August 16, 2010

"Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in City Schools"

From the New York Times:
Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in City Schools
By SHARON OTTERMAN and ROBERT GEBELOFF

Two years ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, testified before Congress about the city’s impressive progress in closing the gulf in performance between minority and white children. The gains were historic, all but unheard of in recent decades.

“Over the past six years, we’ve done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap — and we have,” Mr. Bloomberg testified. “In some cases, we’ve reduced it by half.”

“We are closing the shameful achievement gap faster than ever,” the mayor said again in 2009, as city reading scores — now acknowledged as the height of a test score bubble — showed nearly 70 percent of children had met state standards.

When results from the 2010 tests, which state officials said presented a more accurate portrayal of students’ abilities, were released last month, they came as a blow to the legacy of the mayor and the chancellor, as passing rates dropped by more than 25 percentage points on most tests. But the most painful part might well have been the evaporation of one of their signature accomplishments: the closing of the racial achievement gap.

Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades, 40 percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students met state standards in math, compared with 75 percent of white students and 82 percent of Asian students. In English, 33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient, compared with 64 percent among whites and Asians.

“The claims were based on some bad information,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a research group that studies education policy. “On achievement, the story in New York City is of some modest progress, but not the miracle that the mayor and the chancellor would like to claim.”

Reducing racial gaps in educational performance has been a national preoccupation for decades. But after substantial progress in the 1970s and ’80s, the effort has largely stalled, except for a brief period from 1999 to 2004, where there were some gains, particularly in reading, according to a report released this month by the Educational Testing Service, which develops standardized tests used across the country.

The achievement gap was also the main thrust of the No Child Left Behind law, which mandated annual testing for all students in grades three through eight and required school systems to track the performance of each racial and ethnic group, with the goal of bringing all children to proficiency by 2014.

New York City’s progress in closing its achievement gap on those tests drew national attention as a possible model for other urban school districts. It won praise from President George W. Bush as evidence that No Child Left Behind was working. In 2007, the city won a prestigious urban education prize from the Broad Foundation, which cited the city’s progress in narrowing the racial achievement gap.

But the latest state math and English tests show that the proficiency gap between minority and white students has returned to about the same level as when the mayor arrived. In 2002, 31 percent of black students were considered proficient in math, for example, while 65 percent of white students met that standard.

La Griffe du Lion explained how politicians and educators can scam the media over racial gaps in test passing rates a decade ago. Let's think about it using a stylized example with made up numbers. Say, you start off with a test in 2002 that 50 percent of black students pass and 84 percent of white students pass. You announce that there's a terrible 34 percentile point racial gap and that Something Must Be Done About It. By 2006, the passing rates rise to 84 percent for blacks and 98 percent for whites. Now, you announce, Our Brilliant Leader has cut the racial gap by 20 percentile points. High fives!

Then, in 2010 some killjoy has a crisis of conscience and the next time the test is given, blacks pass only 50 percent of the time and whites 84 percent of the time. Horrors, the racial gap has expanded from 14 percentage points to 34 percentage points!

Now, if you'd read La Griffe, you'd know that, through all the tumult and press releases and award ceremonies and accusatory articles, nothing actually happened to the racial gap. The authorities and the media just used an innumerate way to measure the racial gap -- percentile differences -- one that creates false senses of change whenever overall test scores go up or down.

They should have used standard deviations. In this example, the racial gap was one standard deviation in 2002, one standard deviation in 2006, and one standard deviation in 2010.

Why did the passing rates change over time? There could be lots of reasons: the test got easier, then harder; cheating was encouraged, then cracked down upon; the students learned more, then learned less; the teacher got better, then got worse; all sorts of things could have happened to drive up and down the passing rates. But the key overlooked fact is that changes in overall passing rates make it look like the racial gap is changing even when it's not.

It's like how to get around the EEOC's Four-Fifths Rule for sniffing out disparate impact in firemen hiring tests, cities like Chicago have made the test so easy that 96% of whites pass. The racial gap stays around one standard deviation, but the racial gap as measured in percentiles declines because most people pass.

This isn't the whole story in NYC, but it's a big, big part of the story.

Finally, may I just reiterate that a much more feasible and pragmatic goal than the current goal of trying to raise Non-Asian Minority performance by one standard deviation while preventing whites and Asians from improving is to try to raise all four groups' performance by half a standard deviation?

74 comments:

  1. One day historians will look back on what remains of America and try to figure out what went wrong. I'm afraid they will be forced to conclude that, among other things, the greatest accumulation of wealth and power in the history of the world was spent trying to teach black people to do algebra.

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  2. helene edwards8/16/10, 3:08 PM

    I wish we had stats to allow a comparison of black achievement, in say grades 7-9, before and after rap hit it big. Nothing evinces "I don't care" like rap. What would the dividing year be, 1988, 1990, something like that? John McWhorter is down on rap big-time, and I agree with him. There should be more discussion here of his concept of "therapeutic alienation." I wonder if a lot of people dismiss him because he's gay or/and he presents as arrogant.

