Progressives: all people/races are smart and good. Conservatives: all people are dumb and evil. Classic Sowell constrained/tragic vision vs unconstrained/ utopian vision
Like Democrats’ stubborn and consistent voting vs. school choice (which ultimately benefits whites by keeping out nons in whiter upscale districts).
On the other hand, nons help increase a state’s population, which increases total electoral vote, therefore keeping the GOP competitive in the election.
Perhaps a subtle motto should be: nons: can’t live with ‘em (or around them as they tend to drive down property values as well as reduce a school’s overall quality performance in reading and math), but can’t live without ‘em (most states that are 95% white tend to vote for Democrats, fortunately these states are small in population whereas the non-whites help drive up a state’s total electoral vote -e.g. Mississippi and Alabama have more electoral votes then say, Vermont and Rhode Island. With Oregon, it does tend to be a wash, but that is balanced by a red state such as Louisiana.
In what universe is Michigan a red state? Also, almost all the education laws passed in now purple states of Wisconsin and NC were done prior to them turning purple when they had “red” control. Similarly Minnesota was purple until about 2022. Otoh, it’s beyond obvious there’s a human capital element to even just the white scores. To wit, West Virginia is almost single handedly bring the trend line down on the Trump correlation. Thanks Scots-Irish!
Other than that, really enjoyable read.
(One last point: correcting for Asian is probably unfair to states like Indiana and Wisconsin that have lots of SE Asian “poor test takers” and artificially boosts places like Massachusetts that have a lot of NE Asian types, à la Bostons Mayor Wu).
The Michigan State House is majority Republican. The State Senate is 19-18 with one vacant for the Democrats. Not exactly a deep blue state. The U.S. Congressional delegation is 7 Republicans and six Democrats. Trump won the state by more than 1% of the total vote.
Right. So Michigan is decidedly not red. Purple at best. The last party to hold the legislative and executive branch was the dems in 2022. Holding both branches is the only way to advance your party’s agenda, education or otherwise, since legislation has to pass both houses and be signed by the gov to become law. The one exception is if you hold supermajorities in both legislative houses allowing a veto override, which I believe republicans in NC had recently.
About the white 8th grade math NAEP (second-to-last graph): it looks like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island are all in the bottom half of the rankings. Traditionally, though, white New Englanders did pretty well, right? But it seems that in the Deindustrialization and Fentanyl Era, the flinty people in Calvin Coolidge Country are not doing so well. I believe Tucker Carlson has reported that Maine outside the tourist areas is not doing very well. It seems that the BOS/NYC suburbanites in CT/MA are doing much, much better than the 'swamp Yankee' white Protestants in the rest of New England.
Off-topic: Spencer Klavan takes a stab at explaining how Nick Fuentes is the inevitable result of the demonization of Noticing. Young people (at least the Fuentes) now assume that all appeals to universalistic moral principles are cynical BS. I think that some of our old acquaintances at the Unz Review (and of course the Internet at large) fall into this category as well. It's going to be a tricky situation to get out of.
"So when people describe Fuentes as a misogynist—which he is—or a racist—which he also is—those otherwise apt descriptors ring like the hollow pejoratives they have become after being so recklessly over-used for so long. They give Fuentes license to maintain that he’s being “canceled” for “just asking questions.” The right-wingers he courts are the ones most likely to be drawn in by this claim, because so many of their fellows really have been viciously calumniated for sincerely asking questions or acknowledging sensitive facts."
Regarding Nick Fuentes' attraction to young White men: Leftists have been obsessed with finding the "root cause" of every problem and malfeasance for the past 50 years, when perpetrated by non-Whites. Interesting that they have no interest in finding the "root cause" in this case. (I could give them a start--it began with virtually every institution in the U.S. demonizing and/or mocking Whites.)
At the core, if you just look at school effectiveness, "separate but equal" had worked very well for the US from late 1800s to 1960. The problem of course is its evident non-constituitionality. Before 1945 most Democrats were happy to tolerate it - they were/are not so high on constituitionality anyway. What brought it down was Evil Germany.
For example, if you look at key anthropologists like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, they were happy to accept racial contributions to cognition and behavior before the 1930s.
I have never heard more than 10 seconds of Nick Fuentes. I couldn't even describe what his voice sounds like. The uproar around him, including Rod Dreher wetting his pants, is inexplicable to me.
Nothing has changed in my 62 yrs of observing the handwringing over the Black-White academic gap. It is the same fretting about the same disparities in academics and other life outcomes, over and over and over.
Phonics, whole language, math tables, common core, it's the parents, it's the teachers, it's the lack of school lunches, It's the lack of school breakfasts, It's the lack of school lunches and breakfasts, it's the lack of school breakfasts lunches and after school snacks.
Doesn't Steve's archive at unz.com go back to the late 1990s? Nothing has changed. There are young adults reading these comments who will be struck, ten to twenty years hence, as I was struck, 25+ years ago, by how this shit never, never ever, changes.
I could type out the same rant about the achievement and physicality gaps between men and women.
Nick Fuentes is just the latest iteration of Lester Maddox or George Wallace, or George Lincoln Rockwell before them.
And now not only are blacks and latinos sliding into the wall, but whites are rounding second and sprinting hard.
True, but George Wallace didn't complain the number of Holocaust dead doesn't add up... Besides, Christian Zionists are more relaxed on black/white race issue than the supercessionist Christians. Being of the Old T-variety, they could always reinterpret it as Ham's curse.
Women outperform men in every step of the academic process starting in kindergarten. Males really fall behind starting in 6th grade and never catch up. And for all of the talk about the black/white divide being due to HBD, conservatives love to blame the male/female divide on mean female teachers rather than the established biology of slower mental development for males versus females.
