After a brief hiatus, we’re back to analyzing the 2013-2014 Standards of Learning results… Hill City Jim provided another data set that’s worth looking at — correlating the relationship between the percentage of black students in Virginia school divisions and the percentage of blacks that pass the SOLs. Why would anyone conduct that exercise? 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.
The chart above shows the distribution of school divisions with a measurable black student population (leaving out 14 school divisions in Western and Southwestern Virginia). The vertical axis shows the SOL pass rate, the horizontal axis the percentage of blacks in the school system. An illustration: The red diamond, representing our old friend West Point, has a 9% black student body and a black pass rate of nearly 94% (the highest pass rate for blacks of any school system in Virginia, incidentally).
The black line shows an R² of o.o704, which (according to my primitive understanding of statistics) suggests that only 7% of the variation in black SOL performance can be attributed to the relative concentration of blacks in the school division.
Bacon’s bottom line: The school division data gives some credence to the liberal-progressive idea that putting black children in a school division with more white children will boost their academic performance. But the correlation is a weak one. And as a practical matter, what can Virginia state and local governments do with this information anyway? Implement school busing across school divisions? The resulting expense and furor would be hugely counter productive.
Of course, there is a deeper level of analysis that we have not performed. One could argue that the percentage of black kids in a school division is less relevant than the percentage of blacks kids in a particular school, on the assumption either (a) that predominantly black schools receive less adequate resources than their predominantly white counterparts, even within the same school division, or (b) that the proximity to white students has a beneficial effect. Unfortunately, analysis of the first proposition is exceedingly difficult to perform — at least it is in Henrico County, which I have delved into in the past. Amazingly, Virginia school districts do not break down spending by individual schools. 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.
In the final analysis, this chart, while interesting, does not settle anything. Hill City Jim has some more suggestions for SOL analysis, so, we may be back soon.
Download spreadsheet, “Black students percentage of division.”