How Criminality Became a Black Thing

[ronburgundy]

Thanks for the detailed discussion -still interested and feel the data does show disparity - less computer time next few days - will be back...

Thanks for actually being open to counter arguments and not just replacing my details with "blah blah blah" or accusing me of denying the existence of racism or the "anything but racism" meme, which is sadly the standard response around here to critical analysis of data on this issue.

Hopefully, whats below helps clarify the argument and points of disagreement, so we can have a targeted and productive discussion when you return.

I have acknowledged that their are "disparities" at the national level in terms of funding for "black-schools" versus more white or integrated. schools. This is what the data in that report show. However, the shown disparities arise due to the States and different regions of States that the majority of blacks live in, which have separate sources of revenue and separate people and organizations deciding how much to fund all the schools in their area, which happens to impact blacks and whites differently depending on how concentrated they are in the area covered by those overall decisions.

That is extremely different than what you are arguing, which is that the some pool of revenue controlled by the same people and institutions is being divided unequally by those people and given more to schools with more white kids (whether intentionally or as a byproduct of other factors). I am claiming that the evidence supports the former but not the latter and in fact there is data falsifying the latter, with local pools of revenue most getting evenly distributed among the schools each pool covers, and non-local revenues getting unevenly added to these funds in favor of schools in poor and mostly minority areas. However, those pro-minority uneven distributions are still smaller than the differences in revenues raised in different States that differ in their demographics. Thus, at the aggregate national level, the per-pupil funding is still lower for black students overall than white students.

A point I haven't raised yet, is that the disparity caused by between State differences in how they fund education is partly due to the lower cost of living in those different States. $6000 buys much more education and more good teachers in Alabama than it does in Connecticut, because the cost of land, housing, food, etc. are all much lower in Alabama. So, if blacks get less funding at the national level, mostly due to living in States with lower costs of living, then even that is not a problem because it does not reflect them getting lower quality education due to living in lower revenue States. It reflects them living in States with lower costs of providing the same quality education.
Now, those Southern States may in fact have worse schools in general for reasons above and beyond any lower per pupil spending tied to cost of living. That is a problem, not just for blacks, and not just for all kids in those States, but for the rest of humanity impacted by the politics of that region. But its a very tough problem to solve without essentially dispensing with State's rights and ceding Fed control over their schools.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

Another issue that may tie into this is the religious fervor in the south. These are the people who demand evolution not be taught in schools and are generally opposed to the development of critical thinking skills, yes?

 

[Togo]

A point I haven't raised yet, is that the disparity caused by between State differences in how they fund education is partly due to the lower cost of living in those different States. $6000 buys much more education and more good teachers in Alabama than it does in Connecticut, because the cost of land, housing, food, etc. are all much lower in Alabama.

Eh.. I'm not sure that follows. Most people would rather pay more in rent and get a higher salary, even if they take home the same pay, because a higher rent often reflects a location more desirable for other reasons. Unless the teacher market is strictly local, with little national component, then $6000 won't attract more teachers in Alabama than in Connecticut, except on a local state level.

 

[ronburgundy]

ronburgundy, thanks for the detailed posts you have made regarding the school system in the USA. It is thought provoking. I don't live there so don't have much to add but I do wonder about this...

Again, only the end of teacher Unions wold make that remotely possible, and not because Unions are unreasonable but because it is an extremely unjust policy that would make teaching less attractive overall.

Why is it an extremely unjust policy? The idea of "combat pay" isn't unreasonable. Fund it through federal money sent to the most troubled schools.

My response of it being unjust was to the suggestion that $ used for "combat pay" in struggling schools be shifted away from the districts and schools that raise these revenues from their residents who moved their and pay those extra taxes for their own kid's schools. It violates the whole basis on which these residents live in those areas and vote to pay those extra revenues. For example, just outside of Chicago school district is the village of Oak Park with its own separate district, own revenue raising from its own residents. People move their mostly for the schools which get more funding than Chicago district schools because the Oak Park residents pay more property taxes and agree to do so because they know it goes to their kid's schools. The suggestion being made amounts to the State of Illinois forcibly seizing part of Oak Parks revenues and giving it to struggling schools in the Chicago district. It is beyond mere wealth redistribution, because it violates democratic principles by having a set of rules that impacted where people lived and their voting which created those pockets of revenues, then changing the rule once the $ is in hand.

