Not at all surprising. But great job. I would bet that if you drew a regression curve looking at bad outcomes for African Americans, racism would have little or no independent effect and most of the effect would be due to family structure
Here are my 2016 and 2019 columns on how the Stanford Education Data Archive shows the biggest white-black test score gaps are in liberal school districts like Berkeley:
Hypothesis: the larger BW gap in blue areas may be partly explained by progressives’ stronger commitment to “desegregation”, which leads them to do various things that put smart whites and relatively unselected blacks in the same school districts. Conservatives may be less inclined to do things that produce this outcome.
Consider a simple “Meritocratic Model” with the following assumptions:
1. Each child attends school in the school district in which they live;
2. Each household spends its entire income on housing, and buys a house in the highest-performing school district that it can afford;
3. The correlation between parent income and parent IQ is 1.0;
4. The correlation between parent IQ and child IQ is 1.0;
5. The correlation between child IQ and child standardized test performance is 1.0.
In the Meritocratic Model, even if there’s a national IQ gap between blacks and whites, the within-district test score gap is ZERO. In this model, few black students end up in the highest-performing school districts, since few black parents can afford housing in those districts. But those few students are selected by the same process as the white students, and perform at the same level.
Now consider the “DEI Model”, which makes additional assumptions:
6. Some black students from the region’s cheaper, lower-performing school districts are allowed to enroll in the region’s expensive, higher-performing school districts, even though they don’t live in those districts (busing);
7. Some lower-income black households are given subsidized housing in the region’s expensive, higher-performing school districts, allowing them to live in those districts without passing through the normal income/IQ filter (affordable housing).
Perhaps we see a larger BW gap in blue areas because these places implement parts of the DEI Model, while the red areas stay closer to the Meritocratic Model.
Let's try this by looking in detail at one region: Massachusetts.
The district-level data is more granular than the county-level data in Emil’s paper, but the results are the same. In absolute terms, the highest black scores are found in quiet, politically moderate suburbs well outside Boston (example: Franklin, in which blacks are 0.99 grades above the national level) while blacks do worse in the posh, progressive inner suburbs (example: Charles Murray’s Belmont, in which blacks are only 0.31 grades above the national level). But the whites in Belmont far outperform the whites in Franklin (3.48 grades above national level versus 2.47).
Could busing be contributing to the gaps? Quite possibly. Massachusetts has a longstanding regional busing program called METCO, in which certain highly-ranked inner suburbs admit black and Hispanic urban residents, selected by lottery, into their schools. Here’s a link to a map with the Boston suburbs that participate in METCO and the numbers of METCO students that they take: https://metcoinc.org/about/partner-districts/. Notice the similarity between this map and the SEDA map I linked above.
Could subsidized housing be contributing to the gaps? Yes, it might. Massachusetts has a longstanding affordable housing program called 40B that produces below-market housing in pricey suburbs. It has “affirmative fair housing” provisions that give minorities a leg up in the qualification process, and other provisions that ensure that many of the units go to people with children. There are other housing programs too.
Perhaps progressives implement other “desegregation” measures along these lines that I don’t know about.
Anecdotally, the politically moderate outer suburbs in which blacks do best contain mostly single-family homes and are too far from the city for busing. Perhaps the smaller numbers of black students in these towns tend to be the children of bourgeois, middle-class blacks who enter the town by the same meritocratic method as their white neighbors: they earn solid incomes and buy houses.
One of the smallest white-black test score gaps in the country is found at Carpenter elementary school in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. It's in an expensive neighborhood near TV and movie studios. The black population is only a few percent of the total, and they tend to be in the entertainment business (a field in which blacks are quite competitive and thus attracts top blacks). Some of the whites, in contrast, are literally grandfathered in by Proposition 13 and thus don't need to be as prosperous to afford to live there.
Berkeley, which has a huge White-Black test score gap, busses in kids from Oakland. But it also has a history of black parents complaining that Berkeley schools are too progressive and not focused enough on basics. (Interestingly, Asians tend to stay away from Berkeley public schools.)
Evanston has a different reason for its huge White-Black gap: the last time I was there, in the 1990s, it had a micro-ghetto about 4 blocks across that had been built over 100 years ago as a servants' quarter for the mansion district of Evanston. Middle class black friends in Evanston told us that they and their peers send their kids to Catholic school to keep them away from the underclass blacks in the public schools.
San Francisco is so expensive that the only blacks that can live there tend to be in free public housing projects.
Thanks. It looks like the story here is fairly straightforward.
