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| Countries/states scoring ABOVE average. |
The federal National Center for Education Statistics has released a report linking the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores by state to the TIMSS math and science tests of 47 countries.
There is always a ton of noise in these kind of figures, but a few general patterns can be recognized for those not morally averse to pattern recognition.
There is always a ton of noise in these kind of figures, but a few general patterns can be recognized for those not morally averse to pattern recognition.
Here are the countries and American states that did better than the international average for 8th grade math. The top 5 in the world are Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan.
What do these countries have in common? It probably has something to do with, uh, how they hand out homework, or something.
Then come five American states: Massachusetts, Vermont, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New Hampshire.
What do these states have in common?
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calculated in 1993 that there's an r = .52 correlation between a state's test scores and its distance in miles from the Canadian border.
It must be the hockey.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calculated in 1993 that there's an r = .52 correlation between a state's test scores and its distance in miles from the Canadian border.
It must be the hockey.
Bottom state was Alabama (466); bottom country was Ghana (331).
In case you are wondering, the NCES report doesn't mention race. So don't even think about it.
And here's the bottom of 8th grade science (not math):
And here's the bottom of 8th grade science (not math):
Lilly White Idaho and Utah not doing so hot. I guess Mormonism depresses math-doing ability.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised Israel scores so low.
ReplyDeleteHigher than Finland, though. Finish education methods are often touted by pundits.
DeleteIs it because they included Israeli- Arabs? Be nice to know.
DeleteLook at the composition. A lot of advanced and high and a lot of low and below low
DeleteIsrael scores low because of the Sephardim, Mizrachim, and Ethiopians.
Delete"It must be the hockey."
ReplyDeleteSince Ontario is below Florida, I don't think it's the hockey.
There are two interesting things here, both of which should annoy someone:
ReplyDelete1. Race matters. Asians do better than whites do better than other nonwhites. This ought to annoy the left. Of course they will bray that it is culture.
2. Culture matters. White states with a liberal culture, like MA, VT, and NH, do better than white states with a conservative culture, like MT or ND. This ought to annoy the right.
In some ways, I think things like law-and-order conservatism are adaptive (and hence useful) responses to the problems of diversity. If you have nothing but white people, you can get away with moral hazard-prone systems like social democracy. However, if you have NAMs, you need religion and lots of cops to keep them in line. I'd rather live in Boston than Houston, but I'd rather live in Houston than Detroit.
What explains the Detroit Public Schools? Couldn't get any closer to Canada than that. Could it be..... The actual residents don't like hockey? We shouldn't notice such things.
ReplyDeleteLilly White Idaho and Utah not doing so hot. I guess Mormonism depresses math-doing ability.
ReplyDeleteThe graph shows all who scored above natl avg. and if UT and ID are low by your standards, maybe Mormons and migrant workers don't care for hockey either.
Then come five American states: Massachusetts, Vermont, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New Hampshire.
ReplyDeleteWhat do these states have in common?
They are all Yankee states that did not attract (and are therefore not burdened with) the Negro proletariat.
Wisconsin, a wonderful state, would probably rank right up there with Minnesota but for the Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha, its three sprawling Negro ghettos.
Is there any way to separate the data by race in Wisconsin and Ohio?
Also, is there any way to see what the TFR is for the high achieving states?
The substantial differences between different international student tests were previously discussed here. My impression is that the PISA is psychometrically superior to the TIMSS, but there are measurement issues that makes all international test score comparisons suspect. IIRC, there's also some age issues in the TIMSS, as the average age at test fluctuates substantially across countries, and it's not clear how, or even if, this has been accounted for in the published numbers.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised Israel scores so low.
ReplyDeleteIsrael has 20% Arab peasants. Also, they have a large and fast growing population of fundamentalist Jewish breeders that deliberately stay stupid: no English, no Math, no Science, no Literature (except Torah), no Geography, no History (except Torah). On top of which they struggle with the growing number of Yemeni and Ethiopian Jews who are also quite dumb.
In short, Israel has a fast growing population of Breeder Jews, Camel Jockey Jews and Illegal Infiltrators they have to feed ... and no natural resources.
Which helps explain why the Israeli Ashkenazi [read: white European] elite are troubled that the two recent "Israeli" Nobel Prize winners are "yordim": Jewish escapees to the West who abandoned Israel to get ahead. Can you blame them?
