Re: [xmca] Fwd: NYTimes.com: Hispanic Immigrants' Children Fall Behind Peers Early, Study Finds

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

The point about using national data sets and standardized procedures to draw
inferences plus the ideological
slant of what demographic is the norm take use straight back to 1969,
Michael.  That they are alive today in such
vivid form is a big part of the menace. I will try to dig out newsletter
article by Faye von cook (sp?) from an early
newsletter on EXACTLY this point.

No learning at all, and millions being poured into those huge standardized
studies.
woe is us.
mike

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Michael Glassman <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu>wrote:

> In the next to last paragraph of the paper the authors actually state that
> the measurements were not culturally validated - specifically the Bayley
> Scales which are dependent on the observer recognizing interactions between
> the mother and the child.  We have here the real dangers of using national
> data sets (hey if the numbers are larger they must be good).  The authors
> (who did not seem to collect any of the data) make the argument that that
> markers of home language mismatch between mother and child did not
> significantly effect outcome, but the way they phrase this makes me think
> the they lumped together Asian Pacific (who scored highest) and Latina
> Spanish speaking (who scored lowest).
>
> What is menacing about this article is that in some ways it reinforces the
> argument that Murray and Hernstein made in the Bell Curve - with Asians
> scoring highest, Whites next in line, and African Americans and Latinas at
> the lower end.  This is very much a social bias that seems to persist.
>  Individuals entering the households to do the Bayley measurements may have
> this bias (which may become especially relevant when they don't actually
> know the culture of the family they are measuring).  I would suggest that
> when there is a mismatch, and the person doing the measuring really isn't
> sure of what is going on, they go back to their default bias.  There is a
> really obvious opporutnity for measurement error here.  Articles like this
> then only go to reinforce that bias.  It is sad really, and shows how these
> types of memes continuously reinforce each other.
>
> One other thing of interest - although perhaps the researchers have a
> reason.  Why, if the Asian-Pacific Islanders scored highest was the white
> population taken as a baseline?
>
> And yet this stuff winds up in the New York Times (sigh).
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of mike cole
> Sent: Thu 10/22/2009 9:03 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Fwd: NYTimes.com: Hispanic Immigrants' Children Fall
> Behind Peers Early, Study Finds
>
>
>
> I have lots of questions, too, Nacho and Peter. Including the general
> endorsement attributed to Eugene Garcia who is well known in his
> championship of bilingual education and development of Latino kids.
> Lets see if we can find the published papers.
> mike
>
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 3:16 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
>
> > So, I'm wondering, by what measure are these kids determined to be
> > cognitively behind? The author of the study sounds Anglo, and Luis Moll
> has
> > argued for decades that conventional US school measurements overlook the
> > sophisticated cognitive work accomplished in Mexican-American community
> > life, e.g., distilling medicine from crickets, repairing machinery, and
> > otherwise spinning straw into gold in the face of poverty. Might there be
> > the sort of mismatch between cultural knowledge and research measurement
> > that Mike Cole has brought to my attention for many years? One lesson
> I've
> > learned from Mike is that if kids are doing poorly on tasks, then change
> > the
> > task and see what happens. Is the mismeasurement of man and woman at work
> > here?
> >
> > Peter Smagorinsky
> > Professor of English Education
> > Department of Language and Literacy Education
> > The University of Georgia
> > 125 Aderhold Hall
> > Athens, GA 30602
> > smago@uga.edu
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
> On
> > Behalf Of mike cole
> > Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 10:14 PM
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity; Bud Mehan; Olga vasquez
> > Subject: [xmca] Fwd: NYTimes.com: Hispanic Immigrants' Children Fall
> Behind
> > Peers Early, Study Finds
> >
> > NY Times story with implications for many of us.
> > mike
> >
> > ---
> >
> >         [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/> [image:
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> > *This page was sent to you by: * mcole@ucsd.edu
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> >  * US *   | October 21, 2009
> >  * Hispanic Immigrants' Children Fall Behind Peers Early, Study Finds
> > <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21latina.html?emc=eta1> *
> >  By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
> >  The children tend to start life on intellectual par with other American
> > children, but by age 2 they begin to lag in linguistic and cognitive
> > skills,
> > a U.C. Berkeley study shows.
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