SAT State Ranking Adjusted for Participation Rates
Since the State rankings of Scholastic Aptitude Tests are so threatening to the mythology promoted by media and academia that the inbred hicks of places like Iowa need the enlightened guidance (if not the sperm donations) of places like New York City, Boston, etc. (you know, places with a lot of Jews who are smarter than everyone else) to become something other than illiterate sheep sodomizers with latent white supremacist tendencies, there is the standard catechism that everyone is taught: “That’s just because states like Iowa have lower participation rates in the SATs by lower performing students.” Moreover, to prove their point a Harvard Study was conducted in the 1990s which adjusted the State SAT scores for participation rates: Powell, B., and L. C. Steelman (1996), “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildering: The Use and Misuse of State SAT and ACT Scores,” Harvard Educational Review, 27-59. In this glorious Harvard Study, which you have never heard about, Iowa’s #1 SAT rank, when adjusted for its lower participation from lower performing students, plunged to an abysmal #2. No more studies like this were conducted for some reason.
Now, you won’t find this paper on line. It is referenced, but its all discussion promoting the “dumb hicks need our guidance” catechism of the Holocaustian theocracy. If you search long and hard enough, you find that some guy has extracted the data from that paper and actually put it on line.
That would be me.
No one else could be bothered to put it on line since they were too busy “debunking” the use of State rankings of SAT scores and the data would simply confuse the readers.
Well I’m here to Bewitch, Bother and Bewilder you, my hapless readers, by providing not just the data they won’t put online, but actually provide the rank ordering of what other things are most strongly associated with a State’s SAT rank adjusted for participation rates.
PS: To do this, I put up the money to reactivate the CGI processing of The Laboratory of the States website—something I was additionally motivated to do since State Master, a similar website, as of this writing couldn’t be bothered to provide the correlations with autism rates. I really had hoped that State Master would pick up the work on this problem, since they have such a spiffy user interface and such a wide range of data. But it seems that when important questions come up, State Master frequently doesn’t have the critical data or won’t provide the correlations. (Also, they apparently consider “per capita” variables to be optional much of the time and then don’t let you do arithmetic on absolute variables to adjust for population sizes—a fallacy unworthy even of sophomoric journalists that nevertheless journalists commit all the time.)
NOTE: Since this is correlation with the rank, not the scores themselves, the things associated with higher scholastic aptitude are preceded by a minus “-” sign.
You will noticed that high scholastic aptitude is associated with things like the presence of Scandinavians and IQ. I just can’t imagine why Harvard “educators” wouldn’t want to post to the net corrected data that shows correlations like this.
Posted by Daedalus on Mon, 11 Sep 2006 19:15 | #
Every few years the same nonsense is trotted out and everyone is forced to silently nod their heads in agreement: the schools are failing American students, and we need to spend more money to make the teacher’s unions happy for “no child can be left behind.” The truth is that the gap between American students and their European peers disappears once you factor out Negroes and Hispanics who depress the national average in international comparisons. Also, in many racially mixed districts, upper and middle class whites have withdrawn their children from the integrated public schools and have enrolled them in upscale private schools, which depresses average white test scores. Compare Negro students in the U.S. which are showered with money compared to Russian students in the TIMSS reports. Amazing how impoverished Russians consistently outscore relatively wealthy blacks year after year.