Steve Sailer writes: From my new column in Taki’s Magazine about a huge new database of school achievement test scores that answers the old question: Is there any single place in America where blacks (0r Hispanics) outscore whites on cognitive tests?
Crevasses in the Classroom
by Steve Sailer
May 04, 2016
Where are racial gaps in school test scores worst? Ironically, where liberals are most dominant.
The new national database of school-district test scores created by education researchers at Stanford and Harvard reveals that the single widest white-black racial gap in American public school districts is in the city most synonymous with leftism since 1964: Berkeley, California.
How badly do blacks lag whites in Berkeley public schools? Berkeley’s white-black gap is 1.60 standard deviations. In other words, the median black student would score at only the 5th percentile if he were white.
Yet, Berkeley is ferociously antiracist. It was the first to have a Black Studies Department at the high school level. In the 2012 election, Berkeley voted for Obama over Romney 90 to 5. Berkeley Unified school-district administrators obsess over any data showing that black students get punished more than other races.
Still, the racial gap is bigger in Berkeley than anywhere else. …
The worst white-black gaps tend to be found in old-money liberal towns like Berkeley, Chapel Hill, Shaker Heights, Asheville, and Evanston (the five worst examples of racial inequality in America according to the new Stanford test score database) that can afford a lot of liberal white guilt, which attracts black welfare moms.
Read the whole thing there.
The examples where NAMs score above or just below whites are pretty funny.
I also point out the school district where blacks and Hispanics score highest in all of America, which is pretty ironic.
I love writing these kind of articles where I take an academic’s database, re-sort it, and point out what’s really going on.
COMMENTS:
* In the dark days of the 19th century, when women and minorities were hunted for sport and everybody was wrong about everything, a situation being exactly the same all over the world would have led to scientific conclusions.
* OT, but today’s print UK Guardian features an 8-page souvenir pullout on 5,000-1 outsiders Leicester City winning the English Premier League (footy/soccer).
* In order to make sense of the gaps, you have to look at race AND social class. So in a place where you have high class whites and low class minorities you are going to have a large gap, in a place where you have low class whites and low class minorities you’ll have a smaller gap. In a new city like Frisco where everyone is more or less middle class, the gap will be somewhere in between.
The reason that Berkeley does even worse with black students than a place like Philadelphia is that they are trying to teach blacks in unstructured white liberal learning style. This doesn’t even work that well for whites, but for blacks it is disastrous. I’m sure that they also put the blacks in the same classes as whites out of anti-racism so the black students are unable to keep up with the pace and fall hopelessly behind.
Once they get to the high school level and the hormones kick in, Philadelphia schools are pretty rough places, but at the elementary school level they have made some progress by imposing structure on the kids, especially in the “charter schools”. Most of the public schools require uniforms and they break the material down to a level that blacks can hope to understand, etc. The elementary schools at least are surprisingly orderly places. They are never going to turn out rocket scientists because of the raw material that they have to work with, but they do teach a certain basic level of literacy.
What were the odds against President Trump 2016 at the start of the campaign? I’m looking forward to the Guardian’s souvenir pullout already.
* So you want to take issue with the hate fact promulgated by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, whose chart Steve has published in the past, showing that blacks students from families with yearly incomes over $200K have LOWER test scores than white kids with family incomes under $40K?
* “A practice of Gypsy hunting was quite common—a game very similar to fox hunting. Even as late as 1835, there was a Gypsy hunt in Jutland (Denmark) that brought in a bag of over 260 men, women and children.”
—Gypsies of the White Mountains: History of a Nomadic Culture
* I think a lot of educators instinctively know this even if it is never vocalized – hence the hatred of No Child Left Behind and the goal of getting minority students to perform the same on standardized tests as white kids. They knew this would be an impossible goal to realize and that teachers are a convenient scapegoat for underperforming kids, rather than their parents or communities.