Nobody cares because all women really want is to wear nice clothes and send emails and chair meetings for 30 hours a week while in grown-up world the men fight wars, build things, and make cool stuff.
A few people at the extremes does not make the average male's life better. Men also lead in being criminals, in committing suicide, and in being homeless. And there are more homeless males than males as CEO of the Fortune 500.
> Women outperform men in every step of the academic process starting in kindergarten. Males really fall behind starting in 6th grade and never catch up. And for all of the talk about the black/white divide being due to HBD, conservatives love to blame the male/female divide on mean female teachers rather than the established biology of slower mental development for males versus females. <
LOL. Girls develop faster than boys? Do better in school? Who knew? 1962 is calling and wants its "insight" back. (Actually 1962 is when I learned about this. I'm sure my parents knew about it in the 1930s. My grandparents knew about it teaching school in the 1920s and no doubt learned about it going to school in the '90s and 00s.)
Seriously you have this very weird mental tick if you seriously think Steve--or HBD world in general--is ignorant of or scared to discuss these basic sex differences. Everyone knows and they are not controversial (at least this side of whackadoodle feminism).
Girls:
-- come out of the womb healthier
-- learn to speak earlier
-- develop faster--mentally and physically
-- are more verbal
-- are more cooperative and compliant, are less rambunctious, sit still and behave, do what the teacher says, do their homework (see "teacher's pet"--all of this has been known ... forever)
And yet ...
Boys
-- do better on the SAT
-- dominate the top levels of the SAT (queue Larry Summers) about 2-1 in verbal, 3-1+ in math
-- girls do not catch up until down at the 75-80ish%tile in verbal and way, way, way down at something like the 25ish%tile in math.
and this is on a test taken generally at 16, when girls are developmentally fully baked young women ready for reproduction, while the boys are mostly still "boys" usually with another couple of years of development to be fully baked young men. A test taken at 20 would should an even greater skew in capability.
Despite 2 generations of "liberation" and all this female "achievement", men still dominate the world of actual things--in math, science, engineering. Men are still responsible for something like 95%+ of the actual innovation that produces our immense prosperity. And do essentially all the building and fixing that keeps things humming. Women ... do their usual nurturing and now have meetings and tell each other--and sadly men--how this that or the other thing should be. Women in the West have had 50+ years now to wow the world with their can do mastery and brilliant innovations and .... crickets.
~~
Finally--and seriously this is not complicated. This difference between biological factors--which everyone and pet dog has known about ... forever--and environmental factors which may or may not change is easy to understand.
Men are doing relatively *worse* in school and in life than they used to be doing. And yes, that is because of an even more tedious feminized "hostile environment" for young men--in schools, universities and even corporations--than 50 years ago.
If something has markedly *changed* that is not because of biological factors. (Boys were boys and girls were girls in 1960 and boys are boys and girls are girls in 2025.) Biology does not change that fast. So that *change* is because of a change in environmental/social factors--which of course can interact with the underlying biology of humans, but the *change* is from a changed environment.
At the masters degree, women are pulling away from men. It is engineering that is still dominated by men only and a huge percentage of those are Asian or Asian-Americans. Not the manly men white guys.
And what has been reported is that being a good student requires a lot of non-cognitive skills that women are just better out. There is nothing sexist about expecting boys to do their homework and turn it in.
What has really changed in the last 50 years is that schools, employers, and society has stopped discriminating against females.
It seems that Wainer et al are rather loath to admit (as you pointed out obliquely) that holding back the kids that can't yet read at a minimum level is probably what's driving most of the 4th grade improvement. I'm not quite sure I get why they imply this is somehow cheating on the level of telling the dumb kids to stay home on test day. If the purpose of the test is to assess how well states are doing at educating kids entering 4th grade, it would be useful to know if a state's retention strategy is something that works. Of course, holding back 3 black kids and 1 white kid in a class of 16 blacks, 15 whites, and 4 other as would happen in Mississippi probably plays a lot better than holding back both black kids, 1 non-white Hispanic kid, and one white kid in a class of 25 whites, 3 Asians, 5 n-w Hispanics, and 2 blacks as in Massachusetts.
The assumption should be that the vast majority of those held back are boys and that Mississippi is just following the idea of red-shirting boys who are having problems.
"Republicans tend to dominate in two types of states: ones like Wyoming where everybody is white, and ones like Mississippi where whites must maintain a high degree of political solidarity or their state will get turned into Detroit."
That line stuck out to me, mentioned so casually but yet quite insightful.
Also the line about Texas whites being distinctive from West Virginia and other whites based off the trades that attracted them there. Would love more examples of this, very interesting.
Another way of saying this is that supermajority white states bifurcate into hard red (Wyoming, Montana, Dakotas, etc.) or hard blue (Vermont, Oregon, Massachusetts, etc.), while ethnically precarious states form politically around whichever ethnic coalition holds the bare majority.
I tend to think the white supermajority bifurcation is due to naiveté and status-striving. The Great Plains and Intermountain white Republican states know why they have it good and don't care if anyone thinks they aren't fashionably progressive. While the usually coastal* white Democratic states refuse to see the harm of diversity and really want to be seen as progressive standard-bearers. In a logical consequence of their false beliefs, the white Democratic states have been importing harmful diversity with the inevitable consequences. Over time, this may result in them becoming less Democratic (Minnesota?).
---------
* Minnesota = Lake Superior + 10,000 lakes coast. Vermont = Champlain coast.
In Mississippi, whites generally stick together in the Republican Party to keep the black dominated Democratic Party from having power. In Texas, college educated suburban whites vote for Republicans to keep the Mexican-American dominated Democratic Party from having control. In Maryland, enough whites vote for Democrats to keep blacks from dominating politics.
