The Briefing Room
General Category => Health/Education => Topic started by: rangerrebew on March 27, 2019, 03:40:06 pm
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The Achievement Gap Fails to Close
Half century of testing shows persistent divide between haves and have-nots
By Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, Laura M. Talpey and Ludger Woessmann
SUMMER 2019 / VOL. 19, NO. 3
Education Next will host "Have We Closed Socioeconomic Achievement Gaps?," an event in Washington, D.C. on April 9, 2019.
Paul E. Peterson sat down with EdNext Editor-in-chief Marty West to discuss this article on the EdNext Podcast.
Income inequality has soared in the United States over the past half century. Has educational inequality increased alongside, in lockstep?
Of course, say public intellectuals from across the political spectrum. As Richard Rothstein of the liberal Economic Policy Institute puts it: “Incomes have become more unequally distributed in the United States in the last generation, and this inequality contributes to the academic achievement gap.†Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, citing research by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, says, “Rich Americans and poor Americans are living, learning, and raising children in increasingly separate and unequal worlds.†Another well-known political scientist, Charles Murray, argues that “the United States is stuck with a large and growing lower class that is able to care for itself only sporadically and inconsistently. . . . The new upper class has continued to prosper as the dollar value of the talents they bring to the economy has continued to grow.â€
https://www.educationnext.org/achievement-gap-fails-close-half-century-testing-shows-persistent-divide/ (https://www.educationnext.org/achievement-gap-fails-close-half-century-testing-shows-persistent-divide/)
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If there is a difference in achievement levels, it has to be more the support for education at home than economic factors. Of course, the left will always try to make it economic and like the "collusion" report, will never accept an explanation which says otherwise.
I think of Dr. Ben Carson who grew up in slumland Detroit, and still became one of the great neurosurgeons of our day. His mother always made sure he and his brother did their homework and studied. It took a while, but Carson eventually caught on to the value of being educated. He didn't find out until later his mother could neither read nor write. Because she always had them read their work to her, it never occurred to them she was totally illiterate. It had nothing to do with economic status, it was totally parental investment in her sons' lives, their education, and futures.
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Once was asked by a professor about my literacy and my knowledge of things that I should not know.
I said, "I read Milton and Shakespeare on my own."
He said, "So, you are self-taught."
I said, "Everybody is self-taught."
Nobody can teach you anything that you do not want to absorb. Everyone is self-taught. There is no other kind of "taught".
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Once was asked by a professor about my literacy and my knowledge of thing that I should not know.
I said, "I read Milton and Shakespeare on my own."
He said, "So, you are self-taught."
I said, "Everybody is self-taught."
Nobody can teach you anything that you do not want to absorb. Everyone is self-taught. There is no other kind of "taught".
Of course there is. If you were given access to materials, somehow made to understand that there might be some value in said materials, given reasons to want to learn, and then being challenged to think, and to think beyond your narrow self-interest, then, yes, you were taught. None of those things I just mentioned are being used to any great degree in public schools now.
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You mean "The Ambition Gap" Fails to Close.
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Everyone is self-taught.
It does not matter what environment, it only matters what you take from it.
You think a degree in this or that, is the end?
It is only the beginning. You have been put on a doorstep.
You either walk through, or stay there. You choose.
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You have been put on a doorstep.
You either walk through, or stay there. You choose.
Except when the door is locked.
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Once was asked by a professor about my literacy and my knowledge of things that I should not know.
I said, "I read Milton and Shakespeare on my own."
He said, "So, you are self-taught."
I said, "Everybody is self-taught."
Nobody can teach you anything that you do not want to absorb. Everyone is self-taught. There is no other kind of "taught".
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Well said.
You're in the company of Plato, Cicero, Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Haydn;
to name a handful who never had degrees, those poor unfortunates!!!
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The achievement gap will never, EVER, close for the simplest of reasons.
Some 2,500 years past and 500 years before Christ and Catholicism,
Plato defined the Soul as that astonishing attribute of Mankind that
differentiates each of us for all eternity.
We are not the same and emphatically will never be equal.
Each has unique attitudes, behaviors, impulses and sentiments which
encourage or restrain our passion for achievement. Reality.
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Except when the door is locked.
That's when you knock. Firmly.
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"The Achievement Gap Fails to Close..."
A Fishrrman fearless, fearless prediction:
The "gap" will NEVER be closed.
Because it CANNOT be closed.
NOTHING can or will ever change this.
"The Bell Curve".