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"Dr. Betty Hart, RIP: Scientifically proved blacks don't talk enough or watch TV enough"

37 Comments -

1 – 37 of 37
Anonymous alonzo portfolio said...

I wonder if she ever met this black guy I used to play basketball with. One time he said to another black guy, "Where I'm from we only talk for a little while - then we start to hit!"

10/25/12, 3:09 PM

Anonymous Bostonian said...

The description of her "Meaningful Differences" book on Amazon notes that the 3-year old children of professionals had better vocabularies than the *parents* of the welfare families. Here is an excerpt.

"This study of ordinary families and how they talk to their very young children is no ordinary study at all. Betty Hart and Todd Risley wanted to know why, despite best efforts in preschool programs to equalize opportunity, children from low-income homes remain well behind their more economically advantaged peers years later in school. Their painstaking study began by recording each month - for 2-1/2 years - one full hour of every word spoken at home between parent and child in 42 families, categorized as professional, working class, or welfare families. Years of coding and analyzing every utterance in 1,318 transcripts followed. Rare is a database of this quality. "Remarkable," says Assistant Secretary of Education Grover (Russ) Whitehurst, of the findings: By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families."

10/25/12, 3:12 PM

Anonymous Enoch Powell said...

You can't fix stupid, but you can certainly bankrupt your country and have your entire life and career based on a lie if you try.

10/25/12, 3:13 PM

Anonymous Carol said...

What, watching Sesame Street didn't help at all?

10/25/12, 3:20 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Epigenetics!"

so they are making it up by watching too much?

OT

Countrywide's hustle program:

http://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-americas-hustle-program-2012-10

the good prosecutor also makes an appearance here:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Preet-v-Rajat-An-Indian-American-saga/articleshow/16959255.cms

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/10/25/nyc-police-officer-arrested-for-alleged-cannibal-plot/

10/25/12, 3:39 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I Mean, If I Lose To Mitt Romney, I'll Probably Kill Myself

By Barack Obama

Well, here we are. Less than two weeks left in my reelection bid, and the race is locked in a dead heat. Though I assumed it would be a somewhat close election, I guess I’d be lying if I said I thought that with 14 days to go I’d be in such a vulnerable position. Because, when it comes down to it, my opponent is Mitt Romney. I’m not exactly running against Dwight D. Eisenhower or Abraham Lincoln or even George H.W. Bush here, you know? I’m running against Mitt Romney—a guy who has made so many conflicting statements on so many different issues that the thought of losing to someone like that leaves me severely depressed, and makes me question if I’ve maybe wasted my entire life. Truth be told, if I do lose on Nov. 6, I think the odds are pretty good that I’ll kill myself.

Yeah, I’ll definitely commit suicide if I lose the presidency to Mitt Romney.

I think that would be the best, and even the healthiest, thing for me both personally and professionally. The prospect of welcoming President-elect Romney to the White House, or watching Mitt Romney take the oath of office, or continuing my life as a president, husband, and father who lost the most important position in the entire world to the guy who ran the Salt Lake City Olympics just doesn’t seem very appealing to me. In fact, it makes me wish I were dead.

The question is: Do I even deserve to live if I can’t beat Mitt Romney? And I don’t think I do, really. That’s why I’ll more than likely be packing a little gun with me on election night. Because the sooner I can end it all, the less pain I’ll feel.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-mean-if-i-lose-to-mitt-romney-ill-probably-kill,30092

10/25/12, 3:39 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A few days ago I spent a day riding along with a cable technician in a poor, black area. Based on my (admittedly very limited) sample, I'd say the TV-to-book ratio of the average poor, black household is about 3 to 0. It was striking enough that now I want to ride along through a poor white area, a wealthy black area, and a wealthy white area for comparison.

10/25/12, 3:40 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"By age 3, the recorded spoken vocabularies of the children from the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families."

sheeeeeiiit

10/25/12, 3:56 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The whole thing brings me back to my favorite book on education, Meaningful Differences, by Hart and Risley...

