Average for Blue State blacks = 259.7

Average for Red State blacks = 258.7

Average for Blue State whites = 294.5

Average for Red State whites = 287.3

So, Blue State whites score about 7 points higher than Red State whites, and Blue State blacks score 1 point higher than Red State blacks.

Therefore, if your really wanted ago put a partisan spin on things, you could say that the fact that the gaps in Red States are smaller than the gaps in Blue States is entirely a function of how dumb Red State whites are. I find this sort of analysis pretty boring, myself.

I KNEW that somebody here would take the bait and defend the Inquisition. The Catholic Church may have done some good things but I think it’s pretty safe to say that the Inquisition wasn’t one of them. That they were less murderous than 20th century dictators is damning with faint praise.

Folks from Pella, IA?

Yes, and also Sioux County.

These are places where people are true believers, and are therefore susceptible to heresy. And since Reformed Christianity (aka Calvinism) is the most abstract and theologically-serious brand of Protestantism, reasoned arguments in support of faith are very important.

I pointed that out the last time that story was told on this site. Sowell would have to have lived in Quincy. Or Neponset, which is highly unlikely; as a former club bouncer, I can testify that the punks from Neponset made the Southie/Dot kids look like the Amish.

According to some prestigious journal’s rankings of American colleges’ intellectual horsepower, BU was the 24th most intelligent campus in the US. Which is what you’d expect at a school that’s been variously called “B-Jew” and “Tel Aviv on the Charles”.

BU’s only problem is looking across the water at Harvard and MIT and feeling sorry for itself..

The white voters in at least half of the blue states suported Romney over Obama, sometimes by 60/40 margins

So red states have the dummies…

Once again Minnesota whites have very high test scores, and once again my empirical experience makes me wonder how this can be so.

It’s an interesting argument. (Buzz Mohawk’s reaction reminds me of how humanities professors react when the value of what they do is questioned.) Beyond arithmetic, is math taught very well in most schools? Does it improve logical reasoning in average students?

– as we see with ISIS, the Inquisition, etc. there are no limits on what people are willing to do

The Inquisition was relatively tame. And it did include the presumption of innocence. Was that also a prominent feature of the many secular inquisitions of the 20th century? They could execute more in a single day than the Spanish one did in 300 years.

upper-midwestern, Dutch-American peers

Folks from Pella, IA?

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 –

So a Suplex move by a 260 lb. steroid junkie is a reasonable reaction to a teenage girl talking on a cell phone?

though Jewish SJW types won’the lecture you on the obligations of a Christian.

Instead they will just blather about tikkun olam if they are (nominally) religiously inclined. But most are completely secular and won’t bother with a religious angle at all. If anything, the religiously inclined ones are more dangerous – as we see with ISIS, the Inquisition, etc. there are no limits on what people are willing to do if they are convinced that they are doing God’s work.

You don’t walk through Southie to get to anything that’s not in Southie, unless you live in Southie. Especially to Cambridge. Southie is a peninsula. Did Sowell live in Southie? That would be highly unusual, as blacks just didn’t live in Southie, and still for the most part don’t. Black kids were/are bused in to Southie HS from Dorchester/Roxbury/Mattapan.

99% of all decisions made in life are inductive. I’m not sure how someone would even use deductive logic in any day-to-day circumstances.

A handy adjunct to arithmetic skills would be exposure to Decision Trees. They provide a graphic way of dissecting thought processes and could be presented to help demonstrate basic concepts that even elementary school kids would recognize. That isn’t necessarily just for consumer decisions, but would be applied to all manner of thought processes as a way of helping crystallize ideas and making more informed citizens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree

A more advanced application is the use of Certainty Equivalents, as mentioned in discussion of risk premia. That could help people understand their own personal discount rates, and the tendency toward infinite rates among some folks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_premium

My experience in the upper Midwest is that the SJW facade falls when the subject of the local Native Americans comes up.

true

Having also spent a good deal of time in the upper Midwest, I concur with your observations.

But, could you elaborate on the differences you see between SJW and cultural Marxist types? I have met members of the Lutheran organizations that have opened up the Twin Cities to massive Somalian immigration. And similarly minded people of German descent in Madison, Wisconsin.

Physical appearance aside, I can’t tell much difference between them and Jewish SJW types in New York. Even the rhetoric is similar though Jewish SJW types won’the lecture you on the obligations of a Christian.

