Educational Performance and Masking Statistics

With Rick Perry announcing for President, expect to hear the following assertion: Texas public schools are under-performers.This is where statistics shapes the conclusions you draw. If you aggregate all student scores on the NAEP test, Texas seems to fall right around the national average. So, maybe your conclusion would be that Texas has no better than average schools?
But what if we break out the data by student ethnicity. Here it shows Texas performing much better than the national average within each ethnic group. The "average" performance is simply a function of the fact that 48% of the students in Texas are Hispanic.


2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress Average Scale Score

	National Average	Texas
4th Grade Math
White Students	248	254
Black Students	222	231
Hispanic Students	227	233
4th Grade Reading
White Students	229	232
Black Students	204	213
Hispanic Students	204	210
4th Grade Science
White Students	162	168
Black Students	127	139
Hispanic Students	130	138
8th Grade Math
White Students	294	301
Black Students	260	272
Hispanic Students	260	277
8th Grade Reading
White Students	271	273
Black Students	245	249
Hispanic Students	248	251
8th Grade Science
White Students	161	167
Black Students	125	133
Hispanic Students	131	141

Thanks to Iowahawk for the analysis