Minority Students Don't Perform Well in Progressive Towns: Berkeley, Calif., Chapel Hill, N.C., Evanston, Ill., Asheville, N.C., Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Ga., and University City, Mo.,

Steve Sailer reports:

Ironically, Harris’ old Berkeley school district has today, despite its high level of integration, the worst test-score racial gap in the United States, with its median black student testing at only the fifth percentile of its white students.

As I pointed out in my 2016 Taki’s column “Crevasses in the Classroom,” a vast database assembled by Sean Reardon of Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis demonstrates that the biggest racial divides in school achievement are found in highly liberal districts. By Reardon’s measure, the school districts with the biggest white-black gaps in test scores are: Berkeley, Calif., Chapel Hill, N.C., Evanston, Ill., Asheville, N.C., Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Ga., and University City, Mo., all intensely Democratic.

In Berkeley, which voted for Hillary 90–3 over Trump, the average white public school sixth grader scores at a grade equivalent of 8.3, or 30 percent of his way through ninth grade. That’s 2.8 grade levels above the national average for sixth graders of all races of 5.5.

In the Stanford database, the national average sixth grader represents grade level 5.5: i.e., this typical student starts sixth grade at grade level 5.0 and ends sixth grade at 6.0, so on average while in sixth grade he is at 5.5.

Reardon’s new 2019 paper doesn’t appear to spell out the national averages by race anywhere, but I estimate from his data that the average Asian sixth grader in the U.S. scores at 7.1 grade level or +1.6 school years better than the national average of 5.5.

Nationally, whites average 6.3 grade levels or +0.8 years above the national average, Hispanics 4.5 or –1.0 years, and blacks 4.1 or –1.4 grade levels worse than the typical student.

Nationally, the white-black gap in sixth grade is 2.2 years (and the less often discussed Asian-black gap is 3.0 years). The typical white sixth grader has a knowledge level equivalent to a nationally average seventh grader, while the typical black is at the level of an average fifth grader.

An article well worth your time.