Bloomberg, Meet HBD. HBD, Meet Bloomberg.

New York City

WCBS-2 NYC:

New York City To Try Longer School Day In 20 Middle Schools

The school day is about to get longer for some New York City school kids — and we’re not talking a couple of minutes. It’s about to be two and a half hours longer.

If scores go up, the plan could be extended city-wide, CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer reported Monday.

Will an intensive reading program and an extended school day help Johnny read?

City officials hope so. They’re launching a pilot program with 2,000 middle school students to see if it’s an idea whose time has come.

“It’s where the achievement gap really seems to grow, in New York City about three-fourths of seventh and eighth graders. Three-fourths of seventh and eighth graders do not read at a proficient level,” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said.

Under a pilot program that will start in September, sixth graders at 20 schools throughout the city will stay in the classroom two and a half hours longer for intensive language tutoring — every day — and then continue the longer day into seventh and eighth grades. If they outperform other kids the city will seek to expand the program.

How much do you want to bet that most or all of these twenty middle schools are heavily black and Hispanic?

The reason the middle school years are “where the [racial] achievement gap really seems to grow” (because it does) isn’t because the school days at middle schools aren’t long enough.  The answer can be found in HBD.  At least when comparing blacks and whites, the late elementary and early middle school years are when black brains stop maturing, while white brains keep on maturing.  If you try to pour a gallon full of liquid into a shot glass for six straight hours, and most of the water spills out of the cup, do you expect it to be any different if you try for yet another two and a half hours?

We should just go all the way.  24/7 schooling.  When we finally get 80 IQ Nashwan’tavious-El at the age of 14 to read that epic novel about green eggs and ham, we’ll be well on our way to closing that achievement gap.

Parents, however, seem to be all on board.

“There’s a great need for additional education and resources,” Reyna Franco said.

“I think it’s a great idea. The kids need it,” Gil Denard added.

“It would depend on the family. For us, I would not like that but other children who might need the work it might be a good idea,” Olivia Kahmi said.

Of course the parents love it.  It’s another two and a half hours of taxpayer funded babysitting.  That means these parents can swill on yet another two and a half hours of low information TV bilge (Wendy Williams, woot woot) and eat their EBT-funded junk food and not have to pretend to care about their kids.

Because…diversity.

Dreams of Their Fathers

New England Journal of Medicine

MSN:

Should Short Boys Take Growth Hormone?

Parents often worry when their child, especially a son, is much shorter than average. But as long as there is no medical cause, parents can rest easy, experts say.

Writing in the March 28 New England Journal of Medicine, two pediatric endocrinologists describe a scenario pediatricians see all the time: Parents bring in their 11-year-old son because he’s substantially shorter than his classmates, and his growth seems to have slowed in recent years.

Their concern is reasonable, said Dr. David Allen, co-author of the article and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.

(snip)

Allen said there are instances where healthy children are extremely short, and “it’s appropriate to help them grow.” But for most kids, it’s “reasonable” to just keep watching their growth rate and reassure the parents.

Often, parents worry about their child (again, usually a son) being teased, or — as an adult — feeling unhappy or even being at a disadvantage career-wise.

But studies have not borne out those worries, Allen said. Short children and adults do not seem less happy than their taller peers, and there’s no proof that treating idiopathic short stature improves quality of life.

“The more we look into this ‘assumed morbidity’ associated with short stature, the less we find,” Allen said. “And it’s been very difficult to show that treating (idiopathic short stature) improves kids’ well-being as adults.”

As far as safety, growth hormone “has an excellent track record while kids are on it,” Allen said. But no one knows yet if there are risks later in life. In theory, growth hormone might raise the odds of diabetes or certain cancers down the road. But for now, those are theoretical risks, Allen said.

The other big issue is cost. A conservative estimate is that each inch of height gained with growth hormone treatment would ring up at $35,000 to $50,000, Allen said.

Growth hormone is not the only option for idiopathic short stature. Boys can be given low doses of androgens, or “male” hormones. This therapy boosts boys’ growth rate in the short term, but there’s no evidence it increases their adult height, Allen said.

