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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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I doubt we even have any good data to disprove or approve on whether segregation is good. In part because of how much our housing market filters for school quality and prevents income level mixing. You would have data where the blacks in a 3% black school perform extremely well but their parents are paying $20k a year in property taxes so relatively high income. And then you would look at a 90% black school in West Baltimore and see that those kids do awful academically. The human brain just can’t process that much information especially when there will be academics promoting bad data that constantly needs refuted.

Relatedly I always wander if there is anything positive in the Florida school system which has very high Hispanic test scores. Are Florida Hispanics just filtered better for high income? In one sense they did get a huge amount of Cubans though that likely tilts heavily upper class though such a large percent it does include a lot of people. On the other end Miami is the capital of Latin America and draws the upper class in huge numbers.

For my tribe I want to say everyone should just copy Miami’s school system, but I am guessing a large amount of it is filtering.

I doubt we even have any good data to disprove or approve on whether segregation is good.

That's not really true, we just have so much data on schools. There have been many programs to mix school districts in cities over the past 60 years, so we have a lot of data. Plenty of recent data too, for instance NYC adjusted school boundaries and implemented race quotas in it's elite schools just a few years ago.

Relatedly I always wander if there is anything positive in the Florida school system which has very high Hispanic test scores.

A lot of Florida's hispanics are basically just Spanish speaking Europeans who lived in Cuba. James Franco got a lot of flack from hispanic actors for getting cast as Castro, but Castro had no non-European ancestry. In fact Castro's father and Franco's grandfather probably grew up less than 100 miles from each other.

Compare that to California which is getting a lot of Oaxaca natives these days who speak Spanish as a second language and are illiterate on prose literacy scores.

Red state back to basics education actually does very well at educating new arrivals. Texas does quite well once you control for ethnic makeup. Meanwhile the largest black - white disparity in student performance is in ultra blue Berkley. Teaching black students they can't ever succeed due to institutional racism is damaging.

Hispanic is also a loose and fuzzy category, so there might be some definitional games too.