Last night the conversation at dinner somehow turned to the subject of education and the South. No conclusions were reached except for a vague agreement that Southern states didn't spend a lot on education and had generally poor outcomes.
But is that true? Naturally I decided to check. My metric is 8th grade reading scores on the NAEP because (a) 12th grade scores are old, sparse, and cover only a few states, and (b) reading scores are a better reflection of general education than math scores. Here are the results separately for Black and white students:
All the usual statistical caveats apply here, and this should hardly be taken as the final word. However, one possible confounder that I checked out specifically was private school enrollment, which turned out to be about the same in the South as everywhere else.
The perhaps surprising result of all this is that, relative to other states, six Southern states are above average when it comes to Black scores. Only three are above average when it comes to white scores. I'm not quite sure what to conclude from this.
In any case, when you look at the results for all students it turns out that Southern states are unexceptional. As a group, their reading scores are slightly below average (256 vs. 259, a gap of about one-third of a grade level), but nothing more than that. Among Black children, the average score for Southern states is very slightly above the US average (241 vs. 240).
What are the red bars?
Southern states. Names are below. Click on the tables to enlarge.
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At first glance, I was going to say that Southern states with big cities tend to do better. Maybe big urban areas tend to have better established school systems. Maybe the more prosperous cities attract and support more affluent / higher-skilled workers and their families.
But that doesn't hold for the white students. Florida and Texas, especially, drop way down. Maybe the whites there have fled to the 'burbs & exurbs and left the cities to minorities? Don't know, but 8 of 11 states being below average for whites tells you something ain't right.
For better or worse, much of our impression about other parts of the country is filtered though politics, and if the South has a rep of being less educated, it may be that any sane viewer from outside sees much about their politics as dumb, dumb, dumb. A lot of that's driven by racism, not mere stupidity, but it's led to poor outcomes. The South has a disproportionate share of problems: higher crime, higher divorce, higher obesity, shorter lifespans, and so on. If they were smarter, the whites would vote more like the Blacks, who tend to be the single smartest voters anywhere.
Testing isn't random distribution, though.
Yes. Test results for a given state depends very much on **which students are tested.** For instance, if a state classifies a large percentage of minority students as 'special ed' and doesn't include special ed students' scores in their aggregate scores, then their results will look inflated over states that don't have the same practice.
Modern segregation is worse in the north than south for many states. I bet if Kevin graphed the black scores against segregation there would be a pretty good fit.
From personal experience NC, at least, is less segregated that many in the North or the Northeast. In fact noticed with the large influx of folks moving South, many were self segregating into private schools to avoid "those people".
NC buses and force the schools to blend students based on economics (property value, etc). Folks can only avoid those they don't want to mix with by using private and charter.
Funny, I was going to make almost the same comment. I grew up in North Carolina, moved to NYC in my 30s and now live in Connecticut. I can say unequivocally that NYC and Fairfield County are WAY more racist and segregated than Charlotte or Raleigh, NC.
The schools in Fairfield County aren't just segregated, whole towns are. Lol, and if they had ever tried NYC's "stop and frisk" in Charlotte there would have been open revolution in the streets.
So yea, this never ending need for folks in the north and west to pat themselves on the back over how much more racist it is in the south cracks me up. Doesn't seem to matter how many race riots there are in Los Angeles or wherever else not in the south, the narrative will never die.
Illinois has the very same problem all in one state.
My understanding is that black students do better in less segregated schools. That's why I made the point. "This American Life" has a fantastic series where they touch on this issue.
Having experience in both Midwestern and Southern schools, yeah, the northern schools were waaaaaay more segregated. And the young people in the south are incredibly tolerant of one another's racial differences. It gives one hope, actually.
Whether black students do better in classrooms with more black students and black teachers (which is more likely in the South than in the northern tier) is an interesting question. But then I look at Kevin's top chart. Vermont is at the top for black reading scores while right nearby, Maine is rock bottom. Now Maine has a minuscule African-American population, but does have a significant Somali immigrant population. Whether that explains the lower "black" reading scores there or not, I wouldn't know, many of the Somalis being ESL learners. Vermont has similar demographics, but seems to do far better educating (its very few) black students.
Is education a matter of “push?”
I wonder if the numbers aren't so small for Vermont and Maine that they're susceptible to extreme skews. Although the Somali/ESL theory is interesting.
I would conclude from these graphs that "intelligence", or whatever is being measured by these test scores, is not the source of the South's poorer performance on social issues, because there seems to be no consistent difference between the educational test scores of southern and northern states.
