Jordan Weissmann tackles Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s statement in her majority opinion in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger that affirmative action policies instituted today would ensure that affirmative action would not be needed within 25 years.
Weissmann points to a paper by Krueger, Rothstein, and Turner which assessed whether or not decreasing income gaps and test score gaps could bring us to a point 25 years down the road in which blacks were as meritorious as whites. They found that if then-current trends continued, blacks would still rely greatly on affirmative action to gain access to highly selective universities. O’Connor’s statement was overly confident.
Krueger et al wrote in a summary of their full paper:
The last 25 years saw two distinct regimes, with rapidly closing black–white gaps in the first period and a widening gap since 1990. To extrapolate a linear trend a full quarter century into the future is to assume a dramatic turnaround from recent patterns and sustained growth over a long period. On the other hand, if we could somehow return to and sustain the rapid rate of progress seen in the 1980s, the future will be brighter than even our optimistic forecasts indicate.
As we can see, SAT score gaps between blacks and whites have not closed.
NAEP gaps haven’t closed much either since Krueger et al conducted their research. The NAEP serves as a different measure than the SAT. It is a test largely for administrative consumption. Students don’t care that much about the test; while they are “taught to the test” they probably don’t try to game it because it won’t improve their chances of advancing to the next level. It largely nullifies the supposed impact of test prep services that benefit white SAT scores (stress supposed because there is evidence that black students use test prep more than white students do).
But the NAEP math white-black math gap for 17-year-olds has largely sustained. In 1999 whites scored 31 points higher than blacks; in 2004 whites scored 27 points higher; in 2008 whites scored 26 points higher. In reading, the gap was 31 in 1999, 27 in 2004, and 29 in 2008. And over a longer term, ~ 20-25 years, the gap still sustains. In math, the gap was 29 points in 1986. That’s a three point decline over 22 years. In reading, the gap was 32 points in 1984. That’s a three point decline over 24 years.
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Black advocacy groups should stop putting so much emphasis on saying that the tests are biased. They coming dangerously close to letting the cat out of the bag, the genie out of the bottle, and killing the goose that laid the golden egg all at once. Instead they should be arguing for localization, for example, that the NY science schools should only serve the borough in which they are located. Come up with a new term like “geographic racism” or something to rally around. The SWPLs in Brooklyn won’t send their kids to a black school, even if it is for “gifted” students. So the number of black students at Brooklyn will skyrocket.. The Bronx is all Latino, so they will get admission to Bronx Science. The Asians all live in Queens, so they are taken care of, and whites in Staten Island. Harlem is a problem, but just yell “geographic racism!” at having to have kids travel all the way from northern Manhattan to southern and demand a school in Harlem. Problem solved and no perky questions about entrance exam results.
Black people invented peanut butter and super soakers
White people love peanut butter and super soakers
Whites score better on tests because of blacks peanut butter
Mock Anti-Racist at your own risk white boy ant high ray cyst. Anti-Racist is schooling you faggoty white boys that the only test scores that mean shit are who owes and who is owed. white racists which is all of you owe Dues to Justice and you will pay. Four Soldiers were inspired by the words of Anti-Racist last night and collected.
White people should focus on black people so racing to the bottom happens faster. I guess because so many white people now invest more into football for their sons and beauty pagents for their daughters and black people have had success in those areas lately that we should focus on black people. The United States is no longer black and white, other people live here too and they are making inroads into many areas yet the focus continues to be on bottom of the barrel blacks. The gap between white and Asian test scores is widening. It’s because Asian parents focus on school and test prep. These degrees matter, overall, with a population. White people are being forced down the economic ladder because only 31% of people of European background have college degrees while 89% of Jews and 50-86% of Asians (depending on the ethnicity) do. An overclass is being educated to rule over white people, to tinker with the system white people created and in the process push white people down lower and lower. Did you know that business set asides for racial minorities are usually given to Asians not black or Latino people? Yet the focus remains on black people who have never created a civilization let alone maintain one.
On the other hand, if we could somehow return to and sustain the rapid rate of progress seen in the 1980s, the future will be brighter than even our optimistic forecasts indicate.
That’s ecological fallacy in action. It has been shown that the narrowing of the NAEP gaps in the 1970s and 80s was entirely due to dramatic improvements among the bottom 10 percent of black students, whereas there was no narrowing at all among the better-performing blacks. In other words, the gap narrowed essentially because the number of completely illiterate and innumerate blacks decreased, not because blacks improved in general. So, even if the 1980s trendlines in NAEP scores could be restored, it would not mean that the white-black gap among college applicants would narrow, because college applicants are not drawn from the bottom 10 percent of the ability distribution.
Where is “panty waistist” DL AR? Bitch hasn’t shown his punk ass since being exposed. How long till we know about you?
The well into which black America has sunk is so deep, it seems unlikely that anyone can help the urban poor black population claw its way out.
The culture, at the very least, viruallly guarantees violence, mayhem and failure.
test scores, next to that, seem almost like an irrelevancy.
I seriously wonder if a person who is half-black/half-white, has the IQ of a white, or an IQ that is half-way between the two races…
The answer to that question would tell us a lot.
I suspect that people who are 50-50 are just as smart as whites (recessive genetic traits are removed), but have never seen official data (as the results would be controversial).
Nikos, it depends on the IQs of the parents (who are not a random sample of their respective races), but most data suggest that the gap between whites and biracials in IQ and achievement tests is about 50% (or somewhat less) of the black-white gap. See here for some results from the NAEP. It’s not ideal, because the identification of biracials in NAEP data is somewhat uncertain, and the results vary depending on whether racial identification is reported by the school or the students themselves.