“It’s always reasonable to say, ‘Let’s just watch this,’” Allen said. At first, the gap might worsen if a short child’s peers hit puberty earlier and their growth takes off, he noted. But once a “late bloomer” starts puberty himself, his growth will accelerate, too.

My HBD radar is going off.

What’s going on here?  Answer:  White fathers of white sons nearing or very early in puberty are freaking out because they think there’s something abnormally or pathologically wrong with their sons, simply because they’re a lot shorter than their black male classmates who have already started puberty and are therefore experiencing their growth spurts.  Often these white fathers fear that their white sons won’t be able to make or do well on sports teams, simply because their late blooming white sons are having to compete with early blooming bigger stronger taller faster blacks.  Yep, it’s a combination of the sports cult, fathers living out their failed sports cult dreams through their sons, and our collective inability to accept racial differences.  Therefore, we’re pumping late prepubescent and early pubescent boys with hormones they don’t need, because all they need to be given is time, and maybe the option of self-actualization in some venue other than a field, pitch or court.

The Dork in Orlando With a Fax Machine Has Good News

Orlando

But all might not be as well as it seems.

P-D:

Graduation rates improve for NCAA tournament teams

Overall graduation rates improved among players at schools in this year’s men’s NCAA basketball tournament, and African-American players in particular did better, according to a study released Monday.

The annual report by the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) shows African-American players’ graduation success rate increased from 59 percent in 2012 to 65 percent this year, while white players’ rates increased from 88 percent to 90 percent.

The overall graduation rates for programs in the tournament increased from 67 percent in 2012 to 70 percent.

(snip)

Richard Lapchick, the study’s primary author, said the majority of the report contains good news.

(snip)

Lapchick said there were two major factors in the study’s improving numbers: the NCAA’s tightening academic rules and the recent involvement of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

There’s a contradiction here.  If you genuinely tighten the rules, you leave out more blacks.  This means that if graduation rates for black basketball players is really getting better, the the standards have been weakened.

“Trying to Make a Difference”

Belleville

What, no realizing their full potential? You see, “realizing one’s full potential” is The New “making a difference.”

When you slowly but surely import ESL’s demographics, you also import its social issues.

I suspect that I would have been mentoring these “successful” young black men if the school environment consisted only of young men like themselves and those like the 17-year old version of myself. These successful ones at the high schools in the Belleville district don’t strike me as the brightest bulbs in the box. But in the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king.

And also…the achievement gap.  But not for much longer, because it won’t be long before all the whites are driven out of the Belleville district.

It’s the Least Wonderful Time of the Year

Orlando

College bowl teams announced Monday, the dork in Orlando with a fax machine speaks Tuesday.

I have the same reaction that I had last year, and the year before that, and the year before that…

C’ya in mid-March, Dick.

Misandry, Or Accuracy?

United Kingdom

I tend to think a lot of the “boy” or “man” or “male” crisis is basically code for black boys or men.  Therefore, I think the low grades that “boys” tend to get, they get them because they deserve them.

Some Failing

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Detroit Free Press:

Minority kids are less likely to be buckled up, study says

It’s long been a vexing challenge for road safety advocates: how to increase the use of child safety restraints and seat belts among African Americans and Hispanics.

A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan shows there’s still work to do: The study, published last month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, finds that black and Hispanic infants and toddlers are unrestrained at rates 10 times those of white children; among older children, there’s a two-fold difference.

(snip)

“This is not some failing of a particular race,” says Victor Garcia of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, a cofounder of Buckle Up. “What it is is African Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately in lower socioeconomic groups.”

You either buckle the seat belts or you don’t.  How is it possible that poverty induces people not to use seat belts?

