he said. So that people could make their own judgments, Linda Mathews, the project editor, posted the relevant public documents on the USA Today Web site. Shortly after the follow-up story appeared, the district’s inspector general began what was supposed to be an inquiry, but in July The Washington Post reported that just one investigator had been assigned. “Basically it was one guy in a room who made 10 phone calls,” Mr. Toppo said. Officials with the federal Department of Education have indicated that they are assisting with the investigation. In Washington, two investigators spent five days at eight schools. In Atlanta, the state deployed 60 investigators who worked for 10 months at 56 schools. They produced a report that named all 178 people found cheating, including 82 who confessed. There was not a single case of “redacted and redacted doctoring redacted grade answer sheets at redacted.” People in Atlanta could go to prison. Last week, a grand jury issued subpoenas seeking the names of school employees who had received bonuses for test scores. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that there were subpoenas for “signed copies” of “any and all oaths of office” taken by Beverly Hall, the former superintendent. The three reporters still hope to interview Ms. Rhee. “Absolutely,” said Mr. Toppo. Which brings things full circle: Why won’t Ms. Rhee talk to USA Today? " "If blacks were universally failing on the SAT then this would hardly be worth discussion, but they are not. And whites, or even Asians, are not universally succeeding. The world isn't that simple and if all you can understand is simple then you have probably picked the wrong subject to talk to." Another point I need to make is that I don't believe you can find a single post of mine which even begins to claim that "whites, or even Asians, are [] universally succeeding", as my main point is just the opposite of that. While Professor Lynn puts Italy's IQ at 102, their test scores on all the standardized international math tests puts their IQ at closer to 93. Ditto for Spain, who scores even lower than the good ole' U.S.A. on some of these key indicators. And Asians who come to this country and enjoy our mode of education do very poorly relative to their pure bred brethren back home. So my real view of who IS succeeding might be closer to Haim's than to yours. So you might expect that states with high percentages of Italian or Spanish ancestry would score very low? And guess what? They do. Even when broken down by race, Whites in those states score as much as 300 SAT points lower than states with low Italian and Spanish ancestry. "In math, what we need is 'quantitative literacy,' the ability to make quantitative connections whenever life requires (as when we are confronted with conflicting medical test results but need to decide whether to undergo a further procedure) and 'mathematical modeling,' the ability to move practically between everyday problems and mathematical formulations (as when we decide whether it is better to buy or lease a new car). " What this commie means here is that we need to dumb down math education in this country even further in order to *finally* and at long last "narrow the race and gender gaps", which is straight out of the Communist Manifesto. ALL of the dumbing down that they've done so far DID accomplish just ONE thing-- scores for ALL races in the US declined in exact parallel with each other, with no single race or gender showing a bit of improvement in performance relative to all the rest. HIS did not happen in countries where MATH PERFORMANCE, not race equality, and not gender equality, is given the full attention of QUALIFIED *MATH* teachers (teachers who come from the upper intelligentsia, and not the bottom, as ours do). If we HAD participated in the latest round of 12th grade TIMSS, you can bet your LIFE that we would have done even worse than we did in the last round which we did participate in 15 years ago--dead last in 17 of 34 TIMSS subjects. "If blacks were universally failing on the SAT then this would hardly be worth discussion, but they are not. And whites, or even Asians, are not universally succeeding. The world isn't that simple and if all you can understand is simple then you have probably picked the wrong subject to talk to." The other problem with your above statement is that it makes no sense. Are you saying that if blacks are "universally failing on the SAT" that we should NOT discuss it, that we SHOULD discuss it, or that you just don't WANT to discuss it even if they ARE universally failing? IF they ARE "universally failing on the SAT", then I would say that turning our entire education system upside down, and quadrupling the cost of education per student, JUST to teach them math, certainly IS worthy of discussion, and that this is the very forum on which this discussion should be held. The most coddled Blacks on the planet are in Washington, Dc, where HALF of the Blacks of high school age aren't even in school. The other half score lower on ALL these tests (NAEP, ACT, SAT, and IAEP) than the average student in Mozambique where education spending is less than 1% of GDP. http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/District_of_Columbia_CBS_08.pd f Yet these fewest, most coddled, most expensively educated Black boys in DC score 392 in SAT math. The only people who score lower are Black girls in DC who score 376. There are no White boys or girls in any state who score that low, with White boys in the SAME school district in DC scoring 633. If this is not proof positive that Black boys in DC ARE "universally failing on the SAT", then what possibly COULD be? Sex, Race, Ethnicity, and Performance on the GRE General Test "He said he had been surprised that he had not received any offers and that his attempts to find out why had so far been fruitless. "The universities just said they were incredibly busy and couldn't tell me," he said." Probably if they were forced to answer him, we'd discover that they do the same things there that California's universities do: "At UC Berkeley, where it's called "comprehensive review," the system [read: inviduous sytemic discrimination] is under attack. A study last month commissioned by UC Board of Regents Chairman John Moores and reported by the Los Angeles Times found that in 2002 Berkeley admitted 375 students with SAT scores between 600 and 1000, and rejected about 3,200 students with SAT scores above 1400. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Data subsequently released by the University of California show that UC Berkeley and UCLA in the past two years collectively have rejected more than 10,000 applicants who scored above 1400 (out of a possible 1600) on the SAT. That's nearly half the applicants in that category who applied to Berkeley, and nearly a third of those who applied to UCLA. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Critics of the policies have pointed to a report by John Moore, a member of the University of California System Board of Regents. Moore's report suggests UC- Berkeley only accepted about 56 percent of applicants with SAT scores higher than 1400" "Still in question, of course, is the root cause of the link between number sense and math ability. Do children born with better number sense have an easier time learning to count and to understand the symbolic nature of numbers? Or it is just that children born with less accurate number sense may end up avoiding math- related activities before they develop competency?" This truly is a silly question. The answer is obvious, which is that BOTH must be true--AND this explains the inability of 800 million Blacks in the world, all the way from America to Africa, to learn even the first thing about math. Scoring 50 points lower in SAT math than if they'd just guessed is proof positive that all efforts to teach math to American Blacks can NEVER succeed. [quote user="Aalan88"] S&P has its shortcomings, but they are required to express an opinion about US bonds. The whole world now knows that we have a political faction that relishes the prospect of creating a default event, because proving the unreliability of government fits their ideology. With the weakness of Obama's "negotiations" (or, as one analyst says "with negotiations like this, who needs capitulation?"), the possibility that the extremists will get their way sometime in the next 10 years is not zero. It has to go into the credit rating. Even if there's no overt default, we are devaluing our currency as fast as we can (not an easy task, when every other major currency is trying to do the same thing). Repaying debt in a devalued currency is a form of default, too, isn't it? If the problems in Europe and Japan were not so bad, this would stick out like a sore thumb, and earn us maybe an A- or BBB. [/quote] Once a downgrade like this occurs, it could take a decade or two to get the old rating back. And that's only IF our congressmen began to think like businessmen and not continue to like drunken sailors on a binge. Did anyone see any signs that the two drunks who met in the bar and promised to help each other, actually helped each other? Neither did I. The joy ride is over. It's time to toss the drunks out of the bar and celebrate with a real tea party. These are the actual GRE verbal scores from the link that was quoted: Indian men 466 Indian women 451 Black men 399 Black women 388 Mexican men 449 Mexican women 427 Puerto Rican men 414 Puerto Rican women 408 White Hispanic men 472 White Hispanic women 445 Asian men 490 Asian women 484 White men 512 White women 485 This has been the pattern for several decades now, with the only real change being a fairly siginificant increase in the gap between Asian men and Black women (from 234 to 267 points). Mark49: thehammer: hey look eeajayu, i say you don't last till monday, mark49 sends his best wishes You are an intrusive, controlling little liberal. Emphasis on "little." do you have a problem with john knight or john knight v2 i.e. eeeaway being banned for their racist white trash? my reply Which part of free political speech (which OUR Founding Fathers spilt BLOOD to protect) do you not grasp, thehammer? The part which says only YOU get to issue terrorist threats across OUR internet, a severe violation of the Patriot Act? Re: President Obama's IQ 172 - 166.a few seconds ago | Post #3093311Clearly, thehammer considers the White Race to be his mortal enemy: http://socialize.morningstar.com/NewSocialize/forums/p/228755/3093112.aspx#PageIn dex=5 "It seems that the moderators have kicked in with the common sense and banned your sorry, racist ass. However, do not be of sorrow. We already know that "johnknight" was merely a multiple id of a username you post with here regularly. I have my hunch about who it is, but it will become evident surely. Also, do not mourn, as the comments on that thread showed many conservatives on this site are sympathetic to your viewpoints. howiejmaxie lucasd6, df102884, mark49, santacruz, and kenwk250 all posted on the thread after reviewing your comments and found no reason to criticize or condemn them. The lack of criticism from lucas6 is most telling since he jumps on people over small factual errors or if one does not speak with the utmost respect towards the odious tea party, but nary a word when it came to your hate-filled conservative anti-black rhetoric. If you didn't already know, you can search for bullwinkle on facebook, and others, where these comments of yours will be appreciated and celebrated. But know this, in the public area, the era of white surpremacy is over. When your fellow travelers in the Republikan party and klansmen make bigoted remarks in the public area they are hunted down like rabid dogs, and so that will be for the present and the future.A black man with A MUSLIM father is President and there is nothing you can do about it, teabagger. Sincerely, thehammer" Could ANYBODY in his right mind agree with this? http://socialize.morningstar.com/NewSocialize/ViewPost.aspx? apptype=0&PostID=3092438 thehammer: It seems that the moderators have kicked in with the common sense and banned your sorry, racist ass. However, do not be of sorrow. We already know that "johnknight" was merely a multiple id of a username you post with here regularly. I have my hunch about who it is, but it will become evident surely. Also, do not mourn, as the comments on that thread showed many conservatives on this site are sympathetic to your viewpoints. howiejmaxie lucasd6, df102884, mark49, santacruz, and kenwk250 all posted on the thread after reviewing your comments and found no reason to criticize or condemn them. The lack of criticism from lucas6 is most telling since he jumps on people over small factual errors or if one does not speak with the utmost respect towards the odious tea party, but nary a word when it came to your hate-filled conservative anti-black rhetoric. If you didn't already know, you can search for bullwinkle on facebook, and others, where these comments of yours will be appreciated and celebrated. But know this, in the public area, the era of white surpremacy is over. When your fellow travelers in the Republikan party and klansmen make bigoted remarks in the public area they are hunted down like rabid dogs, and so that will be for the present and the future.A black man with A MUSLIM father is President and there is nothing you can do about it, teabagger. Sincerely, thehammer http://socialize.morningstar.com/NewSocialize/forums/p/228755/3092809.aspx#309280 9 "Did you test these friends of yours? No, of course not. Being witty, or talented, or successful, can never automatically translate to being the ONE outlier on the planet who doesn't fall within the respective bell curves." STOP it! I don't know why you persist in this fantasy. Black people who are witty, talented and successful did not get that way by being morons. I have to admit I am wondering about YOU, though. What brought this on? Why do you come here and post nonsense about how blacks "test" in the lower percentile? I can cite you examples of brilliant black people from George Washington Carver to cardiac pioneer Vivien Thomas. When you denigrate the contributions of people who have made a difference and given so much to the world, you show your own ignorance. You come here and post data supposedly to prove points that contradict the facts and it's getting very tiring, I don't mind telling you. There is not one iota of difference between black, white, yellow or brown people. None whatsoever. In every race there are achievers and slackers, that's what makes a world. Do NOT presume to come around here and make specious statements slamming blacks and expect to be welcome. You are officially on ignore here and I don't put people on ignore. Just you. YOU stop, you ignoramous. You have no idea how well these putative smart, educated blacks you know would do on an actual test because you have not actually tested them. And if you DID actually test them, the odds that they would be the ONLY Blacks on the entire planet who score HIGHER than the extremely small select group of Blacks who've taken the GRE are LESS than ZERO. The 200,000 Blacks who've taken the GRE are a small, select group of less than 0.6% of American Blacks (and less than 0.03% of Blacks in the world) who we have turned the world upside down to try to educate, at an extra cost of multiple TRILLIONS of education dollars. These are the HIGHEST scoring Blacks in the world, having been given all kinds of privileges that NO Asian and NO White has ever been given-a FREE education in the world's supposedly best education system. GRE is proof positive that it produced NOTHING, and that your OPINION is irrelevant. It produced LESS than NOTHING, because American Blacks themselves DID NOT BENEFIT FROM IT! Before all this started: 1) Their family purchasing power was three times greater before the act than today. 2) Less than a quarter of black children lived in fatherless households, compared to more than three quarters today (more than 80% now, per some recent studies). 3) Less than a quarter of black men under the age of 32 had been imprisoned in their lives, compared to more than three quarters today. 4) Less than 30 per 100,000 black male youths were murdered, compared to more than 300 today. 5) Their AIDS death rate was infinitely lower than it is today. posted eajayu morningstar Sunday, July 7, 2011 at 1"09 pm "Post removed for violation of Terms of Use (Inflammatory)" eajayu, This is a notice that your post number 3092523, "Re: President Obama's IQ 172 - 166.", was removed for violating the Morningstar Discuss area Terms of Use, specifically for being inflammatory. Please see our Terms of Use at: http://socialize.morningstar.com/NewSocialize/utility/TermsOfUse.aspx Additional violations will result in the closure of your posting account. Thanks, M*_Casey http://socialize.morningstar.com/NewSocialize/ViewPost.aspx? apptype=0&PostID=3092523 You deserve an answer to your question, Richard, about how many of the billion Blacks in the world might score as high as Obama claims he scored. And to be specific, only 0.0000003 of any population group scores more than five standard deviations higher than their mean, in any test, or endeavor, or income, or whatever other way you choose to measure that group. Of the almost 400 million Black women in the world, it would be expected that 120 of them would score five standard deviations higher than their mean GRE score of 388, or 608. This is the theoretical upper limit of their scores based only on the assumption that scores this low would follow a normal bell curve, an extremely optimistic assumption. Needless to say, none of them would be expected to score six standard deviations higher, or 652. Conversely, a score of 611 for Asian men who take the GRE WHO ARE US CITIZENS ONLY, is only two standard deviations higher than their mean of 490, which means that 2.27% of them score higher than 611. These international tests are now proof positive that Asian men educated in their own countries score MUCH, MUCH higher than Asian men who are American citizens who are educated HERE. Ignoring that for a moment, of the one billion people in the world who are Asian men, we would expect more than 22.7 MILLION of them to score higher than 611 IF say Japanese or Korean or Chinese men educated THERE score no higher than those educated HERE. These of course are only the verbal scores. The race and sex differences are much bigger in math. Sex, Race, Ethnicity, and Performance on the GRE General Test "The rest of your post has too many howlers to cite -- they are vile lies and hurtful to any innocent person who may happen to see them --- and I refuse to believe such excrement was published by any credible source" Have you actually seen the data? If so, did you actually understand it? This is not just one American test, the GRE. This is also from TIMSS, which has recently been administered to several African nations who scored so low that it would be impossible for any of them to have scored even as high as American Blacks. To score lower than American Blacks might seem hard to you, but with a TIMSS score of 267 for Ghana (a country with a higher IQ than Kenya), we have proof that they do: http://timss.bc.edu/PDF/t03_download/T03TECHRPT.pdf http://www.fathersmanifesto.net/timssT03TECHRPT.pdf http://socialize.morningstar.com/newsocialize/forums/p/228755/3091495.aspx#309149 5 If any of this sounds racist to you, you need to attack the College Board, not me, because all I'm doing is quoting THIER own data. Is their data correct? Is it true that NO American Black, even after affirmative action, and the Equal Pay Act, and spending extra trillions of dollars to educate them, has EVER scored higher than 564 (and possibly not even as high as 530) in GRE verbal? If so, and if my calculations are correct, is it your opinion that it's racist to point that out to you? August 7, 2011 at 9:00 am The big question ought to be how someone with such low verbal and math skills might have been admitted to both Harvard and Columbia, don't you think? The answer might be in the following admission from Cheri: "I just took the GRE last week in Dallas. I had two weeks to study. I am 55 years old and I’m a black woman. I graduated magna cum laude at 51 years old. And, I scored 530 on the verbal. 350 on the quantitative but I never was good at math and it’s all I needed for graduate school. One more thing–years ago I got a 27, 28 and 29 on the ACT. Scored in the top 5% of the nation in Englsh. 17 in math brought the composite to 24. I’m just saying. Now, as you were “oh racist one…”" Her score of 350 is a whopping 54 points shy of the AVERAGE for Black women, or 404. People like her cannot possibly form an intelligent sentence on their own, much less understand much about written English. "I cannot believe the President is stupid. But I can believe he is totally 'tone deaf' when it comes to the economy, business, and the role each plays in providing" The only thing I believe someone like Obama with such poor verbal skills could possibly contribute to anything is to read something written on the teleprompter by someone who took NO advice from Obama himself. iow, what Obama reads from that teleprompter is something he had NO hand in creating. huff August 7, 2011 at 9:00 am http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/new-york-gay-marriage-lgbt- advocates_n_912892.html It's not just gay marriage on which the mostly Catholic states are on the wrong side of God's Law, relative to mostly Protestant states. It's a whole array of social pathologies, including divorce (the mostly Catholic states even have higher divorce rates than the mostly Protestant states). Also, even though the Catholic Church CLAIMS to oppose abortion, the mostly Catholic states (like New York) have abortion rates 6-10 TIMES higher than mostly Protestant states like South Dakota (43.3 vs 5.7 abortions per 1,000 women between 15 to 44 years old). They even have much higher murder rates (6 murders per 100,000 population compared to only 0.2 in North Dakota). This sure does not seem to be very smart on their part, wouldn't you say? It makes you wonder about their standardized test scores, eh? Wow. NO wonder Congress shut down NASA. What an IDIOT. Even Gibbs denied that Obama tasked him with using NASA to "reach out to" or praise Islam. If so, Bolden is not simply an IDIOT, he's a LIAR. AND he's clearly cut from the same cloth as our friend Cheri here: http://carrefoursagesse.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/converting-gre-verbal-scores- to-iqs#comment-496 "I just took the GR E last week in Dallas. I had two weeks to study. I am 55 years old and I’m a black woman. I graduated magna cum laude at 51 years old. And, I scored 530 on the verbal. 350 on the quantitative but I never was good at math and it’s all I needed for graduate school. One more thing–years ago I got a 27, 28 and 29 on the ACT. Scored in the top 5% of the nation in Englsh. 17 in math brought the composite to 24. I’m just saying. Now, as you were 'oh racist one…'" posted August 4, 2011 at 7:30 pm http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/PengieP/state-education-rankings- _n_894528_96911362.html Actually, most Asian design engineers make much more than American design engineers, both here, and in their homelands, like Korea, or Japan, or Singapore, or Taiwan. Many Taiwanese design engineers used to stay here after their free American college education, but now most of them return to Tawian, not just because their incomes are now higher there, but also because their tax rate is much lower. Good point about how American high school graduates just barely have enough of an education to fleece the rest of us. If we taught calculus to 95% of our population like they do in Taiwan or Japan or Korea, rather than only 5%, then these graduates might actually have the prerequisites to do something more productive than designing financial instruments that are designed to fail. posted August 3, 2011 at 11:11 am The Catholic Church, which has paid tens of billions of dollars (and maybe hundreds of billions) in damages for their sodomite priests who molested the very boys they were charged with protecting, is still not out of the woods on this one. What we've seen so far might still be the tip of the iceberg. And yet it's the mostly Catholic states which, rather than learning a lesson, have "legalized" gay marriage, with New York beingthe latest to do so. You would think that 9/11 would be warning enough for these degenerates and that each New Yorker would be scrambling to keep their politicians on the right side of God's Law, rather than following sodomite priests right off the cliff. You have to be VERY stupid, and VERY ignorant (particularly about what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah), to do such an egregious thing right under the shadow of the priest scandal. August 3, 2011 at 8:30 am It's easy to understand when you realize that our "global economic partners" now control ALL of our communications channel [read: lamestream media PLUS the internet], AND all of our money supply, AND all of the secretive monetary policies which not even Ron Paul is privy to, AND make everything for us now all the ways from semiconductors to cars to shoes, AND even control our language and encyclopedias and dictionaries, adding new words which they would never dare introduce to their own language and culture. There's utterly no other way to explain why the 12th graders in most civilized nations score a standard deviation higher than their 8th graders while ours score a standard deviation LOWER, other than the naked communism pushed by "our" educators. not posted yet You're not asking for equality. You're DEMANDING super rights for American blacks that NO other Black on the planet has ever been granted. WHY exactly do you believe you should be granted SUPER rights? What exactly will you contribute to society if we discriminate against FAR MORE QUALIFIED Whites and Asians in order to grant you SUPER rights. What's in it for us? What's in it for YOU? How will you benefit by forcing yourself onto people who don't want to be associated with you? What do you think can possibly be gained by allowing a person with even worse quantitative skills than theAVERAGE Blacks woman, into a graduate school? Will you be even less honorable and less honest and less objective [and less qualified] than Beverly Hall? posted JUly 24, 2011 Cheri, if you're trying to prove the point about how intellectually disadvantaged the black race is, particularly American blacks, then you're right on target. You got admitted to OUR [WHITE BUILT] graduate schools with a 350 in GRE quantitative? How did that happen? Do you think you would be there if you were White, oh racist one? http://fathersmanifesto.net/gre.htm For the uninitiated, Cheri's score of 350 is a whopping 54 points shy of the AVERAGE for Black women, or 404, which is already 232 points shy of the AVERAGE for Asian men of 638, MOST of whom were DENIED admission--for what reason? To make room for oh racist one Cheri? And what exactly do WE gain by all this individious racist nonsense? Nothing? No. Less than nothing, as evidenced by Cheri's racist proclamations. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/11/state-education-rankings-_n_894528.html The most obvious disconnect between this study and reality is that this study puts Massachusetts at first place, while their ACTUAL performance on credible worldwide standardized tests like SAT math puts them at 36th place. Many of these low scoring states like North Dakota, and Iowa, and MInnesota, actually score MORE than 100 points higher just in SAT math. They also score even higher in SAT verbal. iow, the study was contrived to attempt to make a political point. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/sunday-roundup_181_b_907800.html at 9:39 am Sunday, July 24, 2011 This is simple Economics 101 which is way over the heads of the average huffingandpuffingster. To expect this forum to grasp that is about like expecting to be hit by lightning--twice. Isn't it funny how free eneterprise works in everything, all the way from giving salesmen in Russia commissions, to private property rights in China, and even educators in Japan, but it does NOT work for teachers in the US? Financial incentives are what make the world go around. Even we [SUCCESSFULLY] give financial incentives to executives and salesmen in the US and don't expect this to lead to cheating, or lying, or crime. But on the rare instance that it DOES, we punish them even more severely than we punish murderers. But with American teachers, oh, no. Paying them a bit extra to do their JOBS automatically causes them to CHEAT--to CHEAT us the taxpayer, to CHEAT their own sudents, and evidently to FIRE any honest teacher who speaks out. Who woulda known that American teachers are THAT corrupt--that they would put such a high price on their own welfare, and such a low price on their own STUDENTS' welfare? Certainly had we known that ahead of time, any notion of paying teachers MORE to do a BETTER job would have been buried with Thomas Jefferson. The answer, though, is not to quit paying teachers more for doing a better job, but to FIRE and IMPRISON the LYING, CHEATING educators so the rest of them can do the RIGHT thing. Why does Beverly Hall still DENY any knowledge of this cheating, even though almost 100 teachers and principles have already confessed, without even the first inkling of a trial? Is she CORRUPT to the core? Is she a moral minor who was put into an position of trust and authority (at a rate of more than $180,000/year) which we all knew she couldn't handle a century before she was put there? Why is it that educators like Paul don't even say a peep about all the CHEATING by TEACHERS, and pretend like everything is ok in American education? Could it be that cheating is just part of their persona? It doesn't bother them at all because cheating is what narrows the race gap? The more cheating there is, the happier they are? http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/21/new.jersey.schools.cheating/ (CNN) -- Thirty-four schools in New Jersey are b eing investigated for possible cheating after an examination of standardized test data revealed irregularities and raised questions, the state Department of Education said. State education officials said some schools showed especially high deviations from the normal amount of wrong test answers being erased and a right one marked. Since 2008 the New Jersey Department of Education has had the state's assessment contractor, Measurement Inc., provide reports on erasure patterns at schools and at each grade level. These reports show the number of times answers on standardized test forms are erased and changed. The 34 schools now under investigation showed erasures from wrong to right two to five times as often as the state average, state school officials said. According to the reports, 25 district and charter schools were found to have these high averages in at least one grade level, while nine schools had abnormally high levels of erasure schoolwide. In numerous U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Philadelphia and Washington, accusations and findings of test cheating being condoned and organized by teachers to make their schools look better have put the issue in the national spotlight, and prompted education officials across the country to re-examine testing procedures and protocols. New Jersey's acting education commissioner, Christopher Cerf, noted those incidents in a memo sent to all districts and charter schools on Tuesday. "The recent wave of cheating scandals across the country has reminded us that even though the vast majority of our teachers and administrators are honest, hardworking professionals, a small handful of unethical people sometimes do unethical things," Cerf wrote Tuesday. But, he insisted, "in no way do these reports prove that cheating occurred, nor do they implicate any school or teacher in wrongdoing," "High instances of erasure marks, where wrong answers are changed to right answers, happen for many reasons, including students checking their work or students making mistakes in tracking their test with the answer folder," he wrote. All told, 120 schools registered higher erasures than the state average, according to the reports. The percentage of erasures from wrong to right was 58.5% in 2010, higher than the 56.9% in 2009. In his memo however, Cerf asserted, "In conversations with testing experts, we believe these results to be in line with trends across the country." "By themselves these numbers tell us nothing," said Justin Barra, director of communications for the state Education Department. "This is one data point that we use to investigate schools for wrongdoing." Barra explained that a combination of the test data, unannounced classroom observations, tips, and other investigations is the best way to maintain secure and accurate testing data and to catch potential cheaters. As a result of standard oversight, the test erasure data and tips from other teachers and concerned parents, eight instructors were found guilty of breaching protocol last year, according to Barra. Of those eight, two worked at schools among the 34 highlighted in the reports. The investigations into possible wrongdoing are expected to be wrapped up in August, according to the Department of Education. In his note Tuesday, Cerf wrote, "We will continue to be vigilant in monitoring potential testing irregularities and acting with the full authority of the department when we find an infraction." huffpost July 21, 2011 And the main point of our public schools participating in 12th grade TIMSS is to assess their progress, relative to the rest of the world. And guess what, our private schools performed on parwith many Asian nations, while our public schools performed DEAD LAST in 17 of 34 TIMSS subjects. Read: they're not collectively worth a dime on the open market. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-07-06-Atlanta-schools-standardized- test-cheating_n.htm A state probe has found that teachers and principals in dozens of Atlanta public schools doctored students' test papers — the latest scandal involving the high- stakes world of standardized testing in the nation's school systems. By Bob Andres, AP Gov. Nathan Deal speaks at a news conference Tuesday to discuss the findings of the investigation of alleged cheating on test scores in the Atlanta Public School System. Enlarge By Bob Andres, AP Gov. Nathan Deal speaks at a news conference Tuesday to discuss the findings of the investigation of alleged cheating on test scores in the Atlanta Public School System. The investigation, detailed Wednesday in a report issued by Georgia Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, showed that Atlanta school administrators emphasized test results "to the exclusion of integrity and ethics." The pressure even prompted one frightened third-grade teacher to tell investigators that "there are ways that APS (Atlanta Public Schools) can get back at you" if teachers don't go along with cheating. "APS is run like the Mob," the teacher said, according to the investigation report. The results come as standardized tests generate increased scrutiny: •Baltimore Public Schools CEO Andres Alonso last week suggested that falling 2011 scores in many city schools could partially be the result of better test security. •USA TODAY last March examined standardized test scores at District of Columbia schools and found 103 public schools with high erasure rates on penciled-in answer sheets. An investigation is underway. USA TODAY also found evidence of test tampering in six states besides Georgia and Maryland, including California, Florida and Ohio. •The Dallas Morning News in 2007 found more than 50,000 cases of student cheating on high-stakes state tests, with 90% of students in some cases showing suspicious answer patterns. The Atlanta probe found a "culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation" that spread districtwide over the past decade, prompting dozens of educators to covertly give kids correct answers on standardized tests and change wrong answers once kids handed in the score sheets. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first raised suspicions about rising scores in APS schools nearly three years ago. Former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue initiated the current probe last August, finding that the district's investigation of suspicious erasures in 58 schools was "woefully inadequate." Student test results play an increasingly important role: At least 10 states require that student scores be the main criterion in teacher evaluations. Some states and districts reward educators for raising scores; a teacher may earn a bonus of as much as $25,000 in Washington, D.C., if his or her students' scores climb. Most of the 130 Detroit public schools closed since 2005 were cited for having low test scores. The Georgia report called test-tampering "an open secret." In one school, a group of teachers brought students' answer sheets to a teacher's home and held a "changing party." Other teachers changed students' answers at school after hours. The school's principal told teachers, "If anyone asks you anything about this, just tell them you don't know. You did not. Stick with it … just stick to the story and it will all go away." Atlanta school board chairwoman Brenda Muhammad told WXIA-TV in Atlanta that the district would work to get rid of educators who were found to have cheated. "We need to ensure that they're never in front of children again." Georgia state law dictates that any educator found to have tampered with student test papers could face up to 10 years in prison for falsifying public documents. Anyone who lies to state investigators faces up to five years behind bars. Local prosecutors in three jurisdictions must decide whether to bring charges. