Why didn't the predicted surge in teen crime happen?

Conservative criminologist John DiIulio called the fearsome horde "super-predators." He estimated that they'd number nearly 200,000 by now. Even unflappable Attorney General Janet Reno foresaw violent crime doubling among kids. . . . William Bennett, the former drug czar . . . wrote a 1996 book with DiIulio on the topic, titled "Body Count," which attributed the problem to moral decay. . . . It never happened. . . . Instead, Americans are experiencing the sharpest decline in teen crime in modern history. . . .

[Why?]

Probably more important than tighter school security . . . were these factors:

In the decade of economic expansion that ended in 2000, the number of older teens who were neither in school nor at full-time jobs dropped by nearly a third. . . . Prosperity . . . gave teens more and better options to crime. . . .

The Latino population in central cities swelled as teen crime declined. . . . Their influx . . . brought more intact families, stronger values, higher religious participation - and lower crime rates. At the same time, many of the black families they replaced moved to suburbs where poverty was less concentrated. "Kids once confined to the inner city started seeing lifestyles other than the street." . . .

Criminologists decided in the `90s to track what worked and what didn't in dealing with teen crime. Boot camps didn't work. . . . Nor did trying juveniles in adult courts. Big Brother and Big Sister mentoring worked. Foster care for delinquents worked better than lock-ups if foster parents were well trained and the goal was to return the delinquents to well-coached biological parents. Suspending delinquent kids from school or leaving them back didn't work. . . . They found that if one parent is strong and consistent, the second isn't missed when it comes to preventing delinquency.

The incarceration rate rose from 1 per 1,000 adults to 4 from the `80s to today, and it has many foes. But . . . jailing more adults sharply reduced the number of teens who commit crimes with adult accomplices.

Economist Levitt attributes teen crime's sharp drop to a reduction in unwanted children, which began with the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Criminologist Zimring, among others, thinks it contributed but isn't as big a factor
as Levitt argues.

From here.

These gems come from a blog associated with The Atlantic magazine, linked to at Enik Rising.

It ties into a Denver Post rehash of a local think tank report on population growth in Denver neighborhoods that I saw today. Three of the top five: Green Valley Ranch, Stapleton, and Lowry, are unsurprising. They are neighborhoods that were previously uninhabited that have seen major residential development in recent years.

The other two, Five Points and Montbello, are cases that fit the dynamic described above in which neighborhoods that used to be predominantly black ghettos with dire poverty that have seen major influxes of Hispanics, as well as others, in a combination of ethnic shifts and gentrification as many black residents of these neighborhoods have moved to suburbs or to central city suburban style neighborhoods like multi-ethnic Green Valley Ranch.

Another place in the metro area that has seen a similar and rapid demographic shift is Old Town Aurora, once a center of blacks and lower income Korean immigrants, that is now increasingly Hispanic.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Denver Post also announced the inauguration of a major overhaul of eleven Northeast Denver schools, a move that has been heralded as positive by some, while arousing extreme controversy, skepticism and complaints about insufficient community consultation from others. FWIW, I haven't followed the overhaul efforts closely and don't have a strong opinion on their merits as a result.

Aurora, also perhaps not coincidentally, has also recently announced a major urban effort directed at the area between Stapleton and Old Town Aurora, although it has been overshadowed by a bid by Aurora to develop a complex that would compete heavily with the convention center complex in downtown Denver.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but, in each case, major governmental initiatives to improve city services in metro Denver neighborhoods have coincided with declining African American populations in those neighborhoods.

Certainly, nothing as crude as Jim Crow racism as it work in Denver, that just elected a second African-American mayor despite having a fairly modest African-American population percentage for a major American central city (Hancock this time around, Webb the last time around), or in Colorado, which recently had an African-American state house speaker (Terrance Carroll). Nor does metro Denver as a whole want for predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods that have been sorely neglected in the government services department. The cause and effect relationships here are more subtle and are not simple examples of racial or ethnic favoritism.

Northeast Denver, for example, has changed due to efforts like the Ballpark Neighborhood gentrification, the transformation of "North Capital Hill" into "Uptown" and the impact of the Stapleton and Lowry developments which sent middle class traffic through these formerly low income predominantly black neighborhoods and called attention to their potential to provide short commutes to downtown.

The housing bubble opened up a lot of affordable, quality suburban homes to people from Denver including families in Northeast Denver that have not been tainted by generations of covert and overt racial discrimination in the housing market that reached a critical mass that became self-sustaining where it has established itself.

Rising real estate values in Denver from a bubble collapsed low point in 1983 until an earlier than the rest of the nation slump, particularly in central Denver, transferred considerable wealth to inner city home owners.

As post from The Atlantic article that led me to the teen crime story that I quoted observed, underclass predominantly black dysfunctional ghettos are nothing to be nostalgic for, even if one is firmly committed to improving the well being of the people who lived in those communities a few decades ago and their children. The transformation of these dysfunctional neighborhoods wasn't a punishment inflicted on its residents; it was a reflection of the fact that the people who lived there have mostly found better alternatives and moved on when barriers to their exit from those neighborhoods became less steep. The neighborhoods weren't bad because they were non-white, they were bad because they had high crime, high truancy, governmental underinvestment, high teen pregnancy, few viable businesses, and high unemployment that had deep and obvious causes in American history.

Improving neighborhood well being makes neighborhoods tolerable to people who have any choice at all about where they live and has led to rapid population growth in these neighborhoods. Creating demand for housing in these neighborhoods boosts property values and makes life more tolerable for those who continue to live there. Even renters who are forced to leave due to rising rents in these neighborhoods spur the construction of newer and better rental housing in the metro area that if often better than what they left behind. The line between someone who is a slum lord who has received a windfall from the changes in these neighborhoods and someone who is a civic minded booster of a neighborhood is often a thin one.

Capitalism may not always seek out hard case situations to invest in for the long run, but it doesn't follow that it profits from large scale systemic socio-economic misery either. It encourages profitable mutual growth, it just sometimes has a hard time getting the ball rolling because not enough people have enough vision to bring the needed investment and suspicion abounds because it is hard to tell who gains and loses from the changes in advance. But, when your current neighborhood is one of the least desirable in the metro area, as was the case for a significant share of Northeast Denver in the 1980s and into the 1990s, it is hard for change, either to the neighborhood or for those who end up leaving the neighborhood as a result, to be a terrible thing or a case of downward mobility.

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Keep The 19th Century Journalist Style Alive

Who knew that the writing habits of 19th century newspaper writers would resurface on the Internet today at a blog called Wonkette. Consider this headline and lede:

WAR FOREVER

Wisconsin Becomes Orgy of Chaos As Recall Elections Begin

by Kirsten Boyd Johnson

1:41 pm July 12, 2011

The forces of good and evil resume their bilious clouded swirl over the state of Wisconsin today as primary voters go to cast votes in the state’s recall elections against six of Scott Walker’s senate puppets, and it is already just an orgy of dead fetuses and robots.

The last time I read such stirring words was in a progressive Denver rag's obituary for Colorado Supreme Court Justice Steele, on display in my child's school, from the turn of the century.

