There's a race debate going on in Maureen Downey's education blog of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Here are my contributions to it.

Downey's title: After a century of discussing merit pay, we still don’t know how to make it work. Can it work?

(Article omitted. I think you can guess the gist of it.)

My comments:

That’s also true of social interventions in general, of every kind over the past century, with the sole exception of improving nutrition among the poor. The gains to be had from that, however, have been fully realized and no more gains will be forthcoming. Otherwise, social intervention efforts to raise student scores have been failing since they were first tried.

Do you know how to tell a leftist program from any other sort of program? Every other sort of program is judged by its results. Leftist programs are judged by their promises. That’s why social interventions that have always failed in the past keep being resurrected and tried again, only to fail again. We’ve been fooled long enough, I think.

The cause of low scores among certain demographic groups is a smaller and simpler brain. There’s really no mystery here. You can’t remedy a biological disparity by handing out compensatory money, and, since it doesn’t work, don’t do it. Save the money for doing what can be done effectively by financial inducements.

Someone named Shannon objected to what I wrote. Here's my reply to him.

@Shannon. That final paragraph in my previous comment is true. You evidently are unfamiliar with the relevant field work by anthropological and medical examiners, such as K.C. Ho, whose 1990 summary of data for 1261 white and black US-residents found a mean brain weight of 1323 grams for the whites and 1223 grams for the blacks; and such as K.R. Beals (1984), who measured about 20000 skulls from every continent and discovered that Asians have an average brain volume of 1415 cm³, Europeans 1362 cm³, and Africans 1268 cm³.

Further, data from the U.S. National Collaborative Perinatal Project, which included 19000 black children and 17000 white children, show that black children have a smaller head size at birth than is true for white children, and that by age seven, although black children have acquired a slightly larger body size, their heads remain smaller in perimeter than is true of white children (Broman et al., 1987). Also, head perimeter at birth, at age 1, at age 4, and at age 7, correlates with IQ at age 7 in both blacks and whites (the correlation coefficients range from 0.13 to 0.24). Further, the racial gap in IQ that exists at age seven widens somewhat with age, despite all of the social interventionist efforts to make it shrink.

So I suggest that you reconsider your statement here:

“Your final, mind-boggling paragraph is just flat-out false. No group of human beings has been proven to have ’smaller and simpler’ brains than other human beings. The plasticity of the human brain has been and continues to be documented.”

Not only is what you said untrue, it is a mistake that a small bit of research would have obviated. Why you felt compelled to make that statement without feeling the need to check the pertinent scientific studies is a matter of some interest, but I can make a guess immediately. You’re a proponent of the racial equality dogma, largely for moral reasons.

The Harvard microbiologist Bernard Davis invented the term “moralistic fallacy” to describe what probably motivates calls for ethical guidelines to prevent, or to circumvent, studies that might yield “dangerous knowledge,” such as a genetic basis for human intelligence. He (and others) noted that the study of racial differences in IQ had produced the best known examples of the moralistic fallacy in action.

Really, the idea of racial equality ought to have been suspect in any reasonable person’s mind from the beginning. Nature produced the visible racial differences, which we usually notice on inspection, and which we mostly agree are trivial. But then the leftists declared that those “cosmetic” racial differences were the only differences between the races. It would be a very strange thing indeed if nature, which created all of the heritable traits in organisms, had been aware of leftist sensibilities since the dawn of time, and had taken great care—with humans—to permit the evolution of only those racial differences having no social significance of which leftists might disapprove.

Even upon reflection, racial equality is an unlikely idea, and it always has been. If you had no data at all, your most reasonable initial assumption about other races is that they are not likely to be your own race’s equals in all of the socially important ways.

So why do leftists make that unlikely assumption? Why do they get emotionally fixated upon their racial equality dogma? It appears to be a very common error in what passes for epistemology in the general public, in which someone confuses what is true with what, for moral reasons, should be true. The epistemological error leads naturally to the idea that “good” science must always lead to approved outcomes.

That might explain why many leftists can’t be reasoned with by those with a better knowledge of the racial differences that must be addressed in law, in public regulations, and cultural rules for racial interrelations. Like a fundamentalist Christian with regard to contradictions in his “inerrant” Bible, the leftists just don’t want to know what scientific study has to say regarding racial differences.