Did you get that one amazing sentence, about how the vocabularies of the three year olds in the professional families were larger than those of the parents in the welfare families? When the kids then get to kindergarten, the poor kids have vocabularies of about 2,000 words. Pretty good, huh? Well, not when you compare that to the vocabularies of the professionals’ kids — they go to kindergarten with 20,000 words at their disposal.

That makes me sick to my stomach. Then it makes my blood boil. And after that, I roll up my sleeves and determine that MY students will have as many rich experiences and conversations as possible. I do all I can to talk to them and listen to them and teach them about conversations, questions, answers, and discussion. The inequality they face as a result of their families’ economic circumstances just gives me more reason to do everything I can to get them ready for kindergarten on an even ground with the more advantaged kids they will meet there.

So please keep in mind that I do not teach in the suburbs. I don’t teach rich kids. My view of preschool is shaped by my experiences in my urban district. If I were to teach the kids of college-educated parents, I might have a different view entirely.

Although, knowing how opinionated and stubborn I am, maybe not!"


The word-count looks suspicious, more than the boiling enthusiasm the lady displays.

http://kiri8.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/meaningful-differences/

10/25/12, 5:06 PM

Blogger elvisd said...

" "Where I'm from we only talk for a little while - then we start to hit!""

Literally, metaphorically, or both?

10/25/12, 5:13 PM

Anonymous Mitch said...

"What does the research say on stay-at-home mothers vs working mothers in terms of children's cognitive development?"

I was raising my son through the late 80s/early 90s, when the mommy wars were at their peak, and the research consistently showed that there was no significant difference between the kids of moms who stayed home and moms who worked. I mean, if staying at home were the best thing for the kid, welfare moms would be raising nuclear scientists.

And of course, they then controlled for education and husband's income.

Anyway, the fact that the research consistently showed no huge difference one way or the other pretty much led to the research dying out. And then, all that talk went pretty much out the window after the first recession in the early oughts, when many of those women who had stayed home in the 90s were now struggling with husbands who were out of work--or who had gotten divorced--and the ramifications of taking 10 years off. Turns out that "financial security" is a way of examining what's best for the child that all those researchers had forgotten about.

These days, most women know that staying home is a luxury that far too many of them take even though they can't afford it, but the odds in favor of hubby losing his job or getting divorced are long enough that they take the risk.

10/25/12, 5:18 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

If you do the math, she is assuming that children under the age of 4 converse with their parents for 14 hours/day , or every waking minute.

Don't poor children (actually all American children) spent lots of time in front of the TV where they talk up a storm? Why hasn't the gap disappeared or at least diminished now that the poor get to hear rich people yapping nonstop?

10/25/12, 5:30 PM

Anonymous hbd chick said...

"Epigenetics!"

i still wanna know what the genetics underlying epigenetics are....

10/25/12, 5:35 PM

Blogger sunbeam said...

Were her kids Stanford matierial?

If not,who cares, one way or the the other.

10/25/12, 5:35 PM

Blogger Assistant Village Idiot said...

We didn't start on Tom Stoppard until middle school, and we stuck to the one-acts at first: After Magritte, The Real Inspector Hound. We did have them take roles to read though, rather than just passive reception.

If I had to do over again, I would have gone with Wodehouse instead.

10/25/12, 6:01 PM

Blogger beowulf said...

Steve, while reading the DC Circuit's Texas voter ID decision, I came across a reference to a fascinating company whose business model you should hijack.

Because Texas does not track voters by race, Dr. Ansolabehere cross-referenced his no-match list [TX voters w/o photo ID] with a database provided by Catalist, LLC. A private vendor specializing in voter registration data, Catalist attempts to determine voters’ race by applying a predictive algorithm that uses “name dictionaries and residential area information.”

As Dr. Ansolabehere explains in his expert report:
"A name dictionary would identify someone named Greg Jones as 60% likely to be Whitebased on the frequency with which that name is used in the population. Someone named Greg Bernard Jones who lives in an area that is 31% Black has an 83% probability of being Black. The combination of name information and local area information, then,sharpens the algorithm for identifying race considerably."