It is also unjust for experienced teachers to not get raises for their experience unless they agree to greatly increase their travel to work time, distance from their own kids, and lower their own enjoyment of what they do. (note, only those who find it less enjoyable would need to be bribed with combat pay). IT is the same as robbing their pensions or increasing their retirement age by 10 years after they've already given 20 years of service. Unless they signed up for that rule when they became a teacher, it is a form of theft. Now, if you want to put that rule in place now for all incoming teachers, that is fine. But it will make the job of teacher far less appealing to most than it already is, greatly worsening the teacher shortage.

The alternative to that suggestion is to not take revenues from any district and still have the same experience pay in "cushy" schools, but to increase total education funding via increases in State or Fed funds funneled to struggling schools that struggle to attract experienced teachers. That is already being done, which is why those schools already get more total funding than other schools within their own district. Yet, they still are schools plagued with students with academic and behavioral problems, and thus still struggle to retain experienced teachers for whom more pay just isn't worth dealing with those issues every moment of job. Maybe if those extra funds doubled and they offered double salaries they could attract and retain a representative % of the experienced teachers. That would have some impact, but not enough in most of those schools to make them close to acceptable in performance, because the fact is that teacher quality is only a small part of the problem, and is actually as much a byproduct of the problem as it is a contributor. Good teachers don't want to teach there because no matter how good they or their fellow teachers are, the academic and behavioral problems of the students are far worse than other schools they could teach at.

I do like the idea of shutting down the worst schools and integrating its students with better schools. Integration is important, especially if there is a racial disparity between the good and bad school. Problem though would be the schools getting too big.

Chicago is trying that, but what is actually means in practice is that primarily majority black schools get shut down and kids get switched to more integrated schools farther from home.
The predictably invalid protests are that this is racist.

Also, if the difference in performance is not due to funding (and it usually isn't), but to what the student and their parents bring (or don't bring) to the classroom (which it often is), then integration only works in a limited way. A % of the students can be moved into the context of the better schools whose pre-existing prevailing classroom environment will lift up and enable those students to learn more. But the greater the % of students from the old school who move into the new one, the more they change that classroom environment toward their old classroom environment, thus "closing the gap" in part by lowering the quality of the new classrooms they move to.
Yeah, sounds harsh, but it doesn't mean these kids and their parents are bad people are inherently stupid. It means they are shaped by and reacting to factors that transcend the class and the school but that they bring with them into the class. Its objective reality that crappy classrooms are often the faulty of the students and their parents, and moving them to another class just moves their problems rather than magically fix them. The mix has to be the right ratio to positively impact the integrated students without negatively impacted the classrooms they move into.

I think most people can accept this, if the crappy classrooms were just unpredictable random occurrences that just sometimes happen as they do even in generally strong schools. For example, a great teacher in a good school could and do wind up sometimes with a crappy classroom environment where everything is a struggle and the kids don't learn as much as most other classrooms they teach. Every honest teacher knows this to be true. If caught early enough, a good solution would be to break that classroom up and reshuffle the students so that a few of them went into multiple other classrooms.

But many hide from this reality when there is some systematicity to those crappy classrooms and they occur more in particular neighborhoods, especially racially segregated ones. Admitting the role of students and parents in crappy classrooms then starts to seem like your making claims about "types of people", and the reality that it is due to complex indirect socio-historical factors and not the type of people they are is just to nuanced for people obsessed with the appearance of racism no matter the underlying reality.

This is one of many social issues in which the hyper focus on racism and false charges of racism based on superficial appearances evades the real problem and makes viable solutions that would actually help people unacceptable to the political left, which is very unfortunate because the right is the enemy of real quality education in general. So, reasonable people who want to address the real problem are surrounded by political machines far more powerful than rational argument.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Something else to keep in mind:

No Child Left Behind. Teachers get in trouble for having poor test scores--but the teachers know that poor students will mean poor test scores.

What good teacher in their right mind would want to teach poor students knowing it could very well be a career-ending move?


So long as we pretend it's a teacher problem we have no hope of fixing things.

 

[ronburgundy]

A point I haven't raised yet, is that the disparity caused by between State differences in how they fund education is partly due to the lower cost of living in those different States. $6000 buys much more education and more good teachers in Alabama than it does in Connecticut, because the cost of land, housing, food, etc. are all much lower in Alabama.

Eh.. I'm not sure that follows. Most people would rather pay more in rent and get a higher salary, even if they take home the same pay, because a higher rent often reflects a location more desirable for other reasons. Unless the teacher market is strictly local, with little national component, then $6000 won't attract more teachers in Alabama than in Connecticut, except on a local state level.

