"Maybe Murray isn't smart enough to figure out how to educate children, so he's saying it can't be done rather than do the hard work."
Exactly. The cynic in me believes most who purport to want to help kids/schools like to hear themselves talk and actually don't have any inkling what to do about the problems.
Good grief.
Where on earth do you get the idea that medicine and law don't do triage, essentially giving up on the poor and the ignorant?
Go down to your local courthouse and sit through a morning and watch the actual legal profession at work--the meatball processing of hapless morons through an inattentive and uncaring bureaucractic machine, represented by unprepared, overworked, and underpaid public defenders rushing from half-assed motion to inept argument. . .
Or look up the numbers of type 2 diabetics who are getting nowhere near to American Diabetes Association targets--the poor and ignorant who do not learn what is needed and cannot be counted on to incorporate difficult disciplines into their daily lives. The medical profession--ie the general practitioners who work with the great unwashed--do indeed do the minimum and let it play itself out as the patients slowly slide toward blindess, amputations and heart attacks. It takes longer to process the medicaid claim than it does to get through the office visit.
I suspect if your daily work involved working with masses of low IQ poor students who did not seem to want your compassion and care or your clever intellectulizing you would--oh never mind. . .
I have to disagree a bit. Last time I went to the ER, I had a broken hand...maybe. They told me I had to wait. I discovered I was waiting while the doctors worked on nearly hopeless patients who had been in a car wreck. No one asked me if I was wealthier than the car wreck victims, and clearly I was more likely to have a good outcome thhan they were. If that's triage, it worked in favor of the sickest patients, rather than the least sick.
As for law, I understand that that's a stickier comparison.
But to simply say that medicine systematically works against the least healthy is not correct.
Also, the parallel comparison to Murray would be to have someone who is a human biologist call for a change in protocols through all of medicine, that doctors consciously decide not to treat the sickest patients as aggressively because they are so sick. That's kind of nuts, don't you think?
Emergency rooms aren't very comparable to general ed classrooms. The treatment of chronic problems in clinics come much closer, since so many health problems are at bottom education problems in that the only effective "treatment" has to do with changing daily practices and habits.
Why would anyone call for for what we already have? Smart, responsive and responsible patients get far better treatment than obtuse and unwilling patients. They tend to have more money, for one thing, and more capacity to change their diet and their exercise regimes.
You can begin to discern the difference readily just by sitting in the waiting rooms of clinics in well-to-do suburbs and in poorer places, observing the patients and eavesdropping a bit.
I picked diabetes to focus on because in order to control Type II diabetes, a patient often needs to understand the disease and make difficult changes in lifestyle. Higher IQ patients regularly receive a team approach to their disease, which includes time with a diabetic educator, meetings with a dietician, and consultations with an endocrinologist who is tracking personal data at a pretty detailed level. Other patients have a blood test once or twice a year, and treatment involves finding more and more powerful drugs, in a quest to neutralize the destructive effects of wrong diets and physical inactivity.
You can pretend health care and law are delivered equally well to all patients only by not looking very closely at the actual world.
In the emergency room the patients are in essence broken machines and everything is up to the surgeon's skill--it's relatively easy to treat all patients the same and a bit foolish not to. A broken arm is just a broken arm.
I don't think it's nuts to think doctors decide to treat the most sick less aggressively, and in a pretty systematic way. I think its obvious that that's what happens. It's pretty easy to get doctors to acknowledge that, in about the same terms teachers use. If patients aren't going to take responsibility, there's nothing much doctors can do, except treat the emergencies and then let them return to their self-destructive ways.
Hmmm. I don't know about "most" doctors. I know about the doctors I know, and coming from a family of doctors that means I know quite a few.
I think they have plenty of evidence that, at least in their practice, what you say is not true. A number would blame the insurance system for making it difficult to care for the poor. But that's not the same as the doctor deciding, in advance, not to care for someone. Sure, these things probably become entangled, but I think it's far less evil than you put forth.
Not that I think doctors or medicine is perfect. But I think there are some aspects of the profession that would be useful to educators. Like, could educators design better "treatments" for the challenged student? Just as doctors have designed better treatments for the most sick, so too educators could perhaps do more for challenged learners. But that's tough to do if you begin with the assumption that some kids are predestined not to learn much or succeed much in school.