The main reason this is still going on is that seat belt enforcement hasn’t been bumped up to primary violation in most states, i.e. it is still secondary.  What I mean by that is that the way it is now, a cop can’t pull you over for no seat belts alone, but can cite you for seat belts if he pulls you over for another reason and sees no seat belts.  Many times, the effort to bump up seat belts from secondary to primary is resisted by the state’s black legislative caucus, because they’re worried about “racial profiling.”  But not worried that little Shy’sheniqua will become one with the windshield.

Obama Knows

Obamaland

Newsbusters:

[SAVANNAH] GUTHRIE [,NBC NEWS]: 17th in science. 14th in reading. And yet the U.S. spends just about as much as any other country per pupil. People are probably wondering what are we spending our money on then?

OBAMA: Well, you know, part of the problem we’ve got is we’ve got a very diverse country compared to some of the smaller countries where all the kids are coming to school pretty well prepared. They’re not hungry, they’re not poor. In our country, you know, we’ve got poor kids and we’ve – some kids who have deep troubles at home.

Barack H. Obama II, like most people of all races, is a white supremacist.

You can’t be a leftist racial egalitarian then turn around and complain about white flight and school segregation.  If the races are truly equal, then it shouldn’t matter who lives where and who goes to school where and with whom.  But they too know the truth.

Related:  Obama admits that crime causes poverty, not the other way around

At Least They Give Us a Picture

Mississippi

While the words “black” or “African-American” don’t appear in the text, the big picture is obvious.

And, of course, a picture is worth a thousand words.

As for the content, they are engaging into two false assumptions:  1.  That the teenaged black girls of Mississippi are procreating earlier than they should because they don’t know that heterosexual vaginal sexual intercourse can lead to pregnancy, and 2.  That they don’t know that heterosexual vaginal sexual intercourse can lead to pregnancy because no official teacher or educator has told them or is allowed to tell them.  Yes, there were people on Earth who couldn’t figure out on their own the link between human sexuality and female pregnancy before people who did know told them (Australian Aboriginals, for instance), but virtually everybody knows it now.

The people who write for Time have to make these assumptions, because the alternative is biologically-based innate racial differences, and from that point, you can queue NAZIHITLERHOLOCAUSTSIXMILLIONJEWS, or whatever Bob Whitaker’s Bug People say.

Undeniable Truths of Life Meets Blogmeister’s Axioms

South Florida

Rush:

Yeah, make sure everybody’s got a shot.  So what does that mean?  Everybody gets a certain amount of money, same amount of money. You take it from those who have it and produced it, give it to those that don’t, same amount of money and turn ‘em loose and everybody’s gonna be cool.  Is that what that means, everybody’s got a shot?  What happens, Mr. President, if you do that, let’s say — pick a number — give everybody a hundred grand, just do it, for the sake of our little experiment here.  What do you bet the people who didn’t have any money before you gave ‘em will be out of that money inside of six months, and the people who had that hundred grand before you took it from ‘em find a way to get it back?

What do you bet, Mr. President , in our little experiment, give everybody a hundred thousand dollars, the same people who didn’t have it before you gave it to ‘em will end up not having it in a very short period of time.  So what have you actually accomplished?  It’s a one-time thing, right?  Could we say, give everybody a hundred grand, give everybody a fair shot, and then after a year, we reassess.  And what happens, Mr. President, when a lot of those people you gave a hundred grand to are back down to having nothing?  Do you do it again?  Do you do it every year?  At what point do you realize this doesn’t work?  Why would you ignore world history?  This has never worked anywhere in the world.

Does this sound familiar?  Sure.  Blogmeister’s Axiom #60:

60.  Poor people have poor ways.  Or, to put it another way, most poor people are poor because of their bad habits.  All the money in the world won’t change their poor ways, and furthermore, their poor ways will eventually result in their being poor once again.

I guess this is an example of “Blogmeister Echo Syndrome,” a phrase I adapted from Rush’s own “Limbaugh Echo Syndrome.”  Too, my “Blogmeister’s Axioms” were made in the mold of Rush’s “Undeniable Truths of Life.”  I’m glad to know he’s one of my readers.

While we’re on that subject…Vince Young is on the vestibule of bankruptcy.  Yes, he decelerated from multi-millionaire to almost bankrupt in six years.

