Race Matters

How much does the picture of urban school systems I was painting yesterday change if you look at race as an indicator of socioeconomic disadvantage rather than family income? The answer is that even though studies show that race exhibits a substantial, income-independent influence on school achievement, the qualitative picture is similar if instead of looking at how cities do with educating poor kids we look at how they do with black kids:

As you can see here, nationwide performance by black children is pretty deplorable with 59 percent rating as "below basic." But given that unfortunate baseline, you can see that several urban school systems -- Charlotte, Austin, Houston, New York, and Boston -- are doing somewhat better than average, while others are doing quite a bit worse than average.

Now it's worth saying that this way of slicing up the demographics is no substitute for a proper regression analysis. You can really see this if you look, for example, at white test scores where suddenly the otherwise poor-performing DC public schools start looking good because the DC white population is unusually affluent and well-educated compared to whites nationwide. Unfortunately, the data available to talk about in order to get city versus city detail is a little sparse. The NAEP TUDA is the best way of getting apples-to-apples comparisons of different urban districts, but it doesn't cover very many cities and doesn't let you get nearly as rigorous as would be desirable.

Still, I believe the overall basic point holds. Demographic factors have a large impact on educational outcomes. When you try to control for demographic differences, suddenly big city school systems don't look uniformly dysfunction -- some are above average. But demographics aren't destiny -- some cities are doing much worse than others. Beyond that, on a nationwide basis poor children and non-white children are doing unacceptably badly even in "good" school districts.

Comments

I predict Steve Sailor will make a comment.

Posted by David | June 24, 2008 12:26 PM

I believe that my urban area, the Twin Cities is doing the worst job of educating our African-American kids, which drives me crazy, because with white kids we're consistently among the top.

Posted by Gus | June 24, 2008 12:41 PM

You've been looking at the available data/lit. Is there racial and socioeconomic status stratified data available for suburban and rural districts as well? How do black and low-earning children do outside of cities? Compared to whites of the same earning status?

Posted by goodepic | June 24, 2008 12:44 PM

And this seems to just back up the point that Sailer always makes, that when people say "bad schools," they really mean "bad students."

So yeah, it's not that urban schools are intrinsically so bad, it's that they have bad students. But the result is the same: middle class parents don't want to send their kids there, so they move to the suburbs. Would YOU want to send your kids to a school where a large fraction of the students were slow or had behavioral problems?

Posted by ed | June 24, 2008 12:54 PM

Demographic factors have a large impact on educational outcomes.

This is an excellent point--one which I hope you and your readers will keep in mind when doing international comparisons of health outcomes.

Posted by Brandon Berg | June 24, 2008 1:05 PM

"And this seems to just back up the point that Sailer always makes, that when people say "bad schools," they really mean "black kids.""

Fixed.

Posted by Ray | June 24, 2008 1:08 PM

I sent my daughter to a mostly-minority urban public school - she just graduated this spring.
The school is 45% Hispanic, 11% American Indian, 6% black. It's a safe school: the gangs were utterly crushed a few years ago. I remember a number of friends flinching when they heard she was going there. But since I knew that variation in school quality is unimportant, I didn't sweat it - again, knowing that the school was safe.

She did OK: valedictorian, National Merit Scholar, 36 on her ACT (tied for highest in the state), admitted to every college she applied to.

Posted by gcochran | June 24, 2008 1:19 PM

I've noticed this a couple times, but it seems that Matt is a bit enamored with regression analysis ("Slicing up the demographics is no substitute for a proper regression analysis"). I wonder what his idea of a "proper" regression analysis is? And does he have expertise in the issues of datamining, specification searches, and sensitivity analysis? Worshipping at the altar of regression is already prevalent in social science academic circles; I'd hate to see popular consumption of the "linear model is God" argument.

FYI, I work in "social science academic circles" and have been known to employ a regression or two in my time. But the little phrase "proper regression analysis" just rubbed me the wrong way---article after article is written arguing about the interpretation of "proper" in that context.

Posted by TWM | June 24, 2008 1:24 PM

. . . non-white children are doing unacceptably badly even in "good" school districts.

I'm pretty sure that in "good" school districts, Asian students kick ass academically. In fact, the best high school in the country ( http://www.usnews.com/listings/high-schools/virginia/thomas_jefferson_high_school ) just admitted more Asians than white students into their class of 2012: http://www.fcag.org/tjadmits2008.html

Posted by DNE | June 24, 2008 1:33 PM

And this seems to just back up the point that Sailer always makes, that when people say "bad schools," they really mean "black kids.

Well, if Sailer were to make this point, he'd be right. Suburbanites don't fear urban schools because urban schools are somehow naturally worse than suburban schools. They fear urban schools because urban schools have a bunch of black kids.

I don't like it, but that's the way it is.