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  3. Well, this is somewhat like what I've been saying all along about CA's API testing. Sacramento has been finessing the achievement gap by gradually making the test easier for everyone. As more whites and Asians "rail" at 1000/1000, increases in black and Hispanic scores look like a closing of the achievement gap. This process of easing test standards is being done subtly so that few notice. And across the board, parents easily delude themselves into thinking their kids are getting smarter.

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  4. ***The State Education Department recalibrated the scoring of the tests this year, raising the number of correct answers needed to pass and saying that the previous standards were not accurate measures of what students needed to know at each grade level. When that happened, the passing rates of white and Asian students dropped a little, but those of black and Hispanic students plummeted.***

    Arthur Jensen explains the dilemma:

    "The problems of schooling illustrate the first and second laws of individual differences. I call them laws because they are demonstrated without exception both in the psychological laboratory and in "real life." Unfortunately, they happen to contradict the popular faith in education as the "great leveler." The first law is that individual differences in learning and performance increase as task complexity increases. The second law is that individual differences in performance increase with continuing practice and experience, unless the particular task imposes an artificially low ceiling on proficiency.

    One notable consequence of these laws is that successful attempts to raise performance by improving methods and amounts of instruction raises the overall mean of the treated group but at the same time widens the distribution of individual differences. The very same effect also applies to group differences. A benefit of raising the overall educational level of the whole population is that it moves a greater proportion of the population above the threshold levels of knowledge and skill required for gainful employment. The downside is the resulting increase in individual and group differences."

    http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/07/the_arthur_jens.html

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  5. If you take each person's percentile score (anywhere from just above 0 to just below 100) and then took the difference between mean percentiles for the 2 groups, that would have been quite informative for any given year (nothing wrong with percentiles). The problem in this case is that they used percentage of students above some arbitrary threshold and used that. Clearly the differences will depend on the selected threshold and that, we agree, is innumerate.

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  6. The "racial gap" story is really long in the tooth by now; it's a permanent story. Just write up a standard story, complete with the usual anguish and bromides, and trot it out periodically with just the dates changed. Would save a lot of effort due to the need for so many folks to rediscover the wheel every so often.

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  7. Am I the only one who is not surprised that the educational "breakthrough" has evaporated? Am I just the only one who is old enough? I seem to have read this story or one just like it for forty years or more.

    Someone gets a article published about some teacher, school or program that miraculously erases all racial test score differences. Everyone is encouraged to be optimistic. Then a couple months later it blows over and the cycle repeats.

    The only thing that is different is that today we pretty much know why black children don't do as well in school as white or Asian children. They have less gray matter in their frontal lobes. A century ago we knew that too but Steven Jay Gould and others tried to hush it up. But we've got better imaging machines today and no one can obfuscate the observations anymore.

    So I'm optimistic. There will be a news conference one day where a prominent politician will announce that they have a way to close the achievement gap. But the difference will be that it will be some technique that expands the brains of black kids - not just another improbable nostrum involving teaching methods.

    Albertosaurus

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  8. Please, please, please. Can someone please tell Mr. Bloomberg to go away? He has done so much damage to the City, it would require volumes to document. It's easier to just go over to the "Queens Crap" blog and have a look at the wrath that Bloomberg has wrought over middle class New Yorkers.

    And this guy still supports open immigration? With overcrowded houses, roads and especially schools, shouldn't he focus on trying to improve the quality of life for New York citizens? Obviously his policies, especially schools, aren't doing such a great job with the immigrants (Asians excepted of course) we already have.

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  9. Like the Vietnam War, the War on the Achievement Gap is not meant to be won, only prolonged.

    The winners were the military-industrial complex in the first event, and the education industry in the second.

    More bombs, more tests -- the house wins, no matter where the chips fall.

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  10. Steve, comment on TopCoder results.

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  11. vaporation of the closing of the racial achievement gap

    Shocking surprise. For the 1001st time.

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  12. One problem here is that most people don't accept that genetics could be cause - and, as Levin noted, genetics (as opposed to epigentics) is the only explanation that can not be regressed to oppression. Take this recent 2008 Book:

    Page 2: "In the US, race is a cultural invention...it is therefore unlikely that genetics explains culture differences."

    http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1w0XIJPr2CoC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=The+rise+and+fall+of+the+Flynn+Effect+as+a+reason+to+expect+a+narrowing+of+the+Black%E2%80%93White+IQ+gap&ots=3u2jK_0ZEl&sig=ae_FDyh-UO3EEVSMM_EVDZlqxsg#v=onepage&q&f=false

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  13. Just reposting the link to the Arthur Jensen interview:

    Jensen interview

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  14. I used a similar method to show the Stuyvesant high school exams "suffer" from the same intransigent racial gap present in all cognitive exams:

    Fundamental Constant of Sociology

    I wish we had stats to allow a comparison of black achievement, in say grades 7-9, before and after rap hit it big.

