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6 responses to “Shedding More Light on Black SOL Performance”

1. 

   Cville Resident

   September 6, 2014

   Could I just say thank you to Hill City Jim and you for providing this really interesting info?

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2. 

   larryg

   September 6, 2014

   as usual – I think by looking at division level data – it masks the facts that within each school division – there are often disparate school performance including with blacks.

   Busing is dead but people will still herd up into neighborhoods that fit their demographic and that’s fine if the individual school performance across the district is relatively close.

   but when you have significant differences in things like percentage of minorities, percentage of economically disadvantaged and larger differences in SOL pass rates.. there are some problems.

   looking at school data at a higher level – promotes the idea that the problem is with the lower scoring kids – and not necessarily how the schools they attend are resourced

   and don’t take my word for it:

   it’s a known real problem not some “liberal” perspective:

   “More Than 40% of Low-Income Schools Don’t Get a Fair Share of State and Local Funds, Department of Education Research Finds”

   http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/more-40-low-income-schools-dont-get-fair-share-state-and-local-funds-department-

   so we have some competing ideas here and some are continuing to want to frame the issue in a way that tends to focus on culture and essentially ignore or mask the documented disparity problems even after they’ve been shown the data confirming the resource issue.

   here’s another: ” Some States Still Leave Low-Income Students Behind; Others Make Surprising Gains”

   my question is – are we really interested in the real issues or are we trying to put together an alternative “plausible” view?

   I too appreciate HillCityJims contributions but I’m not allowing him to dictate what or how often I should comment. He’s free to respond to any he wants to in as many different comments as he wishes or he is free to ignore posts he finds not useful – just as everyone else does , including me.

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3. 

   LifeOnTheFallLine

   September 6, 2014

   ” Because there is a body of thought, mainly in the liberal-progressive camp, that a significant factor explaining poor black academic performance is the segregation of black kids in under-resourced black-dominated school divisions.”

   Compared to their whiter, wealthier peers, this graph does absolutely nothing to dismantle this argument.

   “Implement school busing across school divisions? The resulting expense and furor would be hugely counter productive.”

   Spoken like someone whose children were never at risk of being on the wrong end of the racial disparity in education outcomes.

   “As for the second proposition, that proximity to white children has some magical effect on blacks, that strikes me as borderline racist. It amazes me that any liberal or progressive would ever advance such an argument.”

   No liberal or progressive has ever advanced the stupid argument you stated. What they’ve stated is that majority white schools/districts get more experienced teachers and more resources and that children bused in from majority black schools/districts gain access to those resources and benefit.

   Here, let’s go back and look at the top 10 districts you posted a few days ago where the racial gap was the smallest:

   West Point: One elementary school, one middle school, one high school.

   Covington City: One primary school, one intermediate school, one high school.

   King & Queen: Two elementary schools, one high school.

   Charles City County: One elementary school, one middle school, one high school.

   Rockbridge County: Four elementary schools, one middle school, one high school.

   Sussex County: One elementary school, one middle school, one high school.

   Tazewell County: Nine elementary schools, three middle schools, three high schools.

   Wise County: Two elementary schools, three primary schools, one combined school, three middle schools, three high schools.

   Prince George County: Five elementary schools, one middle school, two high schools.

   Warren County: Five elementary schools, one middle school, two high schools.

   See a pattern there? When white parents don’t have a choice but to send their children to schools with black children the racial gap looks like it shrinks. It’s not “magical” it’s just that – broadly speaking – when the chance to discriminate does not present itself as an option the racial gap closes. Or at least that’s how it appears.

   There are a few districts that have low public school choice that ended up in the lowest performing in terms of the racial gap (Lancaster County, Charlottesville, Franklin, Radford) and two of those are college towns.

   I don’t have any statistical analysis tools on my laptop, but I’d be curious to see the racial gap against the amount of available public schools. I’d love to see it for all available schools, but I don’t anticipate anyone here has that kind of time.

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   1. 

      larryg

      September 6, 2014

      What the state level chart may well be showing is a systematic problem with multi school districts where the individual schools in the districts show large disparities in the performance of race between different schools.

      to give an example of this – look at the 3rd highest rated elementary school in virginia – Shady Grove in Henrico county.

      It’s SOL math scores are 95.5 and reading is 93

      but look at the demographics:

      free and reduced lunch = 1.1%
      African American = 1.7%

      that is so few blacks as to not even show up on the State SOL sub group scores.

      THere are 45 elementary schools in Henrico with only 10 showing significant percentages of blacks – and the reading scores of the 10 school vary from 40% pass to 75% pass.

      Now if “culture” is the cause of the state level black scores, please explain why “culture” is not being reflecting pretty much the same across different elementary school districts.

      why is there a 35% disparity in black pass rates depending on school?

      what the top level graph shows is either systemic differences in resources or system differences in minority performance – but when you look at an aggregate number -you are not seeing the huge disparities in performance between individual schools.

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4. 

   larryg

   September 6, 2014

   oops: ” but when you look at an aggregate number do you see the huge disparities between individual schools in the SAME school district – where these schools have different percentages of blacks ?

   also there are MORE than 10 schools with significant black populations – I neglected to notice the multi-page output from the SOL build-a-table.

   The basic point remains – there is huge variability between the individual schools with respect to black SOL scores that would seem to bring into question the idea that it’s a “culture” thing.

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5. 

   Fred Costello

   September 8, 2014

   My own study of all schools in Virgina can be found at http://www.fcta.org/Pubs/Reports/2014-08a-fac.html. The study showed that the SAT performance of all Virginia public school systems can be explained by their ethnic content, with Asian and Black being the best indicators. The R-squared was 0.71 (i.e., 71% of the difference between the measured and the average is explained by the ethnic content). (White is inferred from the Asian and Black percentages.) See especially Figure 10 of the report.

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