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the teachers union complained about cheating in Atlanta in 2005, but that the complaint was ignored. Weingarten said scandals like the new one in Atlanta "are a sobering reminder of the dangers of high-stakes testing. In the end, it's the kids and their parents in Atlanta who are really being cheated by being denied the kind of high-quality education they need for college, career and life." Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California-Berkeley, said the scandal is "the predictable effect of some policymakers' obsession with high-stakes testing," but added that other educators practice "an enlightened version of accountability" that doesn't put unreasonable pressure on schools. However, with budgets shrinking, he notes: "Enlightened, supportive ways of raising test scores cost more money. But threatening a principal over his or her job is a way to enforce accountability on the cheap." "John Lennon taught us that, among others." Well, that sure explains a lot. Is that why you can't do the simple math about Christian and Jewish populations after WWII? Lennon forgot to teach you about it? Wasn't he a singer? Never heard that he was a teacher. Do you also like Charlie Manson's teachings? Or John Wayne? "The WTO had this fantasy of rules against boycotting brands of tuna because of the dolphin content ("process" was never supposed to feature in trade barriers) but self organizing consumer bands are not bound by restrictions against nation-state sovereignty." Watch the communists at work here, eagerly destroying our once pristine free enterprise system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs "The notion that terms like "socialism" apply in the real world in an all-or- nothing way is a logical fallacy." How ironic that those who don't even understand Economics 101, and thus promote the Communist Manifesto in all its forms, don't even like the label "socialist", and thus make this futile attempt to redefine ALL the terms. The Equal Pay Act and affirmative action and obamacare and government control of GM are COMMUNIST programs, not free enterprise programs. You don't even seem to know enough of our history to know that it was free enterprise which gave us the once highest standard of living (and personal savings rate) the world ever knew, and communism which took it all away, plus some. You don't even need to know calculus (though it sure seems to help in places like Singapore where the personal savings rate is higher than 50%) to know that free enterprise creates personal wealth, and communism destroys it. We got here because Congress gave up control of our money system to people they haven't even met and can't even call when there's a problem, in direct contravention of the US Constitution. NOW, we are the only industrialized nation in the world with a NEGATIVE personal savings rate [read: there IS no personal wealth] because government spending is $43,000 per household [BEFORE OBAMACARE TOOK AWAY THE REST], and the average American man worker earns only $38,000. Just a few decades ago, thanks to free enterprise, we were the world's largest creditor nation. Now, thanks to communism, we now owe China $1.5 trillion, Japan $6 trillion, Saudi Arabia $1.1 trillion, and have NOTHING in the bank. The following are the OFFICIAL personal savings rates: China 51% Singapore 50% Korea 38% Japan 33% Netherlands 29% Germany 27% US -2% Which do you believe is the most desirable social construct? Who do YOU believe will win in the long run? And, yes, Paul, you don't even need to ask. There IS a direct correlation between average national IQ and personal savings rate. What Paul describes here is card carrying communism, not socialism. This is precisely the strategy which DESTROYED a once productive Russia. There is no place in our education system for communists who don't have a clue about Economics 101, and could never understand it even IF they wanted to. Paul A. Tanner III Re: The quality of public school teachers in the US Posted: Jul 18, 2011 11:26 PM - --- On Mon, 7/18/11, Haim <hpipik@netzero.com> wrote: > From: Haim <hpipik@netzero.com> > Subject: Re: The quality of public school teachers in the US > To: math-teach@mathforum.org > Date: Monday, July 18, 2011, 9:20 AM > Kirby Urner Posted: Jul 17, 2011 2:29 > PM > > >From my viewpoint, the mushy thinkers who > >blather about socialism and capitalism as if > >they know what they're talking about... > > Psychologists call this "projection", as > in projecting your own thoughts and emotions onto someone > else. Because socialism is a fuzzy idea in your head, > you imagine it is a fuzzy idea in everyone else's > head. Not so. Psychologists call this "denial", as in denying fact that is too uncomfortable to accept, like the fact that terms like socialism do not apply in an all-or-nothing way. The ultimate problem with this notion that "socialism" applies in an all-or- nothing way is that it runs into the plain fact that many times, statements and even phrases need to be quantified and many times in more than one way to avoid being meaningless via ambiguity. One of those phrases is "the means of production". It's a plain fact that there exists more than one means of production - there is always more than one entity that could produce a good or service. For instance, if there exists more than manufacturing plant, there exist two entities that can produce a good, two entities that are part of the set of "means of production". And so the term "the" in the phrase "the means of production" cannot mean that there exists only one entity that could produce a good or service. And so if this phrase "means of production" is used without being quantified, such as some claim the person x is a socialist, then what is actually being claimed? That person x believes that ALL means of production should be government-owned? What if person x believes that ONLY SOME means of production should be government-owned? If it is "only some", then is that person a socialist? If person x thinks that say, 2/3 of all means of production should be government-owned, then is person x a socialist? If person x thinks that say, only 1/3 of all means of production should be government-owned, then is person x a socialist? And so on. These questions are fundamentally significant. Why? Here are some examples why: If we see people claiming that other people are socialists, and if these claimers mean that person x is a socialist if and only if person x believes that all means of production should be government-owned, and if these claimers know that person x believes that only some means of production should be government-owned, then, by the definition of a lie, these claimers are lying when they make the claim that person x is a socialist. Even more importantly, if these claimers are lying in this way and wish to be able to continue to get away with their lying, then they will steadfastly refuse to clarify their claims by steadfastly refusing to quantify their claims with respect to "means of production". In addition, I pointed out in http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7502307&tstart=0 that Haim has confirmed to us that there exists such a thing pure socialism vs. impure socialism, and so there are degrees of socialism, and therefore degrees to which one can be a socialist. Everything I said above applies to this context as well. By the way, to address the claim that "modern Western socialists have given up on the idea (at lest for now) of actually expropriating productive assets": This is completely incorrect: Some of the richest countries in Europe, including all of the ones whose per-capita GDPs are larger than that the per-capita GDP of the US, have much of their government revenue not in the form of taxes but in the form of revenue from government ownership of some means of production. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita to see all the various countries that practice the hybrid economics of a very large amount of democratic socialism combined with capitalism that are richer than the US in terms of per-capita GDP. Going back through the Wikipedia history of this page confirms that every year, there are a number of countries - usually the same ones - that are richer than the US in terms of per-capita GDP.) The governments of socialist/capitalist countries like Norway, which is very much richer than the US on a per-capita basis, own and profit from much ownership of some means of production, where again, much of government revenues come not from taxes but from ownership of some means of production: "Economy of Norway" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Norway Quote: "The state has large ownership positions in key industrial sectors, such as the strategic petroleum sector (Statoil), hydroelectric energy production (Statkraft), aluminum production (Norsk Hydro), the largest Norwegian bank (DnB NOR) and telecommunication provider (Telenor). The government controls 31.6% of publicly-listed companies. When non-listed companies are included the state has EVEN HIGHER [my emphasis] share in ownership (mainly from direct oil license ownership)." "Is Socialist Norway A Shining Example Marx Was Right?" http://theimpudentobserver.com/world-news/is-socialist-norway-a-shining-example- marx-was-right/ Quote: "As capitalist economies collapse, as unemployment soars to new levels, there remains the case of Norway which is based on Socialist principles and had endured the crisis without encountering the problems of capitalism. Several economists are now returning to the ideas of Karl Marx in order to re-think his comments concerning the destiny of capitalism. A difficulty in discussing "Socialism" with modern people is their confusion concerning the term. Many associate "Socialism" with the USSR which used that expression or NAZI Germany which used the expression. This is akin to saying: "Christians conducted the Inquisition. Christians committed genocide in the New World, therefore, all Christians are guilty of genocide and believe in the Inquisition." There are Christians and there are Christians. Make a list of people who refer to themselves as "Christian" and have absolutely nothing in common with one another." ... Marx was NOT the initial Socialist. There were "Utopian Socialists" prior to him and he hated Utopian Socialists. ... Perhaps, it is time to study what is beneficial in Norway and apply some of those principles in order to save capitalism from its own greed. Who today can deny that Marx was right about the inherent selfishness and greed of capitalists? I have a hunch those being fired would prefer a dose of socialism that would provide them a decent unemployment package, including access to medical care." "In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism" http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism.html Quote: "Although America remains near the top of the world in terms of entrepreneurial aspirations -- that is, the percentage of people who want to start new things-in terms of actual start-up activity, our country has fallen behind not just Norway but also Canada, Denmark, and Switzerland." "Norway's Capitalist-Socialists" http://www.inc.com/max-chafkin/meet-norways-capitalist-socialists.html Quote: "It's taken as an article of faith that socialism-high taxes, government regulation, robust social safety nets-are bad for entrepreneurs and bad for economic growth. But one of the world's most entrepreneurial economies-with more entrepreneurs per capita than even the U.S.-is also heavily taxed, highly regulated, and fully welfared-up." "What Norwegian Socialism Looks Like" http://www.inc.com/max-chafkin/what-norwegian-socialism-looks-like.html Quote: "Yes, the brand of socialism in Norway is very different from that in France and Spain, but come on, let's not get carried away here. Norway has universal, socialized health care, a universal socialized pension system, and universal socialized education. There are, as commenters have pointed out, virtually no private schools or private hospitals in the entire country. If Obama proposed any one of these during his State of the Union Address, more than half of our country would be screaming the S-word and Rick Perry would be preparing articles of secession. There would be talk of how these reforms were going to destroy capitalism as we know it. Oh wait. All that stuff actually happened-in protest of a much, much weaker health care plan than the one in place in Norway." "Norway's success in socialism has me turning red with envy" http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/05/14/norways-success-in-socialism-has-me- turning-red-with-envy/ Quote: "If this were the 1950s, I'd be about to be put on every blackball list in town. Because I'm cuckoo for those Socialist cocoa puffs after reading this piece on Norway's success with the "cradle-to-grave welfare state." Bring on the 12-month paid maternity leaves, the all-access-pass to nationalized health care. Because while capitalism was showing America who's your daddy (in our country, he who has the least morals and the most hunger, laughs all the way to his weekend house in the Hamptons), Norway's socialist finance minister was smugly buying our companies' depressed stock. The country has a cushy 11% budget surplus, zero national debt, and an economy that grew 3% last year while Uncle Sam was dancing a jig into a 12.9% deficit, $11 trillion in debt, and the Recession we now all know and love. These statistics have me turning red with socialist envy. Banks make up just two percent of the economy; drug addicts are given government-funded fixes (with clean needles); tight oversight means no excessive lending practices. Having recorded comfortable amounts of income from the North Sea oil, Norway saved the money in its sovereign wealth fund; the one that was buying U.S. stock as the markets crashed last fall. The U.K. spent its oil money during the market's upswing. But are our governments feeling guilty? Nope. They should be, says Norway expert Anders Aslund, "in Norway, there is instead a sense of virtue. If you are given a lot, you have a responsibility." Hmm... "of whom much is given, of him much will be required," anyone? I guess socialism and good old-school Christianity aren't that different, after all. An economy upon whose money God's name is printed would do well to emulate the Christ-like morals of an economy where, on the 10-kroner coin, is the phrase Alt for Norge, meaning Everything for Norway. It's ironic, isn't it? That a country whose public policy loves its sinners, cares for its indigent, and does not confuse religion and patriotism should end up profiting while a country like ours crashes and burns? The Norwegians are laughing. And don't make me write, "all the way to the bank." Instead, let's take the (obviously untrue) pious statement off our money, put a noose on our banks, socialize our health care system and take care of our working poor. Those who still believe socialism is evil? Please, feel free to blackball me. I'd be happy never to work in this town again if it would mean the U.S. would finally wake up and smell the integrity it hasn't had for a century or more. Give us socialism, or else, you know." This is absolutely untrue. Not a single data point supports this assertion. ACROSS the nation, in ALL the standardized tests, third and fourth (and tenth) generation Hispanics, who consider themselves to be Hispanic whites, score only a few points higher than Mexicans, who score only a few points higher than Puerto Ricans. Here are their SAT verbal scores, for example: Puerto Rican 452 Mexican 455 Hispanic white 465 Asian 496 White 526 What this report omits is that this gap is NATIONWIDE, it exists in ALL standardized tests, it's thousands of years old, and the gap is more than a standard deviation. We've spent an EXTRA half a TRILLION dollars to try to close the gap and got not even a scintilla of evidence that it's even possible. There is no longer any need to speculate about how or why it exists, or how it might be reduced, because all the facts are already in, in spades. Here's the same gap as represented by ACT math scores: Black 15.8 Indian 17.1 Mexican 17.4 Hispanic white 17.9 White 19.5 Asian 21.3 Here's the gap in 8th grade NAEP math scores (before the gap gets much bigger between 8th and 12th grade): Black 261 Indian 266 Hispanic 266 White 293 Asian 301 wordpress July 24, 2011 at 12:17pm You are probably one of those who don't mind at all claiming that Blacks are over-represented in basketball because of their race, in the same breath you claim that race has nothing to do with IQ or income. But your post itself is proof enough that this position is WRONG. If you really are sincere, and you really did take a close look at the IQ data and test scores and annual incomes, you could not possibly believe that race has no influence UNLESS you didn't understand what you saw, or you are LYING. Considering how many Blacks who were put into positions of power and authority in our education system, only to DESTROY entire states' and cities' education systems with LYING and CHEATING, it's most likely the case that you are LYING. However, I also know that you cannot possibly understand the data, because no American Black has EVER demonstrated such a capability, EVER. You can't even understand the LANGUAGE of this nation, as evidenced by Black women scoring 380 in GRE verbal (the test people take to get into our once great universities), a score 50 points lower than if they had just GUESSED. It's REALLY disappointing, after all the great things Michelle Rhee did, even through all the acrid criticism, to see that the claims she made about the progress in DC and Baltimore schools are impossible. She either lied, was incredibly gullible, or is part of the education mafia [read: she didn't even understand her very own data Certainly getting rid of the incompetent teachers in DC (which seems from their ACT scores to be just about ALL of them) is a noble goal. They all deserved to be fired. None of them should have been hired as teachers in the first place. But not even that justifies her participation in the cover-up, or abject ignorance, or extreme naieveity, in the face of the cheating scandal in those same schools which caused her to make the utterly false and misleading proclamation on her web site: "On June 12, 2007, Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed Chancellor Rhee to lead the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), a school district serving more than 47,000 students in 123 schools. Under her leadership, the worst performing school district in the country became the only major city system to see double-digit growth in both their state reading and state math scores in seventh, eighth and tenth grades over three years." http://www.studentsfirst.org/pages/about-michelle-rhee This is an amazing aberration in the data which could be true ONLY if there's something VERY unusual going on, with cheating being the most likely (and now most obvious) option. Test scorees, IQ's, incomes, etc., just don't change this quickly, especially not in two years. We've had DECADES of tampering with these systems, with inviduous discrimination like affirmative action and the Equal Pay Act, and all during this time, almost none of this data has changed THAT much (other than the general downward trend Richard Bennett noted as a 130 point drop in SAT scores). It appears that even the "gap" [between Blacks and Whites], which decreased slightly in some years and then increased dramatically in subsequent years, was evidence that this cheating scandal is nationwide, and not limited just to local state testing. huffpost Sunday, July 17, 2011 at 10:32 AM Well, why don't you link to the only TIMSS study in which our 12th graders participated and note that the US had the LOWEST TCI (coverage index) of the 26 nations who participated. We were at 63% compared to more than 90% in most other nations, and 99% in quite a few of them. Your old wives' tale is not only stale and tiring, but extremely misleading to those who don't believe in "links". Note how much different the following ranking is from the contrived ranking above, which gives a lot of credit to states for questionable and very objective criteria which has little to do with reality: Rank State SAT Math 1 North Dakota ......... 592 2 Iowa ................. 583 3 Minnesota ............ 579 4 Wisconsin ............ 572 5 Utah ................. 563 6 South Dakota ......... 563 7 Illinois ............. 560 8 Kansas ............... 557 9 Nebraska ............. 556 10 Missouri.............. 550 11 Michigan ............. 549 12 Tennessee ............ 543 13 Mississippi .......... 540 14 Alabama .............. 538 15 Montana .............. 536 16 Oklahoma ............. 536 17 Louisiana ............ 535 18 New Mexico ........... 530 19 Wyoming .............. 525 20 Arkansas ............. 523 21 Kentucky ............. 522 22 Colorado ............. 518 23 Ohio ................. 515 24 Idaho ................ 511 25 Oregon ............... 499 26 Arizona .............. 496 27 Washington ........... 494 28 New Hampshire ........ 491 29 Alaska ............... 489 30 California ........... 485 31 West Virginia......... 484 32 Nevada ............... 483 33 Hawaii ............... 482 34 Maryland ............. 479 35 New Jersey ........... 478 36 Connecticut .......... 477 37 Massachusetts ........ 477 38 Texas ................ 474 39 New York ............. 473 40 Vermont .............. 472 41 Maine ................ 469 42 Florida .............. 469 43 Virginia ............. 468 44 Delaware ............. 468 45 Indiana............... 467 46 Rhode Island ......... 463 47 Pennsylvania ......... 461 48 North Carolina ....... 454 49 Georgia .............. 448 50 District of Columbia . 445 51 South Carolina ....... 443 Welshish, first you say: “Oh no. THIS again? You are not pretending that non-public schools are on an equal footing with each other and can be compared in that simplistic fashion are you? Your own education is now in doubt.” And now you say: “YEAH! Because nonpublic schools can remove students who do not have supportive homes, by contract. And that element is the thing that makes the most difference for student achievement. Which is one of the things that does not allow for simple comparisons. Which is exactly what I was referring to.” Do you see the contradiction here? Do you feel strongly both ways? Either nonpublic schools ARE much better schools than public schools, for the reasons you dutifully describe above, plus many other more imnportant reasons, OR my "own education is now in doubt"? WHICH is it? Patricia must sell this weekend $6,300 but negotiable 714-827-8050 Patricia or Kevin. This is a 1964 Hammett Mobile home $950 per month space rent, does have a lot for RV's 211 S. Beach Blvd, Space 60 Pacific Sunset Mobile David Renfro wrote: "Improper integrals are a common topic in calculus 2 and in high school AP-calculus (BC level), and there one sees things like the integral of 1/x^2 from x = -oo to x = +oo is finite. Indeed, the fact that the integral of 1/x^p on (-oo, oo) converges if p > 1 and diverges if p <= 1 is a standard result that is used (in these courses, and beyond) in comparison tests for convergence/divergence of improper (via an unbounded domain interval) integrals." We should also add that a Gaussian Distribution should not be expected at points on the curve where the probability of getting a correct answer by chance exceeds the actual score. For example, while Black women who plan to go to graduate school score 388 on GRE verbal, the score you would get simply by signing your name and completely randomly guessing on all of the multiple choice questions is between 450 and 475. How, then, can it be explained that someone in graduate school in this country could score LOWER than 450? And why would we expect those low scores to have the same Gaussian pattern as scores about 450? Gee whiz. So there was ALSO a very similar cheating scandal in our nation's capitol, where Blacks already score lower than Mozambique, and even Michelle Rhee covered it up? Who woulda known? It makes me wonder just how LOW Blacks can possibly score, if the scores that are reported nationally are ALL based on CHEATING teachers. Not cheating STUDENTS, but cheating TEACHERS! Atlanta's school cheating scandal: 6 takeaways The city's public schools have been rocked by revelations of dishonesty on standardized tests. What does this teach us about the education system? posted on July 14, 2011, at 6:40 PM Pressured to meet testing targets, teachers and school officials in Atlanta reportedly cheated on student achievement tests to skew scores. Photo: Simon Jarratt/CorbisSEE ALL 35 PHOTOS Does the cheating scandal at Atlanta schools prove we should ditch standardized tests? Yes. They pervert incentives, and encourage teachers to cheat. No. They're valuable tools to evaluate schools and teachers. No. But we shouldn't put so much weight on these tests. Best Opinion: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, CS Monitor, Huff. Post... Last week, a report released by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal detailed widespread cheating on standardized tests throughout the Atlanta school system. Close to 80 percent of the 56 elementary and middle school teachers examined in the report had cheated on yearly student-performance tests. The revelations have sent officials and education advocates reeling, and six senior educators have been stripped of their duties. The former superintendent, Dr. Beverly Hall, has been accused of threatening teachers' jobs if they didn't meet certain achievement standards on these tests. Here, six takeaways from the scandal: 1. We need to manage our expectations We've got to learn to "be skeptical of suddenly improving test scores," says The Spokesman-Review in an editorial. "Education improvement takes time," and "we need to have the patience to let it happen." 2. Smaller school districts could help "Would a system of smaller school districts like the one I grew up in, instead of one large one serving the Atlanta metro area, have been less likely to present the opportunity for widespread cheating on standardized tests?" asks Kris Broughton at Big Think. The Atlanta public school system is a behemoth, and studies have shown that larger schools and larger school districts impede student performance and widen the achievement gap between the affluent and the less affluent. 3. Teachers shouldn't be evaluated solely on test scores When teachers' job survival depends on student test scores, this is what happens, says Maryln Tillman, an education advocate, as quoted by The Atlanta Journal- Constitution. "Teachers, administrators, and school personnel are people, too... and people will do what they need to do to survive." 4. There's no excuse for cheating There's a simple lesson here: "Integrity matters, honesty matters," says the U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, as quoted by The Christian Science Monitor. Teachers have a duty not only to teach, but to serve as ethical models for their students. 5. We shouldn't stop testing, but we need a better system While this scandal is shocking, "we should resist efforts to halt testing altogether, or to return to a time when school failure could go largely unaddressed," says Saba Bireda at The Root. Standardized testing "can be a useful tool for teachers." It should be used to evaluate schools and teachers, but it shouldn't be the only means of judging them. We just need to shift our "myopic focus on standardized test results" to the bigger picture. 6. This is happening elsewhere, too Atlanta isn't the only school district to be rocked by a cheating scandal. Just look at Washington, D.C., says John Thompson in The Huffington Post, which sought to "contain" a cheating scandal "by looking the other way." Atlanta's not alone, and it may only be unique in that it "was forced to keep up its culture of denial over a much longer period of time" than other districts. A good place to start is Washington, DC, where, in NAEP math, the lowest scoring Blacks in the country attend some of the same schools that the highest scoring Whites in the country attend (231 vs. 303). It's also the place with the most expensive education cost per student, at $24,000, which is 4-5 times higher than Iowa or NOrth Dakota or Korea, where students score MUCH higher. Yet Blacks in Mozambique, where the cost per student is less than $40 per year, scored higher than those in DC in IAEP, a similar study to NAEP. There is an interesting trend in NAEP scores in Massachusetts, and I thank you for alerting me to it. Over the last decade, scores in Michigan, Wyoming, Arizona, Oregon, Florida, Colorado, Illinois, and Kentucky went down one or two points, and scores in Tennessee, Alaska, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Hawaii, Missouri, Nevada, and New Mexico remained flat, scores in Massachusetts INCREASED more than 2 points. Interesting, eh? NAEP Math, public vs. nonpublic scores California 263, 284 Georgia 262, 292 Iowa 284, 295 Louisiana 252, 276 Michigan 277, 287 Minnesota 284, 293 Missouri 273, 292 New Mexico 262, 282 North Dakota 284, 296 South Carolina 261, 283 Texas 270, 301 Washington 276, 299 Note that NO nonpublic schools score lower than the TOP scoring public schools. posted huff July 14, 2010 at 10:00 am What do you call it when someone knocks the South for their low scores, when the entire reason for those low scores is the high percentage of Blacks? Reverse racism? In 1959, when the US had the best education system the world had ever known, we spent $375 per student per year on average in the US, and $431 in Washington, DC. Now, Washington, DC, spends $24,500 per student (an increase of FIFTY SIX TIMES), Blacks in DC are the lowest scoring in the WORLD, not just the COUNTRY, and we just ranked dead last in 17 of 34 TIMSS subjects. To say that this additional education spending was wasted is a gross understatement. Of course you say that inflation played a major role in this, but it's also true that increasing the cost of public education from 3% to 12% of GDP also played a major role in inflation. Many other federal expenditures experienced the same kind of explosive growth. But just tackling this ONE expenditure is ALL itwould take to COMPLETELY balance the federal budget with NO other cut and no other tax increase. posted July 14, 2010 at 10:00 am "the avalanche of fact that I present in these last three posts, the first being the original post of this thread orphaned into sub-threads" The REAL problem, Paul, is that you have proven in spades that you don't, and cannot ever, understand the first thing about this avalanche, by the following comment: "Quote: 'This curve lies entirely above the horizontal axis, and that axis is an asymptote in both horizontal directions (i.e. as x grows large and positive or large and negative, the curve approaches arbitrarily close to the axis, but never reaches it).'" Those who were fortunate enough to have completed calculus, and probabilities and statistics, and the concepts of economics 101, by the tenth grade (as most students in the schools of our global economic competitors have), are able to read such biased news sources and filter out the obvious errors. It's not just Fox News which has a credibility problem--it's the entire American news media. If you REALLY want to get the REAL news, you ought to check out Pravda where Russians can critique us and themselves without all the taboos that now saddle discourse in this country. Unfortunately, you didn't ever grasp what a Gaussian Distribution is. And because you didn't, your view of Fox News can't possibly be accurate. You need some kind of a grasp of the end points. Because you don't, Fox News can't possibly make any sense to you. And certainly you can't properly critique any of the babble from the other news sources either. You will pass on whatever Beverly Hall or Thomas Sowell say because you don't have the means to see their clear and obvious errors. You have not presented a shred of solid statistical evidence that any of these recent reforms have improved ANYTHING in our education system, and the **small** "improvements" in places like Pennsylvania and Washington, DC ["the only one of 11 urban systems tested that made significant gains in math at both grade levels from 2007 to 2009"], and Atlanta, were either based on CHEATING, or on other factors. posted July 14, 2010 at 10:00 am "What's driving it? Apologists for the teachers blame the pressure to bring kids up to grade level and parents who don't help as the prime causes of these scandals. The apologists say the public has unrealistic expectations. I don't find that persuasive, even though I've taught in Philadelphia, Camden and suburban outposts and know how physically and emotionally demanding teaching can be. I've been down this road before when I took up the cause of Joe Carruth, the former principal of Brimm Medical Arts High in Camden, who was fired after he blew the whistle on a major cheating scandal in the Camden schools. As Monica Yant Kinney reported recently in the Inquirer, Carruth hasn't worked in three years and feels he has been blacklisted. He told me he even was threatened with losing the medical benefits for his very sick daughter before he came forward. It was a scene out of 'The Sopranos.'" http://articles.philly.com/2011-07-12/news/29764957_1_cheating-pssa- investigators/2 You FIRE the honest principals and teachers, PROMOTE Beverly Hall and Thomas Sowell, scratch your butt and wonder why parents object, then claim everyone who expresses an inkling of concern is a racist. Isn't that how a mafia works? Isn't this worse than the Communist Manifesto. Wouldn't it be an insult to communism to call you communists. ">I mean, if what you are going to be doing for the rest >of your life is essentially doing nothing but teaching >and interacting with small children, do you really need >to be some academic genius? No. In fact, it would be >best if you were not. Ah! So, according to you, having stupid people teach our children is part of the master plan. Paul, I am going to stop now." Every time I've made the following observation on this forum, it as been censored, as I'm sure it will now be. There are no teachers in the REST of the world (and I mean third world countries who you probably believe don't even have an education system) who don't hire teachers from the highest intellectual levels, not the lowest, as we do. The Graduate Record Exam publishes their scores for most professions, but no longer publishes them for educators. Back when they USED to publish these figures, anyone with a computer could learn that social workers score higher than our teachers and that almost no profession scores lower. ie., if it weren't for the education mafia, nobody else would hire them. It would be bad enough if these babysitters did nothing but babysit. But what they ACTUALLY do is fill school children's heads with such mush that by the 12th grade, they're worse of than they were in the 8th grade. This is not an opinion. This is not a personal problem. It IS social commentary, but it IS based on solid statistical evidence and not some fluffy wording and puffed up scores from Beverly Hall, et. al. posted July 13, 2011 at 8:00 am You can believe what liars and cheaters like Beverly Hall from the education mafia say, or you can believe solid statistical evidence from a credible, worldwide study like TIMSS. If you choose to believe Beverly Hall, none of your questions will ever be answered. If you really believe the education of our children is paramount, then you MUST answer the question of why, in 12th grade TIMSS physics, our boys scored 56 points lower than our 8th grade boys (446 vs. 502) and our girls scored 104 points lower (393 vs. 497). To put this question into perspective, 12th grade boys in Norway scored 84 points HIGHER than their 8th grade boys (589 vs. 505), which is 143 points higher than our boys and a whopping 196 points higher than our girls. Clearly Norway did something right for their high school students that we did wrong, VERY wrong. Norway is just a small example. The pattern is repeated across the globe. MUCH higher scoring Asian nations weren't even