Invidious Statistics: How focusing on race can make a solution look like a problem.

The Wall Street Journal ^ | April 29, 2009 | James Taranto

[Scanian]

Eight years after Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, American 9- and 13-year-olds are doing measurably better on standardized tests. Good news? Not necessarily. The New York Times report on NCLB carries the headline " 'No Child' Law Is Not Closing a Racial Gap."

Fair enough. If the law is helping white kids but doing nothing for blacks, that doesn't seem right. Only that isn't what's happening, as you learn from reading the actual report:

The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation's best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency. Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide, despite President George W. Bush's frequent assertions that the No Child law was having a dramatic effect. So minority kids are doing better than before. But because white kids are also doing better, and therefore the "gap" remains, the Times suggests the law is a failure. By this measure, it would have been better to pass a law that only benefits minorities than one that benefits everyone.

To be fair, closing the racial gap was one of the stated goals of No Child Left Behind.

[Nachum]

There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.

[utahagen]

This article hit the NYTimes’s website last night. Guess what the Times ran today? Another in a series of articles decrying the AP tests. You know the real reason the left wants to get rid of the AP tests, SATs, etc? Because no amount of government spending will close the gap between black students and everyone else on standardized tests. So...let’s increase wild government spending, demand more affirmative action, and abolish objective testing measures. This is part of the reason Obama wants to massively expand government and why he wants to own a chunk of Wall Street: to pack government and private industry with the same people who (as a group) persist in lagging behind everybody else, forty years after the launch of the Great Society. It’s pure racism and I cannot believe it is happening in our country.

[John Galt's cousin]

That is the problem with the “disparate impact” theory. I think it started out as a presumption that if the results of the testing process did not result in the promotion of the protected groups in the same proportion as they were in the general population then the test was to be presumed to be discriminatory

That seems to have morphed into a “rule” that if the results impact a protected group more, then the testing process IS dicriminatory

We are rushing down to the lowest common denominator and strict quotas

Let’s see how SCOTUS handles the Ricci v. New Haven (fire dept propmotion exam) case

[utahagen]

You are spot-on about how this all started — “...test was presumed to be discriminatory” — and now that that presumption is obviously wrong, the left will do anything to make sure blacks are represented in proportional numbers in all the highly prestigious professions.

I am praying (literally) that the good guys win the New Haven firehouse case!