Rating: 
Summary: A must read for anyone interested in education
Review: An engaging and beautifully written book. As Thomas Sowell said in his review: "If you read just one book about American education all year,this should be the book. It not only goes into the causes and cures of racial disparities in education,in the process it punctures many of the fads, dogmas,
and pious hypocrisies of the education establishment."
Rating:
Summary: Don't Wait for the Paperback
Review: From the New York Sun (10/14/03)BOOKS Asking Tough Questions, Debunking Old Answers By ANDREW WOLF
Mr.Wolf writes a regular column for the op-ed pages of The New York Sun. 'No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning" is destined to become one of the most discussed - and despised - books on the nation's crisis in education in quite some time. It will be discussed because it calmly, methodically, and honestly describes the distressing problems that surround the gaps in academic performance among racial groups in America's schools. It will be despised by those unwilling or unable to confront hard and often painful truths. Those who would rather shoot the messengers than address the concerns they raise will find "No Excuses" a convenient target. The authors - Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and her husband Stephan, a Harvard history professor - have individually and together authored a small library of well-regarded books on historical and social issues, including 1997's "America in Black and White." The painful and thorny issues concerning race are familiar ground to them. "No Excuses" paints a disturbing picture. The education gap between white children and African-American children is growing, seemingly resistant to the enormous effort and expenditure that has been applied to narrow it. The Thernstroms debunk dozens of the popular notions advanced to explain away the problem and the failures of its supposed cures. They reject the notion that the gap results from "racial isolation" or a lack of school funding. The common prescriptions - smaller class size, and more certified teachers - simply do not work. The belief that merely achieving economic equality will lift the performance of African-American students is, unfortunately, a myth.The reality in schools like those in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an affluent - and integrated - suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, is that moving into the suburbs or achieving middle-class status simply doesn't free black students from a learning gap that leaves them, on average, with a junior-high level of education even after graduating from high school. In suburbs such as Cambridge, Mass., well-meaning school administrators are so intent to narrow the gap that honors programs - thought to be "segregated by race and class" - are being phased out of the curriculum and replaced with a program that mixes high- and low-performing students together. In other words, if they can't raise the level of blacks and Hispanics, the alternative must be to lower the potential for whites and Asians. Despite these misguided efforts, despite a huge per pupil expenditure of $17,000 (twice what Boston, just across the Charles River, spends), and despite the second-lowest student-teacher ratio - 12.5 - in the country, blacks in Cambridge lag not just behind whites and Asians but behind the state average for all blacks as well. Many who write about these troublesome issues shy away from the controversial questions surrounding the academic failures of minority children. The Thernstroms forthrightly place the blame and praise on cultural factors such as parental attitudes, peer pressure, and even the relative amount of time children of different backgrounds spend in front of the television set. There is a brutally frank discussion of the behavior problems of black students, beginning as early as kindergarten, as well as the role - or lack of one - that a teacher's ethnicity plays in the success of the children he or she teaches. While "No Excuses" describes the gap between the performances of black and white children in the starkest possible terms, it also demonstrates that significant gaps exist between white and Asian-American children - with white children more often than not on the short end. But the remarkable achievements of Asians, often sitting next to black and Latino kids in "failing" urban schools, offers clues to a solution: What is required is nothing less than altering cultural attitudes towards education, especially among blacks. This goal that can and is achieved in schools like the KIPP Academy in the Bronx, a school that truly accepts "no excuses": Dress codes, a longer school day, a longer school year, Saturday classes, summer classes, and plenty of homework are common traits among the schools in this small group of success stories. The Thernstroms also discuss Hispanics - who barely perform better than blacks. But the authors put the problems of this group into a historical context. Hispanic student performance mirrors the experience of Italian-Americans early in the last century. The difference is that the earlier Italian migration came to a halt when open immigration ended in the mid-1920s, while the academic advances of Hispanics are hidden in part by continuing immigration. And the same rigorous approach to changing cultural attitudes that the Thernstroms advocate for blacks would presumably accelerate the gains being made by Hispanic children as well. Part of the value of "No Excuses" is its intellectual honesty. Studies are candidly discussed - even those that may call into question the conclusions of the authors. While the concepts of charter schools and choice are high on their list of strategies that can make a difference, the Thernstroms acknowledge the merits of arguments against them. They don't deny that, even when charter schools admit students by lottery, the application process can, and is often intended to, serve as a means of self-selection. The dedication of teachers in charter schools is hailed, but the reality that there may be limits on finding teachers who are "running for sainthood" is acknowledged. This is the kind of discussion we need - and so rarely get - about our schools. "No Excuses" asks the tough questions, takes a hard look at the numbers, and comes up with carefully considered, admittedly imperfect solutions to one of our society's most urgent concerns. It is a book Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein should be reading, as it raises serious questions about the programs they are putting into place. If the Thernstroms are on target, and I believe they are, then Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein are driving the system in precisely the wrong direction.