    Gap has been extant since widespread cognitive testing began during WWI. It's been almost the exact same OneSTDV gap since then.

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  15. For anyone who's curious, here's how to obtain the racial gap in standard deviations using passing rates data:

    Using the numbers above [racial pass rates] with Excel's norminv function and assuming a normal distribution, I calculated the z-score of the "passing standard" for each race. I subtracted the black z-score from the white z-score to obtain the gap as a scalar of the assumed equal standard deviation value.

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  16. helene edwards said..."I wish we had stats to allow a comparison of black achievement, in say grades 7-9, before and after rap hit it big."

    Correlation does not imply causation.

    "Nothing evinces 'I don't care' like rap."

    Maybe not but "Tune in, turn on, drop out" comes close.

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  17. "I'm afraid they will be forced to conclude that, among other things, the greatest accumulation of wealth and power in the history of the world was spent trying to teach black people to do algebra."

    You do realize that in fact very little of our wealth and power actually is spent on black people in any way. It's just that we get no return on that investment. America's wealth is being sapped by our military adventures and the accumulation of wealth by a tiny minority of elites.

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  18. http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/la-times-study-asian-math-teachers-better-than-black-ones/

    LA Times Study: Asian math teachers better than Black ones

    Diane Ravitch tweets
    What are officials supposed to do with that finding? Hire Asian teachers, fire Black teachers? Absurdity of VAA analysis.

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  19. Anonymous in 3rd comment has perhaps the most chilling comment on this thread:

    "Well, this is somewhat like what I've been saying all along about CA's API testing. Sacramento has been finessing the achievement gap by gradually making the test easier for everyone. As more whites and Asians "rail" at 1000/1000, increases in black and Hispanic scores look like a closing of the achievement gap. This process of easing test standards is being done subtly so that few notice. And across the board, parents easily delude themselves into thinking their kids are getting smarter."

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  20. McWhorter's not gay. He does have a white wife, however.

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  21. "So I'm optimistic. There will be a news conference one day where a prominent politician will announce that they have a way to close the achievement gap. But the difference will be that it will be some technique that expands the brains of black kids - not just another improbable nostrum involving teaching methods."

    But couldn't the same technique be used to expand the brains of white and asian kids also, keeping them one standard deviation above blacks?

    Far more likely than imaginary brain expansion: forced "dumbing down" brain surgery for white and asian kids. Problem solved! No more racial gap.

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  22. I thought McWhorter was a fan of rap (musically). But in "All About the Beat" he argued that there wasn't much to crow about lyrically or politically. I also thought he might have been gay when I heard Steve reference his predilection for broadway, but he is apparently married. I suppose it's not surprising that he empathizes with the unpopular bookish black students discussed in "Acting White: An Ironic Consequence of Desegregation".

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  23. Comparison to military-industrial complex was spot on, anon. The war rages on. More school, more programs. Before school, after school. Teach their parents. Defeat is not an option. Better, faster, smarter teachers. Teacher draft. If they need to fake a test from time to time to show continued support and funding, that's alright. The patriotic press ain't gonna show tell.

    I hope Albertasaurus is right, but I worry that this house of cards will collapse on itself before the grey matter generated is invented.

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  24. The problem is that most people would not know what a standard deviation is. You normally need an engineering or sciences degree to understand the concept.

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  25. I'm inclined to believe you Steve but there are some things that give me pause:

    Some very smart and very rich people seem to believe that the causes of the racial-gap is not genetic but rather due to environmental factors.

    Are they all wrong? Or, afraid to speak up?

    Or maybe, you're wrong.

    I'm really not sure.

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  26. Immigrant children, a government commission concluded, were the slowest learners in school, the most common residents of alms houses. The fecundity of immigrants and the resulting fear of labor competition, wrote economist Francis Amasa Walker, one of the early presidents of M.I.T., in 1896, so discourages births in good Anglo-Saxon families, that we were in danger of committing “race suicide.” Later, in the 1930s, C.M. Goethe, a leading citizen of Sacramento and militant eugenicist issued a press release warning that Mexican “peons multiply like rabbits…it is this birthrate that makes Mexican peon immigration such a menace.”

    Americans have long been ambivalent about immigration, and when issues of immigration overlap with issues of race, as they often still do, babies and breeding become an emotional issue, especially in an era of birthers. Without the 14th Amendment Barack Obama might not be president. We don’t talk about “race suicide” any more, but how many of us still think about it?

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  27. ...clearly the HBD-sphere does.

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  28. I know a lot of you guys believe that science is going to validate HBD and leaad to smarter policies. As hopeful as you are, I disagree with you on the following grounds:

    1.) The science behind IQ, race, and achievement has been strong for decades. Yet they still deny racial differences in IQ matter, though they do acknowledge the importance of IQ in other cirumcstances.

    2.) Most low IQ people don't understand anything about science. "Proving" that science indicates low-IQ people were dealt a bad hand, genetically, isn't going to advance your case to an 80IQ high school dropout.

