Texas Gives an Education
I mentioned this yesterday (actually early this morning), but did not get the link in correctly.
Texas and Wisconsin education rankings have been compared, with the Wisconsin union teachers blasting Texas for not having union teachers. Wisconsin’s rank on the National Report Card is #2, they noted, compared to #47 for Texas.
But in fact, Texas students are doing better in almost every single regard than Wisconsin students, as Iowahawk notes. In scores in the different subjects at several grade levels, 18 scores in all, Texas beats Wisconsin in 17 of them and it’s about a draw for the last one.
For dropout rates, which Paul Krugman was using as a cudgel against Texas, it’s about on a par with Wisconsin (and better than the national average!) for whites and Hispanics. But blacks in Texas do much better in this category, with Wisconsin black dropouts at a rate much higher than the national average. As Iowahawk put it, “Why do Wisconsin union teachers hate blacks?”
But if Texas is so much better at education than Wisconsin, how could it be ranked so poorly by comparison?
The trick is race-based. Across the country, as I discussed some time back, whites do better than Latinos who do better than blacks. (Note that these are averages, of course; brilliance and idiocy comes in all colors and flavors!)
So why does Wisconsin rank higher than Texas? It’s almost all white. 4% Latinos, for example, compared to more than 30% for Texas. Far fewer blacks; it would be interesting to learn why the Wisconsin dropout rate of blacks is so bad.
Texas whites get a better education, as evidenced by their test scores, than Wisconsin whites. Same for blacks, and for Hispanics. The mix is just different, creating an artifact that the Wisconsin teachers union people took as superiority.
They need an education. And Iowahawk is dishing it out for them.
Barack Obama stumbled into a mistake regarding unions and schools this year, and one answer to why unions are a problem in schools was provided by, surprisingly, an editorial in the New York Times.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Originally published at DeHavelle.com. You can comment here or there.