According to this study, the problem is worse in progressive cities.
Progressive cities, on average, have achievement gaps in math and reading that are 15 and 13 percentage points higher than in conservative cities, respectively
Pointer from Stephen Green, who sees it as an argument for cities to start to vote Republican.
The study compared test scores in the 12 most progressive cities (according to an independent measure) and the 12 most conservative cities. They report the results in tables. I saw a red flag in that they focused on the achievement gap, rather than black achievement scores per se.
From a Null Hypothesis, perspective, one way to reduce the racial gap is to start with dumber white students. Then when differences in schooling have no effect, you wind up with a smaller racial gap.
Using their tables, I got that for reading, the median score in the conservative cities for blacks was 24.5, and in the progressive cities it was 20.5. The median score in the conservative cities for whites was 61.5 and in progressive cities it was 69. Since much of the difference in the gap seems to come from lower test scores for whites, I am inclined to go with the Null Hypothesis interpretation.
It feels like motivated reasoning to suggest that a difference of 7 .5 points is that much larger than a difference of 4; in the context of other differences that are 20 points or so.
The authors correctly point out that they are not making any assumptions about causation but they fail to see how central The Nurture Assumption is to their analysis. There is an unstated assumption that education is the lever that underlies the gap. In my mind, it is pretty clear that the difference in the performance gap is an emergent property of the housing policies and community norms that form a circular feedback loop.
Yuval Levin focuses on positive-sum institutuions, both formal and informal, but our civilization has a tendency to create stable negative-sum institutions that are sticky and like-minded once formed. With progressive cities, you can start with Public Housing Authorities as a core negative-sum institution structure and track the associated social pathologies relative to these starting points. Like the opioid crisis, once the nature of the problem is understood it takes an immensely complicated intervention to simultaneously roll-back the underlying structural pathology while minimizing the damage in/by the communities shaped by it. I
As a side note, this paper nicely highlights that we should separate the idea of human flourishing with that of economic success. Chicago and San Francisco are economic powerhouses independent of their internal social/housing pathologies.
Autocorrect Corrections:
1. Long-lived not like-minded
2. Extraneous end-of-paragraph “I”
Great point about housing. On the one have we’d expect white kids in progressive cities to do better (being wealthier since the poorer ones tend to be priced out) but black ones doing worse seems prims facile harder to explain; but when you think about public housing investment by big progressive cities, they go out of their way to maintain large, poor, underperforming black communities in ways conservative cities don’t.
Interestingly, if neighborhood effects are as significant as Raj Chetty thinks, then some of the deficit may actually be caused by these housing policies, not just a result of differing demographic composition.
Steve Sailer had a post on this sometime in the several years. It’s here at Taki’s.
https://www.takimag.com/article/crevasses_in_the_classroom_steve_sailer/#ixzz47g7k9pcE
= – = – = – =
Sailer concludes basically the same thing as RAD above–housing markets have a lot to do with what we observe on this topic.
RAD pretty much hit the nail on the head. Housing markets help structure what we observe in a static snapshot.
In addition, community norms are key in shaping developments over time–the dynamic effects, including the maintenance of racial test gaps over time in the same school district.
P.S.: Taki’s online magazine will publish almost anybody and anything, it sometimes seems. As Paul Gottfried pointed out, you can learn a lot by reading “rhetorically gifted deviationists.” Don’t tell me how bad some of the material at Taki is. I know it already
Thank you for the link to Sailer. Interestingly he notes that the 14 worst public school districts are on Indian reservations. Presumably all are administered by the Bureau of Indian Education out of the Department of Interior in D.C. Given the federal involvement, the outcomes are not surprising. Department of Defense schools are noted for excellence either. Perhaps one reform capable of null-hypothesis rejection would be simply shutting down the federal education bureaucracy.
And you would be making the same Nurture Assumption error as the progressives. There is not an indigenous population anywhere, that I’m aware of, that doesn’t conform to this housing-policy/community-norm pathological feedback loop. The housing institutional structure does not have to be government related, it can be market oriented. For many indigenous groups it is simply the chasm between the geography of hunter-gather/subsistence-farmer locales and the agricultural/urban locales of modern industrial nation-states. It is very hard to span this chasm.