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Summary: Great Social Science Book on Academic Learning
Review: Full disclosure, read the book, and as someone who has worked in K-12 and college systems. I have tons of experience working with kids of all ethnic background.
The gap in learning between Whites and Blacks and Hispanics have been around for 50-100 years. Despite the billion, trillions spent on remedial programs, the test score gap will never, never, go away for the simple reason that the races are endowed with different level of intelligence.
IQ test most accurately measure intelligence.
IQ of blacks and Hispanics is IQ 85. The score of IQ 85 has been confirmed by over a century of testing.
Witness Africans in Africa and America. Africa was colonized by Europe from Egypt to South Africa. The whole continent with the exception of Liberia was a colony of Europe. Africa in 2004 is a continent of disease, poverty, civil war, coups and life expectancy of 30-40 years old.
Witness, Africans in America, poverty, crime, drugs and low test scores.
Witness the Japanese in Japan and America. Japan is high-tech, rich nation with no natural resources and yet has one of the world's highest standards of living. Japan has the second largest economy in the world.
Witness the Japanese in America; Japanese-Americans have the second highest family income after the Jews. The Japanese in U.S. were put in concentration camps in World War II and yet still retain high intelligence and high income.
Book after book, scientific study after study have proved that that the races have different intelligence levels.
THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.
After billions and billions spent on remedial programs, it's time to accept IQ is at the core of academic success. After going nowhere for 100 years, it's time to accept the truth, truth, and full truth and face the reality in intelligence and academic achievement.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad news and lobbying for charter schools
Review: Get ready for some really bad news if you are a liberal. The authors go to great lengths to outline the academic gap between white versus black and hispanic students. The authors analyze all the excuses for poor performance and come up with the No Excuses truth. Its the cutltures of those ethnic groups.
However, their answer is charter schools and not parental accountability. With the exception of some anecdotal evidence there is nothing to support this conclusion.
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Summary: Liberal-lefties see the (half-) light
Review: Hamlet without the Prince
- a half-realistic attempt to understand and rectify Black educational failure A review of:
Abigail & Stephan THERNSTROM
No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning
New York : Simon & Schuster. Pp. xv + 334. ... . By:
Chris BRAND, Edinburgh (Research Consultant for Woodhill Foundation, USA). This book is remarkable. It offers a practically oriented survey of the U.S.A.'s 40-year struggle to close the Black-White gap in educational attainments. Yet its many passably sound conclusions for improving schools will be of interest not for their originality but merely because of their adoption by two liberal sages -- one at the Manhattan Institute, the other at Harvard. Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom are well known for their anti-racism, concern for the wretched of the earth and -- as they insist here -- their horror at Black children lagging educationally behind Whites to a degree they repeatedly call "dismal", "disastrous", "heartbreakingly disappointing", "shocking" and "catastrophic" - the gap being even greater today than in the 1980's despite thousand-billion-dollar American expenditures. So politically correct are the authors that, in their bar graphs, Whites are assigned the colour black while Blacks are given grey and 'Latinos' have their bars left white. Somebody at the 'New York Times' may thus listen to them. Shock will certainly be the reaction of the many liberal-left readers likely to scan 'No Excuses' - few will actually read it for it is poorly organized and repetitious and comes to so many 'right-wing' conclusions. The Thernstroms' review does not attribute Black failure to poverty. The authors are properly impressed with Black 'embourgeoisement': one third of America's Black children now grow up in suburbs without this doing much for their academic attainments; and the Thernstroms note that the Black-White gap is actually bigger in middle-class children and that it is fully present by age 6 (so scarcely attributable to the schools themselves). Agreeing with (though never mentioning) race-realist Arthur Jensen, the authors write: "After taking full account of racial differences in poverty rates, parental education, and place of residence, roughly two thirds of the troubling racial gap remains unexplained." They reject the views that educational tests are generally biased and that schools need to show more multicultural sensitivity: they admit the successes in America of Oriental and indeed of Sikh and Pacific Islander children. Anyhow, Black children are happy in American schools, showing higher self-esteem despite lack of emotional support at home. Nor do teachers show 'biases', 'stereotypes' or 'low expectations' - at least, no more than can be expected from Black children's low attainments. These cannot be blamed on low investment: resources are little related to school performance generally; and, anyhow, Black state schools actually enjoy 8% higher funding. Equally irrelevant are class sizes and having plenty of White children in