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Post-Long Weekend Observations

* Denver's Mayor-Elect Hancock will be sworn in on the 18th of July. Bill Vidal, the outgoing interim Mayor has done a better than expected job in the interim since outgoing Mayor Hickenlooper took the Governor's office, in terms of the budget and police discipline. He's benefited from not owing anything to anyone and not having to run for re-election.
* Byers School, which has sat vacant since the Denver School of the Arts left for the old University of Denver music campus near Stapleton has a new tenant lined up, a new Denver School of Science and Technology charter school set to open, if I understand the matter correctly, in the 2013-2014 school year. This fills a huge hole in the West Washington Park neighborhood with a wonderful bit of infill, adds a good new educational choice to the Denver Public Schools, and makes a large number of people, my family included, who lobbied for it happy.
* My Fourth of July weekend found me at the Renaissance Festival in Larkspur, Colorado. A certain number of paid models and Renaissance Festival enthusiasts dress in costume - not strictly of any one historical period and often veering into fantasy. Among the most striking, because they come across as quite natural at first glance, were the little devil horns that some people wore, and the furry tails that a number of people (mostly women) affixed to their outfit as if they were natural. Also eye catching in general are other forms of headgear like garlands and fairy antenna, full back angel wing tattoos, and crows masks which are surprisingly frightening.  Genuine wings of angelic, fairy, and birdlike varieties were also in evidence, but rather less effective.  Opponents of weapons control will note that there are few other events where so many people openly bear arms (some fake, but a significant number of the genuine stainless steel and deadly variety).

* The Greeley Stampede, which I also made my way to this weekend, was more notable for the very strong presence of the National Guard, a lot of cliche Western Art, fried twinkies, alligator wrestling, and mutton busting.

* Aurora, Colorado is proposing major tax breaks and zoning accomodations for a Gaylord entertainment sponsored convention center project that, IMHO, is the last thing that the metro area needs right now.

* I don't recall if I mentioned the major new water compact reached this spring under Governor Hickenloopers guidance.  It diverts water from the Western Slope to the Front Range in exchange for giving the Western Slope more control of future diversion plans and other compensation.  The diversion plans include new hydropower for the state.

* Disney already has a radio station, a television station, multiple international destination amusement parks, a movie studio and a major line of characters.  How long will it be before they have a newspaper and sports leagues as well?

READ MORE - Post-Long Weekend Observations

Parenting, Privacy, Porn and the Internet

If you're tired about talking about the real estate market and soccer leagues, and you want to liven up discussion at a party with people with children of a certain age, talk about how you manage your children's Internet access.

Some parents long for every opportunity to monitor and control their children's access to the Internet. Others take a more lassiez-faire attitude. My wife and I are certainly more relaxed than some, although we do have limits.

The Internet and the Death of Childhood Privacy

From a child's perspective, one of the important implications of the Internet is that it makes it possible for parents to know what they are doing at a level of detail that was previously impracticable.

The Denver Public Schools has a system that allows you to see your older child's every quiz grade, every absence and tardy notation, every homework assignment and pretty much everything else that the system has noted regarding your child in something approximating real time.

While they have the power to put passwords on their library cards, they don't, so that I can manage online book renewals and fill my household role a book return heavy, thereby minimizing library fines which is an area where we have imposed early personal financial responsibility. So, I know what they check out for the library. I can also monitor the e-books and e-audio books that they enjoy.

Netflix keeps track of which streaming media are watched for how long on which days, and which DVDs are mailed and returned. It doesn't take much in the way of investigative skills to figure out who is watching what when. If I wished, I could also impose parental controls on that account.

I could impose parental controls on my children's Internet usage, audit their web browsing histories, and more, if I was so inclined. For the moment, at least, I have the log in information to my children's e-mail accounts (all pseudonymous), so I can see how they write to, how often, what they write and when. It is also child's play to look at my daughter's cell phone and see who she has called and texted when and what was said in the texts.

Since they don't have cars yet and don't have license to wander our urban residential neighborhood very far without an accompanying adult, they can't really come and go from the house without us knowing where they are going.

The old school days when you insisted on looking at your child's report card and snooped in their diary and under their beds now and then look positively hands off compared to what is possible these days. Children roamed small town streets on bikes, food and skateboards with all the freedom of outdoor cats so long as they were home in time for dinner or called from a friend's house to say that they were having dinner there.  Local phone calls on landlines and notes passed on scraps of paper in class were not logged and hard to intercept. Nobody's television kept a record of what was being watched when that parents could review later. Library records weren't available for parents to review at the touch of a key while they were on lunch break. A child who was the first to the mailbox in the afternoon even had a plausible shot at intercepting letters directed to them through the postal service.

Bad Stuff It Is Out There

The Internet is not a rated PG forum. There is hard core pornography easily available for free to anyone savvy enough to write a Google search; some of it could even land someone in prison. This is far different from the days when you have to find someone to buy it for you, brave an inquiring neighborhood shop clerk, or engage in petty theft to see it, and even it wasn't nearly so vivid.

Cyber bullying and sexting are not unheard of phenomena, although they seem to be mostly outgrowths of real life interactions.

Phishing scams rolling in constantly to every web address and cause real financial harm.

A public embarrassment on line has the ultimate global audience and can't be erased by any reasonable means.

One of the biggest differences between controlling parents and those who are more relaxed is an assessment of how much of a risk, in terms of likelihood, seriousness and preventability is involved in these things.

Total Control Isn't Easy

We encourage them to use their computers in public view but they have laptops, they not infrequently have homework that requires computer use (my daughter had an insane amount of educational computer games for a math class last year in addition to the demands of other classes like social studies report and essay writing), and it is frequently best for family harmony if they do their work in their own rooms.

If my children were of a mind to keep secrets, they could in a variety of ways that they have the technical know how to manage if they were so inclined. If they were of a mind to use family credit cards to make online purchases, they could (although we'd know that someone made them when the statements came in each month if we paid enough attention and the purchases weren't sufficiently bland).

Having some sense of what your children are up to much of the time doesn't take much effort. Perfectly reliable monitoring and control is nearly impossible without becoming a real tyrant and consuming vast amounts of everyone's time in the process.

Why We Don't Fear Forbidden Fruit

Honestly, the best weapon in the fight against inappropriate Internet use is boredom. They simply are not interested in pushing the envelope. They'd rather watch the latest Disney drek than media aimed at older viewers. Long minutes of teenagers snogging, or worse, rates as seriously boring so far. Stop action you tube flicks of dancing Barbies to the latest tune from the radio, or cute kittens has more appeal than subversive political or religious messages. My working assumption is that adult material won't be interesting until they are ready, or almost ready for it.

We aren't terribly afraid of knowledge, even when it is a bit off color. Secrets can be corrosive, and are hard to hide within a family, and maintaining and preserving an inaccurate air brushed view of the world is even harder. We try not to put off questions, and instead to provide the answers to the questions that are really being asked without adding the undue adult emotional baggage than avoiding questions in the interests of the taboos of polite society can. We try to be truthful, factual and bland when the question and the person asking it don't indicate that it is asked, for example, "why are we learning about AIDS and HIV in a 4th grade Family Life class, the required a special permission slip?", indicate that a bare bones answer will satisfy curiosity without a full fledged birds and the bees talk.

If anything, mystery can call attention and interest to subject that tweens and even teen would otherwise find boring and uninteresting. We don't fetishize wine and liquor as forbidden fruits, and talk about the consequences of drinking too much without undue moralizing and without touting a prohibitionists line we don't adhere to. The same applies to material on the Internet that they don't need but don't necessarily want either, if we don't call attention to it.

