NEWSFLASH! Half of students are below average!

[Blind_Io]

This shocking revelation brought to you by the Wall Street Journal, one of the most respected papers in the world as an analysis of buisness and stock performance; and thus a supposed expert publication in statistics. Apparently they have a department dedicated to "Duh!" news writing.

Here is the article, uncut and unedited:

Intelligence in the Classroom
Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.

BY CHARLES MURRAY
Tuesday, January 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment--you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.

One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.

Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.

How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability--"g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.

There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.

Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."

This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.

To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones--for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.

While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.

That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is the first in a three-part series, concluding on Thursday.

http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009531

Where do I even begin? How about with the basics, that in a normal distribution, like this:

http://img300.imageshack.**/img300/5970/600pxiqcurvesvgcc1.png

The average, or mean, is in the middle. You know why? Because it's one of two numbers that measure the center of the distribution, the other being the median, which is a better measure because it is defined as the point at which 50% of the scores are above and 50% are blelow. The mean is more influenced by outliers. In the case of IQ we have a normal distribution so the mean and the median are the same.

This brings me to my second point, and that is that IQ is on a sliding scale. That means that every few years the scale is moved to account for the Flynn Effect, which the 3 points per decade increase in IQ scores. It would also be adjusted for the Blind_Io Effect, which states the opposite of the Flynn Effect and claims that people are actually getting dumber. Either way, the median and average IQ will always be 100 (assuming a normal distribution). So if I made like Santa Claus and made it to every home in the world in one night and smacked everyone on the head with a hammer to make them drool when they talk, tomorrow the average IQ would still be 100.

Based on this information, where do you think the author of this article falls? Sure, he brings up some good points, such as teaching to each child's maximum ability and improving public schools, but improving intelligence? This guy should stick to business and policy reviews because he doesn't know spit about cognitive functioning or assessment. He never addresses the fact that a student who has a spatial IQ of 130 can have a verbal IQ of 95. These, along with several other sub-scales comprise the Full Scale IQ, or FSIQ that we know as the IQ Score. He speaks of IQ as though it's a mark of one's ability in all areas and it just isn't so. Each IQ score is made up of many other scores that detail one's personal strengths and weaknesses.

Congratulations, Mr. Murray, you read "The Bell Curve" so you understand a bit about statistics, or so I would hope. Now how about you take a year and a half of clinical assessment so you can stop speaking out of your ass.

http://img50.imageshack.**/img50/1839/standarddeviationdiagraoy3.png

 

[Firecat]

I've always found Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences to be an interesting way of looking at intelligence in general. Some people have a natural ability at understanding numbers, others don't....doesn't mean that one is more intelligent than the other.

I'm rambling...

Regarding the Blind_Io Effect, that I can believe. Although people are being crammed with such useless information, it makes them feel smart. Kind of like in Fahrenheit 451.

 

[Buba]

All that soooo reminds me of Idiocrazy, a absolutely fabulous film! Go and watch it, Buba commands!!!

 

[Firecat]

All that soooo reminds me of Idiocrazy, a absolutely fabulous film! Go and watch it, Buba commands!!!

Ha. I watched it 2 days ago (it's sitting on my counter still). It wasn't that great, but enjoyable. I'll watch anything with Luke or Owen Wilson...

sorry for the off-topic.

 

[mmap]

What a load of BOLLOCKS that article is...

As already stated the whole underlying point behind his reasoning os wrong! IN addition to the facts mentioned about IQ, it should also be stated that a) IQ tests are highly cultural weigthted (sure they've tried making ones that are less so but still.. and b) Who the hell believes that a persons IQ is a definite limit to someones abilities???

 

[VR6]

Saying that someone has a low IQ is just an excuse for them not perfomring well. Put some effort in and you will get exactly what you shoot for.

 

[Blind_Io]

Saying that someone has a low IQ is just an excuse for them not perfomring well. Put some effort in and you will get exactly what you shoot for.

Um, actually no. To say that is actually a disservice to those with mental deficiencies. They can not be expected to perform as well as someone who is above average intelligence just through brute force. Realistic and obtainable goals are the most important thing. Look, not everyone can grow up to be an astronaut.

