– Although it’s often assumed that The Gap is due to racism, it tends to be bigger in blue Democratic states.
– Gentrifying Washington DC now has enough white children to get a white NAEP score. Sure enough, The Gap in very liberal Washington DC is bigger than in all the states, due to a very high white score in DC and a slightly below average black score.
– German-Americans and Nordic-Americans don’t seem to know how to deal with African-Americans. As I’ve often pointed out, the biggest Gap is in Wisconsin, but in this table Nebraska, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania have the next widest Gaps. (Any relationship between this and Merkel’s Boner is probably not coincidental.)
– The highest black scores are in Dept. of Defense schools (DODEA), followed by military intensive states like Arizona and Alaska and well-educated liberals states like New Jersey and Massachusetts that also have high white scores.
– The smallest Gap is in West Virginia, which has, by far, the lowest white scores.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* In most cases, a high gap is driven by TWO things: a. above average white people and b. below average blacks. Look at the states at the top of the list and you’ll see both.
In Pennsylvania, most of the gap is probably driven by Philadelphia and its suburbs. In the prosperous suburbs, you have very high quality whites (and increasingly Asians). You have public high schools that have dozens of National Merit Scholars and where virtually 100% of the students are college bound. In the city, there was (the last time I looked) not ONE National Merit finalist in any general high school (there are a few in a couple of special magnet schools).
Philadelphia (like a lot of big Northern cities, especially those that sit just north of the Mason-Dixon line) attracted a lot of Southern blacks in the 20th century, especially during the World Wars, when work was abundant. The Low Country of South Carolina is a common origin. Brains and education were not necessary qualifications, just a strong back. Their descendants attend highly segregated schools (not that desegregation would help) where the teachers are more concerned with maintaining order and their own safety than in actually educating the students, who are really not that interested in being educated.
There’s a big todo now about that white cop who flipped a black girl out of her desk but you don’t see what went on before – the girl talking on her phone during class and refusing to get off the phone even when confronted by the teacher – that’s why the teacher called the cop to begin with. This (and much worse) is an everyday occurrence in schools that are all/mostly black. All high schools in Philadelphia have their own cops (and metal detectors, etc.) because they are needed.
It’s true that blacks who grow up in a non-black environment (e.g. Obama) tend to do a little better and in the low gap states blacks are typically less concentrated in ghettos where dysfunctional ghetto culture puts no (or negative) value on education. In the high gap states, the blacks are found in a handful of big cities (D.C, Phila, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, etc.) Those same cities have above average whites – lots of lawyers and government agencies and doctors, etc. living either in gentrified areas or the suburbs. If those cities and their ring suburbs were to fall into the ocean the rest of the state would have average gaps that you would expect from the normal 1 SD IQ gap.
* The black scores seem remarkably consistent. The best way to eliminate the gap seems to be by driving down white scores.
* The girl was a disruption and did not respond to verbal commands. His choice was to A. use non compliant physical force. B. Clear the room and wait for her to respond.
Once you have made the decision to remove her you have to do that or you will never have order in the classroom again. The fact she went over backwards is because she refused to stand when he guided her upward with his hands. She’s a full sized girl in a chair designed for children with a whole front and side that does not allow movement.
She should have stood up and moved. Most non-compliant physical force looks bad. That’s one reason you’ll see fewer and fewer cops until the tide changes again.
* Black scores are fairly even, the gap between the highest and the lowest is just 20 (not counting DoDEA). The gap between the District of Columbia and West Virginia is 44.
What that really shows is that redneck are really dumb.
* The gap is small in NY because a very large share of NYC Blacks have Caribbean roots. The English-speaking Caribbean itself is a hell-hole but for some reason Caribbean immigrants to the US do relatively well.
Blacks in Dept. of Defence schools are one point below West Virginia Whites – interesting to know.
* White people in red states might as well start agitating for special treatment and programs to close the achievement gap between them and their white cousins in blue states.
But white people aren’t allowed to agitate, and they are forbidden special treatment.
Note how the white averages cover a wide range, from the 270s all the way up well into the 300s, while the black averages are all pretty much the same, in the 250s-260s.
* These data just show that the only thing that really closes the gap is making the tests or schooling easy enough that 80-90% of blacks can pass. Of course that gives you 99% of whites passing, aka a useless measure for discriminating the performance of whites. But who cares, the SJW are pursuing justice! SJW’s define justice as equality of outcome.
* The average black-white score gap above is 31 points and since this is a cognitive (math) test we can reasonably assume the standard deviation is about 31 points*. The following is the equivalent IQ score from the NAEP data:
white 100
black 85
DC whites 112
WV whites 90
DoD blacks 90
Alabama blacks 79
* Classical and then Medieval education was about teaching the student rigorous logical reasoning. They didn’t teach Latin grammar because Latin grammar was useful. They didn’t teach geometry because geometry was useful. They didn’t teach music theory because music theory was useful. The idea was that having a mind which was habituated to the process of abstracting from mundane reality to the realm of ideas, manipulating the ideas logically, and then descending from the changed idea back to the realm of mundane reality was valuable.
Criticizing math for being non-useful in life is like watching someone sharpen a knife and then laughing at them: “What a stupid way to smooth a rock! What good are smooth rocks anyway! There are lots of pre-smoothed rocks down at the river!”
Derbyshire mentions that math was not useful in programming. In a sense, I suppose he is right. He could have learned the critical skills of abstraction and rigorous logic in some discipline other than mathematics. But he wasn’t born with those skills. They were acquired somewhere, and math is one way to get them.
* Smarter people make a bigger gap. They can narrow the gap by banging their heads on desks every day to lose a few IQ points.
* Massachusetts Blacks are definitely above the Black average, but have you ever interacted with Massachusetts Whites? Massachusetts Whites might as well be the brahmin caste of White Americans; we’re so high IQ/educated/well off/in prestigious jobs that we make Jews and Asians look like a bunch of dumb hicks who can’t do basic arithmetic. I went to a private high school where the average IQ was 118; everybody had their IQ tested and your chances of gaining acceptance went up drastically if you scored over 125. The lower IQ kids made up for their lack of IQ with hard work and good behavior. “Smart” meant you ended up at Harvard. “Average” meant you ended up at BU. “Dumb” meant you ended up at Podunk State U.
