Could falling American IQ explain falling NAEP scores in public schools?

by philg

The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are out and American public school students are doing worse than ever. “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows” (NYT):

In the latest release of federal test scores, educators had hoped to see widespread recovery from the learning loss incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Instead, the results, from last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, tell a grim tale, especially in reading: The slide in achievement has only continued.

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history — 33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

There was progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic.

Recent reading declines have cut across lines of race and class. And while students at the top end of the academic distribution are performing similarly to students prepandemic, the drops remain pronounced for struggling students, despite a robust, bipartisan movement in recent years to improve foundational literacy skills.

“Our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which gives the NAEP exam. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

There is even worse news for this failing government-run enterprise (the per-state results don’t include private school kids, though the national results include some):

But the tumult of the new presidential administration may threaten that focus. The federal test scores began to circulate on the same day that many educators across the country fell into panic as they tried to discern how a White House freeze on some federal funding would affect local schools.

Our worst fear is that new bureaucrats might disrupt the proven-to-fail system.

I’ve surveyed a bunch of news articles about these scores and nobody seems to be willing to consider the possibility that a falling average IQ among Americans is primarily responsible for the drop in scores that are correlated with IQ. IQ is correlated with income and we have policies designed to ensure that America’s lowest income residents produce the most children (chart showing the effect of free family-sized housing for those who don’t work vs. brutal price competition for family-sized housing among the working- and middle-class (rich people can afford big houses so they have plenty of kids, but there aren’t too many rich people in the U.S. so the effect on demographics is small)):

In addition to encouraging our least productive and least conscientious natives to have more kids we’ve been aggressively importing humans from societies that have IQs lower than the previous U.S. average of 100. Examples, in alphabetical order (source):

  • Afghanistan: 82
  • Haiti: 81
  • Mexico: 88
  • “Palestine” (Rashida Tlaib): 78
  • Syria: 74
  • Somalia (Ilhan Omar): 68
  • Venezuela: 83

IQ depends partly on education and environment, so presumably a Somali who grows up in Minnesota will have a higher IQ than one who grew up in Somalia. On the other hand, IQ is heritable so the children of immigrants from low-IQ societies, who make up an ever-increasing percentage of American K-12 students, can’t be expected to reach the previous American average.

Put another way: Suppose that Americans had an explicit goal of reducing average IQ in the U.S. What would the government do differently from our welfare state and immigration policies of the last 30 years?

I’m not sure if lower IQ is a better explanation than screen time, coronapanic, and unionized teacher apathy, but it seems worth including on the list of possibilities. (Coronapanic doesn’t seem to be explanatory because #Science-denying states with 2-month school closures, e.g., Florida, experienced similar test score declines to states with #Science-informed 18-month school closures (a little complicated to compare data across years because Florida has a recently introduced lavish school choice program in which parents of any income level can get $8000/year to send a child to private school).) Perhaps we’re unfairly blaming school systems and teachers when the decline in output is attributable to the decline in input. As Harvard President-turned-Professor Claudine Gay originally noted, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves”.

Related:

  • “Assessing the intellectual ability of asylum seekers” (Int J Dev Disabil. 2017): “there are theoretical reasons to suppose that if an individual comes to a developed country from a developing country, his/her measured IQ and true intellectual ability will increase. Both the individual’s health and diet may improve, they may be exposed to a more scientific/logical way of thinking (Flynn 2007) and they may get a better education. The evidence for whether this happens or does not happen is very scant.”

15 thoughts on “Could falling American IQ explain falling NAEP scores in public schools?”

  1. In the not-so-distant future, the only IQ that will matter is the IQ of AI. It could be argued that Cro-Magnons, 20,000 years ago, had higher IQs than their descendants (https://phys.org/news/2010-03-cro-magnon-skull-brains-shrunk.html#google_vignette). However, it didn’t matter then and it will not matter now. Yes, we are less intelligent, but our GDP keeps growing. What society needs is a relatively small number of “good thinkers.” The question is how to handle the consequences of this fact.

    • My statistically exceptional IQ score had dropped 15 points after I moved to USA and started watching American TV and reading NYT. It since has recovered 5 points back after I stopped doing that and started reading Mises.org instead. Still no match for when I needed it to survive and did some interesting work, back in the old country. Now I just use my intelligence to either make other people rich or keep the machine wheels spinning.
      Do not confuse LLM model with intelligence. LLM just efficiently slices and dices already created knowledge, without understanding. It works due to finite and small number of words and phrases in English. What knew knowledge has it created?
      Anon, are you an alien who visited Cro-Magnons? How do you know that their intellect did not matter? I thought that they were humans to conquered Europe. Was it due to them be boring blog commenters, bored Neanderthals and others to death?
      For the republic to survive people need to be intelligent.