Not All Is Well In Gigabit Nirvana

KCMO

Turns out Google Fiber in Kansas City is running into a little bit of a social problem:

The fact that Prospect Avenue is the proverbial railroad tracks.

I guess these will be the grounds to derail the whole thing, because Chocolate Kansas City won’t or can’t get it.  What do they want with a gigabit tier, anyway?  Are mahogany mobs not being organized fast enough at megabit speeds?

The Machiavellian part of me hopes this fails, at least until there’s some effort to clear all the bandwidth-eating junk from webpages.  All that will be accomplished by rolling out pervasive gigabit tiers right now would be just the opposite:  Webpages will be loaded down with even more junk.

Math Bez Racists, Sheeyt

BRA

Education News:

HetchingerEd is offering a rather radical proposal to increase the number of American students who graduate college: dump math. Specifically, the argument is that since many college students, a disproportionately large number of them of an African-American or Hispanic descent, are unprepared to tackle college-level mathematics courses, they might be stymied by a requirement that all those receiving a degree from a particular institution must pass the freshman version of the course.

Just get rid of all standards, and just give every person “of African-American or Hispanic descent” a college diploma as a reward for turning 22 years old.

Take a hint:  Math is one of the very few subject areas that cannot be dumbed down or affirmative actioned.  Math at the college level is purely an abstraction:  Either you have the brain pans to grok it or you don’t.

The original article at HetchingerEd suggests that many college students should be steered into prob/stat rather than the typical math course sequence of alg/geo/trig/calc because prob/stat is relevant to many more careers.  Trust me:  If you can’t get algebra, you’re not going to get probability and statistics.

Stop Taking About “Asses”

Washington, D.C.

I’ll make this really easy for you.

The 74-page report, “Back of the Line: The State of AIDS Among Black Gay Men in America,” says black gay and bisexual men make up one in 500 Americans overall, but account for one in four new HIV infections in the United States.

And:

Wilson also faulted mainstream gay rights groups for putting the HIV-AIDS crisis on the back burner, now that it is no longer a pressing issue for affluent gays in big cities whose bigger concern today is marriage equality.

“There are almost no national LGBT organizations today that give a rat’s ass about the lives of black gay men as they are impacted by HIV-AIDS, and that’s disgraceful,” he said.

Why should the “mainstream” (read: white) LGBTQMIALOLPLPLTH orgs worry that much about HIV/AIDS, when condoms and ARV drugs, and now the new blocker drug, has halted the spread of HIV/AIDS among those who take proper precautions?

It’s Called Inference, Peter

Orszag, writing in Bloomberg:

How Summer Is Making U.S. Kids Dumber and Fatter

(snip)

Consider, first, the evidence for the summer fade effect. Taken together, a variety of studies indicate that students’ academic skills atrophy during the summer months by an amount equivalent to what they learn in a third of a school year, according to a review by Harris Cooper, a professor of education at Duke University, and several co-authors.

This deterioration, furthermore, varies substantially by income and race, and its impact persists even past childhood. Barbara Heyns, a sociologist at New York University who studied Atlanta schoolchildren in the late 1970s, found that although academic gains during the school year were not substantially correlated with income, summer decline was.

Subsequent studies have replicated the finding. Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle and Linda Olson of Johns Hopkins University, for example, found that the summer fade can largely explain why the gap in skills between children on either side of the socioeconomic divide widens as students progress through elementary school. Children from all backgrounds learn at similar rates during the school year, but each summer students of high socioeconomic status continue to learn while those of low socioeconomic status fall behind.

The impact is felt even years later. The learning differences that begin in grade school “substantially account” for differences by socioeconomic status in high-school graduation rates and in four-year college attendance, Alexander and his co-authors report.

Now we have a brand spanking new excuse to explain the achievement gap divert attention away from racial differences in IQ.  We’re supposed to believe that NAMs learn just as well as W&A during the year, but NAMs forget quicker than W&A during the summer.  And this is supposed to be a cascading effect that can explain everything wrong with NAM educational failure through high school.

