Another shonky "study"

"Shonky" is a very useful word much used in Australia which is ROUGHLY translatable as "fraudulent", "misleading" or "a confidence trick". In academe, political correctness is a great source of shonky research reports. An article in "The Times" of London drew my attention to this study. The basic claim of the article is that student motivation is the main determinant of success at school. Ability is given short shrift. As soon as I read the report in "The Times", I thought it looked like the authors were spinning like a top. And so I found it to be when I looked at the research report itself.

The authors start out under their heading Explanations with: "there is no evidence that genetic factors such as systematic differences in innate ability play a significant role in ethnic test score gaps". NO evidence? A very bold claim -- particularly in the light of around 100 years of psychometric research showing LARGE interracial differences in IQ and in view of the undoubted correlation between IQ scores and educational attainment. If the authors had said that there was "some controvesy" about the importance of innate differences in ability, they would have made a properly cautious academic statement. What they DID say is a straight-out lie.

And in their own data analysis they make sure that ability will not be shown to have any effect. They "match" (control) for the neighbourhoods from which the students are drawn by using the official "Index of Multiple Deprivation" (IMD) for the neighbourhoods concerned. No prizes for guessing that deprived neighbourhoods tend to be inhabited by lower IQ people. Smart people are not often "deprived".

Not satisfied with that, they also matched students on their "Mosaic" postcode classification -- a classification which again picks out poor versus affluent neighbourhoods. They were determined that nothing in their study would reveal anything about ability. They used proxies of ability to remove its influence on their results.

So in the end they conclude that some ethnic groups outperform whites in educational attainment. That may well be true. As far as Indians are concerned, I have little doubt of it. But that is not what their research showed. What it showed is that blacks outperformed POOR whites only, not whites as a whole.

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