1) Where are the Washington DC data? Our leftist crazies take a back seat to no one when it comes to implementing woke policies! (Some schools don't have functioning heating and air conditioning; so what?)
2) I still don't understand the Urban Institute's "adjustments"; kind of like good old-fashioned affirmative action, I guess? Unlike Joe Biden, I'm old-fashioned enough to believe a poor kid can learn just as well as a White kid.
3) To assess the true amount of "education" a child has undergone (and account for already-smart kids), it seems to me one would measure the difference in achievement from an early grade (e.g., 3rd grade) to perhaps the 9th or 10th grade.
Also, love this sentence: "The Mississippi Miracle is based on the assumption that its students aren’t necessarily the sharpest knives in the drawer, so they need basic education tailored to their abilities, not fantasies about self-actualization." 😍
" I'm old-fashioned enough to believe a poor kid can learn just as well as a White kid."
I don't think that is the distinction under discussion.
I'm even more old fashioned. I don't think a stupid kid can learn as well as a smart kid. That's practically the operational definition of smart and stupid.
There are large achievement gaps between affluent whites and working poor whites. However, it is usually masked because there are no urban high schools that are 90% or more white kids from blue collar families. One of the data points that black activist point to is that poor white kids generally attended the same schools as middle class or upper middle class white kids.
You missed my sarcasm in the second point--the young, racist Joe Biden said that, with "poor and White" the contrast rather than "poor and rich."
But neither you nor anyone else has explained how a poor child (of any race/ethnicity) can't learn as well as a wealthy child. I won't supply reams of data like Steve, but here's an applicable one: the poorest demographic in NYC public schools is Chinese-Americans (this was true at least a few years ago)!
A first check on any individual's view on education is to see if the individual is directly stating or implying that virtually all high school students can master calculus if given the proper conditions to include trained teachers, enough resources, using a certain method.
In reality, most high school students will never master calculus. The question is whether to develop education policy assuming that every high school student can or cannot master calculus. Assuming that a poor kid has the same chance as a rich kid falls into the idea that everyone can master calculus.
I had an argument with a girlfriend about this. She was very intelligent and didn't buy my assertion that most people can't learn (let alone master) calculus. I asserted without evidence that you needed an IQ of say 120, to be able to learn calculus and she simply did not understand it.
Turns out most people never consider the difference in potential of people of different intelligence levels. They will talk about how stupid everyone is. They will admit that there exist people who are much smarter than they are. Yet somehow it never occurs to them that there are people who cannot learn some things.
It's like my guitar player's assertion that the only difference between us and The Eagles is that the members of the Eagles do it as a job and can practice 8 or more hours a day. :)
Many of the right have started using meritocracy as the opposite of DEI but what part of parents paying for private music lessons, music camps, etc (or the equivalent in sports, visual arts, or performing arts) is the meritocratic part?
Meritocracy assumes that every manager hires the person who will do the best job. Frequently the best job isn't WRT doing what the company wants but rather making the manager feel comfortable.
This chart uses net income as its criterion. I would think that would be as good of measure as any. Perhaps since a lot of Texas farm production is fiber (cotton and wool), that might be part of the difference between the two sources. Or maybe Texas farms are more profitable
This is tremendous analysis, Steve. I'm in the education field, and one rarely sees this kind of scope and depth.
But I've got to try to clarify one misconception you've put forward in this article, i.e. that phonics is for dumb kids, while whole word reading is for smart ones.
You're assuming that 'phonics readers' keep on using phonics -- i.e. they read by sounding out words -- even after they've mastered reading, while 'whole word readers' like you read by recognizing words (or even phrases) at a glance, which is of course much more efficient.
In fact, these two approaches are only rivals in terms of *learning to read*, not for ongoing, fluent reading. That is, phonics is crucial mostly in that Grade 1-3 window when kids are learning to read. By grade 4 kids should be transitioning to faster word-recognition reading. Phonics remains useful for sounding out new words, but it's not used for every word.
In this sense, all kids, dumb and smart, can make good use of phonics, but the great majority of them will leave it behind. It's like a booster used to launch a rocket; it's not the capsule itself.
There is overwhelming, undeniable, incontrovertible research evidence that proves, so far as such proof can be achieved in the social sciences, that phonics works better than 'whole word' in teaching kids to read. The proliferation of the 'progressive' whole word 'method' is one of the greatest malpractices in the history of education. It's essentially telling kids to ignore one of the greatest inventions in human history, i.e. the phonetic alphabet, and instead treat words as pictographs that must be memorized in their thousands. It's utter madness, but it's been extremely popular in schools for a century.
One of the smarter MIT kids way back when told me his inability to spell was due to either his school imposing phonics on him or not imposing phonic on him. I honestly can't remember which. I've always thought spelling was an over-rated skill. That's why you can college major in reading stuff but not spelling stuff.
English is much less phonetic than Spanish or French. With American English adopting words from all over the world, there are so many exceptions to any phonics algorithm that it will lead to spelling errors.
There have been several historical attempts to standardize American spelling but they all failed. I've adopted the "whatever spell correct says" method.
I learned to read in phonics-based classroom. As you and Steve say, I now read whole-word-ly and was probably smart enough that I could have learned to read that way too, but I always thought that my phonics introduction gave me a certain appreciation for the way different word families are formed, which grew, as I grew, into an appreciation for etymologies, the evolution of language, and kinship with other Indo-European languages.