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/voter_id_texas_ruling.php

10/25/12, 6:08 PM

Blogger panjoomby said...

oh brother, just talking a lot more to someone who is predestined to be an 85 IQ might make them come out as an 89 IQ at age 6, sliding down to an 87 at age 10 & if they're lucky an 86 from 12 on. woo-hoo. this is like if i call on the dumb kids a lot more in stats class they will magically become smarter. it's pie in the sky. so talk more to your beagle, it will make him as smart as a lab. riiight. genetics > environment of else breeding animals wouldn't work. duh!

10/25/12, 6:26 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

When the kids then get to kindergarten, the poor kids have vocabularies of about 2,000 words. Pretty good, huh? Well, not when you compare that to the vocabularies of the professionals’ kids — they go to kindergarten with 20,000 words at their disposal.


LOL pretty much every kid I know has professional parents and none of those kids had a 20,000 word vocabulary in kindergarten.


Based on previous research, Nation and Waring (1997) estimate that the receptive vocabulary size of a university-educated native English speaker is around 20,000 base words, while Goulden, Nation, and Read's (1990) intervention indicates that the receptive vocabulary size range of college-educated native English speakers is 13,200 - 20,700 base words (Goulden, Nation, & Read, 1990), with an average of 17,200 base words.


http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.html

10/25/12, 6:28 PM

Blogger Whiskey said...

Meanwhile back at the ranch ...

Doubtless plenty of South Korean and Chinese labs are figuring out ways to boost IQ through DNA manipulation. Already there is ample suspicion that athletic performance is being boosted by DNA manipulation (its been done in labs with mice).

What if there was a DNA procedure (involving say a virus as carrier for DNA alteration) that would on average raise IQ by say, 20 points? Who would take it? Would it be black market (certainly)? Would the whole market for DNA manipulation be as big as say, the global market for heroin and cocaine and marijuana and methamphetimine combined? My guess is yes.

10/25/12, 8:00 PM

Anonymous Mike in Boston said...

I actually know a bit about language acquisition and, political correctness aside, cumulative experience in language acquisition deserves a little more credit than it is getting here.

If you do the math, she is assuming that children under the age of 4 converse with their parents for 14 hours/day , or every waking minute.

True. But if one assumes that she is referring to the larger difference between welfare and professional families, the 13 million word deficit translates to about seven and three-quarters hours a day. Certainly my two-year-old talks to me or her mom nearly nonstop for all the waking hours when she's not playing by herself, adding up to at least eight hours a day, so I have no problem believing that figure.

Don't poor children (actually all American children) spent lots of time in front of the TV where they talk up a storm? Why hasn't the gap disappeared or at least diminished now that the poor get to hear rich people yapping nonstop?

Passive interaction does nothing for first language acquisition.
Otherwise you could leave your infant in front of Chinese cable TV for a year and he would end up speaking Mandarin. Nope, it just doesn't work that way. That's why videos for babies are a rip-off if you are buying them for education. (If you are buying them to get mom a few minutes' peace, of course, they are a great deal.)

Studies have shown that once a language has been acquired, TV can expand vocabulary-- but does so at a much slower rate than actual conversation.

On a less serious note, I have gotta believe that anybody who reads their toddler Pnin will end up spending eighteen years with a kid who's either nasty, depressed, or both. Go for Dostoevsky instead of Nabokov. Of course you'll have to read a little faster since the books are longer but, hey, more words per hour.

Of course, I'm not being serious here: just droning on and on without engaging the kid is just as passive as sitting him in front of the TV, and will have just as little effect on his language learning. But still: ugh, Pnin, what a mean-spirited book.

10/25/12, 8:42 PM

Anonymous ben tillman said...

When the kids then get to kindergarten, the poor kids have vocabularies of about 2,000 words. Pretty good, huh? Well, not when you compare that to the vocabularies of the professionals’ kids — they go to kindergarten with 20,000 words at their disposal.

Preposterous.

