Contrary to many hopes and some claims, the narrowing of the gap in social conditions between Blacks and Whites has not led to any change in the magnitude of the Black-White IQ difference in over 100 years. Massive society-wide interventions such as ending segregation, the subsequent nationwide program of school busing to achieve racial balance, and the Head Start programs have failed to reduce this difference. Head Start programs did produce modest gains in school retention and graduation rates among Whites—but not Blacks
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There is no value in denying reality. While improving opportunities and removing arbitrary barriers is a worthy ethical goal, we must realize that equal opportunity will result in equitable, though unequal outcomes. Expanding on the application of his “default hypothesis” that group differences are based on aggregated individual differences, themselves based on both genetic and environmental contributions, Jensen [59] proposed “two laws of individual differences”—(1) individual differences in learning and performance increase as task complexity increases, and (2) individual differences in performance increase with practice and experience (unless there is a low ceiling on proficiency). We must recognize that the more environmental barriers are ameliorated and everybody’s intellectual performance is improved, the greater will be the relative influence of genetic factors (because the environmental variance is being removed). This means that equal opportunity will result in unequal outcomes, within-families, between-families, and between population groups. The fact that we have learned to live with the first, and to a lesser degree the second, offers some hope we can learn to do so for the third.
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