Matt has shown that, all other things being equal, urban schools are just as good as suburban ones; that fits with everything I've read and heard. The thing is, all other things are not equal; urban schools usually have a ton of black kids. If white/asian people took over the inner cities and black people moved out to the suburbs, everyone would be talking about how "bad" suburban schools are and how "good" urban ones are.

I wish it weren't so, and maybe in the future people's preferences might change.

Posted by Noah | June 24, 2008 1:37 PM

DNE:
If Asians were non-white, this would cast doubt on the hypothesis that racism is responsible for the underperformance of black and Latino students. Ergo Asians are white.

Posted by Brandon Berg | June 24, 2008 1:39 PM

Noah,

I don't think most parents are worried about black kids per se. They're worried about bad things they associate with those kids: violence, poor education, etc. Do you wish that parents didn't care about exposing their kids to these things?

Posted by Jim W | June 24, 2008 1:50 PM

Well, these stats are missing the flipside to the question: how do these different schools do with the better students? It may be irrational prejudice that drives the affluent away from these schools, but if you make a rational judgement based on an examination of actual schools, you would assume that your student from an upper/middle class background is much better off with a bunch of other similar students. The difference is sufficiently striking, that I would imagine that it would be really hard to persuade people otherwise. Personally, I went to a very good public high school and there were things I learned there that I would have never learned at most schools (and would never have learned in college, since they weren't part of my primary studies). But I was a very exceptional student, so that may not be as true on average.

But even if it's true that upper/middle class parents won't and shouldn't send their kids to inner city schools, it seems that the evidence suggests that this may not be a problem. If the disadvantaged kids are doing just as well in those inner city schools, then we need to look elsewhere to find ways to improve their performance.

Posted by mpowell | June 24, 2008 2:37 PM

I don't think most parents are worried about black kids per se. They're worried about bad things they associate with those kids: violence, poor education, etc. Do you wish that parents didn't care about exposing their kids to these things?

The "poor education" part is a bit circular - suburban parents are worried about their kids getting a poor education if they go to schools where other kids have gotten a poor education?

My guess is that it's violence that parents want to avoid, and that they tend to stereotype poor kids - and especially poor black kids - as being more violent.

I don't fault parents at all for not wanting to expose their kids to those things. I'd feel the same way if I had kids.

The question becomes, is the stereotype accurate? If it isn't, how do we show people that it isn't? And if it is, how do we fix the problem itself?

Posted by Noah | June 24, 2008 2:52 PM

My guess is that it's violence that parents want to avoid, and that they tend to stereotype poor kids - and especially poor black kids - as being more violent.

The question becomes, is the stereotype accurate?

Yes, of course it is. Go look at the FBI's statistics on violent crime. Blacks constitute 1/8 of the population while commiting something like 1/2 of all crime.

I would suggest, though, that it's not just "violence" per se that parents want to avoid, although it is bad enough and highly undesired on its own. It is the non-learning environment that is created whenever students are out of control in a classroom. (Which is basically all the time in every classroom, in many inner-city schools.) It is drugs. And it is also certain cultural norms that are common among poor blacks, i.e., contempt for education and the educated.

If it isn't, how do we show people that it isn't?

This is not the question. Rather, the question is: if it is an accurate stereotype but we require that it is not, how to prevent people from noticing it, talking about it, etc.? Well, one good way is excommunication. This is what progressive believers do to those found guilty of racism.

And if it is, how do we fix the problem itself?

Easy: you expel students who refuse control. Permanently, not just for a week of two of ill-gotten vacation. And I'm not talking about expelling only those who commit battery against the teachers (although even the seemingly modest step of permanent expulsion for battery would be quite helpful). I'm talking about those who refuse to, or cannot, sit down and shut up when told to by their teachers. They are the ones who ruin education for all the others. Yes, that might mean expelling 7/8 of the students in some schools.

Posted by the Ugly Truth | June 24, 2008 4:09 PM

Matt,

Thanks for following up on my comments from yesterday. Good work.

The next question, however, is: Are black students homogeneous across the country? Are the NYC, Austin, Charlotte, and Boston school districts doing better because they are objectively better or because they have better black students to work with?

Whites tend to view blacks as regionally undifferentiated, but there are differences.

In NYC, for example, a higher percentage of black students are of West Indian descent, typically from a fairly middle class background in the islands (e.g., Colin Powell, to pick a NYC schoolboy of a long time ago).

I would guess that Austin and Charlotte are at the top of this chart in part because they have been economically fast-growing cities in traditionally low-welfare states. So, they have attracted blacks moving to get a better job.