the classroom -- though the Thernstroms want teachers with higher vocabulary scores (as near as they ever get to admitting the importance of IQ) and allow schools may need to raise salaries by 20% to achieve this objective (while admitting this is likely to help White kids more than Blacks). Nor were Head Start-type programmes ever much help (except to a few White children and doubtless to the many White graduate operatives employed on the programmes) - and the authors amusingly show how educationists tried to disguise the failures (e.g. by making the race-realistic 1966 Coleman Report so fat that no-one except tenured social scientists would be likely to read it). What then is to blame for the "shocking" racial gap, and what is to be done? Essentially, 'No Excuses' answers 'culture' - both at home and at school. Black children apparently lack 'cognitive stimulation' in the home, where Black graduate parents keep fewer books than the average White family, and where children spend more hours weekly watching TV than they have hours of school instruction. At school, the Thernstroms tell moving anecdotes of institutions (usually charter schools) which have uniforms, discipline, phonic reading methods, arithmetical tables, a 4-hour-longer-than-normal school day, Saturday working, rolls of honour and expulsions - resembling British grammar schools of the past though with the addition of Maoist school chants (e.g. 'We stay focused to save time', 'We follow the teachers' instructions') and school outings to baseball games. In a further bid to bring back educational selectivity, the authors favour 'self-tracking' - as did my 1996 book 'The g Factor' (which the Thernstroms show no sign of having read but which the leftish U.K. government of 2004 is now backing ...). Yet how do the authors know that their favoured 'cultures' are not so much causal to success as a happy by-product of having higher-IQ children around the place - and quickly getting rid of any lower-IQ kids who fail to perform? The sorry answer is they don't. Whereas the Thernstroms' documentation of non-explanations (para. 2, above) uses published studies, their traditionalist conclusions derive chiefly from their visits to schools and hearsay. Moreover, even if there were studies which controlled for IQ when asking whether TV watching was linked to poor attainments and chanting Maoist slogans was linked to high attainments, the Thernstroms would not have been able to use them. From their p. 4 onwards, they inform readers that they "assume the racial gap is not an IQ story", that they know (whether from evidence or authority is unclear) that "innate intelligence is not the explanation" and that they "believe" IQ is not the problem. The sheer variety of these epistemic stances gives pause for thought. Why not just have a look and see? Why not read 'The g Factor' - whether Arthur Jensen's 1998 version or my own? Since the authors actually end up favouring school tracking, why not base themselves on the best authority for it? It is a riddle inside an enigma shrouded in a mystery why the Thernstroms keep up IQ-avoidance while abandoning every other sacred cow of the liberal left. One can only presume the religion of PeeCee and its need for token gestures provides the explanation - together with the authors wanting to keep their taxpayer-funded jobs in New York and Boston. FINIS
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating how the evidence doesn't matter
Review: I find it fascinating that several reviewers here "refuse" or "categorically reject" data that there may be intellectual differences between ethnic groups. This is exactly what the authors of this book do - without giving any alternative research or evidence to support their stand. In other words, if you don't like a fact, you think you are free to reject it - without any reason to offer except that you don't want to hear about it. This isn't thinking; it's emoting. If this is the low level that your intellect operates on, you need to go back to the middle ages and enjoy witchcraft, astrology, and the flat earth. The rest of us prefer to come to conclusions based on evidence - not your personal superstitions, emotionally charged prejudices, or ideas that you gleaned from watching daytime talk shows. The evidence is there whether you like it or not. Ignore it at your own peril. If you don't agree with it, come up with evidence that supports your view or get out of the way. African-American children score 16 points lower on every IQ test devised. And no, the tests are not culturally biased. The American Psychiatric Association already ruled that out after an exhaustive study. And some tests don't have ANY cultural referents. Example: One IQ test requires nothing but the pushing of buttons when a light comes on. How is that culturally biased? There are plenty of black athletes and entertainment performers but where are the chemists? The physicists? The Nobel Prize in science winners? Why are African nations an economic and social disaster? Why wasn't the compass, the wheel, or written language in use in Africa even in the 1600's? Facts are facts and the current widespread dismal educational non-achievement of African-Americans continues to be a clear sign that more is at work here than the supposed effects of slavery. Even at an all African-American university such as Howard University, the drop out rate is close to 50%. And Howard is not considered a difficult school. When the church forced Galileo to recant, he signed the papers and then said, "but the earth still revolves around the sun," - meaning: no amount of political nonsense/bullying is going to change the facts.