I infer that those who forget something really quickly never really learned or grokked it to begin with.

But Race Is Just a Social Construct

Wildwood

Summer camp for children with sickle cell anemia at Babler.

Strange.  I’m seeing a lot of something I shouldn’t see in the video.  The odds have to be astronomical.

Leave It To Me

New York City

5:

Study: Babies born just two weeks early may suffer academically

A new study suggests elementary school children may do better in math and reading if they were born at at least 39 weeks gestation.

“There was a linear relationship between gestational age and academic achievement in 3rd grade,” explains Dr. Kimberly Noble.

Dr. Noble and colleagues at Columbia University compared data on more than 128,000 children in New York City.

All of the kids were considered full term at birth, at least 37 weeks.

Those born at 37 or 38 weeks scored worse on reading and math achievement tests in the 3rd Grade relative to children born at 39, 40 or 41 weeks.

Hint:  There are racial differences in gestation.  Whites longer than Hispanics longer than blacks.

To net it out, children who are born after shorter gestation periods don’t do as well in school not because of their mother’s shorter gestation periods, but because shorter gestation periods and IQs are effects to the cause of race.

One For the “Social Construct” Files

Reuters:

Black girls don’t benefit as much from exercise: study

(Reuters Health) – In a new study of U.S. preteen and teen girls, daily exercise was strongly linked to weight and obesity in white girls but not black girls.

(snip)

But for black girls, there was no clear link between physical activity at age 12 and obesity at 14.

I think it might have something to do with drastically slowing metabolism rates in young black women.  It’s most noticeable between the ages of 20 and 30.

When blacks were in Africa, this was a good thing, because food needed to be conserved for the young’ens.  But now that they’re in America with EBT and a steady supply of crap in a sack coming from the clown’s head, it means weight.  Lots of weight.

We’re On the Right Track, Baby, We Were Born This Way

Yes, you’re not seeing things.  There is a Lady Gag video in this post.

MSNBC:

White Americans’ heads are getting bigger — literally, study shows

If someone complains that a person has a big head, it’s normally considered a dig at the enormity of that person’s ego. But when it comes to white Americans, being labeled as big-headed shouldn’t be considered a criticism as much as an apt description: Over the past 150 years, the size of white Americans’ craniums have actually increased in size.

Researchers at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center (what Mary Roach calls “the body farm” in her book “Stiff”) routinely examine skulls to try to determine sex and race of the craniums so if police officers discover just a skull, there are guidelines for gleaning info about it. The database of skulls and bodies has steadily increased to include people who were born and died in the 20th century, whereas prior the skulls were from people born in the 19th century.

Meanwhile, cultural anthropologists still insist that there’s no such thing as race.

As researchers Lee Jantz, coordinator of Forensic Anthropology Center, Richard Jantz, professor emeritus, and Joanne Devlin, adjunct assistant professor, catalogued 1,500 noggins they observed that white people who were born in the 20th century had bigger heads.

They looked at white skulls because they wanted to have a large sample and they don’t have as many black and Hispanic skulls. When people decide to donate their bodies to science, some of those bodies end up at the Forensic Anthropology Center. Historically, more white people have donated their bodies to science than black or Hispanic people, but Jantz suspects that as the makeup of America changes, the center will receive more donations from black and Hispanic people.

Good luck with that.

The height of white male skulls has increased by eight millimeters and the overall skull has grown by 200 cubic centimeters. For women, cranium height increased by seven millimeters and overall by 180 cubic centimeters.

Five, six, seven, eight…

Fight the Power

By putting on some weight.

I kidd thee not.

NYT:

And it’s not only aesthetics that make black fat different. It’s politics too. To get a quick introduction to the politics of black fat, I recommend Andrea Elizabeth Shaw’s provocative book “The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies.” Ms. Shaw argues that the fat black woman’s body “functions as a site of resistance to both gendered and racialized oppression.” By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.

