Tuesday, January 28, 2020

The Persistent Republican-Democrat Achievement Gap

from American Thinker
Based on its own ideology, the American Left must now conclude that their own educational policies are racist. A groundbreaking study by a group called Brightbeam (“a network of education activists demanding better education and a brighter future for every child”) has discovered that cities politically dominated by progressives have far greater gaps between the average educational achievement levels of whites and minorities of blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans than cities politically dominated by conservatives.

John Hinderaker of Powerline introduced me to the findings:

This report by Chris Stewart of Brightbeam is a blockbuster. It is titled: “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity For All.” Stewart is a liberal activist from Minnesota who undertook to find out why the Twin Cities’ left-wing public schools have some of the country’s worst achievement gaps between white and minority (black and Indian) students.

Stewart compared achievement by race in a number of cities that he classified as progressive or conservative. The results didn’t surprise me, but they shocked Stewart. Conservative cities (as ranked by political scientists used as a reference for the study) consistently did a better job of closing student achievement gaps–sometimes, to zero–than progressive cities. This chart sums up the findings:

No topic is dearer to the hearts of America-hating leftists than the “achievement gap” in education. The statistical tendency of minorities deemed racially oppressed by the Left to on average score lower on academic tests and other measures of learning than whites and those minorities that out-perform the white average, in particular East Asians and Jews, always is blamed on “racism!” And the cure for racism! Is supposed to be spending more, sensitivity training, and other factors extrinsic to the underperformers. The history of discrimination against over-performing minorities like East Asians and Jews is relegated to taboo status, as is any examination of parental and cultural values as well as individual behavior of the children.

John Hinderaker links to an essay by James Bacon in Bacon’s Rebellion that sums up the data and probable causal factors:
At one extreme is San Francisco, where Democrats and progressives have long prided themselves on efforts to uplift the underprivileged. Educators are dedicated to openness, tolerance, diversity and equal opportunity. Yet the black-white cap is horrifying. Seventy percent of white students score proficient in math compared to only 12% of blacks — a chasm of 58%. For math, the gap in Washington, D.C., is even worse — 62 percentage points.

By contrast, the conservative cities of Virginia Beach, Anaheim, and Fort Worth “have effectively closed the gap in at least one of the academic categories we looked at, literally achieving a gap of zero or one,” the study reports. “The politically conservative Oklahoma City has even turned the tables on our typical thinking about race-based gaps. There, students of color outperform white students on high school graduation rates.”

The study systematically ruled out other explanations for the differences between progressive and conservative cities — per-pupil spending, income inequality, poverty rates, percentages of white and black students, and other factors. “Of all the factors we looked at progressivism is the greatest predictor.” Remarkably, despite the obsessive attention that progressives give to closing the gap for lower-income students, the racial gap in both San Francisco and Washington, D.C. is worse for low-income students than for middle- to upper-income students.
James Bacon hypothesizes what might lie behind the counterproductivity of the progressive approach:
§ Agency. By blaming racism and discrimination for the woes afflicting minority communities, progressives deprive minority students of agency — the sense that they control their own destinies and that their efforts will make a difference. If minority students see themselves as victims of systemic racism, why bother working hard and “acting white”?

§ Discipline. Progressives have implemented “social justice” approaches to school and classroom discipline on the grounds that suspensions and other punishments disproportionately affect minorities. The resulting breakdown in classroom discipline has the perverse effect of disproportionately harming the minority students whose classes are being disrupted.

§ Lower standards. As an offshoot of the “self esteem” movement, progressive educators don’t want to damage the self-esteem of minority students. Accordingly, they have lower expectations and set lower standards for minorities to offset the advantages that white students have from “white privilege.”
All of these factors make intuitive sense, yet all touch on theological beliefs of the Left, doctrines they will not give upon willingly.

No doubt, the major media will do their best to suppress the findings of the study, and however valiant the efforts of conservative media outlets to publicize the findings, they won’t influence policy makers unless and until parents of children in progressive cities go on the attack, and help themselves to the tactics that Saul Alinsky systematically laid out in Rules for Radicals. In particular, number four:
"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
Editor's note. All web copies of the original study by an organization calling itself The Brightbeam Network have been "disappeared" from the web. So whether this study was an elaborate "hoax", or simply the victim of progressive censorship remains to be discovered.

46 comments:

  1. The way schools are funded explains the achievement gap. Schools should be equally funded instead of via property taxes. Lower-income neighborhoods have less money to work with.

    Yes, I see the line in your article that claims the study took into consideration per-pupil spending, but I'm not buying it. Your article also spells "racism" with an exclamation point for some reason. A CLEAR signal that this "study" is not to be taken seriously. That is a dead giveaway right there. You can't accuse progressives of racism while mocking the concept of racism.