represented. Swedish 12th grade boys also scored 66 points higher than Swedish 8th grade boys (586 vs. 520). Slovenian boys 31 points higher (576 vs. 545). Russian boys 28 points higher (563 vs. 535). Boys in Cyprus 89 points higher (561 vs. 472). Danish boys scored 29 points higher (540 vs. 511). Greek boys 35 points higher (525 vs. 490). Norwegian girls scored 22 points higher (523 vs. 501). Girls in Cyprus scored 21 points higher (496 vs. 475). Girls in Greece 11 points higher (489 vs. 478). This is proof positive of a fundamental flaw in our high school education system, and it's not racist to say so because it's across ALL races--with the half of American Blacks who are still in high school being the WORST performers, even worse than Blacks in Mozambique. It's not simply that our high school students aren't being taught--the only explanation is that they are taught the WRONG thing while students in MOST other countries are being taught the RIGHT thing. How's it possible for the education mafia to teach our high school students the WRONG thing for two to five decades without a SINGLE mafia member sitting up and taking notice, and instead following Beverly Hall off the cliff? "And why do you think Poor Blacks and Poor whites drive down those scores? Hmm.." What you don't seem to realize is that there's no overlap. Whites in the poorest state, West Virginia, score 266 in NAEP math, which is 35 points higher than the richest Blacks in the world, Washington, DC, at 231. Social transfer payments from Whites to Blacks exceed one trillion dollars per year now. It's White taxpayers in states like West Virginia who pay a disproportionate share of that [read: if they weren't forced to do that, they might actually have personal savings in the bank like normal citizens in Norway or China or Japan]. Many Whites in the South are in private schools which score 20 to 30 NAEP math points higher than the public schools there. It's Blacks in the South who drive down average scores in the South. The highest scoring private schools are in Texas, which score 31 points higher than their public schools (as well as public schools in New York and Rhode Island), and 38 points higher than California's public schools. You're missing a HUGE variant in these statistics-- Massachusetts regularly has nearly every student take the SAT-- only those intending to attend colleges upper-crust colleges take the SAT in the south and midwest. Below is a link to Masachusetts ACT scores and Wisconsin's ACT scores-- notice that Mass blew Wisconsin out of the water? The same reason-- the students that wanted to go to the best schools likely took both tests. http://www.act.org/news/data/10/states.html?utm_campaign=cccr10&utm_so urce=data&utm_medium=web So what you're saying is that the reason "Mass blew Wisconsin out of the water" in ACT is that only 22% in Mass take the test, compared to 60% in Iowa (and 100% in Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Tennessee, and Wyoming)? You're right, there's an amazingly strong correlation between a state's ACT score and the percent taking the test. So strong that it's an obvious factor in the state to state differences. As has been pointed out by others on this forum, states with a high percentage of Blacks score lower overall because of the very low scores for Blacks. NAEP doesn't have the problem of different percentagesin different states taking the test And in NAEP math, Whites in Mass scored only 283, which is 20 points lower than Whites in DC. posted July 12, 2011 at 10:19 am We ought to add,dez, that the nonpublic schools [read: the religious schools] score almost a standard deviation higher than public schools in things like NAEP, ACT, SAT, etc. Do you think they achieve this by teaching evolution? Do you think public schools ought to emulate a system which costs two thirds less to educate a student and puts him a standard deviation ahead of his peers in public schools when he graduates (plus teaches most of them calculus before they finish high school)? jacobisrael, sco Once again I need to remind "repliers" to re-read my post. We must evaluate what we find so we can understand it and, with some changes, get better results. Want more information: start here... http://www.experiment-resource s.com/research-methodology.html There's absolutely not a thing that can be learned by any more research. No country has spent more for education research, spent more time and money publicizing that research, had more research results available right there at your fingertips, than we already have. And there is NOTHING that has improved about American education for more than half a century now, ever since we spent less than 3% of GDP for education back in 1959. By every measure, it's gotten MUCH worse and not another nickel spent for this grand experiment will ever produce any other result. Whites in Iowa http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Iowa_CBS_08.pdf math 612 reading 613 Writing 588 Whites in Massachusetts http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/Massachusetts_CBS_08.pdf math 537 reading 529 writing 528 Difference math 76 reading 84 writing 60 Grand total difference 220 SAT points These differences are not insignificant. They're more than .8 standard deviations satbystatecalifornia.xlsx Kinda ironic. The organization which critiques math skills of American schools can't even calculate their own average ); In 1975, California ranked 38th in SAT verbal and 35th in SAT math. For several decades, all we did was raise the cost of education, so that by 1999, California ranked 44th in SAT verbal and 29th in SAT math, and by 2001, California ranked 45th in NAEP math. Appears that we went way beyond the point of diminshing returns, eh? posted July 12, 2011 at 8:50 am huffingtonpost I've been following SAT math scores state to state for some time and was really surprised at how low the Northeastern states score relative to lots of other states. Whites in Iowa, for example, have been scoring about 100 points higher in both math and verbal than Whites in Rhode Island or New Jersey for several decades now. The argument that it's related to the number or percentage of students taking the test (and thus is not a fair representation of all students in each state) is only partially true, as the correlation is only about 0.2. posted July 9, 2011 at 4:50 pm huffingtonpost Casey shouldn't have lied, especially to the police. But we did a poll lately, and 80% of the WOMEN claimed that most American women would tell a lie bad enough to FALSELY imprison an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. If we locked them all up, there wouldn't be anyone around to bear babies. But at least our roads would be much safer ); http://ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=8432 Syracuse newspaper Sexist? So you think it's sexist to cite a study which accurately informs you that women drivers are more dangerous SOBER, than men drivers who drink 7 drinks? Did you think it was sexist the last time you heard the news report (inaccurately, of course) that women drivers are SAFER than men drivers? Of course not. This has nothing to do with being sexist and everything to do with responsible citizenship. posted July 11, 2011 11:11 am "Do you know what SCRIPTURE commands of us for punishment of those who bear false witness (EVERY last one of them)? Do you know what Verse that is? Do you want me to post it for you?" So I'll answer my own question: Daniel 13:62, And according to the law of Moses they did unto them in such sort as they maliciously intended to do to their neighbour: and they put them to death. Thus the innocent blood was saved the same day. posted July 11, 2011 11:11 am "My point was lets keep the dark side of history in sharp focus. There's a balance between lore / history / story and technical content / skills that's a variable. The current math track is too slanted towards analog topics to allow any room for SQL." We don't need SQL or digital data to count populations accurately. We've been doing this accurately for 5,000 years, ever since David numbered the House of ISRAEL. The very dark side which you need to keep focused right now is not how many Jews died in the holocaust, but how many CHRISTIANS did. The track record so far of SQL and digital data proves that analog methods work just as well, if not better. After all, there are some countries where computer use REDUCES PISA math scores (and this occurs mostly in those countries which score more than a standard deviation higher than us). Computers in this country can and do reduce the ability of many of our students to actually learn math. posted July 11, 2011 4:11 am >1. An "Education Mafia" is behind everything you dislike >about public education. > >2. Socialists are behind everything else you dislike. What Haim presents is not simply a personal opinion, it's social commentary. Trying to reduce it to a personal complaint is futile, not to mention disingenuous, not to mention proof positive of the existence of (and tactics of) the education mafia. It's you who attempts to equate it to socialism, but that's an insult to socialism, because this is straight out of the Communist Manifesto. The two billion Christians of the world and the 95.5% of Americans who CLAIM to be Christians, are COMMANDED to reje thct it: "Now we command you, brethren, on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us", 2 Thessalonians 3:6 It's a colossal failure, of such proportions that it's almost impossible for most Americans to grasp the magnitude of it. At least you have Beverly Hall as your mentor and hero: and this name will go down in history as the one who finally opened our eyes. posted July 10, 2011 at 12:40 pm Kirby replies: "You're not the only one making points." . It was YOUR point which I was addressing, and now it's YOUR point which you want to dismiss now that you have all the facts before your feet: "Another way to deny the holocaust is to simply not investigate it. We encourage the opposite approach, with plenty of attention to holocaust denying curricula, as more grist for the mill." Should widely published, widely accepted World Alamancs and Books of Facts be grist for the mill? Of course. Did you ever LOOK in one to see what they say, rather than simply passing on some old wives' tales tossed at you in our public education system? Of course not. I didn't publish these statistical facts. I merely quoted them as grist for the mill so that you won't "simply not investigate it". Did you investigate it? Did I quote them properly? Then is it true that the REAL holocaust was 266 million dead or missing Christians and not some putative 6 million dead or missing Jews? posted July 10 at 9:39 am We have 70% of the world's supply of lawyers, and Stephen McGee estimates that each new lawyer reduces GDP by $250,000. The president of Korea just outlawed law schools there, saying "we need more engineers". Who do you think is winning? Seen the thin screen 61" Samsung tv lately? Think a lawyer can do that? posted July 10 at 9:39 ""I'm not here to defend Dr. Hall, and I'm not here to smear her," said Franklin [former mayor of Atlanta], during an interview Saturday. "I'm here to say this is where we are now. We need to take this opportunity and move forward with it."" "Franklin said she has not yet read the 800-page report and doesn't plan to do so." Yeah, right, Franklin. We're gonna "move forward" just like former weaner Wiener wanted us to all "move forward". Do you both get these silly phrases out of the same Crackerjack box? AFTER you've finished ALL 800 pages of this report as it's your JOB to do--only then can you whine about "move forward". posted July 10 at 9:39 am The other tactic used by the education mafia is to CENSOR any fact, even those reported by the NCES itself, which disputes their fairy land opinions of their great contributions to society. It's total flull. They resort to CENSORSHIP of precisely the free political free speech our Founding Fathers spilt BLOOD to protect. They keep their hand out and beg for even more blood from a turnip that can't be squeezed any more, to try to keep the pretense that the dead corpses of the NSF and US Dept. of Education are still alive. Then they wonder why they get fired, just as all the communist teachers in Korea just got fired. posted July 9, 2011 at 4:35 pm It is claimed that Washington, DC, is the only one of 11 urban school districts to show improvement in NAEP test scores: "The National Assessment of Educational Progress, given to fourth- and eighth-graders every two years, showed that the D.C. public school system was the only one of 11 urban systems tested that made significant gains in math at both grade levels from 2007 to 2009". What exactly were those gains, where did they come from, and are our current crop of educators capable of even understanding what this statement means? How could it possibly be that "The fourth-grade score rose from 203 in 2003 to 217 in 2009. The eighth-grade score, 256, was up from 250 in 2005" in a "state" where, for every dime we increase the cost of education, the Black/White race gap jumps up another notch? Just a SMALL increase in the percent of Whites taking NAEP in a "state" where the percent of Blacks dropped from 82% to less than 50% over the last two decades, would cause a MUCH larger increase in these scores than that. So the ENTIRE reason for this increase might not be related at all to Michelle Rhee's excellent efforts, or any other type of improvement in anything in our nation's capitol. BUT, while this gap is reported for all other states, and for most years in DC prior to this, it suddenly goes missing, at precisely when all eyes are on the ball. So now we must do some rational deduction by observing where the gap WOULD have gone had the increase just continued as normal. While they tout that the NAEP score of Blacks in DC increased from 231 in 2000 to 245 in 2007, they DO show that the gap between Whites and Blacks also increased, from 69 in 2000 to 76 in 2005 (with no scores for Whites shown in 2007). Simply a straight line continuation of that gap to 2009 would have left it at 81.6. There are several explanations, other than any effect Rhee's reforms (or attempts at reforms) might have had, for DC being the "only one of 11 urban systems" to show any kind of improvement: The percent of Black students decreased from 88.2% to 80.3% and the Gap remained constant: Black = 241 White = 317 X = percent White (1 - X ) = percent Black 241 x (1 - X) + 317X = 250 241 -241X + 317X = 250 76X = 9 X = 11.8% = percent of White 8th graders in 2005 1 - X = 88.2% = percent of Black 8th graders in 2005 241 x (1 - X) + 317X = 256 241 -241X + 317X = 256 76X = 15 X = 19.7% = percent of White 8th graders in 2007 1 - X = 80.3% = percent of Black 8th graders in 2007 Gap increased from 76 to 81 in 2007 and the percent of Black students decreased from 88.2% to 75.3% 241 x (1 - X) + 317X = 250 241 -241X + 317X = 250 76X = 9 X = 11.8% = percent of White 8th graders in 2005 1 - X = 88.2% = percent of Black 8th graders in 2005 236 x (1 - X) + 317X = 256 236 -236X + 317X = 256 81X = 20 X = 24.7% = percent of White 8th graders in 2007 1 - X = 75.3% = percent of Black 8th graders in 2007 Does NCES have the ACTUAL scores for Blacks and Whites in DC? Of course they do. But if they reported them honestly, then the story of their grand successes would have been "The National Assessment of Educational Progress, given to fourth- and eighth-graders every two years, showed that the D.C. public school system was [] one of 11 urban systems tested that made [NO] significant gains in math at both grade levels from 2007 to 2009". This would have been more honest, right? But the LAST thing you should expect is for educators like Beverly Hall to be honest about something. posted JUly 8, 2011 at 12:30 pm "Anna, we have already considered them, and we have come to conclusions." Yes, and now we know why educators like Paul have come to so many *wrong* conclusions--they BELIEVE the LIES. No, they LOVE the LIES. ALL of the credible data indicates that grade inflation and cheating by TEACHERS (not students) is what empowers Blacks like Thomas Sowell to make their outlandish assertions--not the least of which is "correlation does not prove causation". The correlation between IQ and test scores is just as strong as the correlation between IQ and crime, IQ and incomes (or IQ and SES). posted JUly 8, 2011 at 12:30 pm "I would expect approximately all of the 85,000,000 of people born before 1900, age 40+ during WW2, to be dead by now, from various causes, including WW2 itself." That's not the point. That completely misses the point, which you probably already know. In 1948, there were 266 million FEWER Christians than there would have been without WWII, and half a million MORE Jews. Even by 1960, there were still fewer Protestants in the world than there were in 1935, while there were TWICE as many Jews in the world in 1992 (which ignores the following evidence that Jews have a BIG problem with keepking track of their population): "The study's credibility became an issue last October after part of its findings on population was released and then withdrawn because some field data were not factored into the 5.2-million population estimate. At the same time, another study by a San Francisco-based group — using a broader definition of who was Jewish — placed the population at 6.7 million. But after reevaluating its methodology and findings, UJC said Wednesday that it stood by the 5.2-million figure." July 8, 2011 AT 2:00 pm It would appear that the only math expert on this putative math forum needs to resort to the grossly misleading and biased Wikipedia website in order to try to grasp what's wrong with his following quote: "Quote: 'This curve lies entirely above the horizontal axis, and that axis is an asymptote in both horizontal directions (i.e. as x grows large and positive or large and negative, the curve approaches arbitrarily close to the axis, but never reaches it).'" Wikipedia is not going to correct your problem with "After more than fifty years of foolery, that the Education Mafia is still in charge of our public schools means we must seriously consider the possibility that Americans are too stupid to survive as a nation. If the U.S. Dept. of Education is not closed down within six months of the 2012 elections, that question will then be settled." Such a statement must always be accompanied with a vivid description of just how far down the education mafia has driven American kids. I like the following, even though every time I post it, the education mafia censors it: "The last time our 12th graders participated in TIMSS was 1995, and at that time, Table 5.2 of the final report had "Mean achievement of the top 10% of students (above 9th percentile)" with the following figures: France 612 Switzerland 573 Canada 567 Sweden 564 Germany 550 Greece 513 Czech REpublic 485 Australia 589 Austria 537 Italy 520 Denmark 582 Slovenia 629 US 485 This is not the top 5%, and it's only 13 and not 25 countries, but it's clear that many neighboring European and Asian countries could have participated since then and their 90th percentile would have scored MUCH higher than us." posted JUly 6, 2011 at 12:30 pm Just in case you think you understand Muslims, especially Muslims like Kadaffi, take a look at the following Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXLQAUUpJwU&feature=player_embedded posted JUly 6, 2011 at 12:30 pm "I don't know where they got the statistic that the top 5% of US statistics are 25th in the list of the top 5% of other countries. Something I can check I guess." While I've received an email copy of my reply, it appears that it didn't post on the forum, so this clarification might not make sense without seeing the other part of the post. We should note that the 127 point gap between the top 10% in France and our top 10% (612 vs. 485) is at least one standard deviation, and perhaps as much as two standard deviations. Now that our resident math expert has proven that he has no concept of what that even means, I wonder if there's anyone on this putative math forum who does. So let me break it down for you. IF this gap between us and France IS two standard deviations, then NONE of our top 10% score as high as the AVERAGE top ten percent of France. And France is not exactly known as a high tech country (and in fact is technologically backwards compared to MANY other more techologically advanced nations). Unionized public school teachers in this country are very powerful. And that's exactly why our 12th graders actually score ONE STANDARD DEVIATION LOWER than our 8th graders and our TOP TEN PERCENT don't even match the AVERAGE in France. posted JUly 6, 2011 at 9:00 AM While I'm not going to fall for your race baiting, gs, I will reply to the following (you can get the answers to your other questions directly from the Torah [read: God's Law], the Holy Bible, Shinto [read: God's Law], the holy Koran [also known as God's Law], and even Buddhism and Hinduism [which almost a third of the world follows]): "How come the USA, the land of hope and glory, is one of repressive, feudal Saudi Arabia's strongest supporters in international fora? I observe that this departure from virtue on the part of the USA cannot be blamed on President Barack Obama, despite him having once observed 'We're buying shrimp, guys!' which you made your calling card for quite a while. (I am fully aware that India, of which I am a citizen, also has close ties with Saudi Arabia despite its record). Could it possibly be the 'Education Mafia' that is responsible for this deplorable lack of virtuous behavior on the part of the US?" Following is my personal opinion. If it doesn't align with your opinion of what's a "deplorable lack of virtuous behavior", so be it. It would appear that what you believe is "virtuous behavior" is the exact OPPOSITE of what every major world religion HAS THE INFINITE RIGHT and God given right to practice. We cannot ever alter that, not even with a Constitutional amendment, because it's given straight from God Himself. On top of that, I know from 13 months in a Muslim nation, and from still knowing many Muslims, that what the newsmedia tells you about them, and reality, are also exact OPPOSITES. It probably disgusted you to the hilt to hear the President of Iran say that Iran doesn't have any homosexuals. You may have presumed that this is because they actually PUNISH that behavior the way God COMMANDS HIM to (not to mention COMMANDS us to), and you would have been right. Which people do you thing are the safest, the sanest, the most righteous, the most religious, AND the most prosperous: A) Subjects of Saudi Arabia? B) Residents of Washington, DC, Detroit, New Orleans, or Gary Indiana who are FOUR HUNDRED TIMES AS LIKELY to be murdered (and who had ONE FOURTH the Gross national income per capita in 2010 per the Atlas method and PPP), as the above subjects? Do you think our education mafia will ever mention THAT? Of course not. Instead, they will forever condemn an independent, RIGHTEOUS nation for OBEYING God. While I detest all this focus on Casey Anthony, there's a silver lining to this cloud on our godless nation. ALL of the talking heads, and ALL of the whining feminazis, and probably ALL of our education mafia, great white leaders in DC, and perhaps our entire "justice" system, were totally and completely discredited by a simple jury who found only one thing to be true: according to SCRIPTURE, Casey was innocent of ALL charges from the beginning, and thus should never have been put in the position of having to bear false witness against herself. Let me put this a different way. If WE had followed God's Law in this case the way MOST *OTHER* nations do, including Saudi Arabia, there would have been no screeching feminazis calling for her blood and forcing her to bear false witness aginst herself. Do you know what SCRIPTURE commands of us for punishment of those who bear false witness (EVERY last one of them)? Do you know what Verse that is? Do you want me to post it for you? posted July 5, 2011 at 5:30 PM "I don't know where they got the statistic that the top 5% of US statistics are 25th in the list of the top 5% of other countries. Something I can check I guess." The last time our 12th graders participated in TIMSS was 1995, and at that time, Table 5.2 of the final report had "Mean achievement of the top 10% of students (above 9th percentile)" with the following figures: France 612 Switzerland 573 Canada 567 Sweden 564 Germany 550 Greece 513 Czech REpublic 485 Australia 589 Austria 537 Italy 520 Denmark 582 Slovenia 629 US 485 This is not the top 5%, and it's only 13 and not 25 countries, but it's clear that many neighboring European and Asian countries could have participated since then and their 90th percentile would have scored MUCH higher than us. HOWEVER, we have not participated in any international tests of 12th graders since then, so we don't have a precise figure. As it now appears that all the hoopla about our stricter standards having improved the education of even one American student is nothing but hot air, my bet is that ifwe HAD participated lately, our 9th percentile would have scored about 450. Dismal, eh? But never forget--the White Black gap MIGHT decrease sometime in the next three millennia, so it will all have been worth it. posted July 5, 2011 at 5:30 PM "Aren't Christians a subtype of Jewish with a chief rabbi named Jesus? That's not how it's taught in current anthropology, or maybe it is, I should check Wikipedia." Well, Wikipedia's certainly the right place to go if you want to continue to believe such nonsense. But if you want to discover the TRUTH for a change, refer to the Holy Bible, which gives a detailed genealogy of the House of Israel, who Jesus was from, and the house of Esau, who the Jews are from. The following two verses pretty much sum up Jesus' Message: Was not Esau Jacob's brother? says the LORD: yet I loved Jacob, but hated Esau; I made his mountains a waste, his heritage a desert for jackals, Malachai 1:3 As it is written: "I loved Jacob but hated Esau," Romans 9:13 not posted In SAT math in 2008, Hispanics in Iowa scored 51 points higher than Whites in New York (584 vs. 533). While Blacks in Iowa scored 99 points lower than Whites in Iowa (514 VS. 613), and Blacks in New York scored 106 points lower than Whites in New York (427 vs. 533), we must note that Blacks in Iowa scored only 19 points lower than Whites in New York (514 vs. 533). July 4, 2011 at 10:00 am For the record, don't look in the dictionaries or Wikipedia for the definition of usury (unless you look at one in a library in Japan or Saudi Arabia), because they are completely contradictory to the definition in Scripture. Usury is not a certain percentage rate which can't be exceeded--it means to charge interest at ANY rate, even 0.1%. Thanks for the compliment, and the promotion of this web site, gs. Unfortunately, most of my replies to you have been censored so far, just as this one most likely will be. So you probably think my lack of a reply is proof that you "won" this debate. Let's see if this simple quote from a fellow academic, Professor Lynn, will make it past the censors: "Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill's Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle's three-volume MĂ©moires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war." Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus, University of Ulster, December 5, 2005 Interesting, no? Eisenhower was RIGHT THERE on the front line, read ALL the important communications, yet never heard a hint about any holocaust of Jews? btw, it was HE who coined the phrase, and when he did that, he was referring to the holocaust of 266 million CHRISTIANS, not any putative 6 million Jews. "Remember it's possible to jump back an forth between religions in a single lifetime. I hope your statisticians understand that." Er, no wonder you didn't want to do the math. So let me see if I can understand your point. Are you saying that you believe there were 14 million Jews in the world just before WWII, that 6 million were killed, leaving only 8 million in 1949, but that 7,688,000 Christians converted to Judaism, which is WHY there were still 1,688,000 MORE Jews after WWII, AND why there were 85 million FEWER Christians? Do you see any problems with this theory, like what happened to the other 77,312,000 Christians? 85,000,000 fewer Christians - 7,688,000 Christians converted to Judaism = 77,312,000 Total number of still missing Christians Also, this doens't even consider that, if you look at the prior growth pattern of Christians up to 1936, and had that continued, and had it not been for WWII, there would have been 266 million MORE Christians in the world in 1948 than there actually were. How many of those do you believe converted to Judaism? Where's your reference which proves even ONE Christian converted? What could possibly cause so many Christians to do that? "Although Bruce-Monroe staff members say the Singapore system has generated enthusiasm among students, those heightened spirits aren’t yet reflected in the data. Standardized test scores are lower than they were before the new curriculum was adopted. On the 2009 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, the first citywide test after the changeover, pass rates remained virtually unchanged, with 49 percent of students achieving proficiency. Last year, the pass rate at the school plunged to 23 percent. That decline was steeper than a citywide drop. " Another point about our dismally low TIMSS scores, all the way from 4th to 8th to 12th grade, is that our very low participation rate (see Exhibit 9.14, pg. 221, TIMSS 2003 Technical Report) of only 73% means that more than one quarter (and probably the lowest scoring quarter) aren't even represented in these scores. Only about half of all American Blacks graduate from high school: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo_t3.htm If they aren't in school, then they can't take TIMSS. If they HAD been represented, how much lower would our dismal score of 504 (101 points lower than Singapore, 85 points lower than Korea) have been? IF those who did not participate ARE the lowest scoring students, and IF they would have scord in the range of Ghana (at 275), THEN we would have scored only 442, even lower by 62 points than our already low score (163 points lower than Singapore and 147 points lower than Korea). Few other countries who took TIMSS had such a low participation rate, and most industrialized nations (or our "global economic competitors") had rates in excess of 97% (Taipei, Iran, Korea, Singapore, Spain (Basque), Malaysia, and even Palestine). The so-called best schools in our grand experimental stew called Washington, DC, where the most coddled but lowest scoring Blacks in the world in NAEP live (in the SAME city where the highest scoring Whites live), the lowest scoring aren't even included because 45% of them dropped out and aren't even in school. So when we say that students in Singapore and Korea score 163 and 147 points higher than us, we're comparing ninety nine percent of their students to the TOP 73% of ours, EXCEPT that the lowest scoring Blacks in cities like DC where almost half of the student-age Blacks aren't even in school, aren't even included. "The grand total of DC public school funding for 2007-08 is thus $1.216 billion. Divide that by the OSSE’s official enrollment figure of 49,422 students, and you arrive at an estimated total per pupil spending figure of $24,606." http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-real-cost-of-public-schools/ Nationally, 20.2% of our population are of school age, 80% of them (and 16.2% of the population), are in public primary and secondary schools. But in DC, only 8.2% are in public schools, so the other 8% or 48,320 school age children are either in private schools--or not in school at all. If Blacks of school age in DC who dropped out before they were counted in the statistics WERE to be included, just how LOW could DC have scored then? We don't even know HALF of the problem with Black students in DC because they're not even on the radar. The other half who are on the radar have the highest paid teachers in human memory (more than four times higher than much higher scoring students in North Dakota and Korea), but still score DEAD LAST in NAEP AT THE 8TH GRADE LEVEL. And it's between 8th and 12th grade that students in HOng Kong and Singapore and Korea even BEGIN their very aggressive learning techniques. All this article proves is that not even teachers in our nation's capitol know the first thing about what that entails. posted July 1, 2011 at 10:30 AM "It's not clear what your point is, so why don't you try to clear it up by telling us why you decided not to do this simple math (either subtraction and addition, or a little work with a calculator)?" So I'll do my OWN math. According to worldwide, credible, widely published (and I mean WIDELY, because you'll find the exact same statistics in Chinese and Russian libraries), credible, and plausible sources, after WWII, there were: 85 MILLION fewer Christians. REposted July 2, 2011 at 8:00 am posted July 1, 2011 at 9:30 AM Our resident math expert, in a frantic (but futile) attempt to suddenly learn Gaussian Distribution, now resorts to Wikipedia, an extremely biased and misleading source which a 21 year old college student with reasonable (by US standards) math skills, to be run, controlled and edited by government patsies, to try to understand why the following quote is irrelevant and silly: "Quote: "This curve lies entirely above the horizontal axis, and that axis is an asymptote in both horizontal directions (i.e. as x grows large and positive or large and negative, the curve approaches arbitrarily close to the axis, but never reaches it)."" Now makes the following observation, proving he is so far off course that not even GPS can get him back on course: "Note that the domain of this continuous function called the normal or Gaussian distribution is from negative infinity to positive infinity, and the range is always greater than 0, f(x) > 0 everywhere, meaning that the curve never touches the horizontal or x-axis. " Again, yes, it IS true that THEORETICALLY this line never touches the axis. But, again, it's meaningless when the value of that line goes below one student, because there are no half students or one tenth student, so any value below 1 is equivalent to ZERO. AGAIN, as an example, consider how many different times various countries of Africa have taken TIMSS math and scored even lower than most Americans would score if they just guessed. Two recent examples are Blacks in Botswana who scored 352 (SD 65), and Ghana who scored 275 (SD 91), versus Singapore at 605 (SD 81) and Korea at 589 (SD 84). Of the 4,790 Black students in Botswana who took this test, 7 of them scored over 412 (3 standard deviations higher than their mean), and 0.15 of them scored over 482 (4 standard deviations higher than their mean). There are no 0.15 students, so somewhere between 412 and 482, the actual number of students scoring that high becomes less than one, which means ZERO EVEN THOUGH IT IS CORRECT THAT THIS CURVE NEVER TOUCHES THE AXIS. Ditto for the 5,100 students in Ghana, where 7 students scored higher than 412 (3 standard deviations higher than their mean), and 0.16 students scored higher than 457 (4 standard deviations higher than their mean). So between 412 and 457, the number of students who score higher becomes zero (to be precise, it becomes zero at 449). CONVERSELY, of the 6,018 students in Singapore who took the test, the number of students who score LOWER than 484 (3 standard deviations LOWER than their mean) is 8, and the number who score lower than 443 (4 standard deviations LOWER than their mean) is 0.19. Another way to put this is that [EVEN THOUGH NONE OF THESE CURVES EVER TOUCH THE AXIS] there are no students in Singapore who score lower than the highest scoring Black students in Ghana and Botswana, and there are no Black students in Ghana and Botswana who score higher than the lowest scoring students in Singapore. This is a classic case of "no overlap", something that doesn't occur that often with Gaussian Distributions, particularly when they represent test scores. Do you know what your resident math expert here had to say about Gaussian Distributions (bell curves), gs? "Quote: "This curve lies entirely above the horizontal axis, and that axis is an asymptote in both horizontal directions (i.e. as x grows large and positive or large and negative, the curve approaches arbitrarily close to the axis, but never reaches it)."" Do you know what he's trying to say here? Do you realize that this proves this putative math expert knows utterly nothing about bell curves, much less standard deviations, much less probabilities and statistics? Do you think any further reply to a "math" forum from someone with demonstrably nonexistent math skills can be constructive? Not only that, but rather than focusing only on the math part of this "math" forum, your resident math expert spent more time bringing up all kinds of irrelevant topics (which he also knew nothing about) than he did trying to learn what his error is. Re: Korea: Test Focus Hurts Love of Learning Posted: Jun 29, 2011 4:31 PM Plain Text Reply Paul: I applaud your decision to walk away from the further effusions of <jk@isrealiteknight.com> - that is the only sensible thing to do. However, I believe that the reasoning at your post at http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7488462&tstart=0 may not have much effect on Mr Knight - and my belief is apparently correct as he has since come out with a sizable number of further effusions. GSC Message was edited by: GS Chandy Not too long ago, we were one of the five creditor nations in the world. Today, we are the largest debtor nation the world has ever known, and guess who's one of our most important lenders? Saudi Arabia, who OFFICIALLY has loaned us more than two trillion dollars. Our situation is so precarious that just one creditor nation like Saudi Arabia could pull that financial support right out from under our three legged stool and cause our instant collapse. Though it most likely will happen anyway at the rate things are going. How did Saudi Arabia (and most other Muslim nations) get so financially sound while we took the lead sled to .ell? For one thing, they follow the "Do Rah", or Torah in English, which means God's Law, just as WE used to when our fragile nation was founded. And what's the KEY part of God's Law? Do not charge usury to your own. What do Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the Republic of Ireland, and North Dakota all have in common? Among other things, they have equally low crime rates, with their murder rates sometimes lower than 0.2 murders per 100,000 people, while our nation's capitol, Washington, DC, has over the last four decades (along with Detroit, New Orleans, and lil' ole' Gary, Indiana) had murder rates FOUR HUNDRED TIMES HIGHER (400X). Just before Katrina, the rate in New Orleans was 92 per 100,000, or FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY TIMES HIGHER. Rather than slamming independent foreign countries (particularly our biggest creditors) just because they follow God's Law, we really ought to take the log out of our own eye. The vast majority of Americans know (or at least sense) that we are on the wrong path, though our educators are still rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 16,513 of the creme de la creme of American black women, after a multi-TRILLION dollar investment in educating blacks, took the Graduate Record Exam and proved once and for all that: 1.American Blacks are even more worse off than they were before all this phony compassion was laid on them. 2.The multi-trillion dollar investment in their education was a multi-trillion dollar loss. 3.Rather than improving education for anyone, it destroyed educational opportunities for everyone, but particularly Whites. 