    3.) As the NAM (black, Latin, Muslim, Pacific Islander, SE Asian) population grows in the first world, the political pressure to deny race-IQ links will likely increase

    4.) The lower performing groups and subgroups are breeding the fastest and will grow as a proportion of the global population, but still not be that wealthy. The last thing they want to hear is that their low IQ causes their problems. They'd rather hear Al Sharpton talk about reparations and redistributionism.

    5.) Scientists are generally too cowardly, too afraid of losing their jobs, and too nerdy to have a major impact on how society thinks.

    6.) If HBD is really true, the logical conclusion is that we should cut welfare, encourage less breeding among the dim, and abolish affirmative action. Leaders of the lower-IQ groups won't like this and will inflame the passsions of their coethnics against those that believe in HBD.

    7.) Denying facts and science is easy. Politicians routinely ignore bad stats on NAM immigrants and call for a "path to citizenship", claiming today's illegals are like yesterday's Jewish refugees. If they can be so oblivious/intellectually dishonest, why can't they deny science?

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  29. To the anonymous who mentioned Francis Amasa Walker. I had never heard of the man, so I looked him up. I found it interesting that his wiki entry stated the following:

    Walker also argued that unrestricted immigration was the major reason behind nineteenth-century native American fertility decline, but while the argument was politically popular and became widely-accepted in mobilizing restrictions on immigration, it rested upon a surprisingly facile statistical analysis that was later refuted.

    Of course they never explained how it was refuted.

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  30. The Triumph of Willful Impossibilities8/17/10, 1:08 AM

    Without the 14th Amendment Barack Obama might not be president. We don’t talk about “race suicide” any more, but how many of us still think about it?

    While Bush was terrible and Obama even worse, the absence of or an interpretation of the 14th Amendment as it was originally written to enfranchise freed slaves would not prevent our elites from appointing Obama as POTUS to look after their interests.

    Obama's mother was a US citizen which pretty much gives him US citizenship whether born in the US or abroad (like McCain in Panama).

    Seems you're just paranoid or propagandizing on this point.

    Also, I don't think as many here think of "race suicide" so much as national and cultural suicide with the attendant loss of opportunities and hope for both for ourselves, family, friends and children.

    It's always the case that the masses are less extreme and vocal than largely imagined boogey men you image based upon a few isolated posts.

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  31. "I know a lot of you guys believe that science is going to validate HBD and lead to smarter policies."

    HBD has already prevailed, although certainly not in the dim consciousness of brown proles. It is the new "divine right of kings" by which the Ivy League class justifies being compensated in the economy by 10 to 100 times the salary of the average worker. It's also the reason why the left obsessively built a case for the brilliance of Barack Obama -- although the best and most convincing case would be the release of his IQ scores or revealing that he was a National Merit Scholar in High School, which he wasn't (he wasn't even commended) -- so that he would be seen as worthy to rule over us. And why do you think the brilliant Dem legislators keep passing 2000 page laws that nobody can understand? Of course so that a genius class of bureaucrats can be paid handsomely to interpret and enforce these labyrinthine rules.

    No, the assumption of Anonymous that the rising tides of brown demography will thwart the ascendancy of HBD ideas is false. It will however destroy Democracy, since "We the People" will be too stupid to participate in the process of governing ourselves. At this point, all our rights and liberties will simply vanish.

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  32. First anon sez:the greatest accumulation of wealth and power in the history of the world was spent trying to teach black people to do algebra.

    I'm not sure this is the real intention of the AA and the No Child Left Behind crowd (except Bush coz he actually believed this crap). Isn't it just a proxy for shafting middle class America? Aren't blacks and increasingly Hispanics just being used by the MSM and the elite, who surely must disdain them even more than whites, to make life intolerable for middle class whites?

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  33. Steve,

    Will you PLEASE find a way to make people chose a name before posting? It's frustrating to read three consecutive, semi-related postings by "Anonymous" and not know where one commenter ends and the other begins.

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  34. re: Francis Walker

    I looked up the refutation, here it is:

    http://tinyurl.com/2b3r89u

    The article is quite fascinating, mainly because it seems that all of the HBD ideas we throw around today were around in the 19th century too.

    It's hard to tell if Walker has really been refuted or not without looking at his own argument.

    Does immigration suppress native fertility? It's kind of hard to say. Almost every day in Manhattan I see black nannies with white children.

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  35. Helen Edwards,
    Wrt John McWhorter, you are wrong, with all due respect. He has indeed been critical of SOME aspects and subgengres of Hip Hop, but actually, he is quite a big fan of certain artists, such as Kanye' West, for example. Please check his appearance on CSPAN's "In Depth" where he speficially says this.

    I'm just sayin'...

    O.

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  36. If you designate a 75 as the highest possible score, then almost everyone who would otherwise score a 100 will of course get a 75; while almost eveyone who would otherwise score only a 75 will have a top score. Everyone wins! But not really.

