Sen. Joe Biden is in trouble for blaming education problems on non-whites in a Washington Post interview. The Democratic presidential candidate says he was talking about socioeconomic factors when he compared students in Iowa and Washington, D.C. But he framed the issue in racial terms.
“There’s less than 1 percent of the population of Iowa that is African-American,” he said, according to an audiotape of the interview with the Post’s editorial board on the newspaper’s Web site. “There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that is, are minorities.”
Biden then asked what the percentage was in Washington. When told it was the probably “the vast majority,” he said, “Yeah. So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.
“When you have children coming from dysfunctional homes, when you have children coming from homes where there’s no books, where the mother from the time they’re born doesn’t talk to them as opposed to the mother in Iowa who’s sitting out there and talks to them, the kid starts off with a 300-word larger vocabulary at age three,” he said.
That last paragraph is very true. In fact, I think Biden underestimates the gap in vocabulary. By bringing in race, Biden discredited his point — and himself.
You’d think a career politician would be more politic, but the talkative senator is known for regular bouts of foot-in-mouth disease.
Now if only the republicans shut up….
But they won’t.
I use a text in my “Legislative Procedures” class whichincldes a quote from a Capitol Hill maven: “The only thing standing between Joe Biden and the presidency is his mouth.” Looks like it’s a hell of an obstacle!
Senator Biden could either attribute the poor performance of the DC school system to employees or to students and parents. When confronted with the choice between insulting one of two powerful Democratic Party constituencies, he choose, rationally, to insult the less-powerful one.
No Democrat can spit in Reg Weaver’s face and survive.
Malcolm, is Jeane your Mother?
His comments do seem especially stupid politically, but the racial achievement gap is pretty pronounced, and the racial composition of the district does usually predict the performance of the district.
We may not want that to be true, and it doesn’t mean anything about the likely performance of any particular student, but it does correspond with the present reality in terms of scholastic performance. And closing the achievement gap is one of the nobler intentions of NCLB.
Can anyone point to district where members of other racial or ethnic groups outperform Whites and Asians? And yet, Biden, discredited his comments by pointing out reality? Does it say more about him or his audience that this would be the case? The achievement gap can never be spoken of or never attributed to differences in the home lives of the kids?
The achievement gap is due to our racist society and white privilege. Equality must be measured in results, not opportunties. We just had a day-long inservice by the fine folks at EDEquity.com, so I’m pretty much up on the subject. A couple of things I learned are that Asians are unfeeling robots that don’t care about the teacher-student relationship as long as you feed them the data to ace the test, but that Hispanics and blacks must be taught according to their own cultural memes or you will fail to reach them. I also learned that educrats really get off on making you feel guilty for being white, but I already sort of knew that.
I think that I properly detect the sarcasm in you answer, Badabing, but even if the gap is related to our racist society and white privilege, it’s still there and the racial composition of a district still predicts a lot.
Did you happen to ask how it is that even when members of oppressed groups hold the majority of leadership positions in a district there’s still a failure to teach students according to their own cultural memes in a way that allows them to be reached? I’ve always wondered about that.
No, NDC, I didn’t ask that because I already know the answer to it. It’s not the answer the ideologues at EDEquity would give, but based on my own experience I would say that the prevailing culture in our district is one of failure in spite of the fact that our principal and the majority of our staff are people of the right color. For example, there is a deeply-seated antipathy toward reading (I recently had a freshman laugh and say, “What kind of kid would go to a library?”), a dismally inadequate vocabulary for grasping 9-12 instruction, an insular mentality that has no interest in anything lying outside the realm of the hood, intellectual poverty in the home, single-parent households, the toleration and even celebration of teen pregnancies, a pervasive mindset of victimhood, an unwillingness to defer pleasure now for the sake of future goals, a disdain for academic achievement, and our administrators’ penchant for blaming teachers when students fail. All these and more militate mightily against learning.
Across the US, the coefficient of correlation(%20K+, score) is negative, where “%20K+” is the fraction of total enrollment assigned to school districts over 20,000 enrollment (or 15,000 enrollment, depending on which year of the Digest of Education Statistics you use) and “score” is 4th or 8th grade NAEP Reading or Math scores. I have used Math composite scores, Numbers and Operations subtest scores, and Algebra and Functions subtest scores. I have used mean scores, percentile scores, proficiency scores, mean scores by parents’ race and level of education. Large districts drag scores down. These results are consistent, with an interesting exception: the coefficient of correlation (%20K+, score) is positive for children of college-educated white parents.
Across the US, the coefficient of correlation(age-start, score) is positive, where “age-start” is the age at which States compel attendance at school and “score” is 4th or 8th grade Reading or Math scores ten years later. Early compulsory attendance is counter-indicated.
ETS reports a smaller Black/White SAT score gap with homeschoolers than with conventionally-schooled children.
From these and other lines of evidence, I derive two generalizations:
1) As institutions take from individual parents the power to determine for their own children the choice of curriculum and the pace and method of instruction, overall system performance falls.
2) Political control of school harms most the children of the least politically-adept parents (“Well, duh!”, as my students would say).
