Want to raise minority academic achievement? Give minorities the same income as whites

Here is an e-mail I wrote the other day to Michael Winerip of the New York Times:

In your article “Teachers, and a Law That Distrusts Them,” you write that since children from higher income families do better in school and children from lower income families do worse, therefore in order to raise the academic performance of minority children to that of white children, the government must equalize the income of minority families with that of white families. You call your proposal the “No Family Left Behind” bill.

Out of respect for you, I will assume that this is intended as a parody of liberal thinking.

But in the event that it is not a parody and you mean it seriously, let me bring two facts to your attention that a writer on test scores, ethnicity, and race should have known.

First, Charles Murray in a post-Bell Curve study in the Public Interest 10 years ago (still using the data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth that he and Richard Herrnstein had used in The Bell Curve) established definitively that IQ differential among siblings from the same families and thus of identical socio-economic background highly correlates with income differential in adult life. In other words, IQ trumps socio-economic background.

Second, as is well known, white children from lower income families have higher test scores (i.e., higher IQs) than black children from middle and higher income families. So your income equalization scheme has already been tried. Raising blacks’ income does not equalize their test scores or their academic performance with that of whites.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 25, 2006 11:44 AM | Send