 

[Top Geek]

I was going to say..."half are below average" -- um, what? Doesn't that sort of define average?

Look, not everyone can grow up to be an astronaut.

This thread needs a ...

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To be serious for a moment, it's balance. VR6 and Blind are both correct to different degrees: no, you can't just use an IQ score as a crutch all the time, but there are people with real limitations.

I've always found Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences to be an interesting way of looking at intelligence in general. Some people have a natural ability at understanding numbers, others don't....doesn't mean that one is more intelligent than the other.

Right, there are difference types of intelligence. I have the ability to memorize many entire songs on various instruments and play them without notes, but my sight-reading blows.

 

[Blind_Io]

I don't get this thing of "using IQ as a crutch." IQ is not the cause for a dysfunction, it's not the reason for a dysfunction. It's a measure of one's current level of functioning, nothing more. You might as well blame the multi-meter for the ohm rating of a circuit.

 

[No Boss]

....That's unposssible!

 

[Momentum57]

All that soooo reminds me of Idiocrazy, a absolutely fabulous film! Go and watch it, Buba commands!!!

Thought it was high-larious, but that said it illustrates some good points.

1. Dumb people have better sex

2. Poor people have better sex

As that students are poor and half are dumb, the real story should be: "Students having best sex ever! Invest in condoms, lube, and Reddi Wip (btw they have it in chocolate too)"

 

[Cobol74]

I was going to post something intelligent, but I am just about to go in to my really stupid 12 hours so I wont until I get into my next really intelligent 12 hours tomorrow.

 

[Peter3hg]

Saying that someone has a low IQ is just an excuse for them not perfomring well. Put some effort in and you will get exactly what you shoot for.

Not really. I knwo loads of people who really put loads and loads of effort in and are still down the lower end of the grade scale whereas I'm a lazy son of a bitch but get decent grades with little effort.

 

[bartboy9891]

Um, actually no. To say that is actually a disservice to those with mental deficiencies. They can not be expected to perform as well as someone who is above average intelligence just through brute force. Realistic and obtainable goals are the most important thing. Look, not everyone can grow up to be an astronaut.

I think he's getting at the fact that most people will just completely give up at school because they think that they are too stupid.

 

[chaos386]

Um, actually no. To say that is actually a disservice to those with mental deficiencies. They can not be expected to perform as well as someone who is above average intelligence just through brute force. Realistic and obtainable goals are the most important thing. Look, not everyone can grow up to be an astronaut.

Did we read the same article? Because it said the exact same things you're saying, yet you bashed it. :?

And while we're bandying probability distributions about, here's the exponential distribution:



Unlike the normal and t distributions, the median of the exponential distribution is not the same as the mean. This distribution is used a lot in reliability theory along with "Mean Time Between Failures". If the failures follow the exponential distribution, ~69.3% of them will happen before MTBF, not 50%.

*Note* That had nothing to do with what you said Blind_Io, I just posted that for people who think "below average" always equals 50%.

 

[Blind_Io]

My problem with the article was not the conclusion, but the route he used to get there. Also it was mindblowing to me that people need to be told that half of everyone is below average.

 

[Peter3hg]

My problem with the article was not the conclusion, but the route he used to get there. Also it was mindblowing to me that people need to be told that half of everyone is below average.

With the typical use of averages (mean) you will not always get half of people below average but it still is a pretty daft thing to say.

 

[chaos386]

My problem with the article was not the conclusion, but the route he used to get there. Also it was mindblowing to me that people need to be told that half of everyone is below average.

It shouldn't be mindblowing. Remember, half of the population has below-average intelligence.

 

[Blind_Io]

Below average is one thing, but even a retarded kid can understand "half"

 

[Hatmouse]

Thought it was high-larious, but that said it illustrates some good points.

1. Dumb people have better sex

2. Poor people have better sex

As that students are poor and half are dumb, the real story should be: "Students having best sex ever! Invest in condoms, lube, and Reddi Wip (btw they have it in chocolate too)"

Momentum = win.