That German/Nordic split is fascinating. When I think about my own upper-midwestern, Dutch-American peers who’ve gone SJW, I guess they tend more toward the Germanic . . . .

I certainly agree that they’re not cultural Marxists.

Wow, Im surprised how low Alabama is, well below even Mississippi and the other Deep South states. Georgia’s score is actually closer to Massachusetts than to Alabama (if looking at whites only or assuming MA goes 50% black.) Yet I remember seeing ap olitical cartoon showing SC and GA wrestling over “last place” in high school SAT scores. There may be at least some selection process going on here, if Georgia is disproportionately testing its high end students and Alabama testing everyone. But I dont know that would be possible if the NAEP is supposed to go to everyone anyway.

As for Wisconsin, it’s been said on this blog that Wisconsin got its first taste of racial diversity when the underclass of the underclass of Chicago blacks began moving to WI to get better welfare benefits. Governor Tommy Thompson killed the welfare, but the people who’d moved in had put down roots and mostly stayed. Thus WI has some of the smartest whites and dumbest blacks in the nation.

I agree.

Any of us who’ve lived or worked extensively in the Upper Midwest can tell stories about observing a SJW person of fairly homogenous German extraction/genome trying to “reason through” why dindus act the way they did in a particular situation, or a person of fairly homogenous Nordic extraction/genome telling sagas about that, trying to fit it into some family or social sense, inventing or tracing vast histories, etc.

I first became consciously aware of this during the ’92 LA riots…and tested it in ’95 with the OJ trial.

When Wisconsin whites, wherever I’ve encountered them, try to explain away the white/black gap in tests, I’ve laid bets with myself on whether the speaker is of German or Nordic extraction by whether they appeal to reason or to saga.

(This is why that type of SJW is NOT a “cultural Marxist.” That’s just a weasel term for “bolshie Jew,” and those tend appeal to emotions like guilt, envy, and rage. They use those emotions to whip the Germanics and Nordics into line, within academic and government settings.)

This is of course observational only. Probably a ton of confirmation bias at work, after all these years of observing it. Robert Anton Wilson’s quarter on the pavement exercise.

Of the White areas, South Boston didn’t seem noted for the intelligence of its inhabitants when I lived in Massacusetts. Cambridge on the other hand certainly had more than its share of smart and odd people.

Thomas Sowell dressed as a prole for a few years when he had to walk through Southie on his way to Cambridge.

Nobody cared that he was black, but he was deathly afraid what might happen if they found out he was a Harvard man.

will not use or need things like trigonometry

Absolutely essential for artillery work and counter-battery.

Goldberg points out, does it really take 18 years to teach consumer math and arithmetic?

The goal ought to be to inculcate educated and versatile citizenry, not “consumers.”

An innumerate populace is easily fooled by politicians and bureaucrats. Every child should read this classic: http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728

When young folks (i.e. high school/college) ask me what set of quantitative skills would be useful for future employment purposes, I always say “regression analysis” without hesitation.

I think I am well-positioned to evaluate the human quality of West Virginian “hill people” and the upper Southern cavaliers, because I own my main residence in the area of the latter and own a farm-of-sorts in the former (and I am not the only one among my lowland acquaintances – quite a few of us own property in West Virginia).

There is no doubt that the whites in the lowlands are “smarter” in the sense they have far higher average education credentials, much higher median income, and probably higher IQ than the hill country folks.

And the hill people do have, on average, higher crime rates, though most crimes are welfare fraud or drug-related and are not in the order of magnitude as violent crimes in black ghettoes.

However, in my own admittedly limited personal experience (limited because it is just one man’s perspective), the hill country whites are grittier, less brittle, and more communal. Not communal in the sense of building and operating a high efficiency/high performance SWPL society, but more in the sense of actually caring for you as almost a kin once they let you into their social circle. If a giant SHTF were to happen and our country were to lose the power grid for a few months, for example, I expect a lot of my extended neighbors in the lowlands to be unable to function well and may even turn on one another. I expect my West Virginia neighbors to look out for each other and survive better.

In other words, the “hillbillies” may not be as smart, as affluent or even as law-abiding as SWPL-types, but, as the saying goes, they are good people… certainly to have as friends and neighbors. You want them on your side in a fight – which is a big compliment in my view.