Google holds the keys to lots of accurate information, as well as lots of mischief, work with them in research related homework projects has helped us to teach them how to distinguish trustworthy and not so trustworthy sources, and there will no doubt be queries in their lives at some point that would be mutually embarrassing for them to ask us that they can get authoritative, accurate answers to over the Internet, just as my generation did from the reference section and non-fiction books in the library. I'd rather that they have the means to get accurate information without asking an adult or letting us know that they are even asking, than not have information that they need at all. Sometimes a question about chlamydia asked because of a concern about a friend really is a question asked because of a concern about a friend. But what adult can help but to leap to suspicions? And, what smart kid doesn't know that they will?

Our main worry is not inappropriate media, or Internet predators. It is Internet and media overload. The limits that we impose have more to do with "how much" than they do with "what" online and media exposure they receive. So long as the number of hours they spend in front of a screen isn't excess, and we do impose limits in that regard, we don't worry much. If they are still reading books, getting outdoor activity, spending time with friends, keeping on top of their homework and so on, a little indulgence is accepted.

Most serious online trouble involves overindulgence. A kid who watches 3 minutes of porn once is not going to be scared for life. A kid who watches hours of it on a regular basis for weeks may get pretty messed up and not realize that this is adult fantasy and not reality. Obsession is more often a problem that knowledge.

In our privacy free online world (so far), sometimes they get caught exceeding the boundaries. Minor transgressions, like a quick check in with an age appropriate online world they have a character in, or a check of an e-mail account, between bouts of homework, are overlooked, although we don't leave them with the illusion that they are putting one over on us. A parental reputation for omniscience can discourage a multitude of sins. Major transgressions are usually punished in kind; watching a movie or playing a video game when you weren't permitted to on Tuesday night may mean forfeiting the chance to do so on Friday after school.

Strategic Reasons For a Light Touch

We try not to be disproportionate in our reactions to a great extent for strategic reasons. We'd like parental discovery of their activities to loom as a lesser tragedy than the alternatives if they get over their head. For example, we wouldn't want them to avoid letting us know about a cyber bully or someone communicating with them inappropriately out of excessive fear of punishment for using the Internet when they weren't supposed to be doing so.

We know perfectly well that we can't hope to be fully informed about what our children do with their friends and their romantic travails as teenagers. But we'd like to think that if the risks of talking to us aren't too high, and questions about their social lives remain as routine and inevitable as our questions about what kind of cake there was at the birthday party and whether it was home made, that we might at least have some sense of who most of the more important people in their lives are these days, and of what those people are like.

Let's face it. Hosting parties for your kids is not simply something that you do out of the goodness of your heart. It is also a part of a comprehensive intelligence strategy to figure out what kind of kids your children choose as company.

At some point, you can no longer choose your children's friends (or eventually, their lovers). But if you keep the door open while remaining basically honest, you can hope to provide some feedback to your child about the people in their lives, for what it is worth, that will be considered as they make their own decisions for themselves. If you acknowledge that sooner or later you will lose control, maintaining credibility becomes more important than bolstering your authority. If you can maintain credibility and stay well enough informed to know when there are opinions to be offered, you don't need hard authority over your children.

Kids have been defying their parents in matters of friendship and love since long before Romeo and Juliet became a classic. The ancient Greeks developed a whole literary genre based upon people ignoring what their betters told them was in their best interests and called it tragedy. But a lot of bridges have to burned before a child ceases to have some preference for parental approval if it is within the realm of the possible, and I'd like to believe that if this card is not overplayed that it can produce beneficial results for all involved.

Who Knows What Approach Works Best?

These observations don't come stamped with a double blind longitudinal study, or the after the fact certificate of approval that comes with kids who somehow managed to do well in the end once they grew up.

Of course, not even couples fully agree how to approach these matters.  My wife is fond of very specific rules that contain the word "never," ideally presented long before the situations to which they apply come up.  Despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that I'm a lawyer, I'm more inclined to generalized character building, talking about situations we encounter in our life, developing a way of thinking about problems, being a role model when I can, and honestly admitting my own shortcomings when I can't.  I don't like to borrow worry and I prefer to take life's challenges as they come.  She sees a parent as more like a law giver dispensing the Ten Commandments of life, while I see a parent as more like a teacher in a liberal arts curriculum or a socratic method law professor trying to get the students to draw their own conclusions from a case.

The combined effect may sometimes be incoherent on the receiving end.  When they do children can arbitrage the approaches to some extent by seeking to be regulated by the preferred parental regime, or can simply do what they wish instead of what they have been told.  What couples (and children) don't face these issues to some extent?  But, because our values aren't that far from each other on the main objectives, we manage.  Maybe we really suck at parenting, but have been blessed with children who were born predisposed to have half decent judgment anyway.  There is really no way to know for sure. But fools rush in where angels fear to tread and in the absence of definitive data you do your best because you have to do make real choices every single day and live with them.

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Reflections On Parenting As School Is Out For The Year

Today is the last day of school for my children in the Denver Public Schools (a few schools affiliated with the district have alternative calendars).

Honestly, as inconvenient as it can be to cobble together everyone's new schedules for the summer, it is a joy for the sense of rhythm it adds to life. I spend the majority of of my daylight hours in climate controlled office buildings, and Denver's weather is quirky enough that the conditions when I do venture out don't always give me a clear take on the season.

Like most jobs, my work is amorphous. I have many cases going at any given time and they almost never all stop at once. While I'm often very aware of the date, one month can blur into the next, and one year slides into another. Everything that I do except tax planning has rolling deadlines, not annual ones. I'm not the exception. A colleague of mine I had lunch with this week could figure out what year he started his current employment only in reference to the year that someone in the firm had a child.

Children ground you and give you bearings. Their schools years make your place in the seasons relevant to your life. Their well defined march from year to year is full of landmarks - entering elementary school, hitting double digits in age, entering middle school, and soon enough for me, the teen years, and high school. Life with one or two preschoolers is so very different from having children in school. Life before one of the kids is old enough to babysit has immense logistical differences from life after that point. Their school vacations, their school performances and awards ceremonies, their sports seasons, their report cards and their fund raisers add predictable highlights to the year. Without them to ground us, life might seem to go by in a fugue.

The end of the school year is also one of the dates, along with my birthday, my anniversary, New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, and the anniversary of my first admission to the practice of law that I step back and reflect on what I've accomplished in the past years.

The end of the school year, even more than my children's birthdays, is a day that I treat a bit like those signs that say "X days without accidents." I have gotten the kids this many years into their lives with parents who have stayed married, a stable home and school, and the kind of academic and social progress that they should have at this point. I'm someone who spends a lot of time reminding people of their mortality in connection with estate planning and probate work, and when I'm not doing that I'm often planning for worst case financial scenarios in asset protection planning. I also monitor the nature v. nurture debate on the context of the latest findings of psychologists and psychiatrists and neuroscientists and geneticists. So, I help but to ponder at the end of each school year, "what if I got hit by a bus right now?", how much of doing everything we've done to raise our children so far would stick and what might fall apart? How irrevocable are the benefits we've conferred upon them this year? How set are they on the courses of their lives?

The academic literature on this isn't terribly rigorous, mostly because people who have critical experiences tend to be undersampled.  Basket case parents usually don't adopt and thus, don't end up in adoption studies. Very few twins are separated at birth, because its cruel. Flakes on the brink of survival tend to not volunteer for longitudinal research studies.