    Love the last line which suggests there never was such a "study". And the "racism" charge seems to be based on what "James Bacon hypothesizes". If a Lefty presented a "study" that "disappeared" you wouldn't accept it as proving anything.

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  2. Baltimore City Public Schools spent the fifth-most per student among the 100 largest school districts in the U.S. during fiscal year 2016, according to data released Monday by the Census Bureau.

    In Maryland, only two counties spent more per pupil than Baltimore City.

    Property taxes are a red herring. These "Democrat" schools ALL get state and federal subsidies (see the chart in the link).

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  3. ps - My kids live in Harford (2nd lowest per-pupil spending). I bussed (at my own personal expense) two of my kids into Baltimore City AND paid an additional $1,000 per student annual city school fee for them to attend the Baltimore School for the Arts where one child majored in acting and the other, dance.

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  4. What James Bacon hypothesizes is BS. Nobody gets into the low wage profession of teaching to tell students to give up -- they can't get ahead in life because of racism. If they hate students that much -- so much that they'd work to demoralize and get them to not try -- they wouldn't have went into the teaching profession.

    This reminds me of that ridiculous YouTube you linked to -- the one where the students only wanted to learn but the teacher would only talk about how they are victims of racism. And at the end she flew out the window. That this is how a "Democrat teacher" approaches their profession is your delusion.

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  5. Poverty's Long-Lasting Effects on Students' Education and Success. (excerpt) "The impact of poverty on a child's academic achievement is significant and starts early", says Jonah Edelman, PhD, co-founder and chief executive officer of Stand for Children, a nonprofit education advocacy organization. "Young children growing up in poverty face challenges with cognitive and literary ability and [often] begin school both academically and socioeconomically behind their peers from higher-income backgrounds". [end excerpt].

    Per-pupil spending does nothing to raise the child's family out of poverty. If the student has issues at home (poverty) they are going to bring those issues to school.

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  6. Poverty is also a proxy for genetics. Below average intelligence correlates pretty strongly with genetics.

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  7. From Charles Murray's new book, "Human Diversity":

    9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component.

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  8. Of course. A good example of how it's Democrats who are racist (meant sarcastically, of course).

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  9. btw, if you truly believe that racist bullshit (and, as a White Nationalist, I'm sure you do), then you MUST also believe the study is fake. Either it's taking away minority student's agency that is to blame, or it's genetics. It can't be both.

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  10. Did you know that Democrats have developed a cure for mental retardation? It consists wholly of ignoring it.

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  11. Rereading your prior comment, this beholder suspects you might have been equating being a minority to being mentally retarded.

    How is it that minority students (as per the fake study) do better in conservative districts when, as per your racism, genetics accounts for lower minority intelligence? Are they engaging in gene splicing experiments?

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  12. Easy. Urban Flight. It takes intelligence to escape the Democrat's city plantations.

    Baltimore is typical of many Midwestern and Northern cities, whose demographics were forever changed by the great black migration of the twentieth century. Not unexpectedly we found a cognitive discontinuity at the city line. Surprising, however, was its magnitude. Whereas suburban mean IQs (86 for blacks, 99 for whites) conform more or less to national norms, city IQs are dreadfully low. With a mean IQ of 76, inner-city blacks fall about 0.6 SD below the African American average nationally. More than a third have death-penalty immunity on grounds of mental retardation. The inner-city white mean of 86 is nearly a full standard deviation below the national white average. By this measure, whites fared worse than blacks. Both groups are seriously deficient in human capital. Neither is very employable. To compound matters, we almost certainly have overstated urban IQs. City residents constitute a low-IQ group extracted from a more cognitively representative population. Their kids, whose test scores we analyzed, should have regressed toward their racial means, i.e., toward higher IQs. That is, inner city kids are smarter than their parents. Accordingly, our estimates of inner-city IQs are best regarded as upper bounds to adult values.

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  13. OK, I got it. You DO believe African Americans are retarded. At least those living in "Democrat city plantations" :(

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  14. Yes, a high percentage are. But there are also a small percentage of African-American geniuses living there, too.

    Deal with it.

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  15. ps - The IQ's of the white people living on Democrat urban plantations isn't very high either. They were too dumb to be able to afford to get out where they could compete for more money.

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  16. As the analysis above states "inner-city white mean of 86 is nearly a full standard deviation below the national white average. By this measure, whites fared worse than blacks. Both groups are seriously deficient in human capital. Neither is very employable. "

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  17. The remaining whites are, on average, borderline retarded.

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  18. If their IQ's were to fall below 83, even the military would have no use for them.

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  19. Re: "If their IQ's were to fall below 83, even the military would have no use for them".