4.Rather than improving lives of blacks, it contributed to the almost complete destruction of black families. BASE GRE Score is 450 I know, I know--a standardized verbal and quantitative test is not an iq test. I know that you get 200 points just for signing your name, so the test is already skewed right off the bat. I know that there are many noise level questions which even kindergartners can answer, which adds another 100 points. I know that many of the questions are multiple choice which means that a person who knows utterly nothing about the subject could get as many as 150 points just by guessing. So I DO recognize that a score of 450 is what a person who knows how to take tests, but knows NOTHING about the subject of the test, might "achieve". But black women scored lower than this on GRE Verbal, at 404. And black women scored lower than this on GRE Analytical, at 421. And black women scored MUCH lower than this on GRE quantitative, at 388. AH, but, you say, there are SOME black geniuses. After all, George Washington Carver only a century ago got four patents for peanut butter, and look at Condoleza Rice and Colin Powell and Obama. They're geniuses. Maybe so. Maybe they didn't take GRE. Maybe black geniuses are so smart they manage to get into graduate school without even bothering with the Graduate Record Exam [or affirmative action mandated they not be required to take it] just like affirmative action permitted them to be admitted to undergraduate schools as MILLIONS of much more qualified White and Asian students were DENIED admission. The creme de la creme of of blackhood, 16,513 black women, did so well in undergraduate school that they were permitted to take the GRE. But NOT A ONE of them scored 800 on EITHER of these three parts of the GRE! Does this make them geniuses? Not exactly. NONE of them scored higher than 570 in GRE Verbal, NONE of them scored higher than 620 in GRE Quantitative, and NONE of them scored higher than 640 on GRE Analytical. With NONE of them scoring 800 on ANY of these three portions of the test, NONE of these 16,513 black women could possibly be considered to be geniuses, could they? So the crowning achievement of our multi-trillion dollar experiment to educate blacks, of the creme de la creme of 16,513 black women, NONE scored over 620 on GRE Quantitative while half of the Asian men scored higher than 671, NONE scored over 570 on GRE Verbal, and 84% of them scored LOWER than the AVERAGE Mexican male in GRE Analytical (who scored 514). Is it still possible that there black geniuses hidden in this number, enough blacks to fill up the average US town? Is there a pony in all this bs? No. Who Scored 800 on GRE Quantitative? 1.1,160 White Protestant men. 2.121 Asian men. 3.2 Mexican man. 4.NO White Catholic men. Would it be fair to say that a "genius" might be one of the above 1,283 students who scored 800 on the quantitative portion of the test? Sure. Either way you define it, how many of the above geniuses were blacks? NONE. Let's not kid ourselves. According to the world's BEST standards of measurement, even with all the fudging and fiddling and dumbing down of our students and mind-numbing expenditures, even after REJECTING MILLIONS of the most qualified White and Asian students from our once-fine universities, ALL of these tests have proven time and time again, for decades now, that NO American black woman came even CLOSE to being classified as even LITERATE, much less as a "genius". If there's even one black woman who scored higher than all the rest of the blacks who took GRE in all three sections, the real creme de la creme of American blackhood, her quantitative skills are lower than the AVERAGE Asian man, her verbal skills are lower than the AVERAGE White man, and her analytical skills are only slightly higher than your Mexican gardener, hardly a candidate for a Ph.D, an M.D.--nor even gardnerhood. This makes the optimistic presumption that black scores follow a regular Gaussian Distribution. It accepts carte blanche, without question, the relatively large standard deviation for blacks reported by the College Board. It ignores that some state laws require a person to be counted as black if 1/64th of their genealogy is black. It doesn't compensate for the number of blacks admitted through the now illegal affirmative action programs which permitted Whites to be admitted because they posed as blacks. It doesn't consider the academic theory that the reason American blacks have higher IQs than African blacks is their higher proportion of Caucasoid genes, perhaps as much as 25%. If this theory is correct, then the 26 who scored higher than 520 in GRE Verbal, the 26 who scored higher than 560 in GRE Quantitative, and the 27 who scored higher than 585 on GRE Analytical, would not be black at all (at least according to their own brethren) because they would be mostly Caucasoid. REposted July 1, 2011 at 9:30 AM CENSORED AS OF JUNE 30, 2011 AT 10:31 AM Isn't that swell, gs? I'm sure the world (or at least our "global economic competitors") will be delighted to hear that you actually began to pay attention to SOME shred of the truth [read: you "have by now read all of <jk@isrealiteknight.com>'s contributions"], rather than all the bs LIES you educators have been fed, and have been promoting. Here's a simple test for you, gs, before you actually begin to ignore something [else]. http://fathersmanifesto.net/timssl10.htm This is one of the many math problems where American students (ONE THIRD OF THEM) scored lower than if they'd just GUESSED at ramdom. It's a phenomena that no other country exhibited. Almost half of the GIRLS in Australia got it right, but only 15% of American girls did (on a FIVE CHOICE multiple choice question): L.10. A warning system installation consistsof two independent alarms having probabilities of operating in an emergency of 0.95 and 0.90 respectively. Find the probability that at least one alarm operates in an emergency". Do you think that ANYBODY on this "math" forum can actually SOLVE this probability problem? I bet: NO! INSTEAD,the pat response will be "correlation doesn't prove causation", or some other silly wives' tale. 356 to 593 = 237 sd is actually 30 gap is actually seven standard deviations "Hey guy, as I was saying, I'm all for running such queries, but I'd like the tabulations to be electronic, such that our math topic, SQL, might be relevant, and yes, I'm aware of the noSQL offerings and their possible 'scrap book' significance." For your digital record, this is what the Friday, March 24, 1933 edition of the Daily Express, which bills itself as the worldwide watchdog for Jews (and thus ought to have a handle on how many Jews there are inthe world) says about the number of Jews in the world (14millioon) and the number of Jews in Germany (600,000): "Fourteen million Jews dispersed throughout the world have banded together as one man to declare war on the German persecuters of their religionists. Sectional differences and antagonisms have been submerged in one common aim--to stand by the *600,000* Jews in Germany who are terrorized by Hitlerist anti-semitism [sic], and to end its campaign of violence and suppression directed against its Jewish minority." It's not clear what your point is, so why don't you try to clear it up by telling us why you decided not to do this simple math (either subtraction and addition, or a little work with a calculator)? not posted Then let me add the following observation. While in Latvia, with a Jewish friend, we decided to visit Rumbula Forest, as the president of Latvia had just publicly apologized on the radio to the Jews for the 200,000 Jews who were allegedly killed there. We got there and found not a single mention that any of the people who were killed there (by the Nazis, not by Latvians) were Jews. Being Jewish, he speculated that Hitler shipped 200,000 Jews to Latvia so they could be killed there. There WAS a plaque which simply said "Koln" with no explanation for what that meant. The irony is that we had just come from Koln (Cologne, Germany) which is now a bustling, beautiful German city of 1.2 million, but which had been completely leveled by our bombers in WWII (with only the Dome standing, which took 25 years to repair). I asked my Jewish friend why Hitler would ship 200,000 Jews all the way to Latvia just so they could be killed, and besides that, where are the bones, not to mention the bullet holes. We also just happened to visit a village in France where the Nazis killed 79 villagers and left behing an immense amount of forensic evidence, notthe least of which is bullet holes everywhere, including in the trees. Yet there was not a SINGLE bullet hole in a SINGLE tree in this densely forested area where you could not possibly miss a tree if you just randomly fired one shot, much less 200,000. Another question: why didn't Hitler just leave the Jews in Koln so they could be killed along with the 1-4 million Christians who were killed there, without him having to waste a single bullet or a single gallon of gas or a single hour of manpower (things he desperately needed in the midst of losing a world war)? He speculated that Hitler shipped all the bones or bodies out (and left not a SINGLE trace of them behind) in oder to conceal his role in killing so many Jews. The problem is: we had also just visited the memorial in St. Petersberg to the two million Christians killed by Hitler, and he didn't lift a finger to conceal his role there, leaving behind lots of bones. Where did Latvia get 200,000 Jews from so they could be killed in Rumbula? There was ONE synagogue in Riga which the NAZIS burned down, and it now has a plaque which says " The following list of those who died in Auschwitz, the names which start with "C", actually contains more Catholics than Protestants (even though there were actually more Catholics after WWII than before, whereas there were far fewer Protestants and Orthodox): http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2007/03/56659.php Here's a math problem for you, Kirby. The 1929 World Almanac reports there were 682.4 million Christians in the world, and the Jewish newspaper Daily Express reports there were 14 million Jews in the world at that time. The 1948 World Almanac reports there were 592.4 million Christians and 15,688,000 Jews, which is three years after WWII. How many Jews died. How many Christians died. How many Christians would there have been in the world in 1948 had the number of Christians increased at its historical rate between 1929 and 1948? I will attempt to attach .jpg's of all three pages. If they don't post, just ask, and you will receive them directly. Either way, please don't leave this important detail out of your putative extensive research. Guess what, Wayne? Christianity doesn't require us to worship the holocaust, other than the holocaust of 264 million CHRISTIANS who died or were missing after WWII. I've been to all these concentration camps, most recently the one in Salispils, Latvia, read the NAMES of the people who died in them. MOST of them were Protestants, some Catholics, and very few were Jews. Even you can research it, right. Look it up. I have the list of each name of each person who died in Auschwitz. June 25, 2011 at 3:49 am "Although I've never heard a serious, nationally-recognized conservative espouse this position, why is it conservative and why is it bad? I don't know the current situation, but one of my *very* liberal colleagues was in the Netherlands for a couple years when his children were in school and that was the set up at that time. They found it very beneficial. Genuinely choose the school you want at taxpayer expense. Again, why is that idea conservative and why is it bad?" It's bad because they know that American children would once again have a chance to actually get an education, rather than the intense brain-washing they now get. Our educators only care about themselves, not why it is that our 12th graders score so much lower than our 8th graders when 12th graders in most other countries score much higher than their 8th graders: 8th grade math Netherlands 541 US 500 12th grade math Netherlands 585 US 466 8th grade Physics Norway 505 US 502 12th grade physics Norway 589 US 446 They obviously follow these TIMSS studies. They obviously KNOW that our 8th graders scored only 41 points lower than 8th graders in the Netherlands who HAVE the choice (a large percentage of whom are in private schools), but that by the 12th grade, the Netherlands is 119 points ahead of us. HOW CAN THAT BE? They obviously KNOW that a similar thing happened in Norway where they also have that choice: we were on par with Norway at the 8th grade, but whatever happens to American children in high school put them a whopping 145 points behind them. They DO know that. They just DON'T CARE. 8th grade science Netherlands 12th grade science Netherlands 558 US 480 At 11:30 AM 5/16/2011, Paul A. Tanner III wrote: >I do not mis-name it - I am talking about if we were to do things >the way conservatives would like to see happen, which is to shut >down completely the public school system and replace it with a >private system, then a coupon it is, leaving everyone with only this >coupon for any private school that would be available. Although I've never heard a serious, nationally-recognized conservative espouse this position, why is it conservative and why is it bad? I don't know the current situation, but one of my *very* liberal colleagues was in the Netherlands for a couple years when his children were in school and that was the set up at that time. They found it very beneficial. Genuinely choose the school you want at taxpayer expense. Again, why is that idea conservative and why is it bad? Wayne http://mathforum.org/kb/post!reply.jspa?threadID=2274672 June 24, 2011 at 12:34 pm "The principal of the Brooklyn Secondary School for Collaborative Studies, Alyce Barr, said she was concerned about including the CUNY remediation rate in a school?s grade. Hers is a ?performance assessment? school and has a state waiver that allows students to write research papers and conduct science experiments instead of taking Regents exams. Last year, the school sent 25 of its 64 graduates to CUNY schools but 83 percent could not pass the colleges? remediation exams. Ms. Barr said her students were not used to taking exams, and she maintained that the skills the school focuses on, like essay writing, are a better indicator of how well they will do in college." That should work. In Africa, maybe. "Quote: "This curve lies entirely above the horizontal axis, and that axis is an asymptote in both horizontal directions (i.e. as x grows large and positive or large and negative, the curve approaches arbitrarily close to the axis, but never reaches it)."" You need to quit trying to learn math from your Cracker Jack box, Paul (and especially from Wikipedia who will lead you off the cliff to oblivion). At this point in your life, not even a course in probability and statistics will ever set you free (the TRUTH will set you free, but you are not of the TRUTH). One small caveat about the prior observation. 7% of Botswana are White who are still there, even though they gained independence from the UK on September 30, 1966. If Whites in Botswana score in the range of their White brethren back in England, 541 (and my PERSONAL observation is that they DO), that would partially explain why Botswana scores so much higher than their neighbor Ghana (which is made of 9 different Black races, but no Whites, which explains their relatively large standard deviation). Therefore Blacks in Botswana must score 351, which is still 42 points higher than Ghana, much higher than expected. THIS would mean that the 7 lowest scoring students in Hong Kong scored lower than the seven highest scoring Black students in Botswana, EXCEPT that this would probably also decrease the standard deviation for Blacks in Botswana. If it decreased only a small amount to 60 (from 77), then only the ONE top scoring student in Botswana scored higher than only ONE lowest scoring student in Hong Kong, THEORETICALLY. IT IS correct that "as x grows large and positive or large and negative, the curve approaches arbitrarily close to the axis, but never reaches it" but it is effectively ZERO for any score for Blacks in Botswana above 472, AND for any student in Hong Kong BELOW 472. iow, ONE student in Hong Kong THEORETICALLY scores lower than 472, and ONE Black student in Botswana scores HIGHER than 472, THEORETICALLY. UNLESS the standard deviation for Blacks in Botswana is as low as 50, which is ENTIRELY possible, in which case NO Black student in Botswana scores higher than 455 and NO student in Hong Kong scores lower than 466. Paul, your problem is not an ideological problem, your problem is that you don't have the capacity to understand what's a truth, and what's not a truth. It's impossible for you to get past your preconceived notions about everything, including Blacks and math. You can't possibly understand the world around you because you don't have the ability to analyze simple graphs. You've been presented with simple data from FEDERAL web sites, and you react with: ""made up "data" and/or "conclusions" remain as truth in the minds of some no matter how many times those made up "data" and/or "conclusions" are demonstrated to be fantastical balderdash resulting from some of the most extreme examples possible of incorrect and fallacious applications of mathematics."" Not only was this data not manipulated, but it's been presented to you in the clearest and most understandable manner possible. I'm not unfamiliar with Gaussian Distributions and standard deviations, as I've used them extensively and been amazed at how closely they approximate the actual data. I've seen Gaussian Distributions which are such a close fit to the measured numbers which are so close that it's uncanny, almost unbelievable. Sometimes it's not always a perfect fit, but usually that means that it was the measurement which was off, not the bell curve. I've used mainframes to calculate hundreds of thousands of second order partial derivatives to estimate Prandtl numbers for heat flow in nuclear reactors and been in awe at how close it fits the real numbers. There's nothing you can teach me about the theory behind these things, what they mean, and how nice it is to get a Pearson Coefficient of 1.0. When you made the following comment, without any indication at all that you understood the first thing about all the posts which set such erroneous assumptions straight, I replied with yet again with clear explanations which you obviously still don't understand: "In addition, this last sentence shows ignorance of one of the most basic facts of mathematical statistics: The normal or bell curve does not have an upper limit or lower limit in terms of its x values: The curve actually never touches the x- axis, since this horizontal axis is a horizontal asymptote for the curve. There are many places on the Internet that explain this, and here is one:" To set the record straight, not for you, but for those who DO want to know the truth, graphs have been provided which show the Gaussian Distribution for the TIMSS 2007 math scores from the following url: http://timss.bc.edu/timss2007/intl_reports.html Once again, here are the highlights for the curves for Ghana, Botswana, and Hong Kong: In Ghana, 103 students score higher than 447, 2 students score higher than 493, and 0.0221 students score higher than 539. Obviously this means that no student scores higher than 539, and the graph shows that the curve gets below one student at 519. In Batswana, 232 students score higher than 441, 16 students score higher than 480, and 0.3674 students score 518. Even though Botswana scored 18 points higher than Ghana, their smaller standard deviation means that their highest scoring students score lower than those in Ghana. The detailed curve shows that it drops below one student at 509. YES, THE CURVE NEVER HITS THE AXIS, AD INFINITUM, but it means nothing after it represents less than one student. Ditto for Ghana. In Hong Kong, 76 students score lower than 507, 1 scores lower than 473, and 0.01635 scores lower than 440. The detailed graph shows that the curve for Hong Kong crosses both the curve for Ghana and the curve for Botswana at 12 students. What this means is that, theoretically, the absolutely highest 12 students in Ghana, and, theoretically the absolutely highest scoring 12 students in Botswana, score higher than the, theoretically, absolutely lowest scoring 12 students in Hong Kong. These are absolute facts. TIMSS has found these types of results for a decade and a half now. These graphs and the above statements have nothing to do with anybody's personal opinion, causation, or your opinion of causation. And now for the personal observation. Having worked with lots of graphs like this, the part that usually doesn't fit with the ACTUAL data (which of course TIMSS has) are the tail ends of the curve. And that would mean that there is NO OVERLAP between the lowest part of Hong Kong's curve, and the highest part of both Ghana's and Botswana's curve. On a putative math forum at http://mathforum.org, putative educator and mathematician Paul Tanner attempted to instruct me on Gaussian Distribution and standard deviations by referring me to Wikipedia, run by jews, and controlled by the federal government. This is about like learning about matrimony and Christianity at a whore house, a place Truman complained that he should have selected over politics, and where all congressmen but Ron Paul belong today. He was referred to sources which, probably in order to continue to conceal the vast gulf in IQ and academic skills between the races, did not accurately report the actual effects of Gaussian Distributions and standard deviations, making Blacks appear to be MUCH smarter than ALL the test scores tell us. Rather than proving that he understood how these sources had misrepresented the actual racial gaps, he posted the following: "In addition, this last sentence shows ignorance of one of the most basic facts of mathematical statistics: The normal or bell curve does not have an upper limit or lower limit in terms of its x values: The curve actually never touches the x- axis, since this horizontal axis is a horizontal asymptote for the curve. There are many places on the Internet that explain this, and here is one:" In one fell swoop, the putative mathematician and educator Paul Tanner proved beyond the shadow of all doubt that he is uneducable, much less eternally incapable of "teaching" our children anything, much less math. I can tell you from direct observation that this is an EIGHTH GRADE math problem in Korea. Not a SINGLE Korean 8th grader would fail to understand the following, which was my reply to this forum: "Certainly this statement is true *theoretically*, but making that observation with realizing that when we're dealing with people, a number below one is essentially zero ( we don't have 9/10ths of a person, or one thousandth of a person) proves once and for all that you're going nowhere in learning Gaussian distribution or probability and statistics. Yes, of the tens of thousands of Black women who've taken GRE quantitative, 0.5 of them theoretically would have scored over 612. But since there are no 0.5 Black women around, she doesn't count". He was given the opportunity, and in fact was requested, to do some of the calculations to prove that some of this might have made sense to him, but instead replied with the following racist screed: I am so tired of such abject ignorance. I am so embarassed to think that he calls himself my fellow man, or my fellow American, or perhaps my fellow Christian. We have UTTERLY nothing to do with such abject ignorance, and it's a CRIME and a sin to permit our children to be exposed to such race baiting. posted June 23, 2011 at 3:45 pm http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/2010-total-group-profile- report-cbs.pdf 2010 national SAT math scores by race Indians 492 Asians 591 Black 428 Mexican 467 Puerto Rican 452 Hispanic 462 White 536 Other 514 If Catholics score slightly higher than Hispanics, then this is the breakdown of the scores for Whites White Protestant 578 White Catholic 467 And this would be the breakdown if Catholics score slightly LOWER than Blacks, which it sure appears that they do: White Protestant 600 White Catholic 424 It's also the ONLY way to explain why our 12th graders scored almost a standard deviation lower than our 8th graders on TIMSS math, and why most twelfth graders in other countries scored that much HIGHER than their 8th graders. For those who believe Paul's rants about our recent changes in federal "standards" improving something, study the following closely: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/nyregion/many-from-a-rated-nyc-schools-need- help-at-cuny.html?_r=2&hpw The ship hit the iceberg a long time ago. Rearranging the deck chairs should have begun in earnest in 1959, just before education expenditures began to skyrocket and our teachers became dumber than social workers. posted June 23, 2011 at 3:35 pm Table 22 of TIMSS 2007 math report Ghana is a country of 23 million with a per capita income of $532, and 32% of their school age population in secondary schools, so TIMSS represents an 8th grade population of about 73,600. They scored 309 in math with an SD of 92, which means that 2 students scored over 493, and .0221 students scored over 539. Of course this curve is asymptotic and never hits the axis, but now you know that 0.0221 students equals ZERO students, right? Botswana, a country of 1.9 million with a GDP per capita of $5,570, average math score of 364 with an SD of 77, and net enrollment in secondary schools of 61%, for a total of 11,590 12th graders. Because of their smaller standard deviation, even though they scored 55 points higher than Ghana, they had even fewer students scoring over 480 (sixteen of them), and only 0.3674 students (read: ZERO) scoring over 518. Russia, with a population of 142.5 million and a GDP per capita of $5,770, had 10% enrolled in secondary schools, for a total of 142,500 in secondary schools). They scored 544 with an SD of 83, which means 22,800 of them scored over 586 (a score above which no student in Ghana or Botswana scored). Hong Kong scored 607 with an sd of 67. With a population of 6.9 million and 79% in school, they had 54,510 in secondary schools, of whom 8,722 scored over 641. Only 76 of their students scored lower than 507, a score above which NO student in Botswana or Ghana scored. The average score for the US was 529, with an SD of 75. With 4 million in secondary schools, 80,000 scored over 604, compared to 27,255 in Hong Kong (with a population about 2% of ours). This is a pattern very similar to GRE quantitative scores in the US, isn't it? scored over 500 Ghana = 0 Botswana = 0 Russia= 119,700 Hong Kong = 100% = 54,510 US= about half = 2,000,000 GRE Quantitative 1997 scored over 800 Asian men = 34 Asian women = 1 White men = 33 White women = 0 "Other" men = 0 "Other" women = 0 Hispanic men = 0 Hispanic women = 0 Mexican men = 0 Mexican women = 0 Indian men = 0 Indian women = 0 Black men = 0 Black Women = 0 Scored over 600 Asian men = 3,997 Asian women = 2,870 White men = 35,041 White women = 8,988 "Other" men = 1,120 "Other" women = 112 Hispanic men = 322 Hispanic women = 0 Mexican men = 238 Mexican women = 6 Indian men = 37 Indian women = 2 Black men = 49 Black women = 0 "In addition, this last sentence shows ignorance of one of the most basic facts of mathematical statistics: The normal or bell curve does not have an upper limit or lower limit in terms of its x values: The curve actually never touches the x- axis, since this horizontal axis is a horizontal asymptote for the curve. There are many places on the Internet that explain this, and here is one:" Certainly this statement is true *theoretically*, but making that observation with realizing that when we're dealing with people, a number below one is essentially zero ( we don't have 9/10ths of a person, or one thousandth of a person) proves once and for all that you're going nowhere in learning Gaussian distribution or probability and statistics. Yes, of the tens of thousands of Black women who've taken GRE quantitative, 0.5 of them theoretically would have scored over 612. But since there are no 0.5 Black women around, she doesn't count. IN 1999, 588 American Indian men took GRE quantitative, with an average score of 540 and an SD of 125, which means that none of them scored over 600. Of the 998 American Indian women who took the test, none of them scored over 625. 2,102 Mexican men took the test, scored an average of 517 (with an SD of 131), and 3 of them scored over 714, compared to 3,635 Mexican women who scored 457 (SD 118), and none of them scored over 600. 5,097 Asian men took the test, scored 638 (SD 131), and 44 of them scored 800, compared to 8,018 Asian women who scored 572 (SD 121), 3 of whom scored 800. There were 76,441 White men who scored 586 (SD 121), of whom 32 scored 800, compared to 167,734 White women who scored 531 (SD 122), none of whom scored 800. "Other" men scored 583 (SD 129), there were 3,119 of them, none of whom scored 800. There were 3,999 "Other" women who scored 509 (SD 123), none of whom scored 800. 16,513 Black women scored 404 (SD 104), of whom NONE scored over 570. Why don't you prove that you understand what this Gausian Distribution means by telling us (and ignoring for a moment that American Blacks are the only race where women have higher SAT math scores than men, and where women are over- represented compared to men as GRE test takers, by almost THREE FOLD), how many Black men you believe scored over 800? If you need the original data from GRE, let me know. They're not necessary to work this out, but it might make you feel more comfortable if you see the actual data from the original source. i.e., I'm not making this up. Scored over "It is a plain fact of life that almost 100% of all 12th graders learn algebra, geometry, and calculus in school or not at all. (Only a very small minority are ever homeschooled after middle school.)" Agreed, believe it or not. The point Charles Murray makes is that the other 90% are wasting their time being in our public education system, and I agree wholeheartedly. It is FATHERS, and not teachers, who teach their own children calculus. How many of those 202,112 American students who you claim *understand* calculus (less than 5% of all our 18 year olds), actually learned it in public schools WITHOUT their own fathers being involved? My bet is NONE. And the REST went to private schools where students are free from race baiting like yours. When annual salaries by profession are correlated with SAT Math scores, without making any adjustment, or removing any outliers, it's clear that there's a pattern, with salaries increasing $110 for each one point increase in SAT math scores. (even though the Pearson coefficient is only 0.5572). Removing just two outliers, economics majors and education majors, increases it to 0.8735, giving us more confidence about this relationship. If we adjust annual salaries to achieve a Pearson Coefficient of 1.0, the only salaries which need to be adjusted a lot are educators and economists ($10,000 and $28,400, respectively). Conversely, it appears that mathematicians are underpaid about $8,000 per year, Physicists $11,000, and Asian women $6,157. We know why educators are paid about 30% more than their math scores indicate they should be paid: unions. But it's not so clear why economists are paid almost 50% more. Either there's a strong demand for economists which outpaces their supply, or those with low math skills are drawn to a profession where good math skills would seem to be more important than that. We get a bit of a different pattern with GRE quantitative scores, with the Pearson coefficient a bit higher out of the box, at 0.6643, and math, physics, engineering, computer science, sociology, business, psychology, English literature, and history majors falling right on the curve. The only salaries which need to be adjusted downward to achieve linearity are education majors (again, but this time by only $2,000), economics majors (by $10,000), and geology majors (by $16,000). For some reason, chemistry majors are underpaid by $22,000. SAT verbal scores correlate closely with SAT math scores, by major, so incomes and verbal scores also correlate closely. However, GRE verbal scores don't correlate AT ALL with incomes (0.0116), most likely because of all the foreigners in our graduate schools (like Asians) whose superior math skills MORE than make up for their poor verbal skills. "This is a well known phenomenon, by the way: For most of us, it is usually the case that our performances on an IQ test like WISC don't change all that much if at all while we acquire knowledge throughout life - which could mean increases in academic achievement if we acquire that knowledge formally in school - throughout all our lives. Heck, for some of us, due to some natural decline due to aging, we could see our IQ test scores on some IQ tests actually decrease a bit even while we acquire more and more knowledge throughout our lives. What this means is that as we age, our performance on some IQ tests could actually go down while out performance on some knowledge-based or achievement tests could actually go up." A LOT of scientists, including Philippe Rushton, have been misled into believing that IQ tests measure something that's meaningful to the real world, and thus accept the mantra that "there is no difference in IQ between men and women". Yet, by 12th grade, EVERY standardized test ever conducted shows that, when broken down by race, the difference between the sexes of ALL races is at least a half a standard deviation, and as much as a full standard deviation, with the difference between Black males and Black females being one of the smallest. And the most recent GRE data shows that the gap between Asian men and Black women just skyrocketed from 234 to 267 points. If this is not due to differences in intelligence, then what's it due to (and please note that SES correlates DIRECTLY with race and sex, so don't try that one again). Our "education" system is a bigger welfare agency than the Welfare Department. There is NO WAY that you can spend $24,606 per STUDENT in Washington, DC, and even more than that in failed states like New Yersey, when the REST of the country manages to educate their children for less than $4,000, and many Asian nations for less than $3,000, AND DO A MUCH BETTER JOB OF IT. It's another individuous form of discrimination where the producers are are FORCED to subsidize the useless eaters (and I don't refer to just Blacks, as it seems that Catholics are even bigger welfare queens than they are). The table can be seen in it's original format at: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d95/dtab390.asp The first column which has yes and no answers is the "ethnic homogeneity" column, which is defined as having more than 90% of one race. As you can see, the 11 highest scoring countries have ethnic homogeneity, which means THEY DO NOT CARE what the "causation" is between Blacks and ALL FORMS of social pathology, up to an including out of control crime rates, destroyed education systems, poverty, unbridled public debt, and worst of all, moral decay. There is NO EXCEPTION to this observation. NONE. x@3578691248 16,513 of the creme de la creme of American black women, after a multi-TRILLION dollar "investment" in educating blacks, took the Graduate Record Exam and proved once and for all that: 1.Blacks are patently, inheritably uneducable. 