I would guess that the source of the South's problems is rather in their attitudes, particularly an inclination towards authoritarianism, but that's just my guess.
I've long suspected that certain geographical areas attract individuals with common characteristics, and that those characteristics are inheritable and can influence the development of the social culture in those areas.
I have worked as a consultant for almost forty years and I've seen many, many company cultures. Some are great, and some are incredibly toxic, but each company filters its employees to ensure that the culture remains compatible to the wishes of the people running the place, whether they be good or bad.
For example, the United States as a whole is particularly capitalistic when compared to most other parts of the world, but it was largely settled by people who were self-selected for certain traits, such as the willingness or need to emigrate from the original country and to start a new life where there were more opportunities. When you think about it, this is almost the definition of entrepreneurialism.
An alternate explanation for the differences in social outcomes between countries is that there are differences in the geography and resources between countries. I think that Jared Diamond favors this explanation, but I tend to lean the other way. I've read that authoritarian traits are inheritable, and I believe that the hierarchical societies that authoritarianism produces would be better suited to slave states, and that slave societies (or imperialistic societies in general) would be more attractive to authoritarians.
In every society in the world, there exists a large percentage of the population which is not comfortable with living in a liberal democracy. They instead want hierarchical order. They even have a slogan for the world they want to build: "Ordnung uber alles." When this group gets control of the society, social outcomes for the out-group decline, and I think this is what has happened in the South.
Despite the DC suburbs, Virginia should be counted as a Southern state. Aspirationally, West Virginia is, too.
I thought that, too. If you're including Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, you probably should include Virginia.
Virginia is no longer a cultural southern state, We swapped out General Lee for Rumors of War in Richmond for instance. There are of course pockets of Dixie remaining but the suburbs are growing and the suburbs are culturally mid-Atlantic not Dixie.
Maybe all states do terribly at educating their black students, so the results there are both lower overall (look at the y axis) and also more random than the white students (so some southern states just randomly make it into the top half vs bottom half)? I mean, as some other commenters have said, school segregation in the North is often a lot worse than in the South.
For white students, which were all that America explicitly cared about for the first 180 years or so until Brown vs Board of Ed (and that sentiment just went underground for another 50+ years after that but still was/is implicitly true), it does seem like northern & western states generally do better than southern states.
VA and WV are definitely part of the south BTW. I would throw OK in there too, but that's more of a judgement call I guess.
As always, GIGO, sigh. As I constantly remind my students, statistics is easy. Getting good data? That's hard. Extremely so, particularly given the cheapskate approach to collection.
What we would pay teachers if we paid them what we pay babysitters,
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/11phxlj/what_we_would_pay_our_teachers_if_we_paid_them/
Bob Somerby -- Please clear out the repeated-word spam from your blog comments. I would try to contact you there about it, but you provide no way to do that.
How much reading is actually learned in schools? Certainly parents who read themselves and think it is important make sure that their kids learn to read, whatever goes on in schools. On the other hand math learning may depend more on schools.
Kevin should show the math comparison, whatever his own opinion.
It seems to me that this chart is mostly proof that states that spend more on education than others have better outcomes than the less affluent ones.
The same names are on both charts at the left and right, albeit in slightly different orders.
If one made a similar chart ordered not by outcomes but rather by expenditure per pupil, and I bet one would see a similar descent toward the right.
You know, sometimes I suspect that the idea that more spending on education resulting in better academic achievement is reversed --- it seems to me as often as not that the affluent/well educated whose children are more likely to be high academic achievers settle in areas that spend a lot on education rather than the high spending of those areas cause the better outcomes.
In some ways, it seems kids likely to succeed do well pretty much no matter what, while lots of spending in schools does not much affect the long-term academic achievement of kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.
You may be on to something there 😉
That was the entire premise of now Senator Warren's book "The Two Income Trap".
I've said this a million times already and I'll probabaly say it 600,000 times again: The top predictor of academic perforance is parental involvement followed by parental profession and education. I don't have a cite handy (or rather I do, lost in a welter of other stored links with no naming convention whatsoever), but I believe those two features explain at least 60% of academic achievement. That's it. Sure, it's nice to have tony facilities and a big school budget, no disagreement there. But they aren't necessary for academic success. You know what I'm going to say, right? Test scores, geographic region, are proxies for this essential ingredient, and poor ones at that.
I also think that you may be on to something there!
Curious that "NAEP 8th Grade Reading" stats for Black students only covers forty-one states.
Give us time. We'll fix that. I have faith in our dipshit governors.