March 30, 2002

"Analysis Finds Race Disparity in School Tests"

"Analysis Finds Race Disparity in School Tests" reports the NYT in what I call America's Longest Running Series of 'Dog Bites Man' Stories. Has anyone ever seen a newspaper article where a school district (not a single school) didn't come out with this general ranking of Asian and whites doing better on tests than Hispanics and blacks? The renegade statistician who calls himself La Griffe du Lion explains how to convert these kind of test scores into standard deviation terms here. In school districts all over the country, the white-black testing difference comes out to right around 1.0 standard deviations. La Griffe finds this same result in all sorts of different fields, such as the racial difference in rate of uncountable ballots in the 2000 Florida election. He calls the one standard deviation gap The Fundamental Constant of Sociology.

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