Author Jeff Schmidt explains to Biden administration why lower academic standards for black students constitute racial discrimination, files civil rights complaint
I saw this in Newark, NJ when I was an adjunct professor in the summer of 1990. I had been a teaching assistant for three years at Rutgers during my masters program and graduated in the spring of 1990. I taught Freshman English/Writing courses. I had a remedial section in the summer after I graduated. All of the students had graduated high school from Newark public schools. I did not give any grades higher than a C. I told them I could not grade on a curve because when they passed my course they would have to compete with the general student population in English 101 (Introduction to Writing). I told them if I graded on a curve, they would be devastated to see their grades when competing with the other students in English 101 and would not likely pass. I told one student, who improved from about Third Grade level writing to Ninth Grade level writing over the summer that she needed to take the Remedial Course again and keep working on improvement, in order to be able to compete with the rest of her Freshman Class peers. It was really hard to have to do this but I felt it would have been misleading to grade these summer students against themselves then throw them to the wolves with the rest of the Freshman Class in their next section.
I think of this a lot as an attorney who works in public interest law representing parents in juvenile dependency (CPS) cases. We do no service to people when we lower our expectations for them based on external criteria. We must believe in people, share our beliefs that they can accomplish what they set their minds to, and give them the resources to succeed. People rise to meet expectations when people believe in them and inculcate in them the same belief that they have the ability to succeed. We must give them the resources to succeed or our efforts will fail. I remember telling my high school 11th Grade English professor that “My worst was my best for her.” Sadly, she DGAS and just went through the motions of teaching, in my case, the daughter of a university professor, I knew what I could achieve, but like any teenager, I needed to be prodded because most teenagers are lazy and not self motivated.
Imagine if we had teachers, all over the country from Kindergarten on up, that believed in their students and gave them the resources to succeed. Did not accept any outside excuses, like race, family origin or style, neighborhood, ethnicity, and so on. Had IEPs for those with learning and cognitive issues. We need to get rid of institutionalized education. No more teacher unions. Let teachers teach without the heavy hand of politics, metrics, and federal funding.
I agree. Absolutely. How can people not see the actual, literal disparate treatment? The discrimination, the pretend caring, the behind hands smirking? It is baffling to me.
I suspect it is a societal problem. I’m so old I remember kids getting “whacks” in the hallway with a paddle. Wouldn’t dare resort to corporal punishment today. If your parents found out, you were in more trouble when you got home. Many families have no paternal figure. That guy was why I behaved. By high school I’d have been out of control had he not been there.
I’m trying to say, mom saying “don’t do that” while in kindergarten, won’t do it.
Do the changes have to begin in the ova and the sperm? Perhaps not. Let's treat the more comfortable alternative hypothesis with all of the respect that it deserves. So, if these differences in outcome are culturally and politically tractable, what evidence can be brought that supports the supposition for such tractability on a population-wide scale? How does one achieve optimistic, 'tabla rasa'-based goals without (ironically) running afoul of the equity activists? What are the implications for fundamental assumptions of the liberal world order if the notion of 'tabla rasa' regarding intelligence is false? Does inflexible psychological attachment, and commitment, to the the genetic 'tabla rasa' disqualify one from the conversation?
(By the way, I was a committed laborer in the vineyard where the 'grapes of 'tabla rasa' " fully committed to the premise. You could say that I am lucky to be alive. There is no protection afforded simply for having the permissible, liberal, egalitarian ideas.)
Jeff Schmidt sent me this comment, and I have permission to share it:
"It's great to see that people have commented on the complaint.
The liberal establishment won't talk about this stuff. When they are confronted with the failure of their schools, they say "we have to do better." They are happy to spend more money, much of which is wasted on high salaries and graft, but they refuse to hold anyone accountable for the educational outcome. They may be buying people's silence with the high salaries."
Public schools have failed anyway, and in every way. Charter schools are one answer.
I do have a question: If professionals are expected to bring all students up to the same standard, and assuming they won’t simply lower the standard (which they will), how does one elevate a student or group of students who don’t care?
Imagine what would happen if public schools started to teach the laws of logic, and explained how all logical fallacies can be reduce to violations of just one law (non-contradiction). The global hierarchy of exploitation would collapse in a single generation. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/is-it-rational-to-teach-rationality
In order to have equal academic achievement across races, they would have to keep blacks in school for 12 hours per day, whites for 4 hours per day, and East Asians and Jews for 3 hours per day or something.
