Every two to four years the American Department of Education tests public school children across the country. They give reading and math tests to fourth graders (9-year-olds) and eighth graders, (13-year-olds).
Just to keep it simple, I will look just at the reading scores of 13-year-olds in 2007. The general pattern for math and 9-year-olds is much the same, though the particulars are different.
Note that in what follows only averages are reported. Not everyone scores at or near the average – many score way above and many score way below.
The good news is that reading scores have gone up since 1992 for both blacks and whites. The bad news is that the racial gap has not narrowed much at all: blacks still score way lower than whites:
- 270 whites in 2007
- 265 whites in 1992
- 244 blacks in 2007
- 236 blacks in 1992
The scores are on a 500-point scale. I always list scores from highest to lowest.
Poor children generally read worse than middle-class ones, but that alone cannot account for the gap: middle-class blacks read as badly as poor whites:
- 274 middle-class whites
- 257 poor whites
- 254 middle-class blacks
- 238 poor blacks
“Middle-class” in this case means your parents make more than 1.85 times the poverty level. “Poor” means they make less than 1.30 times the poverty level – poor enough to get a free lunch at school.
Here are the states with the worst average reading scores for whites:
- 265 Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky
- 262 Hawaii
- 263 Nevada
- 261 Alabama
- 256 West Virginia
Now compare that to the states with the BEST average reading scores for blacks:
- 259 Miltary (has its own schools)
- 255 Hawaii
- 253 Massachusetts
- 252 Colorado
- 252 Virginia
So the white 13-year-olds of West Virginia, as bad as they read on average, are still better off – on average – than blacks, even in the states that are best for them. And even the black army brats barely outscore them.
(Note that some states do not have enough blacks and whites to do a good comparison: nine states are too white – Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota – and DC is too black.)
Notice that Hawaii is in both lists: it is the only state without a racial gap. True, there is a 7 point difference, but that is within the statistical margin of error for the state.
Some states have a much smaller gap than the country as a whole:
- Sometimes it is for a good reason: blacks do well compared to blacks as a whole – Virginia, Delaware, Alaska and the military.
- Sometimes it is for a bad reason: whites do poorly – Kentucky, Nevada and New Mexico.
And there is one state where the gap is way bigger than in the rest of the country and, no, that state is not in the south: Wisconsin. The whites there are average, but the blacks are the worst 13-year-old readers in the whole country.
Here are the worst states for blacks:
- 237 California
- 236 Alabama, Arkansas, Michigan
- 231 Wisconsin
So much for the idea that the South has some kind of lock on bad education for blacks.
See also:
The acheivement gap has been widely investigated, including that best seller work a few years ago focusing on the community of Shaker Heights in Ohio. Though in many instances our educational systems, especially in the big cities, continue to perpetuate a lingering system of apartheid, even when one removes such factors there is still an educational acheivement gap. In other words, black students and white students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, in the same classrooms, show a marked acheivement gap.
I don’t think that the answer is that every teacher in every classrooms is a racist who favors non-black students. Note, for example, that blacks who immigrate to the US perform on a par with whites, as do other ethnicities.
Nor is there any valid science showing a genetic distinction.
The answer has to reside in some social factor. In support of this conclusion, I have seen something somewhere to the effect that, although immigrant blacks perform on a par with white peers, within just a couple of generations their children/grandchildren show the same gap as American born blacks.
The “some social factor” seems to be an admixture of several things, most of which have been exhaustively discussed by authors like John McWhorter — to name a few, a sense of defeatism and self loathing that is a legacy of institutionalized racism, an express rejection and suppression of academic acheivement within the black community, and a tendency of black parents to adopt the “empty cup” approach to their children’s education (that the child is an empty cup and the job of the school is to fill him up with knowledge — as contrasted with a more activist, involved parenting style that believes education begins and ends at home with the schools being a mere adjunct to the educational process).
The Wisconsin result does not suprise me. Most of Wisconsin is lily white. Blacks in Wisconsin for the most part live in and around Milwaukee, a crumbling, decaying rust belt city with a bleak future. In the census from a few years back, Milwaukee was one of the only American cities that had become more segregated since the prior census.
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I agree mostly with that. Bad schools are part of it for sure but so is internalized racism, which Obama brought up last night at the NAACP dinner.
Two things I notice from my own experience:
1. Those who do best at school are not those with the most intelligence but those with parents who accept nothing less than top marks: “My parents will kill me”.
2. America compared to the West Indies is profoundly anti-intellectual. Teachers are not respected. In America if you do well at school people make fun of you. Black Americans call it “acting white” but White Americans are little better. To West Indians (at least in my experience) intelligence is like beauty or wealth: you can never have too much of it and most of us have too little. But in America it is like something is wrong with you if you know “too much”. There was time in my life when I believed them, sad to say, but I did well at school anyway – because otherwise my parents would kill me.
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Out of curiousity Aba, which Caribbean island do you hail from? When did you come to the U.S.?
I agree, America is profoundly anti-intellectual.
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Exactly, Aba…I have Caribbean roots too. Going to school and having good grades, and just plain learning was ALWAYS encouraged in my family and culture.
