>The achievement gap is the result of stark socioeconomic inequality.
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker came out in 2002 and showed why this thinking is flawed. The achievement gap is significantly caused by genetic differences, and the correlation to income is not totally causation. The term used by geneticists "heritability" gives the proportion of differences between people (within a population), on some trait, that is caused by genetic differences. The traits that will determine your success at school, like personality and IQ are significantly heritable.
Here's a recent study from the UK that looked at identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins and gave heritability estimates for different school subjects: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273
>The researchers found that for compulsory core subjects (English, Mathematics and Science), genetic differences between students explain on average 58% of the differences between GCSE scores. In contrast, 29% of the differences in core subject grades are due to shared environment -- such as schools, neighbourhoods or families which twins share. The remaining differences in GCSE scores were explained by non-shared environment, unique to each individual.
>Overall, science grades (such as Biology, Chemistry, Physics) were found to be more heritable than Humanities grades (such as Media Studies, Art, Music) -- 58% vs 42%, respectively.
You've pointed to a study that found a link between individual's grades and genetic differences in one country. But it's a big leap to go from there, and explain why a particular school would have bad grade averages, especially schools in different countries - unless you're making the argument that schools are composed of people from large groups of genetically similar people, and these people are necessarily very distinct from people at schools that have better grade averages. Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the society would have to be extremely stratified, geographically and genetically, with very little intermixing.
> Intuitively, that seems unlikely to me; the society would have to be extremely stratified, geographically and genetically, with very little intermixing.
That sounds right to me. Gated communities, luxury buildings vs slums, FiDi vs. Outer Sunset -- communities are incredibly stratified.
There's a big difference between variations in ability within a group which probably have a large genetic component and differences between different populations, say a poor area and a rich area or different races which appear predominantly non genetic and probably to a large extent cultural.
It's surprising to hear that heritability can be so significant for individuals but races somehow never diverged in those same traits, while they did diverge in other heritable traits like skin color and height.
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker came out in 2002 and showed why this thinking is flawed. The achievement gap is significantly caused by genetic differences, and the correlation to income is not totally causation. The term used by geneticists "heritability" gives the proportion of differences between people (within a population), on some trait, that is caused by genetic differences. The traits that will determine your success at school, like personality and IQ are significantly heritable.
Here's a recent study from the UK that looked at identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins and gave heritability estimates for different school subjects: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273
Article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131211185323.ht...
>The researchers found that for compulsory core subjects (English, Mathematics and Science), genetic differences between students explain on average 58% of the differences between GCSE scores. In contrast, 29% of the differences in core subject grades are due to shared environment -- such as schools, neighbourhoods or families which twins share. The remaining differences in GCSE scores were explained by non-shared environment, unique to each individual.
>Overall, science grades (such as Biology, Chemistry, Physics) were found to be more heritable than Humanities grades (such as Media Studies, Art, Music) -- 58% vs 42%, respectively.