It is unfair to compare Israel with Europe. The Israelis should be compared with the other semitic desert peoples around them.
They are doing quite well compared to Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Jordan. Now if only the smarties would stop moving back West.
I'm surprised Israel scores so low.
ReplyDeleteIf you were Israeli, you'd be surprised it wasn't lower.
I moved up to Eastern Massachusetts (Boston area) from Maryland (DC suburbs). What surprised me most about Boston and the surrounding areas was the dearth of black people and other minorities. It seems very white. If you drive from the North Shore to the northwest areas to Metrowest, et al., you will see very few blacks or Hispanics or "others". In nicer towns (Lexington, Belmont, Wellesley, Newton, Needham, et al.), you'll see nothing but whites and a good percentage of East Asians (Korean and Chinese) and some East Indians. In fact, the city of Boston has a very noticeable and significant population of East Asians (a lot in education and medical areas). Even in a lot of the solidly middle-class and working-class areas (out near 495 and outside) the whites seem a cut above the middle-class whites in Maryland and Pennsylvania (no doubt the dearth of blacks can't hurt).
ReplyDeleteNorway is surprisingly low. Below even Slovenia.
ReplyDeletePeter
For those wondering why I call Rhode Island the red-headed stepchild of New England, here's the proof why.
ReplyDeleteSo Norway only did slightly better than Mississippi (population 40% black?
ReplyDeleteKY is 90% white and was fairly low on the scale. West Virginia was even lower. So there's clearly more than just race going on here.
ReplyDeleteWhite states with a liberal culture, like MA, VT, and NH, do better than white states with a conservative culture, like MT or ND. This ought to annoy the right.
ReplyDeleteThose more rural states don't have an SWPL culture that focuses on getting into the best schools and the best colleges for status reasons. The kids just go to the local university or other second tier schools, if they go to college at all. Why bother since much of the work is farm/ranch work or other blue color jobs where college makes no difference anyway. And if there is no social pressure to get into an Ivy or other top school, what's the point of doing so well in high school? You're getting into the State college if you can show up and sign your name.
White people in the liberal northeast urban areas can't even fathom that other white people live their entire lives not giving a damn about what college they went to (other than to root for their sports teams).
I'm surprised Quebec scored so high. It's not a math-friendly place.
ReplyDeleteWas Ghana the only Sub-Saharan nation that was tested? What about all those computer savy Nigerians?
ReplyDeleteOff topic but according to the UN population projections Nigeria's population will be some where in the vicinity of 330 million in twenty years or so. Can you imagine if only 50 million of them come here! Good bye America Hello third world.Of course the good news is that this will create more jobs;for police.
While I understand your thesis here (ie: "lol lol no one is talking about race lol") it seems to me that one doesn't have to be a completely naive liberal mushead or whatever to accept the fact that yes, the vastly different teaching standards of Japan versus Ghana probably have a lot to do with these results.
ReplyDeleteAlso: what's an example of a really wealthy, dumb state/country?
I've actually been to Ghana. It's a fairly nice country, actually.
ReplyDeleteThere's some sort-of low hanging fruit to be had in all those Arab countries. I've spent quite a lot of time there, there's no way they're dumber than sub-Saharan Africans, they're just unbelievably lazy.
ReplyDeleteWhat's up with Norway?
ReplyDeleteIt's all the Swedes who have moved there recently to escape the multicultural wonderland that Sweden has become. Swedes ruin everything.
DeleteSo Ghana must be a pretty kick-ass country, because most sub-Saharan countries don't figure at all, right? So they're organised enough to collect data.
ReplyDeleteOT, but the current Vonage commercial looks like an advertisement for open borders.
ReplyDeleteHere is how the ad is described:
"The new Generosity Officer is already breaking down walls at the office, just like Vonage lets you make international calls without any restrictions."
It opens with the line, "Walls separate people, Jose!" as the
Generosity Officer uses a sledge hammer to smash through the office wall of a Mexican worker of the white-Hispanic variety. Then we see immigrant office workers hammering through walls while shouting "Mehico!", "India!", "Brazil!", "China!"
I guess the wrecked office represents the historical American nation.
Anonymous 10/25/13, 3:12 AM wrote: I'm surprised Israel scores so low.
ReplyDeleteI'm not. Ashkenazi Jews make up only half of the population, possibly less. The balance is made up mostly of Middle Eastern Jews. Also, an increasing proportion of Ashkenazi children are ultra-Orthodox whose schools focus more on Torah and Talmud than math and science.
