That’s interesting on the IQ testing.

The original KIPP in Houston had a student body that was almost exclusively free and reduced lunch eligible Hispanics at the beginning. Yes, they may have been low-income kids who were willing to work and sign up for the program, but let’s keep that level of selection bias in context. Income segregation in the public schools is pervasive, and the fact that KIPP is able to outperform leafy suburban schools with lots of kids wealthy two parent families is very impressive.

I don’t agree with Murray’s views on education. I also like Kipp, but KIPP schools are charter schools and just having an admission form is going to weed out those students with parents at the bottom of the curve and those parents who don’t want t o abide by KIPPS strict rules. It’s a selection bias problem. Plus, the data seems to indicate that KIPP isn’t exactly boosting college graduation rates among its students.

Lastly, there are plenty of adoption and twin studies that show that massive interventions like Oher received tend to wash out by the end of adolescence.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Oher might never have needed what you correctly identify as a massive level of intervention if he had a high quality school to attend from the beginning. KIPP schools take disadvantaged children at an earlier age than Oher’s intervention and send them off to college as well without having them adopted by a wealthy family.

Murray is a brilliant guy who knows much more about IQ testing than me, given that I know nothing. Nevertheless, I simply don’t buy into this IQ fatalism line of argument that Jay discusses in the linked article above.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Where will you find the resources to do this intervention for every child who needs it? With what money? what time? what people? How as a society are we going to deny more intervention to those with high IQ while giving it to those with less?

Your post has one big innacuracy: Oher was NOT identified as a gifted athlete. He was identified as a PHYSICAL MONSTER so large that it simply did not matter what he did or didn’t understand about athletics. The book points out that it was exceedingly difficult to teach him anything at all about plays, or passes, or how football was executed. It just didn’t mater–he was so damn huge that that was all the NFL was looking at.

Of course the thrust of your question wasn’t really language so much as it is education.

Let me ask you a question out of pure naive ignorance: if Tarzan were lost in the wilderness as a young child and was given an IQ test as an adult with an extremely limited vocabulary, how could you hope to test his “intelligence.” Or more to the point, if you tested him before and after teaching him a language, I’m trying to imagine a test in which his score wouldn’t go up.