There is a lot of literature on on the extent to which traits are hereditary and the point in time when academic achievement gaps start to manifest. This literature offers reassurance to the anxious parent. Statistically speaking, a much larger share of variance between people in a wide variety of traits than people who are not familiar with the literature would expect can be attributed either to hereditary effects, or to "non-shared environment" between siblings which mostly involves things other than the choices that parents can control in raising their children.

But, to be a pessimist and cast a necessary dollop of doubt upon these findings, a great many traits involve gene x environment interactions, and the vast majority of people whose experiences give rise to the estimates of heredity don't experience many major upheavals in their lives. Studies that select subjects based on shared experiences of major upheavals and traumas tend to see bigger environmental effects than studies of the general population that capture people who have experienced these things only sporadically.

For example, the research seems to indicate that the genetic component of IQ is basically a ceiling on a person's intellectual ability in the absence of negative environmental factors that drag someone down. For people in middle class or upper middle class environments that have few of these drags on learning, the genetic component of IQ is quite large. For people who grow up in poverty, the shared environment impact of poverty on family members which varies a lot depending upon the parenting present that can mitigate or aggravate these environmental drags on learning are far more important as a source of variation from one person to the next, than a person's peak genetic potential IQ which is very hard to achieve when one is in poverty.

Not all traits in a child's development are in formative periods at the same time either. The genetic and environmental influences of IQ have pretty much run their course by the time a child heads to middle school, if not sooner.  Most children have clearly left the path that includes anger management problems and disruptive behavior by then as well.  A tendency towards anxiety manifests extremely early, as does gender identity (i.e. viewing oneself as male or female, regardless of one's body or sexual orientation).  A child's capacity to delay gratification also appears to manifest quite early.

There is some psychological literature that indicates that middle school and high school are critical ages in terms of how a person will function later in life in intimate relationships. A nasty divorce or betrayal of trust by an adults through sexual relationships with a kid at that point in life can undermine a kid's willingness to make the commitments and have the trust needed to avoid stumbling blocks later in life in those relationships.  But, few people end up spending their lives with their middle school, or even high school, sweethearts.  Some people are more resilient than others in the face of trauma.  Some young people who are made into child soldiers or gang members will be forever stone cold, while others can be restored to some semblance of normalcy if intervention happens soon enough and their reentry to society is managed well.

There is anecdotal evidence that people tend to keep whatever hairstyle and fashion preferences they adopt in their early twenties for the rest of their adult lives.

For parents the goal posts keep moving. Just when you can be confident that you have finally cleared the hurdle of getting your kids on the right track in life in one thing no matter how much you screw up later, there is some new critical developmental hurdle to clear.

Of course, this isn't exclusively a parent's responsibility. Kids make good and bad choices in their own lives that start when parents no longer have effective absolute veto power over what they eat for lunches and snacks and continue well into adulthood. Academics and opera singers have critical developments they need to make in their career specialties that will influence the rest of their lives greatly, well into their thirties, long after most have left the nest. For political staffers and lawyers and management consultants and investment bankers and doctors, one's first few years on the job are typically when you develop your professional specialty, which can be very hard to predict based upon your generalized education before that point. Some people who move to a new country as adults will adapt fairly gracefully, even if they never entirely lose their accents, while others fail to thrive or "crack" psychologically at that point. A choice of a life partner can change who you become.

For better or for worse, my own tendency is not to second guess what I've already done very much - it is what it is, but to fret over how secure what has already been accomplished will be in the future and one what developmental issues are not yet set strongly for children of the same age and gender as mine. I'm sure that there are other ways of looking at it, and some are probably better than mine. But, these are the kind of yardsticks that come to mind almost involuntarily.

Similarly, it is hard for me to stay focused on what my children do well and could perhaps advance further doing, as opposed to focusing on the issues that they struggle with but need to master. Focusing on the negative can be discouraging to them, but every time I see an issue come up for one of my children that is a struggle, I hear a clock silently ticking away in my head. Is it too late to make real progress in dealing with this? And, of course, there is joy in simply seeing children cease to become abstract possibilities and become their own distinctive individuals on their own paths in life. Each time that they take one fork instead of another in life you can develop a better feel for the kinds of paths they will take in life as adults and who they are becoming. Is he outgoing or introspective? Will she be a tomboy or a girl who is all sugar and spice? How tall will they grow? What are their academic strong and weak points? How do they treat their friends?  What lessons are they learning from me by example?

Sometimes you can get ahead of yourself. My dear wife has been obsessing about where our children will go to college since they were in pre-school, although this urge has been tamed a little over time. I'm less like a "tiger dad" and more like someone reading all of the Harry Potter books from start to finish and impatiently driven by pure curiosity to see what ends up in the epilogue, perhaps at the expense of the joy of the journey, without as much emphasis on having any particular ending.  We each only have one shot for each child and we can only do our best and strive to improve.

READ MORE - Reflections On Parenting As School Is Out For The Year

Denver Businesses and Real Estate Holes Come Back To Life

For any urban area, real estate development and utilization is central to a community's health. Denver's metropolitan area, which took a relatively light blow during the financial crisis and housing bubble collapse, seems to be bouncing back with new businesses and developments filling gaps left by businesses that the downtown purged.

* A major infill development from Alameda to the I-25 and Broadway light rail station which would include 3,000 new homes, a new school, and new office space is in the advanced planning stage. Currently it includes the Denver Design Center which is a suite of interior design oriented retail spaces, a Sam's Club, an Albertsons, two light rail station, a K-Mart, and some strip mall development.

* The Gates Rubber Plant to the south of the planned new development has been the major projects focus for the area at the fringe of Denver's West Washington Park neighborhood, some office space was restored on the east side of Broadway, and a new apartment complex went in at the southern tip of the project, but environmental concerns and a financial crisis spawned collapse of investment in major new real estate projects has put it on hold. But, if both the Gates Rubber Plant and the new transit oriented development planned between it and the Baker Neighborhood eventually take off, it will be a major transit oriented population expansion in Central Denver.

* Another small transit oriented development, with senior housing and retail is going in at the I-25 and Yale light rail stop.

* National Jewish Hospital has finally decided to buy the long vacant Gove Middle School at Colorado Boulevard and 14th Street, that is adjacent to its campus, allowing it to consolidate its expanding operations, and providing capital projects cash for a cash strapped Denver Public Schools.

* The former University Hospital on University Boulevard was to have been redeveloped by a developer who managed to rezone the property but gave up on the project. The new infill developer on the project has more modest ambitions, but looks likely to be able to put this major hole in the neighborhood back into productive use. A new apartment complex and new restaurants have kept that neighborhood surprisingly healthy considering the massive loss of employment that it has experienced.

* A shakeup is looming in the area of Saint Joseph's and Presbyterian/Saint Luke's Hospital in North Denver. P/SL has recently upgraded its ER and added a children's focused facility to fill the gap created by the departure of Children's Hospital to Fitzsimmons. Saint Joseph's signature tower has serious building code issues, so a somewhat complicated plan involving major new construction is underway to deal with it.