New York seems to be significantly outperforming its demographics. I'd like to see the distribution within the state.
ReplyDeleteWas going to make the point that if just MA and VT scored better than MT & ND you could probably make the point that MA and VT probably spend lots more education $$ than MT and ND - but fiscally tight NH maybe doesn't. But thinking that southern NH has become so much a bedroom suburb of Boston that maybe that no longer applies - as shown by NH now often voting for Democrats, which once would have never been the case.
ReplyDeleteEducation $$ spent per student in NH maybe now not that much different than MA & VT and education $$ may enter into it. My teacher wife would probably say it does, though she is liberal enough to have blinders on about much else.
Race may matter a little bit, but I bet non-racial elements matter more: such as history, social conditions, etc.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that most of the worst countries appear not be those from sub-Saharan Africa, but from the Muslim world.
ReplyDeletesomeone explain to me Norway and their science results from the bottom graph.
ReplyDeleteThat sticks out like a sore thumb in relation to the rest of the states/countries/regions on that list.
Genuinely puzzled.
@0312:
ReplyDeletePerhaps the orthodox drag down the Ashkenazi?
You have to wonder about results where Norway barely ranks above Kazakhstan and Turkey, where Utah does worse than Wyoming, and Ontario does worse than Florida.
ReplyDeleteA bit too much "noise" for me.
Wait, can anyone explain to me why the white people in Vermont do so much better in school than white people in utah?
ReplyDeleteWhy does Quebec do so much better than Ontario ? The effect of Toronto ?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this will be discussed here in Canada ?
AKAHorace
On a different topic Steve, have you seen this video:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNqQx7sjoS8
Most of them are white and don't have the poverty problems of Kentucky and West Virginia. NH is libertarian even though they vote Democratic. lower taxes in NH except property taxes.
ReplyDeleteNew Jeresey is odd are they telling the truth or lying on their stats. The state is about 18 percent Hispanic, 17 percent black and 20 percent foreign born.
ReplyDeleteNew Hempshire is not liberal, its left-libertarian and doesn't spend much on education or tax much unless its property taxes.
ReplyDeleteRice centric diet.
ReplyDeleteI think Idaho and Utah have a lot more mestizos than some of the other lily white northern states.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised NJ is that high in the rankings.
ReplyDeleteI guess a good share of their minorities are Asians, but still...Newark? Camden?
It would be interesting to quantify the effects of brain drain from states without upscale white-collar economies to states that have those jobs.
ReplyDeleteIf a white Alabama resident gets an Ivy League education, it seems unlikely that he would end up working back in Alabama rather than NY, DC, Silicon Valley, or whatever.
On the other hand, Vermont and New Hampshire aren't exactly urban wealth centers, so wouldn't they lose their smart kids too?
Yet on the other other hand, they have a lot of relocated New Yorkers and Bostonians.
Of course, none of these questions can be addressed without first disaggregating by race.
Diane Ravitch spoke at our Local Lefty Bookstore recently about her new book, which argues that No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, charter schools, value-added teacher ratings and other ‘reform’ movements are all hoaxes. U.S public schools are doing well, she said, since NAEP scores for each major demographic group, black, white, Asian and Hispanic, have been steady or rising since about 1970.
ReplyDeleteUh, so far, so good, or least a welcome bit of candor. But 1970 is not a great reference year, as it was several years into the slide. Schools are supposed to teach character too, and they have notably failed to do that in many big cities (but perhaps inner-city families make that impossible). Also, we have been paying steadily more for, at best, flat education performance. And, of course, as demographic mixes change, even constant results by each group means a declining average, which must have some implications.
It was when Ravitch got into possible improvements that the tush-covering began. America’s big educational problems were poverty and income inequality, she argued. So we need to: 1) change taxes and other economic policies to equalize incomes; and 2) put more money into schools to offset poverty and income inequality by, for instance, reducing class size and hiring more staff to deal with poor children.
She had one plausible remedy, better prenatal care to avoid cognitive damage before birth. But the rest was just the standard liberal agenda, dressed up as educational reform.
What did Ron Unz say might happen to a country that runs its schools, economy and government as if Marxist economics, Lysenkoism or some other blatantly fraudulent theory were true? And what if each failure of the theory perversely causes the country to double down on it?