He took 2,411 SNPs which were associated with educational attainment in a paper titled "Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals". He then looked up the frequencies of the SNPs among different populations and calculated polygenic scores for the SNPs. For populations from 1000 Genomes, the "EDU3 (weighted)" score was about 1.1 to 1.6 in East Asians, about 1.1 in Finns (who are a mixture between whites and Mongoloids and who have outperformed unmixed whites in PISA), and about 0.3 to 0.8 among non-Finnish Europeans, but the score was around -1.5 to -1.2 in blacks from Africa, the U.S., and the Caribbean.
Dr. Rancourt, just to let you know, somehow someone has found a way to use my name and Substack page to submit a comment. This is actually a very serious problem for Substack, its users and, of course, a concern for me. I now must wonder how many other sites have comments misattributed to me---and why. Is it a glitch or not.
Looking across thousands of peer reviewed IQ/Gaussian Curve studies, we see blacks score 25-40% lower in such tests. 1-2 Z Scores lower than Whites and East Asians, and this is nearly perfectly reflected in professional and academic jobs requiring cerebral horsepower.
In terms of sociopathy, psychopathy, many studies have measured black impulse control at 300% less than the White/East Asian cohort. This is easily seen in their dominance of violent crime, many in nations like Canada, Sweden and the UK that never kept them as slaves.
In the US, blacks have been free for around 150 years. There were politicians and social engineers, including the tyrant, Abe Lincoln, who had worked on elegant, albeit expensive models to physically repatriate them. Liberia, but on a much grander scale. In present value dollars, that might have been a $500B exercise, FAR less than the $10trillion plus when adding up welfare, jail construction and maintenance, legal costs, and all the whites they have killed.
I saw this in Newark, NJ when I was an adjunct professor in the summer of 1990. I had been a teaching assistant for three years at Rutgers during my masters program and graduated in the spring of 1990. I taught Freshman English/Writing courses. I had a remedial section in the summer after I graduated. All of the students had graduated high school from Newark public schools. I did not give any grades higher than a C. I told them I could not grade on a curve because when they passed my course they would have to compete with the general student population in English 101 (Introduction to Writing). I told them if I graded on a curve, they would be devastated to see their grades when competing with the other students in English 101 and would not likely pass. I told one student, who improved from about Third Grade level writing to Ninth Grade level writing over the summer that she needed to take the Remedial Course again and keep working on improvement, in order to be able to compete with the rest of her Freshman Class peers. It was really hard to have to do this but I felt it would have been misleading to grade these summer students against themselves then throw them to the wolves with the rest of the Freshman Class in their next section.
I think of this a lot as an attorney who works in public interest law representing parents in juvenile dependency (CPS) cases. We do no service to people when we lower our expectations for them based on external criteria. We must believe in people, share our beliefs that they can accomplish what they set their minds to, and give them the resources to succeed. People rise to meet expectations when people believe in them and inculcate in them the same belief that they have the ability to succeed. We must give them the resources to succeed or our efforts will fail. I remember telling my high school 11th Grade English professor that “My worst was my best for her.” Sadly, she DGAS and just went through the motions of teaching, in my case, the daughter of a university professor, I knew what I could achieve, but like any teenager, I needed to be prodded because most teenagers are lazy and not self motivated.
Imagine if we had teachers, all over the country from Kindergarten on up, that believed in their students and gave them the resources to succeed. Did not accept any outside excuses, like race, family origin or style, neighborhood, ethnicity, and so on. Had IEPs for those with learning and cognitive issues. We need to get rid of institutionalized education. No more teacher unions. Let teachers teach without the heavy hand of politics, metrics, and federal funding.
The across the board collapse in standards is seriously corroding society. I see it as delibrate.
I agree. Absolutely. How can people not see the actual, literal disparate treatment? The discrimination, the pretend caring, the behind hands smirking? It is baffling to me.
Thanks you!
My sister and brother-in-law both taught in high school. It’s hard to believe in students that you have to be afraid of.
The changes have to start in Kindergarten. It is too late by high school.
I suspect it is a societal problem. I’m so old I remember kids getting “whacks” in the hallway with a paddle. Wouldn’t dare resort to corporal punishment today. If your parents found out, you were in more trouble when you got home. Many families have no paternal figure. That guy was why I behaved. By high school I’d have been out of control had he not been there.
I’m trying to say, mom saying “don’t do that” while in kindergarten, won’t do it.
