What’s the policy lesson from these three success stories?
It’s that the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education. For at-risk households, that starts with social workers making visits to encourage such basic practices as talking to children. One study found that a child of professionals (disproportionately white) has heard about 30 million words spoken by age 3; a black child raised on welfare has heard only 10 million words, leaving that child at a disadvantage in school.
The next step is intensive early childhood programs, followed by improved elementary and high schools, and programs to defray college costs.
Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”
The problem with Kristof’s rationales are that they’ve been attempted and failed miserably. Sure, there have been a few successes, but chances are those successes might have happened without the sociological experiments.
Our education system, prior to the reforms of the ’60s and since have actually dumbed down the generations of students since their inception. All the efforts to improve literacy, have actually increased illiteracy. Our children are given magazines to read, not the textbook and literature requirements that many of us grew up with. Teachers aren’t discussing such things with students, nor are they paying more attention to them. Increasingly more teachers have come to view poor and middle class students as less thans, incapable of anything on par with their own understanding, and simply do not care.
K-12 ESL has lead to a demand for bilingual education, the expenditure of billions of dollars on these programs in each of the states per year, forcing them to do away with first art and music education (programs that actually were found to have raised math and science scores), then field trips to art and science museums and other educational sites of interest, then it lead to less funding for text books, not hiring teachers with actual math and science degrees. Both ESL and bilingual education have contributed to a higher than 50% increase in the dropout rate.
Kristof’s family emigrated here, they were able to take advantage of a strong and stable society, it provided them with opportunities they would never have had in their home country. Their son benefited from all this, yet he treats the subject so cavalierly, most likely because, his parents were both hardcore Marxists, college professors who took the benefits of our free society, while striving to undermine those benefits, rights and freedoms from subsequent generations.
Kristof can’t help it, I suppose. His entire column points to the importance of personal drive overcoming personal weaknesses such as low IQ, language skills, etc., then he ruins it all by slipping into the soothing bromides of social workers, programs and funding. Maybe his editors at the NYT required it…who knows?
I’m sorry, but I seriously doubt any of those things will make the slightest difference when a child exists within a culture that scorns every virtue he called out.
It’s possible, even probable, that perserverance and drive are in your DNA, and inherited.
I have seen the IQ studies showing disparities among racial and ethnic groups. I refuse to believe, however, that these disparities are primarily biological. I think it’s culture. When one’s culture, one’s home environment, encourages study, self-discipline, and academic performance, then academic performance happens more often than not. Parents in the lower socio-economic groups must demand performance. Schools could help by quitting the making of excuses for these students and instead presenting them with demanding material and asking them to learn it. They can. Numerous charter and private schools prove this every day.
The Irish are not mentioned, though statistically they are among the most successful groups economically in the US.
#4. Katherine, Your analysis seems right on the mark to me. I would add only that we must also demand better performance from parents in the lower socio-economic groups. A part of that is positive identification of fathers and an insistence that they support their children — even to the point of enforced and regimented labor. When parents learn responsibility for their actions, children learn responsibility for their actions. Mothers should not carry the burden alone, but neither should taxpayers be paying the bills.
As to the degree to which IQ determines success, the jury is out and will stay out. Some success is fundamentally determined by IQ, which Kristof ignores: The high sciences are an obvious case in point. Does anyone doubt – has anyone ever doubted? – that determination plays a large role in success? No, of course not. Kristof has simply decided to come down on the side of Nurture instead of Nature in this perpetual debate. He is, obviously, both right and wrong. the trouble with arguments like his is that parents will go on saying to their children, “You can be whatever you want if only you try heard enough.” This is manifestly false. L
Stable families raise stable children who are more likely to do better than their parents. That requires jobs that allow workers to support themselves and their children. Kristof ignores that and so many other issues. How well can one, “educate, educate, educate” when one can’t work and support ones self? In the ’90s, pursuing a college degree in math and science was incentivized, and yet, despite having a glut of people with math and science degrees, the government and corporate elite tell us we have a shortage of math and science degrees, so they can excuse their exploitation of our visa programs to bring in foreign, cheaper, substandard math and science degrees.
The demand that all our problems would be eliminated by more education is a distraction, intended to divert our attention away. Such social workers would be ignored, resented and most likely victimized. The families he’s feigning concern for, would be vastly improved if they had the ability to work real jobs, earn a US wage standard and be able to feel they had a stake in society.
Mari, what’s your source for citing a “glut of people with math and science degrees”? I’ve seen a great deal of research saying the opposite (as you note), and would like to look at your information.
Regardless of Kristof’s assertions, groups that value education and teach respect for educators will generally succeed.
Distain for education, and the peer pressure to not “act white” doom many minorities to life of underachievement.