Still, the thing can be taken too far. I had age-peer cousins in a different district who were taught reading in a kind of fanatical ultra-phonics where not only did they sound out each phoneme, they were taught to write every word phonetically and given books in which all the words had been transformed into their phonetic-equivalent spellings. So by fourth grade, though we could still talk to each other normally, they read and wrote some kind of kompleetlee aylee-en lang-goo-ej that I could read with effort, but my own and the English-speaking world's written language was incomprehensible to them. They did eventually learn to read and write standard English, but I'm not sure they ever completely caught up. (This may be the background to the spelling-illiterate MIT student Erik described in an adjacent comment.) This lunatic ultra-phonics program was eventually junked by the school, but perhaps it was the damage caused by this kind of excess that made school districts swing excessively over to the whole word approach in reaction.
That link between phonics and word roots is underplayed. It's an excellent point.
The problem with English phonics is of course the high number of exceptions to the standard phonics rules. There really is no better way to teach kids these than getting them to remember them via assertion and repetition. The whole word advocates pounce on this, and use the frequent exceptions in English to try to discredit the broader phonics approach. This tactic certainly resonates with many of the ways 'progressives' manipulate narratives and people . . . .
Doesn't every parent start with the kid on the lap, "at, cat, fat, sat, mat" reading approach? Sounding out short A and basic consonants and blending them together to read the simple words is unassailable for young beginners.
The kid memorizes "the" and "a" and he or she is off to the races. It's not rocket science, and the only variable is how fast the kid will catch on.
I think many parents might do this, but lots don't. They might read aloud to their kids, but not really try to link the symbols on the page to the sounds they represent. My parents were like this. They read to me sometimes, but didn't try to teach me to read. I got all the way to 1st grade and had no idea how it all fit together. But then after getting only very basic phonics instruction in school, I suddenly realized how it worked, and was almost immediately reading fast and in profusion.
Ironically, the infamous 'Dick and Jane' books that many of us remember, and which used repetitive patterns like the one you've mentioned here, were explicitly designed for teaching reading via the 'whole word' (aka 'whole language' or 'look-say') approach. Kids were not meant to identify the patterns in the letters and sound out the words; they were supposed to just 'look' at the words, recognize them by appearance, and then remember the whole word itself.
Great piece. Years ago when I lived in DC, the Post published an article suggesting perhaps it would be more productive if education was more geared towards boosting reading and math scores by race against their previous baseline rather than trying to equalize outcomes between groups. Naturally this was rejected as bigoted and it dropped off the radar.
It’s a good idea though, and we would all be better served by a system that honestly tried to ensure a basic acquisition of language and math ability first and foremost, since for the lower performers that would ultimately put more decent if unspectacular jobs within reach. But obviously that means tacit acceptance of different economic expectations between groups and although I think a lot of normies across the racial and ethnic spectrum would be OK with this, political activists whose game is speaking for others definitely will not, since leftist politics in general are not about acceptance of how things are but insisting wholesale societal changes are desirable and positive.
In related news, the NYT has an article today wondering if Mamdani will spend time and attention on educational “ integration”, which obviously means destroying standards and forcing kids from disparate abilities and locations to share the same teachers.
Maybe the different-strokes-for-different-folks approach could have worked if they'd been less honest about what they were doing (i.e., left "race" out of the description, but kept race in the practice).
Sad to say that under a dishonest regime, sometimes you can only have Nice Things by being dishonest about it.
Right. The way to frame it is not "the testing gap between blacks and whites is still XX, but that the black scores went up by YY percent" so you get a larger number to tout. Obviously at some point you hit a ceiling, but it's a worthwhile goal that might result in good faith efforts, whereas the impossible goal of equalizing scores or graduation rates just leads to outright fraud in grading.
In the Mary Poppins parody episode of The Simpsons (1997) there is a brief scene where Principal Skinner is attempting to sell Jimbo Jones, one of his students. When Jimbo questions the legality of this, Skinner points out that this practice is legal "only here and in Mississippi"
Averages tend to emphasize the role of not so large, but very badly performing (as well as extremely well performing) subgroups. The alternative is to use the percentiles - it also makes the outcomes less affected by admixture or inadmixture of subgroups. So I wonder how the White&Asian scores look at national comparison for the 5% best and the 10% best? Massachusetts again ruling the roost?
There's just no way they are credibly accounting for race and ELL status in that adjustment. None. I don't buy it. Mississippi has a high white poverty rate, which means its poor population has good test scores, being much whiter than most states' poor populations, and also a high black poverty rate, which means its non-poor population is mostly white. It has no ELLs to speak of. There is no way you can say hey, Mississippi is doing a great job compared to California or New Jersey unless you just do a straight race comparison. And MS does pretty well in 4th grade with racial comparisons, but not in 8th.
Surely there’s a big difference between how a kid reads when he’s first learning, and how he then reads when proficient? Isn’t it natural for a kid to start by sounding out parts of a word, and later progress to whole-word glancing?
Progressives: all people/races are smart and good. Conservatives: all people are dumb and evil. Classic Sowell constrained/tragic vision vs unconstrained/ utopian vision
Aren't conservatives like - almost all people are dumb and evil, though some can be exceedingly smart and some can be really, really good?
LOL, progs are basically Mr. Rogers, and cons are basically John Calvin.
I'm glad I read you, Steve.
Is "Matt" the highest IQ name of Generation X/Millennials? The way "Steve" was of Silents/Boomers?
Of course it is, big duh.
Matt
Joel
Paul
Steve
all vie for the top billing for intelligence. But then again, I'm a Selfish Boomer.
Like Democrats’ stubborn and consistent voting vs. school choice (which ultimately benefits whites by keeping out nons in whiter upscale districts).
On the other hand, nons help increase a state’s population, which increases total electoral vote, therefore keeping the GOP competitive in the election.