Unlike PISA, Finish did pretty poorly in this test. The consistency of Asian countries in student and adult performance seems outstanding. They must cheated, I guess, at least based on education race realist.
ReplyDelete2. Culture matters. White states with a liberal culture, like MA, VT, and NH, do better than white states with a conservative culture, like MT or ND. This ought to annoy the right.
ReplyDeleteHow do you know that the difference is not simply due to the mean IQ of people who have settled in say, MA vs MT? There is quite a big range of IQ means in the different European countries. And where there are large, selective universities, those former students who settle there will bring the state average up if it is a small state.
What's with Russia doing so well? Are there still that many Jews? Do they not administer the test in their more, um, vibrant, regions? Or do they exclude the special ed types like Texas does?
ReplyDelete@Anon: "Lilly White Idaho and Utah not doing so hot."
ReplyDeleteYour mis-reading the first graph. Well not stellar, Idaho and Utah did better than the international average.
I first noticed about 20 years ago that New Jersey did better on a lot of measures than you'd expect from the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen songs.
ReplyDeleteIt has a large underclass and not that big of an upper class, but its upper middle class is impressive.
"Interesting that most of the worst countries appear not be those from sub-Saharan Africa, but from the Muslim world."
ReplyDeleteGhana was the only majority black country in the world to participate in TIMSS, and it came in last. But you have to give them credit for trying. In general, Ghana has been one of the better governed sub-Saharan states for about the last 30 years (although it's been about 5 years since I checked on Ghana).
I first noticed about 20 years ago that New Jersey did better on a lot of measures than you'd expect from the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen songs.
ReplyDeleteIt has a large underclass and not that big of an upper class, but its upper middle class is impressive.
"I think Idaho and Utah have a lot more mestizos than some of the other lily white northern states."
ReplyDeleteA year or so ago a Salt Lake paper posted stats on every Utah school district, including percentage of Hispanics. Even in districts reputed to be lily-white, the numbers were shockingly high.
I've been to Lebanon and I've been to Qatar. There's no way Lebanon is dumber. Most of the Gulf Arab states were built by Lebanese and Palestinian engineers.
ReplyDeleteAccording to this wikipedia article Ashkenazi Jews make up less than half of the Israeli Jewish population, which could account for poor Israeli performance. Limited secular education among the ultra-Orthodox may have further depressed Israeli performance on TIMSS.
ReplyDeleteGhanaian American here. I'm disheartened that they are bringing up the rear as I know Ghanaians on average are brighter than that.
ReplyDeleteI am happy they were able to pull the data together for analysis though. Evidently this is a difficult task for the other 40 odd Black African countries to accomplish.
Joisey is a beautiful state, and no laughing. OK, you can laugh, but I'm right. The part of NJ where Bon Jovi lives is so beautiful you'd think you are in heaven.
ReplyDeleteNow take Newark. Please. No seriously, Newark is 55% black, and they control the city politically. Their nabes are the usual dumps.
But the Ironbound district is very nice, and the rest of the city is is characterized by historic, stately mansions. They also have a huge park designed by F.L. Omstead.
Don't believe what you read about NJ.
Of course, I agree that practically everything in our society is a hoax and a fix, but NJ is really quite a nice state.
Quebecois here
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, the Canadian province of Quebec does noticeably better than Ontario.
Granted, Quebecers have hockey in their blood, but maybe some demographic differences are at play, too. Visible minorities are still a comparatively small proportion of the population. Blacks are less than 3 percent of the total, and we all know how blacks don't like hockey.
I live in Idaho, and it is very white, and a wonderful state, but I'm not surprised at the low ranking. It's sort of the West Virginia of the north. Not all problems can be blamed on non-whites.
ReplyDeleteSenator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calculated in 1993 that there's an r = .52 correlation between a state's test scores and its distance in miles from the Canadian border.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the R when you measure in kilometers?
Massachusetts has been the education capital of America for 373 years.
ReplyDeleteseriously...63 comments and not a word about Norway's performance in the science test?
ReplyDeleteI'm genuinely curious because that can't be right.