    >the greatest accumulation of wealth and power in the history of the world was spent trying to teach black people to do algebra<

    But it's such a godly and noble goal to turn black people into white people, isn't it? We have the skin creams, we just have to keep workin' on the rest of it.

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  37. Florida resident.8/17/10, 6:56 AM

    Dear Mr. Sailer !
    Great post, as always.

    On almost un-related subject.
    Do you have any source of critique of Gardner's multiple intellegences concept ?
    I am reading his works, and the arrogance of Gardner prevents me to read quietly and with cold head.

    Your truly, Florida resident.

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  38. The winners were the military-industrial complex in the first event, and the education industry in the second.

    http://www.agi.harvard.edu/

    "The Achievement Gap Initiative is a university-wide initiative
    based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School"

    "Bridging Research and Practice by framing issues, producing and disseminating research and distilling implications for decision makers in an emergent movement for excellence with equity."

    Since excellence and equity are incompatible, the goals stated by Harvard are impossible, so the Gap Fussers there will have excellent job security: they've already been paid to fail for 40 years.

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  39. Correlation does not imply causation.


    Not really. Correlation does imply causation. It doesn't prove causation per se, but it definitely indicates that further research into a link between two phenomena - in this case, social trends - may be useful.

    I'm not saying the mainstream popularity of rap music correlates to social decline - the above commenter, after all, offered nothing but speculation without actual info on academic achievement - but if there is a correlation, then a causal link is therefore possible.

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  40. Finally, may I just reiterate that a much more feasible and pragmatic goal than the current goal of trying to raise Non-Asian Minority performance by one standard deviation while preventing whites and Asians from improving is to try to raise all four groups' performance by half a standard deviation?

    Or as you've said before Steve, just hit all the White and Asian kids over the head with a ball-peen hammer.

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  41. Nackerman, the idea that education does not lift all boats equally is embedded in Paolo Freire's revolutionary educational teachings. He is taught in sanitized form in ed schools across the nation.

    Paolo taught that the smart kids should be held back in school and forced to teach the dumb peasant kids to raise them equally, avoid the inevitable stratification into upper and lower classes, and inculcate Solidarity with the Masses. It is Paolo that taught group-based work in elementary school in which each table of students get the same grade for some project and the smart kids who finish a task early help the dummies at their table. Better than a ball peen hammer, pacé Steve, but not a Good Thing for the smart kids.

    The Marxist revolutionary aspects of Paolo's theorizing are played down in Ed School, of course.

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  42. I find it terrifying that Hispanics did better on the English portion of the test than blacks did!

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  43. "Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge, perhaps the ultimate Boston Brahmin, was among the many who warned that they’d never become good Americans."

    The irony in this often heard argument is that Cabot Lodge has been proven right. Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants have changed the character of America, undeniably. Maybe for the better from our point of view, but I guarantee you if Cabot Lodge looked around today's America he would tell you his predictions had come true. He would certainly be horrified by the power of the Israeli lobby, the corruption in city governments, the lack of pride in civic matters, the lack of veneration for American traditions and history.
    Winners write history, don't forget that.

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  44. "Walker also argued that unrestricted immigration was the major reason behind nineteenth-century native American fertility decline"

    I don't know if this fertility drop actually happened or not but if it did i expect the mechanism is similar to what happens today in areas that become white-minority.

    Mass immigration is disproportionately young males and tends to be concentrated so what happens is you get an area where the original ethnic group is still the overall majority but the incoming ethnic group has become the majority of young men.

    The young men of both sides then fight and the majority incomers win and start to show their dominance of the terriotory in typical primate ways. It's that sense of being conquered (in that particular small area) that leads to all sorts of self-destructive behaviours among the original majority.

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  45. This topic of educational B/W racial gap should be required to be brought forth in context. Ackerman's various posts seem cognizant of this.
    Jensen's paper "Spearman's 'g' and the Problem of Educational Equality" is a classic in this respect. We have had one media Eureka frenzy after another, announcing the problem solved or vastly mitigated--only to dissipate. Macro-psychotic.

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  46. Sad, yes, but progressives know, they know in their hearts, that next Christmas will be the one that Santa brings a pony.

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  47. "Of course they never explained how it was refuted."

    The article that supposedly refutes Walker's theory was published in 1992 by Professor Dennis G. Hodgson of Fairfield University.

    You can read it on his own website:

    http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/fa

    culty/hodgson/Courses/so184

    /popdocs/Walker.pdf

    So what says you? Does Hodgson have a case?

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  48. Anon said:

    "What immigration restrictionists say now about Latinos was said a century ago about the Italians, Slavs, Greeks, Jews and the “hordes” of other southern and eastern European immigrants then arriving at our eastern ports, and before that about the Germans and Irish.

    They were of inferior intelligences, prone to crime and disease and so busy trying to earn a living, as Prescott Farnsworth Hall, one of the Brahmin members of the Immigration Restriction League, said, that their neglected children were “the most criminal class in the community.” Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge, perhaps the ultimate Boston Brahmin, was among the many who warned that they’d never become good Americans."

