I have some thoughts, yeah.
So there is extremely solid evidence of cognitive differences.
This is uncomfortable to liberals, but who cares. That’s nothing to do with is it true or not.
There was a guy called Charles Spearman about 100 years ago who gave groups tests on various cognitive abilities:
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General knowledge. What’s the capital of Bolivia?
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Visualising: which of these shapes can be made from these shapes?
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Give people 100 arithmetic questions like 13×37 to answer in three minutes. The questions are easy, but how many can you get in three minutes? It’s a test of speed.
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Vocabulary: do you know what ‘bellicose’ means?
It turns out there is a correlation between a person’s scores on these categories. Someone who scores high will score high across the board. Someone who scores low will score low across the board. Of course the correlation is not 100%, people have comparative strengths/weaknesses.
There’s no negative correlation, which would be a trade-off, e.g. being sharp verbally reduces your visual intelligence. Cross-culturally, girls and boys score the same.
This finding is extremely well replicated and solid. It is true cross-culturally: find a classroom of kids in Kerry, Caracas, Korea, and there’ll be bright/sharp kids in the class, and not-so-bright ones. That’s a robust finding regardless of how it fits anyone’s political views.
So yeah, we can test cognitive ability pretty well, there is a real phenomenon there.
I’m looking at this guy’s substack. He looks like a secret reactionary. “Anti woke identity politics”, yuk.
Honestly, it’s the substack of a non researcher. We don’t have to give a fuck about his non published findings. Also his Wikipedia page makes him look terrible.
this was a particularly funny post of his. i almost kind of get his frustration, there isn’t a cohesive left wing political project in the US, so you look silly acting like there is. This century’s “woke” is last century’s “hippie”; he’s getting mad at a shifting sense of what’s polite, what’s considered right and wrong; there’s no earnest political movement behind it, just cultural evolution.
dudes tilting at, i don’t even know, something less of a presence in real life than windmills
first two paragraphs: ‘oh i’m not talking about: literally every valid complaint about standardized testing—i’m talking about people (fucking WHO??) insisting the very concept of tests are invalid’
and then all this hogwash to disprove these definitely real ‘liberals’—which seems mostly to consist of explaining what and how assessments are. i’m sure a descriptive argument would get you very far with someone philosophically opposed to the idea lol
Right? He painstakingly goes over the minutia of how test are made, then at the very end admits that
[tests show] deep inequality along racial and class lines
but he has no broader analysis. He’d rather take apart the most vapid 150-character tweets than generously consider why people feel so negatively about tests.
Like, yes, test show racial and class inequality, and they have done for a very long time. But we’ve never done anything with that insight. Instead, the test are used to dole out grants and resources to the highest performing schools and students. We could use the tests as a tool for measuring and iterating on our institutions of education. But we don’t. We just use them to decide who gets full ride scholarships. Most people understand that, even if they can’t articulate it well. Even he understands that! He just isn’t interested in that conversation.
i kind of get it, when you know the subject and people talk about it in ignorant ways it can stick in your craw. but before you pen a 30 page screed you gotta step back and think whether you’re dealing with some clumsy rhetoric or deeply held conviction. maybe ‘tests’ is generally implied to mean ‘standardized tests’ and it isn’t spelled out every time? use some context clues instead of fabricating a mass anti-intellectual movement?
“Educational Assessments” are not equivalent to “Standardized Testing.”
This is most commonly and directly expressed as resistance to the SATs, but opposition to educational assessment writ large has become a key part of liberal cultural identity and is a growing concern in leftish climes, driven in part by affluent parent resistance to state standardized tests that frequently confuses fair questions about the extent of testing and its uses with misguided swipes at their effectiveness in assessing and predicting student ability.
Hey guys, is it leftist to want your kids’ teachers to assess the kids they teach based on the courses they develop instead of a third party assessment program that requires teachers to throw away any educational plan they make and teach exclusively to the test the third party makes?
liberal skepticism towards educational assessment is totally unjustifiable through reference to the evidence
I did not go to public school in a liberal place, everybody complained about the standardized tests in the deep red state I grew up in.
They attack the tests for **revealing ** racial stratification without acknowledging that literally all educational data (grades, SAT/ACTs, state standardized tests, NAEP, graduation rates, disciplinary rates, and a vast number of ancillary indicators) show racial stratification, which suggests that the tests are more valid rather than less.
No, Freddie, the tests don’t just reveal racial stratification, they enforce it. That’s the critique. We already know there’s racial stratification, nobody needs the calipers measuring a kid’s head to figure this out.
To put it simply: liberal skepticism towards educational assessment is totally unjustifiable through reference to the evidence.
Education assessment is not the same thing as standardized testing. Me getting a bad grade on a vocabulary test and getting a low score on an IQ test will not have the same consequences for my life. One gives my teacher some means of figuring out if I need to work harder to learn the vocabulary, of it there is some issue that is keeping me from learning the vocabulary. Your SAT score isn’t something that tells somebody where you need to do more learning, it categorizes you individually or as a group and allows for that score to be used as a shortcut in deciding whether you get into another educational program.
I have no idea wtf they’re talking about. Standardized testing has always been a scam to sell more standardized testing. Idk or care if it accurately measures anything, that’s never mattered. It’s only ever been used to tear chunks out of public school funding so private firms can feast, and to re-implement segregation by starving “under performing” (minority) schools of resources. Literally no living human being except this nerd actually cares of standardized testing actually measures what it claims to measure.
It’s only ever been used to tear chunks out of public school funding so private firms can feast, and to re-implement segregation by starving “under performing” (minority) schools of resources.
The old “the purpose of a system is what it does”
In a socialist society, standardized testing could be useful, but as it is its purpose Is to segregate schools and steal money from children’s education.
