Education and the achievement gap

This article* confirms what my intuition has told me for the last 20-something years: the problem is that kids in poverty are given a different kind of upbringing. It also suggests that anything we do to eliminate the achivement gap will make it worse: our best methods will work best with those children who already have the foundations for learning. It's like what Goethe said about good teaching: it only works on those who don't need it.

Colleges of education foster the idea that the problems are insurmountable; I've seen this and heard it first hand. Serious research, with real mathematics and real neurobiology scares the bejeezus out of education academics. They don't want simple answers that are pointed to by numbers. They will reject it out of hand as "simplistic" or "unrealistic." And, yes, I meant for those quote marks to be interpreted literally. Education academics are the academy's most insecure members. Mostly because they know that they are pretty much frauds. They know *nothing* about how learning takes place and they can't understand the statistics that show them what's happening. All their papers quote the papers of other education academics and so they engage in tail-chasing and thesis padding.

In my many years of association with public educaiton, I've seen innumerable "programs" put in place that, in the end, only accomplished the enrichment of the program creator. *Nothing* works for every kid. *Nothing* works at every site. *Nothing* will be implemented the same at a different location, at a different time, by different people. The variables tend to swamp the data, obscuring the real information.

We need to rely on neurologists, anthropologists, and statisticians to tell us what happens when kids learn and what the real influcences are. Then we can create schools that might be able to reach the broad base of the student population.




*Oh, the link to the article may require a password. You can steal one at www.bugmenot.com.