In contrast, states that naively offered high welfare and easy eligibility in the 1960s tended to attract a less ambitious sort of black family. Thus, in 1997 (the last time I checked), the state of Iowa had the highest percentage of blacks in prison.

http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/050213_mapping.htm

Another issue to keep in mind is that Texas cities are allowed by state law to imperialize outlying suburbs. So, the DC situation, where the more upscale black families leave DC for surrounding counties doesn't happen as much in Texas cities, because Texas cities follow them out to the suburbs. D.C. had the finest all-black high school in America, Dunbar, for many decades, but I would imagine the grandchildren of Dunbar's graduates tend to live today in the Maryland suburbs.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 24, 2008 4:19 PM

Easy: you expel students who refuse control. Permanently, not just for a week of two of ill-gotten vacation. And I'm not talking about expelling only those who commit battery against the teachers (although even the seemingly modest step of permanent expulsion for battery would be quite helpful). I'm talking about those who refuse to, or cannot, sit down and shut up when told to by their teachers. They are the ones who ruin education for all the others. Yes, that might mean expelling 7/8 of the students in some schools.

This is sarcastic, but ultimately foolish. There are two big reasons why taking this attitude is a bad idea: 1) How is it fair to kids that grew up in a broken/severely disadvantaged household to then condemn them to belonging to a permanent underclass? That's a very non-progressive viewpoint. 2) Great, now you've created a permanent underclass. A significant percentage of your population is a net drag on society, spreading disease, poverty and crime.

It's not unreasonable to despair and just end up blaming the poor people for being poor. But at the end of the day, it's not a helpful response. That's why you see so much policing about holding politically-correct non-racist views. I'd rather take the approach to just let people know directly: if you blame black people for being poor, they're not going to get any less poor. There is nothing genetically deterministic about their being poor. But a history of oppression followed up quickly by a war on drugs in the inner cities and a very raw deal for poor people in general in the US, has lead to an inner city black culture that is a vicious feedback loop of noneducation-poverty-crime. It is a moral imperative that as a society we explore methods of breaking that loop.

Posted by mpowell | June 24, 2008 4:21 PM

The blogger Audacious Epigone did a clever study to try to figure out which states' public schools are adding the most value, given the capabilities of the children they have to work with. His goal was to look at the relative job the schools were doing instead of the usual look at the absolute job. So, he looked at federal NAEP scores for 8th graders in 2007 by state vs. NAEP scores by state for 4th graders in 2003.

This makes for something of an apples to apples comparison, although migration in and out of states and just plain sampling error will affect the results.

(You could also look at 12th grade scores, but states with, all else being equal, higher high school dropout rate would wind up looking better, so he skipped that.)

The results were interesting but no particular patterns emerged. Many of the states near the top of the relative list of self-improvement were ones that score well on the absolute list as well -- Massachusetts, Montanta, and North Dakota. The bottom of the relative list was West Virginia, which has the lowest achieving whites in America by far. But also down there were North Carolina and Connecticut.

But #1 in terms of self-improvement from 2003-2007 was a surprise -- the uniformly maligned District of Columbia! I have no idea how to explain this. Perhaps DC has terrible K-4 schools and better 5-8 schools? Perhaps the home environment in DC is so bad that the longer they are in school, the better they get? Or maybe DC schools really aren't as bad as they are made out to be? Keep in mind that the white people of D.C. are far better educated than the whites of any state, so they may have unrealistically high standards.

Anyway, enough speculation, if you are interested, you should check out Audacious Epigone's work:

http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2007/11/state-rankings-by-naep-improvement-from.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 24, 2008 4:53 PM

And, Audacious Epigone reran the 2003 4th grade vs. 2007 8th grade data for whites only to lessen the impact of demographic change between 2003 and 2007 (e.g., the Hispanic share of the school age population in North Carolina has been going up rapidly, which would likely lower the overall score):

http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2007/11/state-rankings-by-naep-improvement.html

North Carolina, by the way, still does very badly just on whites only.

Unfortunately, there are so few whites left in the DC public school system by 8th grade that we can't get a read on whites in DC. Their 4th grade scores are far higher than those of any state's white 4th graders, but there aren't enough left by 8th grade to include in the NAEP results.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 24, 2008 5:04 PM

I would encourage anyone with Excel to do a blacks-only and Hispanics-only version of this 2003 4th grade vs. 2007 8th grade analysis and post it online. Just be careful about sample sizes, which can inject a lot of noise in the results. So leave out Wyoming and the like.

For more comments from Audacious Epigone, see

http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2007/11/map-of-relative-improvement-from-4-8.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 24, 2008 5:44 PM

And here's the NAEP study of ten urban school districts (for math) that Matt's posting refers to:

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/dst2005/2006457r.pdf

You can see that black performance in DC in 2005 was relatively less awful in 8th grade than in 4th grade, supporting Audacious Epigone's more careful methodology showing the same counter-intuitive result that DC students get relatively better from 4th grade to 8th grade.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 24, 2008 6:04 PM

Because, as Matt now admits, "race matters" in educational performance -- and thus in life and thus in the texture of American society (e.g, where we stand in-between traditional Scandinavian equality and traditional Latin American inequality) -- can we consider a simple policy idea without howls of outrage and name calling?