So when Latrina and Aquanetta are at McDonalds swilling their way through extra valuedom, they’re not being gluttonous, they’re protesting.

Getting over on the man.

What’s Causing Early Puberty In Girls? (NYT Misses Its Own Irony)

NYT has a long spread to expound on many theories, all of them valid.  But this paragraph alludes to a theory they missed:

In the late 1980s, Marcia Herman-Giddens, then a physician’s associate in the pediatric department of the Duke University Medical Center, started noticing that an awful lot of 8- and 9-year-olds in her clinic had sprouted pubic hair and breasts. The medical wisdom, at that time, based on a landmark 1960 study of institutionalized British children, was that puberty began, on average, for girls at age 11. But that was not what Herman-Giddens was seeing. So she started collecting data, eventually leading a study with the American Academy of Pediatrics that sampled 17,000 girls, finding that among white girls, the average age of breast budding was 9.96. Among black girls, it was 8.87.

For Hispanics, it would be somewhere in between, and for Asians, it would be very close to or slightly later than the white average.

There’s another explanation:  The reason why the average age that American girls (and boys) hit puberty is decreasing is that more and more “American” girls, as a percentage of the whole, are black and Hispanic.  This might also explain why the average gestation period for expectant American women is slowly decreasing.

Mine Eyes

Madison (Wisc.) Isthmus:

Faces of the achievement gap in Madison: The stories behind the statistics

In 2010, just five black and 13 Hispanic graduating seniors in the Madison Metropolitan School District were ready for college, according to data from the district and Urban League of Greater Madison. These statistics should make your heart race. If they don’t, and you’re white, you may be suffering from what anti-racism educator Tim Wise calls “the pathology of white privilege.” If you do get it and don’t take action, that is almost worse.

Only five blacks and thirteen Hispanics who graduated from Madison public high schools in 2010 were college ready?  And Tim Wise calls it a problem?

I call it an honest metric.

UPDATE

I read the whole thing again, and this little vignette jumped out at me:

Fact: Research suggests that arresting students at school actually increases the likelihood that they will commit future offenses.
[Source: National Council of La Raza]

La Raza, as in “for those of the race, everything, for those outside the race, nothing.”  There’s a real credible source.

But methinks they have correlation and causation a little mixed up.  It’s not that students who arrested at school will go out and commit subsequent crimes because their first arrest was at school, it’s that the kinds of students who are arrested at school would have been the kind of teenagers and adults who would have gone into a life of crime, even if they were never arrested at school.

Progress = Cheating

Apparently, it is in the SLPS.

We can take comfort in the fact that “Herzog” in Herzog Elementary probably doesn’t refer to Whitey Herzog.

The article insinuates that this scandal will have no bearing on whether DESE relinquishes control.  But if they were cheating on science testing, why wouldn’t they cheat on math and reading?

BBC Does The STL

Delmar isn’t the dividing line it used to be.  Believe me, (and also believe Matt Quain), there is plenty of “North of Delmar” far south of Delmar, more and more by the year.  The only reason there are some nice neighborhoods just to the south of Delmar in the Central West End is because almost all of those houses are big, expensive, exquisite and owner-occupied, (exceedingly few rental units), therefore, the white liberals of that area have been able to hang on, in spite of the “diversity” they love so much staring them in the face.

Remember, Delmar is a regular urban boulevard, not a 50-foot wall or a 10,000-volt electric fence.  Anyone can cross at anytime.  White liberal yuppieville and the ghetto are eyeball to eyeball, and the people in the former are more than happy to “break down stereotypes.”  Yet, “integration” still failed.

The corner of Kingshighway and Delmar holds a special place in the heart of one of my regular readers.  He will instantly know why, but for those of you who don’t and who need a hint, think about what used to be southwest of that junction.

That Didn’t Take Long

Well, whaddaya know.  I knew we would hear from him this week, but I was thinking more like Wednesday or Thursday.  The dork in Orlando with a fax machine must have started work right at 7 PM when the selection show was over and worked all night.  His home town paper was first with the news.