* A string of vacant store fronts along Alameda Avenue in West Washington Park created by the pull out of Twist and Shout Records, a closing Blockbuster store, a failed used book store, a closed laundromat, a long dead gas station, a floundering dinner assembly business, and several other faltering small businesses is almost entirely back to life. Two bars at Alameda and Downing have come under new management replacing the old ones. A hair salon has expanded to fill the space left vacant by the loss of a small neighborhood gym. A tailor and a new dry cleaner moved in, while a space once held by a travel agent struggling with declining commissions has been filled by a home nursing service. Pho Pasta took over the used book store space, Bittersweet have turned the old gas station into a beautiful new fine restaurant, Italian restaurant La Scalia filled the space previously occupied by a Dinner assembly business and the adjacent Chinese restaurant has taken the opportunity to give itself an upscale face life. A high end appliance store filled one gap. A Jimmy Johns, a hair salon, a new small gym, and a Larkburger have filled the gap created by the move of Twist and Shout records to Colfax near East High School. A new bar will fill the gap created by a closing Blockbuster. Further down the road, medical marijuana dispensaries have filled several street front locations zoned for retail.

* Also nearby the Wask Perk coffee shop at Emerson and Ohio in West Washington Park has expanded, both taking over the space of its retail neighbor which was most recent a struggling gift shop and starting to offer a mobile bicycle like station in Washington Park itself. The establishment seems to be thriving, after struggling through at least three successive rounds of owners, clashing with the local neighborhood association, and facing traffic declines due to road work. Nearby a new bare bones retro style barber shop has moved in, next to a pet grooming business.

* The new Central Denver Recreation Center that had been planned for a parcel near East High School that had once been a grocery store and then was a church, on land purchased for a pretty penny (arguably suspiciously high), has been put on hold in favor of what I call the million dollar dog park. The dog park meets the urban planning goal of turning what had once been a popular gathering place for vagrants and youths with nothing to do into a space securely held by middle class dog owners, but has not filled the hole in community services that exists in the neighborhood.

* One major question mark that may be resolved in the next few days or weeks is the fate of the old Byers School. It was the home of the Denver School of the Arts until that relocated to the former DU Music School near Stapleton, and has sat vacant since then. Its school yard was redeveloped into a complex of what I call cereal box houses. They are small, narrow houses that look like half duplexes but have space between them because the neighborhood association (WWPNA) insisted that they be single family dwellings rather than town houses or duplexes (a preference that still baffles me). Neighbors, myself included, are pushing to have the location serve as the home for a new campus of the Denver School of Science and Technology, the most successful of Denver's charter schools. Success would mean another major hole in the neighborhood filled, an attractive new educational option nearby, and relief for the Denver Public Schools from the fiscal strain of carrying valuable empty real estate without getting any benefit from it. Failure would probably lead to increased efforts to dispose of the property, but this wouldn't be easy as it has few alternative uses that wouldn't take lots of ambition and capital investments.

* Downtown, a space filled by the failed Niketown store on the 16th Street Mall is slated to become the new home of discount fashion department store H&M. Considerable rumor had gathered suggesting that it would replace the departing Saks Department store in the Cherry Creek mall, but that apparently, will not be happening. A new tenant there has not been announced.

* The Commons Park, South Platte, Highland area to the west of LoDo is thriving.

* West Colfax will soon lose Saint Anthony's Hospital to the suburbs, a major hole in a neighborhood that has not seen the redevelopment and infill activity of many other Denver neighborhoods.

* Construction seems to be picking up again in Stapleton. It also has a new beautiful church opening in a signature concrete arch building, a new modern architecture inspired new recreation center, and new schools. Much of this is development funded.

* The new, reasonably affordable, suburban style Gateway neighborhood on the road to DIA in Denver proper, just opened a new library and is also getting new schools.

* Aurora, in a urban planning department lead initiative, is looking for a way to open the doors to a major infill redevelopment of the area between Fitzsimmons and Stapleton, which is currently a working class residential neighborhood that has seen major upheaval as many black and moderate income Asian residents have moved to more suburban neighborhood's like Denver's Green Valley Ranch and the E-470 corridor, and many new Hispanic residents have moved in, given the "Old Town Aurora" neighborhood a new ethnic character. They would like to expand the middle to high income neighborhoods created by the redevelopments of Lowry and Stapleton and Fitzsimmons to link them all into a coherent larger scale zone of prosperity. But, it is unclear is the private sector interest to make it happen in present.

* A major new development that will bring thousands of new residents is planned for Douglas County near Chatfield Reservoir at densities within the levels allowed by current zoning, but the supposedly pro-growth, anti-government regulation Republicans of the area are balking at the new project.

* Meanwhile, facing renewed budget cuts, the Denver Public Library system is pushing to form its own property tax funded district, apart from the municipal government's general fund from which it is funded now, to stave off those cuts and provide it with greater budget security. Hickenlooper's administration managed to stave off deep cuts to the system, compared to many library systems such as the decimated Aurora Public Library system, but the fear that another recession could inflict deep permanent damage to the system lingers.

* Despite funding shortfalls that leave the prospects of a timely completion of Northern expansions of Denver's light rail and transit system in doubt, as it isn't clear what sort of sales tax increase voters would support to fund it, the FasTracks line from central Denver to the Jefferson County court house is coming ever closer to entering service and the Union Station redevelopment is moving along. Most of the new light rail bridges for the line are in place.

* Next in line for rail transit expansion will be the efforts already underway to connect downtown Denver and the Denver International Airport, a line that might also connect Stapleton to DIA via rail.

* The Greyhound bus station downtown is closing, and the very obvious optimal place for it to relocate would be Union Station, which is supposed to be a multi-modal transit hub for downtown. But, it isn't clear that this will happen.

READ MORE - Denver Businesses and Real Estate Holes Come Back To Life

Boigon Out; Who Is Left In The Running To Be Mayor Of Denver?

The race to bethe mayor of Denver has lost its highest polling female candidate, city council woman at large Carol Boigon, who in turn endorsed Michael Hancock. 

It isn't obvious, however, that many voters will be swayed by her endorsement of her city council ally.  He needs a boost in support if he is to displace Romer or Meijia, who are currently on track to make it to a runoff election in a race where no candidate is likely to win majority support in the first round.

Chris Romer, James Meijia, Michael Hancock and Doug Linkhart, in that order, are the strongest polling candidates remaining in what is now a nine way race for Mayor.  Boigon had been polling in fifth place with 8% support.  It isn't obvious whom supporters of eliminated candidates would support in a second round runoff election. 

Theresa Spahn, who was polling even more weakly than Boigon before Boigon dropped out of the race is the only woman left in the running, and may pick up Boigon supporters who would like to have a female Mayor.  Also running, but very unlikely to either win or even make it into the second round of voting are: Danny F. Lopez, Jeff Peckman, Kenneth Simpson, and Thomas Wolf.

Some people have characterized this race as a Romer v. not Romer race, but it isn't obvious that this is the case. Strategic voters who recognize that their favorite candidate is unlikely to make a runoff election may choose to vote for Meija or Hancock to influence who makes it into a runoff election.


The race looks likely to track the election that ultimately put Hickenlooper in office the first time around, with African-American plurality precincts likely to favor Hancock, Hispanic plurality precincts likely to favor Mejia and white plurality precincts likely to favor Romer.

Republicans in Denver have been most public in supporting Romer and Hancock in this official non-partisan race, although the momentum of Republican support appears to have swung towards Romer.  Linkhart is the most prominent progressive leaning social liberal in the race who has devoted much of his efforts while in office towards developing a less punitive and less expensive stance on criminal justice issues.