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Summary: No excuse for not answering the culture question?
Review: I loved this book! I couldn't put it down as it put in print what all good teachers know. We can't make all kids do their homework, come to school, behave in an acceptable manner, get parents to care, charter schools are great because they are selective...In other words, we can't change the culture. I continued to read for the real solution to the achievement gap--culture. I also was hopeful another wasteful, ineffective program like Title I and Headstart, IDEA, would be discussed. Understandably, I was disappointed when I finished the book and never learned the Thernstroms' solutions to the culture problem. Once again, the achievement gap has been discussed; we all know what causes it, but no one has a solution. Maybe there isn't one.
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Summary: Great facts, but debatable conclusions
Review: I was very impressed with the factual information contained in "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning." The Thernstroms unequivocally identify huge academic achievement gaps in America, with Blacks and Hispanics on one (the lower) side, and Whites and Asians on the other. However, the solutions the authors propose--essentially running schools more like businesses--left me a little cold. Still, "No Excuses" is a thoughtful, insightful work worthy of a close examination.
Rating:
Summary: Great facts, but debatable conclusions
Review: I was very impressed with the factual information contained in "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning." The Thernstroms unequivocally identify huge academic achievement gaps in America, with Blacks and Hispanics on one (the lower) side, and Whites and Asians on the other. However, the solutions the authors propose--essentially running schools more like businesses--left me a little cold. Still, "No Excuses" is a thoughtful, insightful work worthy of a close examination.
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Summary: "No excuses: Closing the government schools" by RexCurry.net
Review: In "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning" by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, the authors miss their own points. They criticize government and then urge their own reforms as another layer to add on to the government system. They need to advocate cutting government, cutting government schools, and cutting money to government, so that reforms occur because of individuals making independent choices that are not part of any government system at all.
The hackneyed term "public schools" is used when the authors meant "government schools." In a sense the authors are victims of brainwashing by the government schools, as evidenced by their own vocabulary.
And the point becomes clearer as the authors hold up non-government schools, and all free market products and services, as examples of why the public thrives in freedom and why government schools fail. True "public schools" are non-government schools. Yet, the authors miss that point in their vocabulary.
Their ideas rings through all market concepts: accountability, competition, choice, reinvention, innovation. But their reforms do not cut government, cut government schools, and cut money to government, so that the market works. Nothing in the book necessarily leads to fewer government schools, lower taxes nor less money to the government. It is another example of "conservative socialism" and explains how the present Republican administration is triple in socialism what Clinton's was (in social spending alone, including spending for education).
The authors advocate all manner of government action and government programs especially because of what they perceive as racial disparities (in government schools). Yet, government schools were promoted by U.S. socialists to end freedom, freedom of choice and economic freedom. Even the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a self-proclaimed National Socialist who advocated that government should operate all schools as a socialist monopoly and end all of the better alternatives. The government forced children to attend racist and segregated schools where they recited the Pledge using it's original straight-arm salute. The practice began three decades before it was adopted by the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and the government school racism continued through WWII and beyond, and the government schools still exist to this day. The Pledge of Allegiance was the origin of the salute of the National Socialist German Workers Party, as exposed by the journalist Rex Curry. The authors are a victim of that ideology and the system, and they doesn't have the wherewithal to recognize the problem and end it.
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