Is it better for a state to have 15% of white and 15% of black citizens have a college degree or for 28% of white and 25% of black citizens to have one? If both groups average 1000 on the SAT, is that better than 1200 and 1150? Is it better for the median incomes to be $35000 for both or $45000 and $43000? To have a 90% high school graduation rate or a 98% and 96% rate?
Putting that in the form of a question detracts from the message without protecting you from harsh judgement. Just say it. Equalizing people to a lowest common denominator is no good for anyone.
It's the absurd premise of No Child Left Behind, which sounds nice but logically implies that no child gets ahead.
That's the thing. You and I seem to agree that the answers above are that the second cases are all better, possibly obviously better. If you choose different figures in the questions, I can find cases that would be concerning to me, even if everyone appears mathematically better off. (If the median incomes were $500,000 and $45,000 for example.)
Even with the figures I chose, I bet there are people who would wish for them to be "more equal" even at the expense of lower numbers for both groups.
I think that makes it a genuine question, even though the answer is fairly obvious to me at those levels.
I can only answer for Texas. Texas is stereotyped as racist and uneducated, but that only seems true when you don't compare across the same demographics. For high school diplomas and college degrees, if you compare whites to whites, blacks to blacks, Asians to Asians, Texas does very well [1]. The only ethnicity that this is not true for is Hispanics, but that is because Texas has a high proportion of non-English speaking Hispanics. If you were to break down the stats by English-speaking vs not, you would likely see Texas doing well by that metric as well.
Texas is very free in terms of choice. It's trivial to home-school. College admissions are very open to all races. If you're in the top 10% of your high school class, you automatically qualify for state universities, regardless of whether your school was lily white or deep in the hood. The Hazelwood Act provides 150 free credit-hours to military veterans and to a lesser extent to their spouses and children. In my meth-infested neck of the woods, the military is a common way for poor people to obtain job skills and/or a college education.
>Share of Adults with at Least a Bachelor’s Degree: Double Weight (~36.36 Points)
that is the biggest contributor - so either they strongly and successfully promote African-American college education or there aren't much whites with college degrees.
Equality can have different shapes and different ways of achieving it. I for example come from the USSR where majority of the people enjoyed almost total economical equality ... of having almost nothing.
Explanation: Democrat-associated states tend to have (old, famous, elite, and large) schools with strong racist traditions and legacy admission is a reality.
Is it better for a state to have 15% of white and 15% of black citizens have a college degree or for 28% of white and 25% of black citizens to have one? If both groups average 1000 on the SAT, is that better than 1200 and 1150? Is it better for the median incomes to be $35000 for both or $45000 and $43000? To have a 90% high school graduation rate or a 98% and 96% rate?