I hope to find time for another post on this race before votes are cast that sums up the key points that distinguish each of the mayoral candidates, as I will need to do that in any case before voting myself.
Ballots in the all mail election are already in the hands of voters, and they must be received by May 3.

READ MORE - Boigon Out; Who Is Left In The Running To Be Mayor Of Denver?

Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

IQ is one of the stronger predictors of socio-economic success in life, and success on a wide variety of other measures, and a lot of a person's IQ is heritable.

Personality, IQ and Success

In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an  IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup.  Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000.  Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning.  Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.

Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.

More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament.  Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:

A number of meta-analyses have confirmed the predictive value of the Big Five across a wide range of behaviors. Saulsman and Page examined the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and each of the 10 personality disorder categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Across 15 independent samples, the researchers found that each disorder displayed a unique and predictable five-factor profile. The most prominent and consistent personality predictors underlying the disorders were positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness.

In the area of job performance, Barrick and Mount reviewed 117 studies utilizing 162 samples with 23,994 participants. They found that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all performance criteria for all occupational groups. Extraversion was a valid predictor for occupations involving social interaction (e.g. management and sales). Furthermore, extraversion and openness to experience were valid predictors of training proficiency criteria.

The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations.  Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:

[E]ven though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.

Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).

Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.

Of four recent twin studies, the mean estimated broad heritabilities on self-report measures for the Big Five traits were as follows:

Openness: 57%

Conscientiousness: 49%

Extraversion: 54%

Agreeableness: 42%

Neuroticism: 48% . . .

Many studies of longitudinal data, which correlate people's test scores over time, and cross-sectional data, which compare personality levels across different age groups, show a high degree of stability in personality traits during adulthood. More recent research and meta-analyses of previous studies, however, indicate that change occurs in all five traits at various points in the lifespan. The new research shows evidence for a maturation effect. On average, levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease.  . . .

Cross-cultural research from 26 nations (N = 23,031 subjects) and again in 55 nations (N = 17,637 subjects) has shown a universal pattern of sex differences on responses to the Big Five Inventory. Women consistently report higher Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and men often report higher Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Sex differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Both men and women tend to grow more extraverted and conscientious and less neurotic and agreeable as cultures grow more prosperous and egalitarian, but the effect is stronger for men.

Conscientiousness overlaps with ADD inattentive symptoms, and both of these traits are also correlated with digit ratio which is an easy to measure physical trait associated with natal testosterone level exposures.  Specifically: "More masculinized finger-length ratios show associations with ADHD symptoms, possibly acting through the trait mechanism of conscientiousness."  This is in line with the cross-cultural gender discrepencies observed in onscientiousness.

The second digit to fourth digit finger ration has been shown to be a reliable indicator of testosterone exposure in utero. If your fourth finger (your ring finger) is longer than your second finger (the one next to your thumb) you had a high exposure to testosterone when your mother was pregnant with you. This ratio has also been associated with genital size, aggression, ADHD and now conscientiousness.

Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary.  Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.


Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order).  ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.

The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.

Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more.  Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income.  In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):

Conscientiousness:  $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000

Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.

Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual.  The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.

Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.

These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:

Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years.

This adds to a growing literature on traits other than IQ that are important to lifetime successes.

Grit and Success

Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success.  The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit.  But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time. 

The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:

With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities.

But:

Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. . . . Here are the scientists: "Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance."

In other words, practice is what produces results, but "grit" (a.k.a. "tenaciousness" a.k.a.  “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”) is the key psychological trait that determines how much someone practices.  And, like the Big Five personality traits, grit is largely unrelated to intelligence:  "Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence."  It is not independent of the Big Five personality traits, however, although it doesn't completely overlap:

Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals. This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit unique from conscientiousness.

Grit has been validated in settings other than spelling bees.

Grit provided incremental predictive validity . . . above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits; . . . higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p<.01); [and] that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy[.] . . . Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

Grit also predicts the performance of Teach For America teachers in "under resourced public schools.", as does life satisfaction prior to entering the program.

A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened  "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."

As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."

The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:

[T]here’s a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance.

Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn’t resemble the NFL Combine.

Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit.

The problem, of course, is that grit can’t be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it’s a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.)

The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no “consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance.” We need  . . . a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.

Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.

Poverty and IQ

So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.

We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved.  This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.

Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care.  While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range.  Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).

Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential.  These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life. 

With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:

[T]he brutal reality is that U.S. schools that contain more than 25% poor children do abysmally--they are literally pulling the scores down:

If we subdivide the U.S. data in a very obvious way, we observe something, well, rather obvious:
But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

We might not be living in a nation where one-third of a nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It's only one in five, give or take. . . . Until we get serious about reducing poverty, as well as breaking up large geographic concentrations of poverty, our average test scores will be poor.

This poverty effect is not simply a product of poor students having lower maximum potential IQ at birth because their parents are below average in IQ and poor as a result.  The conditions of poverty prevent thse children from achieving their potential.

You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district.  A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.

In a nutshell

IQ,  which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population.  These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ.  Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.

Implications

This has several implications of importance:

1.  If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary. 

2.  While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.

3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes.  Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician?  Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?

4.  Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer.  Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.

5.  Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ.  Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers.  What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ. 

6.  Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person.  This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations.  Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.

7.  The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them.  Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children.  Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.

8.  To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures.  This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.

READ MORE - Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

Graduation Rate And Remedial Education Data

Last week, the Colorado Department of Education released the latest detailed data on high school graduation rates in Colorado, and the Colorado Commission on Higher Education released reports on Remedial Education and Enrollments of high school graduates at Colorado colleges and universities that receive state funding (including three private institutions of higher education: Regis, DU and Colorado Christian University).

Executive Summary of Denver Public Schools Analysis

I look at the detailed data for the Denver Public Schools below. About 9.6%* of students who start high school in DPS graduate from high school and start college without needing remedial work, and about 6% of DPS students who start college will eventually earn a two or four year college degree (the percentage of DPS students who start high school who earn a four year college degree within six year of starting college is between 4% and 5%).

DPS greatly underperforms the rest of the state mostly because it has a student body that is dealing with an immense load of problems from poverty, to homelessness, to lack of English language proficiency, to disabilities. In part, this is because Denver is a central city where these issues are concentrated. In part, this is because affluent students who grow up in Denver choose private school, have families that move to the suburbs, or exercise rights in the state school choice system to leave the District and this happens disproportionately at the high school level, where DPS performance by absolute measures is worst. The Denver Public Schools fails to enroll more than one in four of the students who live in the District and that measure itself fails to capture the continuing tendency of families with older school aged children to move to the suburbs. DPS has made great gains in the post-desegregation order era, first at the elementary school level, and in the past few years, at the middle school level, at increasing the share of resident children who attend DPS. But, progress at the high school level in increasing the share of resident children who attend DPS continues to be quite low. (Note, much of the factual support for this paragraph is in prior posts at this blog.)

In many of Denver's high schools, the collection of personal stresses and schools where academically well prepared students coming into high school are too rare for the school to be sufficiently geared towards meeting their needs, combine to pose very poor odds of earning college degrees even for students who have been identified as gifted and talented and do well in other districts in the state. The very low college attendance rate of students at Lincoln High School and West High School, relative to the number of gifted and talented students at those schools is particularly distressing.

