“To even talk about whether there might be a genetic element to educational attainment and social inequality breaks a huge social taboo – particularly on the political left, which is where you say your own sympathies lie. The spectre of eugenics looms large, and no one wants to create a honeypot for racists and classists. To be clear, it is scientifically baseless to make any claims about differences between racial groups, including intelligence, and you are not doing that. But why go here?”
Oh my! The left discussing their most feared taboo! In the Guardian no less!
Ruha Benjamin also suggested the hunt for more data to explain things just ends up being a barrier to acting on what we already know we need to do to fix the academic achievement gap…
“I disagree that we already know what to do. If you look at meta-analyses of educational interventions, you see most of their effect sizes are zero. Most of the things we try in education, even when they are well intentioned and well funded, make no difference to students’ lives. It is a fiction we have this army of effective, scalable solutions just waiting in the wings. Figuring out what works for whom and when is very hard. The risk of not talking about genetics is continuing the status quo, where we are much less effective at intervening than we could be.”