And their music is soulful.

Of the White areas, South Boston didn’t seem noted for the intelligence of its inhabitants when I lived in Massacusetts. Cambridge on the other hand certainly had more than its share of smart and odd people.

I took a proofs-based honors geometry class in high school in the early 1990′s, but even then proofs had disappeared from many non-honors high school geometry curricula. I would be surprised if 20+ years later proofs-based classes didn’t represent an even smaller portion of total geometry classes than they did back then.

“The smallest Gap is in West Virginia, which has, by far, the lowest white scores.”

Probably, but they do score quite well in race realism.

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.

You could say the same thing about every damn person on this planet! It’s not just the leftists, everybody thinks that their own experiences make up the entirety of reality. If the only Jewish kid you knew while growing up was a dullard, you’d probably assume that all Jews are dullards. If the only Blacks kids you knew while growing up were 3 standard deviations above the mean for their race, you’d probably think that all Black kids are smart and well behaved.

And I did forget the most important thing for a mathematician which helps with algorithm development – pattern recognition. The ability to recognize the underlying patterns in the data is something that makes for a good mathematician and programmer.

Actually, that annuity calculation is a specific example of a geometric series where r is the interest rate for the period. See what you forget when you don’t remember high school math?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_progression

As a senior programmer you have to construct the algorithms that you eventually code. The logic, calculations, and any necessary simplifications needed to make the algorithm work benefit from a mathematical background.

Geometry is the first class where the student is introduced to proofs. You know taking what you know has already been shown to be true and logically constructing a more sophisticated argument until you reach a final conclusion of significance.

Yep, completely unnecessary in today’s world where the Kardashian’s are all you need to know.

If you can be tracked by your cell phone then the cell phone can be disabled when you are on school grounds during school hours. The administrators can have phones with access codes allowing them to call in case of emergencies.

Getting rid of cell phones during school hours needs to be looked at.

Nigerian immigrants seem to do particularly well.

Ed, My son coached at a Midwest powerhouse Jesuit prep school. He liked to say that they had all the doctor’s and lawyer’s and accountant’s brainy sons that they needed, What they wanted was the strapping son of a welder or factory worker. They will find your colleague’s son a mentor and a tutor. Don’t want that boy going to De Matha.

I was one of those ‘non-STEM’ COBOL programmers Steve talks about in the Eighties before C++ scared us off into management. I remember writing a program to calculate interest repayments. I showed it to a colleague and he asked what all these loops were doing. I told him it was subtracting a payment plus interest from the principal for each period of the term of the loan. If there was a balance positive or negative, the amount would be adjusted and loop, loop, loop until we converge on the payment. He was highly amused. I wasn’t sure why until I discovered the ‘Present Value of an Annuity’ shortcut formula a year or two later in MBA studies. In a way, I was at business school because of that formula.

Educated immigrants from Africa? It’s well known that Houston is a magnet for them, with a solid economy and no real winter.

I hereby dub your theory the Clock Boy Hypothesis.

He’ll do ok at Gonzaga but even he will most likely run into difficulties. I suspect that many of the black prep school students are probably mediocre compared to their white peers since many are athletic admits.

Was Bing?

this is outdated baggage from classical education

The classically educated could write a constitution. The progressively educated–i.e., us– can’t even read one.

People keep mentioning the gap in Wisconson.

Why has no one pointed out that WI blacks, after AL blacks, are the dumbest blacks in the nation???*

This is remarkable to me. I can’t explain it at all.

*Assuming smarts/brightness can be reasonably determined by this exam

I worked for several decades in a quantitative field with some association to finance and I would say to you that the most important thing to be able to do in mathematics is is the four functions of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

The key is that you have to be really good at those things, which basically means if you do not have a math background you should simply practice, practice, practice with things like multiplication wheels, the square of numbers up to 20, etc. While doing so you will discover little tricks for yourself, such as how the traditional (a+x)(a+x) = a^2 + 2ax + x^2 can be used to get the square of any two digit number in ten seconds or less. Other things you would want to learn is quickly flipping from numbers to decimals to fractions, because that is how a lot of on the spot calculations are done. Another thing to do is just screw around with spreadsheets and concoct tables of some number, say, 1.03, and raise it to powers up to 10, and then take the inverse (i.e., divide into 1) and then you have factors that you can use to calculate both present values and future values very quickly. (these are the kinds of calculations that Murdoch was probably engaged in.)