Namely, when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

At present, we really don't have much of a clue how to dig our way out of the hole of racial inequality in educational attainment in any large scale, replicable fashion. (Other than hitting the Asian and white kids over the head with a ballpeen hammer).

And the hole we're in keeps getting deeper because of demographic change. For example, just from 2000 to 2007, the percentage of preschoolers in America (ages 1-5) who were Hispanic exploded from 19% to 24%.

The last time the NAEP asked students if they were born in the U.S., the test score gap between American-born Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites was 2/3rds as large as the notoriously troublesome white-black test score gap. And we know from the landmark "Generations of Exclusion" book published recently by sociologists Vilma Ortiz and Edward E. Telles of the UCLA Chicano Studies Center that Mexican-Americans do not close the educational attainment gap in the third through fifth generations. So, the usual suggestion of waiting 50 or 100 years for "assimilation" to work has already been proven to not work.

So, although we can't stop digging the hole we're in right now due to the high fertility of Hispanic immigrants (3.7 babies per immigrant Latina's lifetime in California according to demographer Hans P. Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California), one thing we actually can do is let in fewer illegal immigrants. It's not all that easy to do, but we actually do know more or less how to do it, whereas we're still basically clueless about how to solve the problems exacerbated by illegal immigration.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 24, 2008 6:48 PM

As a teacher who has worked in both poor urban and poor rural school districts, I have to say that the problem is so much more complicated than bad schools. It is so complicated and such a vicious entangled cycle. I am personally so discouraged and burnt out, that I am going to leave the teaching profession.

The problems are so complicated that I can't begin to explain them as I see them here.

Suffice it to say, there is a lot of corruption and lying going on with regard to these schools and test scores, that the actual results are much worse than they even seem on paper. But the problem with educating kids in these schools effectively is a Sisyphean struggle.

Posted by elizabeth | June 24, 2008 6:59 PM

And it is also certain cultural norms that are common among poor blacks, i.e., contempt for education and the educated.

To be fair, these cultural norms are also common among white Republicans.

Posted by Tyro | June 24, 2008 7:34 PM

One other thing that Matt should keep in mind is that in places with relatively high performing black students, the racial gap is often even larger than in places with low performing blacks.

For example, nationally, 37 percent of 8th grade whites score Proficient or Advanced on the NAEP math test versus 8% of blacks. One way to look at this is to call it a 29 point gap.

In contrast, in Matt's list of 11 urban school districts above, blacks do best in Charlotte, where 14% are Proficient or above. Yet, in Charlotte, 60% of whites are at that level, so the race gap on this metric is 46 points in Charlotte versus 29 points nationally. Similarly, in Austin, the race gap is 49 points.

In Cleveland, where only 3% of blacks are proficient or above, only 17% of whites are at that level, for a 14 point gap. So, Cleveland has come the closest to attaining racial equality! I'm sure everybody in Cleveland is very proud.

The general point is that there's not much evidence that if the public schools did a better job of helping students come closer to their full individual potential that the race gap would narrow.

Indeed, if you improved the urban public school significantly, you'd not only get higher test scores from the current students, but you'd start bringing back more children of high-achieving white families from private schools and from high property tax suburbs. So, the quality of white students in urban school districts would go up, and by more than the quality of black students would go up, likely widening the race gap.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 24, 2008 7:51 PM

Why assume that the differences between the school districts, after accounting for some demographics, are caused by the effectiveness of the schools themselves rather than by other demographic factors that you aren't accounting for? Perhaps schools are even more irrelevant in determining educational success than your initial analysis suggests.

Posted by Realist | June 24, 2008 8:34 PM

Part of Matt's problem here is that all black people look pretty much alike to him. He just doesn't know much about African-American culture, so he makes assumptions about blacks that he wouldn't make about whites. If he looked at the white test scores in this study and saw that Austin ranked second highest, behind only the whites of D.C., he wouldn't say, "Wow, they must be miracle workers in the Austin school district to take the children of all those idiots from Dell Computer and the U. of Texas and get them to score well." No, he'd say, "Yup, a lot of smart people move to Austin." But, when it turns out that black students in Austin also get the second highest test scores among blacks, it's all Terra Incognita to him. It couldn't possibly be that blacks who work for Dell or went to the U. of T. or got management jobs in the state government are pretty smart and have pretty smart kids. No, it must be some secret miracle ingredient known only to the Austin school district!

See Table 4 in this PDF:
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/dst2005/2006457r.pdf

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 24, 2008 10:14 PM

The "Sailor" thing again. I just don't understand it.

Posted by Billare | June 24, 2008 10:19 PM