Another shonky study

“Shonky” is a very useful word much used in Australia which is ROUGHLY translatable as “fraudulent”, “misleading” or “a confidence trick”. In academe, political correctness is a great source of shonky research reports. An article in “The Times” of London drew my attention to this study. The basic claim of the article is that student motivation is the main determinant of success at school. Ability is given short shrift. As soon as I read the report in “The Times”, I thought it looked like the authors were spinning like a top. And so I found it to be when I looked at the research report itself.

The authors start out under their heading Explanations with: “there is no evidence that genetic factors such as systematic differences in innate ability play a significant role in ethnic test score gaps”. NO evidence? A very bold claim—particularly in the light of around 100 years of psychometric research showing LARGE interracial differences in IQ and in view of the undoubted correlation between IQ scores and educational attainment. If the authors had said that there was “some controvesy” about the importance of innate differences in ability, they would have made a properly cautious academic statement. What they DID say is a straight-out lie.

And in their own data analysis they make sure that ability will not be shown to have any effect. They “match” (control) for the neighbourhoods from which the students are drawn by using the official “Index of Multiple Deprivation” (IMD) for the neighbourhoods concerned. No prizes for guessing that deprived neighbourhoods tend to be inhabited by lower IQ people. Smart people are not often “deprived”.

Not satisfied with that, they also matched students on their “Mosaic” postcode classification—a classification which again picks out poor versus affluent neighbourhoods. They were determined that nothing in their study would reveal anything about ability. They used proxies of ability to remove its influence on their results.

So in the end they conclude that some ethnic groups outperform whites in educational attainment. That may well be true. As far as Indians are concerned, I have little doubt of it. But that is not what their research showed. What it showed is that blacks outperformed POOR whites only, not whites as a whole.

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, June 7, 2006 at 12:33 AM in
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Posted by John S Bolton on June 07, 2006, 05:18 AM | #

Somehow they managed to wish out of existence the ETS’s latest results, showing that blacks from households with incomes over $100k, did worse than whites from families with only $10k income, on the SAT.
Children do not have their own SES; they have that of their parents, when they take an IQ-like standardized test at age 17.
All of which goes to show that comparison groups must not be skewed to deliver the desired results.
At the same time, immigration cohorts from India, with over a billion people, are highly skewed towards their top percentiles in a qualifications-based immigration program, which may account for most of the visas granted from such a country.
India is shown in Murray’s Human Accomplishment(p. 284), to have been perfectly stagnant for 70 years, in Nobel prizes and scientific mentions.
This can only be because the nobility and magnanimity of British imperialism, had already condescended to reach all the way down into the wretchedness of Indian cultural levels, to find those exceedingly few meritorious, and raise them up into places where they could achieve something notable, before independence.
Socialism in India cannot be blamed, only the genetics of tropical-adaptedness can account for intellectual achievement there, staying where the IQ scores say it will stay.
They have had no socialism to speak of, in comparison to other countries during the same period. The railways are actually antisocialist in their effect, as can be seen in the present orgy of demolition and land-grabbing for the switch toward highway building there. Railways use much less land, and allowed private property to be less nationalized, until now that highways are taking over.
The small percentage in India, with IQ’s averaging around 100, have mounted a strike against affirmative action recently. The government is just now pushing to extend quotas to the private sector, 35 years after the US did so. Nationalized steel industries are not capable of explaining the above; one family was not about to make an industrial revolution in a country of hundreds of millions.

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