++Addition++Thanks to Jokah's astuteness, I've included graphical representations of two data points that I hadn't previously specified (though I did use them in the regression calculations). Additionally, I confused the axes and inadvertently left out Turner high school in the initial post. The former was an easy cosmetic fix (but nonetheless the fix to a sloppy error on my part).
As the most integrated public high school in the two county region, I was worried Turner's inclusion might contradict the editorial thrust of the post and make me look like a clown for being so hasty. Fortunately for my credibility, Turner's results are exactly in line with the data from the other 22 schools. The correlation between a school's Ice people percentage and its combined math/reading scores remains an astounding .93 (p = .0000000001, three times more certain than before!). Here is the updated graph:
Sumner, the selective and best performing Sunny school under consideration, is regularly held up as some sort of educational polestar for the state of Kansas. Wikipedia relays some of the accolades the school has enjoyed in recent years:
In MG's world, Sumner's relatively strong performance would indeed be a potential cause of celebration (though upon closer inspection it would almost certainly become clear that said relatively strong performance is primarily a result of skimming the cream of the surrounding NAM crop and consequently not something that could be replicated over any geographically concentrated area). In reality, though, few people are aware of how underwhelming Sumner's test results are. From all the hype I've heard, I must naively confess to being surprised at the scholastic results once I actually started digging. I've lived in this area since elementary school and have been aware of Sumner's existence and putative profile for at least a decade but never dug any deeper than the second-hand media reports on the school's purported success. I subconsciously assumed it was roughly on par with the leafy, suburban high schools in southern Johnson county. Shame on me for being fooled again. The count is well beyond two, by the way!
---
I'm getting provincial here, but at the moment location, location, location is what I'm focused on. Anyhow, the graph* above serves as a fairly representative microcosm of how things are outside of my neck of the woods. The graph above shows how the 23 public high schools in the two most populous counties on the Kansas-side of the KC metro area fare on scholastic testing** (x-axis) as well as the percentages of students in each high school who are Ice people. The correlation between a high school's Ice people percentage and its amalgamated math/reading score is a staggering .93 (p = .0000000003). That is, 87% of a school's performance can be predicted by the racial composition of its student body alone.
Race matters, oh how race matters. As our fearless leaders keep telling us, we really do need to have an honest conversation about it. It's long overdue.
The most conspicuous outlier, Sumner Academy, is a magnet school in the Wyandotte district that pulls the more promising kids out of the clump of schools huddled at bottom left of the graph. Even the Dotte's wheat is less luscious than Joco's chaff, though.
Lest I be fingered as a prestidigtator artificially creating a yin-yang contrast by taking one of the most affluent counties in the Midwest and putting it up against one of the Sunniest ones, the correlation between Ice % and reading/math average scores in the Johnson County schools alone--those, with the exception of Bonner Springs, populating the top right cluster of the graph--is still a rigorous .82 (p = .0002).
Parenthetically, it should also be noted that Ice, in this case, refers overwhelmingly to non-Hispanic whites, while Sun is almost equally split among blacks and Hispanics with "other" (primarily Native American and 2+ races) making up the remaining fraction. The mean composition of the high schools under consideration is 62.6% white, 15.2% black, 14.5% Hispanic, 4.1% Asian, and 3.6% other.
Mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, the multi-millionaires running Microsoft, and the rest of Silicon Valley's executives in a post like this might seem utterly orthogonal at a stretch, but upon closer inspection, tangential doesn't even do such a mention justice. See, by loaning their prestige and pocket books to the crusade for open borders, the patriots at FWD.us are able to ensure a dumbing down of the nation's students--and, by extension, its schools--thereby giving an ever-thickening air of legitimacy to their lamentations about having a suboptimal domestic labor pool from which to hire from. Virtuous circle, that!
* Taken from an old version of excel and dressed up in... Paint. Apologies for lack of aesthetic crispness.
** Calculated by averaging the percentage of students who are deemed as being up to standards (ie, proficient) on the math and reading sections of the 2011 Kansas State Assessments.
^ For the locals, I am aware that, geographically, the farther south one travels, the Icier the population tends to become and that, conversely, the farther north one heads, the Sunnier the natives are. Directions in the graph's title are meant to be normative rather than directional.
