Steve Sailer: too much of a race reductionist?

In his post he refers to Race and Education: 1954-2007 by Raymond Wolters, who cites the research of James S. Coleman.

The achievement gap troubled Coleman. As a sociologist he was inclined to ascribe the differences in black and white test scores to the influence of the social environment, and he also knew that attributing even part of the difference to racial inheritance would place him outside the pale of his profession and render him ineligible for future grants. For Coleman and for many other educators and sociologist who studied his report, the key variables were family background and neighborhood. There was no correlation between test scores and per-pupil spending, age of textbooks, and a host of other measures. But there was a correlation with family background, the education and occupations of parents, and the number of books in the home. ...

Where Mr. Sailer sees race (and genetic inheritance) as the explanation, I see [family] culture, and possibly a problem with pedagogy. Parents who are active in their children's learning, and whose language arts are strong, can compensate for bad teachers (or for a lack of teaching due to other factors) in the public schools.

For Coleman, these findings were unwelcome. Personally, he favored more spending for education. And Coleman's dismay was compounded by another correlation that emerged from the data. Both black and white children seemed to do better on tests if their teachers had done well on a standard test of vocabulary. This was especially problematical because black teachers were "on the whole less well prepared, less qualified, with lower verbal skills, than their white counterparts." This led to "the conjecture that [students] would do less well on average under black teachers than under white teachers." If so, "a major source of inequality of educational opportunity for black students was the fact they were being taught by black teachers." Yet this possibility was so heterodox that the Coleman report did not pursue the matter. In 1991 Coleman expressed regret over the decision "not to ask the crucial question." "A dispassionate researcher," he wrote, "would have gone on to ask the question we did not ask." ...

Poring over the statistics, he noted that African American teachers, on average, had slightly more years of formal education than their white counterparts. But the black teachers lagged behind whites in vocabulary and reading comprehension.

Did the same teachers who had more years of formal education also lag? Or only those with less years?

As for Mr. Sailer's conclusion, that having more better teachers means that we need more white teachers -- I've seen plenty of white teachers who are not strong in language arts. (And non-white teachers as well.) Perhaps we should be encouraging more home-schooling instead, since we continue to churn out so many college graduates. If parents are taking less of an active role in their children's learning, and sound pedagogy has been replaced by novel but ineffective techniques, should we not see a drop in achievement scores accordingly?

Related links:
James Samuel Coleman
James S. Coleman (1926–1995)
James S. Coleman American Sociological Association
Johns Hopkins Magazine -- April 2000
Equality of Educational Opportunity (COLEMAN) Study (EEOS), 1966

VDARE: Race and Education: An Interview With Professor Raymond Wolters