Meanwhile, the District is failing the roughly half of its students who drop out, and we have few good ways of measuring how well the District is meeting the needs of the students, who make up a larger share of its student body than all but one or two other districts in the state, for whom graduating from college is an unrealistic goal by the time that they enter high school.

This isn't all the high school's fault. Overwhelmingly, students who are well below grade level in elementary school academic performance stay there, having academic troubles in middle school, often flunking classes there, and then drop out of high school only after the public schools have shown them one profound academic failure after another for a decade. It is rare for a students whose "at risk" status has not been obvious for many years to suddenly drop out of high school. But, high schools, despite a wide variety of non-traditional programs, are still failing to show students that they have something to offer them as they are now about half of the time.

Graduation Rates

The statewide high school graduation rate in Colorado is 72.4%.

In the Denver Public Schools the high school graduation rate is 51.8% (2,623/5,083). This isn't necessarily a product of the Denver Public Schools doing a poor job. Its students come to school with lots of problems. Of the 5,083 students who start high school in Denver, 655 have disabilities, 633 have limited English language proficiency, 3,488 are "economically disadvantaged," 188 are "migrant" students, 3,171 are in Title 1 programs, and 209 are homeless. On the other hand, 699 have been identified as gifted and talented. More than one category can apply to a single students - a gifted and talented student can be economically disadvantaged and homeless for example.

There is great variation in high school graduation rates from school to school.

Denver has twenty dropouts from its incoming cohort before they start their freshman year.

Graduation rates by high school in the Denver Public Schools are as follows;

Abraham Lincoln High School 51.7% (208/402)
Ridge View Academy Charter School 5.1% (13/255)
Academy Of Urban Learning 31.0% (13/42)
Amandla Charter Academy 0.0% (0/6)
Emerson Street School 0.0% (0/13)
Fred N Thomas Career Education Center 85.7% (72/84)
Challenges, Choices & Images Charter School 0.0% (0/2)
Colorado High School 19.5% (22/113)
Ace Community Challenge Charter School 0.0% (0/29)
Connections Academy 28.6% (16/56)
Denver Center For International Studies 92.5% (37/40)
Denver School Of The Arts (96.8% (120/124)
Denver School Of Science And Technology 80.7% (67/83)
Denver Venture Charter School 0.0% (0/1)
East High School 80.7% (405/502)
Emily Griffith Opportunity School 3.2% (9/277)
D P S Night High School 0.0% (0/1)
Escuela Tlatelolco School 33.3% (4/12)
Florence Crittenton High School 2.6% (2/77)
George Washington High School 80.9% (313/387)
John F Kennedy High School 77.0% (207/269)
Justice High School Denver 26.9% (7/26)
Life Skills Center Of Denver 0.5% (1/216)
Manual High School 0.0% (0/2)
Martin Luther King Middle College 89.6% (69/77)
Contemporary Learning Academy High School 0.0% (0/106)
Montbello High School 56.2% (221/393)
North High School 63.8% (155/243)
Bruce Randolph School 85.9% (73/85)
Online High School 42.6% (20/47)
Prep Assessment Center 0.0% (0/40)
P.S.1 Charter School 10.5% (8/76)
Skyland Community High School 29.4% (10/34)
South High School 61.8% (215/348)
Southwest Early College Charter School 32.2% (29/90)
Thomas Jefferson High School 78.0% (199/255)
West High School 47.6% (119/250)

Remediation In Higher Education

At the two-year institutions the overall remediation rate in FY2010 was 52.8%. . . . At the four-year institutions the overall remediation rate was 18.3%. . . . When examining remediation by discipline, most Colorado students required remediation in mathematics, followed by writing and then reading. At both two-year and four institutions, mathematics is by far the subject with the highest number of students assigned to remedial study (Figures 1 & 2). Approximately 41% of total two-year students and 14.5% of total four-year students were assessed math remediation.

The remediation report notes that about $19 million a year of Colorado General Fund dollars are devoted to remedial education for public college matriculants. Of this, $18.1 million is spent at the community college level, while $1 million is spent at Adams State and Mesa State Colleges (several other four year colleges failed to produce detailed cost estimates). About 60% of students taking remedial education courts at higher education institutions passed those courses, about a quarter failed, and most of the rest withdrew.

For the 2006 cohort at 2 year Colorado institutions, 52.7% of students who did not need remediation graduated, while 19.3% of those who did need remediation graduated (from a two year program or with a certificate or after transferring to a new institution). Half of students (49.9%) at two year colleges assigned to remedial classes were retained a year later.

For the 2003 cohort at 4 year Colorado institutions, 62.9% of students who did not need remediation graduates in six years, while 29.5% who did need remediation graduated in six years. Students requiring remedial instruction at schools with higher overall graduation rates were more likely to graduate that students requiring remedial instruction at schools with lower graduation rates. For example, 65.0% of students at the Colorado School of Mines who needed remedial classes graduated in six years, while only 19.6% of students at Metro State who needed remedial classes graduated in six years. Six out of ten students (60.1%) at four years colleges assigned to remedial classes were retained a year later.

Within the Denver Public Schools, many non-traditional high school programs sent no students to public college at all in the Fall 2010 year covered by the study (Challenges, Choices and Images; Colorado High School; Contemporary Learning Academy; Emily Griffth Opportunity School; Florence Crittendon High School; Fred N. Thomas Career Education; Life Skills Center of Denver, P.S. 1). Those schools that did have student starting public colleges in the fall of 2010 had remediation rates as follows:

Lincoln 78.6% (55/70) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 15
Denver School of the Arts 19.0% (8/42) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 34
East 38.5% (79/205) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 126
George Washington 60.0% (84/140) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 56
John F. Kennedy 62.7% (74/118) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 44
Montbello 71.8% (61/85) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 24
North 72.1% (44/61) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 17
South 68.8% (66/96) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 30
Thomas Jefferson 57.3% (71/124) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 53
West 90.7% (39/43) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 4

DPS Total 59.0% (581/984) Prepared Graduates Starting College: 403

Matriculation

The last report shows, for example, that in the fall of 2009, a total of 1,196 students from the Denver Public Schools (about 46% of its high school graduates) enrolled at the following institutions of higher education in Colorado:

Community College of Denver 313
Metropolitan State College 169
University of Colorado Boulder 159
University of Colorado Denver 106
University of Northern Colorado 85
Colorado State University 65
University of Denver 44
Community College of Aurora 42
Arapahoe Community College 33
Red Rocks Community College 28
Colorado State University Pueblo 26
Mesa State College 26
Northeatern Junior College 26
Adams State College 15
Fort Lewis College 13
Colorado School of Mines 9
University of Colorado Colorado Springs 6
Front Range Community College 6
Western State College 5
Colorado Northwestern Community College 4
Regis University 3
Trinidad State Junior College 3
Pikes Peak Community College 3
Colorado Christian University 2
Colorado Mountain College 2
Aims Community College 1
Otero Junior College 1
Pueblo Community College 1
Lamar Community College 0
Morgan Community College 0

Thus, 733 DPS graduates went on to publicly funded four year colleges in Colorado and 463 DPS graduates went to publicly funded two year colleges in Colorado.

The data are also broken out by individual high schools. For example, the University of Colorado Boulder matriculants from the Denver Public Schools were graduates of East High School (69), George Washington (31), South (16), Thomas Jefferson (13), Denver School of the Arts (12), Denver School of Science and Technology (10), Montebello (3), North (2), P.S. 1 (2), and Lincoln (1).