Again, the key is just work on the stuff so that you can make quick substitutions without really thinking about it and then you can not only see the answer intuitively relatively instantaneously but you can assist the decision process.

There are lots of other things you can do of course and that involves various statistical methods but the basis of all of those are also four function, and with a spreadsheet you can do pretty complicated calculations with great quickness.

IDK any tricks for weighted averages (common) except that if you have 90 people with 70 IQ and 10 people with 120 IQ then your weight would be basically 9 x 7 = 63, and 1 x 12 = 12, add a few decimals and your weighted average should something like 75.

It’s really all about practice. I taught my son spreadsheets when he was 3 and he went on to minor in mathematics, what he did, what I did, and what a lot of people I know in the numbers business did is learn how to up date batting averages and and ERA’s from the Sunday newspaper.

The reason math has a bad reputation is because the higher math assumes great facility with four function math, and furthermore, it really can take hours to calculate some of these more difficult answers.

My colleague’s son is being recruited heavily by Gonzaga to play football. His mother had him young, 17 but she remarried and is a no-nonsense black mother. He is very talented at football and gets superb grade’s at school. He’s top ranked but here’s the rub. The school he attends a general education mostly black suburban school. It’s not academically rigorous.

He’ll do ok at Gonzaga but even he will most likely run into difficulties. I suspect that many of the black prep school students are probably mediocre compared to their white peers since many are athletic admits.

ROTFL

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3291539/Cheating-Syrian-refugee-husband-leaves-UK-mum-heartbroken-telling-lover-dying.html

Not necessarily, plus the purebred Irish girls may not have worked as whores in large numbers.

The Caribbean received a large number of Irish slaves –and they were hard core slaves. The Irish by temperament and complexion weren’t that good in the fields but the women made good breeding stock with black slaves. The female mixed slaves were very attractive and populated the whorehouses frequented, particularly, by British naval officers who tended to be among the intellectual elite. End result, rather smart Caribbean “blacks”.

Uh, wouldn’t the all Irish girls have been a little more attractive to the sailors?

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.

No, it doesn’t.

It shows that the lowest performing white group outperforms the highest performing black group.

So, really dumb rednecks (your term) still outperforms highest group of blacks that the tinkerers carefully culled of losers.

I ended up running a derivatives desk. Being good at “Sums” was useful.

The Milwaukee population climbed until 1967 and then started dropping. 1967 was the year of the big riots. Downhill ever since.

I noticed that white Texans beat white New Yorkers 298 to 290. And black Texans beat black New Yorkers 267 to 264. What’s up with that? I thought Yankees are smarter than Southerners in every instance. Maybe not.

German-Americans and Nordic-Americans don’t seem to know how to deal with African-Americans. … the biggest Gap is in Wisconsin

Smarter people make a bigger gap. They can narrow the gap by banging their heads on desks every day to loose a few IQ points.

Philosopher and professor Bruce Goldberg wrote a Cato Institute book arguing that this is outdated baggage from classical education (specifically, the Greeks).

Whether this is outdated baggage or not depends on what you think education is about, what you think it is for. 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.

Did you find that the abstract reasoning and the problem-solving techniques to which you were exposed in higher maths was useful in your programming career, or elsewhere?

There is likely some benefit to the study of topics that may not be directly useful in subsequent work activities. In keeping with the themes at UR, noticing that not everyone may need those extra synapses is likely to produce a reaction.

But you at least wrote a book about math, or mathematicians, or something.
I’m curious about how much or what level of math is used in high levels of business or deal making. I think I once read that Murdoch could calculate business transactions and probabilities very quickly, much more effectively than his peers, which gave him a leg up in negotiations and such, where you have to make decisions quickly and not sent stuff home for your team to work on. What kind of math is useful for that. Less than homological algebra, whatever the is, but more than sums.

The Caribbean received a large number of Irish slaves –and they were hard core slaves. The Irish by temperament and complexion weren’t that good in the fields but the women made good breeding stock with black slaves. The female mixed slaves were very attractive and populated the whorehouses frequented, particularly, by British naval officers who tended to be among the intellectual elite. End result, rather smart Caribbean “blacks”.