I’m not going to bother responding to any of this, because I have already done so numerous times in the past, after Dorky Dorkenstein runs his mouth every mid-December and mid-March.  I did notice that if the new Academic Progress Rate proposal was in force right now, SLU wouldn’t be allowed in the tournament.  (It’s just as well, they’re one and done in my bracket anyway).  Too, if it is ever implemented, then it might make Dorky Dorkenstein’s brain blue-screen when he realizes that it will result in less diversity (i.e. fewer blacks) in college basketball.

Now, we won’t have to hear from him until December, when the BCS Bowl teams are announced.  Except the Summer Olympics are coming up in August, so he might take the chance to pop off about how the swim teams are too white.  What’s that you say?  The sprinting squads on the track team are too black and decidedly non-diverse? (*)  Naw, you won’t hear a peep from him about that.

* – Yes, I’m pulling for Christophe Lemaitre.  But I think he has a better chance to medal in 2016 or 2020.

Of Carrots and No Sticks (White Skin Privilege At Work)

WOIO-CBS-19 Cleveland:

Cincinnati High School Paying Students To Come To School

CINCINNATI, Ohio (CBS Cleveland) — A Cincinnati high school is paying its students to come to school.

The Dohn Community High School has launched a $40,000 incentive program to get students to come to class.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, students will get Visa gift cards for showing up everyday for school, being on time for class and not getting into trouble. Seniors would get $25 while underclassmen would get $10.

The school would also put $5 into a savings account for the student that earns a gift card.

(snip)

The school is trying out this new idea after the Ohio Department of Education designated the school an “academic emergency” on its report card. About 14 percent of students graduated from Dohn during the 2010-2011 school year.

Yep, 95% black, according to that website that will soon be denounced as a hate crime against humanity, GreatSchools.com.

Wait until these students get into the real world, there there are no bonuses for showing up on time and every day and being civil on the job.  It’s instead thought of as a minimum standard of professional behavior.  Then again, stamping out license plates in prison and collecting welfare aren’t really “jobs” per se.

Big Mama

Deep down in an article about American obesity:

However, more needs to be done to target such efforts in minority groups who tend to have higher rates of obesity than whites, she said.

For instance, obesity rates among white men were 36.2 percent in 2009-2010 compared to 38.8 percent among black men.

The obesity prevalence in white women was 32.2 percent compared to 58.5 percent in black women.

***

Cause and Effect. Heard of It?

Eureka Alert:

Study reveals an association between impatience and lower credit scores

NEW YORK – December 13, 2011 – A study conducted by Columbia Business School’s Prof. Stephan Meier, Regina Pitaro Associate Professor of Business, Management, and Charles Sprenger, Assistant Professor, Stanford University Department of Economics, determines that there may be a psychological reason for why people default on their mortgages. The research, which will be featured in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that the participants in the study with poor credit scores were more impatient and were more likely to choose immediate rewards rather than wait for a larger reward in the future.

While working at the Federal Reserve’s Center for Behavioral Economics and Decisionmaking in Boston, Massachusetts, the researchers created a study that would help determine if there are factors beyond the screening for mortgage applicants or other institutional reasons that leads to people to make the decision to default. Meier and Sprenger recruited 437 low-to-moderate income people at a community center in Boston that offered tax preparation help. Each person was given a questionnaire that featured choices between a smaller, immediate reward and a larger reward they would receive in the future. The participants also agreed to let the researchers access their FICO credit scores.

The study shows that time discounting and FICO scores were significantly correlated, and that this correlation was comparable to previously found correlations between time discounting and health behavior. Participants who were the most willing to delay rewards and exhibited more patience had FICO scores that were approximately 30 points higher than those of participants who were the least willing to delay. Also, the impatient participants fell below the subprime lending cutoff of 620. At this score, individuals generally face substantially elevated borrowing rates.

“Conceptually, it does make sense that how people discount the future, i.e. how impatient they are, affects their decision to default on their loans,” Meier says. “Individuals accumulate debt and then have to decide whether to repay the money or use the money for something else.”

