This never gets old for some liberals - at least those with the incredibly large chips on their shoulder. There was the “IQ by State” fraud sent around in 2000 and in 2004 after Democrats lost the election, purporting to show that blue states have a higher average IQ than red states. Of course, no such data exists.
Then there was the Morgan Quitno study (that I believe they do every year) that ranked the “smartest state” based on 21 factors. Seeing a correlation between the “smarter” states and their political leanings, liberals ran with it. Of course, a closer examination of the 21 factors revealed that as few as 8 actually dealt with intelligence while the remainder dealt primarily with money. (The one overarching factor seemed to be the belief that throwing money at schools makes your state “smarter.”)
I ran the numbers myself a few years back and determined that based on test scores, there was no statistically significant difference between the blue states and the red states. I found that ironic since the raw data (actual test scores) showed that blue states are statistically identical to red states. Now, with the Morgan Quitno study, they are assuming that throwing money at schools makes you “smarter” when it actually does nothing to improve performance. I wouldn’t remove it from the study, though. I’d actually penalize states that spend more money, since they clearly don’t understand they are wasting money.
Thanks for keeping that information from going down the memory hole.
I wonder what their confidence level was for their study?
Yesterdays kids taught at the blackboard seem to be smarter than todays kids taught on computers. No statistics; just opinion.