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Unlike you I think there are more better performing kids than there are poor performing kids. This is an old chart: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-high-school-graduation-rates-by-race-ethnicity.html The only state on this chart where Black kids are not graduation above a 50% rate is Nevada. While Black students perform at a much lower rate, and 60% is a terrible percentage, I think the focus on poor performing students actually contributes to the failure of borderline students which is why the graduation rate or failure rate is so high in our community. I've seen first hand students who are borderline turn into failing students because the focus is on high performing kids and the worst performing kids. There isn't a balance and a lot of good kids become bad kids because they want the same attention. If yo simply place the emphasis on the borderline group something interesting could happen, but that will never be the case when everything we research and address has to deal with the students who are failing only. It's a tough problem to deal with and I wish you luck in doing so. I gave 20 years of my life to education and my job now is to save my own kids.

Having taught, lived, and having been raised in poverty, maybe I have a more personal relationship to poverty and I can speak to it more than your research Pioneer. Are White kids smarter than Black kids? It depends on what the conversation is. I know for a fact that a Black kid is ten times as smart as a White kid when it comes to popular culture. So I think your discussion on intelligence due to vaccines may have grounds and a foundation, but intelligence overall is a matter of what is of importance for a kid's parents and the kid. I was in education for over 20 years at every level and from experience the majority of kids do well in school. The problem is the squeaky wheel gets the oil so people focus on the kids who are lower performing. The problem with that focus is that they never address the real issue of parenting which takes us all right back to PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY Kids aren't "smart" about things that don't matter in the world. A kid who happens to live in the ghetto has the best memory you can find because I've seen these same kids who can't spell rattle off all of the cheat codes for Playstation and rap word for word every song that comes on the radio. How is that kid not capable of learning? They are capable, it's just that if your parents aren't capable of supplying you with the importance of education and showing you why it's important, then it won't be important. It ain't about water or vaccines or any of that, it's about parents being capable of providing for their kids the support so they can grow. This is affected by income and jobs. Which has to deal with the ever popular discussion of the failure of social policies. Now, if you talked about kids in the hood having higher cases of asthma, due to chemicals then I get it and that's evident, but even in those asthmatic kids I've seen some of the smartest kids in the country. You know why? Because their parents/parent was as involved as they could be. Now when you talk about the people born from the 60s being damaged in some way, I get it. If you were going to say that intergration and the civil rights movement actually created a lot of the issues, I would even agree with some of that argument. The bottom line for me in this discussion is that the kids born after the 60s are the kids of the Korean and Vietnam Era as well as welfare policies that removed the male influence from neighborhoods and families. This was reinforced by Reaganomics and the crack era which led to privatized prisons. I honestly lay the problem of Black America at the feet of Black men and their lack of involvement in the Black community at the parental and social level. This is why even in well to due Black households you see many of the same problems in lower income families. When Black men are in the home, they are often first time fathers who have never seen parenting. More important they are also workaholics who aren't really interacting with their kids. You have a generation of people who don't have parents who know how to parent and they can't go to anyone to discuss how to parent. I just can't blame vaccines and lead in the water when I've been raised in poverty, lived in it, taught in it, worked in it and I've seen kids who rise out because of dedicated teachers and influences and I've seen the same kids right next door taken out because they never found that one positive influence that remained consistent in their lives.