In Israel, this kind of math is no longer emphasized in school. Computer science is emphasized in its place. They have the best system of middle and high school computer science education in the world, which is why something like 25% of US computer science professors are Israeli and why Israel has so many companies on the Nasdaq and why their economy is booming relative to the rest of the industrialized West. It also shows why results like this cannot simply be taken at face value. For example, Russia always did well in math because math did not take capital investment which the USSR could not afford. So it was emphasized and one could succeed on an international scale even with the meager resources given. Talent goes where it is needed/wanted. The Asians go into math because they think it will produce the standardized test results that will get them ahead. They are correct in that I suppose.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to see the Utah data broken down by gender. A lot of the women aren't thinking about careers.
ReplyDeleteMassachusetts has been the education capital of America for 373 years.
ReplyDeleteCulture is an interesting thing. I read that there are now more people with Italian names than people with Yankee names in Mass, Yet the beat goes on.
I can explain Kentucky and West Virginia pretty easily. First, my background...
ReplyDeleteBorn in Kentucky, got most of my education there (HS, BS, MS), now live there. Worked in WV for more than a decade.
If you subscribe to David Hackett Fisher's theories from Albion's Seed, Appalachian culture has historically been suspicious of the highly educated, especially the formally educated. West Virginia and the eastern plateau region of Kentucky is practically ground zero for that culture—and both areas have experienced one of the Western world's biggest brain drains for generations.
Kentucky has a lot of the same backcountry culture, but outside of the eastern coal region, it was never as isolated as the bulk of WV. Also, Louisville and even Lexington are much larger than any cities in WV. But, brain drain isn't restricted to the eastern coal region... not by a long shot. I went to high school in Paducah (river town in the extreme west). Of the smarter folks in my class, not many of them stayed in that area. The biggest magnets were St. Louis and Nashville; these days, Nashville would likely be the bigger draw.
"The top 5 in the world are Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan.
ReplyDeleteWhat do these countries have in common? It probably has something to do with, uh, how they hand out homework, or something."
population with most aggressive test cheaters.
I've lived in NJ, I've lived in Massachusetts. Of course it's not surprising both score high - Massachusetts is full of colleges, needing smart people to work at those colleges. Jersey is full of upper-middle class bedroom towns full of moms and dads commuting to NYC. Both generally nice places to live, unless you care about courteous driving.
ReplyDeletebest quality of Mass - crawling with single cute women (due to the colleges).
Best quality of NJ - best beach towns in America.
NJ has a much larger minority underclass and also more smart Asians (I think). Massachusetts whites are probably better than NJ whites on average, but the low end of Massachusetts whites seem to be some of the most vile people in America (think Mark Wahlberg as a kid).
"something like 25% of US computer science professors are Israeli"
ReplyDeleteNo. N-O. Hell no.
You've made this assertion here before. This is so far outside the realm of likelihood as to require a citation. Do you have one?
I can possibly believe that some (tiny) subset of US comp sci professors are Israeli, but I strongly doubt that 25% of university comp sci professors are Jewish (which would include American AND Israeli Jews), but 25%? Hell no.
seriously...63 comments and not a word about Norway's performance in the science test?
In Firefox click Edit --> Find and then type Norway in the textbox. You'll see 5 comments prior to yours noting the unlikelihood of Norway's rank.
"Norway is surprisingly low. Below even Slovenia."
Slovenia has a nominal per capita income of $22,000 - thrice that of Bulgaria and Romania. Not bad for an ex Soviet block country which, unlike Norway, has neither fish nor oil.
"Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calculated in 1993 that there's an r = .52 correlation between a state's test scores and its distance in miles from the Canadian border."
ReplyDeleteMoynihan could get away with phrasing it way because the stereotype of dumb Southerners is one of the last acceptable bigotries. It's OK to offend Southerners, but not blacks.
They have the best system of middle and high school computer science education in the world, which is why something like 25% of US computer science professors are Israeli and why Israel has so many companies on the Nasdaq and why their economy is booming relative to the rest of the industrialized West.
ReplyDeleteThen I guess now is a good time to end our annual $3 billion subsidy to Israel, what with their booming economy and our perpetual budget crises.
"The top 5 in the world are Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan.
ReplyDeleteWhat do these countries have in common? It probably has something to do with, uh, how they hand out homework, or something."
population with most aggressive test cheaters.
Playground stuff, I'm afraid. Makes stereotype threat look coherent.
john marzan said...
ReplyDelete"The top 5 in the world are Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan.
population with most aggressive test cheaters.
That would be very comforting, wouldn't it -- that all Asian academic success is due to cheating and corruption?
