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This is a laughable assertion. The standard HBD take acknowledges that culture and environment can cripple any person or set of persons, just that asserting those things apply to some situations is also laughable.
No it is not.
Near as I can tell, the sort of view expressed by @Folamh3, @self_made_human, and others here that...
...is not an extreme or hyperbolic take, it's the median.
Charitably you are engaging in a very blatant Motte and Baily where you try to play the "group differences in outcome" card right up until someone asks how exactly you determine group membership for the purposes of determining group differences. IE Is a dark-skinned man who votes Republican "black" or is he, as Joe Biden and the Hosts of the View assert, "white". (Edit: See Slate and the LA Times' treatment of Clarence Thomas and Larry Elder)
Less charitably you are simply lying.
Do you realize that he was paraphrasing DeBoer and you can look up what else the guy has written? Specifically, from the same link,
[…]
I do not see how you can object to anything in there. Genetics drives the differential ranking of humans; environment drives the absolute magnitude of what's possible for every given percentile; it seems to be the society-wide environment and not some school or teacher's ultra clever nudging or a bit of extra resources. The evidence really suggests that, as long as you don't hit the kids over the head with a lead pipe, don't starve them or force into pit fights, and provide merely reasonable learning conditions by the standards of modern pedagogic science – which are in many cases cheaper to achieve than some extravagant progressive practices – they basically reach up to their genotypic potential in the contemporary society. Which is unequal in predictable ways.
Sure, ruining education remains easier than getting it right, just like producing inedible slurry is easier than running a decent food stall. But the latter is still not rocket science. It's reasonable, arguably necessary, to enforce some standards of hygiene and ingredient quality; it is inane to assert that, say, differences in height of New Yorkers of different races are driven by distribution of ethnic food stalls in their neighborhoods. Likewise with education.
…But of course you understand all that, you [expletive deleted]. You were trolling @Folamh3 back then as well:
etc. etc.
You just refuse to engage charitably on this matter, and in fact seem to take some pride in that.
Look man, you and I have been doing this for years. 10 years this October by my count. What do you think my "engaging charitably" would look even like in this context?
The way I see it I have been eminently charitable, and in the decade I've been participating in this specific community I've seen an HBD post that rose above tired "arguments as soldiers" or "look at me I'm so edgey" maybe a handful of times at the most.
What this look likes from my end you have staked out a position in the Motte, and because your position in the Motte may have some merit (emphasis on the may) I am expected to cede the Bailey as typified by the linked post without a fight in the name of "charity".
If that's what is expected of me then, yes. I will admit that I do take a certain amount of pride in refusing to "engage charitably".
What are your responses to Freddie DeBoer's arguments on this topic? Education Doesn't Work 2.0, a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps and Genes Believe in You are blogposts, and the book is The Cult Of Smart (pirated). These aren't about race, which he sort of ignores, but make strong arguments about individual differences in ability, and ones that readily generalize to race.
My response is that as a member of the educational establishment DeBoer is likely trying to deflect blame for poor educational outcomes away from himself and his colleagues and on to the children.
To quote @FCfromSSC in the previously linked thread...
Otherwise see above
There are also blood pressure medications that work better for black people than white people and vice-versa. Is that also culturally driven? Some black people think this is racist. In fact so many that the meme made itself into an episode of House.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RCGLyLUNMv8
Phonics is a program designed to help poor performing students no? No wonder it did more for black kids. But it is a mirage, like pre-k, the gains evaporate over time and sometimes there is even regression past the mean.
Personally I agree with the premise that educators have little power to influence outcomes. I went to school. Unlike, I feel, most other adults, I remember what it was like. Unlike most people on this site (in most likelyhood) my school was ranked in the bottom 50% of schools in my state. In fact, there were more than 1 stabbings during my matriculation. Yet, me and both my siblings got full academic ride scholarships to flagship state schools. Weird. In fact, weirdly we weren't the only ones. It seems at "middling-to-poor" schools scholarships and admissions to high end universities tend to cluster in families. So odd.
Now, families share more than just genes, of course (although that is just passing the buck for one extra cycle wherein we must ask why families have different cultures) but it does disprove, largely, the impact that schools have, at least on the upside. And on the downside, its pretty obvious that bad schools are caused by having ungovernable students, rather than bad teachers. Most of the "worst schools" have much higher than average teacher compensation for their state.
Is it?
The linked discussion was about a reading program instituted in the usual crappy inner-city schools, which showed massive improvements on reading ability by all the school's metrics, with exactly the students who never, ever show massive improvement. And faced with this improvement, the teachers refused to continue the program, because they didn't like teaching it.
Not that it stopped working. Not that the gains weren't sustainable. Not that it only worked with a specially-selected sub-population of students. The kids who couldn't learn to read were learning to read, and the teachers refused to continue the program because doing their fucking jobs was too much of a downer. And we know that this is how it was, not because their private emails leaked, or someone dragged it out of them through FOIA, but because they said so publicly in interviews with the press, apparently oblivious to how fucking monstrous this sounds to anyone with a brain.
Of course, this is only an isolated incident, so it would be irresponsible to imagine that if a whole school system can fuck up this badly and have no one call them on it, maybe others could be suffering similar fuckups, or maybe even that they might be fucking other things up as well. Like when they did a push nation-wide to cap the amount of discipline black students receive, resulting in a total breakdown of school discipline, or when they make it official policy to retain disruptive students despite solid evidence that such students impede the learning of the rest of the class... just minor details like that, you know?
The standard HBD argument is that we've tried all the environmental interventions, they didn't work, so HBD is the only explanation remaining. Only, we haven't tried all the environmental interventions. We tried the environmental interventions popular with the exact set of people who gave us the replication crisis, and no others.
Maybe you're right, it's down to genetics, and there's nothing to be done. I'm willing to accept that after we've burned down the institutions that have been operating with a degree of incompetence indistinguishable from pure malice, forced the people who built and staffed those institutions to accept full personal responsibility for their failure, and then at least tried the things that we have solid reasons to believe would actually work.
And sure, that's not easy to do. And sure, there's no reason to humor the bullshit accusations of racism for even a single second more. But before I'm willing to accept that it's all down to genetics and there's nothing to be done, I want to see a rigorous test of the thesis that actually, this mess is the fucking Progressives' fault.
I agree losing phonics is bad, but throughout the phonics discussion a consistent theme is 'for better-off kids, they don't need phonics, they'll learn to read anyway. for worse-off kids, they need phonics'. It's imagined the worse-off kids are so because their parents aren't teaching them to read at home. I think 'innate capacity for intelligence' is as big of a factor here.
All of the remaining interventions we have are ones that apply equally to both white and black kids. And we can tell because the IQ gap remains at higher deciles, with both rich and poor black parents. There are a lot of black millionaires, yet no black nobel prize winners.
(also, genes-cause-individual-differences is more important here. Many black kids learn to read fine without phonics. Many, more as a percent than black, white kids learn to read without phonics. If we divide the population up into '<90iq' and '>90iq', the differences in outcomes between the two are so much starker than the differences between white and blacks.)
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