10/25/12, 8:46 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

As Steve is fond of pointing out, the children of Chinese immigrants end up knowing lots of English words (at the high end of the scale) but no one is speaking English to them at home.

10/25/12, 8:47 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I suspect that nannies will be going out of favor now.

10/25/12, 9:08 PM

Blogger Glaivester said...

That moms refuse to follow experimental methodologies when it comes to their own kids is bad for science, but good for children.

We think. We can't prove it, though.

10/25/12, 9:16 PM

Anonymous Ex Submarine Officer said...

Studies have shown that once a language has been acquired, TV can expand vocabulary-- but does so at a much slower rate than actual conversation.

This jibes with my experience. My wife is Japanese and pretty much only spoke Japanese to our son here in the U.S. from the time he was born.

That starts laying the groundwork, but it is not nearly enough for real fluency. For starters, he doesn't hear how males or anyone other than his middle age/middle class mom talks.

In addition to mom, he had yearly family trips to Japan for a couple of weeks each year and skyping w/relatives in Japan.

Nice, but still not enough. Our silver bullet was the tube. For his whole time here in the U.S., he only watched Japanese language TV, didn't even know our TV could speak English, he was astonished to find this out when he was 5 or so.

When he was six, we moved to Japan and enrolled him in 1st grade a few weeks later when the school year started. At this point, he certainly was fluent, but distinctly preferred to lead with English and in Japanese he had a bit of a hesitancy that he didn't have in English.

Nonetheless, he had absolutely no language difficulties from day one in Japanese schools. But without the TV, I really feel things would have been much harder.

First time in my life I found TV useful for something.

Beyond that, raising a bilingual kid, being a monolingual myself, has been a fascinating experience. Like at what age he realized that this stuff he was speaking was really two languages, that Dad is just faking it in Japanese (4th birthday, I remember it distinctly, it was sort of embarassing), and so forth.

Vocabulary acquisition is interesting. When he doesn't know a word in either language, he may have to be to told it several times, sort of reinforcing a new concept.

But when he knows a word in one language, you usually only have to tell him the word in the other language once, like there is an empty slot there waiting to be filled.

10/25/12, 10:44 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Meanwhile back at the ranch ...

Doubtless plenty of South Korean and Chinese labs are figuring out ways to boost IQ through DNA manipulation. Already there is ample suspicion that athletic performance is being boosted by DNA manipulation (its been done in labs with mice).


Whiskey,

The virus approach to genetic modification is imperfect and risky (see the case of Jesse Gelsinger at Penn a few years ago). Intelligence is likely to be a trait influenced by many genes spread across the genome, none of which individually has a large effect. As of today, none of those genes is even known with certainty. Widespread and meaningful genetic engineering in humans is not as close as you think, unless you are referring to pre-implantation embryo selection.

10/26/12, 12:14 AM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Nobody has a 20,000 word vocabulary when they enter kindergarten. Remember that vocab test I linked to? The maximum was 45,000 words and I just barely crept over 40,000, and I'm old.

20,000 words is about what an average college grad parent has as a vocabulary, and no way have they come close to transmitting it to their child by age 5. Kids aren't interested in Daddy teaching them what "amortization" means.

10/26/12, 12:46 AM

Anonymous Simon in London said...

"What does the research say on stay-at-home mothers vs working mothers in terms of children's cognitive development?"

I'm pretty sure no one has tried to measure this, just as no one has actually tried to measure what effect chatty vs taciturn mothers have on their offspring once you strip out Socio-Economic Status.

What little research we do have seems to indicate that the importance of environment declines with age, and the importance of heredity increases with age. So the best guess would seem to be that the children of professional working mothers start off disadvantaged but catch up later.

10/26/12, 2:16 AM

Blogger BrokenSymmetry said...

" Carol said...
What, watching Sesame Street didn't help at all?"

"Anonymous said...
As Steve is fond of pointing out, the children of Chinese immigrants end up knowing lots of English words (at the high end of the scale) but no one is speaking English to them at home."