As the most integrated public high school in the two county region, I was worried Turner's inclusion might contradict the editorial thrust of the post and make me look like a clown for being so hasty. Fortunately for my credibility, Turner's results are exactly in line with the data from the other 22 schools. The correlation between a school's Ice people percentage and its combined math/reading scores remains an astounding .93 (p = .0000000001, three times more certain than before!). Here is the updated graph:
Sumner, the selective and best performing Sunny school under consideration, is regularly held up as some sort of educational polestar for the state of Kansas. Wikipedia relays some of the accolades the school has enjoyed in recent years:
In the May 16, 2005 issue of Newsweek Magazine, Sumner Academy was named 75th in the "100 Best High Schools in America." This was the second time Sumner Academy was placed on the list. In 2004, Sumner Academy was listed in 99th place. As of 2008, Sumner Academy was named the 183rd best high school in America by Newsweek Magazine. As of December 2009 Sumner Academy was ranked the 69th best high school in the nation, reported by U.S. News & World Report, making Sumner the only high school in the state of Kansas to make the top 100 list.It does well for having a student body that is mostly comprised of NAMs, but it does considerably worse than any of the largely white high schools in the area, even the the ones with the dumpiest reputations.
In MG's world, Sumner's relatively strong performance would indeed be a potential cause of celebration (though upon closer inspection it would almost certainly become clear that said relatively strong performance is primarily a result of skimming the cream of the surrounding NAM crop and consequently not something that could be replicated over any geographically concentrated area). In reality, though, few people are aware of how underwhelming Sumner's test results are. From all the hype I've heard, I must naively confess to being surprised at the scholastic results once I actually started digging. I've lived in this area since elementary school and have been aware of Sumner's existence and putative profile for at least a decade but never dug any deeper than the second-hand media reports on the school's purported success. I subconsciously assumed it was roughly on par with the leafy, suburban high schools in southern Johnson county. Shame on me for being fooled again. The count is well beyond two, by the way!
---
I'm getting provincial here, but at the moment location, location, location is what I'm focused on. Anyhow, the graph* above serves as a fairly representative microcosm of how things are outside of my neck of the woods. The graph above shows how the 23 public high schools in the two most populous counties on the Kansas-side of the KC metro area fare on scholastic testing** (x-axis) as well as the percentages of students in each high school who are Ice people. The correlation between a high school's Ice people percentage and its amalgamated math/reading score is a staggering .93 (p = .0000000003). That is, 87% of a school's performance can be predicted by the racial composition of its student body alone.
Race matters, oh how race matters. As our fearless leaders keep telling us, we really do need to have an honest conversation about it. It's long overdue.
The most conspicuous outlier, Sumner Academy, is a magnet school in the Wyandotte district that pulls the more promising kids out of the clump of schools huddled at bottom left of the graph. Even the Dotte's wheat is less luscious than Joco's chaff, though.
Lest I be fingered as a prestidigtator artificially creating a yin-yang contrast by taking one of the most affluent counties in the Midwest and putting it up against one of the Sunniest ones, the correlation between Ice % and reading/math average scores in the Johnson County schools alone--those, with the exception of Bonner Springs, populating the top right cluster of the graph--is still a rigorous .82 (p = .0002).
Parenthetically, it should also be noted that Ice, in this case, refers overwhelmingly to non-Hispanic whites, while Sun is almost equally split among blacks and Hispanics with "other" (primarily Native American and 2+ races) making up the remaining fraction. The mean composition of the high schools under consideration is 62.6% white, 15.2% black, 14.5% Hispanic, 4.1% Asian, and 3.6% other.
Mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, the multi-millionaires running Microsoft, and the rest of Silicon Valley's executives in a post like this might seem utterly orthogonal at a stretch, but upon closer inspection, tangential doesn't even do such a mention justice. See, by loaning their prestige and pocket books to the crusade for open borders, the patriots at FWD.us are able to ensure a dumbing down of the nation's students--and, by extension, its schools--thereby giving an ever-thickening air of legitimacy to their lamentations about having a suboptimal domestic labor pool from which to hire from. Virtuous circle, that!
* Taken from an old version of excel and dressed up in... Paint. Apologies for lack of aesthetic crispness.
** Calculated by averaging the percentage of students who are deemed as being up to standards (ie, proficient) on the math and reading sections of the 2011 Kansas State Assessments.
^ For the locals, I am aware that, geographically, the farther south one travels, the Icier the population tends to become and that, conversely, the farther north one heads, the Sunnier the natives are. Directions in the graph's title are meant to be normative rather than directional.
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