    1) Even after 100 years, many of those groups, especially in the Northeast, still aren't completely integrated.

    2) Scots-Irish and Yankees still don't get along especially well, despite coming from the same country and being of the same race, after 300 years.

    3) To the degree which Italians, Slavs, Irish, etc. have integrated into American culture, they've massively altered it. You may like the changes or dislike them, but there is no denying that the Northeast would be a very different place if post-Civil War immigration had never happened.

    4) Was Henry Cabot Lodge wrong in being concerned? What has been the fate of the Boston Brahmins?

    5) This imperfect assimilation happened in a much more self-confident culture with populations racially and culturally more similar to us. We should expect worse outcomes today.

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  49. Some very smart and very rich people seem to believe that the causes of the racial-gap is not genetic but rather due to environmental factors. Are they all wrong? Or, afraid to speak up?

    The Civil Rights Movement was created for the sole purpose of empowering the, ah, "Bolshevik" element in this country - by simultaneously exploiting white guilt and negro vindictiveness.

    When the day comes that the negro no longer serves any purpose for that crowd, they will immediately turn on a dime and discard the negro like so much used toilet paper.

    Onward to China!

    PS: If the problem is finally "proved" to be genetic, then you immediately lose white guilt, because none of these problems would ever have been Ol' Whitey's fault in the first place, and you also burst the bubble of negro vindictiveness, because you can no longer blame Ol' Man Racidm for all of the world's ills.

    There is lots and lots of money to be made in the profiteering bidness - just ask Olof Aschberg [WHOSE NAME IS STILL BEING CENSORED BY GOOGLE, WHICH OWNS BLOGGER/BLOGSPOT!!!].

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  50. I'm black. If blacks won't work, can't read, and can't count, things are not going to end well for us.

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  51. >I'm black. If blacks won't work, can't read, and can't count, things are not going to end well for us.<

    Not necessarily. You all are still breeding well. And that, in the end, is all that counts.

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  52. Quote:

    Peter A said...
    You do realize that in fact very little of our wealth and power actually is spent on black people in any way.

    Neighborhoods, towns, public school systems, and entire cities have been abandoned to get away from their crime. I wouldn't call that very little cost,and that's only a fraction of it. Over half of the cost of the criminal justice system (Courthouses, Jury Duty, Police Stations, Prisons, Medical Examiners, Morgues, and more) is due to them.

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  53. Lucille said..."[quoting me]'Correlation does not imply causation.'


    Not really. Correlation does imply causation. It doesn't prove causation per se, but it definitely indicates that further research into a link between two phenomena - in this case, social trends - may be useful....if there is a correlation, then a causal link is therefore possible."

    Yes, really. Correlation does not imply causation, as I said, but it's equally true that correlation can imply the possibility of causation, as I take it you said.

    In any case, you can take it up with Wikipedia:

    "'Correlation does not imply causation' is a phrase used in science and statistics to emphasize that correlation between two variables does not automatically imply that one causes the other (though correlation is necessary for causation and can indicate possible causes or areas for further investigation)."

    Correlation does not imply causation.

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  54. "PS: If the problem is finally "proved" to be genetic, then you immediately lose white guilt, because none of these problems would ever have been Ol' Whitey's fault in the first place, and you also burst the bubble of negro vindictiveness, because you can no longer blame Ol' Man Racism for all of the world's ills."

    It weakens it anyways. This is why we have a moral imperative to investigate the true cause of the various gaps.

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  55. WHOSE NAME IS STILL BEING CENSORED BY GOOGLE, WHICH OWNS BLOGGER/BLOGSPOT!!!

    Part of the problem is that his name isn't spelt consistently.

    I would have guessed "Olav Aschberg" myself, but the apparent standard is Olof. And there's a fun spin on the old commie's last name in an actual published book (no blaming WWW ignorance for that one!)

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  56. "Neighborhoods, towns, public school systems, and entire cities have been abandoned to get away from their crime."

    Fair enough - but the only policy that would have addressed that would have been expulsion of blacks out of the country. The problem you're describing has nothing to do with education policy.

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  57. Chuck said

    >This is why we have a moral imperative to investigate the true cause of the various gaps.<

    Totalitarian alert.

    "We" have a "moral imperative" (uh-oh...) to investigate the "true" cause. Gee, what IS the "true" cause, Commissar Chuck? Obviously you believe we have failed to identify it and you have succeeded in identifying it, since you call for an investigation of it. We can't investigate it if we don't know what it is - so tell us.

    Let me guess it. The "true" cause is ... Way-cism? Right? Hm, not hard to guess that one correctly, for it could ONLY BE Way-cism, no matter what hatefacts get in the way.

    Onward with the Moral crusade, citizens.

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  58. >I find it terrifying that Hispanics did better on the English portion of the test than blacks did!<

    What's so surprising about that? Brush up on your Bell Curve.

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  59. As P. J. O'Rourke once sarcastically put it: "Blacks have made very little economic progress since 8.45 this morning."