    • In response to your question, I would say that I’m “sort of” an alien and a Cro-Magnon myself. There’s no question that intelligence is a desirable trait in individuals and populations. I read The Bell Curve by Charles A. Murray and Richard Herrnstein, and I agree with some of the ideas presented in the book. However, it was misguided to present those ideas against the backdrop of race. The authors’ thesis applies to societies that are monoracial just as well. There are about 45–50 million people in the U.S. with IQs lower than 85. Perhaps the number is now higher, but who cares? The problem is figuring out what to do with that fact—and the fact that soon we’ll all be in that category compared to AI.

  2. Low Skilled Immigran> LLM just efficiently slices and dices already created knowledge, without understanding

    This is getting to be harder to swallow as the AIs become more impressive. If you’re going to make this assertion, it would seem that you would need to be confident that that isn’t how Natural Intelligence works.

    • Mitch Berkson,
      Sorry for use of word “efficiently” in “LLM just efficiently slices and dices “. It meant inefficiently.
      Not sure whether you are vested in AI stocks, do not mean to affect your wealth, hopefully investors do not read this. but why do expect from statistical engine that uses quintillions of computer instructions gradient walk and human – developed statistical tests to create new intelligence out of all words and phrases produced and naturally categorized by humans?
      I am 120% certain my brain does not work as this – I do not see any GPUs on my X-Rays and my food budget is significantly smaller then $1,000,000,000. And I do not remember all statistical tests AI uses, or you think they are coded subconsciously into my brain?
      Newton discovered Newton Mechanics, Einstein created Special and General Relativity, out of interpreting experiments. They both work for their domains! What did Chat GPT discovered? E=mc2, out of scanned literature? Where is United Field Theory, what LLMs produced it for all billions of dollars spent on electricity? We call it “neural network”, in reality these are iterative/looping structures over memory location buckets.

    • Sorry for my typos. LSI = perplexed when topics are low skilled immigration/patriotic IQ studies/end of year bonus discussions. It is used sparely due to our host not liking glorification of low skilled immigration and lampooning of the term. Did not fit to use it in replying to LLM – related statements. I am sure LLMs or threat of LLMs will soon to be used in year end bonus discussions, maybe than.

  3. No consideration of the effects of the diversion of educational resources into irrelevant and soul-sucking pursuits like DEI, niche sex ed and CRT in the elementary schools?

    • Mitch: Although DEI, evangelism for Rainbow Flagism, and CRT generate a lot of headlines, I don’t think that they account for a significant number of hours out of the school year. Also, in states such as Maskachusetts where these school activities are common, the activities have been around for 10+ years.

  5. IQ is the third rail that no politician will address it since it casts into doubt the American experiment, that given the right environment, i.e. the US, anyone can accomplish anything. Unfortunately IQ seems to be the major determinant of financial success and IQ does not seem evenly distributed across ethnicities and racial groups. IQ also seems mostly heritable – See The Son Also Rises. We have all sorts of government programs to raise the status of this or that group in relation to some other group without considering whether this is possible – at least based on objective criteria rather than racial preferences. Though perhaps it is not addressed because at least for those who are already here there is not much you can do about it so why pay it a lot of attention in a multiethnic society like ours.

  6. > … e.g., Florida, experienced similar test score declines …

    When Philip Greenspun and his family moved to Florida, I expected the state’s average IQ to rise. Clearly, their presence hasn’t made any impact, even Mindy the Crippler’s high IQ didn’t help!

  7. “they may be exposed to a more scientific/logical way of thinking”

    Are we doing assimilation again? Does this work in reverse? Does exposing the children of urban areas to goatherd-level thinking lower those IQs?

  8. So $8k school choice – would love to have it in WA, but what are practical consequences, did all private schools become more expensive?

    What is private school situation in general in Florida? Seattle’s east side has reasonable and relatively inexpensive private schools. Public schools here by American standards are “very good”, and a joke by any other standard.

  9. Although there are a variety of factors mentioned above, I think the largest factor is addiction to cell phones (social apps mostly) and video games.

    We had video games back when I was a kid, but the quantity and quality have increased dramatically. And cell phones mean these are always available.

    Reading seems rather dull by comparison.

  10. Phrasing the question differently exposes the tautology in play.

    “Are children who are doing worse at exams doing worse at exams?”

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