The researchers acknowledge that defaulting on a loan isn’t always a deliberate choice. People may default for a variety of reasons, such as when they lose their job. However, as Meier explains, “There is a little bit of strategic defaulting going on, where some people make a cost-benefit analysis and choose to have more money now and deal with the repercussions later.”

Okay, now I get it.  Their bad credit score psychologically traumatizes them, and that causes them to engage in spending for instant gratification instead of making wise long-term financial decisions.  It can’t possibly be because their microeconomic behavior is the reason why they have low credit scores to begin with.  To put it in more simple terms, Official America thinks that people are impatient and impulsive because they know they have low credit scores, Sensible America knows that people have low credit scores because they are impatient and impulsive.

I know the Occutards are against credit scores, and want credit ratings agencies either abolished or everyone’s scores reset to perfect.  Remember, the Boston Fed is where that junk social science study in 1992 originated, (hence, my emphasis in the blockquote), the study that was used as the basis for affirmative action in mortgage lending, which fed the whole subprime crisis and the financial crisis.  Are they greasing the skids for the prohibition of credit scores and ratings as a sop to the left wing?  History doth repeateth itself, methinks.  I guess this time, the Fed is worried about being eliminated entirely (President Ron Paul) or having its power and authority cut back substantially (a few other Republican contenders), and they’re trying to buy protection with the left wing.

Seven Come Eleven

Daily Mail beside itself:

Betrayed by schools, the 50,000 bright seven-year-olds who fail to shine at 11

The devastating extent to which primary schools are failing bright pupils was revealed yesterday.

Up to 51,000 11-year-olds who achieved top grades at age seven have effectively gone backwards after being left to coast in maths and English.

Four in ten youngsters who were above average in the three Rs at seven are failing to fulfil their early promise, official league tables show.

Around half of primary schools – more than 7,500 – have failed to get each of their brightest pupils up to the highest grades in Key Stage Two tests at 11.

As usual, “it’s the fault of the schools,” yadda yadda.

May I be so presumptuous as to advance a few alternate theories?

No?  Okay, here goes.

1.  Kids that young tend to change a lot when they get four years older.  I’m sure you can find 50,000 seven-year old outstanding Pee Wee League football players who aren’t so good in Pop Warner when they turn eleven.  Mainly because their competition’s level of marginal improvement from age 7 to age 11 was greater than their own.  Great middle school players sometimes don’t pan out in high school, great high school players sometimes wash out in college, great college players are sometimes pro busts.

I have told you in this space in the past that while I was one of the the best ten-year olds on my Boys Club summer baseball team, the very next year, while I know I improved, some of the boys who were my teammates both years improved a lot more.  That’s when I knew I would never be in the major leagues.

2.  Yeah, white elephant.  Race, and racial differences in brain maturation.  I bet a lot of these 7-year olds that are doing well in school are black,  but between ages 7 and 11, their mental maturity levels out, while their white and other peers are still developing, zooming by them in that age range, usually in the latter end of that age range.  This theory actually depends on the first theory quite a bit.

 

Dear McPaper: We Can Read Between the Lines

McPaper:

Report: Child homelessness up 33% in 3 years

(snip)

The states where homeless children fare the best are Vermont, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and Maine.

It finds the worst states for homeless children are Southern states where poverty is high, including Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, and states decimated by foreclosures and job losses, such as Arizona, California and Nevada.

Whites not homeless, blacks and Hispanics homeless.  I’m surprised McPaper didn’t come right out and say this in order to blame “Whitey.”

Start Your Stopwatches

By the time your stopwatch gets to exactly 365:00:00:00.000, we’ll find out that there was fraud behind this:

Illinois test scores up, but fall short of federal standards

(snip)

The Illinois state standardized test results released today show the gap in performance between different groups of students is narrowing at the elementary school level, particularly because of gains among African-American, special education and low-income students. The achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed by 11.4 percent in math and 7.9 percent in reading, according to the state.

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