That’s why, when I went to Catholic school, we split up the smart kids and the stupid kids, as a form of triage.
The “stupid” stream had a nice name like “general” but we all knew it really meant “stupid,” including the kids who were in it. (Even they weren’t that stupid.)
I guess they don’t do that anymore…
Making tests super-easy automatically narrows the racial gap as measured by the simpleminded method of subtracting the percent of blacks passing from the percent of whites passing. (…)
If Mayor Bloomberg, who has made himself $17,500,000,000 delivering statistics to traders, doesn’t know about standard deviations, well, Bloomberg L.P. employs hundreds of people who could have explained it to him. (…)
The Fire Department of New York tried the same tactic to avoid a disparate impact suit over the notoriously innumerate Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s rule that blacks must score at least four fifths as well as whites in percentage terms. They pushed the white passing rate on the fireman’s hiring test to 97 percent so that the black rate hit 85 percent. (…)
The racial gaps are usually portrayed in terms of black children, whom white Americans find highly sympathetic. But most of the mounting frenzy in elite circles over the gaps is currently driven by the vast numbers of Hispanics our ruling class has let into the country. Weissberg subversively notes:
“Imagine that current students from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and other Third World nations suddenly all voluntarily returned home. Professional educators would be congratulating themselves on the dramatic turnaround, and nearly all of today’s reform agenda would quickly vanish. Yet, this possibility can only be uttered in the most hushed conversations since it hints that human beings are not interchangeable in terms of cognitive ability. Better to pour billions into futile reforms than to broach taboo topics.”
