Texas and Massachusetts

I'm still processing what I think about this, but here's a few facts that are borne out by the numbers (based, arbitrarily, on the 2009 8th grade math scores, because that's what I clicked first):

1. Texas and Massachusetts are tied for best education of Black students
2. Massachusetts is 1st, and Texas 4th, for best education of White students.
3. White students in West Virginia (worst outcomes) do almost exactly as well as Black students in Texas and Massachusetts. 

I'm not sure how to reconcile this with my subjective experience of Texas as a miserable place, and Massachusetts as my civilized home.  Perhaps I'm just a classist snob.  Maybe rednecks just rub me the wrong way. Either way, Texas, the tight-fisted conservative paradise, does a better job teaching math to its black (and white) children than just about any other state in the country, and that's a fact that seriously challenges my worldview. 

At minimum, I'm going to stop blindly arguing that education is a problem that we can solve by throwing money at.