Yes Virgina, There are Racial Differences in Intelligence

Santa Claus isn't real; but, dear Virginia, racial differences in intelligence are real

All of modern American life is predicated on one rule: All Men are Created Equal (AMCE). There's a caveat to this rule: wherever and whenever white people come to dominate a certain profession or set the standard for academic achievement, only "white privilege" or "racism" can be involved, an insidious ally in giving whitey a leg up over the competition.

So what happens when a state like, say, Florida decides to implement new racially-based education goals [The Hard Bigotry of Great Expectations, SBPDL]? Wouldn't this be a breach of contract in the AMCE guidelines that govern all of American life?

Well, it's not just Florida... [Firestorm Erupts Over Virginia's Education Goals, NPR, 11-12-12]:

As part of Virginia's waiver to opt out of mandates set out in the No Child Left Behind law, the state has created a controversial new set of education goals that are higher for white and Asian kids than for blacks, Latinos and students with disabilities.

Virginia Democratic state Sen. Donald McEachin first read about the state's new performance goals for schoolchildren in a newspaper editorial.

"And I was shocked to find that the state board of education [was] putting in place permanent disparities between different subgroups — Asians at the top, African-Americans at the bottom," says McEachin.

Here's what the Virginia state board of education actually did. It looked at students' test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities.

Alarmed by these numbers, McEachin and members of the Legislature's black caucus denounced the new policy as a "backwards-looking scheme."

"If we don't demand the best of our children, we won't receive the best," says McEachin.

At a meeting of the state board of education in late September, Patricia Wright, Virginia's superintendent of public instruction, defended the new policy.

"Rest assured, all of us hold all students to the same academic standards, but when it comes to measuring progress, we have to consider that students start at different points," Wright said.

In a phone interview with NPR, Wright explained that Virginia's expectation is that all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, will correctly answer the same number of questions to pass the state tests.

But the reality is that black and Latino children generally don't do as well as white and Asian children, and that gap, says Wright, is what the new policy is meant to address by setting more modest goals for struggling minority children and giving them more time to catch up.

"The concept here is that if indeed within six years we can close the achievement gap between the lowest- and highest-performing schools — at least cut it in half — that would be acceptable progress," says Wright.

At least one board member responded indignantly to accusations that the new policy harkens back to the era of segregation and Jim Crow. "We're not trying to go back to Jim Crow. What does that make us, Uncle Toms?" said Winsome Sears, one of three black board members at a meeting last month.

"So why do we have these different subgroups? Because we're starting with black children where they are. We can't start them at the 82 percentile because they're not there. The Asian students are there. And so the real question is why aren't black students starting at the 82 percentile? Why? Why are they not there?" Sears said.

That's the problem the board wants to solve, Sears said. Virginia devised the new policy after receiving a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education. Thirty-three states have received such waivers freeing them from what they call the unrealistic goal of the No Child Left Behind law — that all children perform at grade level by 2014.

But what Virginia has really done, critics argue, is institutionalize lower expectations for minority and disabled kids.

"Virginia has done something very, very wrong," says Amy Wilkins, with the Education Trust, a research group that advocates for closing the achievement gap.
"What Virginia said is, black kids in our state should achieve not at grade level but at the highest level that black kids have achieved in the past. That's not a forward-looking goal," Wilkins says. "That is not a goal that's going to ensure that black kids catch up with white kids or Latinos catch up with white kids or poor kids catch up with rich kids."

Wright disagrees but would not elaborate.

"Well, I really can't comment on Ed Trust's statement," says Wright.

"Institutional racism" can only be blamed for the "lower expectations" for minority and disabled kids in Virginia. Incredibly, the bar that black kids must reach for acceptable passing of the math portion shows a -23 point difference between what a white student must get to pass; a -37 point difference between what an Asian student must get to pass; and only a +12 point difference between what a student who is "cognitively challenged" (mentally handicapped) must score to pass.

There's not much more to add to this, save this article [Fairfax Success Masks Gap for Black Students, Washington Post, 4-14- 2006]:

Black students in Fairfax County are consistently scoring lower on state standardized tests than African American children in Richmond, Norfolk and other comparatively poor Virginia districts, surprising Fairfax educators and forcing one of the nation's wealthiest school systems to acknowledge shortcomings that have been masked by its overall success.

Even within Fairfax schools, black elementary school students are outperformed on reading and math tests by whites and some other students, including Hispanics, poor children and immigrants learning English.

The statewide disparity occurs among all age groups except the middle-school grades, but it is most pronounced at the elementary level, according to Virginia Department of Education data analyzed by The Washington Post. Black third-graders in Fairfax ranked 91st among more than 125 Virginia districts in reading and 69th in math in tests taken last year. Fifth-graders ranked 40th in reading and 71st in math.

"Something is broken with the way we teach a segment of the population," said John Johnson, education chairman for the Fairfax County NAACP and the father of two students in county schools. "Despite all the things we have at our disposal, our children are being outperformed by people like us -- or people with fewer resources."

In light of the academic cheating that has been documented across the nation in majority black districts (run by black administrators, like the Atlanta Public Schools system), perhaps it is the scores of the black students in Fairfax that were correct; those scores in almost all-black Richmond Public Schools were manufactured for racially correct results?