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Based on the evidence so far, there's good reason to believe that genes influence everything and exclusively control nothing. Intelligence, in particular, is a field with lots of evidence for heredity but little evidence for the precise impact of any known gene. We're very early in this research. If you start poking around in scholarly debates over IQ and general intelligence, or "g," you start to realize how much the field resembles astronomy or particle physics, with entities and qualities being calculated from complex inferences rather than directly observed. That's not to say inferences and calculations aren't scientific. But we should beware mistaking them for unshakeable facts.
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We've already identified genes that correlate with traits and vary in prevalence between ethnic groups. Are you confident that intelligence will turn out to be exempt from this list? Confident enough to leave no backup plan, no understanding of equality that can withstand a partial role for heredity? Confident enough to keep tallying and reporting test scores by race? And if intelligence turns out not to vary genetically between groups, do you imagine that we'll get just as lucky with every other significant mental trait?
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People of your race may be on average faster, smarter, or more volatile than people of my race. But the opposite pattern may turn up if you and I are classified in some other way. ... The distribution question doesn't settle the framing question, because race is just one way in which ability can be unevenly distributed. To answer the framing question in the affirmative, you have to show something more. You have to show that classifying and comparing by race, rather than using some other classification system or judging each person as an individual, does more good than harm.
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Why categorize and measure students by race? Aren't there better ways to organize the data? "Lower-performing 9- and 13-year-olds make gains," says one section of the NAEP report. "No significant change for 17-year-olds at any performance level," says another. "Reading scores improve for 9-year-old public and private school students over long term," says a third. "Score increases for 17-year-olds whose parents did not finish high school," says a fourth. These tables organize the data by factors that can help us target and adjust educational policy: kids with low scores, kids in public school, kids in high school, kids whose parents didn't graduate. I'd like to see tables for income and spending per pupil, too. But race? Does that category really help? And what message does it send to kids when headlines assert a persistent "racial gap"?
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Why do poor kids have more trouble in school? Is it due to environment or biology?
The answer, according to a new study, may be both.
We tend to think of biological explanations as an alternative to environmental explanations. The clearest example of this conflict is the debate over genetic theories of intelligence. But biology is more than genetics. It includes physical processes that are environmentally influenced. So if poverty causes cognitive impairment, biology should be able to explain part of the effect.
That's what a study published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tries to do. Working with a sample of nearly 200 children, the authors set out to identify "underlying biological mechanisms that may account for the income-achievement gap." But instead of looking for genes, they look for a different kind of mechanism: measurable stress.
And they find it. "Childhood poverty no longer predicts young adults' working memory capacity once chronic stress exposure is partialed from the covariance between childhood poverty and adult working memory," they report. In other words, stress is the missing link. They conclude:
One, we demonstrate that the duration of childhood poverty is related prospectively to working memory performance later in life among young adults. Two, we show that allostatic load, an index of chronic stress, conveys a significant proportion of the covariation between childhood deprivation and an adult's working memory performance. The longer the period of childhood poverty, the higher the levels of allostatic load during childhood, and the greater the reductions in young adults' subsequent working memory. Furthermore, elevated childhood allostatic load predicts working memory in young adults and, in turn, largely explains the prospective relationship between childhood poverty and these working memory deficits.
In an interview with Rob Stein of the Washington Post, the study's lead author enumerates various ways in which poverty can cause stress: "You may have housing problems. You may have more conflict in the family. There's a lot more pressure in paying the bills. You'll probably end up moving more often."
This study alone doesn't settle anything. It hasn't monitored cognitive performance over time, doesn't measure performance beyond working memory, and doesn't rule out other underlying factors. But it shows how biological and environmental explanations can help each other. And that's an important lesson in a field too often polarized between the two.