In the case of native Americans, the government spends a lot of money subsidizing people to stay in their ghettos, and reservation property laws make it difficult to leave. If we eliminate government restrictions and subsidies, and leave housing to the market, I would agree that we would still see ghettos with poor educational outcomes, I think this overstated the ostensible market failure. Basically, the bottom 10% (in terms of cognitive ability , behavioral pathology, etc.) has to live somewhere, and since they’ll tend to be poor, they’ll tend to cluster together in poor, underperforming neighborhoods.
IOW, the organic emergence of such neighborhoods isn’t inconsistent with most of the negative feedback loop effect being due to state subsidies/constraints, because some amount of ghettoization is just the inevitable result of some fraction of the population inevitably being economically and behaviorally challenged, and that fraction tending to live in the same neighborhood, regardless of peer effects.
“Basically, the bottom 10% (in terms of cognitive ability , behavioral pathology, etc.) has to live somewhere, and since they’ll tend to be poor, they’ll tend to cluster together in poor, underperforming neighborhoods.”
If the poor move in, the middle class move out. We’ve seen it over and over. Moving people around doesn’t work. As Steve Sailer said, “the one thing the poor today can’t afford is to move away from other poor.”
Even if peer effects are important to outcomes, it’s a zero sum game. If you are an above average peer to someone else, they are a below average peer to you.
And I suspect the sweet spot is in having a community with similar backgrounds and standards. Having too wide a standard deviation is probably negative sum for outcomes.
So there isn’t much to do. The poor will probably congregate with the other poor.
Either the poor themselves or some outside force will have to demand/impose/reward/punish if they want the norms in that group to change.
I figure that is part of what Murray was going for. He said that either that would be done by “the administrative state” which he thought would be demeaning and ineffectual. Or it would be done by people further up the social ladder deciding to take an active personal role in the welfare of the poor. Success in getting the poor to behave better would also take pressure off middle class flight, since the poor would be better peers.
However, there is little incentive for people to do so. I can’t particularly blame them. To be honest its difficult, costly, and largely fruitless work in a material sense. I can’t imagine someone committing to it for non-transcendent reasons.
Mark Z, I am still giddy that not just one but two people (you and Charles) read and understood my comment. The fact that we might disagree on the characteristics of the emergent properties of this system is a happy state of affairs as far as I’m concerned.
I agree completely that the reservation system, both in the U.S. and in Canada, fully shape the current negative-sum equilibrium; it is all government. I was thinking of the Inuit of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland with my comment about “the geography of hunter-gather locales” and the Maori of New Zealand as “subsistence-farmers” as the Polynesians had a rich toolkit of domesticated plants and animals that they migrated with. These less-than-Dunbar size to Chiefdom-size groups are healthy equilibriums that promote human flourishing but the transition to industrial nation-state social equilibriums is non-trivial. I don’t think the the difficulty of these transitions is purely social, some of it is structural. At the very least, the Australian and Canadian experiences with “residential schools” should demonstrate that even well-intentioned efforts to spread a shared lingua franca and literacy can result in implementation disasters. Generation after generation of progressives assume that the past generation of progressives failed to improve the lives of indigenous people because of racism. Some of the implementation disasters were due to racism but the underlying difficulty is fundamentally structural. It is a hard problem to bring language/literacy to a remote and sometimes mobile people. The same holds true of the Romani of Europe. If you view illiteracy as the key barrier to Romani economic flourishing then the structural barriers that prevent the spread of literacy among a transient people are the key challenge.
Alright, that is not fair about DoDEA. But, DODEA doesn’t have the discipline problems so abundant in public schools. Reading this “ San Francisco middle school descends into ‘Lord of the Flies’ environment” by John Sexton. It seems like “don’t do restorative justice discipline” is any step that would reject the null.
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) is an example of a free market outcome that has no human agency underlying the downward spiral.
My understanding of the null hypothesis is that in American education, there is no scalable change that will have significant positive results.