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As to the anti-intellectual thing being an issue in the white community, I can attest to it personally. I grew up in a remote, 100% white town very isolated in a heavily wilderness part of the northern mid-west. In other words, no outside cultural influence at all. As a kid I was teased mercilessly about being a “brain,” to the extent that I would intentionally do things like misspell words at spelling bees to avoid drawing attention to myself.
Sarah Palin represents the epitome of that anti-intellectual strain in white America. Many whites wear their ignorance as a badge of honor. My own theory is that it’s a cultural descendant of the type of whites who mostly populated this country — for the most part, lower caste outcasts from Europe who came here to eke out a survivalist living, as well as gold rush type opportunists, etc.
As to the link between student performance and parental expectations, that part is absolutely true in my personal anecdotal experience. With our own kids, we expect top marks in all subjects, and to date they have consistently performed at the top of their respective classes.
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I am aghast by the lack of concern based on political events that many people in America just don’t care about, I was just recently confused with how I couldn’t discuss historical nor modern events with many of my friends it seemed as though the average American was just ignorant. Yet when i asked someone closed to me “why is doesn’t America care about anything that has happened or is happening, are most of us ignorant??”, and he said “no.. the events just affect them so much that they cant understand, so they just go about living they’re lives” is that true???? Please this has been rattling in my head for a few days…
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*”why doesn’t America care about anything that has happened or is happening, are most of us ignorant??”* (sorry for the typo)
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John: My impression is that Americans are individualists who believe that their actions have a profound effect on their destiny.
I think they aren’t as concerned with what’s happening around them because they feel that it won’t really effect them. It’s “over there”.
America’s just so… big. It’s such a large country and there’s so much going on. When I lived in Germany I was much more focused on other countries; they seemed closer. I feel more isolated here.
And truly: when you live in other countries a lot of the news is about… America.
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I agree with Blanc2. It’s a cultural thing.
Black people expect too much from the teachers. They feel that if the child is going to school, it is being educated. Instead of seeing the teacher as a partner in education, they see the teacher as responsible for education. Perhaps this is the reason for the strong black support of teacher’s unions?
I see it with the homeschoolers we meet. A lot of the parents have children they have removed from the schools due to academic problems. All of the children caught up to grade level (usually higher) within a year, including some with severe developmental issues (ADHD/autism/dyslexia) who had been written off in the schools.
Homeschoolers are interesting because there is no difference in the average reading abilities of children, regardless of the method that is used to teach them to read and when they begin reading. In other words, both the unschooler who learns to read with 7 years old and the classical child who begins to read with 4 will most likely read on an above-average level by the age of 11. And the spread between the average homeschooler and schooled children grows from year to year, regardless of the teaching method.
Homeschoolers like to read and care about education. The schoolers who also fit that definition do almost (school obviously takes time away from learning) as well as they do and the others don’t. It really is that simple.
And, because it’s a cultural issue, it perpetuates itself from generation to generation. My mother read aloud to us every night and my father (who is black) used to take us to the library every week. We’d hang out there for hours and each went home with a backpack full of books. I also do this with my children. It’s funny because the homeschoolers and the “afterschoolers” (parents who enroll their children in school but pursue enrichment at home; typical PTA-types) all know each other here. And, yeah, our kids are all WAY ahead of the others.
Here’s an interesting column on this topic: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-05-03-parents-edit_x.htm
There’s definitely no genetic component. That’s obvious when you look at mixed-race (black/white) children. If the main care-giver is white the children perform better academically, on average, than if the main care-giver is black.
We’ve decided to live dangerously in our house and risk my teaching them. 😉
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I’m from the Caribbean and, while I can’t speak for everyone in the region, I can speak for my family and their values. Education, particularly learning, was encouraged every step of the way in my home. My grandmother taught me to read and count before my 4th birthday, and my mother would buy me practice books to work with outside of school – and those are just the minor ways they helped me. More people need to realise that educating children doesn’t just start and end with school; family plays a role too.
And, yes, my mother would have caned my backside if I failed at school. ^^; Quality education here is not cheap.
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In terms of IQ tests, those with white mothers and black fathers do the best – better than those with a black mother and white father, better than two white parents, better than two black parents.
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Here’s two interesting results of studies that will show you why Blacks IQ can be lower.
1997, 19.4 percent of all adult African immigrants in the United States held a graduate degree, compared to 8.1 percent of adult white Americans and 3.8 percent of adult black Americans in the United States, respectively. This information suggests that America has an equally large achievement gap between whites and African/Asian immigrants as it does between white and black Americans.
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Even though they come from the same ethnic group, Catholics (the discriminated minority) score 15 points lower on IQ tests than Protestants.
In the U.S., both Korean and Japanese students score above average in IQ tests; many scholars agree that, genetically, they are about as close as two ethnic groups can get. But the Korean minority living in Japan scores much lower on IQ tests than the Japanese. Why? The Japanese are extremely racist towards Koreans; they view them as stupid and violent, and employ them only in the dirtiest and lowest-paying jobs. Tensions are so great between the two groups that violence often erupts in the form of riots.