Do the changes have to begin in the ova and the sperm? Perhaps not. Let's treat the more comfortable alternative hypothesis with all of the respect that it deserves. So, if these differences in outcome are culturally and politically tractable, what evidence can be brought that supports the supposition for such tractability on a population-wide scale? How does one achieve optimistic, 'tabla rasa'-based goals without (ironically) running afoul of the equity activists? What are the implications for fundamental assumptions of the liberal world order if the notion of 'tabla rasa' regarding intelligence is false? Does inflexible psychological attachment, and commitment, to the the genetic 'tabla rasa' disqualify one from the conversation?
(By the way, I was a committed laborer in the vineyard where the 'grapes of 'tabla rasa' " fully committed to the premise. You could say that I am lucky to be alive. There is no protection afforded simply for having the permissible, liberal, egalitarian ideas.)
I do not know how it occurred, but I did not write this comment. ---
David Schmitt, Ph.D.
Writes American Siberia - David Schmitt's Newsletter.
There is a problem with Substack or hacking in a way that I do not understand. This is not the content that I would write.
This is a serious problem of misattribution or fraud. It makes me wonder what other comments are being made in my name.
Jeff Schmidt sent me this comment, and I have permission to share it:
"It's great to see that people have commented on the complaint.
The liberal establishment won't talk about this stuff. When they are confronted with the failure of their schools, they say "we have to do better." They are happy to spend more money, much of which is wasted on high salaries and graft, but they refuse to hold anyone accountable for the educational outcome. They may be buying people's silence with the high salaries."
Summed up in the old saw "the soft bigotry of low expectations".
Public schools have failed anyway, and in every way. Charter schools are one answer.
I do have a question: If professionals are expected to bring all students up to the same standard, and assuming they won’t simply lower the standard (which they will), how does one elevate a student or group of students who don’t care?
Race doesn’t need to be read into that.
They should fail, and not be "passed on." But that's another non-starter in today's education system (20 years teaching, LA school district)
Imagine what would happen if public schools started to teach the laws of logic, and explained how all logical fallacies can be reduce to violations of just one law (non-contradiction). The global hierarchy of exploitation would collapse in a single generation. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/is-it-rational-to-teach-rationality
That is a bigger discussion, however I do understand. I substitute taught high school before getting my teaching assistantship.
In order to have equal academic achievement across races, they would have to keep blacks in school for 12 hours per day, whites for 4 hours per day, and East Asians and Jews for 3 hours per day or something.
Read this paper by Davide Piffer: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332076417_Evidence_for_Recent_Polygenic_Selection_on_Educational_Attainment_and_Intelligence_Inferred_from_Gwas_Hits_A_Replication_of_Previous_Findings_Using_Recent_Data.
He took 2,411 SNPs which were associated with educational attainment in a paper titled "Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals". He then looked up the frequencies of the SNPs among different populations and calculated polygenic scores for the SNPs. For populations from 1000 Genomes, the "EDU3 (weighted)" score was about 1.1 to 1.6 in East Asians, about 1.1 in Finns (who are a mixture between whites and Mongoloids and who have outperformed unmixed whites in PISA), and about 0.3 to 0.8 among non-Finnish Europeans, but the score was around -1.5 to -1.2 in blacks from Africa, the U.S., and the Caribbean.
Piffer has posted his R code here: https://rpubs.com/Daxide/.
Dr. Rancourt, just to let you know, somehow someone has found a way to use my name and Substack page to submit a comment. This is actually a very serious problem for Substack, its users and, of course, a concern for me. I now must wonder how many other sites have comments misattributed to me---and why. Is it a glitch or not.
Looking across thousands of peer reviewed IQ/Gaussian Curve studies, we see blacks score 25-40% lower in such tests. 1-2 Z Scores lower than Whites and East Asians, and this is nearly perfectly reflected in professional and academic jobs requiring cerebral horsepower.
In terms of sociopathy, psychopathy, many studies have measured black impulse control at 300% less than the White/East Asian cohort. This is easily seen in their dominance of violent crime, many in nations like Canada, Sweden and the UK that never kept them as slaves.
In the US, blacks have been free for around 150 years. There were politicians and social engineers, including the tyrant, Abe Lincoln, who had worked on elegant, albeit expensive models to physically repatriate them. Liberia, but on a much grander scale. In present value dollars, that might have been a $500B exercise, FAR less than the $10trillion plus when adding up welfare, jail construction and maintenance, legal costs, and all the whites they have killed.
Why educate them at all? Let's separate entirely.