It doesn’t say anything about negative results.
I think Robert Plomin’s U.K. education data make the Null Hypothesis case for negative results. Education outcomes, good or bad, are negligible once you independently measure student potential. Teachers matter but the variation in teaching skills doesn’t. Freakishly counterintuitive like the parenting results.
I assume you mean Plomin’s discussion on pages 86-89 of Blueprint. He says, “The [government] ratings of school quality explained less than 2 per cent of the variance in [high school leaving exam] scores after correcting for students’ achievement in primary school.” (p. 87) One could quarrel with the government’s measures of quality or suggest that there is an unmeasured correlation between the primary and secondary schools that students attend–but assuming the results are what Plomin takes them for: it shows that within the present UK schools, “school quality” doesn’t make much difference at all. There is a pretty narrow band when it comes to actual life-changing effects.
What I was trying to suggest was that while it may not be possible to break out of the band on the upside, it is possible to get worse. Indeed, if you read Lant Pritchett’s The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning, you’ll see that in much of the world, schools are considerably worse, and it does make a difference. Of course, given the culture and politics of the United States or the United Kingdom, it is easy to argue that things probably won’t get worse enough to make much of a difference.
Maybe I’ve seen too many movies where someone says, “Well, at least it can’t get any worse.” And then …
I’ve now read through Sailer’s article, twice, and I’m left scratching my head. Charles, you obviously understood my point about emergence as you summarized it very nicely but Sailer is not making the same point. On one hand he is mistakenly invoking the Nurture Assumption, stating that progressive educational experiments are directly causing poor minority outcomes.
On then other hand, he is making an asdf-like argument that outcomes reflect a difference in minority IQ/skills and that progressive freebies are attracting the worst people, and the Appalachian and Detroit communities are experienced a mirror-image white brain drain.
Sailer seems to be the kind of writer I hope most journalists become, “rhetorically gifted” and proficient with applied data science tools, but he either doesn’t understand my emergence narrative or he doesn’t believe it. He is focused on cities as dimensions in a data set but not as a source of housing-oriented pathological institutions that are durable.
I’ve been wondering if emergence isn’t one of those concepts that requires an Aha! moment to make it sink in and later recognize as a recurring pattern. Recursion as taught in University level Introductory programming courses is a notoriously difficult concept to learn/teach. The programming language Lisp is often described as requiring an almost spiritual enlightenment moment where the concepts of data-as-code and functional programming finally click. Maybe emergence is the same.
Sailer is mostly a “noticer.” He goes around noticing things. Then he moves on to notice something else.
I will have to ponder this whole discussion carefully before adding anything else. Thanks for the exchange of views. This is the Best Blog Ever
I dunno. “Not be Detroit” appears to be one thing that rejects the null hypothesis.
Maybe Detroit is Detroit because all the people would make it something other than Detroit (or who made it what used to be Detroit) all left? Doubtless they exerted some positive externalities, but there’s an argument to be made that most of the aggregate decline in cities like Detroit is attributable to the compositional change, e.g. maybe cities get poorer more because the rich people leave than because the poor people who stay behind got poorer. I’m sure it’s a mix of both, but the former may be the larger effect. One reason why I think Americans worry too much about declining cities or regions. In theory it’s entirely possible for a city to decline without any of the people in it to decline.
Talk about “The Rigor Crisis”, this report is one of those things that makes one despair for the prospects of our society’s intellectual life.
The only thing this report has going for is a kind of trolling operation trying to bait progressives into offering some kind of absurd normative-sociology story to account for it. “How do you explain this if the scores are all about education method and local politics, huh?” As if that’s some kind of gotcha trap.
That’s why the plainly idiotic “We Tried to Explain It Away, But We Couldn’t” line. They didn’t try very hard, just with the usual progressive knee-jerk responses like “privilege” and “income inequality”. (Also a good example of DADA, because few will dare respond with the racial disparity version of the Null Hypothesis.)
But this kind of trolling never works. The answer always stays the same no matter what, because if jurisdictions are different, then that allows for different experiences of racism to wave it all away and justify doubling down again and again.