Perhaps a subtle motto should be: nons: can’t live with ‘em (or around them as they tend to drive down property values as well as reduce a school’s overall quality performance in reading and math), but can’t live without ‘em (most states that are 95% white tend to vote for Democrats, fortunately these states are small in population whereas the non-whites help drive up a state’s total electoral vote -e.g. Mississippi and Alabama have more electoral votes then say, Vermont and Rhode Island. With Oregon, it does tend to be a wash, but that is balanced by a red state such as Louisiana.
In what universe is Michigan a red state? Also, almost all the education laws passed in now purple states of Wisconsin and NC were done prior to them turning purple when they had “red” control. Similarly Minnesota was purple until about 2022. Otoh, it’s beyond obvious there’s a human capital element to even just the white scores. To wit, West Virginia is almost single handedly bring the trend line down on the Trump correlation. Thanks Scots-Irish!
Other than that, really enjoyable read.
(One last point: correcting for Asian is probably unfair to states like Indiana and Wisconsin that have lots of SE Asian “poor test takers” and artificially boosts places like Massachusetts that have a lot of NE Asian types, à la Bostons Mayor Wu).
The Michigan State House is majority Republican. The State Senate is 19-18 with one vacant for the Democrats. Not exactly a deep blue state. The U.S. Congressional delegation is 7 Republicans and six Democrats. Trump won the state by more than 1% of the total vote.
Right. So Michigan is decidedly not red. Purple at best. The last party to hold the legislative and executive branch was the dems in 2022. Holding both branches is the only way to advance your party’s agenda, education or otherwise, since legislation has to pass both houses and be signed by the gov to become law. The one exception is if you hold supermajorities in both legislative houses allowing a veto override, which I believe republicans in NC had recently.
Very useful. I wonder if Professor Gelman will take note.
It seems strange that Gelman so badly screwed up on the actual 2024 NAEP math rankings for Mississippi. Surprisingly shoddy work.
I see that Mr. Sailer (among others) has pointed out the error to him, but Gelman has not yet made a correction.
If the subject is important enough, politically inspired people may start fooling around with stats. Just a hypothesis!
About the white 8th grade math NAEP (second-to-last graph): it looks like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island are all in the bottom half of the rankings. Traditionally, though, white New Englanders did pretty well, right? But it seems that in the Deindustrialization and Fentanyl Era, the flinty people in Calvin Coolidge Country are not doing so well. I believe Tucker Carlson has reported that Maine outside the tourist areas is not doing very well. It seems that the BOS/NYC suburbanites in CT/MA are doing much, much better than the 'swamp Yankee' white Protestants in the rest of New England.
Off-topic: Spencer Klavan takes a stab at explaining how Nick Fuentes is the inevitable result of the demonization of Noticing. Young people (at least the Fuentes) now assume that all appeals to universalistic moral principles are cynical BS. I think that some of our old acquaintances at the Unz Review (and of course the Internet at large) fall into this category as well. It's going to be a tricky situation to get out of.
https://fairerdisputations.org/the-fuentes-fallacy/
"So when people describe Fuentes as a misogynist—which he is—or a racist—which he also is—those otherwise apt descriptors ring like the hollow pejoratives they have become after being so recklessly over-used for so long. They give Fuentes license to maintain that he’s being “canceled” for “just asking questions.” The right-wingers he courts are the ones most likely to be drawn in by this claim, because so many of their fellows really have been viciously calumniated for sincerely asking questions or acknowledging sensitive facts."
Regarding Nick Fuentes' attraction to young White men: Leftists have been obsessed with finding the "root cause" of every problem and malfeasance for the past 50 years, when perpetrated by non-Whites. Interesting that they have no interest in finding the "root cause" in this case. (I could give them a start--it began with virtually every institution in the U.S. demonizing and/or mocking Whites.)
At the core, if you just look at school effectiveness, "separate but equal" had worked very well for the US from late 1800s to 1960. The problem of course is its evident non-constituitionality. Before 1945 most Democrats were happy to tolerate it - they were/are not so high on constituitionality anyway. What brought it down was Evil Germany.
For example, if you look at key anthropologists like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, they were happy to accept racial contributions to cognition and behavior before the 1930s.
I have never heard more than 10 seconds of Nick Fuentes. I couldn't even describe what his voice sounds like. The uproar around him, including Rod Dreher wetting his pants, is inexplicable to me.
Nothing has changed in my 62 yrs of observing the handwringing over the Black-White academic gap. It is the same fretting about the same disparities in academics and other life outcomes, over and over and over.
Phonics, whole language, math tables, common core, it's the parents, it's the teachers, it's the lack of school lunches, It's the lack of school breakfasts, It's the lack of school lunches and breakfasts, it's the lack of school breakfasts lunches and after school snacks.
Doesn't Steve's archive at unz.com go back to the late 1990s? Nothing has changed. There are young adults reading these comments who will be struck, ten to twenty years hence, as I was struck, 25+ years ago, by how this shit never, never ever, changes.
I could type out the same rant about the achievement and physicality gaps between men and women.
Nick Fuentes is just the latest iteration of Lester Maddox or George Wallace, or George Lincoln Rockwell before them.
And now not only are blacks and latinos sliding into the wall, but whites are rounding second and sprinting hard.
Crooked timber, all the way down.
lol at the rd comment
True, but George Wallace didn't complain the number of Holocaust dead doesn't add up... Besides, Christian Zionists are more relaxed on black/white race issue than the supercessionist Christians. Being of the Old T-variety, they could always reinterpret it as Ham's curse.
Women outperform men in every step of the academic process starting in kindergarten. Males really fall behind starting in 6th grade and never catch up. And for all of the talk about the black/white divide being due to HBD, conservatives love to blame the male/female divide on mean female teachers rather than the established biology of slower mental development for males versus females.
Nobody cares because all women really want is to wear nice clothes and send emails and chair meetings for 30 hours a week while in grown-up world the men fight wars, build things, and make cool stuff.