Rate of Prepared College Student Production

What percentage of students do DPS high schools graduate who enter college and don't need remedial work when they get there?

The numbers are approximate, because two new turnaround schools (Martin Luther King Jr. Early College and Bruce Randolph) are excluded from the data which precedes their first graduating classes. The understatements are likely to be greatest at high schools like East, George Washington, South, Thomas Jefferson, DSA and DSST that send significant numbers of students to the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Also, keep in mind that these numbers also understate the number of prepared college students by omitting students who go to college outside of Colorado or to private colleges that receive no state support (e.g. Harvard, the University of Colorado, or Colorado College).

But, for older schools the numbers (in rank order) are as follows:

Denver School of the Arts 27.4% (34/124)
East 25.1% (126/502)
Thomas Jefferson 20.8% (53/255)
John F. Kennedy 16.4% (44/269)
George Washington 14.5% (56/387)
South 7.8% (30/384)
North 7.0% (17/243)
Montbello 6.1% (24/393)
Lincoln 3.7% (15/402)
West 1.6% (4/250)

DPS Total 7.9% (403/5,083)*

* The 9.6% figure cited above in this post is more accurate for DPS as a whole as this 7.9% figure and the per high school figures use data from inconsistent years which is adjusted for in the estimate earlier in this post, but for comparative purposes between high schools this adjustment has not been made; the absolute numbers for high schools understate the total but are still comparable relative to each other).

Even these school by school figures fail to tell the whole story. George Washington's numbers would look very different if they were broken out between a high performing IB program and a lower performing traditional program. East High School is very strongly tracked into what amounts to separate high and low achieving programs (academically). Other schools may make similar divisions.

One interesting comparison in the number of prepared college students a high school produces and the number of students identified as gifted and talented that it has in the cohort used for the high school graduation rate numbers above.

But, for older schools the numbers (in rank order) are as follows:

Denver School of the Arts 68.0% (34/50)
East 88.7% (126/142)
Thomas Jefferson 110.4% (53/48)
John F. Kennedy 93.6% (44/47)
George Washington 56.0% (56/100)
South 75.0% (30/40)
North 77.3% (17/22)
Montbello 80.0% (24/30)
Lincoln 36.6% (15/41)
West 18.2% (4/22)

DPS Total 57.7% (403/699)*

At DSA, East, GW and South there may be meaningful distortion in the numbers due to significant numbers of graduates attending private colleges, while a larger share of talented students from Thomas Jefferson, JFK and North are probably attending public colleges in Colorado, as they have less affluent student bodies.

But, by any measure, it is clear that the most talented students at Lincoln High School and West High School are disproportionately not graduating from high school and then going to college, presumably due to some combination of financial stress and inadequate college advising and peer support. This may also be happening a GW and DSA where financial stress along may be at work.

Implications

There are several big picture points that the data drive home for me:

1. The detailed high school data in Denver confirms that national data on a key point. A large number of low income kids in poor neighborhoods who are very talented academically are not going on to college, despite the fact that they have what it takes to succeed there. To recap the slogan of the United Negro College Fund, "a mind is a terrible thing to waste." This reaches a particularly distressing level at West High School and Lincoln High School in Denver. It is imperative that our society do more to help these kids achieve their potential. We have to overcome the financial barriers to meritocracy which are demonstrably still very present today.

2. The dominant reason that students need remedial courses when they show up at colleges and universities in the state is weak preparation in math. The good news is that math is much more self-contained as a subject than reading and writing, and much more a product of the educational process than reading and writing which are part of language skills developed every waking hour (and many dreaming hours) for a student's entire lifetime. Beefing up the curriculum and our expectations of our students in math can reasonably be expected to make a dent in this problem.

3. Graduation rates, college matriculation rates, remedial education rates, and college retention rates are exceedingly sticky and are decades in the making. There is room for improvement. The performance of the Denver Public Schools as measures by factors like graduation rates is poor even when factors like poverty, lack of English proficiency and other concerns are taken into account. DPS has poor graduation rates not just overall, but for specific demographic and individualized need based subgroups. But, the realistic goal for DPS should be to bring its performance up to or above par for the course considering its student body's needs, which even if it overperforms state averages somewhat for every category of student will still be far below the state averages.

4. The Denver Public Schools has not yet succeeded in making itself attractive enough for affluent families with academically talented kids to keep them in its high schools. Previous successes at the elementary and middle school level have shown that making attractive options available can bring these students back into the system, but the crunch time is approaching as a cohort of families who have stuck with DPS for elementary school and middle school when a few years ago similar families were not doing so have to decided if they will stay in DPS for high school. DPS needs those students to have the critical mass of students that it needs for academically rigorous programs that can be made available to all students, and to make economical use of its ample excess of infrastructure resources like empty schools.

5. Half of students who begin high school at the Denver Public Schools won't graduate from high school, half of those who graduate from high school will never go to college, and well over half of those graduates who go to college will never earn a degree with many dropping out of college in the first year or two. Only about five percent of students who start high school at DPS will ever earn a four year college degree. By the time they enter high school it is possible to predict with considerable accuracy how likely it is for a particular student to graduate from high school and to earn a college degree.

The only high profile measure of how successful DPS high schools are at equipping non-college bound students for life after high school is the dropout rate, and that is a crude measure indeed. DPS has many non-traditional programs for non-college bound students. Some, like the Fred N Thomas Career Education Center, appear at least to be doing a successful job of convincing students who are not college bound that it is worth their while to stay in school and graduate. Others may or may not be making a difference, but there is no way for the public to know if these programs fit that bill - dismal graduation rates in many of these programs aren't encouraging.

DPS needs to have something to offer its non-college bound students besides a watered down college prepatory curriculum that makes it worth student's time and effort to stay in school and graduate. It may as well have these students out pounding rocks all day for all the benefit they will get from that approach - that might at least do something about obesity and improve their lifetime fitness. Indeed, many teachers and counselors encourage these students to sign up for the Army and enter basic training if they can graduate, which has a certain amount of similarity to it. These students have spent more than eight years trying traditional academic classroom instruction aimed at getting them ready for a college prepatory high school curriculum and that approach crashed and burned. Four more years of the same won't make a difference for them. We need to find something more fruitful to offer the students who have failed with this approach.

Since students are the consumers here and are voting with their feet, figuring out which programs matter to them is more important than what college admissions officers or state politicians think that these students should be learning. What kind of educational opportunties would these students have purchased with the $6,000+ per year per head that the district is given to spend on them if they had more of a say in devising it? My intuition is that what most of these students want is to be ready for a career that will support them in life, while having the same high school experiences extracurricularly that their college bound peers do. Vocational education is an attractive possibility for a lot of students that has been neglected for too long.

DPS also needs to devote resources to develop useful, high profile measures of its success with non-college bound students that go beyond graduation rates, college matriculation rates and remedial education rates. It needs these measures much more than most districts in the state. For example, there should be good individual high school and individual high school program data on unemployment rates, criminal conviction rates, earnings, voter registration, poverty, and teen/out of wedlock parenting rates for non-college bound DPS graduates and dropouts. Schools that produce good results on these measures with students who have little realistic chance of graduating from college should be recognized for their achievements.

READ MORE - Graduation Rate And Remedial Education Data