Small problem. Singapore, for example, is known for its extreme lack of corruption and cheating. It is one of the cleanest countries in the world, figuratively and literally (not to forget one of the most advanced). Whenever there is a scandal of some sort in Singapore, invariably it involves either recent Chinese immigrants (which has created a widespread anti-immigrant backlash) or Western expatriates (Nick Gleason/Barings, Leonard Glenn Francis of the current Navy bribery scandal, etc.).
And Japan is a country where millions of dollars worth of cash (in Yens, obviously) were picked up on the flooded streets by strangers and dutifully returned to their owners or the police in the aftermath of the catastrophic tsunami recently. This is not the behavior of a people who would engage in cheating.
Certainly some Asian countries have hyper-competitive cultures that increase cheating, but cheating is not universal to all (East) Asian countries. What is universally acknowledged, however, is that East Asians have high IQs and highly academically-oriented cultures -- those factors explain much, perhaps all, of the successes of their children in these tests.
JN
Josh Yellowfever: "Unlike PISA, Finish did pretty poorly in this test."
ReplyDeleteReally? Finland is clearly above the average in math (514). Actually it is 6th best independent country (after East Asians, Israel and Russia, which has surprisingly high score). Finnish average is above that of US (509) and clearly above other Nordic countries Sweden (484) and Norway (475). In science Finland fares even better.
Probably people are so used to stellar Finnish performances in all kind of educational comparisons, that normal, very good performance seems like a failure.
“Norway is surprisingly low. Below even Slovenia”
ReplyDeleteWhat´s wrong with Slovenia? They were the first Slavic nation in EU, unlike Norway they have Euro, and according to the recent genetics research they are mix of pre Ice Age Europeans with Protovenetians and Ethruscans. There´s practically no difference between Slovenia and neighboring Italian areas. Great architecture, tall, good looking white people. Foreigners have propensity to confuse Slovenia with Slovakia. And there´s nothing wrong with Slovakia either, for that matter (short of sizable gypsy minority). Actually, former communist countries were doing very well in science subjects in international comparisons 20 years ago. Before a confusion set in with infusion of New Age western education theories…
There have been several comments here to the effect of Boston being nice because it's white/Asian. Which is odd, because the thing which is most striking to me about the place is how *many* blacks there are, and how well they behave. I just looked up the demographic statistics, and they're consistent with my observations.
ReplyDeleteI think it's useful to investigate in more detail why Boston works.
New Jersey is a nice place outside of a few dreadful cities. Princeton, Rutgers, and other decent schools are there, and Northern New Jersey enjoys the cultural and economic advantages of having New York City so close.
ReplyDeleteJack, I'll see you a Mark Wahlberg and raise you any of the idiots from the Jersey Shore crew. Please...
ReplyDeleteDoJ, a lot of blacks here in Boston are the post-WW II first wave. Their grandkids have assimilated pretty well; the black murder rate in Boston is pretty much driven by Haitian and Cape Verdean immigrants. That said, the murder rate is still higher than Tampa's. Cross the Charles River to tiny Chelsea, where more than half the population speaks Spanish as their first language, and you'll find, thanks to MS-13 and the similar ilk, a murder rate higher than Boston's.
Greater Boston has 88 colleges and universities inside the Route 495 belt, ranging from MIT to Roxbury Community College. Intelligent people from all over the country (and the world) arrive by the tens of thousands to go to school, and a good number decide to stay, including many of the Talented Tenth.
Anon: "I moved up to Eastern Massachusetts (Boston area) from Maryland (DC suburbs). What surprised me most about Boston and the surrounding areas was the dearth of black people and other minorities."
ReplyDeleteGuess you haven't had the pleasure of visiting Roxbury (blacks), Lawrence (puerto ricans & dominicans), Fall River (dominican-like portuguese), or Brockton (blacks & rough Whites), or S. Boston (more rough Whites).
Anon: "I'm surprised Quebec scored so high. It's not a math-friendly place."
ReplyDeleteNor is it an English friendly place.
SS: "I first noticed about 20 years ago that New Jersey did better on a lot of measures than you'd expect from the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen songs."
ReplyDeleteOr the lyrics from a few Bon Jovi songs.
Northwest Alt: "Not all problems can be blamed on non-whites."
ReplyDeleteSuch as???
"I think it's useful to investigate in more detail why Boston works."