Jenny,
I'm not saying it's evil.
And the doctors I'm talking about are not so much picking and choosing patients and deciding to give inferior treatment to some--rather, the bulk of their practices are aimed at patients who are getting minimal care. They are not evil. They are struggling with hard problems and finite resources.
If you honestly think that all American patients are getting equal levels of medical care and treatment, well. . .or have equal capacity to make use of the the best medical information. . .
Doctors regularly pursue different medical strategies depending on the intelligence and responsibility of the patient. It's not a secret. It's part of their training.
This is, like Murray's point about the difficulties of low IQ students in school, too obvious and too easily confirmed to argue about.
What I am concerned about is the social untopianism that leads to platitudes that make the utterer feel morally superior but lead to practices that cannot be made to work.
Murray is not stupid and he is not evil and he is not trying to set the clock back. He's trying to engage you in serious conversation and serious thought about serious problems. His discourse requires pretty good analytical abilities. This is why, I think, he's publishing in WSJ--a venue not chosen as a way of communicating with those who practice the craft of educational leadership.
Anon: Okay. let's say that you are correct that doctors are trained to differentiate treatment based on a perceived intelligence and responsibility of the patient. The patient has been to see the doctor three times with diabetes, and is having a hard time controlling it. The doctor is trained at this point to offer less treatment, or somethig, because the patient is struggling to manage the current treatment.
Suppuse this is common in internal medicine practices throughout the nation. And suppose that a medical economist writes a series of articles for the WSJ talking about how smart it is to provide less treatment to diabetes patients who demonstrate they are less intelligent and responsible.
How would people respond to this? Do you think they would sanguine about it? Do you think that diabetics, for example, would agree that this is good?
Isn't that the parallel to Murray's argument?
Murray may know a lot about IQ, but he doesn't know anything at all about education.
Good teaching, decent curriculum's, and education reform will result in drastic improvements in the achievement of low performing students.
What is left out of the argument, is will these reforms result in even greater improvement of high performing students. The average scores may go up, the majority of students may become literate and fluent in mathematics, but the achievement gap could actually increase.
Will our current mimimum standards increase if everyone achieves them? Is equality of results more important than equality of time expended.
Murray isn't even willing to ponder these questions. It seems as if he is willing to give up on high achievement by any except for the elite. He thinks that all low performing kids should give up and become plumbers... nevermind that skilled trades require skills taught in schools as well.
So the question is not what is real but how do people feel about it?
Good teaching, decent curriculum's, and education reform will result in drastic improvements in the achievement of low performing students.
Murray is dealing in evidence rather than feel-good platitudes. He said there is absolutely no evidence for such assertions, and you respond not by citing evidence but by repeating the assertions.
I end as I began: good grief.
MLU, run this by me again. Murray said there is no evidence that teaching improves student learning? There is no evidence for that because there is no control group. It's Murray's little backhanded way of hoodwinking the uninitiated. Of course there is no control group. Where can we find a group of 12 year olds who have never been to school, but been tested annually in academic subjects?
Actually there is evidence that specific instructional protocols and actions improve student learning. Do you want citations? Try the comparison of SFA, Tennessee STAR, REading Recovery in EEPA, and I think it's 2004 and if you really want the cite I'll get it. There are others. Bob Slavin has done a good job showing that SFA improves student learning, and as Ken DeRose at D-ed Reckoning about direct instruction.
Yes, in fact, good teaching will result in improved student learning. Why would Murray be against it?
JennyD, There is much more in Muray's essay that I disagree with than I agree with but...
"I have to disagree a bit. Last time I went to the ER, "
One case is not relevant. Given your training in statistics I am supprised that you wrote this. Such a claim will only embolden anyone who disagrees with you to feel more certain about that position.
"Also, the parallel comparison to Murray would be to have someone who is a human biologist call for a change in protocols through all of medicine, that doctors consciously decide not to treat the sickest patients as aggressively because they are so sick. That's kind of nuts, don't you think?"
Isn't this the one of the main differences between health care in Europe and the US? In the US we spend a much larger percentage of our health care dollars on paitiens in the last few months of life than the Europeans do.