Jeane is your mother.
Malcome Kirkpatrick,
Do you think that the children of the “least politically-adept parents” as you put it would be best served by their parents home schooling them?
It’s one thing to conclude that the relatively small group of parents who have already chosen to home school instead of using the public school generally provides a better education than the public schools, but quite another to conclude that therefore all or most students would be better off being home schooled, don’t you think?
“That last paragraph [on the vocabulary gap] is very true.”
There’s no evidence of causation. In other words, students in poorly educated households have a vocabulary gap, but there’s no evidence that access to vocabulary (or lack thereof) is the cause.
Maybe Biden can get Neil Kinnock’s help again, if he’s still available…
In the meantime, one day people are going to wake up and see that the cause of underperformance in schools among different ethnic and racial backgrounds has NOTHING to do with ethnicity of race and EVERYTHING to do with culture. If you come from a family that does not value education, chances are you will not do so well in school, and that goes for everyone, regardless of ethnicity or race.
If school is a means, not an end in itself, then it makes no more sense for all children to be in school than it does for all children to be hospitalized. It does not take 12 years at $10,000 per year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Real-world experience works better than classroom lectures for much vocatioal training.
The socialization argument does not support compulsory attendance for the sub-adult population generally. School is bad socialization. In Hawaii, juvenile arrests for assault, drug possession, and drug promotion fall when school is not in session. Juvenile hospitalizations for human-induced trauma fall when school is not in session.
Einstein opposed compulsory attendance at school. Gandhi opposed compulsory attendance at school.
If it is fraud for a mechanic to charge for the repair of a functional motor, and if it s fraud for a physician to charge for the treatment of a healthy patient, then it is fraud for a teacher to charge for the instruction of a student who does not need our help. If the State-operated, tax-subsidized, compulsory school system is not an employment program for dues-paying members of the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel, a source of padded contracts for politically-connected insiders, and a venue for State-worshipful indoctrination, why cannot any student take, at any age, an exit exam (the GED will do) and apply the taxpayers’ age 6-18 education subsidy toward post-secondary education at any VA-approved post-secondary institution or toward a wage subsidy at any qualified (say, has filed W-2 forms on a least three employees for at least the previous four years) private-sector employer?
Malcolm,
What question were you answering?
We don’t have “State-operated, tax-subsidized, compulsory school” systems anywhere, do we? Are there states that don’t allow private school enrollment or home schooling? Being able to demonstrate that you are educating your child between the ages of six and sixteen typically seems to be required by law, but I don’t think anyone is being help prisoner by the public schools. Are things different in Hawaii?
I’ve got no problem with allowing students to test out whenever they are ready, but I don’t feel like taxpayers should have to continue to pay for their educations for a pre-set number of years, simply as an entitlement. Decide what they ought to know and get them out, I’d say.
Catch Thirty-Thr33, you’ve never observed that race and ethnicity are often tied to culture? Interesting. I agree that race and ethnicity don’t say anything especially valid about any particular person, and yet general trends do exists, it seems to me. Otherwise why would we see Asian SAT scores typically being higher than Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, even when controlled for income or parental education level? I agree that it’s tied to family culture, but culture is often tied to race and ethnicity.
1) I use “State” to mean government, generally. I capitalize “State” to mock believers’ faith in The God that Failed.
2) Attendance at State (government, generally)-operated schools is compulsory for all children whose parents are (a) too poor to afford the ransom charged by the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel’s accomplices, the exclusive private schools (I exempt parochial schools) and/or (b) unable to sacrifice an income to homeschool.
3) Compulsory attendance (truancy) statutes apply to children.
4) Compulsory education (educational neglect) statutes apply to parents.
5) Restrictions on homeschooling vary widely from State to State.
6) Culture is certainly important, and relates in several important ways to differences in school performance between groups. One large cultural difference is that between the white-collar academic culture of legislators, bureaucrats and curriculum designers, on the one hand, and the blue-collar culture of many students’ families, on the other. For many people “academic” has become a synonym for “irrelevant”.
7) Compulsory, unpaid labor is slavery, black or white, male or female, young or old. There are two reasons to combine pre-18 escape options and to use the taxpayers’ age 6-18 education subsidy to support post-secondary education or on-the-job training for early escapees:
7.1) To create incentives for students trapped in a system which currently offers to many students few reasons to do what schools require, and
7.2) To drain resources from this parasitic institution and so cut the positive feedback loop between government school budgets and insiders’ lobbying muscle.
Malcolm, that just seemed a little nutty to me, particularly the slavery comment, but to each his own, I guess.
Student motivation is the single most important policy variable which influences differences between school systems. The slavery analogy is exact, and explains quite a lot about observed system and student performance. Students act dumb to reduce overseers’ expectations. Students make life miserable for teachers’ pets and hoop-jumping ass-kissers because these raise overseers’ expectations of what others can accomplish. Homeschoolers accomplish miracles, compared to conventionall-schooled students, because children, especially very young children, don’t respond to adult incentives but will work their hearts out for the love of mom.