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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

An important fact to keep in mind whenever PISA scores come up is that the U.S. has far more children in poverty than pretty much every western nation you'd compare it to: http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/CO2_2_ChildPoverty_Jan2014.pdf (over 20%, versus under 5% for Finland or under 10% for Germany). If we adjusted PISA scores to reflect those demographics, the U.S. would come out about the same as France, Germany, or the U.K., though still a step behind Finland: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin....

Also:

> Unsurprisingly we found that culture, values and attitudes matter a great deal.

Ultimately, if that's the case, there is very little hope for improving American education. It's almost impossible to force cultural change on a country.

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> It's almost impossible to force cultural change on a country.

A few decades ago, a majority of Americans didn't support gay marriage. Now it has majority support, and is legal in every state. This didn't happen by accident either. A lot of groups were involved in promoting gay rights and funding legal battles across the country. This isn't the first time this happened either: women's rights, civil rights, etc. Even today, organized groups are winning hearts and minds in the fight for criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization. So it's very possible to instigate cultural change (perhaps force is a strong word). It just takes a long time.

It's probably easier to get a person to change their opinion on what someone else can do than to get them to change their own behavior.

This is a great example. Cultural change happens faster than most people imagine. Look at slavery, an institution that had existed for a long, long time. Look at atheism. Women's right to vote. All these things flipped from everyone being one way to another in a brief time (ok slavery is a bit complicated, having evolved differently in the US and UK).

Maybe more relevant. We got rid of de jure segregation in the 1950's, but today today only 23% of black children in the south go to a school that is majority white. And nationwide, 40% of black children go to a school that is over 90% minority. The typical black child goes to a school where 60% or his classmates are low income. And those numbers are up substantially in the last 20 years. Its been really hard to change the culture of segregation with top-down directives.

There are other factors which explain PISA score gaps quite nicely, and don't run into quite so many measurement issues as poverty (e.g., how does "poverty" in the US compare to "middle class" in Bulgaria):

http://super-economy.blogspot.in/2010/12/amazing-truth-about...

http://super-economy.blogspot.in/2011/01/how-well-do-above-a...

These other factors also address the issue raised in rbehrends' comment.

Umm, the methodology appears to be rather unsound.

> For all countries except the U.S. all first and second generation immigrant scores are excluded.

> For the U.S, Asians, Latin speakers, and all groups other than non-Hispanic whites are excluded. European immigrants are included.

This is really an apples vs. oranges comparison. For starters, some countries (such as Australia and Canada) have immigration policies that favor high-skilled immigrants, therefore such an adjustment hurts them (relatively speaking); then the author uses a special rule for the US that just happens to exclude poor minorities.

Given the data available, how would you slice it better? Do you believe the result would change significantly if a better slicing were done?

I wouldn't. Sometimes you simply can't draw conclusions (one way or the other) from the available data.

Looking at the article again, I'm also concerned that the author seems to have an agenda and somehow perceives this as a US vs. Europe issue; frankly, it is not. There are, as I noted, wealthy European countries (Sweden, Norway) that do worse than the US.

Also, at least for math, you don't really need to look that hard for explanations. US high school math is a disaster area; it is no secret that there's too much focus on teaching rote procedures [1], which will hurt you on PISA (which is more about figuring out the solutions to problems) and that by the end of 12th grade, the average American student will lag 1-2 years behind many other developed countries. Note that this problem extends even to the first years of college.

[1] Not really a secret, see (for example) "The Teaching GAP" by Stigler and Hiebert, which analyzed video recordings that were taken as part of the TIMSS 1998.

[2] http://parentsacrossamerica.org/james-milgram-on-the-new-cor...

I wouldn't. Sometimes you simply can't draw conclusions (one way or the other) from the available data.

Then strangely, you do exactly that two paragraphs later:

So making a crude attempt to control for demographics is invalid, and you can't draw conclusions from the data. Yet if you make no attempt to control demographics, it's somehow valid? Huh?

Also, your theory that teaching rote procedures causes poor performance is already refuted by Sanandaji's article. It works just fine for Asian Americans, who perform just as well as wealthy Asians in Asia. Doesn't that piece of data contradict your theory?

> Then strangely, you do exactly that two paragraphs later:

No. I'm drawing conclusions from different things, such as curriculum content, plus the huge body of existing research on teaching math in the US [1].

My larger point is that it's pointless to treat statistics as a black box and try and make conjectures (or worse, massage the data to fit your conjectures), when there are known documented deficiencies.

> Also, your theory that teaching rote procedures causes poor performance is already refuted by Sanandaji's article. It works just fine for Asian Americans, who perform just as well as wealthy Asians in Asia. Doesn't that piece of data contradict your theory?

No. First, it merely shows that when you select the highest performing group, you'll get a higher than average performance. The thing is, the same happens elsewhere, too. For example, the best-performing cantons in Switzerland (a country that is as ethnically diverse as the US [2]) had an average PISA score in math of around 560 in 2009, when the average was 531.

PISA scores are spread out over a pretty wide range. Poor teaching does not make you unable to perform at high levels, it merely handicaps you. Other factors can compensate for it, such as the known higher work ethic of Asian Americans and cultural valuation of intelligence and cognitive skills [3].

Second, he uses a composite score, while I'm specifically talking about math, where the US score is really bad (as opposed to, say, reading).

[1] To get started, look at what @tokenadult has written on this, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5054856 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8825364

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8416.full.pdf

If it's a disaster, why does the same curriculum work well for Asian Americans (raising their scores to east Asian levels), but badly for white Americans?

First, it merely shows that when you select the highest performing group, you'll get a higher than average performance.

Ok. What causes the variance between high and low performing groups? Since the school system seems the same, it doesn't seem to be educational techniques.

Other factors can compensate for it, such as the known higher work ethic of Asian Americans and cultural valuation of intelligence and cognitive skills

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be more or less agreeing with me here. Some trait which is very common among Asians appears to be the primary driver of test score deltas.

While socio-economic status is an important predictor for student performance within the same country, it does not explain why some poor countries such as Poland and Estonia can outperform the US, while rich countries with very low inequality (such as Sweden and Norway) perform even worse.

"Socialism" might be a really good explanation for both Poland/Estonia and Sweden/Norway.

(It takes some background knowledge to unpack but I really do believe it is the core reason. Different kinds of Socialism, though.)

the U.S. has far more children in poverty than pretty much every western nation you'd compare it to

That really depends on definitions of "poverty:" http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/how... . Using consistent definitions often deflates the "poverty" rate to under 5%.

One way to increase real income (which poverty often doesn't consider) involves loosening land-use controls in high-income urban areas: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/06/thomas-p... , but such proposals are rarely considered in discussions of poverty / income / etc.

OECD uses a consistent definition of poverty across countries: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/factbook-2010-en/11/02/02... (it's defined as % of population below half the median income).

... and that sort of definition is precisely the problem Cowen's post alludes to: defining "poverty" as a percentage of income means that poverty can never be alleviated and will always be with us, and even if real incomes in a given area double, the "poverty" rate will remain.

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