Bad Science in Education

Deborah Meier from Bridging Differences has a good post about painting a picture of what education could be, as a means of motivating society to put forth the necessary resources to attain it.  She references Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, a book claiming that differences in education achievement are function of innate intelligence, or IQ, and that white kids achieve more than black kids because they are innately smarter.

We both know that on the biggest question—of human potential—Murray is dead wrong. It takes only one example to prove that point. It is no longer a matter of hope or faith for me, but experience. Although one example doesn’t demonstrate how it can be done on a larger scale.

But this post - by a pretty big figure in the education community - makes an elementary statistical error.  Murray claims that the white kid bell curve is shifted several points to the right of the black kid bell curve, so that the typical white kid is smarter than the typical black kid; he does not say all white kids are smarter than all black kids.  In fact, the graph below demonstrates that his own argument requires that almost 50% of black kids are smarter than almost 50% of white kids.

Now, I happen to think Murray is wrong too.  But when people make mistakes like Meier, it makes people like Murray appear more credible, and I think all of this underscores the lack of attention the education community places on mathematical or scientific literacy (perhaps because so few of us have math and science backgrounds).

The more compelling argument against Murray is one mentioned by cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker in The Blank Slate: which is that while population sub-group IQs can be different at a given point in time, they tend to converge in the long run.  And in fact, this is what has happened to most American immigrant groups, suggesting that differences in sub-group IQs are environmental rather than innate.