I seem to recall a few years back DC proposed abandoning equalizing white and black test scores and just focus on how much of a percentage increase black students could achieve over past benchmarks. It was accompanied with the usual comments about privilege, private tutors, and so on (I honestly don’t know any parents who use private tutors), but it was a surprisingly realistic perspective about what is possible.
* A lot of BHS alums in my family. The first issue is that Berkeley is naturally going to be the public school district for all of the faculty (and grad students and post docs with children) at UC Berkeley (Cal), which is right up the street. It’s also home to a large number of intellectual-High IQ types who work in San Francisco, or wherever (Michael Chabon, doctors, lawyers, CEO’s, CFO’s, etc.) These people are vastly white.
On the other hand, there are neighborhoods to the west near the bay and south leading into Oakland and this is where the black students come from. The area to the West is where there was a Portuguese community (Billy Martin grew up there), but that was supplanted by Latinos and Blacks a long time ago, and the main N-S drag in that part of town, San Pablo, was where the hookers and pimps hung out, catching all the traffic from Richmond down to Oakland (IIRC, the blaxploitation movie, “The Mack” was largely shot there.)
The neighborhoods to the south that bleed into Oakland — remember, there is no barrier or anything, it’s just that at some point in the grid you are no longer in Berkeley, you are in Oakland — used to be a location for a lot of poor blacks also. (The word I get from the West Coast now is that there’s a lot of gentrification all over).
Since the pre-HS schools are mostly locally fed, there probably isn’t a lot of integration in the schools at that level, as a matter of fact. There isn’t such a tradition at the HS, either. Basically what used to happen is that blacks and whites were put on separate academic tracks, so they rarely took the same classes, unless someone went out of their way to cross over. Friends who taught there within the past 20 years or so indicate that this bifurcation simply got more pronounced, Disraeli’s “two nations” comes to mind.
* Honest teachers from diverse districts will tell you Steve is, of course, correct in his interpretation of this data. They endure all the crap programs and unfair evaluations thrown at them in the expectation that natural gaps can be closed. They also have to put up with “vibrant” discipline problems without much backup from politically correct (and often corrupt) administrations. Can’t have “disparate impact” on expulsion numbers, you know.
I have another, related subject:
Even in homogenous white school districts, there is another crevasse teachers are expected to cross: that between “special needs” kids and the rest of the class. Affluent districts, like the one where I live, throw more money every year at the ludicrous idea of “inclusion,” and we pay for it with our outrageous, ever-increasing, property taxes.
The insane idea that everyone is an equivalent blank slate is costing us billions of dollars and robbing students of the opportunity to learn at their own, appropriate levels. It’s also driving good teachers nuts!
It’s all the same, half-century-old, left-wing bullshit — and it’s killing us.
* Berkeley, Chapel Hill, Shaker Heights, Asheville, and Evanston are all university towns: so what that will mean is that the (mostly non-black) universities will strongly bias against the black population.
Why that isn’t an issue in Cambridge, Mass., New Haven, CT, etc. I do not know, probably a zoning issue. I know that most of the Ivy League colleges are sequestered from large minority populations simply by where they are. (Not U Penn, though: but Philly, like New York, is huge.)
O/T but can’t resist: How can any Republican actively support Hillary for president? Impossible, I think. The fact that the National Review is asking for donations because Trump “hates them” just shows that NR is now fully functional irrelevant.
* I love the various school test scores databases. As I explain to liberals, school teachers are not only racist, they are active participants in the largest secret racist conspiracy in the USA.
In the 16000 school systems in America, not a single one–NOT ONE–shows black test scores greater than white test scores. Since “all men are created equal”, the odds of this happening by chance are infinitesimally small.
It must be intentional and it must be coordinated. There is no other explanation.
And then I tell them I will give them $100 if they can find one single school district where blacks score higher than whites.
[There is one city. As best I remember, in a 20+city study of urban schools conducted 10-20 years ago, Detroit black boys scored higher than Detroit white boys.]