Despite the progressives’ obsession with them, the BW gaps themselves are uninteresting, since they’re a function of the raw B and W scores. The question is what determines those scores.
Since academic ability is mostly innate, the good schools are simply those that select good students. But most good public schools select students indirectly, by imposing real estate price barriers that select for parents with high incomes.
It looks like the progressive areas tend to impose harsh income filters on white parents/children, but let certain black parents/students off easier. This increases the gap size in those areas.
More speculatively: I would bet that the very smartest individual black students are *not* in the Republican areas, as one might predict from the aggregate data, but rather in the same progressive school districts as the smartest white students. These would be the children of black professionals in finance, law, etc. who earn high incomes and do actually pass through the real estate price filter that the local white parents pass through. But these students are probably relatively few in number, so their scores are offset by the lower-scoring black students in those districts.
I think another possible factor is whites in rural republican areas have lower IQs then thier counterparts in say nyc San Francisco and Los Angeles, also jews tend to be in urban areas further skewing the IQ gap
It could be possible you need a threshold of black to white population ratio for systemic racial prejudice to manifest. I don’t see that parameter in the data distribution. Again good work. Appreciate the effort a god read for data inclined.
Inner cities combine inability to afford living in the suburbs with typical liberal city welfare states. It selects for the worst blacks.
Blacks that can afford to get a mortgage and move out to the suburbs/exurbs are better blacks, relatively speaking.
Conversely, in the more gentrified cities with lots of urban professionals the white mean tends to be very high. There is in a way a kind of perverse relationship. The worse the blacks are the more only UMC whites can afford to segregate away from their dysfunction, with middle class whites moving out of the suburbs to escape it.
So areas with high GOP vote share tend to be more middle class of all races, while areas with high DEM vote share tend to be highly segregated high/low coalitions.
Not at all surprising. But great job. I would bet that if you drew a regression curve looking at bad outcomes for African Americans, racism would have little or no independent effect and most of the effect would be due to family structure
Here are my 2016 and 2019 columns on how the Stanford Education Data Archive shows the biggest white-black test score gaps are in liberal school districts like Berkeley:
https://www.takimag.com/article/crevasses_in_the_classroom_steve_sailer/
https://www.takimag.com/article/san-francisco-vs-frisco/
Hypothesis: the larger BW gap in blue areas may be partly explained by progressives’ stronger commitment to “desegregation”, which leads them to do various things that put smart whites and relatively unselected blacks in the same school districts. Conservatives may be less inclined to do things that produce this outcome.
Consider a simple “Meritocratic Model” with the following assumptions:
1. Each child attends school in the school district in which they live;
2. Each household spends its entire income on housing, and buys a house in the highest-performing school district that it can afford;
3. The correlation between parent income and parent IQ is 1.0;
4. The correlation between parent IQ and child IQ is 1.0;
5. The correlation between child IQ and child standardized test performance is 1.0.
In the Meritocratic Model, even if there’s a national IQ gap between blacks and whites, the within-district test score gap is ZERO. In this model, few black students end up in the highest-performing school districts, since few black parents can afford housing in those districts. But those few students are selected by the same process as the white students, and perform at the same level.
Now consider the “DEI Model”, which makes additional assumptions:
6. Some black students from the region’s cheaper, lower-performing school districts are allowed to enroll in the region’s expensive, higher-performing school districts, even though they don’t live in those districts (busing);
7. Some lower-income black households are given subsidized housing in the region’s expensive, higher-performing school districts, allowing them to live in those districts without passing through the normal income/IQ filter (affordable housing).
Perhaps we see a larger BW gap in blue areas because these places implement parts of the DEI Model, while the red areas stay closer to the Meritocratic Model.
Let's try this by looking in detail at one region: Massachusetts.
Here is a link to a SEDA map that shows the magnitude of the district-level BW gaps in Massachusetts: https://edopportunity.org/explorer/#/map/none/districts/avg/ses/wb/8.52/42.26/-71.16/. As expected, the gaps are largest in the strongly Democratic inner suburbs near Boston.
The district-level data is more granular than the county-level data in Emil’s paper, but the results are the same. In absolute terms, the highest black scores are found in quiet, politically moderate suburbs well outside Boston (example: Franklin, in which blacks are 0.99 grades above the national level) while blacks do worse in the posh, progressive inner suburbs (example: Charles Murray’s Belmont, in which blacks are only 0.31 grades above the national level). But the whites in Belmont far outperform the whites in Franklin (3.48 grades above national level versus 2.47).