“So, even when the lowest cognitive ability 1/5 of potential parents are eliminated ”

Lowest 1/5? It varies,but you have to score in the top 2/3 on the AFQT to get into the military. Top 2/3 overall is not top 2/3 for blacks, though. More like top 1/3 for blacks.

Military brats make for particularly annoying SJWs. They think they know a lot about blacks because “I went to school with tons of blacks!” They think they know a lot about whites because “I went to school with tons of whites!” What they went to school with are the children of very strongly positively selected blacks and the children of whites from the middle of the white ability distribution (both ends cut off).

Texas has a black score of 267, one of the highest. Yet it’s a former slave state, with lots of blacks. What’s going on?

Texas has a lot of people from military bases. So, better blacks from around the country are in Texas schools near bases.

Also, Texas has very low welfare benefits. Until Obama came along, people did not qualify for MedicAid until they were down to 67% of the poverty line. Loser blacks could get more freebies elsewhere. Texas also quite willingly locks up bad youth in detention centers where they can’t have kids till they serve their sentences. It is not that friendly to bad behavior. And some blacks moved to Texas for opportunities after the Civil War, so they were some of the brighter more ambitious folks.

School proficiency exams can be gamed.

I found this in a comment section:

I taught in ND back when Bush was governor of Texas(90s). We had migrant students from Texas each Fall and Spring. They said they spent almost all day on Math and Reading in Texas. Not much Science, Soc. St., Language Arts, etc. Bush’s Texas was where all the frequent Standardized testing got started. I got the impression that Math and Reading were mainly what was on the tests and they were basically teaching to the test.

“Texas has a black score of 267, one of the highest. Yet it’s a former slave state, with lots of blacks. What’s going on?”

Texas is only about 12% black, last I checked.

And, off the top of my head, it’s always had enough less than PC Hispanics to make it less attractive, especially for the less industrious blacks. It would probably have fewer bona fide Af-Ams and a lot more black immigrants and their progeny. They don’t do great, but they do okay by black standards.

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
Looks reasonable to me. What’s new here?

*The fundamental law of sociology is a summary of hundreds of observations. It asserts that:
On large-scale tests of reasoning ability, the observed mean difference between non-Hispanic whites and African Americans is 1.1 + 0.2 standard deviation.

That is interesting. If you ordered the list by white scores it wouldn’t be that much different. If you ordered it by black scores, it would almost be randomized.

A lot of those black, military brats might be bi-racial as well.

“The English-speaking Caribbean itself is a hell-hole but for some reason Caribbean immigrants to the US do relatively well.”

Yeah, dude, keep telling yourself that.

More immigrants in blue states,

The gap is bigger because blue state whites are racist. Forget what we say and look at what we do.

And we do know how to deal with blacks – we keep them far away in a low resource ghetto school or in remedial ed classes hidden in the school basement where they can learn skills sufficient to work in nasty service jobs like garbage collector or to be store clerks or surly government bureaucrats. It’s not accidental that our states divide up schools by township, which is extremely effective for containing the contagion of minorities. Around Philadelphia where I live they are conveniently contained in half a dozen districts which they fully control, leaving them with no excuse and leaving everywhere else tranquil and undisturbed and also creating a great example of why we do not want them around.

I still remember my mother’s surprise when she found out my Wisconsin high school was 15% black. I had only had one black in class with me in 4 years. Everyone else was vocational track or remedial education where they literally were hidden in the school basement.

You write as though we are missing out on something here by not educating our ghetto blacks and having them close by in school. I’m not sure what that could be. The handful of educable blacks are generally identified early on in their lives and plucked from their peers and showered with favors. Any effort on the rest would be a total waste.

Educated immigrants from Africa? It’s well known that Houston is a magnet for them, with a solid economy and no real winter.

link doesn’t work anymore. Did you mean this?

http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/10/28/principal-body-slammed-cafeteria-fight.ktxl/video/playlists/caught-on-camera/

Hawaii’s not on the list most probably because it could be adequately represented by the DoDEA stat. There aren’t very many blacks here in Hawaii, and those that do exist are primarily military families.