"Where can we find a group of 12 year olds who have never been to school, but been tested annually in academic subjects?"
Sudbury Valley, Home Schooling Unschoolers, pre-schoolers (wont be 12 but you can find a lot of students in younger ages to make comparisons)
Now to the question of education and who to spent what on. If you are going to go about centralizing the control of education (which as a country we have), what should the allocation of resouces be to the people in the top 10% (by what ever metric you choose) be verses the resources given to the bottom 10%? If you look at extra resouces above the average, I think you will find that the bottom 10% gets many times more additional public dollars, probably 10x or more. Why should this be the case?
As for some of the wacky stuff in Murry:
"The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. "
How do you teach people to make acurate Judgements by telling then to be non-Judgmental and not practice making judgements?
"They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks."
How do you equally respect one vs the other but spend much more time on one verses the other? What is ment by respect?
"The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults."
Again how can you possibly learn to express yourself without practice?
So yes, Murry is more wrong than right about most of his points... but that doesnt mean his is completly off base in every point.
What I am concerned about is the social untopianism that leads to platitudes that make the utterer feel morally superior but lead to practices that cannot be made to work.
Murray is not stupid and he is not evil and he is not trying to set the clock back. He's trying to engage you in serious conversation and serious thought about serious problems. His discourse requires pretty good analytical abilities. This is why, I think, he's publishing in WSJ--a venue not chosen as a way of communicating with those who practice the craft of educational leadership.
Speak it brother, speak it.
I KNEW that Tangoman would come by for this. Hi TM.
Hi Jenny. I littered Ken's blog with my comments this time 
Even the government knows that wealth, income, and education level is a proxy for intelligence and adjusts its programs accordingly.
You would struggle to purchase a lotto ticket in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC but virtually every store in Anacostia sells lotto tickets. The government knows that many people will never understand odds and probability and thus, the government takes those people's money.
Why should schools function any different that the test of government. Every gone in a library in a rich neighborhood versus a poor neighborhood?
Murray isn't advocating any kind of government program whereby we segregate society based on IQ. For one thing, as he points out, this is already the case naturally. Our smarter citizens tend to end up as our doctors and leaders. His point is that we place more value on college bound jobs to the neglect of all other careers.
He argues that we are wasting our efforts trying to shape an educational system around getting everyone up to college entry level. As half of us are average to less than average in intelligence when compared in the aggregate (no IQ tests are needed to realize that in any comparison there has to be a spectrum with an average and two slopes leading in opposite directions from it), many of us would benefit putting our efforts towards careers where we have the potential to be successful. Why push so many of us to pursue college degrees and jobs where we'll end up only being mediocre?
I think the outrage many people feel reading Murray stems from your own prejudices against non-white-collar-type jobs. You all feel that it is somehow offensive to suggest to a child that college may not be for them. Why? Something wrong with cutting hair for a living? It’s many of you who are actually snobs. But you pretend this is not the case by adopting the stance that all children are capable of having good white-collar jobs, if only our society would “educate” them properly.
Education is so full of cant that even many teachers can't acknowledge the realities they face every day. The ideological intensity of professionalized and unionized teaching is pretty dispiriting.
The worst thing I see regularly is the uncritical championing of teaching "critical thinking" to kids whose very lives depend upon being given true and tradition-tested guidelines for living that will save them from the worst and most predictable errors.
I followed one student very closely over several years. He wasn't very smart, but his teachers and his brainwashed mother insisted he was brilliant in some unorthodox way. They thought they were teaching him something when they kept encouraging his critical thinking and coloring outside the lines and behaving in weird ways. The emphasis was always on how clever he was, as he continued to behave idiotically.
When he finally ended up in a den of thieves after high school--literally--he at last found people who would tell him clearly the rules of life. He quite happily followed them. He went to prison for stealing costume jewelry worth nothing (after breaking into houses).
What he really needed was an adult world unafraid of being moralistic and didactic who would teach him the old homilies: honesty is the best policy, good grooming is important, always be punctual and neat, etc. I always thought he would have done as he was taught and been happy to know a good way to live.
He's now approaching middle aged: a three-time prison convict, the drunken driver of a car that killed a retired couple returning from a weekend at the lake, no teeth, alcholic, and stupider than ever. . .
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