Could busing be contributing to the gaps? Quite possibly. Massachusetts has a longstanding regional busing program called METCO, in which certain highly-ranked inner suburbs admit black and Hispanic urban residents, selected by lottery, into their schools. Here’s a link to a map with the Boston suburbs that participate in METCO and the numbers of METCO students that they take: https://metcoinc.org/about/partner-districts/. Notice the similarity between this map and the SEDA map I linked above.
Could subsidized housing be contributing to the gaps? Yes, it might. Massachusetts has a longstanding affordable housing program called 40B that produces below-market housing in pricey suburbs. It has “affirmative fair housing” provisions that give minorities a leg up in the qualification process, and other provisions that ensure that many of the units go to people with children. There are other housing programs too.
Perhaps progressives implement other “desegregation” measures along these lines that I don’t know about.
Anecdotally, the politically moderate outer suburbs in which blacks do best contain mostly single-family homes and are too far from the city for busing. Perhaps the smaller numbers of black students in these towns tend to be the children of bourgeois, middle-class blacks who enter the town by the same meritocratic method as their white neighbors: they earn solid incomes and buy houses.
One of the smallest white-black test score gaps in the country is found at Carpenter elementary school in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. It's in an expensive neighborhood near TV and movie studios. The black population is only a few percent of the total, and they tend to be in the entertainment business (a field in which blacks are quite competitive and thus attracts top blacks). Some of the whites, in contrast, are literally grandfathered in by Proposition 13 and thus don't need to be as prosperous to afford to live there.
Berkeley, which has a huge White-Black test score gap, busses in kids from Oakland. But it also has a history of black parents complaining that Berkeley schools are too progressive and not focused enough on basics. (Interestingly, Asians tend to stay away from Berkeley public schools.)
Evanston has a different reason for its huge White-Black gap: the last time I was there, in the 1990s, it had a micro-ghetto about 4 blocks across that had been built over 100 years ago as a servants' quarter for the mansion district of Evanston. Middle class black friends in Evanston told us that they and their peers send their kids to Catholic school to keep them away from the underclass blacks in the public schools.
San Francisco is so expensive that the only blacks that can live there tend to be in free public housing projects.
Thanks. It looks like the story here is fairly straightforward.
Despite the progressives’ obsession with them, the BW gaps themselves are uninteresting, since they’re a function of the raw B and W scores. The question is what determines those scores.
Since academic ability is mostly innate, the good schools are simply those that select good students. But most good public schools select students indirectly, by imposing real estate price barriers that select for parents with high incomes.
It looks like the progressive areas tend to impose harsh income filters on white parents/children, but let certain black parents/students off easier. This increases the gap size in those areas.
More speculatively: I would bet that the very smartest individual black students are *not* in the Republican areas, as one might predict from the aggregate data, but rather in the same progressive school districts as the smartest white students. These would be the children of black professionals in finance, law, etc. who earn high incomes and do actually pass through the real estate price filter that the local white parents pass through. But these students are probably relatively few in number, so their scores are offset by the lower-scoring black students in those districts.
Any clue what happened to Pesta? Looks like judge is going to dismiss his lawsuit.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67021659/pesta-v-cleveland-state-university/
more BS nonsense.
I think another possible factor is whites in rural republican areas have lower IQs then thier counterparts in say nyc San Francisco and Los Angeles, also jews tend to be in urban areas further skewing the IQ gap
Excellent racist opinion good for you
Well or this show White Supremacy is good for non-caucasians or is a scam, whether you choose it bust white racista oppression narrative
It could be possible you need a threshold of black to white population ratio for systemic racial prejudice to manifest. I don’t see that parameter in the data distribution. Again good work. Appreciate the effort a god read for data inclined.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/city.htm
Baltimore City Blacks: 76
Baltimore County Blacks: 86
Blacks in the inner city are the dumbest blacks.
Inner cities combine inability to afford living in the suburbs with typical liberal city welfare states. It selects for the worst blacks.
Blacks that can afford to get a mortgage and move out to the suburbs/exurbs are better blacks, relatively speaking.
Conversely, in the more gentrified cities with lots of urban professionals the white mean tends to be very high. There is in a way a kind of perverse relationship. The worse the blacks are the more only UMC whites can afford to segregate away from their dysfunction, with middle class whites moving out of the suburbs to escape it.
So areas with high GOP vote share tend to be more middle class of all races, while areas with high DEM vote share tend to be highly segregated high/low coalitions.
i think one of the causes is the gap in between white republicans and white democrats.
Hey Emil, will you do a blog post on Woodley and Carl's new paper?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289623000879
I imagine Noah Carl will write about it himself. After all, we have our own paper on taboos in science coming out soon (cited in their paper).