Glenn Loury & John McWhorter speak on standardized testing in the Black community

@DEAD7

 

These guys are hit and miss(mostly misses), but standardized testing is a layup.

 

McWhorter is correct that a part of it is cultural, along with resources.

 

Threads about this topic get locked and bushed, even in HL.

 

Standardized testing tests training for said test.

The absolute vast majority of people who perform well on these tests would not do so had they not had specialized training for said exam.

Loury and McWhorter are impressive in that they're both academically successful and strong in their fields - while simultaneously being morons.

 

This may be true, but its not really relevant in this context given the fact that the exams are a barrier to entry.

The underlying substantive value or predictive use of the exam is a separate issue.

The issue here is: Generally speaking why is it that Black students across class lines don't do well on standardized exams?

 

maybe.

I know I didn't during my grade school years and always smoked em. Some people are not good test takers, some are.

Always said that "smartness" is more about the speed of being able to pick something up, not that you can't learn it. A lot of "smart" people pick shyt up and comprehend faster than others But those same others can and in many cases do better once they do learn and completely understand something.

 

It is the Institutionalization of Racism white supremacy that alienates Black Americans that is the root of their underperformance in academia.
This then forced maladaptation is further socialize within Black American communities and thought of as Black American Culture.

In 2008 or there about, Nigerians were considered the most educated group in America...This I take as evidence that Black Americans failure to thrive in academia is not because of their Africanness but their Blackness.

 

I've also been in the 95-99th percentile on standardized tests from 2nd grade through law school - and have never gone through specialized training; but I can attribute the majority of that to certain skills I've developed throughout my childhood - pattern recognition, association, and context analysis that are taught in the specialized training for testing.

 

We don't put the actions into valuing education as much as we should.

 

Did you take LSAT and Bar Exam prep/review courses?

 

black folks to this day our undereducated in every aspect of the american educational process and it often builds a resentful attitude to successful academic progress
frankly the amount of our people who have been able to beat a system that genuinely wants very few black people educated is quite remarkable in hindsight.

 

A lot of people forget there were literally white culture questions on these exams.

 

True.
Then the question becomes why don't we?
In other words why don't we "put the actions into valuing education"?

 

Did anyone in there actually catch a single sentence that would improve schools for Black kids? "Teach harder teachers!" I'm pretty sure that was the deepest practical advice they gave in the entire 15 minutes, but someone school me if they said anything more insightful than that.



Some of the stuff they're saying is obvious but goddamn there's some ignorance in that video. They're cherry-picking a few random extremists here and there so they can dunk on low-hanging fruit and then jumping all the way to completely superficial and really fukking stupid prescriptions for education that will do nothing to help the problem.

Black students aren't failing because black schools aren't teaching mathematics or because black kids refuse to drill their time tables diligently enough. They're not failing because teachers aren't teaching to the test. They're not failing because they aren't being discipled strongly enough or they aren't being "taught harder". The shyt they imply is completely counterproductive and this has been shown over and over in the school environment in real life, but they're ignoring the actual research in favor of hot takes they pull off the top of their heads and then pretend it's science.

The # of serious people who say, "Black kids don't need to learn academics like White people do" is vanishingly few. The question is how you bridge the gap, and they're not saying anything at all that actually addresses that gap.

They're saying, "Look at China! Look at Pakistan!" First of all, are China and Pakistan really the models you want to look at? Is that the kind of education you want these kids to have? Why not look at the school systems that are actually producing the kind of students you want to produce and see what they're doing, rather than just naming shyt off the top of your head that you know nothing about.

It's blindingly obvious that you, just like McWhorter and Loury, don't know jack shyt about education.

It's an economist and a linguist talking about a field they know nothing about and then assuming they can override the experts in the actual field. You can tell right off the bat that they've never actually participated in a systematic analysis of different types of educational systems or actual experimental evaluation of the black-white learning gap because their prescriptions don't engage with the research at all.