You support my point. The teacher may prefer CT over Alabama for various reasons. But whether they can live and teach in CT depends on getting paid more in CT than they would in Alabama, otherwise they cannot pay rent in CT. Thus, higher per pupil spending in CT is required to higher the same teacher. Thus, providing the same level of education costs much more in CT than Alabama. Thus, one cannot infer from lower spending in Alabama that this leads to lower quality education.

The fact that Alabama sucks for many other reasons is beside the point. That makes both crappy and great teachers prefer CT, all things being equal. Regardless, there are some great teachers in Alabama and they get paid much less than similarly great teachers in CT, due to cost of living, meaning that much of the different in spending has nothing to do with differences in education quality, even if there is a spurious indirect correlation. Bottom line is that any between state variance in funding needs to be adjusted for cost of living, and only the remaining differences reflect funding tied to differences in quality.

 

[ronburgundy]

Something else to keep in mind:

No Child Left Behind. Teachers get in trouble for having poor test scores--but the teachers know that poor students will mean poor test scores.

What good teacher in their right mind would want to teach poor students knowing it could very well be a career-ending move?


So long as we pretend it's a teacher problem we have no hope of fixing things.

Good point. Conservative pushes for teacher accountability based on student performance are idiotic and destructive to improving education for any and all students.

 

[ronburgundy]

Another issue that may tie into this is the religious fervor in the south. These are the people who demand evolution not be taught in schools and are generally opposed to the development of critical thinking skills, yes?

Yeah, that is among the non-funding factors I was imagining that hamper education in States with high concentrations of blacks. In fact, it is also part of the "culture" I referred to that hinders classroom quality in black schools in the north and more progressive States. No matter where they live, blacks are more likely to share much of the anti-intellectual religious close-mindedness that is more common to Southern US States. Just like the many Southerners that don't share this disposition, the many blacks that don't either are still impacted by its prevalence in their communities.

That said, I think this contributes only a small % to any within State racial differences in learning outcomes.

 

[ApostateAbe]

It is established fact that antisocial/criminal behavior is largely heritable within groups, and it is established fact that races vary in their criminal behavior, with black Africans being more criminal among many nations and across time. There is no established explanation for why the racial differences exist, only unsettled hypotheses, but I will tell you the hypothesis I prefer. Within each human mind, there are two psychological forces at odds with each other but both providing selective advantage: cooperativeness and competitiveness.

This would be reasonably easy to test: Look at adopted kids.

Do they tend to inherit the criminality of their birth parents or of their adoptive parents?

I haven't seen anything specifically regarding criminality but in general they are closer to their adoptive parents. Thus I think it's very likely we are looking at cultural matters, not genetics.

The established science on the matter, following from both twin studies and adoption studies, is that antisocial behavior variations follow from both genes and upbringing equally. About 50% heritability. See this article for an overview of the science:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2174903/

And see the abstracts of these two meta-analyses:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02239409
https://www.researchgate.net/public...tudies._Psychological_Bulletin_128(3)_490-529

 

[ronburgundy]

This would be reasonably easy to test: Look at adopted kids.

Do they tend to inherit the criminality of their birth parents or of their adoptive parents?

I haven't seen anything specifically regarding criminality but in general they are closer to their adoptive parents. Thus I think it's very likely we are looking at cultural matters, not genetics.

The established science on the matter, following from both twin studies and adoption studies, is that antisocial behavior variations follow from both genes and upbringing equally. About 50% heritability. See this article for an overview of the science:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2174903/

And see the abstracts of these two meta-analyses:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02239409
https://www.researchgate.net/public...tudies._Psychological_Bulletin_128(3)_490-529

From your linked article:

Heritability estimates suggest as much as one-half of the variation in propensity toward antisocial behavior can be explained by genetic differences among individuals.

Genetic research, however, also makes a strong case for the importance of environment in influencing antisocial behavior. In fact, the more we know about genetics of behavior, the more important the environment appears to be. Heritability estimates are far from agreement, leaving much room for environmental variations to influence antisocial outcomes. Most importantly, the environment itself appears to play a critical role in the expression and magnitude of genetic influences in antisocial behavior, as evidenced by the well-replicated findings of GxE interactions in several adoption studies, as well as more recent studies of specific genes such as MAO

Note the "as much as one half" combined with the massive disagreement between studies as to the estimate means the half is the high end of a range of estimates, making the likely accurate estimate notably lower.

Anyway, the article doesn't once mention ethnic differences because the authors understand the data has zero implications for that and tell us zero about the causes of between racial differences. The, at best, 50/50 split in genetic and environmental variance explained leave open every single possibility for the source of racial differences. This is especially the case since between group differences are a small fraction of within group variation. Thus any source of variance that contributes even 5% to within group variance is an equally plausible candidate to account for 100% of any racial differences.