2.The multi-trillion dollar investment in their education was a COMPLETE waste. 3.Rather than improving education for anyone, it destroyed educational opportunities for everyone, but particularly Whites. 4.Rather than improving lives of blacks, it contributed to the almost complete destruction of black families. I know, I know--a standardized verbal and quantitative test is not an iq test. I know that you get 200 points just for signing your name, so the test is already skewed right off the bat. I know that there are many noise level questions which even kindergartners can answer, which adds another 100 points. I know that many of the questions are multiple choice which means that a person who knows utterly nothing about the subject could get as many as 150 points just by guessing. So I DO recognize that a score of 450 is what a person who knows how to take tests, but knows NOTHING about the subject of the test, might "achieve". But black women scored lower than this on GRE Verbal, at 404. And black women scored lower than this on GRE Analytical, at 421. And black women scored MUCH lower than this on GRE quantitative, at 388. AH, but, you say, there are SOME black geniuses. After all, George Washington Carver only a century ago got four patents for peanutbutter, and look at Condolesa Rice and Colin Powell and Obama. They're geniuses. Maybe so. Maybe they didn't take GRE. Maybe black geniuses are so smart they manage to get into graduate school without even bothering with the Graduate Record Exam [or affirmative action mandated they not be required to take it] just like affirmative action permitted them to be admitted to undergraduate schools as MILLIONS of much more qualified White and Asian students were DENIED admission. The creme de la creme of of blackhood, 16,513 black women, did so well in undergraduate school that they were permitted to take the GRE. But NOT A ONE of them scored 800 on EITHER of these three parts of the GRE! Does this make them geniuses? Not exactly. Only 25 scored higher than 654 in GRE Verbal, only 23 scored higher than 716 in GRE Quantitative and only 27 of them scored higher than 746 on GRE Analytical. With NONE of them scoring 800 on ANY of these three portions of the test, NONE of these 16,513 black women could possibly be considered to be geniuses, could they? So the crowning achievement of our multi-trillion dollar experiment to educate blacks, of the creme de la creme of 16,513 black women, less than 250 of them scored as high as the AVERGE Asian man on GRE Quantitative at 638, less than 500 of them scored as high as the AVERAGE White man on GRE Verbal at 512, and 84% of them scored LOWER than the AVERAGE Mexican male in GRE Analytical at 514. Is it still possible that there black geniuses hidden in this number, enough blacks to fill up the average US town? Is there a pony in all this bs? No. 1.600 of all students (209 of whom were White women) scored 800 in GRE Verbal 2.6,109 of all students (510 of whom were Asian men) scored 800 in GRE Quantitative 3.6,309 of all students (4,955 of whom were White students) scored 800 in GRE Analytical Would it be fair to say that a "genius" might be one of the above 6,309 students who may have scored 800 on all three portions of this test? Sure. Or you might say that all 6,309 are "geniuses" in their particular area of expertise. Either way you define it, how many of the above geniuses were blacks? NONE. Let's not kid ourselves. According to the world's BEST standards of measurement, even with all the fudging and fiddling and dumbing down of our students and mind-numbing expenditures, even after REJECTING MILLIONS of the most qualified White and Asian students from our once-fine universities, ALL of these tests have proven time and time again, for decades now, that NO American black woman came even CLOSE to being classified as even LITERATE, much less as a "genius". If there's even one black woman who scored higher than all the rest of the blacks who took GRE in all three sections, the real creme de la creme of American blackhood, her quantitative skills are lower than the AVERAGE Asian man, her verbal skills are lower than the AVERAGE White man, and her analytical skills are only slightly higher than your Mexican gardener, hardly a candidate for a Ph.D, an M.D.--nor even gardnerhood. This makes the optimistic presumption that black scores follow a regular Gaussian Distribution. It accepts carte blanche, without question, the relatively large standard deviation for blacks reported by the College Board. It ignores that some state laws require a person to be counted as black if 1/64th of their genealogy is black. It doesn't compensate for the number of blacks admitted through the now illegal affirmative action programs which permitted Whites to be admitted because they posed as blacks. It doesn't consider the academic theory that the reason American blacks have higher IQs than African blacks is their higher proportion of Caucasoid genes, perhaps as much as 25%. If this theory is correct, then the 25 who scored higher than 654 in GRE Verbal, the 23 who scored higher than 716 in GRE Quantitative, and the 27 who scored higher than 746 on GRE Analytical, would not be black at all according to other blacks because they would be mostly Caucasoid. The POINT is, Paul, that there are MANY REASONS that the "causation" for the correlation between SES and race, which you yourself acknowledge, is NONE of our concern. The ONLY important point, as we can see from the following, is that we get back to our Founding Fathers' vision. Populations | | | | | | (comprehensive) | | | | | | | | | | | | Canada\4\ ..............| No | 6 | 188 (0.2)| 304 (0.8)| No | 13 (1.3) France..................| Yes | 6 | 174 (1.7)| 370 (3.4)| Yes | 29 (4.9) Hungary.................| Yes | 6 | 177 (1.5)| 223 (1.3)| Yes | 32 (4.2) Ireland ................| Yes | 6 | 173 (0.9)| 323 (4.4)| Yes | 39 (5.8) Israel\5\ ..............| No | 6 | 215 (2.2)| 278 (6.5)| Yes | 46 (6.7) Jordan..................| Yes | 6 | 191 (0.9)| 260 (2.9)| Yes | 63 (5.3) Korea...................| Yes | 6 | 222 (2.5)| 264 (2.4)| Yes | 24 (4.9) Scotland................| Yes | 5 | 191 (0.9)| 324 (2.3)| Yes | 23 (4.0) Slovenia................| Yes | 7 | 190 (1.5)| 248 (2.5)| Yes | 50 (5.3) Spain\6\ ...............| No | 6 | 188 (2.3)| 285 (3.2)| Yes | 33 (5.0) (Former) Soviet Union\7\| No | 6 or 7 | 198 (2.1)| 243 (2.6)| Yes | 72 (5.1) Switzerland\8\ .........| No | 6 or 7 | 207 (3.2)| 305 (7.4)| No | 11 (3.5) Taiwan..................| No | 6 | 222 (2.5)| 318 (6.9)| Yes | 10 (2.8) United States...........| No | 6 | 178 (0.4)| 338 (5.0)| No | 5 (2.2) | | | | | | | | | | | | Populations | | | | | | (with exclusions or | | | | | | low participation) | | | | | | | | | | | | Brazil, Fortaleza.......| No | 7 | 183 (1.1)| 223 (9.8)| No | 62 (5.3) Brazil, Sao Paulo.......| No | 7 | 181 (0.2)| 271 (9.3)| No | 60 (4.6) China...................| Yes |6.5 or 7| 251 (2.1)| 305 (7.1)| Yes | 43 (6.3) England.................| Yes | 5 | 192 (1.8)| 300 (4.4)| Yes | 24 (8.3) Italy\9\ ...............| Yes | 6 | 204 (0.5)| 289 (5.0)| Yes | 18 (5.1) Mozambique, Maputo, | | | | | | and Beira .............| No | 7 | 193 (0.0)| 272 (0.0)| Yes | 92 (0.0) Portugal................| Yes | 6 | 172 (1.1)| 334 (6.5)| Yes | 56 (7.9) reposted June 23, 2011 at 3:30 pm "Quote: "Racism as a concern of the ecumenical movement goes back to the World Missionary Conference, in Edinburgh 1910, where explicit references were made to racism. A special programmatic focus on the issue of racism dates from 1968, thirty-four years ago, when the IVth assembly of the WCC set its face decidedly against the scourge of racism and thus gave impetus to the creation of A PROGRAMME TO COMBAT RACISM (PCR) [my emphasis]. From that time on, the WCC played a significant role within the international anti-racism movement, extending solidarity and resources to thousands of Indigenous and racially and ethnically oppressed communities and organisations, and those who work in support of them, in almost every part of the world." The term "racism" wasn't even coined until 1934 when H. G. Wells coined it (at which time it meant the exact opposite of the way you now use it), so how exactly did they "explicit references were made to racism"? 95.5% of Americans, and two billion people in the world (almost one out of every three peopleo nthe planet) CLAIM to follow Jesus. Admittedly Catholics are supposed to follow the Pope rather than Jesus, except now that the Pope has proven himself to be nothing but a promoter of a worldwide homosexual movement, every Catholic I know now follows Jesus and not the Pope: And if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed. 2 Thessalonians 3:14 Was not Esau Jacob's brother? says the LORD: yet I loved Jacob, but hated Esau; I made his mountains a waste, his heritage a desert for jackals, Malachai 1:3 "Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies", Psalms 139:21-22 But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person, 1 Corinthians 5:13 "Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbor", Leviticus 19:15 "Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God's: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it", Deuteronomy 1:17 "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?" 2 Corinthians 6:14 "Now we command you, brethren, on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us", 2 Thessalonians 3:6 For example, those who do not follow just one of the Ten Commandments are those who walketh disorderly, from whom Jesus COMMANDED us to withdraw ourselves. Not a single Black I know accepts even ONE of the Ten Commandments, and instead view EACH ONE as a violation of their civil rights. If you don't believe it, listen to just a few minutes of Obama's favorite spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who runs a Black Nationalist Church, not a Christian Church, who profanes both God and Jesus (not to mention the US Constitution) when he preaches DAILY "not God bless America, but God .amn America). Wallow in your own mire, but we sure don't have to, and in fact Jess COMMANDS us not to. "That is not what the study is suggesting. It is suggesting that if whites and blacks had the exact same level of advantages and disadvantages of socioeconomic status, then the difference pretty much disappears. " Really? Like in Washington, DC, where the most pampered Blacks in the world live, who earn even more than Whites right down the street in West Virginia (which also has one of the nation's lowest crime rates)? How exactly have these pampered Blacks fared? Following is the year, percent Blacks, and murder rate per 100,000 population, for Washington, DC: 1989 69.70% 71.9 1990 65.80% 69.9 1991 66.90% 72.2 1992 68.10% 75.2 1993 69.00% 78.5 1994 67.20% 70 1995 65.00% 65 1996 67.00% 73.1 1997 59.00% 56.9 1998 60.00% 65.8 1999 53.10% 46.4 2000 61.30% 41.8 2001 60.00% 41 2002 59.90% 46 2003 58.90% 44 2004 57.80% 36 2005 56.90% 35 2006 57.10% 29.1 2007 61.60% 30.8 2008 56.50% 31.4 2009 54.00% 29.2 2010 50.70% 25.2 Do you see any correlation here? Or causation? Or do you need to know what the pearson coefficient is before you answer? Doesn't this fit perfectly with their low NAEP scores, where they score even lower than Mozambique? DC rape 41.2, robbery 851, aggravated assault 1075, burglary 1316, larceny 5063, motor vehicle theft 1,431 Mesa rape 35.9, robbery 560, assault 560, burglary 1219, larceny 4,799, mvt 963 US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1999, pg 49, sec01.pdf of “Population” Table No. 48 Cities with 100,000 or More Inhabitants in 1998—population, 1980 to 1998, and Land Area, 1990 Resident Population by Race, Hispanic or Latino Origin, and State: 2005 Table 23, pg 26 (2007 edition) 2005 Washington, DC—percent Black in 1990 = 65.8% No. 345. Crime Rates, by Type—Selected Large Cities: 1997 U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1999 Pg 216 of Law Enforcement, Courts, and Prisons sec05.pdf District of Columbia also had the nation's highest AIDS death rate, 99.6 per 100k, which was almost ten times higher than the national average of 11.7 and infinitely higher than Vermont, North Dakota, and South Dakota who had no AIDS deaths "Nvsr47-9.pdf “Mortality levels also varied by race in 1996. Overall, age- adjusted death rates for the black population exceeded those of the white population by about 58 percent. Rates for the black population were higher for most of the leading causes of death. The largest race differential was for homicide, with an age-adjusted death rate for the black population that was 6.2 times that for the white population.”" It's cancer death rate of 254 was 50% higher than the national average of 203.4 and almost four times higher than Guam at 72.4. The infant mortality rate for Blacks nationally of 14.7 is more than twice that of Whites at 7.6 but the rate in DC of 17.6 is another 20% higher. Nationally, the homicide rate for Blacks is 71.6, which is 23 times higher than for Whites, but in DC the rate was 102, 42% higher than the national average. The rate at which Black males are murdered just by firearms is 42.3. Nationally, the motor vehicle fatality rate for Blacks is 25.2, which is 2 ˝ times greater than the rate for Whites of 10.0. Between 1990 and 1996, the age-adjusted death rate for drug-induced causes increased by 44 percent. In 1996 the age-adjusted death rate for drug-induced causes for males was 2.3 times the rate for females, and the rate for the black population was 1.6 times that for the white population. In 1996 the age-adjusted death rate for alcohol-induced causes for males was 3.4 times the rate for females, and the rate for the black population was 1.7 times the rate for the white population. The age-adjusted rate for death by firearms for Black males nationally is 52, which is 14 times greater than that for White females at 3.6. In 2010, the Expectation of life at birth (years) in the US was 78.4 years, in Japan 81.6 years, France 80.3 years, Kenya 58.8 years, and Zimbabwe 39.1 years. June 21, 2011 10:15AM The IMPORTANT point you continue to ignore, Paul, is that most of these countries who score so much higher than us (up to two standard deviations higher) allow prayer in their PUBLIC schools. According to William Bennett, SAT scores have dropped 130 points since we banned school prayer in public schools in 1963. Most of your own cites confirm this correlation, but the ones which claim that ther is no correlation between incomes and IQ (or more accurately, standardized test scores like SAT, ACT, GRE, NAEP, IAEP, PISA, and TIMSS), are completely without merit. And that's most of your cites. Rushton proved in thousands of ways what the correlation is, AND what the "causation" is in your lexicon [read: it has a high degree of correlation, AND it's statistically significant). Your bias was revealed when you cited a definition of racist which you "liked" the most, rather than looking up the word in a normal dictionary--with the OED being the preferred final authority. Whites with a high school diploma earn 25% more than Blacks with a high school diploma, and Asians earn 4% more. Whites with some college earn 29% more than Blacks with some college, and Asians earn 6% more. Whites with an associate degree earn 23% more than Blacks with an associate degree, Asians earn 14% more, and Hispanics earn 5% more. Whites with a bachelors degree earn 36% more than Blacks with a bachelors degree, Asians earn 14% more, and Hispanics earn 17% more. Whites with an advanced degree earn 52% more than Blacks with an advanced degree, Asians earn 45% more, and Hispanics earn 68% more. The more we try to educate Blacks, the worse they do in incomes relative to Whites, Asians, and Hispanics. This is not because employers hate Blacks and love Whites, Asians, and Hispanics, but because so few Blacks are productive employees. "That is, to put this back to the data un question: In 1995, there were much higher standards for required study in Europe than in the US for a high school education, and European high school students (who were predominantly white) studied algebra and geometry in high school, while a large minority or a majority if not a large majority of US whites did not. Yet we see the fantastical hypothesized claim that the US whites scored essentially as high as the European whites on those 1995 TIMSS 12th grade tests that included measuring algebra and geometry knowledge simply because the US whites and European whites have presumably essentially the same measured IQ or are of the same 'genetic stock'." You make the false assumption that American Whites need public schools to be productive members of society, to understand things like algebra and calculus, and to have at one time until very recently been some of the best innovators in world history. You ignore that the most successful here never even had a high school diploma, that the most qualified students are those who are denied admission while students from India who can't qualify for med school there (a country with an average IQ of 81) are willingly admitted here under affirmative action, and that it's boys who are two thirds of those who score over 550 in SAT math while it's girls who are now two thirds of college admissions (the Alberto Gonzalez Syndrome). "...both the American adoption study by Sandra Scarr and Barbara Tizard's study of British orphans showed that when blacks and whites are brought up under the same circumstances the difference pretty much disappears." So you're saying that Black parents are incompetent at raising Black babies but that White parents ARE COMPENENT at raising Black babies? Isn't that called rabid racism in your lexicon? Do you want us to remove the remaining few Black fathers who are still in the household (less than 20% today by some counts) and insert White fathers? Or put away even more than the 3 million Blacks who are already behind bars or on parole in the US? "I agree the benefits of the 1964 CRA are debatable. Its connection to AIDS seems more tenuous. Lots of things happend after the CRA. For example, my son was born after the CRA, but I am reluctant to make a connection. I suspect you are committing a simple Post Hoc fallacy." Haim, I hope you'll give me the benefit of the doubt when I say that correlating millions of data points like divorce statistics with millions of data points like household incomes or crime rates, is a bit more credible than correlating this with your one data point about your son's birth? When millions of data points track with each other over time, moving up and down in unison, and when the Pearson coefficient is high and the data is statistically significant, I hope you understand that you have quite a bit more than just the coincidence of your son's birth? "Scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children were analyzed in a sample of 7-year-old twins from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project. A substantial proportion of the twins were raised in families living near or below the poverty level. Biometric analyses were conducted using models allowing for components attributable to the additive effects of genotype, shared environment, and nonshared environment to interact with socioeconomic status (SES) measured as a continuous variable. Results demonstrate that the proportions of IQ variance attributable to genes and environment vary nonlinearly with SES. The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse."" Part of the problem here (no, the MAJOR problem) is that many of our IQ tests are designed to measure things that are utterly meaningless in the real world. I have taken Philippe Rushton's data and correlated it with IQ and gotten the same poor correlation he got. But when correlated with GRE quantitative scores, the Pearson Coefficient was greater than 0.94, something he seemed surprised to hear. GRE scores also correlate much more closely with incomes by profession than IQ scores, with educators being one of the major outliers. Once they're removed, correlation is almost linear. Paul, did you know that in PISA math in 2000, mostly Catholic Mexico scored 385, almost two standard deviations lower than mostly Protestant Finland, at 544? Or that girls in Brazil, which is the most Catholic country in the world, scored 322, more than two standard deviations lower than mostly Protestant Finland and NON-Catholic Hong Kong (at 564)? Did you know that this pattern of the differences in test scores (as well as annual incomes) between Catholics and Protestants is repeated across the globe, and that there's no reason to believe that it's not also true in the US? Did you know that for DECADES now, the mysterious and unexplainable gap between Whites in Iowa and Whites in Rhode Island has been around 93 SAT Math points? If the ONLY reason for the gap is the millennia long difference in the way Protestantism and Catholicism handle the education of their children, then there's no reason to believe that Catholics in the highest scoring mostly Protestant states score any higher than Catholics in the lower scoring mostly Catholic states, nor that Protestants in the lower scoring mostly Catholic states score any lower than Protestants in the higher scoring mostly Protestant states, is there? X = SAT math score of Protestants Y = SAT math score of Catholics Rhode Island: .6Y + .4X = 519 Iowa: .17Y + .83X = 612 X = (519 - .6Y)/.4 .17Y + .83(519 - .6Y)/.4 = 612 .17Y + 1076.925 – 1.245Y = 612 1.075Y = 464.925 Y = 432.5 X = (519 - .6Y)/.4 X = (519 - .6 * 432.5)/.4 X = 648.8 So what appears to be only a 93 SAT math point gap between White Protestants and White Catholics is in reality a 216 point gap! Whew! The same applies to writing and reading skills in the same proportion. http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/2010-total-group-profile- report-cbs.pdf 2010 national SAT math scores by race Indians 492 Asians 591 Black 428 Mexican 467 Puerto Rican 452 Hispanic 462 White 536 Other 514 If Catholics score slightly higher than Hispanics White Protestant 578 White Catholic 467 If Catholics score slightly LOWER than Blacks White Protestant 600 White Catholic 424 "...both the American adoption study by Sandra Scarr and Barbara Tizard's study of British orphans showed that when blacks and whites are brought up under the same circumstances the difference pretty much disappears. He further points out that: * the charts are misleading, * correlation is not cause and that * the g factor is likely a statistical artefact." I don't believe it, and in fact can quote article after article which disputes it. And furthermore it's a moot point. These are the average IQ's by race which fit most closely with annual incomes, SAT scores, TIMSS scores, and ACT scores [read: the Pearson Coefficient is 1.0]: Asian, 108 White, 97 Other, 95 Indian, 85 Hispanic white, 82 Mexican, 80 Puerto Rican, 76 Black, 69 126 SAT points - $82,000 per year "Therefore the hypothesized 1995 12th grade score you gave for (what you clearly say are the superior) US whites is way too high (due to their not having studied algebra and geometry to anywhere near the same degree as European whites). And therefore the hypothesized 12th grade 1995 scores you gave for (what you clearly say are the inferior) other groups in question are way too low to obtain the known average 1995 US 12th grade score. " The College Board is very generous in sharing their data about incomes and SAT scores. What they've found is that, when broken down by income groups, there's an increase in annual incomes of $650 for each one point increase in SAT math scores, and $603 for each one point increase in SAT Verbal scores. When this data is correlated, the Pearson Coefficient is higher for math scores than for verbal scores (0.988 vs. 0.9456). This doesn't mean that verbal skills aren't important, only that better math skills make up for lower verbal skills. For example, even though Asians have lower verbal skills than Whites, their much higher math skills make them more important to employers, and thus they are paid about 15% more than Whites. Less than $10,000/year, 443 $10,000 - $20,000/year, 456 $20,000 - $30,000/year, 474 $30,000 - $40,000/year, 489 $40,000 - $50,000/year, 503 $50,000 - $60,000/year, 512 $60,000 - $70,000/year, 519 $70,000 - $80,000/year, 527 $80,000 - $100,000/year, 540 More than $100,000/year, 569 So it should not come as any surprise to anyone that Blacks, who score 140 SAT math points lower than Asians (426 vs. 566), would be earning about half as much as Asians. In fact, Blacks earn $27,910 per year even though they score even lower than the range of those who earn less than $10,000, and Asians earn only $51,205 even though they score even higher than those who earn $80 to 100K per year. Incomes by race also correlate with IQ's, but the correlation is lower than it is for verbal skills, which of course is lower than that for math skills. If we use the commonly accepted range of IQs of 85 for Blacks, 98 for Whites, and 102 for Asians, the Pearson Coefficient is not so good. But we get a linear correlation if we use 108 for Asians, 96.5 for Whites, and 72 for Blacks. I'm not aware of a single thing about American Blacks which would suggest that the American education system has benefitted them. I know many African Blacks who are pleasant to deal with, speak English with a perfect British accent, and are happy with their lives. Even though they have high crime rates relative to Asian and European countries, they are one thirtieth as likely as American Blacks to be murdered, or imprisoned. We have more Blacks in jails and prisons than the entire Continent of Africa (and four times as many as were ever slaves in the US). Black families are stable in Africa, but Black families in the US are almost non-existent, with most Black fathers tossed out of their own houses under the Welfare Department's "man out of the house" rule. Could it be possible that the average IQ of American blacks is LOWER than the average for Kenya, or 72? If they score lower than Mozambique (which Blacks in DC did), then it's probable. Paul, I can't believe that a thinking man would actually believe a word these crackpots write here. For someone to claim that there is no causation between IQ and income, which is exactly what these people you quote are claiming, is the height of absurdity, not to mention a slap across the face of our Founding Fathers' concept of free enterprise (not to mention a slap across the Face of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). This ought to be called the Alberto Gonzalez Syndrome--how to get a law degree from Harvard while never getting past a second grade understanding of the U. S. Constitution, not to mention free enterprise. http://www.act.org/news/data/10/pdf/profile/DistrictofColumbia.pdf? utm_campaign=cccr10&utm_source=averagescores&utm_medium=web pg. 14, Table 2.4 In ACT Math, Blacks in DC score 16.4, which is 0.7 points lower than the national average for blacks of 17.1, 10.2 points lower than Whites in DC (26.6), and 5.6 points lower than Asian/Pacific Islanders in DC. In ACT English, they score 15.0, which is 0.7 points lower than the national average for Blacks, 13.1 points lower than Whites in DC(28.1), and 10.3 points lower than Asian/Pacific Islanders in DC. In ACT Reading, they score 16.1, which is again 0.7 points lower than the national average for Blacks, 12 points lower than Whites in DC, and 8.7 points lower than Asian/Pacific Islanders in DC. In ACT Science, they score 15.9, which is 9.7 points lower than Whites in DC, and 7.1 points lower than the national average for Asian/Pacific Islanders. Is there ANYBODY who could POSSIBLY score lower than that? WEll, of course. Table 4.1 shows that teacher education majors in DC score only 14.9, another .2 points lower. "He also says that Murray and Herrnstein are racists. He is the first white author I have read who says that flat out. He says racism is: the persuasion that some races are definitely better than others in some socially important ways, and that the difference is of genetic origin. Murray and Herrnstein certainly think IQ is socially important, that whites have more of it and that it is mostly genetic. Therefore they are racists. Even though they talk as if racism has pretty much disappeared." Having lived in Asia for a while, I can assure you that there's nothing more racist than an Asian. If you had a contest between which is the most racist, a Korean or a Japanese, you just have no idea which would win, do you? So you ought to add Michelle Rhee to your list, because it was certainly racism, and not simply the fact that education majors in DC score a mere 14.9 in ACT composite, that she fired 220 teachers there, right? Mozambique participated in IAEP and got 28.3% correct, compared to 80.2% in China, 55.3% in the US, and 73.4% in Korea. The recent breakdown of scores by race in the US by TIMSS suggests the following to be the racial component of our score of 55.3: Protestant White 35%, 83.2% Catholic White 18%, 40.8% Other 7%, 51.1% Asian 3%, 76.1% Hispanic 24%, 38.3% Black 13%, 29.1% Blacks in DC 21.5% Mozambique 28.3% "The grand total of DC public school funding for 2007-08 is thus $1.216 billion. Divide that by the OSSE’s official enrollment figure of 49,422 students, and you arrive at an estimated total per pupil spending figure of $24,606." http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-real-cost-of-public-schools/ This compares to $5,100 per student in Iowa and North Dakota, and $3,000 per student in Korea and Singapore. So the MOST pampered student on the universe, the Black student in DC who already costs $24,606 per year to educate, almost FIVE TIMES more than a student in Iowa or Korea, STILL scores 11 NAEP math points lower (at 231) than the AVERAGE American black student, 70 points lower than a nonpublic school student in Texas, and 72 points lower than the AVERAGE White student in the SAME schools in DC (at 303). What does MOzambique do right that DC does wrong? How exactly do American Blacks benefit from this? How do WE benefit from this? Table 390.--Mathematics test scores of 13-year-olds in educational systems participating in the International Assessment of Educational Progress: 1991 _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ | | | | | Average percent correct | Percentile scores | Topic averages | Process averages |________________________________| __________________________________________________________________| _______________________________________________________| ____________________________________ | | | | | | | | | | | | |Data | | | | Country | | | | | | | | | |Numbers | | | analysis, | | | | | | | | | | | | | |and |Measure- | | statistics,|Algebra |Conceptual | | | Total | Male | Female | 1 | 5 | 10 | 90 | 95 | 99 |operations|ment |Geometry | and | and |under- |Procedural |Problem | | | | | | | | | | | | | probability|functions |standing /1|knowledge /2|solving /3 ________________________|__________|__________|__________|__________|__________| __________|__________|__________|___________|__________|__________|__________| ___________|__________|___________|____________|___________ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 ________________________|__________|__________|__________|__________|__________| __________|__________|__________|___________|__________|__________|__________| ___________|__________|___________|____________|___________ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | IAEP average............|58.3 --- | --- --- | --- --- | --- --- | --- --- | --- --- | --- --- | --- --- | --- --- |61.0 --- |46.9 --- |62.2 --- |69.1 --- |54.2 --- | 60.6 --- | 58.4 --- | 55.9 --- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Populations | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (comprehensive) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Korea...................|73.4 (0.6)|74.4 (0.9)|72.2 (1.0)|20.0 (0.0)|33.3 (1.5)| 41.3 (1.5)|96.0 (0.0)|97.3 (1.9)|100.0 (0.0)|77.4 (0.6)|59.5 (0.9)|77.4 (0.6)| 81.2 (0.7) |70.8 (0.8)| 78.3 (0.5)| 73.4 (0.7) | 68.5 (0.7) Taiwan..................|72.7 (0.7)|73.1 (0.9)|72.4 (0.9)|18.7 (1.4)|26.7 (0.0)| 35.0 (3.0)|97.3 (1.3)|98.7 (0.0)|100.0 (0.0)|74.7 (0.6)|63.7 (0.9)|76.6 (0.8)| 81.2 (0.6) |69.2 (0.9)| 74.7 (0.7)| 74.7 (0.7) | 68.6 (0.8) Switzerland /4 .........|70.8 (1.3)|72.8 (1.5)|68.7 (1.1)|30.7 (1.2)|42.7 (0.8)| 50.7 (1.9)|93.3 (1.3)|94.7 (0.0)| 98.7 (0.0)|73.6 (1.0)|62.0 (1.5)|76.6 (1.3)| 81.8 (1.1) |62.7 (1.9)| 71.7 (1.1)| 69.0 (1.4) | 71.9 (1.3) (Former) Soviet Union /5|70.2 (1.0)|70.0 (1.3)|70.3 (0.9)|20.9 (2.4)|35.2 (1.4)| 42.7 (0.8)|92.0 (0.0)|94.7 (0.0)| 98.7 (0.0)|69.2 (1.0)|59.7 (1.1)|77.6 (1.0)| 76.1 (1.3) |71.9 (1.1)| 70.3 (1.0)| 73.2 (1.2) | 66.7 (1.0) Hungary.................|68.4 (0.8)|68.5 (1.0)|68.3 (0.9)|21.3 (0.9)|32.4 (2.3)| 38.7 (1.3)|93.3 (0.0)|96.0 (0.0)| 98.7 (0.0)|69.4 (0.7)|55.1 (1.0)|73.3 (0.8)| 75.9 (0.8) |69.8 (0.9)| 69.8 (0.7)| 70.8 (0.8) | 64.2 (0.8) France..................|64.2 (0.8)|65.5 (0.9)|62.8 (0.9)|22.7 (3.0)|30.7 (0.8)| 37.3 (1.0)|89.3 (0.0)|92.0 (5.3)| 97.3 (1.3)|65.0 (0.7)|52.7 (1.0)|73.1 (0.8)| 79.3 (0.7) |57.0 (1.0)| 67.4 (0.7)| 65.7 (0.9) | 59.3 (0.8) Israel /6...............|63.1 (0.8)|64.4 (0.9)|61.8 (1.1)|21.3 (1.0)|30.7 (1.0)| 37.3 (0.2)|87.8 (2.6)|90.7 (0.0)| 96.0 (3.9)|64.8 (0.7)|47.2 (1.1)|65.8 (1.0)| 74.8 (0.8) |64.7 (1.0)| 63.8 (0.8)| 65.3 (0.9) | 59.8 (0.9) Canada /7...............|62.0 (0.6)|63.0 (0.7)|60.9 (0.6)|21.3 (0.6)|32.0 (0.0)| 37.3 (0.0)|86.7 (0.0)|91.8 (4.3)| 97.3 (1.3)|65.6 (0.6)|49.9 (0.6)|68.1 (0.7)| 76.4 (0.6) |52.7 (0.7)| 65.1 (0.6)| 61.9 (0.7) | 58.9 (0.5) Scotland................|60.6 (0.9)|60.4 (1.0)|60.8 (1.1)|21.3 (0.8)|29.0 (2.8)| 34.7 (0.0)|86.7 (0.0)|90.7 (0.0)| 96.0 (0.0)|59.7 (0.8)|51.0 (1.2)|69.6 (0.9)| 79.1 (0.8) |52.8 (1.2)| 61.8 (0.9)| 59.2 (1.0) | 60.9 (0.9) Ireland.................|60.5 (0.9)|62.6 (1.2)|58.4 (1.1)|17.8 (1.3)|26.8 (1.7)| 33.3 (2.0)|86.7 (0.0)|90.7 (0.0)| 96.0 (4.2)|65.1 (0.8)|49.4 (1.0)|59.9 (1.1)| 71.8 (1.0) |55.6 (1.1)| 61.5 (0.8)| 62.0 (1.2) | 57.9 (0.8) Slovenia................|57.1 (0.8)|58.1 (0.8)|56.1 (1.0)|21.3 (0.0)|27.1 (3.9)| 32.0 (0.1)|82.7 (0.2)|88.0 (2.6)| 94.7 (0.0)|62.2 (0.7)|43.1 (0.9)|63.1 (1.0)| 63.6 (0.8) |51.8 (1.0)| 58.5 (0.7)| 59.0 (0.9) | 53.7 (0.8) Spain /8................|55.4 (0.8)|57.1 (1.1)|53.8 (0.8)|20.3 (1.6)|28.6 (0.5)| 32.9 (2.0)|78.4 (0.8)|84.7 (1.3)| 91.9 (2.0)|60.1 (0.6)|37.9 (0.8)|60.0 (1.2)| 67.7 (0.8) |52.5 (1.2)| 58.4 (0.7)| 55.8 (0.9) | 51.9 (0.8) United States...........|55.3 (1.0)|55.8 (1.1)|54.8 (1.3)|17.3 (3.8)|24.0 (0.6)| 29.3 (0.0)|82.7 (1.3)|90.7 (0.1)| 97.3 (0.0)|61.0 (1.0)|39.5 (1.0)|54.3 (1.0)| 72.2 (1.0) |49.2 (1.6)| 57.4 (0.9)| 56.0 (1.3) | 52.3 (1.0) Jordan..................|40.4 (1.0)|41.4 (1.2)|39.1 (1.9)|13.3 (0.0)|17.6 (1.2)| 21.3 (1.5)|65.3 (3.1)|75.7 (3.3)| 89.3 (5.2)|42.8 (1.0)|32.0 (1.0)|43.5 (1.1)| 45.7 (1.0) |38.1 (1.3)| 44.9 (0.9)| 38.5 (1.2) | 37.9 (1.0) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Populations | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (with exclusions or | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | low participation) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | China /9................|80.2 (1.0)|81.7 (1.0)|78.5 (1.1)|37.0 (2.2)|49.3 (2.7)| 57.3 (3.3)|96.0 (1.3)|98.7 (1.3)|100.0 (0.0)|84.9 (0.9)|71.3 (1.5)|80.2 (1.1)| 75.4 (1.2) |82.4 (0.9)| 81.6 (1.0)| 83.0 (0.9) | 75.6 (1.2) England.................|60.6 (2.2)|60.8 (3.0)|60.4 (2.2)|18.7 (1.9)|27.4 (3.3)| 34.5 (3.7)|89.3 (0.5)|93.3 (1.3)| 97.3 (1.0)|58.5 (2.0)|51.2 (2.5)|70.3 (2.4)| 79.5 (1.8) |54.0 (2.8)| 62.0 (2.1)| 59.0 (2.6) | 60.8 (2.0) Italy /10...............|64.0 (0.9)|65.8 (1.1)|62.1 (0.9)|23.0 (1.3)|32.4 (0.9)| 36.5 (1.5)|88.0 (0.0)|91.8 (0.5)| 96.0 (0.0)|63.8 (0.8)|62.8 (1.1)|75.3 (1.0)| 71.7 (0.8) |52.6 (1.2)| 66.6 (0.8)| 62.1 (1.1) | 63.3 (0.9) Portugal................