Small update to my prior post on concentrated poverty

This is just quick update to my prior post on concentrated poverty.  I re-ran the California test score data at a school-level to compare within school black-white differences in test scores and converted all of the scores data to standard deviation units relative to (above) the non-hispanic mean by school, weighted by the number of test takers.  The pattern can be observed as early as 2nd grade and it is quite consistent for all major/mandatory tests.

 

Black vs White within school comparison

Grade 2 English

 

Grade 2 Math

 

On concentrated poverty and its effects on academic outcomes

According to a large and growing number of progressives, the achievement gap between “minorities” (especially blacks) and whites can be traced directly to the effects of “concentrated poverty”.  This implies that we cannot compare the outcomes of individual “middle class” blacks to whites of similar income because they don’t have the same amount of wealth, which would allow them to escape their poor neighbors, bad schools, or something along those lines.

Presumably the relationship between the actual neighborhood-level SES, as measured by poverty rates, income levels, education levels, etc, and academic outcomes should look something like this:

In other words, this achievement gap is presumably only found in areas of concentrated poverty, but those few families that manage to “escape” these particular bad environments converge on white outcomes or even close the gap entirely.

Having actually studied this data, I can tell you that reality looks more like this:

Put simply, there is no evidence to support convergence.   Broader outcome measures generally show a solidly linear relationship with these measures.  There is also much more overlap in material condition than the picture that most progressives present (curiously they sing a very different tune when they want to talk about these differences in other contexts).    Below I will present some evidence to this effect.

On school quality, test scores, and SES

I am going to share a little analysis I’ve done by combining Pennsylvania’s PSSA test scores, Census ACS data,  and Department of Education statistics to refute a few popular progressive notions about education, namely, that:

1: The SAT/ACT only “measures family income”:

2: This is somehow being caused by more and better test prep efforts amongst the more affluent.

3: Higher income school districts are actually better because they spend more money.

Understanding the academic achievement gaps

Warning: This is long somewhat meandering post and a work-in-progress

My intent here was to compile the evidence in a narrative fashion.  There are more detailed and more technical sources for much of the information I presented here, but much of it is scattered and much of it is targeted at people that are both knowledgable and willing to invest the time.  My approach here was to present the information in a relatively accessible, top-down fashion, i.e., first identify the magnitude of problem, then characterize it, then present evidence that the favored environmental explanations do not add up, and then (briefly) touch upon some more controversial hypotheses….

One of the first things that clued me into the fact that school systems and socioeconomic status cannot explain the black-white (B-W) academic achievement gaps was seeing SAT data like this:

The obvious pattern here is that high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials.   This is really hard to explain away as being mainly a product of poverty, bad schools, and things of that sort either.

Race is not just a social construct

I have frequently heard people insist that “race is just a social construct”, that there is no genetic basis to it, that it has no statistical relevance, and so on and so forth.  This is clearly wrong, as others have pointed it out repeatedly, but people keep on repeating it for some reason.   To save myself and others time next time around, here is a compilation of the facts, evidence, expert opinion, and more that ought to settle the issue for most fair minded people that are not overly ideologically blinkered.

In no particular order….