Undead Astronauts

1. Both Newsweek and USNews released their annual best high school lists. Grissom ranks 623 and 804 respectively. Unfortunately, USNews this year failed to provide the same sorting features they did last year, so you can’t find a list of schools with high minority enrollment unless you make it yourself. Also unfortunately, their methodology rewards high non-Asian minority representation unlike Newsweek which doesn’t look at race and is therefore more strictly meritocratic. Newsweek’s weakness is that they only looked at a fraction of the schools that USNews did – something like 2000 compared to 22,000.

2. More PISA analysis that delves into how much immigrant populations affect PISA scores and national IQ. For most nations, the effect is unfortunately negative. Noticeable exceptions are some middle eastern nations like Qatar and Dubai where the immigrants far outscore the natives. The differences are so stark that I wonder if they’ll soon develop market dominant minorities along with all its consequences. 2nd generation scores also differ, and show that some countries with elitist high IQ immigration laws like Singapore and Australia have kids that get better scores than natives. Singapore’s results are interesting in particular because of Lee Kuan Yew’s opinions on race realism and the fact that he tailored his immigration policies in part based on those beliefs.

3. This graphic makes me thirsty. Head here for the math.

US News has put out a ranking of the top 100 public high schools in the US for 2011. Conveniently they let you see the schools with high Asian American percentages. 4 of the top 5, and 6 of the top 10 schools have high Asian American attendance (>20%). 40 schools with a high Asian population are on the list. Only 2 are ranked 90 or lower. Well no surprise there. Tim at 8asians also points out that 10 of those 100 schools are in San Francisco. I counted at least 21 in NYC metro area. Not all of those schools are Asian dominated of course, but a significant fraction of them are.

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the list of top US high schools is out again (this is newsweek’s list). see where your school ranks. interesting to see birmingham having the number 2 ranked high school.

see here for last year’s list (this is USNews’ list).

check to see if your old high school is on the list of best high schools in the US.

a funny thing tho. 8asians mentioned that the #1 high school thomas jefferson sci/tech has only 4.9% minority enrollment in their detailed stats. orly!? is that why below that stat, where it shows racial breakdown, u see asians comprise 40.2%? whitney, the #3 ranking school shows 11.5% minorities but has 84.9% asian population. they should really rename that stat to non-asian minority (nam) to clear the confusion no? wiki shows the asian pop to be 4.4% of the US total, so some ppl might be confused about just when exactly to use the word “minority.” do we only apply the minority label to traditionally low academic achieving minorities? really?

Newsweek has come out w/ their yearly ranking of public high schools. some birmingham hs comes in 3rd surprisingly. auburn hs comes in the 300-400 area, and grissom ranks 927 this year. this is lower than grissom has ranked in the past, but every hs on the list ranks w/i the top 6% of the nation.

PS: i took a look at the birmingham school and apparently in 2008, they were considered too elite for the list. that put it in the category of stuyvesant, bronx science, thomas jefferson sci/tech. not sure why they’re back on the list this year.