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Your hypothesis is that California ranks poorly on science because they have more blacks than other states. Virginia is ranked #10 and has 40% proficient in sc
by droithomme 15y ago
Your hypothesis is that California ranks poorly on science because they have more blacks than other states.
Virginia is ranked #10 and has 40% proficient in science.
California is ranked #47 and has 22% proficient in science.
Virginia has 19.4% black population. (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/51000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/51000.html)
California has 6.2% black population. (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html)
Since Virginia has almost twice the rate of science proficiency as California does, and Virginia also has three times as many blacks by percentage of population as California, it would seem that the hypothesis that California ranks poorly on science because they have more blacks than other states is not correct.
- jhspaybar 15y agoThanks for these statistics, I think the issue is pretty clearly "urban" as even the article points out. As other commenters have said it has more to do with poverty than race, it's just that blacks are generally heavily concentrated in poor communities. It may have nothing to do with race outside of the correlation of race to income levels in many communities, but the fact remains we are failing our black populations.
- Jach 15y agoOn the other hand, California has about 1.5 times as many total blacks as Virginia. One might wonder whether there's a critical threshold X that is independent of the population proportion. Basically, I don't think these figures are sufficient to conclude either way.