Furthermore, the anti-social behavior being measured in most of these studies is neither a necessary nor remotely sufficient cause for criminal behavior.

Definitions of antisocial behavior vary widely across these studies, from violations of rules and social norms to various forms of aggression, including self-defense or other reactive forms and proactive behaviors such as bullying.
.....
Studies of younger children tend to rely on parent or teacher reports

IOW, many crimes have nothing to do with having an anti-social psychological orientation, and having such an orientation usually does not lead to crimes. When anti-social dispositions lead to crimes depends upon highly variable contexts (aka, environment).

So, if criminality only has weak and environment dependent relationship to anti-social tendencies, then racial differences in criminality are likely to only have weak and context dependent ties to racial differences in anti-social tendencies, plus such differences in tendencies could easily be entirely environmental.

What the massive cross national variance plus over-time variance in these criminality differences tell us is that environment plays a large role. The open question is whether that role is merely large or the entire source of such differences.

The "settled science" is that is it unscientific religion motivated by racism to even imply that racial differences in criminality are likely to be genetic. The status of there being some contributing genetic role in racial differences in criminality is nothing more than "Not ruled out a impossible".

 

[ApostateAbe]

The established science on the matter, following from both twin studies and adoption studies, is that antisocial behavior variations follow from both genes and upbringing equally. About 50% heritability. See this article for an overview of the science:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2174903/

And see the abstracts of these two meta-analyses:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02239409
https://www.researchgate.net/public...tudies._Psychological_Bulletin_128(3)_490-529

From your linked article:

Heritability estimates suggest as much as one-half of the variation in propensity toward antisocial behavior can be explained by genetic differences among individuals.

Genetic research, however, also makes a strong case for the importance of environment in influencing antisocial behavior. In fact, the more we know about genetics of behavior, the more important the environment appears to be. Heritability estimates are far from agreement, leaving much room for environmental variations to influence antisocial outcomes. Most importantly, the environment itself appears to play a critical role in the expression and magnitude of genetic influences in antisocial behavior, as evidenced by the well-replicated findings of GxE interactions in several adoption studies, as well as more recent studies of specific genes such as MAO

Note the "as much as one half" combined with the massive disagreement between studies as to the estimate means the half is the high end of a range of estimates, making the likely accurate estimate notably lower.

Anyway, the article doesn't once mention ethnic differences because the authors understand the data has zero implications for that and tell us zero about the causes of between racial differences. The, at best, 50/50 split in genetic and environmental variance explained leave open every single possibility for the source of racial differences. This is especially the case since between group differences are a small fraction of within group variation. Thus any source of variance that contributes even 5% to within group variance is an equally plausible candidate to account for 100% of any racial differences.

Furthermore, the anti-social behavior being measured in most of these studies is neither a necessary nor remotely sufficient cause for criminal behavior.

Definitions of antisocial behavior vary widely across these studies, from violations of rules and social norms to various forms of aggression, including self-defense or other reactive forms and proactive behaviors such as bullying.
.....
Studies of younger children tend to rely on parent or teacher reports

IOW, many crimes have nothing to do with having an anti-social psychological orientation, and having such an orientation usually does not lead to crimes. When anti-social dispositions lead to crimes depends upon highly variable contexts (aka, environment).

So, if criminality only has weak and environment dependent relationship to anti-social tendencies, then racial differences in criminality are likely to only have weak and context dependent ties to racial differences in anti-social tendencies, plus such differences in tendencies could easily be entirely environmental.

What the massive cross national variance plus over-time variance in these criminality differences tell us is that environment plays a large role. The open question is whether that role is merely large or the entire source of such differences.

The "settled science" is that is it unscientific religion motivated by racism to even imply that racial differences in criminality are likely to be genetic. The status of there being some contributing genetic role in racial differences in criminality is nothing more than "Not ruled out a impossible".

Loren Pechtel's point was about the heritability of antisocial behavior within groups, not between groups. There is no settled science on the cause of differences of antisocial behavior averages between groups. To claim that the settled science is that it is both an unscientific religion motivated by racism to even imply that racial differences in criminality are likely to be genetic and that it is not ruled out as a possibility (if I understand your meaning) seems to be contradictory. Go with the second option. The public allows their judgments of scientific probabilities to be affected by political ideologies. So do professional scientists but generally less so, and of course it would be the ideal to leave politics out of it, though we are all human.