What the California 2016 Assessment of Student Performance and Progress Shows.

Academics are crowing about the small gains that have been made, overall, in the most recent tests of proficiency in English and Math in California high school students. However, they bemoan the fact that only 49 percent of California students are proficient in English and only 37 percent are proficient in math. More troubling to them are the marked racial differences in the test scores. The wide gap in performance between the Asian and white students on one hand and black and Latino students on the other, despite years of focused efforts and the infusion enormous amounts of state and federal funds to close this gap, is particularly perplexing to our educational leaders. State Superintendent of Education Tom Torlakson called the racial differences :"pernicious and persistent." It is not clear if Superintendent Torlakson understands the reason for the marked racial disparity we are seeing on our California schools, most likely he does not. "We'd like to see more of a state of urgency and more progress for English language learners and low income and African-American students in particular," said Carrie Hahnel of the Oakland advocacy Educational Trust-West. As I've said many times, they people do not have the slightest clue as to why racial differences in educational achievement persist despite over 50 years of effort and billions of dollars of funding to close the racial educational gap for the blacks and Latinos in our country. The statistics provided by Noguchi and Tsai in the August 25th edition of the East Bay Times provides the answer. Despite differences in the economic background of the students tested, the statistics never changed. In this respect, Asian students on average always outperformed all other racial groups, irrespective of their environmental background, and whites were only a few points behind them. On the other hand, blacks, irrespective of the economic circumstances of their parents and the environmental status of their childhood, always placed dead last in the English and math proficiency tests. Latinos, with one exception in Santa Clara County, always, marginally, outperformed blacks. Filipinos, the only other race included in the statistics, had mean scores that were only slightly lower than the whites tested. Anyone who has read Herrnstein and Murray's Bell Curve knows exactly what this latest group of educational statistics tell us. Asians, on average, do better in school, not because their superior study habits, but because their mean IQs are 3 to 9 points higher than that of the white population. Blacks and Latinos will always fair less well, on average, than their white and Asian counterparts in their educational endeavors because their mean IQs are 15 and 13 points, respectively, lower than that of the white population. Nothing the politicians can do will change the basic fact that there are marked disparities in inherited racial IQ. We should be spending more time and money dealing with the consequences of these differences and less of our limited resources trying to change the unchangeable (more jobs for the uneducated, reducing the birth rates of low-IQ single mothers, reestablishing the black family and reducing the numbers of low IQ Mexicans who are crossing our boarders illegally by hundreds with each passing day. In summary, the latest educational statistics for California High School students are, for the most part, simply a reflection of the racial disparity in the IQs of the students tested. Until we understand this fact, nothing will change and we will continue to waste monies, that we do not have and must borrow, on misguided social programs like school busing and head-Start. Finally, we should stop blaming the teachers for their inability to educate the uneducable in classrooms teeming with rowdy misfits who should be in reform schools, not the class room.