Somewhat related; Hawaii is obviously mostly composed of Asian, Hawaiian, other exotic mixtures, etc. not woeful stories of historical victimization, so the black grievance industry – despite the heavy liberal white presence – just hasn’t established much of a foothold. After all, you can’t out-grieve the sprinkle of Hawaiians who have their own sovereignty movements under way. There was a black speaker featured at the state legislature a few months back who ticked off a long list of the usually grievances… and was met by cold-stone Hawaiian and otherwise Asiatic stares. She left without much fanfare. Not much traction to be had here for such nonsense.

Texas has a black score of 267, one of the highest. Yet it’s a former slave state, with lots of blacks. What’s going on?

Glossy, there are 1.1 million students in NYC, of which 40% are Hispanic, 14% are white, 15% are Asian and 30% are black…. can’t find a break down for Caribbean born students, but the numbers on the graph are for New York State, not just NYC. The school districts in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse are majority minority and dysfunctional, so I expected the gap to be higher for NY State…really need to know who was tested.

The Scottish Enlightenment is strong evidence against your thesis. In fact, a number of old-time observers thought that the average Scott or similar denizen of northern England, “rednecks” all, was smarter or “more capable” than the typical low-land Englishman.

West Virginia just seems too close to some regions that in the past were much more dynamic, especially when America was growing real industries more attractive to real rednecks. Could have been significant brain drain (or muscle+brain drain) to Pittsburg, Ohio cities, old Detroit, and old “east Virginia” as well.

Also, there is evidence of significant absentee ownership of much of the state, a strong incentive to clear out for more promising pastures. Absentee ownership is probably number 3 on the list of ills inflected on the good people of America by our evil elites. Everyone at iSteve knows 1 and 2.

That’s my alma mater. A depressing vid.

am I dyslexic or is Utah not in the list?

The word is traditionally “dyslectic”, but apparently no one could remember whether the C came before the T, or vers vicea.

The English-speaking Caribbean itself is a hell-hole but for some reason Caribbean immigrants to the US do relatively well.

Well, duh. Selective migration. It’s the smart and ambitious who make it out.

So conservative whites are less intelligent than their liberal counterparts, and there is no greater way to destroy a civilized welfare state than to bring in lots of blacks. (Or, if you like, welfare states are catastrophic for blacks but, as a liberal myself, I don’t care and just don’t want them defecating on our Nice Things.)

Makes sense.

There is probably something in this. Another clue might be looking more closely at New York and at Indiana, the two outliers of the pattern.

Blue states seem to have a common set-up of a serious, Yankeeish/ Scandinavian/ German white, “liberal puritan” culture, with a few inner city ghettos where Blacks from the plantation country in the South migrated northward. Hence the gap. This is obviously not the case with New York. I’m not that familiar with Indiana.

No I agree if all the blacks are bundled into one dysfunctional ghetto then the scores will be as low as elsewhere even if the rest of the state is white. But what I am looking for are the scores from states where there are no ghettos, like even Vermont of New Hampshire where I believe (correct me if I am wrong!) drops of blacks are more or less spread out evenly in a sea of white. These would be the ideal conditions for blacks to score their best on these tests.

I just found some other test scores on the achievement gap (from 2011) and it seems blacks do very well (Mass or NJ levels) in Montana, Wyoming, and New Hampshire. Not so well in Vermont, Utah, or Idaho.

Congratulations, your comment is the stupidest thing I have read today.

Do you use pushups in your everyday life? Situps? Aerobic exercise?

Think of math as mental exercise. It is that. Developing brains need exercise.

They need to learn how to think logically too.

Leave out math, and you might as well just give kids a lobotomy.

The garbage you have read and cited is part of the misguided effort to dumb-down things even further so that inferior minds can still pass and collect meaningless diplomas — deceiving themselves and devaluing the real ability and hard work of their brighter classmates.

WV white at 272 is practically the same as DoDea blacks at 271.

Of course, the DOD discriminated against all low scoring blacks by not allowing them in.

High average scores are also found among blacks in the Ivy League schools and their children.

Vermont and New Hampshire are not on the list.

Could it be that dumb whites in WV mix freely (in schools and society) with equally dumb blacks and therefore the gap is smaller?

Are we looking at the same data? They are not equally dumb. WV whites are on average smarter than the very very few WV blacks who mix freely, of necessity since there are so few.

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.

Count the list and you’ll see that there are not 52 listings (50 states plus DC plus DoDEA (Schools run on American military bases overseas)). I assume they left out states with too few blacks to generate significant results.

makes it all the more egregious when they are right about something.

