New York Times hires unapologetic racist writer

[SlackerInc]

So according to Dibble, I’m willing to forthrightly state controversial, even taboo, positions on highly charged topics—but I’ve spent years falsely declaring that I consider Obama the best president in American history to conceal the fact that I actually hate him? Ask yourself how this makes any sense whatsoever.

@Evil_Economist

Oh right, your fragile little “intellect” can’t handle acknowledging error, so you’re incapable of learning.

Ha! This is rich. The irony is strong with this one. But hey, you’re back to being entertaining at least!

@Evil_Economist

P.s. For anyone who cares, here’s the post where I showed SlackerInc he was wrong:

Sigh. Now you’re forcing me to go into the weeds of that whole back-and-forth in that thread, thanks to your out-of-context bullshit.

So here’s what actually happened, in as condensed a form as I can manage for a debate that played out over many posts:

@SlackerInc

Yes, black schoolchildren have significantly more money spent on their education than do white children in the same district. This is exactly the opposite of the situation before Brown.

@Evil_Economist

I simply don’t believe this.

@SlackerInc

Are There Too Many or Too Few Black and Latino Children in Special-Education Classes? - The Atlantic

Six million disabled children in the U.S. receive special education. However, African American children do so at a much higher rate—1.4 times that of white children.

Special Education | NEA

The current average per student cost is $7,552 and the average cost per special education student is an additional $9,369 per student, or $16,921.

Evil or not, you’re not much of an economist if you still disbelieve it after seeing this evidence.

Next, EE quoted something without linking to the source or even naming it, one of his favorite tricks (this becomes relevant later in the exchange):

@Evil_Economist

Spatig-Amerikaner found that public schools spend, on average, $334 more on white students than on nonwhite students. That per-pupil spending disparity, when compared between schools that are mostly white and those that are comprised mostly of nonwhite students, is even more stark. In schools where 90 percent or more of students were white, per-pupil spending was $733 more than in schools where more than 90 percent of students were nonwhite. Roughly one-third of the students who are represented in the national data set attend such racially segregated schools, according to the report.

@SlackerInc

Evil, I thought it was fishy that you posted an excerpt without a link to look it up, so I Googled. Center for American Progress, right? You left out (or more charitably, didn’t see) this part:

The purpose of this data collection was to analyze state and local spending on general education in districts receiving Title I funds. This means that some big cat- egories of spending were excluded, among them all federal dollars, expenditures on special education, adult education, school nutrition programs, summer school, preschool, and employee benefits (other than salaries).

:dubious: Except for those things, eh? What a joke. You should be embarrassed for offering this up as supposed evidence of your position. Pfffft.

Then EE started getting all weaselly with goalpost-moving, and Kimstu followed suit (that was what I referenced upthread):

@Evil_Economist

I asked you a question–is it your claim that black schoolchildren receive less funding than *equivalent *white schoolchildren (on a district-by-district basis)?

(Suddenly “equivalent” is in there, despite my never having referenced anything like this. Just all black students’ per capita funding vs. that for white students in the same district.)

@Kimstu

No. As EE’s simplified example makes clear, the problem is that it’s possible for all black kids to be underfunded relative to white kids with the same education status, even the ones who aren’t special-needs.

This is because the proportion of special-needs to mainstream students isn’t the same in both populations. Your insistence on averaging-out the special-needs and mainstream groups obscures that fact.

Suppose you have a group of, say, ten dogs and five cows, and you feed them a healthy diet of, say two pounds of dog food per dog and 30 pounds of fodder per cow, for a total of 170 pounds of assorted foodstuffs per day.

And you have another group of, say, five dogs and ten cows, which you feed at the much less nutritious rate of one pound of dog food or 20 pounds of fodder per animal respectively, which would be a total of 205 pounds per day.

The average weight of food for each animal in the second group would be larger than that for each animal in the first group, but each animal in the second group would still be seriously underfed.

I was never able to get Kimstu (or EE for that matter) to see how beside the point this argument is—since I never claimed “low IQ black students get more funding than low IQ white students”, only that black students got more funding than white students, mainly because so many more of the former have IQs low enough to qualify for special education funding.

Then later, after all of this (I left out quite a few posts, but this provides the gist), EE posted the numbers in that post he quoted here as his supposedly “proving me wrong”. I noted that once again he was putting up unsourced data, and the last time he did that I was able to track it down and find that there were a ridiculous number of caveats he hadn’t disclosed. So I declared I wasn’t even going to address his new numbers unless he provided a cite for them. As far as I can tell, he never did, and that was the end of the debate—until he had the chutzpah in this thread to claim that his never-sourced post was his coup de grace! Pfffft.