Word: environmental
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...whites. Out of this academic barrage emerged the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which has poured billions of dollars into compensatory education for the disadvantaged in urban schools. Now, four years later, the results are trickling in, and they constitute a near disaster for backers of the environmental approach to urban school problems. "There's no place in the country," says one Ed School researcher about compensatory education, where you can say, 'Look, it's worked...
These developments have forced students of ghetto education to re-examine their assumptions. Some are sticking with compensatory education and looking for elements in the ghetto school environment which they might have overlooked in their previous efforts. Others are looking for totally new perspectives, or--in Jensen's case--making...
Working with these concepts, Jensen tries to construct a formula for measuring the relative strengths of gene structure and environment in determining phenotypes. He comes up with a statistical measure for "heretability"--a term which refers to the proportion of individual differences which are attributable to genetic influences. As Jensen...
Taken together, these statements are simply irresponsible. The compensatory position is not discredited, for the same reason his analysis is flawed. first of all, the notion of heretability as a quantity separable from environmental influence is at best questionable. The interaction between gene structure and environment is a complex one, and Jensen has not sufficiently isolated one factor from the other. He argues, for instance, that environment operates as a threshhold variable in affecting development. Below a certain minimum threshhold of environmental benefits, the genetic potential of an individual does not develop, and cannot be considered an important variable...
But some of Rosenthal's most interesting data indicates that even if students in less advanced tracks show exceptional ability, teachers often refuse to recognize it or reward it, and instead find fault with the student's behavior, or attitude, or something. In this kind of environment, infusion of books...