Considering that women are more than 50% of medical, dental, and law school, the data would disagree with one's viewpoint.
Men are the powerhouses in all those fields. Actually, men are the powerhouses, period.
A few people at the extremes does not make the average male's life better. Men also lead in being criminals, in committing suicide, and in being homeless. And there are more homeless males than males as CEO of the Fortune 500.
> Women outperform men in every step of the academic process starting in kindergarten. Males really fall behind starting in 6th grade and never catch up. And for all of the talk about the black/white divide being due to HBD, conservatives love to blame the male/female divide on mean female teachers rather than the established biology of slower mental development for males versus females. <
LOL. Girls develop faster than boys? Do better in school? Who knew? 1962 is calling and wants its "insight" back. (Actually 1962 is when I learned about this. I'm sure my parents knew about it in the 1930s. My grandparents knew about it teaching school in the 1920s and no doubt learned about it going to school in the '90s and 00s.)
Seriously you have this very weird mental tick if you seriously think Steve--or HBD world in general--is ignorant of or scared to discuss these basic sex differences. Everyone knows and they are not controversial (at least this side of whackadoodle feminism).
Girls:
-- come out of the womb healthier
-- learn to speak earlier
-- develop faster--mentally and physically
-- are more verbal
-- are more cooperative and compliant, are less rambunctious, sit still and behave, do what the teacher says, do their homework (see "teacher's pet"--all of this has been known ... forever)
And yet ...
Boys
-- do better on the SAT
-- dominate the top levels of the SAT (queue Larry Summers) about 2-1 in verbal, 3-1+ in math
-- girls do not catch up until down at the 75-80ish%tile in verbal and way, way, way down at something like the 25ish%tile in math.
and this is on a test taken generally at 16, when girls are developmentally fully baked young women ready for reproduction, while the boys are mostly still "boys" usually with another couple of years of development to be fully baked young men. A test taken at 20 would should an even greater skew in capability.
Despite 2 generations of "liberation" and all this female "achievement", men still dominate the world of actual things--in math, science, engineering. Men are still responsible for something like 95%+ of the actual innovation that produces our immense prosperity. And do essentially all the building and fixing that keeps things humming. Women ... do their usual nurturing and now have meetings and tell each other--and sadly men--how this that or the other thing should be. Women in the West have had 50+ years now to wow the world with their can do mastery and brilliant innovations and .... crickets.
~~
Finally--and seriously this is not complicated. This difference between biological factors--which everyone and pet dog has known about ... forever--and environmental factors which may or may not change is easy to understand.
Men are doing relatively *worse* in school and in life than they used to be doing. And yes, that is because of an even more tedious feminized "hostile environment" for young men--in schools, universities and even corporations--than 50 years ago.
If something has markedly *changed* that is not because of biological factors. (Boys were boys and girls were girls in 1960 and boys are boys and girls are girls in 2025.) Biology does not change that fast. So that *change* is because of a change in environmental/social factors--which of course can interact with the underlying biology of humans, but the *change* is from a changed environment.
One should look up the real data.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/women-earned-the-majority-of-doctoral-degrees-in-2020-for-the-12th-straight-year-and-outnumber-men-in-grad-school-148-to-100/
At the masters degree, women are pulling away from men. It is engineering that is still dominated by men only and a huge percentage of those are Asian or Asian-Americans. Not the manly men white guys.
And what has been reported is that being a good student requires a lot of non-cognitive skills that women are just better out. There is nothing sexist about expecting boys to do their homework and turn it in.
What has really changed in the last 50 years is that schools, employers, and society has stopped discriminating against females.
Sure. But then Steven Klavan doesn't get positive reviews in NYT. Not even on Fox News...
It seems that Wainer et al are rather loath to admit (as you pointed out obliquely) that holding back the kids that can't yet read at a minimum level is probably what's driving most of the 4th grade improvement. I'm not quite sure I get why they imply this is somehow cheating on the level of telling the dumb kids to stay home on test day. If the purpose of the test is to assess how well states are doing at educating kids entering 4th grade, it would be useful to know if a state's retention strategy is something that works. Of course, holding back 3 black kids and 1 white kid in a class of 16 blacks, 15 whites, and 4 other as would happen in Mississippi probably plays a lot better than holding back both black kids, 1 non-white Hispanic kid, and one white kid in a class of 25 whites, 3 Asians, 5 n-w Hispanics, and 2 blacks as in Massachusetts.
The assumption should be that the vast majority of those held back are boys and that Mississippi is just following the idea of red-shirting boys who are having problems.
"Republicans tend to dominate in two types of states: ones like Wyoming where everybody is white, and ones like Mississippi where whites must maintain a high degree of political solidarity or their state will get turned into Detroit."
That line stuck out to me, mentioned so casually but yet quite insightful.
Also the line about Texas whites being distinctive from West Virginia and other whites based off the trades that attracted them there. Would love more examples of this, very interesting.
Another way of saying this is that supermajority white states bifurcate into hard red (Wyoming, Montana, Dakotas, etc.) or hard blue (Vermont, Oregon, Massachusetts, etc.), while ethnically precarious states form politically around whichever ethnic coalition holds the bare majority.
I tend to think the white supermajority bifurcation is due to naiveté and status-striving. The Great Plains and Intermountain white Republican states know why they have it good and don't care if anyone thinks they aren't fashionably progressive. While the usually coastal* white Democratic states refuse to see the harm of diversity and really want to be seen as progressive standard-bearers. In a logical consequence of their false beliefs, the white Democratic states have been importing harmful diversity with the inevitable consequences. Over time, this may result in them becoming less Democratic (Minnesota?).
---------
* Minnesota = Lake Superior + 10,000 lakes coast. Vermont = Champlain coast.
