Anyone who has read all my posts on Washpost opinion gal Jennifer Rubin would probably tell me to shut the fuck up. But this one’s different, because I agree with Jennie yet dispute her tactics.
Jennie’s post of contention, “Graham sums up how stupid the GOP has become”, is an extended poke at South Carolina mushmouth/loudmouth Lindsey Graham, who, Jennie points out, once ridiculed Donald Trump but now seems determined to be recognized as the president’s biggest and bestest bitch. The new Lindsey, Jennie (correctly) says, “perfectly typifies the horrible habits of the Trumpized GOP — playing to low-information voters’ ignorance, ignoring real problems in favor of hyperventilating over phony ones, infatuation with authoritarianism and deep cynicism.”
Okay, that’s 100% true, but a few column inches later, Jennie goes off the rails, pissed, justifiably, that Graham wants the president to take money allocated to be spent on such projects as a middle school (for children of military personnel) in Kentucky for his false border emergency, “explaining” that “I would say it’s better for the middle-school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border.”
“[T]est scores for kids in rural, red states like Kentucky are atrocious,” wails born in Pennsylvania raised in California Jennie, sounding very much like the provincial bi-coaster she is. “Kentucky routinely ranks near the bottom in educational attainment.” Jennie “proves” her first statement by quoting a state testing official moaning over scores on Kentucky’s own state tests, while she buttresses the second to a link that, if you search long enough, ranks states by percentages of residents according to educational attainment.
First of all, if you look at national testing scores, that is to say, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or “NAEP”, on whose behalf I labored for almost 20 years, you’ll find, as of 2017, that in reading and mathematics for grades 4 and 8, Kentucky ranked at the national average for students at or above NAEP's standard for "Proficient"1 in three out of four cases (below average for grade 8 mathematics), while cough, cough California was below the national average in all four instances. In terms of educational attainment, Kentucky has a lower percentage of residents without a high school diploma than California, though, surprise, surprise, also a lower percentage of those with advanced degrees.
When people like Jennie, and their name is legion, bewail the “atrocious” scores of kids today, what they mean is “I never met a fourth-grader as smart as I am,” which is a statement that even I could make. Wailin’ Jennie and her ilk expect everyone to be like them, though, if they bother to remember, back in high school there was no one like them, no one else so compulsively competitive, so pumped over Moby Dick2 or Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.
Afterwords
California’s poor performance is largely a function of its massive Hispanic population. Variations in test scores among states reflect both SES (socio-economic status) and the size of low-scoring racial/ethnic populations, i.e, black and Hispanic. States that are low income, and/or have large black or Hispanic populations will tend to have lower test scores. Kentucky has few blacks or Hispanics, but ranks 46th in income, which suggests that Kentucky’s educational performance could easily be higher than would be expected, considering its demographic makeup, rather than “atrocious”.
1. NAEP's "Governing Board", which sets NAEP's proficiency standards, says that every student should reach them. In fact, this is setting the bar far too high. The twelfth-grade standards "translate" to "capable of successfully completing a four-year college curriculum without remedial instruction." It is silly to expect half the student population to meet this standard, let alone the entire population.
2. When I was in high school I thought Moby was the greatest book ever written. All my friends thought it was the dumbest.