ReplyDeleteBetter behaved blacks, and more human and financial resources to keep criminals in line.
Blacks in the South are there because of slavery. Blacks in the Midwest and California were drawn there for manufacturing jobs during the wars. Boston attracted blacks of a somewhat better quality.
Massachusetts (pop: 6.6 million) is 8% black. Boston (pop: 640,000) is 24% black. Boston's 2011 murder rate was 10.1 per 100,000. If you assume that 3/4ths of those murders are by blacks (which may or may not be fair), then you get a black murder rate of about 30 per 100,000, which is not especially out of line with black murder rates elsewhere.
Metro areas which become overwhelmingly black end up losing the talent and resources they need to cope with crime - see Detroit or Memphis. But Boston proper is less than 1/4th black, and Boston metro is no more than 11% black, so it's not anywhere close to having that problem.
What´s wrong with Slovenia? They were the first Slavic nation in EU, unlike Norway they have Euro, and according to the recent genetics research they are mix of pre Ice Age Europeans with Protovenetians and Ethruscans. There´s practically no difference between Slovenia and neighboring Italian areas. Great architecture, tall, good looking white people. Foreigners have propensity to confuse Slovenia with Slovakia. And there´s nothing wrong with Slovakia either, for that matter (short of sizable gypsy minority).
ReplyDeleteHear, hear!
Re: Boston. We have a story in the news right now about a 14-year old mulatto kid who just moved to a Boston suburb from Tennessee with his white mom and half-breed sister. Seems the kid was unhappy about the move, which caused him to slice up the 24-year old Nice White Lady math teacher in the bathroom and drag her body out into the woods in a school recycle bin. It being Greater Boston, the kid is written up in the police report as a Zimmermanesque "dark-skinned white".
ReplyDeleteRoissy should be all over this one. White mother abused by black husband, filed divorce papers but never followed through.
In September Mexico’s Ambassador Francisco Suarez railed against Canada’s Harper administration. Quoted from Taliba, “We’re now really mad. Canada has the most stringent visa system for Mexicans by any country in the world.”
ReplyDeleteSuarez told Taliba that it is easier to get a visa to the US where there are more illegal border crossings from Mexico. “The Canadians require 10 times more information than the Americans.”
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/88693/new-report-says-immigrants-fiscally-burden-canada
No West Virginia?
ReplyDeleteThey do worse than the District of Colombia on the SAT, when you adjust for the state participation rate.
Massive shame that there isn't a migrant adjusted, ancestry adjusted index.
ReplyDeleteWhite Massachutetians (or whatever they are called) might've pipped Japan (even sans their high Ashkenazi advantage).
Really? Finland is clearly above the average in math (514). Actually it is 6th best independent country (after East Asians, Israel and Russia, which has surprisingly high score). Finnish average is above that of US (509) and clearly above other Nordic countries Sweden (484) and Norway (475). In science Finland fares even better.
ReplyDeleteProbably people are so used to stellar Finnish performances in all kind of educational comparisons, that normal, very good performance seems like a failure.
Interestingly, although some like Steve Hsu tend to attribute this success to the Flynn effect being higher in Finland than Western countries, this doesn't actually appear to be the case from direct data on Finnish IQ.
Eka Roivainen has collected large young Finnish samples and they're if anything slightly lower than the French, Germans or Britsh, and comparable to older Finns (also true of Spaniards).
http://tinypic.com/r/20kx6vs/5
Their strengths seem to come from their culture, rather than IQ. although whether the same system would work well with a different culture (e.g. Western Europeans and their offshoots are probably more outgoing, socializing obsessed and socially fluent compared to Finns, for one aspect) is an interesting question.
I'm surprised Israel scores so low.
ReplyDeleteRe: Israel, on the 2009 PISA, Israeli "Hebrew speakers" considered just on their own hit about the average for a European country - 498, while Israeli "Arab speakers" are around 398.
Of the Hebrew speakers, around 7% are Yemen or Ethiopian, 43% are other non-Ashkenazi Jews.
It's hard to put a number on the Sephardi, but from history I would work at assuming they are between the Arab speakers and the European average, so 448, slightly worse than Greece and Dubai and comparable to Bulgaria and the Russian Fed.
If the total Hebrew score is a composite of 0.7*398+ 0.43*448+0.5*x=498, then x is about 560, which on the 2009 PISA would be slightly better than South Korea, but not as good as Shanghai.