It doesn’t go that much by state but rather by city. Wisconsin is only 6% black but 70% of Wisconsin blacks live in Milwaukee, which is 40% black (outnumbering whites) and the public schools are 86% minority, which makes Milwaukee a pretty lousy place to go to school. But if you are black in any other part of Wisconsin, you are pretty much sure to attend a school that is mostly white.

I was googling for stats and I came across this article, which is hilarious:

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/03/05/390723644/why-is-milwaukee-so-bad-for-black-people

Milwaukee is bad FOR black people. It’s not that black people are bad for Milwaukee or that Milwaukee has (particularly) bad black people (which it does) but Milwaukee is bad FOR them. It’s so bad for them that more and more blacks keep moving in – the city has gone from 8% black in 1960 to 40% today.

I’m not surprised at all. I was making a joke.

I was also making a point: people are not tabulae rasae. They differ among themselves within their racial groups, and on average between groups. Just like individual examples of dog breeds. You know what I mean.

Trying to raise average scores for your cousins in W. Virginia makes as much sense as all the crap we’ve been doing to close the racial “achivement gap.”

Don’t worry, I don’t expect West Virginian whites to start rioting anytime soon. They’re too smart for that. (Their average may be lowest for whites, but it still beats the highest black score. There is no overlap in these two columns at all. They are separate and distinct groups.)

It seems like being around whites doesn’t help black students much, but nobody asks how white students in red states are affected by being in classrooms that are often mixed or heavily black.

very informative.

Sounds like East Africans. What countries are the kids from?

The Washington Post did story on a Hurricane Katrina family (English speaking Americans) that moved to Nebraska 10 years ago. The parents are a hot mess but the oldest daughter now attends the University of Nebraska and is on the track team. The daughter credits her teachers for her achievements.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/08/29/youre-one-of-us-now/

In the past it was well understood that not all whites were equal in the brains dept. – inbred banjo picking hillbillies from W. Virginia and Alabama were assumed to be not as bright as Boston Brahmins. In recent decades it’s probably only gotten worse as anyone in W. Virginia with brains takes off and moves to DC or NY, etc. There aren’t too many of Murray’s “Belmonts” in W. Virginia.

But I guess since we live in the Era of Not Noticing and in the era where the few remaining white people are supposed to band together, we’re supposed to be shocked and amazed when rich white people in suburban Massachusetts and NJ are better at school than poor white people in the hills of W. Virginia and the hick towns of Alabama.

There was some concern about DoDEA students not performing well due to the constant moving and attending a haphazard mix of government and civilian schools. for 8th graders, DoDEA students rank 1st in reading and 5th in math nationally. The black DoDEA reading score (271) is exactly the same as the white national average. Gap closed. However, the black DoDEA math score (271) is significantly lower than the white national average (291) but highest for blacks.

This result should help counter the argument that schools need more funding when in actuality kids need brighter, more stable parents.

When I think of NJ I always think of Newark, East Orange, and Camden. Do most blacks live in nice NJ suburbs? I am surprised that they test so well.

Assumed in all of Steve Sailor’s school test analysis is that the math taught in school and tested for is necessary or even useful. As mathematician and professor Morris Kline pointed out in his book on math education ( Why Johnny Can’t Add), the vast majority of secondary school students (98%) will not use or need things like trigonometry or solving quadratic equations in life or their college studies. So why force the vast majority of students to learn this stuff that will be useless in life and work? For the small percentage that go into STEM? Other academics have argued for Kline’s position. Philosopher and professor Bruce Goldberg wrote a Cato Institute book arguing that this is outdated baggage from classical education (specifically, the Greeks). He says the only counter-arguments educators will raise to primary/secondary math education is the need for math in consumer activities (consumer math, how to balance a checkbook). Goldberg points out, does it really take 18 years to teach consumer math and arithmetic?

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.

am I dyslexic or is Utah not in the list?

- 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.)

Nebraska may be due to African-Africans, rather than African-Americans. Over the past few years when visiting family there’s always been a story in the paper about nice white teacher ladies trying to get refugee children up to speed in the education system.

Here’s a non-Common Core math question: based on this trend, how many states would we need to have to have one without a gap or where the relationship is reversed?

(No real point, just amused at the ubitquity of the trend)