Terence Tao (2006 Field medalist, 760 Math SAT...at 8!) picked up numbers and letters from Sesame Street as a two year old in Australia.

10/26/12, 2:26 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The anthropologist Mary Douglas did some interesting work on this sort of thing back in the day, and since I wrote a few papers about it in the mid-80's, I assume that Douglas's work pre-dates Hart's.

Douglas was concerned with class more than race, and her comparison of working-class child/parent language interaction with bourgeois or professional-class child/parent interaction seemed, IIRC, to indicate that it wasn't the amount of time spent talking or the kind of words that mattered, it was the substance of what was being said.

A working-class mother was much more likely to reprimand her child by simply saying "Stop that!" or "Don't do that!" When the child inevitably asks why?, the response is something like "Because I'm your mother and I said so."

The professional-class mother is much more likely to explain the reason why the disapproved behavior is wrong, etc etc.

She produced some research showing that these authoritarian models vs. explanatory/empathetic models had a noticeable impact on certain types of cognitive development, etc.

But it was a long time ago and I wasn't even an anthropology major, I came to the research through a sideways process, so I can't remember all the details, nor was I able to check it against the rest of the normative literature. Thought it was interesting, though.

10/26/12, 5:54 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...


Vocabulary acquisition is interesting. When he doesn't know a word in either language, he may have to be to told it several times, sort of reinforcing a new concept.


Interesting story about the TV ... however, does he read a lot in either or both languages.

I would expect him to pick up new vocabulary from reading, although, especially in English, not necessarily how to pronounce the words correctly.

As someone else who has bi-racial children (no, not black, there are other races out there), and who is expending effort to learn the other language while neither child really has, the are a whole host of difficulties, including pronunciation, that can get in the way.

10/26/12, 6:53 AM

Anonymous Gene Berman said...

Just possibly, ol' Hillary was onto such parental vocabulary deficits, persuading her, that, therefore, "it takes a village."

10/26/12, 7:00 AM

Anonymous Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

I suspect that nannies will be going out of favor now."

Any word on the ethnicity of the murdering nanny?

10/26/12, 7:44 AM

Anonymous MaMu1977 said...

@Anonymous 5:30PM

It depends on the content. There's a world of difference between C.S.I., The Young And The Restless and a Young Boosie (yes, this is a real name) video marathon.

10/26/12, 10:59 AM

Blogger pat said...

My experience with welfare homes is getting kinda old by now. But I suspect it is still relevant.

I was always impressed with how many televisons that welfare recipients had. They weren't very good TVs, but there were a lot of them. I had a family on my caseload that had seven - every room had a TV. The idea that welfare families don't have TVs is like the myth that they don't have cars.

I just checked craigslist. I found 651 TVs for sale for under $25. Many are available for $10 or less.

10/26/12, 2:14 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Nobody has a 20,000 word vocabulary when they enter kindergarten."

I don't know if I'd say "nobody," but it's pretty darned unlikely.

When I entered kindergarten (at 5 years 2 months), I had already been reading for more than two years and tested at the 8th grade level. People didn't believe it was possible; some told my mom I must have cheated somehow. They put me in third-grade reading because they figured if I went any higher the size difference between me and the other kids would be disturbing (for me or for them? Not sure).

And yet I doubt even I had a 20,000-word vocabulary entering kindergarten. To say that the children of professionals, many of whom wouldn't even be reading yet, are familiar with that many words on average, just seems ludicrous.

10/26/12, 3:19 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's interesting that Janice Harding, the mother of Jonathan and Reginald, the perpetrators of the "Wichita Horror" said her sons grew up without warmth and intimacy. "I'm not a huggy, kissy person," she admitted. The family celebrated no holidays. This was after the men had been convicted of torturing, raping, and killing several white people in hopes that the two would not get the death penalty. This was supposed to be a mitigating circumstance....but again, as Steve Sailer says, ask an Episcopalian about being huggy and kissy and figure out how many murderers have been spawned from the lack of emotion in those homes.

10/28/12, 2:52 PM

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