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  60. you can no longer blame Ol' Man Racism for all of the world's ills."

    It weakens it anyways. This is why we have a moral imperative to investigate the true cause of the various gaps.


    You mis-spelled "Racidm".

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  61. BTW, are other bloggers at Blogger/Blogspot having as many comments "eaten" as we seem to be losing at iSteve?

    Either this software package was written by orangutans, or else someone is screwing behind the scenes with just iSteve.

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  62. B Lode: Part of the problem is that his name isn't spelt consistently.

    Try the following Google Search:

    GOOGLE SEARCH - olof aschberg site:isteve.blogspot.com

    That search OUGHT to find the following thread at iSteve:


    We can only hope the title of this 2008 book isn't already obsolete
    Tuesday, March 24, 2009
    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/03/we-can-only-hope-title-of-this-2008.html

    ...Although an enormous amount has been written about "Nazi gold" laundered through Switzerland, the much larger amount of "Bolshevik gold" laundered through Sweden in 1918-1923 has previously received little attention. Lenin's problem was that gold ingots stamped with the tsarist Russian seal were obviously stolen by the Bolsheviks, so they traded at a large discount. He found a capitalist, Stockholm bank Olof Aschberg, to sell him the rope. Aschberg would buy Russian gold in Estonia, ship it across the Baltic, and have the Swedish Royal Mint melt down the gold and put its own insignia on this. In return, Aschberg would sell the Soviets weapons needed for their civil war and subsequent 1922 war with their own peasantry...


    However, the aforementioned Google Search consistently does NOT find that thread, because someone at Google has gone in and [manually] deleted the thread from the search database.

    One time I was able to get the thread to re-appear in the search results for a day or two, but then someone at Google re-jiggered the thing and removed it from the search database again.

    PS: Something tells me that Sergey Brin's ancestry might not be entirely irrelevant here.

    PPS: Curiously, tonight I am sitting at a computer which I haven't sat at for about four months, and the "Auto Complete" for "Olof As" gives me

    1) Olof Aschberg

    2) Olof Aspelin

    So either the person who is screwing with the search database hasn't altered the "Auto Complete" results, or else Google has been following me for a while now.

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  63. Lucille wrote:
    "Correlation does imply causation. It doesn't prove causation per se, but it definitely indicates that further research into a link between two phenomena - in this case, social trends - may be useful."

    ==============================

    In the phrase:
    correlation does not imply causation
    the word imply is being used in the sense that it is used in formal logic.
    A implies B means that whenever A is true, B is also true. To make A implies B false, you only have to find a single counter-example where A is true but B is false.

    So the statement correlation implies causation is false because examples exist where correlation is true, but causation is not.

    It might be more useful to say correlation is no guarantee of causation. Even if there is causation, it is not always apparent which direction the causation goes.

    In the second half of the 20th century a lot of social scientists used correlation as "proof" of whatever their favorite theory about causation was. A lot of this involved child-rearing methods, and there was a lot of nonsense that passed as science in that time. For example, the idea that autism is caused by cold mothers.

    And of course the whole racial "gap" thing. Blacks didn't do as well in school and blacks lived in bad areas of town. Therefore, the researchers concluded, living in a bad area of town caused children to do badly in school.

    A lot of these theories about child rearing have been shown to be false by adoption studies. But people still believe them, and still teach them.

    The Nurture Assumption by Judith Harris write about this--though not about the racial examples.

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  64. "Obama's mother was a US citizen which pretty much gives him US citizenship whether born in the US or abroad (like McCain in Panama)."

    No, it doesn't for a number of reasons. But I'd prefer that lawyer Phil Berg, enlighten you on that topic. As for McCain's situation, it was at least publicized and discussed in the MSM. He was the son of two adult American citizens for one thing.
    Also, something about a law passed in the early 30s. But at least it was discussed and he didn't pay a major law firm a million dollars to shut up the accusers, as has someone else we all know.
    That topic as never been debated here, and just as well isteve keeps on topics that do not get the Obots too acitvated/

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  65. Last night I finished Colored People by Henry Louis Gates..it was really kind of sad. He actually laments the arrival of integration in his hometown. They lost their black schools and damn near their black churches too. They had their own little colored universe, which was decimated by "progress." It ends with the last segregated company picnic, really quite poignant. No one really seemed happy about it at all.

    He added that they were all "working for" integration and all, because Dr. King et al said they should. But it definitely sounds like it was a net loss at least for him and his town.

    While Gates was a very bright mixed-race student, I still think he was lifted out of state college and boosted into Yale under an early form of AA.

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  66. Why are the NYC differences only one standard deviation? Aren't there a fairly significant number of Jews in NYC schools? Or do they mostly go to suburban or private schools?

    If there are a decent amount of Jews, it means either the non-Jewish whites are unimpressive, or the blacks are a little better than most other blacks.

