Monday, April 25, 2005

Black kids and bad schools

Steve Sailer:

In Freakonomics, Levitt-Dubner go on to blame the widening of the racial test score gap as children mature on the fact that black kids attend worse schools.

Yet the authors' description of what makes schools attended by blacks bad verges on self-parody—almost a nudge-nudge-wink-wink to alert the reader while avoiding a politically-incorrect gaffe that could get them roasted like poor Larry Summers:

"Just how are black schools bad? Not, interestingly, in the ways that schools are traditionally measured. In terms of class size, teachers' education, and computer-to-student ratio, the schools attended by blacks and whites are similar.

“But the typical black student's school has a far higher rate of troublesome indicators, such as gang problems, nonstudents loitering in front of the school, and lack of PTA funding.

“These schools offer an environment that is simply not conducive to learning."

You'd have to be awfully naïve not to notice that Levitt and Dubner are signaling that the essential reason schools that have lots of blacks students tend to be bad is because they …have lots of black students.

Levitt and Dubner do seem to be implying that.

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