* The “average white person” in this country has an IQ of 100. The average black person in this country has a IQ of 85. That’s a hell of a difference. No one has said the average black or white is a “total idiot” or that the average black or white is “dumb.”
What has been said and what IS true is that the mean (or average) in cognitive abilities between population groups differ–that, therefore, there IS a gap one can expect to see in achievement in schools and that we’ve spent time, money, and talent trying to do the impossible, make the damn gap go away so that good little anti-science “Progressives” (god, what a name), can feel better about everybody being the same, or they say, “equal.”
Yeah, as you suggested, “average” ain’t all that bright,but a hell of a lot of average folks have been productive citizens and taxpayers throughout our history. You must also understand that some averages are MUCH higher than others. In other words, averages aren’t “equal.”
Schools would be better if we understood we can achieve some things with “average” and “below average”; we could start by understanding that the more “average” and “below average” kids are, the more structure they need, not less, as stupid anti-science sorts would have you believe.
* The national average racial gap between whites vs. blacks & Hispanics is 2 grade levels, to give you a sense of scale.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/achievement-gap/
So if you figure that the school age population is around 1/2 white, 1/2 other, that means that the average white kid would be around 1 grade level above the average of all races. So the white kids in Berkeley are ANOTHER 1.7 grade levels ahead of the average white kid. If you figure that the average white kid in Berkeley is the child of a professor or other educated professional, this is not impossible. Figure that these kids are either actual Ashkenazi Jews or about as smart as average Ashkenazi Jews – they are a group that is roughly as far ahead of whites in intelligence as whites are of blacks. Because Jews are such a small segment of the population, 3 out of 4 smart people will still be non-Jewish on average.
* I don’t think liberal old money towns have been all that welcoming of poor blacks in the last 30 years or so, but they’re stuck with the descendants of the ones their grandparents welcomed in more optimistic times.
* I seriously doubt if Mexico will ever annex its former territories, because if it did, it would be in as bad shape as the rest of Mexico within a couple of decades. I don’t think the Mexicans want that, and I don’t think the illegal immigrant Mexicans want that, either.
Remember, these Mexicans are not coming to the US in order to squat for reconquista. They are coming here because they can make actual money here, have a decent life here, get social benefits that actually function properly, have an environment where they are physically much safer, and have a better future. It’s like a black couple moving out of the ghetto into a white suburb: they aren’t doing this to be the expeditionary force for some colony ghetto, they are moving there to get away from the ghetto.
* Having been a public school teacher in both Detroit and Richmond CA (just up the road from Berkeley), and currently a teacher in truly one of the nation’s most diverse districts anywhere, I count myself as an absolute authority on all things public schooley:
Chaldean-Americans (Middle-Eastern Iraqi Christians with an incredible amount of ethnocentric tribalism and Old-World conspiracy-mongering thrown in) make up a huge part of the “whites” of Detroit, Sterling Heights and West Bloomfield.
Hard-working at the store or business (open late, much to the academic detriment of the teenage sons who are expected to close the cell-phone store or the liquor store), the Chaldean community is the future of America, I think. Not terribly interested in the kind of effort for real academic achievement, but certainly interested in learning enough to get by.
The girls are usually quite attractive and generally sociable. Many cultures do much worse in protecting their young women from unwanted attention. Chaldean girls do not suffer any unwanted pregnancies. No way. It does not happen, and that is refreshing, given the crude sexual advances that many young black men make toward the black girls.
Most of the boys are quite confident and happy to be in America. If we are looking for a “model” minority, we could do a lot worse than Chaldean-Americans. If they are the future, and maybe they are, then things will be OK.
Not great, just OK.
But, with 4 billion Africans looming on the horizon of the next generation, well, maybe “OK” will have to do.
* And the systemic test cheating in Atlanta has been flushed down the memory hole.