Massachusetts isn’t a supermajority white state.
Massachusetts is ~70% white and most of the rest are quiescent Latins and Asians.
In Mississippi, whites generally stick together in the Republican Party to keep the black dominated Democratic Party from having power. In Texas, college educated suburban whites vote for Republicans to keep the Mexican-American dominated Democratic Party from having control. In Maryland, enough whites vote for Democrats to keep blacks from dominating politics.
A few comments:
1) Where are the Washington DC data? Our leftist crazies take a back seat to no one when it comes to implementing woke policies! (Some schools don't have functioning heating and air conditioning; so what?)
2) I still don't understand the Urban Institute's "adjustments"; kind of like good old-fashioned affirmative action, I guess? Unlike Joe Biden, I'm old-fashioned enough to believe a poor kid can learn just as well as a White kid.
3) To assess the true amount of "education" a child has undergone (and account for already-smart kids), it seems to me one would measure the difference in achievement from an early grade (e.g., 3rd grade) to perhaps the 9th or 10th grade.
Also, love this sentence: "The Mississippi Miracle is based on the assumption that its students aren’t necessarily the sharpest knives in the drawer, so they need basic education tailored to their abilities, not fantasies about self-actualization." 😍
" I'm old-fashioned enough to believe a poor kid can learn just as well as a White kid."
I don't think that is the distinction under discussion.
I'm even more old fashioned. I don't think a stupid kid can learn as well as a smart kid. That's practically the operational definition of smart and stupid.
There are large achievement gaps between affluent whites and working poor whites. However, it is usually masked because there are no urban high schools that are 90% or more white kids from blue collar families. One of the data points that black activist point to is that poor white kids generally attended the same schools as middle class or upper middle class white kids.
You missed my sarcasm in the second point--the young, racist Joe Biden said that, with "poor and White" the contrast rather than "poor and rich."
But neither you nor anyone else has explained how a poor child (of any race/ethnicity) can't learn as well as a wealthy child. I won't supply reams of data like Steve, but here's an applicable one: the poorest demographic in NYC public schools is Chinese-Americans (this was true at least a few years ago)!
I didn't know Biden said that.
Yeah, pretty funny, but he was still a hero to the left!
https://youtu.be/7qYckI0YV-0?si=LNTLFS5KTmNfLEo9
A first check on any individual's view on education is to see if the individual is directly stating or implying that virtually all high school students can master calculus if given the proper conditions to include trained teachers, enough resources, using a certain method.
In reality, most high school students will never master calculus. The question is whether to develop education policy assuming that every high school student can or cannot master calculus. Assuming that a poor kid has the same chance as a rich kid falls into the idea that everyone can master calculus.
I had an argument with a girlfriend about this. She was very intelligent and didn't buy my assertion that most people can't learn (let alone master) calculus. I asserted without evidence that you needed an IQ of say 120, to be able to learn calculus and she simply did not understand it.
Turns out most people never consider the difference in potential of people of different intelligence levels. They will talk about how stupid everyone is. They will admit that there exist people who are much smarter than they are. Yet somehow it never occurs to them that there are people who cannot learn some things.
It's like my guitar player's assertion that the only difference between us and The Eagles is that the members of the Eagles do it as a job and can practice 8 or more hours a day. :)
Many of the right have started using meritocracy as the opposite of DEI but what part of parents paying for private music lessons, music camps, etc (or the equivalent in sports, visual arts, or performing arts) is the meritocratic part?
Meritocracy assumes that every manager hires the person who will do the best job. Frequently the best job isn't WRT doing what the company wants but rather making the manager feel comfortable.
Texas is the number two state in net farm income at about $14 billion per year, far ahead of #3 state Iowa at $7 billion.
According to https://www.farmprogress.com/management/what-us-states-produce-the-most-food-ranking-1-50-
Texas is fourth with Iowa second. One should provide a link so we can all determine the difference.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/farm-income-and-wealth-statistics/charts-and-maps-about-your-state
This chart uses net income as its criterion. I would think that would be as good of measure as any. Perhaps since a lot of Texas farm production is fiber (cotton and wool), that might be part of the difference between the two sources. Or maybe Texas farms are more profitable
Texas appears to produce three times the beef that Iowa produces. I suspect that California produces more high margin items such as wine.
This is tremendous analysis, Steve. I'm in the education field, and one rarely sees this kind of scope and depth.
But I've got to try to clarify one misconception you've put forward in this article, i.e. that phonics is for dumb kids, while whole word reading is for smart ones.
You're assuming that 'phonics readers' keep on using phonics -- i.e. they read by sounding out words -- even after they've mastered reading, while 'whole word readers' like you read by recognizing words (or even phrases) at a glance, which is of course much more efficient.
In fact, these two approaches are only rivals in terms of *learning to read*, not for ongoing, fluent reading. That is, phonics is crucial mostly in that Grade 1-3 window when kids are learning to read. By grade 4 kids should be transitioning to faster word-recognition reading. Phonics remains useful for sounding out new words, but it's not used for every word.
In this sense, all kids, dumb and smart, can make good use of phonics, but the great majority of them will leave it behind. It's like a booster used to launch a rocket; it's not the capsule itself.
There is overwhelming, undeniable, incontrovertible research evidence that proves, so far as such proof can be achieved in the social sciences, that phonics works better than 'whole word' in teaching kids to read. The proliferation of the 'progressive' whole word 'method' is one of the greatest malpractices in the history of education. It's essentially telling kids to ignore one of the greatest inventions in human history, i.e. the phonetic alphabet, and instead treat words as pictographs that must be memorized in their thousands. It's utter madness, but it's been extremely popular in schools for a century.