In the U.S., Polish Jews arriving before 1910 were also perceived as stupid (for no other reason than they were accustomed to a different culture and spoke another language). So many “Pollock” jokes arose that Americans still tell them to this day, even if no one remembers why. The Polish Jews suffered heavy job discrimination and suspicion of criminality; not surprisingly, their children suffered low grades and IQ test scores. Today, of course, many Americans hold the opposite prejudice; Jews are viewed as the most brilliant of ethnic groups.
Russian-born Jews who became American soldiers in World War I also scored low on IQ tests. So low, in fact, that Carl Brigham, the creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, declared that the results “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”
There are countless examples around the world where the dominant ethnic group scores higher on IQ tests than the discriminated minority, even when the two groups are of the same ethnic stock. Here is a partial list:
Group Differences Around the World (1)
High IQ/grades, Low IQ/grades,Country Dominant class Discriminated class
———————————————————-
Australia Whites Aborigines
Belgium French Flemish
Czechoslovakia Slovaks Gypsies
Great Britain English Irish, Scottish
India Nontribals Tribal people
High caste Low caste
Israel Jews Arabs
Western Jews Eastern Jews
Japan Non-Burakumin Burakumin
Japanese origin Korean origin
New Zealand Whites Maoris
Northern Ireland Protestants Catholics
South Africa English Afrikaaners (Dutch)
United States Whites Blacks
Whites Latinos
Whites American Indians
Most geneticists agree that there is far more genetic variation within groups than between groups. According to one commonly cited study, 85% of all human genetic variation is intra-population, 7% intra-race and only 8% inter-racial. (3)
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Excellent comment. Thanks!
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Do you think the way one spreaks can have an effect on the way they read and write?
I have young cousins who can’t recognize written words which they mispronounce.
They often just spell phonetically.
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In terms of IQ tests, those with white mothers and black fathers do the best – better than those with a black mother and white father, better than two white parents, better than two black parents.
Do you have a link.. ? I haven’t seen that…
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The Iq tests results are interesting(oppressed minority vs majority) It is CONSISTENT lower with minorities( even of the same ethnic blood!) in repressive environments. It is interesting to note that Africans (who grew up belonging to a culture thatFROM YOUNG) treated them as first rate,shielded from racism from young, emphasis on education/strong father figures did better than those who grew up in a country with racism/centuries of oppression.
As a Caribbean growing up in Canada, there was some racism. But my parents,from young, having NO CLUE about racism, they used to tell me (this is what kept me going)…It doesn’t matter what these people say because you BELONG to another culture. You want and can choose the culture that will always love you for you, where you will be considered equal and values will embrace and worship you for your afro hair,your round nose, your brown skin..That is our normality!!
poorer African-Americans need to see that the world is HUGE. And USA values/ racism mean nothing outside of USA. There is a choice to reject this culture that shows only the bad part of Africa consistently and show us succeding only in sports and entertainment. Read about the pre-colonial civilizations such as Great Zimbabwe, Timbuktu,Sudanese pyramids, Mali. About great Black inventors..Visit/Live with these cultures. You will realize that you have been miseducated through media, TV, film, school..The sense of beloning and pride will be unparallelled!!
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To Janice:
Even though they come from the same ethnic group, Catholics (the discriminated minority) score 15 points lower on IQ tests than Protestants.
Janice.. you should cite your source.. it looks as if you copied and pasted from here:
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-inferiorIQ.htm
Most geneticists agree that there is far more genetic variation within groups than between groups. According to one commonly cited study, 85% of all human genetic variation is intra-population, 7% intra-race and only 8% inter-racial.
This comes from Richard Lewontin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lewontin
Although true.. potentially a specious argument…there is also a substantial amount of similarities between chimps and humans but that doesn’t make a human being a chimp. (With the exclusion of George Bush…)
A rebuttal to his argument is called Lewontin’s fallacy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin%27s_Fallacy
At this stage I don’t think even hypothesis has been conclusively proven.
As the Catholics vs. Protestants of Northern Ireland, the citation comes from a book by Richard Lynn who ironically is a strong advocate of tying race and IQ together:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn
I’d like to read more about the study from this Ulster man (a Irish Protestant..) I suspect he didn’t use data IQ tests but extrapolated from data on testing for A levels in Britain. I know he has been very fast and loose when comparing the average IQs of different countries.
But the Korean minority living in Japan scores much lower on IQ tests than the Japanese. Why? The Japanese are extremely racist towards Koreans; they view them as stupid and violent, and employ them only in the dirtiest and lowest-paying jobs. Tensions are so great between the two groups that violence often erupts in the form of riots.
As for Koreans in Japan (Zainichi) this is very archaic data. Riots between Koreans and Japanese..? Ummm not since before WWII when Japan was ruled by a fascist government. Has there been discrimination against Koreans in Japan yes.. but at the moment a large majority of ethnic Koreans in Japan have Japanese marriage partners, speak only Japanese, and have changed their surnames to Japanese surnames. There is a group that identifies with North Korean, that also identifies much more strongly with the Korean language and culture. Form a friend of mine who is Zainichi, her comments were that for the most part every Japanese person she meets believes she is Japanese.
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Yep
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