|48.3 (0.8)|48.9 (1.3)|47.9 (0.9)|17.3 (0.9)|23.9 (1.3)| 28.0 (0.5)|74.7 (0.9)|80.6 (1.7)| 89.7 (2.6)|52.1 (0.8)|31.9 (0.7)|49.0 (1.3)| 68.6 (1.0) |43.1 (1.1)| 51.5 (0.9)| 47.1 (1.0) | 46.4 (0.7) Brazil, Sao Paulo.......|37.0 (0.8)|37.9 (0.9)|36.2 (0.9)|10.3 (2.1)|16.7 (1.0)| 18.7 (0.9)|62.7 (0.7)|70.7 (1.5)| 82.7 (0.7)|40.9 (0.8)|24.1 (0.5)|34.3 (1.5)| 49.7 (1.0) |35.6 (1.1)| 38.5 (0.9)| 36.5 (1.1) | 36.0 (0.6) Brazil, Fortaleza.......|32.4 (0.6)|35.2 (0.9)|30.5 (0.6)|10.9 (0.4)|14.7 (0.6)| 17.3 (0.3)|56.8 (2.1)|65.3 (0.6)| 80.8 (3.5)|35.8 (0.7)|20.5 (0.5)|28.6 (0.8)| 43.8 (0.8) |32.3 (0.9)| 35.3 (0.7)| 30.8 (0.8) | 31.0 (0.5) Mozambique, Maputo, and | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Beira..................|28.3 (0.3)|28.8 (0.5)|27.8 (0.3)|11.5 (1.1)|16.2 (0.6)| 18.7 (0.1)|44.6 (1.4)|50.0 (3.2)| 60.0 (2.2)|33.8 (0.4)|20.1 (0.3)|29.2 (0.5)| 35.4 (0.6) |20.5 (0.5)| 34.0 (0.4)| 22.9 (0.4) | 28.2 (0.4) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Populations (Canadian) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Quebec-French...........|68.7 (0.7)|69.8 (1.0)|67.5 (0.8)|29.3 (1.4)|39.7 (1.8)| 45.3 (2.8)|89.3 (0.0)|93.3 (0.0)| 96.4 (2.7)|72.3 (0.6)|56.4 (1.0)|78.1 (0.8)| 81.1 (0.6) |58.4 (1.0)| 72.6 (0.7)| 68.0 (0.8) | 65.3 (0.8) Saskatchewan-French.....|67.5 (1.0)|68.8 (1.5)|66.3 (1.4)|32.0 (1.3)|36.0 (2.9)| 46.5 (3.7)|87.8 (3.9)|90.7 (2.5)| 96.0 (1.3)|73.9 (1.0)|53.8 (1.3)|69.2 (1.3)| 76.0 (1.2) |61.6 (1.4)| 70.1 (1.2)| 69.3 (1.0) | 62.9 (1.1) British Columbia........|66.2 (0.7)|66.8 (0.8)|65.4 (1.0)|25.3 (0.7)|35.6 (2.1)| 41.3 (0.0)|90.7 (4.0)|94.7 (3.6)| 97.3 (1.3)|69.3 (0.7)|54.1 (0.9)|69.6 (0.9)| 79.9 (0.7) |60.2 (0.8)| 68.5 (0.7)| 68.0 (0.8) | 61.8 (0.7) Quebec-English..........|65.7 (0.9)|65.7 (1.6)|65.7 (0.8)|23.0 (2.5)|33.8 (3.9)| 41.3 (1.3)|90.7 (0.0)|94.7 (2.4)| 98.7 (0.0)|68.7 (0.9)|53.5 (1.1)|70.6 (1.0)| 78.1 (1.0) |59.6 (1.1)| 68.3 (0.9)| 66.6 (1.0) | 61.9 (1.0) Alberta.................|64.0 (0.7)|64.5 (0.8)|63.4 (0.8)|23.5 (2.6)|33.3 (0.0)| 38.7 (3.5)|88.0 (0.3)|92.0 (1.8)| 97.3 (0.0)|68.6 (0.7)|54.3 (0.9)|67.2 (0.8)| 80.0 (0.7) |52.1 (0.9)| 68.3 (0.7)| 62.6 (0.8) | 61.0 (0.7) Manitoba-French.........|63.1 (0.6)|64.5 (1.1)|61.9 (0.8)|26.7 (2.7)|34.7 (2.4)| 41.3 (0.0)|85.3 (0.0)|89.3 (0.0)| 94.7 (0.0)|67.1 (0.7)|48.5 (0.7)|66.6 (0.8)| 75.0 (0.8) |58.5 (0.7)| 64.6 (0.7)| 66.0 (0.7) | 58.2 (0.6) Saskatchewan-English....|62.0 (0.7)|63.2 (0.9)|60.7 (1.0)|21.3 (1.3)|29.7 (4.5)| 37.3 (5.8)|86.7 (3.8)|90.7 (0.0)| 96.0 (0.0)|66.1 (0.6)|49.6 (0.9)|62.9 (1.2)| 78.3 (0.7) |54.6 (0.8)| 64.0 (0.7)| 64.4 (0.8) | 57.2 (0.7) New Brunswick-French....|60.6 (0.4)|60.5 (0.6)|60.7 (0.6)|20.3 (1.3)|30.2 (3.1)| 36.0 (0.0)|85.1 (1.3)|89.3 (0.0)| 93.3 (0.0)|65.4 (0.5)|46.5 (0.5)|64.5 (0.5)| 72.3 (0.5) |54.3 (0.4)| 63.7 (0.4)| 62.6 (0.4) | 55.3 (0.4) Nova Scotia.............|59.7 (0.6)|60.7 (0.9)|58.8 (0.8)|20.0 (0.0)|29.3 (1.2)| 35.1 (1.5)|85.3 (0.0)|90.7 (0.0)| 97.3 (0.0)|62.9 (0.6)|47.3 (0.8)|63.7 (0.7)| 73.9 (0.7) |53.5 (0.8)| 61.8 (0.6)| 60.2 (0.6) | 57.1 (0.6) Newfoundland............|58.9 (0.6)|57.8 (0.7)|59.9 (0.8)|18.7 (1.3)|29.3 (0.4)| 34.7 (0.0)|84.0 (2.1)|88.0 (5.8)| 96.0 (2.7)|61.9 (0.6)|45.1 (0.7)|65.1 (0.9)| 72.4 (0.7) |52.7 (0.6)| 61.8 (0.7)| 60.3 (0.7) | 54.3 (0.6) Ontario-English.........|58.3 (0.8)|59.3 (1.0)|57.4 (0.9)|20.0 (1.2)|29.3 (0.0)| 34.7 (0.0)|84.0 (2.0)|89.3 (1.3)| 96.0 (1.3)|61.8 (0.8)|46.2 (0.9)|63.4 (1.0)| 73.6 (0.8) |49.5 (1.0)| 60.8 (0.8)| 58.5 (0.9) | 55.5 (0.8) Manitoba-English........|58.0 (0.8)|58.0 (0.9)|57.9 (1.0)|20.0 (1.7)|28.0 (2.7)| 33.3 (4.2)|82.7 (0.0)|86.7 (0.0)| 96.0 (3.5)|62.5 (0.7)|45.6 (0.9)|58.4 (0.9)| 73.6 (0.9) |50.8 (1.0)| 60.5 (0.8)| 58.8 (0.9) | 54.4 (0.7) New Brunswick-English...|57.7 (0.5)|58.3 (0.7)|57.1 (0.7)|20.0 (0.0)|27.5 (1.6)| 33.3 (0.0)|82.7 (0.0)|89.3 (2.0)| 96.0 (0.0)|62.4 (0.5)|51.3 (0.6)|62.4 (0.6)| 71.0 (0.6) |43.2 (0.6)| 61.4 (0.5)| 55.4 (0.6) | 56.4 (0.5) Ontario-French..........|53.5 (0.6)|53.5 (0.8)|53.5 (0.8)|18.7 (0.2)|25.3 (1.1)| 32.0 (0.0)|76.0 (3.0)|82.7 (0.0)| 92.0 (2.3)|58.0 (0.6)|38.8 (0.7)|59.0 (1.0)| 69.0 (0.7) |44.7 (0.9)| 56.6 (0.7)| 54.1 (0.8) | 49.6 (0.6) ________________________|__________|__________|__________|__________|__________| __________|__________|__________|___________|__________|__________|__________| ___________|__________|___________|____________|___________ 1/ Conceptual understanding questions analyzed students' abilities in understanding of mathematical facts and concepts. 2/ Procedural knowledge tasks required students to apply knowledge and concepts in solving routine problems using procedures taught in the classroom. 3/ Problem solving questions required the student to apply several skills to a unique situation. These tasks usually involved multiple steps. 4/ Fifteen cantons. 5/ Schools in 14 republics, where instruction is in Russian. 6/ Schools where instruction is in Hebrew. 7/ Nine provinces. 8/ Schools where instruction is in Spanish, in all regions except Cataluna. 9/ Twenty provinces and independent cities. 10/ Emilia-Romagna province only. ---Data not available. NOTE.--Standard errors appear in parentheses. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, International Assessment of Educational Progress, "Learning Mathematics," by Educational Testing Service. (This table was prepared February 1992.) With 12th grade Blacks in South Africa scoring 320 (compared to TIMSS 2003 8th grade math scores for Ghana of 276, and for South Africa 263), a score of 690 is five standard deviations higher than their average score. Even with a perfect Gaussian distribution (which scores this low most likely are not), only 0.00003% of these students would score this high. So of the million Black students in South Africa, none of them would score as high as the AVERAGE student in Singapore. Ditto for American Blacks, IF they score as high as the Black students of South Africa. But they probably don't. Blacks in DC scored lower than Mozambique in IAEP not too long ago, so perhaps American Blacks DO NOT score this high at the 12th grade level. Myung Bak Lee's favorite personality is Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson hated lawyers and set up a system which precluded them from taking control of our government. It worked for a long time here, and the president of Korea, to prevent the same from happening there, followed through on his promise to shut down most of the law schools in Korea and sent the students to engineering schools. You can bet that he followed Albert Gonzalez, who managed to get a Harvard law degree without ever getting a second grade understanding of the US Constitution, closely enough to see right through this scam. Educators from all around the world (even including China) are visiting Korea to see what they're doing right, going back to their own countries and implementing changes to their own systems, in a way that we haven't even begun to discuss, much less understand, much less implement. Our fall makes the Fall of the Roman Empire look like child's play by comparison. "Do you really think that low or high scores on academic achievement tests like TIMSS and PISA are determined by this alleged "inferior" or "superior" "genetic stock" just because of this "known and published IQ's of nations" rather than by differences in environmental factors like educational systems, poverty, and the degree to which a culture - including young person culture - puts academic achievement at the top of the list for things to achieve? " It seems like you're promoting the myth that there are no superior genetic stock in the same breath you're promoting the myth that there IS a superior genetic stock in Israel? But as long as you ask, and since YOU raised the point about Israel's poor performance on standardized tests, Professor Lynn generously puts Israel's IQ at 94 (quite a bit lower than Charles Murray's estimate of 106). But when IQ's are correlated with IAEP reading scores, Israel is such a far outlier that it must be removed in order to get a decent Pearson Coefficient. Their score of 439 is more in the range of countries with IQ's of 87 rather than 94. This is also the pattern on all other standardized tests. As grist for the mill, the World Health Organization also rated their track record on the highway and found that they have a safety record worse than India, Ghana, and South Africa (239 deaths per 100,000 vehicles, vs. 145, 199. and 174, respectively). In 1995, South Africa was the only country which scored lower than us in TIMSS math, with a score of 356, compared to our dismal 461. But 15% of South Africans are Whites, mostly from the Netherlands, who scored 560 (99 points higher than us). If Whites in South Africa score in the range of their brethren in the Netherlands, then the 85% who're Black must have scored 320. And if American blacks that year scored in that range, then the math score for American White Protestants must have been in the range of 590 (30 points higher than the Netherlands, and 20 points higher than the previous estimate of 570). American White Catholics must also have scored about 470, or 20 points higher than the prior estimate. So I think the following is a more accurate estimate of the race breakdown of TIMSS math scores, except that I'm fairly well convinced that we would have scored even lower had we participated in TIMSS 2008 as Russia and Iran and the Netherlands did: Protestant White 35%, 590 Catholic White 18%, 470 Other 7%, 423 Asian 3%, 614 Hispanic 24%, 336 Black 13%, 320 This increases the Asian/Black gap from 274 to 294 which is more consistent with tests like SAT and GRE and ACT. Why, Paul, would you obfuscate this discussion about standardized math scores as it relates to our public education policy, by raising the irrelevant issue of Jews or the holocaust? According to Jewish sources themselves, less than 1% of Americans are Jewish, and most of them put their children in private schools which, as you know, have not outlawed school prayer (yet). Why should we base OUR education policy on a teensy minority of less than 1/4% of students who, if we DID emulate, would probably cause school prayer to be restored to our mainly Christian public schools? I agree 100% with what Charles Murray wrote in the following article: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/10/06/charles-murray/down-with-the-four-year- college-degree/ I'm sure you have zero proof he's wrong. Gee, Paul, if you don't want an honest answer, don't ask the questions. If most of my posts here weren't already censored, I would gladly provide a complete response. But since they are, this will suffice as a partial response that hopefully will pass the censors. I'm certain that you're one of the great unwashed who believes that the Civil Rights Act was a boon to Blacks, but NONE of the Blacks I know would agree with you, and I see NOTHING of it that was of benefit to them. Before this grossly unconstitutional act was passed and before they were FORCED to integrate with Whites: 1) Their family purchasing power was three times greater before the act than today. 2) Less than a quarter of black children lived in fatherless households, compared to more than three quarters today (more than 80% now, per some recent studies). 3) Less than a quarter of black men under the age of 32 had been imprisoned in their lives, compared to more than three quarters today. 4) Less than 30 per 100,000 black male youths were murdered, compared to more than 300 today. 5) Their AIDS death rate was infinitely lower than it is today. If you see a pony in all that bs, where exactly is it? Do you disagree with the College Board report cited by Charles Murray that only 10% benefit from all this "education"? Why? Where's your PROOF that it's wrong? I know you hate the idea of correlating IQ and test scores, and that the last thing you want to know is the Pearson Coefficient for the correlation, but permit me to expand this by letting you know that, right out of the box, with no correction at all to known and published IQ's of nations, the Pearson Coefficient with IAEP reading is greater than 0.85. Surely you just can't wait to hear what it is for IAEP or TIMSS math? As one of the early respondents to the Black Exile Poll, you are entitled to a FREE beautifully bound report of the final results. To claim your copy, please reply with "free Black Exile Poll" in the subject header. Sincerely, John Knight Paul, it's clear that you do believe, strongly, that all of these changes in education you claim were made since 1995 have had a positive effect on our kids. There's nothing wrong with being an advocate, but I'd really like to know what solid evidence you have that you're correct. Every bit of evidence I'm aware of, even the biased and distorted and politically corrected NAEP scores, indicate that our education system has gotten CONSIDERABLY worse since 1995, and that these changes might be PART of the reason. If we made any changes intended to improve our 12th graders, then by necessity those changes should have manifested themselves by the 8th grade In terms of teacher qualifications, it appears we are STILL going backwards. Exhibit 6.3 on the TIMSS science report shows that STILL only 9% of our teachers actually majored or "specialized" in science. HOW CAN THEY EVEN BE EXPECTED TO BE ABLE TO TEACH SCIENCE??? This compares to 83% in Kazakhstan (of all places), 48% in Russia, 39% in Taipei, 69% in Germany, 43% in Iran, and 71% in Latvia. Where's the beef. Where's your proof, not just something you ass-u-me, that our kids improved even ONE point? Nonexistent? Yes. The same holds true for math. Exhibit 6.3, pg. 251, of the 2007 TIMSS math report reveals that only 42% of our MATH teachers even bothered to MAJOR in math, compared to MORE than 90% in almost third world countries like Armenia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia, Syria,and Tunisia. And in the higest scoring nations? 62% in Hong Kong, 81% in Taipei, 76% in Japan, 69% in Singapore, and 99% in Russia. HOW CAN WE POSSIBLY COMPETE WITH THEM IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY with such a miserable opinion about math education while even war-torn and bankrupt Bosnia manages to provide math teachers to 96% of their students? Sure, I could focus ONLY on the 16 point increase in our 8th graders' TIMSS math score between 1995 and 2007 (from 492 to 508) and convince myself that our non- math math teachers are somehow doing a better job, but ONLY IN A VACUUM. I could argue that because Singapore's score decreased 16 points to "only" 593 (still more than s standard deviation higher than us) that we might be gaining on Singapore. But I just can't ignore that Taipei's score increased 13 points, Korea's increased 17 points, Hong Kong's increased 4 points, England 16 points, Lithuania 34 points, and Colombia 47 points. Thanks for making those great points, Haim. "One hardly needs any proof, although proof there is (in spades), that the attempt to put all students on a college track does a great deal of harm. Most students do not want to go to college and should not have to. I have pointed out to this forum, before you joined, JK, that once upon a time (still in living memory, though barely), that lawyers did not have to attend law school to practice law, and accountants did not have to attend college, at all. (Further back in time, even lawyers did not have to attend college.) " The president of Korea recently outlawed law schools in Korea. Why? "We need more engineers, not more lawyers". Our Founding Fathers would be disgraced if they knew that 70% of the world's lawyers are in the very country whose entire law was intended to be ONE PAGE. Today, we have 27,000 laws just on how to raise and ship cabbage, and 23,000 gun control laws, compared to the ONE gun control law they "proposed" [read: spilt blood to protect]: "A well-regulated militia, necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Our education system was not designed for and cannot work with Blacks, and Blacks know it. Paul's claim that American Blacks score higher than African Blacks is based not on our success with educating them, but because American Blacks are about 25% Caucasian (according to the Bell Curve). Contrary to what Paul wrote, we DO have a data point for African blacks, from TIMSS 2003 where math scores for Ghana were 276, and for South Africa was 263. If the 75% of American Blacks are from genetic stock equivalent to Ghana-like territory, and the Caucasian part is equivalent to the Netherlands (who scored 536), then we would expect them to score 341. Instead, they score around 320, which is 21 points lower than we would expect based on their racial composition, yet one more indicator that trying to force our education system on such an unwilling host HURTS, not helps, them. The problem is that this is way too conservative, because all of the other standardized tests show that these racial gaps skyrocket between 8th and 12th grade. This is most likely how our AMAZINGLY LOW 12th grade TIMSS math score broke down by race in 1995 [read, this is about the only way to explain it]: Protestant White 35%, 570 Catholic White 18%, 450 Other 7%, 388 Asian 3%, 593 Hispanic 24%, 374 Black 13%, 356 8th grade TIMSS 2007 as reported by NCES Protestant White 35%, 563 Catholic White 18%, 480 Other 7%, 500 Asian 3%, 549 Hispanic 24%, 475 Black 13%, 457 Estimate for 12th grade TIMSS math in 2008 had we taken the test Protestant White 35%, 545 Catholic White 18%, 360 Other 7%, 349 Asian 3%, 567 Hispanic 24%, 336 Black 13%, 320 Paul, until we make some foundational changes in our education infrastructure, I cannot believe that one single student in public education has or will have improved even one single point,and that instead it's still a lead sled to .ell. The above is very generous. http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa? forumID=206&threadID=2265070&messageID=7452806#7452806 On all charts I have identified the US overall average > score as well as the separate scores for the ethnic groups > being discussed (as horizontal reference lines). The other > countries do not supply race data so keep in mind that we > are comparing parts of the US score to the entire score for > a whole country. > > The largest group are whites making up 54% of the test > population. Followed by hispanics (24%), blacks (13%), > asians 3% and other (7%). > > The first chart is the raw score chart, most pertinent to > Paul's statements. The second two charts show the percentage > of students scoring above 80% and above 90%. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001_suptables.pdf TIMSS scores for US broken down by race Table E-14 Even if we make the most optimistic assumption that in 12th grade TIMSS math, the 13% who were American blacks scored in the range of South Africa, or 356, that the 12% who were Hispanics score higher than Blacks in proportion to SAT scores, or 374, that the 3% who are American Asians score only 600, and that the 72% who are White score in the range of the average for Western Europe, or 540, we would expect our TIMSS score to be 498. Yet it was only 461, which is 37 points lower than the lowest possiblility we could expect. Ditto for TIMSS science. With Blacks at 349, Hispanics at 366, Asians at 600, and Whites at 559, we would expect a score of 510. Instead, we scord only 480, which is 30 points lower than this low expectation. How can it be explained? If these estimates for math scores for Asians, Hispanics, Blacks are correct, then the only possibility is that the AVERAGE for American Whites was 489. If the average for American Whites is correct (and it seems that as much as we spend for education, this OUGHT to be the case), then the scores for Blacks and Hispanics must be much lower than for South Africa (210 and 221 respectively). Ditto for our science scores. Either Whites score 516, or 43 points lower than the average for Western Europe, or Blacks and Hispanics score 233 and 245, many points lower than South Africa. These estimates for Asians are very low. They most likely score much higher, which would increase this gap even more (only slightly, though, because there are fewer of them). So the reason the gap between public and nonpublic schools skyrocketed from 9 NAEP math points to 18 is cherrypicking? OR the reason for the original 9 point gap is cherrypicking? Or this gap doubled because nonpublic schools got better at cherrypicking? At precisely the point that the federal government got even more involved in education than they already were is precisely the point that they got even better at cherrypicking? Is cherrypicking also responsible for our EIGHTH GRADE TIMSS math score increasing only 16 points (from 492 in 1995 to 508 in 2007), compared to 17 points in Korea, 16 points in England, 34 points in Lithuania, and 47 points in Colombia (from 332 to 380)? Note that in EIGHTH GRADE math, the US is on the low end of student pariticipation, at 92%, compared to 100% in Japan, Scotland, and Cyprus; 99% in Malaysia, New Zealand, Taipei, England, Italy; and 98% in Korea, the Netherlands, and Norway. Yet only 6% of our eighth graders reached the advanced benchmark in math (625), compared to 8% in England and Russia, 10% in Hungary, 26% in Japan, 31% in Hong Kong, 40% in Korea and Singapore, and and 45% in Taipei. Is this becuase of cherrypicking? Guess what? I AGREE. Note that our TIMSS science score DROPPED 7 points recently, between 2003 and 2007. Cherrypicking? What kind of a trend do you believe that portends for our 12th grade scores? While our science score did increase 7 points between 1995 and 2007, the score in Korea also increased 7 points, suggesting no progress in science education relative to Korea. Ditto for Slovenia (which increased 24 points), Hong Kong (20 points), Russia (7 points), Lithuania (55 points), Jordan (31 points), Colombia (54 points),and Ontario (30 points). Our pariticipation rates in science were equivalent to our low rates in math. Either the changes we made in the last 1-2 decades made our education system worse, or a LOT of our *key* global economic competitors made theirs MUCH better. "> Here's the sixty four thousand dollar question: What > percent of the 202,112 American students who PASS the > calculus exams are just DOING calculus, and what percent do > YOU think actually UNDERSTAND calculus? Show scientific data that actually measures the distinction, and we'll see. " THis wasn't a rhetorical question. You've obviously done a lot of research in this area, and it really would be nice to get your input on the difference: what percent of these 202,112 students do you believe can DO calculus, and what percent do you believe UNDERSTAND calculus? While you're at it, it would also be nice if you would explain the DOUBLING of the gap between private and public schools in NAEP math SINCE all of these federally mandated changes in public education (which presumably were not applied to any private education systems)? This education gap is not small. It's ALMOST the size of the gap between Whites and Blacks, and at the current rate, it will be BIGGER in the next 16 years. Paul wrote: "The total is that 324,865 high school senior aged people in the US took I'm not sure I understand your point, Wayne--but when you say "learn at school", what you skip over is that this is precisely the problem revealed by TIMSS. Before this, I was already suspicious of what public education in the US was doing wrong, but had no proof. The simple fact that scores of our 12th graders are a standard deviation lower than our 8th graders, while it's exact opposite for so many other nations, suggests to me that if this CAN be called learning, they must be learning the wrong thing. On top of that, as a parent who has to re-educate my children after every public school classroom day, I have no idea how anyone can succeed at it. What public schools teach today is the exact opposite of what our Founding Fathers based "free" public education on [read: the entire purpose of the education system was to promote Christian values]. In one form or another, this has been going on for 5,000 years, and our very recent banning of school prayer (in 1963) has produced far worse results than even I might have imagined.the exams in 2010. Passing is defined as scoring 3 or better. Note that 55.6% of those who took the AB exam scored 3 or better. This means that about 136,702 people passed the AB exam with a 3 or better. Note that 82.8% of those who took the BC exam scored 3 or better. This means that about 65,410 people passed the BC exam with a 3 or better. About 202,112 people passed the calculus exams." This is what a Japanese math teacher said during TIMSS 1996: "About 20 percent of students are able to both do and understand. Almost all students are able to do calculus, although they may not understand it. I am referring to science students here. As for the humanities students, all those that have taken math are able to do calculus, whether or not they understand it. But very few students understand the concept of change in calculus. That is why I think that there is an element of the horse learning to pull out the card when hearing two thumps. I do not think that this is a good way to teach math. I dislike this immensely. But I forget that and teach." ALL of Japanese high school students, including humanities students, are able to DO calculus. But only 20% understand it. Here's the sixty four thousand dollar question: What percent of the 202,112 American students who PASS the calculus exams are just DOING calculus, and what percent UNDERSTAND calculus? To put this question into perspective, I discovered very recently at a college reunion that one of my classmates, the one of two who was selected by the school as the TOP academic student that year, whose name is emblazoned on the side of a rock, could DO calculus, but STILL did not UNDERSTAND it the way the 20% of Japanese students UNDERSTAND it. "The myth that we spend less on education than other countries is a lie. We spend more in most cases and more than many of those countries that have better results. Our mistake is that because we are so busy working and minding our businesses and families we have become ignorant at where educationalists have taken this whole thing. And we have become ignorant to many things, not just educational policy." There's actually a strong inverse correlation, both country to country, and state to state, between academic achievement and education spending per student. The more a country or state spends for education, the lower the score. Washington, DC, consistently spends more per student for education than any other state, city, or country, and consisently scores dead last, while Iowa and North Dakota spend one third to one fifth as much and score at the top on almost all tests. Korea spends 3% of GDP for public education and scores 105 TIMSS points at the EIGHTH GRADE level higher than us, at almost 11%. Once you know these end points of the equation, figuring out the problem is easy (but not so politically correct). Since we didn't take 12th grade TIMSS in 2008, we can only compare our 1995 score with those countries who took TIMSS in both 1995 and 2008, namely Russia, Italy, Slovenia, and Sweden. We scored 450 in advanced math, which is 87 points lower than Russia, 70 points lower than Italy, 21 points lower than Slovenia, and 30 points lower than Sweden. IF our academic performance since then hasn't changed relative to Russia, then we would have scored 474, if it hasn't changed relative to Italy, we would have scored 379--relative to Slovenia, 436, and relative to Sweden 382. This average of 418 is the most optimistic assessment, as the widening gap between private and public schools from 9 to 18 NAEP points suggests that recent changes to federal education policy actually caused public education to get much worse. "With the latter, in the US that percentage is around 15% - higher than probably every other country on the planet outside of possibly those 4 exceptional East Asian countries of Japan, South Korea, Chinese Taipei, and Singapore." Do you know why nobody believes you, Paul? Because our TOP TEN PERCENT in 1995 scored only 485 (with a standard error of 6.1). This compares to 612 in France, 575 in Switzerland, 567 in Canada, 550 in Germany, 513 in Greece, 589 in Australia, 537 in Austria (a VERY low scoring European nation), 582 in Denmark, 629 in Slovenia, and 520 in Italy. This is from Table 5.2 on the final 1995 TIMSS report. Our TOP 10% scored TWO STANDARD DEVIATIONS lower than Slovenia's top 10%, and more than a standard deviation lower than almost any other nation who took TIMSS. What this means is that less than 2% of our top ten percent score as high as the AVERAGE for the top ten percent of students in Slovenia and France posted June 3, 2011 at 4:00 pm http://www.nctm.org/resources/content.aspx?id=1580 High School Calculus in the United States and in Japan by Thomas W. Judson In Japan, as in the United States, calculus is a gateway course that students must pass to study science or engineering. Japanese educators often voice complaints similar to those that we made about students' learning of calculus in the 1970s and 1980s. They believe that many students learn methods and templates for working entrance-examination problems without learning the concepts of calculus. University professors report that the mathematical preparation of students is declining and that even though Japanese middle school students excelled in mathematics in TIMSS-R, these same students expressed a strong dislike for the subject. Japan has a national curriculum that is tightly controlled by the Ministry of Education and Science. In Japan, grades K–12 are divided into elementary school, middle school, and high school; students must pass rigorous entrance examinations to enter good high schools and universities. After entering high school, students choose either a mathematics and science track or a humanities and social science track. Students in the science track take suugaku 3 (calculus) during their last year of high school; most of them take a more rigorous calculus course at the university. The course curricula for AP Calculus BC and suugaku 3 are very similar. The most noticeable differences are that Japanese students study only geometric series and do not study differential equations. The epsilon-delta definition of limit does not appear in either curriculum. In the spring and summer of 2000, Professor Toshiyuki Nishimori of Hokkaido University and I studied United States and Japanese students' understanding of the concepts of calculus and their ability to solve traditional calculus problems. We selected two above-average high schools for our study, one in Portland, Oregon, and one in Sapporo, Japan. Our investigation involved 18 students in Portland and 26 students in Japan. Of the 16 Portland students who took the BC examination, six students scored a 5. We tested 75 calculus students in Sapporo; however, we concentrated our study on 26 students in the A class. The other two classes, the B and C groups, were composed of students of lower ability. Each student took two written examinations. The two groups of students that we studied were not random samples of high school calculus students from Japan and the United States, but we believe that they are representative of above-average students. We interviewed each student about his or her background, goals, and abilities and carefully discussed the examination problems with them. Since we did not expect Japanese students to be familiar with calculators, we prohibited their use on the examinations. However, the students in Portland had made significant use of calculators in their course and might have been at a disadvantage if they did not have access to calculators. For that reason, we attempted to choose problems that were calculator independent. However, some problems on the second examinations required a certain amount of algebraic calculation. We used problems from popular calculus-reform textbooks on the first examination. These problems required a sound understanding of calculus but little or no algebraic computation. For example, in one problem from the Harvard Calculus Project, a vase was to be filled with water at a constant rate. We asked students to graph the depth of the water against time and to indicate the points at which concavity changed. We also asked students where the depth grew most quickly and most slowly and to estimate the ratio between the two growth rates at these depths. We found no significant difference between the two groups on the first examination. The Portland students performed as expected on calculus-reform-type problems; however, the Sapporo A students did equally well. Indeed, the Sapporo A group performed better than we had expected. We were somewhat surprised, since the Japanese students had no previous experience with such problems. The performance of Japanese students on the first examination may suggest that bright students can perform well on conceptual problems if they have sufficient training and experience in working such problems as those on the university entrance examinations. The problems on the second examination were more traditional and required good algebra skills. For example, we told students that the function f(x) = x3+ ax2 + bx assumes the local minimum value—(2 )/9 at x = 1/—and asked them to determine a and b. We then asked them to find the local maximum value of f(x) and to compute the volume generated by revolving the region bounded by the x-axis and the curve y = f(x) about the x-axis. The Sapporo A students scored much higher than the Portland students did on the second examination. In fact, the Portland group performed at approximately the same level as the Sapporo C group and significantly below the Sapporo B group. Several Japanese students said in interviews that they found that certain problems on the second examination were routine, yet no American student was able to completely solve these problems. The Portland students had particular difficulty with algebraic expressions that contained radicals. Several students reported that they worked slowly to avoid making mistakes, possibly because they were accustomed to using calculators instead of doing hand computations. Students from both countries were intelligent and highly motivated, and they excelled in mathematics; however, differences were evident in their performances, especially in algebraic calculation. One of the best Portland students correctly began to solve a problem on the second examination but gave up when he was confronted with algebraic calculations that involved radicals. On his examination paper he wrote, "Need calculator again." Perhaps the largest difference between the two groups lies in the different high school cultures. Japanese students work hard to prepare for the university entrance examinations and are generally discouraged from holding part-time jobs. In contrast, students in the United States often hold part-time jobs in high school, and many are involved in such extracurricular activities as sports or clubs. Thomas Judson is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. He is interested in mathematics education and has spent parts of the last eight summers visiting Japan to learn Japanese and study mathematics education there. oops. I missed your post about the TCI on http://timss.bc.edu/timss_advanced/downloads/T08_TR_Chapter4.pdf Based on that, we have the following average percent of students who take the five TIMSS calculus topics: Armenia .3% Iran 6.2% Italy 18.5% Lebanon 5.6% Netherlands 3.3% Norway 10.5% Philippines .4% Slovenia 35.6% Sweden 12.2% You might argue that your estimate that our TCI is 15% puts the US in a good light, eh? If only we'd participated in 2008 TIMSS for the 12th grade. Since we didn't, we can only compare our prior scores to the countries which participated in both 1995 and 2008, namely Russia, Italy, Slovenia, and Sweden. Back then, we scored 87 points lower than Russia, 70 points lower than Italy, 21 points lower than Slovenia, and 30 points lower than Sweden. If the state of our education system since then hasn't changed relative to Russia, we would have scored 474, relative to Italy, we would have scored 379, relative to Slovenia 436, and relative to Sweden 382, for an average of 418. This means that only the Philippines would have scoredlower than us (but only 63 points lower). Just for grins, note that the Pearson Coefficient for the correlation between TCI and math scores is 0.0007, which means there is NO correlation. F'rinstance, the TCI for Slovenia was 35.6% but they scored MUCH higher than the Philippines whose TCI was only 0.4%. So it's a gross error to just assume that a low TCI will automatically produce a high score, OR that our LOW score is DUE TO a high TCI. "How many countries outside of possibly those 4 East Asian countries do better than this in terms of universal calculus education measured via percentages of the ENTIRE 18-year-old population of the country? Probably 0." I had a chance to consult with some Chinese educators and physicists who came to the US to compare our education systems, and to set up PCB manufacturing there. We know that they concluded that they would be teaching calculus to all Chinese students. But we don't have any real solid data on the REAL academic skills of all Chinese, only that of a few areas, like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. IF the math skills of all 1.2 billion Chinese are on par with those three countries, then there are TENS OF MILLIONS of Chinese who outperform our top 5 percent who PASS calculus. I know that the College Board administered GRE there and claimed that the Chinese were cheating (because their scores were so high). When they discovered that Chinese students actually knew the material, they quietly dropped their claim about them cheating. 