But as the result of the experimental evidence of the real significance of race for society, the leftist theory of racial equality is now in the position that modern astronomy imposed upon the doctrine of the Church. As the evidence for a sun-centered solar system kept mounting, those who clung to the old Earth-centered paradigm began looking sillier and sillier. Eventually—meaning after 400 years of intransigence—a Pope admitted that Galileo had been right all along and that the former Church position had been in error. That might be more graciousness than we’ll ever see from the dogmatic leftists on the subject of race.

Excuse me for my sweeping statement that “all” of the nutritional gains in IQ have already been made. I should have qualified that by writing “nearly all,” and recognized the existence of cracks in programs designed to better the nutrition of poor people. Still, what I wrote is mostly true. You need not expect another Flynn effect from nutritional improvements.

When a social program is politically correct, the requirement that it actually work is not absolute. The government almost continually sponsors leftists social interventionist ideas that are merely slight variants of ideas that have failed in the past. It is as if the government really did believe that there was a certain color that, if you painted it on a bucket, would turn gasoline into an efficiently fire-dousing liquid. So they try this color, and WHOOSH this house burns down. Then they try that color, and WHOOSH that house burns down. And on they go, endlessly varying the color of paint on the bucket, and endlessly getting the same failure over and over again.

Certainly, some leftists are motivated by a desire to help people. But other leftists are status-seekers, social climbers who see which way the political wind is blowing and rig their sails accordingly. A few leftists are probably actually malevolent, pushing an agenda that they know will harm the country they hope to destroy, unless they are allowed to control it, dictate to it, and declare in all things what shall be—nevermind that the state, itself, has no such power.

You wrote: “Finally, it isn’t the leftists who are pushing merit pay–the program detailed in this column which is not yet correlated with any positive results. No, the people pushing it are conservatives, who believe that accountability must be a good thing, even if you can’t measure it and it bears no correlation to outcomes.”

Yes, the conservatives might well be in favor of merit pay and accountability, but the leftists would also favor it because it is a form of social intervention that evades the matter of biological racial differences. I’m no more conservative than leftist.

Someone else [V for Vendetta] objected to what I wrote. Here's my reply to him.

@V for Vendetta. What you said is not true. My references to inferior brain function in (some) non-white races is scientifically accurate. I have cited peer-reviewed studies, but when their findings don’t agree with your opinion you discount them. I can’t teach the blind to see. My facts are from actual, scientific studies by perfectly good scientists who know what they are doing. They are neither “outdated” nor “hopelessly misguided.” You simply wish that they were.

I’ll give you a hypothesis, which might someday be confirmed or refuted by an experiment.

1. Racially segregate the schools, or else identify schools that are already almost completely segregated because of residential demographics.
2. Choose 10 elementary schools, 10 middle schools, and 10 high schools, for the purpose of the study, which have entirely (or almost) white students. Identify the same number of schools of each type that have entirely (or almost) black students.
3. Give the same per-pupil funding to all of the schools.
4. Teach the same curriculum from the same textbooks in all of the schools.
5. Measure the educational achievement by the students in all of the schools by the same standardized tests.
6. Associate each white school with a black school of the same type, and swap their teachers and principals back and forth each year.
7. Continue educating the white and black students in all of these schools under these conditions for, perhaps, five years.

I predict that the white schools will consistently have the higher test scores than the black schools will.

Without a doubt, leftists will pick at nits in order to claim that the causes of the differences in educational outcomes is environmental, rather than genetic. Allow them one round of objections, and fix all of the nits that seem reasonably amenable to fixing at a cost affordable by the source of funding. Then do the study again. I predict that the same results will occur once again. I also predict that the leftists will be accusing and demanding and objecting in the most outrageous ways, since their belief in the racial equality dogma is religious in nature. It is not any result of science.

There is no special reason for why a claim about racial equality in intelligence ought to be allowed to stand a-priori and unexamined, as if it were a castle firmly supported in the air. But no leftist with whom I’m acquainted will accept the idea that his dogma is, unless proved, simply another hypothesis, rather than a scientific conclusion. Because his conviction has a religious character, you see, it’s just gotta be true! It’s just GOTTA! But it isn’t.

Naturally, the liberals are all telling me to shut up, that nobody is interested in what I'm saying, that I'm being disruptive and offensive, etc.