If you think about it, the more powerful argument would be the exact opposite approach, that is, if all jurisdictions showed exactly the same results for scores, despite every other variable having very wide variance. If no matter what you do, where you live, how racist or woke it is, and so forth, the results always come out the same with a one standard deviation disparity, that makes it harder to fall back on the typical explanations without embarrassing oneself. It at least requires some clever creativity.
Think about the story you would have to invent to explain how frequencies of left-handedness were due to social factors, when social factors are really different from place to place, but the frequency is always the same.
At any rate, using a “proficiency” based on whatever thresholds the state or local jurisdiction sets, when they set them all differently, but comparing across anyway, is a crazy and inexcusable methodology.
“To put these gaps into perspective, consider San Francisco, where 70% of white students are proficient in math (based on the state’s and district’s own standards)”
NAEP didn’t have San Francisco, but it did have Fort Worth. Fort Worth says 56% of white students are proficient in math, and that’s what’s in the report, but NAEP says it’s only 47% according to the nationally set levels. Come on “brightbeam”.
Then there’s the problem with the levels themselves. Back in 1996, in a less diverse student population, only 24% scored proficient in math, with 38% “below basic”. Today 34% are proficient, and only 30% below basic. “Advanced” blew up by a factor of five from 2% to 10%. That’s just so far from reality it’s laughable.
That’s way, way beyond “Flynn Effect” in just over two decades. It’s either a triumph of pedagogical improvement (I guess all those ‘teaching to the test’ and ‘No Child Left Behind’ horror stories actually paid off) and clear evidence against the Null Hypothesis (since it’s an improvement that’s (1) significant, (2) lasting, and (3) scaled ) or, in the alternative, the NAEP was substantially dumbed down to make it easier to pass in a way no one wants to acknowledge.
As they point out, Detroit has closed the gap, which is why educators around the country make pilgrimage in junkets to Detroit to learn how they got it done. Just kidding, it’s a bombed-out post-city within the official boundaries, with so few whites and asians that NAEP says “reporting standards not met” for them.
I thought Virginia Beach was the most interesting result – so far as you can even believe the results – of relatively high and nearly gap-free results for whites and blacks (65 and 62). There are significant numbers of both district-wide (50% white, 25% black).
In an honest and sane intellectual culture, that would the one to investigate and ask whether one could explain it away with non-education-related special differences or not (e.g., “nearby huge military base which recruits top-intelligence blacks from around the country and concentrates them in particular areas). If one “Tried to Explain It Away” this way, “But Couldn’t”, and Virginia Beach was actually taking a very different approach to education, then maybe you’ve struck gold.
There seem to be at least three hypotheses around causality:
(1) Higher-achieving blacks and lower-achieving whites tend to move to conservative cities. Lower-achieving blacks and higher-achieving whites tend to move to progressive cities.
(2) Higher-achieving blacks and lower-achieving whites tend to elect political leaders that enact conservative policies. Lower-achieving blacks and higher-achieving whites tend to elect political leaders that enact progressive policies.
(3) Conservative policies tend to raise black achievement and lower white achievement. Progressive policies tend to lower black achievement and raise white achievement.
Null hypothesis rejects (3). Hypothesis (2) suggests that policy is not even exogenous. Hypothesis (3) suggests that over time, due to movement and self-sorting, exongeneity may not even be relevant.
Interestingly, we almost always default to (2) in understanding the private sector: consumer preferences are exogenous and product offerings reflect those preferences, if only through natural selection of which businesses survive. One could argue that the government sector is different because (a) policy may not reflect voter preferences due to rational ignorance, concentrated vs. dispersed interests, and other public choice effects and (b) government can force constituents to comply with those non-preferred policies through threat of criminal punishment. Still, though, it’s worth keeping in mind that expensive restaurants don’t raise the incomes of their patrons through some sort of nutritional effects.
Final sentence should be, “Hypothesis **(1)** suggests that over time, due to movement and self-sorting, exongeneity may not even be relevant.”
The article may accurately reflect a reality that many people are more concerned with “the gap” than they are with how well people read.
Solve for the equilibrium?