From here (rural Midwest), outmigrants can go any direction but mire likely west, and the more successful ones end in big cities.

Well said.

Also I am not sure this study is representive of the white ethnic groups in the South because I grew up in area where the major ancestoral groups were French and Spanish. The city I live in today has a very large Greek population.

that’s the point. Southerners- and most importantly their leaders- have never really given a fig about education or improving its population and it has shown in their poverty and lack of development until ww2. Make no mistake, the stats for the South would be even worse if not for post WW2 military spending, which for many Southerners amounts to welfare/at risk youth programs, and the Sunbelt migration.

@Razib,

thanks for the link, can easily see that as a potential time consumer. I suspect already a problem with dealing with “Germaness” in the South, West and Midwest is that it is underrepresented. Many individuals of German descent probably identify as “American.”
This under reporting has already been recognized for the Scotch-Irish, but it could equally apply to other ethnic groups.

My understanding is that English ancestry is significantly underreported in census data. One theory is that it seems too neutral (the default American ethnicity, as it were) for many Americans, and that they prefer something more distinctive, with Irish being a very popular substitute.

But the ranters aren’t from the south and midwest. Tom Friedman is the poster boy for this – he’s sure America is doomed because kids in Singapore have higher scores.

Eastern Europeans, Scandinavians and Italians are all relatively recent arrivals in the Southeast. While there have been some concentration of these groups in the DC environs, WV coal country, or New Orleans for at least 100 years, I suspect the majority of people with these ancestries in the South are Sunbelt era products. Note how Scandinavians, Eastern Europeans and Germans (college educated for the latter) in the South outperformed their MW cousins. That’s probably the Sunbelt factor, as the Sunbelt migration selected for upper middle class and management types. The Italian stats, however, might discredit my observation. I’m not sure if there were enough pre-Sunbelt Italian Southerners to pull the stats down, as we see with the British and Irish.

Impossible to see, I guess, but would be interesting to see a break-down of “Irish” and “German” on religious lines. Taking into account economic class, I suspect that Catholic Irish would consistently outperform Protestant Irish everywhere but the NE. The same holds true for Germans. Once again factoring for class, Midwestern Catholic Germans would probably consistently outperform Midwestern Protestant Germans, particularly those Protestants with ancestries going back to the 18th-century German immigrants.

Now come on, John, you know which particular schools they’re talking about. And of course there’s no one to defend them – I have never heard an official in the Northeast publicly brag “Hey – our African-American students outperform their African-American students by a wide margin – we’re doing great!”

On the contrary, the officials publicly flagellate themselves over their terrible performance because there’s an “urban/suburban” gap (which happens always to work out to ~1 s.d. when you look at it). The “ranters” on this issue come from all over. It’s just that Republican ranters pick on teachers’ unions while Democrat ranters pick on the alleged poor quality of the teachers themselves. And the proposed solutions are similarly predictable: Republicans – We spend too much money!; Democrats – We don’t spend enough! But no one ever says – You know, we’re actually doing pretty good!

The interior populations which outscore one of the coasts are, in the South, Eastern Europeans without college and college-educated Germans, and in the Midwest, college-educated Irish, Italians, and British.

College and non-college British, Scandinavians and Germans score worst in their areas of greatest concentration (S and MW), as do college-educated Italians in the E. Seemingly migrant populations are generally superior to stay-at-home salt-of-the-earth populations. Germans, Scandinavians, and E Europeans in the South are tiny minorities, though.

I have seen indications that white americans due to tend to cluster into a northern european and southern european groups but I think its pretty questionable how informative of ancestry the ethnic identities of british, vs german vs, scandinavian are for americans.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2730349/?tool=pubmed