Steve Sailer writes: We’ve had a couple of commenters in the past who were superbright Hawaiian intellectuals, which is a pretty rare thing.
The federal government has invested a lot of money in Hawaii over the decades. For example, Congress put up a lot of money to start the East-West Center at the U. of Hawaii as America’s version of the Lumumba University in Moscow for waging the Cold War around the Pacific Rim. The President’s mother was affiliated with it for much of her career.
But Hawaii has really dropped off the radar.
For example, I’ve seldom heard anybody say anything insightful about the President in relation to his being from Hawaii. Nobody pays attention to Hawaii anymore, even though it was an obsession in the 1960s and into the 1970s.
The idea is to figure out which state has the best educational policies and which are executing the worst: It looks like Massachusetts does education well. The state underwent a big reform 20 years ago and it seems like it was pretty legit. Texas and Indiana are next.
California is clearly pretty bad at public schooling, a combination of liberalism of ideology and conservatism of budget. It has pretty limited budgets and then it wastes what money it does spend. LAUSD was destroyed by busing in 1978. Jewish parents pulled their kids out of public schools. That’s pretty much been memory-holed.
Louisiana isn’t all that bad, not compared to its lackadaisical traditions, perhaps due to post-Katrina reforms.
But most states are pretty average: adjusting for demographics reduces the spread in scores. There are a few outliers: Indiana, a state with smart governors recently, is particularly interesting. But there really isn’t all that much variation once you adjust for demographics, suggesting that demography is the 800 pound gorilla.
But also some of the variation is accounted for by differences within groups: Florida looks pretty good, but that may be because its Hispanics are fairly white. Massachusetts probably has smarter white people than West Virgina has on average, and so forth.
– They are looking at grade equivalents above or below the national average. If a state at averages one grade above the country it would be at +12 months.
– They are doing a multiple regression in which the national averages for each race, for free lunch or not free lunch, for special ed, etc. are adjusted to what they’d be at the national average. For example, Mississippi’s school system isn’t as bad as it looks from raw scores, it just has a whole bunch of blacks and poor whites. Minnesota’s isn’t as great as it seems, it just has a lot of middle class whites.
* Hawaii has been another portait of our future for generations.
It is a textbook case of elite-driven cheap-labor-importing population replacement, and the results are evident in those test results.
The overthrow of the Hawaiian nation was accomplished through the machinations of a group of what we would now consider foreign global elites who wanted cheap labor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Kingdom_of_Hawaii
Filipinos are now the largest ethnic group, and growing due to immigration, birthrate and young age.
The test results show the future of Hawaii more than other things because they look at the students (kids), whose ethnic breakdown skews much further toward recent immigrants, etc. Median age of the Japanese is way higher, and they aren’t taking tests in school anymore.
There are now more Filipinos than whites or Japanese, and, I think, more Hispanics than there are Hawaiians.
Sad!
* Many public schools in the US are like foreign entities. I like to call them government schools actually.
I live in a rich area, but one where they bus in the Mexicans to attend the public schools and hence you must go private. It pisses me off that my property tax dollars educate Latin America’s lower class. These government schools are like a different universe from the private schools. I would never, ever subject my children to the government school hellholes. I would drive two hours each way to work to prevent my children from attending the government schools. I would eat one meal a day. I would simply never send them there.
I love to laugh at the suckers who say with a straight face that more money will help these schools/kids. What a joke! My kids are very young but they are already too far ahead for these public school kids to ever catch them. My two year old can identify states, countries, planets, etc. Talks in complete sentences. But if they only had money for universal Pre-K, every public school kid would be talking like my kid! What a joke. It’s mostly demographics/IQ with some parenting thrown in there at the margin and to help with focus. But we are paying to educate Latin America’s lower classes.
* You are not going to get to the very top unless you have a lot of “Belmont” type places in your state (Belmont is literally in MA, a Boston suburb right next to #1 Lexington). That’s where you get a lot of synergies – lots of high IQ white (and increasingly Asian) kids from homes where education is highly valued, better credentialed teachers to teach them, wealthy school districts with lots of $ to spend/waste on fancy labs and programs and those teachers with high credentials, a competitive environment where kids try to outdo each other academically and being intellectual is not something that you try to hide from your peers so you don’t get beaten up, etc. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of Belmonts in Utah and Idaho.
In Pennsylvania, the state that I am most familiar with, if you look at the list of National Merit Scholars, probably 80% of the winners come from these Belmont type places – the rich suburbs that surround Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. These are also the schools with high NAEP scores that boost the state average.