    Now you are insulting the troops. How very "pro military" of you. btw, how can Dotard be anti-endless-war yet believe we need a "strong" military (i.e. shovel even more money into the MIC)?

    In regards to your "Levels of IQ" chart, do you think that, if Dotard got a hold of it, he would Sharpie in "very stable genius" ABOVE "very superior"? LOL!

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  20. I served, so I'm allowed to insult them.

    And Mr. Ed was a very stable genius.

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  21. So you agree that Dotard is full of shit when he makes this claim about himself? btw, horses, no matter how smart they are, can't talk. Mr. Ed was fictional.

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  22. A 130 IQ isn't very rare. So I don't think it's a lie. It was 130 when Trump first tested, it's 130 today. Very stable.

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  23. You are full of shit. I've never found a source that gave Dotard's IQ (I have looked). I know it sure as hell is not 130. Snopes says, "a document discovered in May 2019 reveals that Donald Trump's IQ was measured at 73 during his high school years". They rate this as "false", but they're talking about a document being discovered (one wasn't) and not Dotard's IQ being 73.

    It is very obvious that 73 is closer to accurate than 130. I doubt Dotard would want the real number to get out. Just like (as per Michael Cohen) he doesn't want his grades to get out (surely because they embarrassingly bad).

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  24. LOL! "Given the usual requirements for admission to a top school like Wharton. I estimate that Mr. Trump has a 156 IQ at the minimum".

    When I said I looked, I meant I looked for a confirmed number, not a bogus estimate. I have seen the clearly BS 156 figure previously. That is why your 130 number confused me. You seemed so sure, but when I called you on your BS you provide a link that says it is NOT 130. Proof you pulled 130 out of your ass. As did Dean Keith Simonton with his fake estimate.

    FYI, your own article debunks the 156 IQ claim... Quote: Wharton's admission requirements are irrelevant, since Trump did not enter Wharton as a freshman. He transferred there is his junior year and Wharton does not list SAT scores among its requirements for transfer students. [End quote]

    Dotard's dad got his mildly mentally retarded son into Wharton the same way he got him out of serving in Vietnam. As a rich man he pulled some strings and got preferential treatment.

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  25. Also from the article you link to... quote, "he got into Wharton mainly because he had an interview with and admissions officer who had been a high school classmate of his older brother. And Wharton's admission team surely knew that Trump was from one of New York's wealthiest families".

    Ooops! Not a good source for you to link to after all. LOL!

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  26. btw, now that I think about it, the article you linked to was the same article I read previously. I remember now that they first gave the bogus 156 number, then later explain the real reason why Dotard got into Wharton. What a poorly written article. First they "confirm" a fake IQ for Dotard, then later debunk their own fake claim. Weird.

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  27. So the eff what? All Dotard did was SAY he is a genius. There is no evidence to support that claim and LOTS of evidence to dispute it. If we're just going with our guts (what you did) then my gut (and all the available evidence) says Dotard's IQ is 73.

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  28. You think someone with a 73 IQ would brag about it? Transcripts aren't a part of the public record. Even if you think Barack Obama's scholastic records should be.

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  29. That you could believe a 73 IQ could ever attend UPenn shows just how gullible you are.

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  30. I DO believe it. The article you linked to says he cheated to get into Wharton, so it's not a big stretch at all to believe he cheated to get into UPenn or graduate from Wharton. And Dotard IS clearly a moron. Additionally, the evidence says he always has been a moron.

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  31. Quote: Jared Kushner, who serves as a top aide to Trump, and his acceptance to the Ivy League school was investigated as part of the 2006 book "The Price of Admission" written by ProPublica editor Daniel Golden. The book examined how the nation's wealthy buy their children into prestigious schools with tax write-offs and other donations. One such donation was made by Kushner's father, real estate developer Charles Kushner. [end quote].

    Buying degrees for their stupid kids is a perk of being wealthy.

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  32. Of course you believe that cheating you get away with isn't cheating. Same as crimes you commit aren't actually crimes. Excepting Democrats (and especially Barack Obama) of course. Was Obama booted from the presidency due to his being ineligible? Guess you didn't prove he was born in Kenya.

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  33. He bought their silence.

    Quote: An investigation published last week by the campus newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, found that Donald Trump may have given over a million dollars to Penn over the course of the past three decades. [end quote].

    He was only there 2 years. Additionally, we know Dotard is stingy and has actually stolen from his own charities. So why in the hell would he give so much money to Penn? Especially when they dislike him there (as per the linked-to article).

    :P

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  34. Silence is proof? The real saying is, "silence is consent". :)

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  35. OK. So they agreed to keep Dotard's academic records (poor despite his cheating) under wraps. I'll agree with you on that. btw, I remember that you like to use the phrase "silence is consent" to excuse rape. This is another situation entirely.

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