Pages 100-250:
"No circle is more vicious than the one having to do with intelligence. Children who may be only a little behind their peers to begin with tend to avoid doing those things that could have made them smarter. As a result they fall further and further behind. Meanwhile, the kids who started out a little ahead are doing push-ups with their brains.
Behavioral geneticists have found that the heritability of IQ increases across the lifespan—estimates for older adults are as high as .80, which seems to say that 80 percent of the variation in intelligence among the elderly can be chalked up to their genes.
The increase in the heritability of IQ over the lifespan is due mostly to indirect genetic effects—the effects of the effects of the genes. What starts out as a small difference can balloon into a large one.
Developmentalist Thomas Kindermann studied some cliques in a fifth-grade classroom and found that children who belonged to the same cliques had similar attitudes toward schoolwork. Well, that’s not too surprising: the kids probably belonged to the same cliques because they had similar attitudes. But in fifth grade, cliques haven’t solidified yet—children can still move into them or out of them. This gave Kindermann the opportunity to study what happens when a kid moves into or out of a clique of academic achievers. What he found was that children’s attitudes toward schoolwork change if they switch from one group to another over the course of a school year. If a child moves into a clique of academic achievers, her attitude toward schoolwork is likely to improve; if she moves out of it, her attitude gets worse. Kindermann’s findings demonstrate that children’s attitudes toward achievement are influenced by their group affiliations. The changes he measured could not have been due to changes in the children’s intelligence or in their parents’ attitudes, since neither is likely to reverse direction over the course of a single school year.
Now you can see why ability grouping (or “tracking”) has the effects it does. When teachers divide up children into good readers and not-so-good ones, the good readers tend to get better and the not-so-good ones to get worse. A group contrast effect at work. The two groups develop different group norms—different behaviors, different attitudes.
Attitudes such as those that I’ve posited for the not-so-good reading group—that reading is unimportant, that school sucks—have effects that compound themselves over the years. Being a poor reader may cause a child to categorize himself with the poorer students in the class even if the teacher doesn’t formally acknowledge such groups. The child then adapts to the norms of that group and takes on its attitudes, and the attitudes are likely to be anti-school and anti-reading. The consequences are harmful and they are cumulative. Group contrast effects between quick learners and slow ones result in the slow learners adopting norms that make them dumber—or, more precisely, norms that cause them to avoid doing things that might have made them smarter.
African-American students, for example, who as a group perform less well in school than Americans of European or Asian descent, do not have lower self-esteem than children in other ethnic groups. Forget what you may have thought or read on this subject: on average, the self-esteem of young African Americans is no lower than that of young European Americans. Self-esteem is a function of status within the group. People judge themselves on the basis of how they compare with the other members of their own social category.
An argument for ZERO low IQ delinquents in classrooms:
With no group in the classroom adopting an anti-school, anti-intellectual attitude—with every kid working at maximum capacity—the teacher can go vroooming ahead.
Most programs like Head Start have only temporary effects on the children they serve and some have no measurable effects at all. Interestingly enough, the ones that have no measurable effects at all tend to be those that try to change the parents’ behavior. Programs that rely on visits by professionals to the children’s homes can produce changes in the parents’ behavior—a significant reduction in child abuse, for example. But they have no noticeable effect on how the children behave when they are not at home or on how well they do in school. The programs that get the parents involved produce no better results than the ones that leave the parents out.26 This is just what group socialization theory would predict.
Bilingual programs have been, in the words of one knowledgeable critic, “a dismal failure.”33 Group socialization theory can explain why these programs fail. They fail because they create a group of children with different norms—norms that permit them not to speak English, or not to speak it well. The fact that their teachers might speak grammatical, unaccented English is not enough.
Cultures are passed from the older generation to the younger one via the peer group, not at home. Children acquire the language and culture of their peers, not (if there’s a discrepancy) those of their parents or teachers.
Now you can see why kids who go to private schools and parochial schools do so well. These schools serve homogeneous populations: the children who go to them come from homes where the parents care enough about such things to actually pay for their kids’ education. Throw a few scholarship students into these schools, sink or swim, and they take on the behaviors and attitudes of their classmates. They take on their culture. Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Britain, was a scholarship student at a fancy private school. And now, perhaps, you can see why it might not work to send a large number of kids from low-income neighborhoods to a private or parochial school. They might form a group of their own and retain the attitudes and behaviors they brought with them to the school.
Programs designed to cure delinquents of their delinquency have been notably unsuccessful. Usually the re-arrest rate of the kids who have been through the flavor-of-the-month program is almost as high as that of the kids who haven’t. Sometimes it is higher. It is more likely to be higher when the delinquent kids are treated tough—sent to prison or to a modern version of what used to be called “reform school.”35 In view of what I’ve told you, I hope you can see why putting kids who’ve committed crimes together with a bunch of other kids who’ve committed crimes is not likely to disabuse them of the notion that committing crimes is normal.
In adulthood, when people attempt to exert conscious control over the way they behave or the way they talk, they find it difficult or impossible to change them. These largely unconscious, largely involuntary patterns of behavior are what this book is about. They are what I believe we get from our peers and not from our parents."