Gary shared a link on ranking of Los Alamos schools among the best of the best.
Which brings up a huge topic; how does student success in one demographic, that of very high concentration of graduate degrees and high research salaries such as Los Alamos, relate to success in poor and even middle class areas lacking those resources at home and at school?
Sometimes there’s a temptation to correlate achievement with what are said to be “races” or “ethnic” groups, but while sometimes it might seem logical to our minds today, as Buckminister Fuller states, it’s really not a scientific approach to understanding individuals and groups.
It’s just a heck of a problem to somehow create an “equal opportunity” for American kids when it comes to education….so why not do as Bucky Fuller says…create an alternate model that routes around the problem. At least there’s a real chance of doing that with online learning.
As a consequence of the slavish “categoryitis” the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions “Where do you live?” “What are you?” “What religion?” “What race?” “What nationality?” are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth.
We are still early in the 21st century, and there are obvious signs of some racial barriers diminishing in US with more interracial marriages and other social advances toward equality such as a black president. (who is actually half white, so what group is he really in? )
OTOH, given the current popularity of “Anti Immigrant” (read anti Mexican and Latin American) “feelings” and “ideas” in the US, and anti immigrantion in Europe and Middle East and general xenophobia present in much of the world, there’s a long way to go.
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There’s been a number of studies that overlay “student achievement” with demographic maps, and pretty much invariably the areas of “good schools” and “good students” are found in the higher income areas, and vice versa.
Schools have many ways for income of the neighborhood to impact their budgets….and we’ve not been able to make schools “Equal” in capability for that, and other, reasons. Which is one of the hopes of online access to learning resources…students wouldn’t be limited to what their local school can do with/ for them.
Genes are an interesting part of achievement, but are also a statistical trap, as averaging by “racial or ethnic” group is very imprecise. Who is actually clearly in a particular racial or ethnic group? Can we draw scientifically valid lines of demarcation?
For Hispanics, spanish is a culture/ language all across the globe from previous extensive empire covering many nations and ethnicities…good luck trying to parse that into a “racial identity”…and so is English.
Africa is a huge continent, and while we in US tend to think of “blacks” as a defining word, the genetic variation over a continent is huge, despite commonality in skin pigment.
And the real problem with genotype vs phenotype, is that no human exists without both, and phenotype is determined by the actual experiences while being alive, and can be radically different depending on where the person lives. Genes are just one part of the equation of what an child becomes, and are mysteriously complex in many of their manifestations.
Since cultures tend to replicate certain aspects of being, we can look to “cultural memes and patterns” which is what Moynihan and others tried to say about “black families in US”…where realities of post slavery and post Jim Crow have had so much destructive influence on US blacks, who tend to be descendants of only a few areas or “nations” in Africa out of a zillion tribes and groups.
But while that may account for some of “how we got here” it’s not much of a guide to getting where we need to get with equal opportunity in US, and especially in education, where a mind IS a terrible thing to waste.