The state of Florida plans to lower IQ requirements for gifted programs (free reg. req.) in government schools from 130 to 120 in an effort to include more “minority” students.
But it won’t work.
In “‘Holistic Review’ Just Another Disguise for Race Preferences,” I wrote a mini review of a highly-recommended book, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, by Charles Murray. I won’t rehash the post; you can read it for yourselves.
Murray (of The Bell Curve fame) states the obvious: Most scientific and artistic accomplishments from 800 B.C. to 1950 were achieved by white European males. He argues that contrary to paranoid belief, Europeans did not conspire to downplay or ignore the accomplishments of non-European nations. He advises revisionists, multicultural exaggerators, and other naysayers to consider a couple of points:
- White Europeans get the credit for finding and publicizing scientific and artistic accomplishments of non-European countries, not non-European countries or individuals complaining about “western bias” in recognition.
- If naysayers want to expand the list of significant figures in the arts and sciences to include more non-European figures, their efforts will backfire. If they “dumb down” requirements for the inclusion of great scientists, sculptors, musicians, painters, etc. (which they must do), vastly more Europeans would qualify for the lists, knocking non-European figures even further down those lists.
Government bureaucrats who create programs ostensibly designed to include or admit black students by lowering standards and/or playing up “life experiences” (like holistic review) face a similar problem. Lowering standards generally would benefit more white and Asian students. But such policies typically don’t apply to white and Asian students. If they did, more whites and Asians would be included, admitted, etc., than blacks, frustrating the entire race preference strategy.
Back to Florida. Lowering the IQ standard for gifted programs from 130 to 120 would increase the number of white students in gifted programs. Even someone with the most tenuous grasp of statistics (like me!) understands that. Whatever you think IQ is or isn’t, it measures something, and the IQ difference between whites and blacks is about one standard deviation, or 15 points.
Considering there are more whites than blacks in the United States and whites on average have higher IQs, there will be more white students testing into gifted programs under the proposed lower requirement. It matters little whether whites average 115 and blacks 100, or whites 100 and blacks 85.
Of course, the bureaucrats know this, so they tried a workaround, which, as I said, turned out to be illegal: An excerpt of the article (free reg. req. – Did you spot the grammar mistake in the article’s title?):
Florida was forced to discontinue a policy allowing schools to drop the IQ requirement to 120 for low-income and minority students.
By allowing access to all students who score an IQ of 120, the new rule does away with those affirmative action policies. Some experts worry that will actually make the programs more exclusive by giving access to more white students.
“Generally, gifted education classes are comprised of upper-middle-class white kids,” said Elizabeth Shaunessy, a coordinator for the Florida Association for the Gifted. “My concern is the new policies don’t address increasing those under-represented groups.”
Lowering standards only for black students and not others violates all kind of laws. Cursed Civil Rights Act!
Strictly going by the numbers (IQ, test scores, grades) will not achieve the rainbow effect bureaucrats claim to covet. (I use claim because I have a hunch many of these same people send their kids to private schools with low black enrollment and live in “lily white” neighborhoods. Diversity for thee, but not for me!)
Why do I write about these things? Mainly to highlight the absurdity of such policies and call attention to what’s really going on. It is obvious what dropping IQ requirements is supposed to accomplish, but it can’t work…unless you have a separate standard for black students and judge them only against each other.
If schools want more black kids in gifted classrooms, they’ll have to lower the bar for black students. Not only would this treat people unequally, it’s unfair to students who meet the requirement. Unless schools lower the bar for all, without regard to race, the scheme is illegal. If they lower the bar for all, they may as well do away with the concept of gifted altogether. It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma!
There just aren’t enough blacks testing at 130 IQ and above to fill gifted classrooms to the satisfaction of white liberals…
…who send their kids elsewhere. 
Related posts:
- Montgomery County Dumbs Down “Gifted” Programs
- Intelligence: The Last Taboo
- Intelligence: Some Research
- New Spin on Old “Stereotype Threat” Theory
Sources:
- Liberty & Learning: Milton Friedman’s Voucher Idea At Fifty
- The Black-White IQ Gap: Is It Closing? Will It Ever Go Away? — Discussion at the American Enterprise Institute, with video, audio, and links
- Scholars Debate Outlook for Closing Black-White Gap in IQ
- Educational Achievement and Black-White Inequality
