Group 1998 NAEP 2024 NAEP Change
----------------------------- ---------- --------- ------
White 268 266 −2
Black 242 243 +1
Hispanic 241 245 +4
Asian/Pacific Islander 261 280 +19
All public-school students 261 257 −4
Race/ethnicity 1999 Grade 8 2023 Grade 8 Change
--------------------------------- ------------ ------------ --------
White 64.5% 44.0% −20.5 pp
Black 16.1% 14.9% −1.2 pp
Hispanic 14.3% 29.4% +15.1 pp
Asian/Pacific Islander 3.9% 5.9% +2.0 pp
American Indian/Alaska Native 1.2% 0.9% −0.3 pp
Two or more races not separately reported 4.8% -Also if you want to entertain the theory that it is racial/genetic, it'd be important to do that analysis on a continuum since a lot of people who are "minority X" may be more than 50% white or there may be trends in that over time.
You are the person in this discussion invoking race genetics. Why does your mind go there?
Doesn't it strike you that poor Hispanic reading performance might actually be largely related to Spanish vs. English-language proficiency?
> I think a richer analysis with wealth, parental education, english as a first language cofounders might be helpful.
We have all that data it's just significantly less predictive of outcome then race.
If you don't think that what happened and is happening to black people affects our average performance on tests, you haven't eliminated racist assumptions, you've eliminated the entire black experience in America and any reason for a grudge or complaint.
Grouping a list of test performances by race shouldn't lead to an assumption of natural stupidity any more than grouping a list of incomes or wealth by race should lead to an assumption of natural laziness.
And the fact that you jump to that conclusion, and it makes you nervous, so you think it's bad to talk about the facts that remind you of that conclusion, does not help black people.
You could say the same thing about Hispanic economic migrants. You don't think that economic migrants from countries with good universities and healthy middle classes are going to score lower on tests? The ones that fly in are a different story, they're often elites, but the ones that walk in? They're bottom caste where they come from, and looking for a chance to change things.
1998? I wanted a quarter century of Grade 8 and that gives me 1998 to 2024 with NAEP. 2000 reading assessment was Grade 4 only. You can do it with any pair of years.
Does this correlate with the racial proportion data?
It is wrong to get overly exact here though. We are talking about a overall score variance of just 10pts in the face of an achievement gap of nearly 30pts, with an absolutely massive 20% decline in white population share over the 26 year period.