If someone wishes to have a serious conversation about the relation between race/ethnicity and academic achievement, we could certainly have it. It would be an extraordinary achievement here, however, because the basic and, so far as I can tell, only style is flaming different points of view.
Well, there are exceptions. Bill and I have managed to lay down a series of points we disagree fundamentally about so we keep (a) talking about others where the disagreements are not so fundamental, but (b) manage to take a good hearted but serious poke at one another at times.
If there were to be a serious conversation, it needs to use non politically based research that's methodologically well done. It's not my field but I can imagine the questions get, not complex, but manifold. The term academic achievement has a good many different operationalizations that would need to be considered, for instance. Second, the difficulties of untangling social class from race/ethnicity methodologically are not straightforward, at least doing so in a way that can be safely generalized from. Third, once one isolates some effect from race/ethnicity, the question of just what accounts for that effect is sometimes hard to determine. And here ethnic stereotypes complicate the work of the best of us. Finally, no doubt, there are other variables.
Also, I would guess the results of serious work here will be like work in other areas, the answers are not as straightforward as one would like. I doubt single variable explanations will get the matter very far. Once one gets into multiple variable ones, the policy issues get difficult to address.
I'm not saying this cannot be done. Lots of people do research here. I'm simply saying I don't think the results can be recast as flame wars.
Rather it would need to be a serious discussion. I'm much too cynical about the ability of this thread or any other SI thread to carry such a discussion forward (well, I take that back; I think the FADG thread could have handled this in its early life, certainly not now; and I think the level of analysis and serious character of the discussions on the early incarnations of the G&K thread, a remarkable thread, would be up to it).
But, despite that, if someone cared enough to try to get it started, I would chip in. I'm traveling from the middle of next week into the following week but will be back here the middle of the following week, so my participation will be somewhat erratic for a while. But after that I'll be back in my study. |