One of the smarter MIT kids way back when told me his inability to spell was due to either his school imposing phonics on him or not imposing phonic on him. I honestly can't remember which. I've always thought spelling was an over-rated skill. That's why you can college major in reading stuff but not spelling stuff.
English is much less phonetic than Spanish or French. With American English adopting words from all over the world, there are so many exceptions to any phonics algorithm that it will lead to spelling errors.
There have been several historical attempts to standardize American spelling but they all failed. I've adopted the "whatever spell correct says" method.
I learned to read in phonics-based classroom. As you and Steve say, I now read whole-word-ly and was probably smart enough that I could have learned to read that way too, but I always thought that my phonics introduction gave me a certain appreciation for the way different word families are formed, which grew, as I grew, into an appreciation for etymologies, the evolution of language, and kinship with other Indo-European languages.
Still, the thing can be taken too far. I had age-peer cousins in a different district who were taught reading in a kind of fanatical ultra-phonics where not only did they sound out each phoneme, they were taught to write every word phonetically and given books in which all the words had been transformed into their phonetic-equivalent spellings. So by fourth grade, though we could still talk to each other normally, they read and wrote some kind of kompleetlee aylee-en lang-goo-ej that I could read with effort, but my own and the English-speaking world's written language was incomprehensible to them. They did eventually learn to read and write standard English, but I'm not sure they ever completely caught up. (This may be the background to the spelling-illiterate MIT student Erik described in an adjacent comment.) This lunatic ultra-phonics program was eventually junked by the school, but perhaps it was the damage caused by this kind of excess that made school districts swing excessively over to the whole word approach in reaction.
That link between phonics and word roots is underplayed. It's an excellent point.
The problem with English phonics is of course the high number of exceptions to the standard phonics rules. There really is no better way to teach kids these than getting them to remember them via assertion and repetition. The whole word advocates pounce on this, and use the frequent exceptions in English to try to discredit the broader phonics approach. This tactic certainly resonates with many of the ways 'progressives' manipulate narratives and people . . . .
Doesn't every parent start with the kid on the lap, "at, cat, fat, sat, mat" reading approach? Sounding out short A and basic consonants and blending them together to read the simple words is unassailable for young beginners.
The kid memorizes "the" and "a" and he or she is off to the races. It's not rocket science, and the only variable is how fast the kid will catch on.
I think many parents might do this, but lots don't. They might read aloud to their kids, but not really try to link the symbols on the page to the sounds they represent. My parents were like this. They read to me sometimes, but didn't try to teach me to read. I got all the way to 1st grade and had no idea how it all fit together. But then after getting only very basic phonics instruction in school, I suddenly realized how it worked, and was almost immediately reading fast and in profusion.
Ironically, the infamous 'Dick and Jane' books that many of us remember, and which used repetitive patterns like the one you've mentioned here, were explicitly designed for teaching reading via the 'whole word' (aka 'whole language' or 'look-say') approach. Kids were not meant to identify the patterns in the letters and sound out the words; they were supposed to just 'look' at the words, recognize them by appearance, and then remember the whole word itself.
Great piece. Years ago when I lived in DC, the Post published an article suggesting perhaps it would be more productive if education was more geared towards boosting reading and math scores by race against their previous baseline rather than trying to equalize outcomes between groups. Naturally this was rejected as bigoted and it dropped off the radar.
It’s a good idea though, and we would all be better served by a system that honestly tried to ensure a basic acquisition of language and math ability first and foremost, since for the lower performers that would ultimately put more decent if unspectacular jobs within reach. But obviously that means tacit acceptance of different economic expectations between groups and although I think a lot of normies across the racial and ethnic spectrum would be OK with this, political activists whose game is speaking for others definitely will not, since leftist politics in general are not about acceptance of how things are but insisting wholesale societal changes are desirable and positive.
In related news, the NYT has an article today wondering if Mamdani will spend time and attention on educational “ integration”, which obviously means destroying standards and forcing kids from disparate abilities and locations to share the same teachers.
Maybe the different-strokes-for-different-folks approach could have worked if they'd been less honest about what they were doing (i.e., left "race" out of the description, but kept race in the practice).
Sad to say that under a dishonest regime, sometimes you can only have Nice Things by being dishonest about it.
Right. The way to frame it is not "the testing gap between blacks and whites is still XX, but that the black scores went up by YY percent" so you get a larger number to tout. Obviously at some point you hit a ceiling, but it's a worthwhile goal that might result in good faith efforts, whereas the impossible goal of equalizing scores or graduation rates just leads to outright fraud in grading.
In the Mary Poppins parody episode of The Simpsons (1997) there is a brief scene where Principal Skinner is attempting to sell Jimbo Jones, one of his students. When Jimbo questions the legality of this, Skinner points out that this practice is legal "only here and in Mississippi"
Averages tend to emphasize the role of not so large, but very badly performing (as well as extremely well performing) subgroups. The alternative is to use the percentiles - it also makes the outcomes less affected by admixture or inadmixture of subgroups. So I wonder how the White&Asian scores look at national comparison for the 5% best and the 10% best? Massachusetts again ruling the roost?
There's just no way they are credibly accounting for race and ELL status in that adjustment. None. I don't buy it. Mississippi has a high white poverty rate, which means its poor population has good test scores, being much whiter than most states' poor populations, and also a high black poverty rate, which means its non-poor population is mostly white. It has no ELLs to speak of. There is no way you can say hey, Mississippi is doing a great job compared to California or New Jersey unless you just do a straight race comparison. And MS does pretty well in 4th grade with racial comparisons, but not in 8th.
Surely there’s a big difference between how a kid reads when he’s first learning, and how he then reads when proficient? Isn’t it natural for a kid to start by sounding out parts of a word, and later progress to whole-word glancing?