Consider Reardon, Kalogrides & Shores (2019). They found that even in districts where lower-performing groups had higher SES than Whites, they still tended to perform worse.
In this picture, 79% of the mean Black-White gap is independent of SES. At the metro level, 62% was.
It is a pernicious myth that test scores and achievement gaps are mere reflections of geography and that geography plays a major causal role in test scores.
The truth is that their association primarily reflects selection.
I have just put out an article dealing with numerous misconceptions about this topic, and a complete explanation of why autism diagnoses have become more common.
It starts with acknowledging that more kids are diagnosed than in the past:
But this is misleading for a few reasons.
One has to do with how this data was sourced. We didn't have a DSM with autism in it before 1980, so all the oldest people in this cohort were diagnosed as adults.
Adults are underdiagnosed. Go out of your way to diagnose? Same rates.
So something is off about this graph.
A major issue is that the older diagnoses here were done under a more arbitrary criteria: Autism has only been a described thing since Kanner's studies in 1943 and mass diagnosis kicked off in 1980.
In 2016, researchers found that the minority-White wage gap was overestimated by about 10% because, at work, non-Whites tended to partake in more leisure, waiting around, etc.
They delayed releasing the study out of fear Trump would "use it as a propaganda piece."
They explicitly admitted that they let their personal politics get in the way of releasing a study with contentious but correct findings.
That doesn't inspire trust, but at the same time, given the topic, it might!
This isn't the worst example of scientists hurting the public for political reasons.
More infamously, this guy stopped the release of the COVID vaccines to prevent Trump from winning re-election in 2020, killing tens of thousands in the process.
If you want to "fix" this situation within reason, you need to cut funding.
Doing that has disproportionately negative impacts for the educations of people from socioeconomically worse off backgrounds. Or in other words, it hurts upward educational mobility for the poor.
Or, you could provide this presidential administration with a gift:
Centralize the universities and have the government more directly control all the funding. Make them "free".
This is far more likely than alternatives like 'Just give universities infinite money', but still bad
Compared to twenty years ago, kids are eating some types of ultraprocessed foods more and some types lessđź§µ
For example, one thing there's proportionally less of is sugar-sweetened beverage consumption. Meanwhile, there's relatively greater sweet snack consumption.
Overall, the ultraprocessed food (UPF) consumption share is up across young ages to similar degrees.
The increase is definitely there, but it isn't dramatic. For example, going from 61% to 67.5% is an 11% increase in twenty years.
The increase in consumption is not differentiated by the sex of children.
In other words, boys and girls are both eating a bit more ultraprocessed food.