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  67. An aspect of this issue is the research about boosting IQ by way of
    meganutrients--vitamins and protein supplements, etc. Hans Eysenck in the early 90's was able to get regard by the British Psychological Society to early research results. There were some "high responders" but overall the increase in IQ was
    marginal. Reuben Fuerenstein, an
    Israeli psychologist, got somewhat similar results by way of "cognitive/perceptual/ training" (Instrumental Enrichment ). Feurenstein's results got a massive Eureka frenzy within the US media and within the National Association of School Psychologists. But over time, replication took lots of wind out of the sails. US media have remained silent about the deflation of Eureka enthusiasms in the Fuernstein approach. The meganutrient claims, likewise, tended to deflate upon replication. The matter of "high responders" nonetheless cries out for clarification and explication. Even if, say, only one ghetto Black out of 20--or Appalachian poor white our of 20-- proves to be highly boosted by meganutrients, is it not ethically imperative that he/she be found and so aided? The meganutrient approach never got much media attention in the US (in the UK??). After all the notion of boosting IQ by boosting an organ shaped so directly by human evolution as is he brain--is a little too close to the taboo nerve. The notion of boosting IQ by enriching verbal and cognitive experience is, well, what we "all" "know" to be the correct approach, as in "politically correct". A large issue is the fetish re conventional reserach design. Exactly who decreed in these matters that we can not go forward with a mere protocol approach, noting and identifying the few ( what?
    01 in 12? 01 in 20? ) high responders and thereby not obscuring the occasional "classroom significant" results just in order to conform to conventions of academic research??

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  68. Anonymous Janujs said...

    Anon said:


    You forgot:

    6: they greased the skids for multiculturalism.

    This is one even many white nationalists like to avoid, and part of the reason I dropped "WN" and started using "ethnopatriot."

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  69. Florida resident.8/19/10, 10:28 AM

    Re my previous comment:
    Dear Mr. Sailer !
    Great post, as always.

    On almost un-related subject.
    Do you have any source of critique of Gardner's multiple intellegences concept ?
    I am reading his works, and the arrogance of Gardner prevents me to read quietly and with cold head.

    Your truly, Florida resident.

    I have actually found quite sufficient discussion of that topic in the chapter 1 (pp. 17 to 30) of the book "Real Education" published in 2008 by Charles Murray.

    Murray's statement is the following. While for an individual person it may make sense to distinguish 7 abilities (or, as Gardner calls them, "intellegences"), the most important for academic success and for mass employement in the US society are 3 of them: Spatial ability, Logical-Mathematical ability and Linguistic ability.

    Being represented in different proportions in an individual person, all three are so much statistically correlated with each other in a large sample, and so much correlated with g-factor, that they make no separate importance for the discussion of general trends of population as a whole.

    Gardner needed them to justify his politically correct statement: that _every_ student is _above_average_ in some particular field (of equally imporant "intellegences".)

    Murray shows it is not so.

    Your truly, F. r.

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  70. "I wish we had stats to allow a comparison of black achievement, in say grades 7-9, before and after rap hit it big. Nothing evinces "I don't care" like rap. What would the dividing year be, 1988, 1990, something like that? John McWhorter is down on rap big-time, and I agree with him. There should be more discussion here of his concept of "therapeutic alienation." I wonder if a lot of people dismiss him because he's gay or/and he presents as arrogant."

    No, blacks were always like that. Blacks made rap, not the other way around.

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  71. "Triumph Fades"

    It's hard to be a liberal crackhead. Just when a win is in your grasp, zotz! like quicksilver through your fingers!

    Leaving you with an astonished, hangdog expression. Time and time, and time again.

    I can see the mouth screwing up, the eyebrows tensing angrily. Finally the person says piously: "We must try again, and redouble our efforts."

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  72. >Blacks made rap, not the other way around.<

    No. People like the Beastie Boys made rap.

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  73. Thanks, Melykin. Excellent stuff.

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  74. Anon's pessimism about "science" leading to new policies that take HBD seriously is correct, but for the wrong reason.

    It won't be "science" that leads to the new policies, it will be a reform of Holocaustianity.

    Jews created the US's official state religion of Holocaustianity, which has been the foundation of pseudo-science about HBD during the last half of the 20th century. They set up this state religion so they could benefit.

    However, precisely because they were dogmatic and not scientific, things haven't gone as they expected. They're now experiencing "the heat" that the rest of us have been subjected to under their moral authority over our culture authority granted by setting themselves as the light unto the world that is entirely innocent of wrong doing and senselessly crucified.

    So, Jewish intellectuals can and will reverse the damage they have done to science but only in a few selected areas. Those areas and those alone will be be free from their culture of critique and we can even expect extremely sloppy science out of them, not unlike the evolutionary psychology delaying tactic responding to sociobiology's threatening posture occuring before Jews were ready -- at the time they were harvesting fertile young sexually liberated boomer women in their institutions of "higher learning", hence corporate concubinage. That con game is over now and has been for a while.

    Look around at the Jewish "scientists" in HBD and you'll see this happening pretty much on the schedule I've been warning about for oh, say, 15 years now.

    Its going to get really ugly.

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