Philadelphia itself is almost a black hole in relation to its population. Not just because the schools are mostly black (although that is a major factor) but also because the remaining whites fall mostly into categories that produce few if any National Merit types: first of all, childless whites – young hipsters, empty nesters, gays. 2nd, lower class Fishtown whites – literally, since the actual Fishtown is in Phila. (Fishtown itself is increasingly gentrified but again these are young hipsters who are mostly childless or whose kids are too young to be in high school). There are enough upscale whites with kids to support a couple of public magnet schools, but that’s a drop in the bucket in a city of 1.5 million (formerly 2M – between 1950 and 2000, half a million whites fled to the suburbs).
What was shocking (to me at least, when I saw it) is that once you take away the magnet schools and the private and Catholic Schools and look at the general enrollment public schools, the entire city produces ZERO National Merit Scholars – nada, none, zilch. Not one in the whole public school system. Even if you count all schools, the total # of semifinalists is very low in relation to population size. There is one suburban district (Tredyffrin/Easttown listed below as ” Berwyn -Conestoga High School”) with a total (not school, but total) population of 40,000 people that produces about as many merit scholars as the ENTIRE city of Phila. that has almost 40x as many people.
Nor does the rest of the state contribute a lot, despite being fairly white. The joke about Pennsylvania is that if you take away Philly and Pittsburgh and their suburbs, what is left is West Virginia. This is about right. If you cross out Phila. and Pittsburgh and their suburbs, the list gets VERY short.
* From my experience, Iowa and the Dakotas are somewhat unique in their mediocrity. And I say that as a compliment.
The middle and upper middle class kids from those states just aren’t that impressive academically when compared to East Coast states. (They’re also not a bunch of status-obsessed douchebags like so many East Coast kids.)
On the other end, poor and working class kids from those states generally don’t cause too many problems, do a bit of homework and generally score reasonably well for their class and IQ, while poor and working class whites on the East Coast seem to be falling apart. (Fishtown.)
Iowa and the Dakotas: Our highs aren’t too high, and out lows aren’t too low. Steady Eddies, just how we like it.
I wonder if migration patterns haven’t impacted Iowa and the Dakotas. They are nice enough places to live but not the most exciting. From my experience, the more ambitious and intellectually curious (not necessarily always the highest IQ though I’m sure there’s a fair amount of crossover), tend to leave for Minneapolis (somewhat ambitious), Chicago (more ambitious) or the East and West Coasts (the most ambitious), leaving behind capable but not outstanding middle and upper middle class young people. The working and lower-middle class kids stick around, keeping family and town/neighborhood ties intact, which is very helpful for the next generation of lower IQ kids.
* If we are going to have a genetic arms race then we are going to lose, badly. The Chinese are very unsentimental about this kind of stuff and are willing to abort for sex selection, etc. Whereas in America we will diddle along and take decades to approve it and many people won’t want to do it, either because it is “unnatural” or it violates their religion or yada yada yada and by the time (if ever) it is approved here the Chinese will have another 15 IQ points on us and it will be game over.
* “The achievement gap between white and minority students remains as big as ever in Minnesota schools, despite a “restorative justice” approach to student discipline designed to address the problem … student achievement has flatlined.. despite efforts to keep unruly minority students in school with a “restorative justice” discipline policy, a persistent achievement gap shows the approach has had little effect.”
LOL. This is what James Taranto of the WSJ Journal calls “The Butterfield Effect”, named for NYT reporter Fox Butterfield who wrote about “paradoxes” such as “Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates” (this was literally the title of his story).
Whenever you see “despite” in a story written by liberals they have the arrow of causation backward 9 times out of 10. Michael Crichton called this “wet streets cause rain” in his description of the “Gell Mann Amnesia effect” – that when you read the paper about some topic about which you have personal knowledge (in Gell Mann’s case, physics), you immediately recognize that the reporters are clueless idiots that have everything totally backwards and could not possibly be more wrong (wet streets cause rain), but then you turn the page and read about international affairs or something else of which you have no personal knowledge and on those stories you suddenly develop amnesia and forget that the reporters are total fools and you actually believe what they have to say about those topics.
* The high cost of living keeping out the students who would otherwise force the high-scoring students into private schools.
Once upon a time, those who ran the public schools understood this dynamic and so kept the disruptive students from driving out the high scorers, but nowadays the “elites” prevent them from doing so, not coincidentally preserving their own relative position thereby.
* Dysfunctional minorities can remain very isolated because nobody wants their genes, but where the larger society does not impose barriers, even the most resistant successful minorities will break down over time. We are now seeing the dissolution of the American Jews in this way (a few generations of 70+% intermarriage rates for non-Orthodox Jews and there will be none) but it took 50+ years from the time that the societal barriers fell. Kaling herself dates B.J. Novak , a non-Indian (Jewish) guy. The Indians are a few generations behind the Jews but they will suffer the same fate. The Indian community will make valiant efforts to keep their kids from intermarrying (a tradition of arranged marriage helps) but in the long run it will be a losing battle.
