Obviously, one size fits all classrooms don't work - but this must not be used as an excuse to further existing inequalities. I hear a lot more horror stories about people being discouraged from sufficiently challenging material than being pushed into it - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1lrvit/what_memor... has a lot of examples, to pick one random internet thread from this week. One thing that we can fully agree on is that NCLB is horrible policy. Uniform education, with no catering to the genuine interests and capacities, is stupid; only a few alternatives, like not educating the majority of people, or basing education on statistical arguments about amorphous groups rather than individual merit, are stupider.
Our civilizations, for the most part, don't cultivate genius, unfortunately. And geniuses aren't radically less common in some groups, unless you mean groups like "people who suffered severe childhood malnutrition". Normal schools aren't really set up to deal with people with IQs more than a standard deviation, or perhaps two standard deviations, from the norm.
If you define genius to be an IQ of 160+, and model it as a Gaussian with a standard deviation of 15, most schools have no geniuses of any race. If you take a more-reasonable fat-tailed distribution, many schools still don't.
My personal, anecdotal bias: the best school I went to was quite small, and had several geniuses - including a black one. There weren't many black kids, but the ones who were there were exceptional; I wouldn't be surprised if they had the highest average IQ of any ethnic group at the school (and yes, there were plenty of Asian and Jewish students, from several countries).
Our civilizations, for the most part, don't cultivate genius, unfortunately. And geniuses aren't radically less common in some groups, unless you mean groups like "people who suffered severe childhood malnutrition". Normal schools aren't really set up to deal with people with IQs more than a standard deviation, or perhaps two standard deviations, from the norm.
If you define genius to be an IQ of 160+, and model it as a Gaussian with a standard deviation of 15, most schools have no geniuses of any race. If you take a more-reasonable fat-tailed distribution, many schools still don't.
My personal, anecdotal bias: the best school I went to was quite small, and had several geniuses - including a black one. There weren't many black kids, but the ones who were there were exceptional; I wouldn't be surprised if they had the highest average IQ of any ethnic group at the school (and yes, there were plenty of Asian and Jewish students, from several countries).