Originally posted by: Charles Higgins
Where's the source for your stats? Did school lockdowns due to the pandemic have any influence on these test scores? Lots of kids weren't learning anything at all when schools were closed... which just might have influenced test results. Did the actions / positions of the national teachers unions during the pandemic have anything to do with test scores? Do you have census data to back your suggestion of red state population decline..or drooler centralization for that matter? I assume the smart parents from your labeled shitkicker states took their smart kids with them when they moved? Where'd they move to? Clarify your correlation coefficient for that, or present the source data info.
According to this nonpartisan ( apparently) source
- Idaho, Utah, Montana, Arizona, and South Carolina (in order) had the greatest state population increases during 2020 to 2021 (compiled in 2022). Four of those are red states ( and Trump won those electorally)..Arizona flipped blue during the time frame (Biden won). Texas and Florida ranked 7th and 8th, respectively, for state population increase from this data( Trump of course won those). There are a plethora of alternate reasons why the populations of these states increased in recent years beyond student standardized test scores. Those are for incessant future argumentative threads, though.
- The five US states with the largest population declines from this same time frame and data source were New York, Illinois, Hawaii, California, and Louisiana (in descending order). Trump lost all of those states except Louisiana. I guess, from your inferences, that a majority of the smarter parents and kids stayed in all those states. Again, there are many alternate reasons why red vs blue state population numbers increase or decrease..beyond student test scores. That's fodder for future disagreements.
Show us the money..the source for your data.
I no longer post links, because literally anything under the sun can be "proved" by some internet "source." I'm sure I could find a link to a "source" "proving" that the moon is made of tofu. The inevitable result, of course, is that the conservitard goobers say that I can't "prove" my contentions--but I don't care, since they always, reflexively and stupidly, say that anyway; and I don't give a flying fuck what stupid Tommie-poo, Boilerboob, Millerscum, etc. think. You, though, despite your views, do in fact have a functioning brain, so you deserve an answer.
My sources include the various entities that administer standardized tests, including Scholastic Testing Service, various scholarly articles and published papers (many of which I can't link to BTW; I subscribe to a paid service that allows me to access that stuff), estimates of state populations (many of which are of questionable accuracy, of course), and a few polls administered to people with school-age kids who have moved to and from various areas (I wish there were more than just a few of those). The US Census data is of only limited use for this question, given that its most recent factual data (as in, not estimates) is from 2020.
As far as the effect of people moving, there has been a lot of crowing (here and elsewhere) about how people are "flooding" into places like Florida and Texas and "fleeing" California and New York. The conservitards say that it's because people don't like liberal politics and policies. The polls, however, ALL say that the primary reason given is cost of living. It makes sense--liberal areas are more desirable than conservative areas, and the more desirable an area, the higher the cost of living.
But if the people who CAN afford to stay in these desirable areas, because they have in-demand skills and earn good incomes, stay, while those who don't have the skills to earn enough to remain, leave, does that lead to a dumbing-down of those less desirable areas--even if they do increase in overall population? My preliminary research says it does.
And one factor that I've included, with which you may vehemently disagree, is that Trumpers are usually less intelligent than non-Trumpers (which includes, of course, conservatives who didn't vote for him). This fact has, as it stands, been very well documented--college-educated people generally didn't vote for Trump, and uneducated people did. I mentioned the .69 correlation between education levels of parents and the academic performance of their children, which comes from a number of studies dating from 2001-2010 conducted in the US and Canada. So the Trumpiness of a state, as it turns out, is a pretty good indicator of the intelligence level of its inhabitants--and thus, the academic (test) performance of its children.
Because this postulate is based on what's called a "correlation chain," if I were writing this up in a scholarly article, I would caution that the effect, which real and tangible, may be fairly weak because of confounding variables. However, on an internet forum where a gang of idiots call me a liar literally no matter what I say--if I said that the Earth revolves around the sun, Millerscum would scream at me and call me a liar and stupid Tommie-poo would link to a statistic "proving" that it doesn't--I don't bother.
But if you wish to discuss this topic further, I welcome that. To answer a couple of your specific questions, there's not a lot of good data out there, but what there is suggests that the pandemic affected test scores (negatively), but how MUCH depended on the dilgence and effectiveness of home schooling, which in turn depended on the education levels of parents (which makes sense, intuitively). The actions of teachers' unions had little effect, because of their fairly short duration and relative rarity.
As far as the phenomenon of drooler centralization (I like that term; I think I'll use it) goes, certainly if it's a reality, it would result in a goober state test score decline greater than that of comparable non-goober states. The real bitch here, of course, is controlling for the 500 other variables. "Ceteris paribus" is what makes every PhD dissertation 200 pages long :)
I think we'll see, in the future, a LOT more manifestations of the drooler centralization phenomenon in addition to election results and test scores. Rarely in American history, though, has there been such a strong correlation between the intelligence levels of voters and who they vote for as when the Orange Turd ran for orifice. And test scores are going to have to be a better indicator of actual academic performance than they are now (now, they're good but not great, but it's all we have).
