Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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Once you control for wealth a lot of the gap disappears.

I haven't looked at it extensively, but I don't believe this is true.

This study shows that SES (Socio Economic Status) doesn't explain much of the gap.

http://www.umich.edu/~rdytolrn/pathwaysconference/presentati...

This study (sorry, can't find a non-paywall version) shows that even holding income constant, blacks do worse than whites at the college level. In particular, low income whites perform as well as high income blacks.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2963200

Also, even if you could explain the Black/white income gap via wealth, racism or other environmental factors, how would you explain the White/Asian gap?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Personal_income_race.png

And how would you explain that in spite of wildly different environmental factors (compare Singapore to Texas), there is a relatively small gap between Asian Americans and Asians? And similarly, there is only a small gap between white Americans and white Europeans?

(By the way, I'm not trying to claim there are no other factors at play. I'm just pointing out that race does seem to be a biggie.)

The study you note focuses on income. There's another branch of research that focuses on wealth that shows that wealth is more important than income when it comes to things like college attendance.

See: http://collegepuzzle.stanford.edu/?p=1590

"“The Differential Impact of Wealth vs. Income in the College-Going Process” finds that wealth and income affect the college choice process differently, with wealth consistently being more significant in predicting who enrolls in college, and the type of college they attend – even after controlling for student differences in academic achievement, habitus, social capital, and cultural capital."

More research clearly needs to be done here, but from what I've seen its clear that wealth looks to dominate income.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there aren't other differences. In fact I suspect there are societal and cultural differences that will manifest in one way or another. If you spend a lot of time in Asian households in the US, you'll see they often resemble, culturally, canonical Asian homes more than "US" homes.

And there's data about the success of African immigrants to the US. Who often don't come wealthy (although some are), obviously are Black, but still do well. So there's clearly a culture issue here too, but I don't think we can really tease this apart without more data.

You could be right about wealth, though I'd be surprised - it would be really weird if wealth effects in the US caused Asian Americans to perform almost exactly as well in school as Asians, and white Americans to perform almost exactly as well as white Europeans.

But this doesn't change my original point - US schools do only slightly worse than Singaporean schools at educating people with an Asian-style home environment, Asian genes, or whatever else being Asian is a proxy for. And cultural factors in black America may cause black Americans to perform worse than whites and African immigrants. Whatever the underlying factor is, it has nothing to do with the school system. That's the only point I'm trying to make.

Whatever the underlying factor is, it has nothing to do with the school system.

This cannot possibly be true. School system are artificial constructions created by men to serve men. They are not given laws of nature. The only thing we can tell from the above is that the current school system does not serve well black Americans. School system should adapt to whatever the "cultural factors" of the populace they serve.

Whether this should be through prolonging schooling hours; providing stronger and more persistent emphasis in personal hard work; correcting a harmful self-image; getting rid of institutional racism; using different instruction techniques; or any other method that may addressed the "underlying factor" can only be discovered through research, experimentation and a willingness to change and adapt.

It is easy to find examples of a schooling that adapts to the unique circumstances of some children, for example: intense language training for children from immigrant families, schools at hospitals or schools that follow a circus around the world (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/jan/26/schools.uk).

It may well be the case that one or both of US and Singaporean schools are worse at educating blacks/whites/hispanics than hypothetical school system you can dream up.

It is irrelevant when considering the question of whether Singaporean schools do a better job than US schools. For all we know, Singaporean schools might be worse than US schools - i.e., they could education Asians equally well, but blacks/whites/hispanics vastly worse [1]. But it wouldn't matter since Singapore doesn't have any blacks/whites/hispanics.

[1] You actually see this effect (Simpson's paradox) when comparing US states. Texas is better at educating blacks, whites and hispanics than Wisconsin, but appears worse when averaging over the entire population.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-ba...

I recall reading about a study that showed that self-image (gender and race) contributed to performance on a test.

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