131 million Russians have about the same problem we do, which is public education. Based on my travels in Russia, though, I don't believe they could not have accomplished so much without having once had an excellent education system, particularly a good calculus education. Since Russia didn't provide data for their TCI for calculus on EXhibit 1.12 of 12th grade TIMSS, it's just a guess that they're on par with the following countries: http://timss.bc.edu/timss_advanced/downloads/TA08_International_Report.pdf There are five calculus topics taught in the following countries. The percentage of students who have completed those five topics is as follows: 66% of students in Armenia complete those five topics 95% of students in Iran do also 94% of students in Italy 95% of students in Lebanon 93% of students in the Netherlands 96% of students in Norway 64% of students in the Philippines 88% Slovenia 95% Sweden ----------------- 15% US (per YOUR estimate) Needless to say, I just don't believe you when you say: "In fact, the coverage indices themselves for any advanced math for so many other countries held up as superior to the US are actually lower than even just these percentages above for the US that address even just calculus." Your own calculations above put this figure for our TCI at 15%, at most. Compare that to Norway who claims in an international report, TIMSS, that 96% of their students are taught these five calculus topics. From another TIMSS report, a Japanese calculus teacher estimates that only two thirds of his students actually understand calculus. If this is true in Norway too, then 62% of Norwegians UNDERSTAND calculus compared to only 5% of ours. One of the allegedly smartest Ph.D.'s in the world, Alberto Gonzalez, got a law degree from Harvard, but his Harvard classmates unanimously declared in a center splash in the N.Y. Times that he didn't have a third grade understanding of the U.S. Constitution. Which do you believe now? A Harvard Ph.D., or his classmates? Here's a clue: <begin quote> At UC Berkeley, where it's called "comprehensive review," the system [read: inviduous sytemic discrimination] is under attack. A study last month commissioned by UC Board of Regents Chairman John Moores and reported by the Los Angeles Times found that in 2002 Berkeley admitted 375 students with SAT scores between 600 and 1000, and rejected about 3,200 students with SAT scores above 1400. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Data subsequently released by the University of California show that UC Berkeley and UCLA in the past two years collectively have rejected more than 10,000 applicants who scored above 1400 (out of a possible 1600) on the SAT. That's nearly half the applicants in that category who applied to Berkeley, and nearly a third of those who applied to UCLA. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Critics of the policies have pointed to a report by John Moore, a member of the University of California System Board of Regents. Moore's report suggests UC- Berkeley only accepted about 56 percent of applicants with SAT scores higher than 1400. <end quote> read: there are a LOT of Ph.D.'s who're even dumber than Alberto. "I'm going with the only real and true experts on all this, the PhDs in mathematical statistics, mathematical psychology, and psychometrics, not with those who reject their expertise." So if these experts tell you there is no causation between IQ and salaries, and you discover that the Pearson Coefficient for the correlation between IQs and salaries is 0.912, what would you conclude? btw, Wikipedia would be the WORST place in the world to learn math, particularly probabilities and statistics. "It seems that your original contention was that people don't want to pay for public school, in fact, they want to replace it with a private system." The irony now is that most of those who pay for it get NOTHING in return for it. Take for example parents with children in private schools who pay exactly the same in taxes for public schools as parents with children in public schools. What do they get back in return? A lot of grief and insults is about all that can be measured (unless you factor in the contribution that education dollars have had to subsidizing the world's murder capitals, like Washington, DC, Detroit, New Orleans, and lil ole' Gary, Indiana). This is patently unfair. It's precisely the opposite of what our Founding Fathers envisioned. Almost no other civilized nation engages in such invidious discrimination. Those nations where parents have a choice between public and private schools (and thus have far more private schools than us per capita) are now eating our lunch in the global economy [read: those are the nations whose TIMSS scores are more than 100 points higher than ours, and even hold more of the top American patents than Americans themselves hold]. That's consistent with my own observations. What we call college level calculus here is considered 8th grade math in Korea. And I was really surprised at how many very young Korean students carry around an English version of an American college level economics book. They are more impressive (and probably more accurate) than my own college economics book. They have pointed out some serious flaws in our textbooks published by Addison Wesley. Two that I remember are the calculus book, and the one on dislocation theory. I have seen ZERO evidence that a single solitary thing about our education system has improved since NAEP published the following. The only real data I have is that it has gotten even WORSE: <begin quote> NAEP tests have found that the percentage of high school seniors performing at the level needed for college work is far lower than the percentage who enroll in college. For example, 58 percent of students who graduated from high school in 1988 enrolled in 2- and 4-year colleges, but Only 7 percent of 17-year-olds could solve multi-step mathematics problems such as finding percentages, a skill that does not require advanced algebra or calculus (1990); Less than 5 percent of 17-year-olds could interpret historical data at a level that is expected for college work; Only 6 percent of 17-year-olds tested in civics could answer questions such as who in the federal government has the power to tax; Only 9 percent of 17-year-olds knew enough science to infer basic relationships and draw conclusions using detailed scientific knowledge (1990); Only 1 in 100 high school seniors chose to write a coherent response of more than one paragraph to an essay question (1990); and Only 7 percent of high school seniors could read at the advanced level (1990). <end quote> "> Whether we like it or not, what TIMSS did, ever since 1995, > was measure the *IQ* of students, not just the ability of > educators to teach them math and physics and science. This is so incorrect. You evidently have not been educated as to the distinction in psychometrics and mathematical psychology between what they call achievement testing and intelligence testing. There is not a single true expert in these areas who would say what you just said, since they all know better." If there's a single expert who tells you otherwise, you need to cross them off your list of experts. IQ correlates with LOTS of things, not the least of which are incomes, college grades, SAT (not to mention GRE, ACT, NAEP, PISA, and TIMSS) scores, and even things like motor vehicle fatality rates and per capita alcohol consumption. Rather than denying this, you ought to be asking what the Pearson Coefficient is so you can make a judgement on your own. It IS possible to design an IQ test so that it does not correlate with these things, which is the problem with the Wechsler IQ tests, which were designed with an obvious political agenda in mind. Scripture is not for you. It was not written for everyone to understand it. Jesus spoke in parables so infidels would not understand Him, but His followers would. Only infidels misunderstand what Jesus meant by the Verse you tried to quote. "With a roughly 8% dropout rate, that means that there are roughly 3.6 million people in the US of high school senior age." The Census Bureau, which seems to more mathematically inclined than our curent crop of educators and their great white leaders, puts this figure at 4,357,142. Are you surprised that our educators are off by 757,142, or a whopping 21%, on this most BASIC figure? "At least 5% of the ENTIRE high school senior aged population of the US passed the calculus exams with a score of 3 or better. I doubt that there is a country on the planet outside of possibly those 4 exceptional East Asia countries". Well, not quite. If only 202,112 pass the exam, this is only 4.6% of our 18 year olds. The following is quoted from http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/JapanCaseStudy/chapter2c.html <begin quote> Most of the teachers we interviewed indicated that the goal of instruction is exposure, not mastery. Although most Japanese high school students are exposed to calculus, Japanese teachers indicated that they did not expect all their students to understand calculus. When asked, “What percentage of students, in your experience, are able to do calculus problems and understand calculus?”, one teacher said: About 20 percent of students are able to both do and understand. Almost all students are able to do calculus, although they may not understand it. I am referring to science students here. As for the humanities students, all those that have taken math are able to do calculus, whether or not they understand it. But very few students understand the concept of change in calculus. That is why I think that there is an element of the horse learning to pull out the card when hearing two thumps. I do not think that this is a good way to teach math. I dislike this immensely. But I forget that and teach. Retention (genkyutomeoki) is rarely practiced in Japanese schools, particularly during the compulsory years, or even during senior high school. In fact, one senior high school teacher could not recall a time in his entire teaching career when a student was retained. Other senior high school teachers reported “one case every 4 or 5 years.” Instead of retaining students, Japanese teachers are encouraged by administrators to provide extra instruction in basic skills (fushinsya shido) to students having trouble meeting minimum school standards. This may involve the teachers spending time with students outside of class or providing remedial homework assignments during the summer or winter vacations. In spite of these efforts, some students still perform poorly on examinations. In these cases, Japanese teachers reported practicing what they call “letting the student put on a pair of geta (Japanese elevated wooden clogs)”. This expression refers to giving students extra points for good effort. <end quote> Hedrick Smith,"Rethinking America", July 15, 1995 points out that 6% of U.S. and 40% of German and 94% of Japanese students study calculus in high school. "Regarding my earlier post on the meaninglessness of these numbers... My real favorite, because it is so popular among math ed types (Google: jo boaler railside) , is a high school in the Bay Area that I was able to reveal after a complementary article in Education Week in which it was quoted that something like 50% of the 12th-graders take calculus. On closer inspection, no one from the school had taken the ETS exam in the previous 5 years and most of the admissions to CSU campuses (such as my own) that have a standard math competency exam administered by ETS did not test out of remedial math (intermediate algebra). Nice publications but no substance. The worst part? It's a damn lie to would-be college students in math-based disciplines. Wayne " It's truly amazing how many myths about American education that educators promote. The simple fact that they even believe so many of these myths without cross-checking with other sources is proof enough that their education is "complete"--and explains perfectly why absolutely none of the fundamental problems with American education have even been put on the table, much less discussed in back room meetings, much less implemented. While 65% of students in Germany, and more than 90% of students in Japan and Korea and Taiwan, finish calculus in high school, American educators promote even more myths and even argue, convincingly to some, that calculus is not even important. Do they ever wonder why 80% of the top holders of US patents are Japanese, or now Korean, while NONE of their top patents are held by Americans? "This is falsity. It is not true that the US 8th graders scored at the bottom on TIMSS in 2007" Correct. This is an error. I meant to refer to our 12th grade scores in 1995, not the 8th grade scores in 2007. "For 4th grade: It is 550. For 8th grade: It is 533. See Table E-33 for the mean 4th and 8th grade science scores: For 4th grade: It is 567. For 8th grade: It is 551. ALL 4 scores are higher than the mean score of EVERY LAST country in the world that took TIMSS in 2007 outside of those 4 exceptional East Asian countries and that part of China in question." Agreed. And furthermore would like to add that it would have been impossible for us to have organized such an advanced civilization and vast empire in such a short time had we not had MUCH better verbal and math skills than ALL of the ASian nations, much less the European nations. The people who did this are the 20% who are the producers, and the other 80%, which includes mostly Whites, are the consumer class. And that gets back to the more than 250 SAT point gap between Whites in the mostly Catholic states and Whites in the mostly Protestant states. The only possible way for this to have happened is if White Protestants have MUCH higher verbal and math skills than White Catholics--a gap even larger than the 84 point advanced math gap between mostly Catholic Italian men (at 484) and Russian Orthodox men (at 568), or the 121 point gap between mostly Catholic Italian women (at 460) and our male AP students (at 581), or the 175 point gap between mostly Catholic Austrian women (at 406) and our male AP students (at 581) [see Exhibit 6]. "Quote: ... students who obtained a grade of 3 or above on either of the AP Calculus Exams obtained an average score of 596 (3.2) on the TIMSS Advanced Mathematics test, OUTPERFORMING ALL OTHER COUNTRIES [my emphasis]. These facts above are well known as a fact by everyone who is familiar with the evolution of high school curricula over the past couple of decades and by everyone who is familiar with the evolution of state and district standards for high school education and graduation over the past couple of decades" Well, now, here you are quoting the exact same 1995 TIMSS data which you proclaim that I CANNOT quote because it's "ancient history". How funny. Also, Exhibit 3 of YOUR reference reports that our AP calculus students scored 573, not 596. ON top of that, you're now comparing the top 1-2% of American students to the top 20% of French students (who scored 557, only 16 points lower), the top 10% of Greek students who scored 513, or 60 points lower, the top 14% of Swiss students who scored 533, only 40 points lower. This is a meaningless comparison, particularly when you see the REST of the data, like Exhibit 15 which shows our TOP 1-2% in physics scored only 543, which is 46 points LOWER than Sweden's top 16%, 51 points lower than Norway's top 8%, 32 points lower than Russia's top 2%, equivalent to Germany's top 8%,and only 14 points higher than Switzerland's top 14%. iow, there are MANY students in MANY other countries who scored MUCH higher than our top 1-2%. Whether we like it or not, what TIMSS did, ever since 1995, was measure the *IQ* of students, not just the ability of educators to teach them math and physics and science. Over CENTURIES such things don't change much, and they don't change at all over a mere two decades. However, the simple fact that a majority of American 12th grade girls answered lower than if they'd just GUESSED on more than a third of the test (AND scored almost 100 points lower than our 8th grade girls) suggests at least that they were taught the WRONG thing. That of course is something that IS correctable by educators. Your own reference to Wikipedia puts the figure for those in the US taking calculus at 250,000, which is only 7% of all American high school students and less than 6% of our 18 year olds. Page 90 on TIMSS math 98049.pdf reports the following exclusion rates (i.e., those in vocational schools) and combined participation rates: Australia 6% excluded, 55% combined participation rate Austria 18% excluded, 81% combined participation rate Canada 9% excluded, 77% combined participation rate Cyprus 22%, 96% Czech Republic 6%, 92% Denmark 2%, 49% France 1%, 77% Germany 11%, 78% Greece 0%, 87% Italy 30%, 68% Lithuania 16%, 92% Russia 43%, 96% Slovenia 6%, 42% Sweden 0%, 89% Switzerland 3%, 87% USA 4%, 67% Even though we have an average exclusion rate of 4%, note that at 67%, NOBODY had a lower combined participation rate than us. So our EXTREMELY low TIMSS scores EXCLUDE the lowest scoring 33%, while Sweden's EXTREMELY high score includes almost nine out of ten of all Swedish high school students. Ditto for Switzerland, Russia, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania. "Should I have gone instead with, say Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, Harold Camping, and, oh, Cotton Mather?" You SHOULD have gone with the biggest infidel of them all, the biggest liar and false prophet, is Billy Graham who didn't begin to teach the abomination of universalism until very late in his ministry. This is how Christians are to deal with such infidels: But them that are without God judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person, 1 Corinthians 5:13 "Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbor", Leviticus 19:15 "Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God's: and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear it", Deuteronomy 1:17 "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?" 2 Corinthians 6:14 "That's the genius of the "country founded by Protestants, for Protestants" (though many of the Framers were, let's say, *unusual* protestants)." Mr. Jefferson wrote in his own hand many times "I am a *real* Christian", where he managed to both underline and italicize "real". Leaders around the world, far, far from Virginia and Monticello, including the current president of Korea Myung Bak Lee, their most favorite past president Chung Hee Pak, and the chairman of the board of Samsung Lee Kun-hee, cite Mr. Jefferson as their favorite figure. One big reason is that he understod and wrote both Greek and Hebrew and thus was able to make minced meat of "religious leaders" like Calvin, who he roundly criticized. Gee, Paul, and you thought you and I could never agree on anything. But now here you are agreeing with me that private schools ARE better [a standard deviation better?] than public schools? Voila. See, that wasn't all that hard. I'd bet you'd also agree that, while the ONE factor you mention [cherry picking] IS important--that it is in reality one of the least important of more than ten other much more important factors? Let's use an example. ALL of the students in both public and private schools in Korea [and I mean 99.9% of them] say a simple prayer to God three times a day, and that prayer is based on OUR concept of the Torah [Do Rah, which means "God's Law]. And All of the children in both public and private schools in Japan do pretty much the same, only their concept of God's Law is Shinto [actually spelled "Sin Do"] which also means "God's Law". Now for my anecdote. Our translator in nasty atheistic Moscow invited us to her 6th grade son's classroom where, voila, they all started off the day with [oh, no] a CHRISTIAN prayer in their PUBLIC school classrom. Nasty, huh? So I asked around about how long such infamy has been going on, and just who might have started [or re-started] this ignominious practice, and also began to explore just how different Russian Orthodox is from Protestantism and the Torah and Shinto. Well, guess what I found. The exact same King James errors we find in OUR version of the Torah are also found in the Cyrillic Script of Russian Orthodox, including some key verses in Malachai [as well as in the Korean text]. To avoid cognitive dissonance, I will save the who and when of CHRISTIAN prayer in PUBLIC classrooms in Russia for later. Might that have something to do with the HUGE gap between our 8th graders, and Russian, Japanese, and Korean 8th graders? Or do you chalk it up to just coincidence? Before you tackle that, please note that Russia (who spends 3% of GDP for education compared to our 12%) DID participate in 12th grade TIMSS in 2008 where they scored higher than any other nation in math (561), which was 122 points higher than Norway, whose boys scored 99 points higher than our boys in TIMSS math in 1995 (555 vs. 466). Is this ALL due to CHRISTIAN prayer in PUBLIC classrooms? NO. Spending so little for education is an even BIGGER factor. You don't seem to know the difference between a mortal sin and a sin with a minor penalty. Yes, of course divorce, liars, cheats, adulterers, abusers, morally bankrupt, tax cheats, non christians, and non believers are all sinners to the 95.5% of Americans who CLAIM to be Christians. But they are not mortal sins which require the death penalty as homosexuality does, unless they are serious ones like the two judges who LIED about Susanna. Daniel 13:62 "And according to the law of Moses they did unto them in such sort as they maliciously intended to do to their neighbour: and they put them to death. Thus the innocent blood was saved the same day." NOt even those sinners did as much damage to society as homosexuality does, though. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/31/goldman-goldman-sachs-fund- shareholder_n_868923.html So what's new? Goldman also lost MORE than 98% for MOST of it's AMERICAN investors. How come they didn't make such a sweetheart deal [read: Ponzi scheme] with us as they made with him? "If we lose 98% of your money, then for sure you can trust us: just add another $3.7 BILLION into the mix". No WONDER Gadaffi's so mad. If I had an army, I'd have done the same, and more. ] Lou, your very own NAEP math scores claim that the gap between public schools and Catholic schools increased almost 50% between 1990 and 2009 (from 9 points to 14 points). You don't think that two decades worth of data showing a gap of almost 1 1/2 standard deviations is proof positive that, relative to public school students, Catholic students are some of the "most intelligent, as well as moral, honest, and hard working"? Note that even NAEP estimates "private" [read: Protestant] schools score another 4 points higher than Catholic students, EXCEPT that by the 12th grade, the gap in SAT scores is more than 250 points. These "religious leaders" you cite have had ZERO impact on me and mine. I know absolutely nobody who even listens to them, much less trusts a word they say, much less follows them, much less disagrees that they should have been punished as righteously as they WERE punished. If only the pedophile Catholic priests had been punished as harshly as THEY were, rather than being crammed in between 15 centuries of fine art in the Vatican with little children running behind them ringing bells whenever they enter a room. You need to stick to math. If you can't even tell by now the difference between Christianity and Islam, or Protestantism and Catholicism, or Scripture and what American televangelists spout off, you ain't got no hope. may 30, 2012 at 1:00 pm err, correction: "To put this in perspective, the 69 point gap in reading between private and public schools in New Zealand and the 71 point gap in the US is MUCH [should have read: LARGER] than the 57 math point gap between Singapore's private schools and girls in Greece (516 vs. 459). This gap between public and private education (ALL around the world, not just here) is not as trivial as you would have your audience believe." It would appear from these miserable NSF physics scores that the NSF is far, far more concerned about teaching gender and racial equality to our children than they are about actually promoting science, math, and physics. While they might not have selected the WORST students for their physics curricula, for the AVERAGE to be in the range of Greek girls, the scores of any higher performing students would have to have been offset by many VERY inferior students. This four billion dollar per year boondoggle ALSO needs to come to a screeching halt. It's utterly beyond any redeeming social value. may 30, 2012 at 11:00 am "Anyone who claims that the major changes that have occurred since 1995 have not occurred is simply not aware of what has been going on for the past couple of decades and simply does not know what he/she is talking about." Paul, this is the exact *opposite* of what I wrote. I do agree that there have been changes to US education since our 12th graders participation in TIMSS in 1995. It appears from that statement, and your failure to address the point about the HUGE gap between public and nonpublic schools in both NAEP Math and all PISA subjects, AND the following statement, that you misunderstood about everything I wrote: "What's really inconsistent about so much of your argument is, on the one hand, your claim that public school systems are inherently incapable of educating students well, and on the other hand, we have the fact that those East Asian highest performing school systems" Following is a small example of how federal government involvement in education makes our children's education worse, much worse: http://modeling.asu.edu/Evaluations/TIMSS_NSFphysicsStudy99.pdf NSF has American students participate in their physics curricula with the supposed intention of improving their education. So what is the end result? Our TOP physics students DID score 52 points higher than the AVERAGE American physics student (475 vs. 423). But they scored 106 points LOWER than the AVERAGE Norwegian physics student (475 vs. 581). And 98 points lower than the AVERAGE Swedish physics student. And 70 points LOWER than Russia, 47 points lower than Germany, and 19 points lower than Cyprus. Greek girls scored only 7 points lower. How long has NSF been around? Do you think ANYTHING they did recently raised their scores to any level significantly higher than Greek girls since then? I sure don't. And as you can see from my analysis of this 20 "increase" in NAEP math scores, even more activity from NSF is guaranteed to produce even "better" [only from their perspective] results. The latest round of PISA shows the following point differences between public and nonpublic schools in reading, math, and science: http://pisa2009.acer.edu.au/interactive.php US 71 point gap in reading, 61 point gap in math, 68 point gap in science Korea (one third of students in private schools) 16, 12, 11 Denmark (one quarter of students in private schools) 17, 14, 20 Spain (one third of students in private schools) 36, 31, 31 Australia (40% of students in private schools) 45, 38, 41 Switzerland 18, 7, 13 Greece 62, 59, 61 Germany 16, 21, 17 Finland 6, -6, 10 New Zealand 69, 64, 59 Sweden 35, 30, 29 Shanghai 20, 37, 25 Estonia 9, -10, 11 Two thirds of students in the Netherlands (one of the HIGHEST scoring European countries, 40 points higher than the OECD average) are in private schools, as are one third of TAipei's students who outscore Korean students in some tests, 93% of Hong Kong students (consistently one of the HIGHEST scoring TIMSS and PISA and IAEP nations). To put this in perspective, the 69 point gap in reading between private and public schools in New Zealand and the 71 point gap in the US is MUCH smaller than the 57 math point gap between Singapore's private schools and girls in Greece (516 vs. 459). This gap between public and private education (ALL around the world, not just here) is not as trivial as you would have your audience believe. Gee, Lou, for a man living in country founded by Protestants, for Protestants, in which 95.5% of the people CLAIM to be Christians, you don't seem to know much about Protestantism. Each of the religious figures you named are anathema to Protestants, particularly the Catholic figures. In 1774, King George established trinitarianism (Catholocism) as the state religion, to which we responded with 1776. Since then, we displaced the world's once great sea power with our own empire, based on Protestantism, not Catholicism. Many of the things that Catholics have done WRONG to this country make the Salem Witch Hunt pale by comparison, not the least of which is trying to "legalize" gay marriage. The 2009 NAEP "Nation's Report Card", Figure 18 on pg. 25, reports that 8th grade NAEP math scores for public schools increased 20 points between 1990 and 2009, from 262 to 282. Are we really to believe public school math education improved by this much, or is this just one more example of how educators distort the data to maintain the status quo [read: protect their jobs]? An indication that it's the latter is how the gap between public schools, and BOTH private and Catholic schools, increased by more than 50%. While the gap was only 9 points in 1990, it was 14 points in 2009 [read: Catholic school scores increased by 25 points, from 271 to 296]. Private schools historically have outperformed Catholic schools by up to 4 points, so it's entirely possible that the gap between public schools and private schools increased to about 18 points by 2009, almost double that of 1990. How do you believe that BOTH private and Catholic schools increased their scores even more than all these new education techniques supposedly improved PUBLIC education? Neither private schools nor Catholic schools made any significant changes to the way they teach during this time, did they? For the most part, these religious teachings go back 5,000 years, right? So how can it be explained that the gap between them increased more than 50% and perhaps almost doubled? What I believe happened is that none of these schools improved their teaching methods and none of their students [not public, not Catholic, and not private] increased their scores. None of our founding fathers believed that the federal government should meddle in education, and all the stats I see prove in spades that their predictions of what would happen if the federal government got involved were extremely conservative. Without even knowing the details of what happened to public education in the US in the last 15 years, the mere fact that the federal government promised to "help" schools and school children is all the proof I need to know that it FAILED. The federal government makes no bones about how they now control the data, how much they are willing to manipulate the data to achieve their goals, and precisely why they refuse to release the state to state data for 12th grade NAEP math scores--a critical detail that's still missing from the above analysis. But even taking their own data at face value, and without questioning a single data point or methodology or how they arrived at their standard deviations, this data is PROOF POSITIVE that students in nonpublic schools had an average IQ which was 9 IQ points higher than public school students in 1990, but that by 2009 their average IQ might have increased to as as much as 18 IQ points higher. Does this put them in the range of Asian schools? Perhaps at the 8th grade level. How do you believe they achieved this? Might there be some merit to their crackpot notions of God and creation? Could it be that banning school prayer in public schools in 1963 was not such a hot idea after all? timss12thadvmathC_full.pdf First column is mathematics TIMSS coverage index, and the second is Physics TIMSS coverage index Australia 15.7%, 12.6% Austria 33.3%, 33.1% Denmark 20.6%, 3.2% France 19.9%, 19.9% Germany 26.3%, 8.4% Slovenia 75.4%, 38.6% Russia 2.0%, 1.5% Canada 22.3%, 19.4% US 21.8%, 22.9% 1 act point = 3 SAT points 1 IQ point = 3 SAT points For a long time, us taxpayers in California have been hearing about how much better our schools will get if we just throw more money at them. In 1973, California ranked 13th from the bottom in SAT verbal, at 435, and 16th from the bottom in SAT math, at 473. In 1980, we were 15th from the bottom in verbal (435) and 20th from the bottom atmath (475). In 1985 were 8th from the bottom in verbal (423) and 21st from the bottom in math (481). In 1990 were 9th from the bottom in verbal (415) and 23rd from the bottom in math (482). We spent ever more money and finally by 1995 we ranked 6th from the bottom in verbal at 417. The more we spent, the lower the scores dropped. This is a classic case of the Peter Principle of going WAY, WAY past the point of diminishing returns. It's absolutely no secret, and it's not at all a wild theory, that REDUCING education spending now will INCREASE our test scores. I should add, again by English definitions, that the "theory" of evolution is not a theory at all, but instead wild speculation by a man with no formal degree at all, much less one in the sciences or mathematics. Darwin actually admitted this himself before he died. It meets none of the tests for an actual scientific theory, which might be why 91% of Americans, even after decades of being taught to the contrary, reject it and instead accept (or "believe in") creation. It's no consolation to them that the very same poll revealed that only 50% of American scientists reject this "theory" of evolution. Is that a failing by American scientists, a failing by American "education", a failing by PUBLIC education, or a failing by God or Scripture? It's so nice to know that I'm in the majority on this one, ya know? ps--here's a hint. States with the highest SAT scores accept creation, states with SAT scores more than 250 SAT points lower, don't. Fri. May 27, 2011 at 12:06 pm definition of science: "1) study of physical world: the study of the physical and natural world and phenomena, especially by using systematic observation and experiment 2) branch of science: a particular area of study or knowledge of the physical world 3)systematic body of knowledge: a systematically organized body of knowledge about a particular subject" Isn't each one of those precisely the definition of Scripture? Dear Paul, You remind me of those who claim that Scripture and science are anti-podes at the same time you studiously ignore that by definition Scripture IS science. Until you come up with a single solitary data point which even hints that all this stuff you talk about improved public education one single solitary point, you have nothing but what you call ancient history--our MISERABLE performance at the 12th grade level in 1995. The number of American students who take calculus increased five fold? So what! That STILL leaves us at 9%, vs. 90% in MOST of the other countries who took 12th grade TIMSS, including nasty old Iran (where I lived for 13 months and thus was not at all surprised to learn that Iranian 12th graders score 48 points higher than Italy, 497 vs. 449). And that doesn't even take into account our high drop out rate where our worst students leave high school before they're even included in our MISERABLE TIMSS average score. In both Iran and Germany, less than 20% of high school students take the vocational track, and the rest take the academic track. In both Japan and Korea, 99.9% of ALL students not only GRADUATE from high school in the ACADEMIC track, but they ALL finish calculus before they graduate. I know from direct experience that calculus is taught AND UNDERSTOOD in the 8th grade in Korea. Aren't the scores of those in the vocational track included in their overall scores, though? I'm not trying to destroy public education. I (and almost everyone I know, and most who've taken recent national polls) want to END it, not destroy it. Why? Because you STILL argue, 16 years after the fact, that our current crop of educators whose GRE and SAT and ACT and NAEP scores are lower than social work majors, ARE capable of educating SOMEBODY when the tests show that most American high school students are more qualified than their own PUBLIC EDUCATION teachers. NO other country's educators argue like you do. Why? Because the teachers from ALL of the countries I'm familiar with choose teachers from the HIGHEST intelligentsia, not the LOWEST. Your post is a classic exhibit of why you CANNOT be re-educated, much less understand, the entire point of how these international standardized tests and proved beyond a shadow of all doubt just how poorly education of our children has been handled by "public" education. You do make a good point about why within the White Race that it's the education system and not some inherent ability which is responsible for the 250 SAT point gap from the best performing states to the lowest performing. Could you please expand on that? As an aside, a lot of other countries HAVE made some significant changes in their own education systems in the last few decades. Do you think they came to the US to learn how to change it? No, most of them went to Korea. But even Korea itself just went through a "minor" (actually, earthshaking) revolution in education thanks to the new and dearly loved president. Would you like to know what they did, thanks to Korean parents who DO take charge of education and DO NOT ever accept government dictates regarding how to educate their children? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/tennessee-teaching-homosexuality- ban_n_864895.html?show_comment_id=89835246#comment_89835246 Free speech no longer applies in public schools to Christians who simply want their children to live their lives by their religion--which according to most recent polls are 95.5% of Americans. The less than 1% who're gay in this country are now the only ones with free speech. They have a thousand racist and sexist slurs to use against any single American who would dare uphold his own religion, much less quote what God *really* thinks about gays, much less uphold existing LAWS--laws which will never ever be removed from the books. What's interesting, Paul, is that I agree with just about every point Wayne makes and disagree with just about every point you make. Even though some of your facts might be correct and accurate (and even important) you keep missing the main data point, and in fact claim the only data point we have about that problem is "ancient history". Please focus your energy on this problem. And the problem is that OUR TIMSS math and science scores drop by almost a standard deviation between 8th and 12th grade while the scores in almost all the other countries who took 12th grade TIMSS INCREASED by almost a standard deviation. The three major exceptions, the three countries who experienced the same problem we experienced, are the Czech Republic, France, and Austria. And Austria's scores decreased by even more than ours did--down and almost 90 points for boys and 140 points (TWO standard deviations) for girls. Does this have anything to do with Austrian economics? Or math? Or religion? Or culture? Did we implement Austrian education practices, or some other system or concept which destroyed our delicate social fabric? I should add that the point you make about how some races are unfairly dragging down our scores is a good one--except that you've never addressed the question about why within the same race (the White race) there's a 250 SAT point gap from the lowest scoring states to the highest scoring states. Could it be that the only reason our TIMSS scores decrease by almost a standard deviation is that scores in those Austrian-like states drop as much as they do in Austria, while scores in the higher scoring states INCREASE by a standard deviation? If so, then this gap between Austrian-like states and higher scoring states is much, much bigger than a mere 250 SAT points, right? Another way to assess the academic skills of Black 8th graders (but, unfortunately, not 12th graders) is NAEP math broken down by state, sex, and race, which has shown a steep decline in math scores for Blacks recently. The highest scoring Blacks are in Colorado and Nebraska (at 255 and 256) and the lowest scoring are right there in our great white leaders' own backyard, Washington, DC, at 231 (who spends five times as much per student than states like Iowa and Utah). Ironically, the highest scoring Whites are also in DC, at 303, and the lowest scoring Whites are right down the street in West Virginia at 266. Our cradle of civilization by the Potomac is also home for the lowest scoring Hispanics in the country, at 221 (10 points lower than Blacks in DC). The highest scoring Hispanics are in Iowa at 268 (2 points higher than Whites in W.Va.). Indians score almost identical to Hispanics in many states, and Asians "and Pacific Islanders" in Maryland score 306, 3 points higher than Whites right down the street in DC. Hawaii is the lowest scoring of the Asian category, scoring 40 points lower, at 266, an indication of the high percentage of Pacific Islanders. "It is a worthless point. The 1995 TIMSS separated out high achieving students from average students. The average American students, when compared to all the other average students, performed abysmally. The high achieving American students, when compared to the other high achieving students, performed worse." Educators are still holding out hope that our highest scoring students are world class, but 12th grade TIMSS reported the scores of our top 10%, and they weren't even up there with the average students in MOST other countries who took this test. Even our AP students and NSF physics students scored lower than Greek girls in physics. Thanks for those comparisons of graduation rates in the US. Agreed that these are very different education systems, but disagreed that they can't be compared. If it were true that, say, only the top 10% of Iran's students graduate from the academic-style high schools (where they take calculus and are the only ones who take TIMSS), and the other 90% go to technical high schools (where they don't take calculus nor participate in TIMSS), then Iran's scores and their participation rates in calculus would not be representative, and could not be compared, as you say. But it seems to be the other way around--as many as 90% of Iran's students (as well as most of the other countries who took 12th grade TIMSS) are on the academic track, and only 10% on the technical track. This of course doesn't explain how the scores of so many third world countries could have increased so dramatically between 8th and 12th grade, while ours decreased by that much, or more. Cognitive dissonance, anyone? And we're still not even taking into consideration 12th grade students in countries like Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, whose 8th graders scored as much as 150 points higher than ours. Unless this entire study is fabricated or fraudulent or somehow biased against us, it seems inevitable that a vast majority (not all though) of our high schools are actively engaged in dumbing down ALL students of all races, even Whites and Asians (otherwise why would American Asians score so much lower than Asian Asians). When looking at SAT scores of just White students state by state, there's as much as a 260 point gap between most mid-Western states (North Dakota, Iowa, Montana, etc.) and Eastern states (Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey). This gap is so big that my bet is that White 8th graders in the mid-Western states DO score higher than Asian 8th graders. But it seems impossible that even they would score as high as say, Korea, at the 12th grade level. Our failure to teach calculus to as many students as possible, as seems to be the case all the way from England to Iran to Singapore to Korea, is a colossal error. From direct observation in both Sweden and Iran, it's my impression that they have a higher high school graduation rate than we do, and that these statistics are for all of their high school students, not just a chosen few. I'm right now looking at Table A5.14 from the 12th grade TIMSS that we participated in which confirms part of this obsdervation (though we aren't listed on this table, so we can't make a direct comparison to the US): 96% of Sweden's 17 year olds are enrolled in high school, and 88% of all Swedes aged 25-34 have comleted secondary school 82% of Swiss 17 year olds are enrolled in high school, and 88% of Swiss aged 25- 34 have completed secondary school Slovenia 85% and 85% Norway 90%, 88% New Zealand 74%, 64% Netherlands 91%, 70% Iceland 77% Hungary 71% Germany 93%, 89% France 91%, 86% Denmark 82%, 69% Canada 69%, 84% Austria 88%, 81% Australia 77%, 57% From other sources, we know that 99% of both Japanese and Korean students complete high school. To do that, they are required to COMPLETE calculus. However, we have no clue how their performance in 12th grade math or science compares to ours, because they never took 12th grade TIMSS. And we took it only once. And what it showed is that our 12th grade boys scored almost 60 points lower than our 8th grade boys, whereas 12th grade boys in Cyprus, Sweden, and Norway scored MUCH more than 60 points HIGHER than their 8th grade boys. We should note that boys in Austria, Czech Republic, and Switzerland experienced the same thing we did. If we discover what it is that they did wrong, this might help us understand what we did wrong. I suspect the answer lies in exactly where we went wrong in teaching calculus (which, btw, I completed in Japan, something that would never have happened had I remained in schools in Washington, DC). "Is your source that ancient history of TIMSS 1995? That source is utterly meaningless as to how 12th graders from all countries would compare today." 16 years ago is hardly history, much less ancient history. And the trend in this country for the last two centuries suggests that our education system has been getting worse anyway, not better, especially at the 12th grade level. On top of that, as pointed out in a prior post, our science score actually dropped 4 points since 1995. The putative 16 point increase in our math score was far outdone by almost all of our global economic competitors who not only score much higher than us, but also increased THEIR scores by even more than our 16 points. Where's the pony in all this bs? In your imagination? I would have to say that if anything changed in the last 16 years at the 12th grade level in this country, that it got even worse, particularly since only 14% of our 18 year olds have completed calculus, compared to more than 90% in almost all the countries who recently took 12th grade TIMSS. May 22, 2011 at 5:49 pm Sunday Well, I understand your point. I'm only going by Exhibit 1.12 on page 47 of the following report of the 2008 TIMSS test of 12th graders: http://timss.bc.edu/timss_advanced/downloads/TA08_International_Report.pdf I posted this before, but you might not have seen it, as it seems to have disappeared. What it shows is that there are five calculus topics taught in the following countries, and the percentage of students who have completed those topics is as follows: 66% of students in Armenia complete those five topics 95% of students in Iran do also 94% of students in Italy 95% of students in Lebanon 93% of students in the Netherlands 96% of students in Norway 64% of students in the Philippines 88% Slovenia 95% Sweden How could this have happened? How could students whose average performance in the 8th grade was as low as you point out, have improved THIS much by the 12th grade? Lebanon scored almost as high as the Netherlands in advanced math (545 vs. 552). And Iran scored higher than Italy (497 vs.449). How do I explain it? I would have to say that our wholesale failure to teach a simple thing like calculus to students at the AGE that they are most able to learn it, singlehandedly could have caused our education dilemma. calculus.htm Calculus "Close to one third of the 1.8 million students who this year will go directly from high school to either a 2- or 4-year college have taken calculus in high school. These constitute an overwhelming majority of the students we are likely to see in our calculus and advanced mathematics courses. Listed below are some basic questions and what I know about answers. I would greatly appreciate pointers to any other information that may be out there." .http://www.maa.org/columns/launchings/launchings_06_09.html The US Census Bureau estimates that there were 4,357,142 Americans of 18 years of age in 2010 http://www.census.gov/population/www/projections/files/SummaryTabB1.pdf Therefore, the 600,000 students who take calculus in high school are 14% of all 18 year olds. The Census Bureau also estimates that 20% of Americans never graduate from high school. Thus, of the 4,357,142 eighteen year olds in 2010, only 3,485,713 of them graduated from high school, of whom 17% took calculus in high school: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html So many of our educators don't appear to be aware that the 12th grade TIMSS was conducted, worldwide, but that the US chose not to participate? Why do you think that is? Were the results of 1995 too embarrassing for educators to risk a repeat performance? http://timss.bc.edu/timss_advanced/downloads/TA08_International_Report.pdf There are some surprising results on page 47 of this report. For one thing, more than 90% of the students in Iran, Armenia, Italy, Lebanon, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden FINISH calculus before graduating from high school. Even 64% of the students in the Philippines finish calculus, compared to, what in the US? 15% if we include "pre-calculus [read: 5%]? The other surprise is on pg. 65, which is how high countries like Jordan and Iran scored. Jordan scored 545, which is right up there with the Netherlands, and Iran scored 497, more than one standard deviation higher than where WE scored in 1995. See page 47. HOWEVER, the plot thickens. Wikipedia estimates that only 250,000 American students now take calculus each year, which is only 7% of all American high school students and 6% of all American 18 year olds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement_Calculus Furthermore, Fast Facts from the NCES report the following: "In 1998, 2000, and 2004, private school graduates were more likely than public school graduates to have completed advanced courses in science and mathematics. For example, in 2004, a greater percentage of private school graduates than public school graduates completed at least one advanced course in science (85 vs. 67 percent) and a calculus-level course (25 vs. 13 percent)." http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=97 Paul Tanner - --- On Thu, 6/2/11, Wayne Bishop <wbishop@exchange.calstatela.edu> wrote: > From: Wayne Bishop <wbishop@exchange.calstatela.edu> > Subject: Re: Korea: Test Focus Hurts Love of Learning > To: math-teach@mathforum.org > Cc: math-teach@mathforum.org > Date: Thursday, June 2, 2011, 12:30 AM > At 01:08 PM 6/1/2011, jk@israeliteknight.com > wrote: > > "Quote: > > ... students who obtained a grade of 3 or above on > either of the AP Calculus Exams obtained an average score of > 596 (3.2) on the TIMSS Advanced Mathematics test, > OUTPERFORMING ALL OTHER COUNTRIES [my emphasis]. > > Here is another reason why that is misleading > statistic... Most US students in "AP Calculus" would > not score 3 or better; most do not even take the national > exam. At least half to three fourths of all calculus students in the US take the calculus exams. About two thirds pass with a score of 3 or better, and the percent of the ENTIRE high school senior aged population of the US that passes these calculus exams with a 3 or better is at least 5%. This is a very high percentage, higher than what I stated before (I found that I overstated how many high school senior aged people there are in the US). Here's the proof of all this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement_Calculus Grade distributions for AP Calculus AB In the 2010 administration, 245,867 students took the exam. The mean score was a 2.81. The grade distribution for 2010 was: Score-Percent 5 21.2% 4 16.4% 3 18.0% 2 11.2% 1 33.1% Grade distributions for AP Calculus BC In the 2010 administration, 78,998 students took the exam. The mean score was a 3.86. The grade distribution for the 2010 BC scores was: Score-Percent 5 49.4% 4 15.4% 3 18.0% 2 5.8% 1 11.4% This means that 324,865 high school senior aged people in the US took the exams in 2010. Passing is defined as scoring 3 or better. We have that 55.6% of those who took the AB exam scored 3 or better. This means that about 136,702 people passed the AB exam with a 3 or better. We have that 82.8% of those who took the BC exam scored 3 or better. This means that about 65,410 people passed the BC exam with a 3 or better. This means that about 202,112 people passed the calculus exams. "AP Calculus: What We Know" http://www.macalester.edu/~bressoud/pub/launchings/launchings_06_09.html Quote: By spring, 2009, the number of AP Calculus exams was just over 300,000. If the percentage has stayed constant, then about 575,000 of this year's graduating seniors have studied calculus while in high school. This does not count students who may have seen some calculus in a course that does not have calculus in its title. THE COLLEGE BOARD ESTIMATES THAT 70-75% OF THE STUDENTS IN AP CALCULUS TAKE THE EXAM [my emphasis], which suggests that this year 400-430,000 students took a course called AP Calculus." The below essentially says that there are about 3.3 million high school seniors in the US: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 Quote: "The percentage of high school dropouts among 16- through 24-year-olds declined from 11.8 percent in 1998 to 8.1 percent in 2009. About 3,273,000 students are expected to graduate from high school in 2010-11, including 2,962,000 from public high schools and 311,000 from private high schools." With a roughly 8% dropout rate, that means that there are roughly 3.6 million people in the US of high school senior age. Given roughly 3.3 million high school seniors and roughly 3.6 million people of high school senior age, the estimates above are that roughly 400,000 to 600,000 students or roughly 11-16% of the ENTIRE high school senior aged population of the US (roughly 3.6 million) take calculus as high school seniors. With 324,865 of the roughly 3.3 million high school seniors and roughly 3.6 million people of high school senior age not only taking calculus but actually taking the calculus exams and with 202,112 passing the exams with a score of 3 or better, at least 8% of the ENTIRE high school senior aged population of the US took not only calculus but also took the calculus exams and at least 5% of the ENTIRE high school senior aged population of the US passed the calculus exams with a score of 3 or better. Note that the ENTIRE high school senior aged population of a country includes everyone - out of school in school, where type of school does not matter whether it be a math-based subject area school or fine arts schools or music schools or general vocational schools or whatever. At least 5% of the ENTIRE high school senior aged population of the US passed the calculus exams with a score of 3 or better. I doubt that there is a country on the planet outside of possibly those 4 exceptional East Asia countries of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore that does better than this in terms of universal calculus education. Because don't forget that the US is essentially the only country in the world that does not ration its advanced math education opportunities after middle school - the other countries via testing track only their higher performing students into advanced math based high schools. The rest go into other high school based on vocational training. - --- On Thu, 6/2/11, jk@israeliteknight.com <jk@israeliteknight.com> wrote: > From: jk@israeliteknight.com <jk@israeliteknight.com> > Subject: Re: Korea: Test Focus Hurts Love of Learning > To: math-teach@mathforum.org > Date: Thursday, June 2, 2011, 10:31 AM > "With a roughly 8% dropout rate, that > means that there are roughly 3.6 million people in the US of > high school senior age." > > The Census Bureau, which seems to more mathematically > inclined than our curent crop of educators and their great > white leaders, puts this figure at 4,357,142. Are you > surprised that our educators are off by 757,142, or a > whopping 21%, on this most BASIC figure? This figure of 4,357,142 does not actually exist in any link you provided. If you can show a link that actually shows that the actual 2010 Census (not the 2000 Census) gives a number of 18-year-olds in the US in 2010, then let's see it. > "At least 5% of the ENTIRE high school senior aged > population of the US passed the calculus exams with a score > of 3 or better. I doubt that there is a country on the > planet outside of possibly those 4 exceptional East Asia > countries". > > Well, not quite. If only 202,112 pass the exam, this > is only 4.6% of our 18 year olds. > > The following is quoted from http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/JapanCaseStudy/chapter2c.html > > <begin quote> > > Most of the teachers we interviewed indicated that the goal > of instruction is exposure, not mastery. Although most > Japanese high school students are exposed to calculus, > Japanese teachers indicated that they did not expect all > their students to understand calculus. When asked, > a?oWhat percentage of students, in your experience, are > able to do calculus problems and understand calculus?a?, > one teacher said: > > > About 20 percent of students are able to both do and > understand. Almost all students are able to do calculus, > although they may not understand it. I am referring to > science students here. As for the humanities students, all > those that have taken math are able to do calculus, whether > or not they understand it. But very few students understand > the concept of change in calculus. That is why I think that > there is an element of the horse learning to pull out the > card when hearing two thumps. I do not think that this is a > good way to teach math. I dislike this immensely. But I > forget that and teach. > > Retention (genkyutomeoki) is rarely practiced in Japanese > schools, particularly during the compulsory years, or even > during senior high school. In fact, one senior high school > teacher could not recall a time in his entire teaching > career when a student was retained. Other senior high school > teachers reported a?oone case every 4 or 5 years.a? > > Instead of retaining students, Japanese teachers are > encouraged by administrators to provide extra instruction in > basic skills (fushinsya shido) to students having trouble > meeting minimum school standards. This may involve the > teachers spending time with students outside of class or > providing remedial homework assignments during the summer or > winter vacations. In spite of these efforts, some students > still perform poorly on examinations. In these cases, > Japanese teachers reported practicing what they call > a?oletting the student put on a pair of geta (Japanese > elevated wooden clogs)a?. This expression refers to > giving students extra points for good effort. > > <end quote> > > Hedrick Smith,"Rethinking America", July 15, 1995 points > out that 6% of U.S. and 40% of German and 94% of Japanese > students study calculus in high school. That US figure is now around 15%. You did not address what I said, which was "outside of possibly those 4 exceptional East Asia countries", which I identified elsewhere as Japan, South Korea, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), and Singapore. And "studying calculus" can mean merely being exposed to it in the least little bit, like maybe one little unit on some of the simplest ideas in some class after Algebra II. This therefore is meaningless. The only thing that it meaningful is how many actually take a formal course that is actually a calculus course, and for a whole year, and how many take a national calculus exam at the end of that year long course, and how many pass it. Even if it were true that there are a little more than 4 million 18 year olds in the US: Up to roughly 600,000 students in the US take a full year of a calculus course, roughly a little over 300,000 take the national calculus exam, and about 200,000 pass it, that means that about 15% of all 18 year olds (in school, out of school, type of school if in school, it does not matter) take a full year of a formal calculus course, about half - about 7-8% of all 18-year-olds - take the national exam, and about two-thirds of those taking the exam - about 5% of all 18-year- olds - pass it. What I'm generally saying is not falsified in the least, which is that the US has a larger percentage of its entire 18 year old population taking a full year of a formal calculus course and taking a national calculus exam and passing it than any other country on the planet outside of possibly those 4 East Asian countries. In fact, the coverage indices themselves for any advanced math for so many other countries held up as superior to the US are actually lower than even just these percentages above for the US that address even just calculus. Note that any math after Algebra II is the TIMSS definition of "advanced math", including non- calculus courses like statistics, trig, analytic geometry, computer science related math courses covering intros to maybe some number theory, matrices, combinatorics and so on. Since there are just as many if not more high school seniors in the US taking one of these non-calculus courses as there are high school seniors taking calculus courses means that the present day coverage index for the US is up around at least 30%, statistically as high or higher than essentially all those other countries in the world exalted as superior to the US outside possibly those 4 East Asian countries. Again, keep in mind that essentially all these other countries ration their advanced math learning opportunities after middle school, allowing only those who score highest on tests to enter those more mathematical rigorous high schools, the rest going to easier high schools or into vocational high schools. Again, here are those data for the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement_Calculus Grade distributions for AP Calculus AB In the 2010 administration, 245,867 students took the exam. The mean score was a 2.81. The grade distribution for 2010 was: Score-Percent 5 21.2% 4 16.4% 3 18.0% 2 11.2% 1 33.1% Grade distributions for AP Calculus BC In the 2010 administration, 78,998 students took the exam. The mean score was a 3.86. The grade distribution for the 2010 BC scores was: Score-Percent 5 49.4% 4 15.4% 3 18.0% 2 5.8% 1 11.4% The total is that 324,865 high school senior aged people in the US took the exams in 2010. Passing is defined as scoring 3 or better. Note that 55.6% of those who took the AB exam scored 3 or better. This means that about 136,702 people passed the AB exam with a 3 or better. Note that 82.8% of those who took the BC exam scored 3 or better. This means that about 65,410 people passed the BC exam with a 3 or better. About 202,112 people passed the calculus exams. Therefore about 15% of all 18 year olds (in school, out of school, type of school if in school, it does not matter) take a full year of a formal calculus course, about half - about 7-8% of all 18-year-olds - take the national exam, and about two-thirds of those taking the exam - about 5% of all 18-year-olds - pass it. How many countries outside of possibly those 4 East Asian countries do better than this in terms of universal calculus education measured via percentages of the ENTIRE 18-year-old population of the country? Probably 0. Re: John W. Knight, III, and the Father's Manifesto Posted: Jun 22, 2011 9:31 AM Plain Text Reply Lou Talman posted Jun 18, 2011 1:27 AM: > Anyone who has engaged, or hase considered engaging, > in discussion with > > <jk@isrealiteknight.com> > > may want to explore the website > > <http://www.fathersmanifesto.net/>. > <SNIP> > I will not draw any conlcusions here; readers can > draw their own after examining the "Father's > Manifesto" website. > > However, I, for one, currently intend to ignore all > posts from Mr. Knight. > > > - --Lou Talman > Department of Mathematical & Computer Sciences > Metropolitan State College of Denver > Thanks for that useful heads-up. I had arrived at the same conclusion/decision that you have after studying a couple* of the <jk@isrealiteknight.com> postings at various threads at this forum. GSC * Actually, a dozen or so. Message was edited by: GS Chandy ----------------------------------------------------- Posted: Jun 17, 2011 9:07 PM Plain Text Reply Thanks, Lou. Talk about giving Christianity a bad name... http://www.fathersmanifesto.net/holocaust.htm Wayne At 12:57 PM 6/17/2011, Louis Talman wrote: >Anyone who has engaged, or hase considered engaging, in discussion with > ><jk@isrealiteknight.com> > >may want to explore the website > ><http://www.fathersmanifesto.net/>. > >The site ><http://who.wildwestdomains.com/whoischeck.aspx? ci=44064&prog_id=wildwestdomains> >lists the following information for this site: > >+++++++++++++++++++ >Registrant: >Christian Party > >PO Box 3232 >Laguna Hills, California 92654 >United States > >Registered through: HostingDude.com >Domain Name: FATHERSMANIFESTO.NET >Created on: 15-Jan-09 >Expires on: 15-Jan-12 >Last Updated on: 13-Jan-11 > >Administrative Contact: >Party, Christian jk@israeliteknight.com >PO Box 3232 >Laguna Hills, California 92654 >United States >+1.9495441461 > >Technical Contact: >Party, Christian jk@israeliteknight.com >PO Box 3232 >Laguna Hills, California 92654 >United States >+1.9495441461 >+++++++++++++++++++ > >The following further information about the e-mail address ><jk@isrealiteknight.com> can also be found at ><http://who.wildwestdomains.com/whoischeck.aspx? ci=44064&prog_id=wildwestdomains>: > >+++++++++++++++++++ >Registrant: >Christian Party > >PO Box 3232 >Laguna Hills, California 92654 >United States > >Registered through: HostingDude.com >Domain Name: ISRAELITEIDENTITY.COM >Created on: 18-Dec-08 >Expires on: 18-Dec-11 >Last Updated on: 14-Jun-11 > >Administrative Contact: >Knight III, John W jk@israeliteknight.com >Christian Party >PO Box 5704 >Irvine, California 92616 >United States >9495441461 > >Technical Contact: >Knight III, John W jk@israeliteknight.com >Christian Party >PO Box 5704 >Irvine, California 92616 >United States >9495441461 >+++++++++++++++++++ > >I will not draw any conlcusions here; readers can draw their own >after examining the "Father's Manifesto" website. > >However, I, for one, currently intend to ignore all posts from Mr. Knight. > > >- --Lou Talman > Department of Mathematical & Computer Sciences > Metropolitan State College of Denver > > <http://rowdy.mscd.edu/%7Etalmanl> --------------------------------------- - --- On Sat, 6/18/11, Wayne Bishop <wbishop@exchange.calstatela.edu> wrote: > From: Wayne Bishop <wbishop@exchange.calstatela.edu> > Subject: Re: John W. Knight, III, and the Father's Manifesto > To: "Louis Talman" <talmanl@gmail.com> > Cc: "Math-teach Teach" <math-teach@mathforum.org>, "Louis Talman" <talmanl@gmail.com> > Date: Saturday, June 18, 2011, 12:07 AM > Thanks, Lou. Talk about giving > Christianity a bad name... > http://www.fathersmanifesto.net/holocaust.htm > > Wayne To follow-up the post above by Wayne, these were found associated with the site that Lou mentioned further below: http://israeliteknight.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/jews-are-not-human-30/ http://israeliteknight.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/jews-are-not-white-21/ http://israeliteknight.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/the-real-holocaust-dresden-2/ http://israeliteknight.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/inflammatory-allegation-4/ http://israeliteknight.wordpress.com/page/73/?pages-list http://fathersmanifesto.net/vonettaflowers.htm http://israeliteknight.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/obama-be-multiracial/ http://israeliteknight.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/aint-no-black-geniuses/ Finally, enter the terms Haiti israeliteknight at Google, and enter the term israeliteknight at YouTube. I presently have decided to join everyone else here - I now intend to no longer reply to posts by Mr. Knight. > > At 12:57 PM 6/17/2011, Louis Talman wrote: > >Anyone who has engaged, or hase considered engaging, in > discussion with > > > ><jk@isrealiteknight.com> > > > >may want to explore the website > > > ><http://www.fathersmanifesto.net/>. > > > >The site > ><http://who.wildwestdomains.com/whoischeck.aspx? ci=44064&prog_id=wildwestdomains> > > >lists the following information for this site: > > > >+++++++++++++++++++ > >Registrant: > >Christian Party > > > >PO Box 3232 > >Laguna Hills, California 92654 > >United States > > > >Registered through: HostingDude.com > >Domain Name: FATHERSMANIFESTO.NET > >Created on: 15-Jan-09 > >Expires on: 15-Jan-12 > >Last Updated o , Christian jk@israeliteknight.com > >PO Box 3232 > >Laguna Hills, California 92654 > >United States > >+1.9495441461 > > > >Technical Contact: > >Party, Christian jk@israeliteknight.com > >PO Box 3232 > >Laguna Hills, California 92654 > >United States > >+1.9495441461 > >+++++++++++++++++++ > > > >The following further information about the e-mail > address > ><jk@isrealiteknight.com> > can also be found at > ><http://who.wildwestdomains.com/whoischeck.aspx? ci=44064&prog_id=wildwestdomains>: > > > >+++++++++++++++++++ > >Registrant: > >Christian Party > > > >PO Box 3232 > >Laguna Hills, California 92654 > >United States > > > >Registered through: HostingDude.com > >Domain Name: ISRAELITEIDENTITY.COM > >Created on: 18-Dec-08 > >Expires on: 18-Dec-11 > >Last Updated on: 14-Jun-11 > > > >Administrative Contact: > >Knight III, John W jk@israeliteknight.com > >Christian Party > >PO Box 5704 > >Irvine, California 92616 > >United States > >9495441461 > > > >Technical Contact: > >Knight III, John W jk@israeliteknight.com > >Christian Party > >PO Box 5704 > >Irvine, California 92616 > >United States > >9495441461 > >+++++++++++++++++++ > > > >I will not draw any conlcusions here; readers can draw > their own > >after examining the "Father's Manifesto" website. > > > >However, I, for one, currently intend to ignore all > posts from Mr. Knight. > > > > > >- --Lou Talman > > Department of Mathematical & > Computer Sciences > > Metropolitan State College of Denver > > > > <http://rowdy.mscd.edu/%7Etalmanl> John W. Knight, III, and the Father's Manifesto Posted: Jun 17, 2011 12:57 PM Plain Text Reply Anyone who has engaged, or hase considered engaging, in discussion with <jk@isrealiteknight.com> may want to explore the website <http://www.fathersmanifesto.net/>. The site <http://who.wildwestdomains.com/whoischeck.aspx? ci=44064&prog_id=wildwestdomains> lists the following information for this site: +++++++++++++++++++ Registrant: Christian Party PO Box 3232 Laguna Hills, California 92654 United States Registered through: HostingDude.com Domain Name: FATHERSMANIFESTO.NET Created on: 15-Jan-09 Expires on: 15-Jan-12 Last Updated on: 13-Jan-11 Administrative Contact: Party, Christian jk@israeliteknight.com PO Box 3232 Laguna Hills, California 92654 United States +1.9495441461 Technical Contact: Party, Christian jk@israeliteknight.com PO Box 3232 Laguna Hills, California 92654 United States +1.9495441461 +++++++++++++++++++ The following further information about the e-mail address <jk@isrealiteknight.com> can also be found at <http://who.wildwestdomains.com/whoischeck.aspx? ci=44064&prog_id=wildwestdomains>: +++++++++++++++++++ Registrant: Christian Party PO Box 3232 Laguna Hills, California 92654 United States Registered through: HostingDude.com Domain Name: ISRAELITEIDENTITY.COM Created on: 18-Dec-08 Expires on: 18-Dec-11 Last Updated on: 14-Jun-11 Administrative Contact: Knight III, John W jk@israeliteknight.com Christian Party PO Box 5704 Irvine, California 92616 United States 9495441461 Technical Contact: Knight III, John W jk@israeliteknight.com Christian Party PO Box 5704 Irvine, California 92616 United States 9495441461 +++++++++++++++++++ I will not draw any conlcusions here; readers can draw their own after examining the "Father's Manifesto" website. However, I, for one, currently intend to ignore all posts from Mr. Knight. - --Lou Talman Department of Mathematical & Computer Sciences Metropolitan State College of Denver <http://rowdy.mscd.edu/%7Etalmanl> ------------------------------------ Richard Strausz Posts: 2,003 Registered: 12/4/04 Watch this User Re: John W. Knight, III, and the Father's Manifesto Posted: Jun 17, 2011 4:32 PM Plain Text Reply Good detective work, Lou! Thanks - Richard ---------------------------------- Louis Talman Posts: 2,600 Registered: 12/26/05 Watch this User Re: John W. Knight, III, and the Father's Manifesto Posted: Jun 18, 2011 2:01 PM Plain Text Reply On Jun 17, 2011, at 5:32 PM, Richard Strausz wrote: > Good detective work, Lou! Google, my friend. Google. (And the unix "whois" utility.) - --Lou Talman Department of Mathematical & Computer Sciences Metropolitan State College of Denver <http://rowdy.mscd.edu/%7Etalmanl>