Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

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A Hacker News participant who kindly checked the facts in another recent thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3319177

was able to verify what I had read in other official sources on international testing programs, namely that United States students underperform (because their schools underperform) on an ethnicity-matched basis. One detailed report on the issue that I think you will find to be interesting reading is the Education Next report on mathematics learning opportunities for top mathematics students in the United States,

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

which shows that United States students miss opportunities in school to develop their abilities to the fullest. A look at the content of mathematics textbooks in different countries, and specialized studies on differences in teaching practices

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

in different countries have helped me understand the differences I frequently observe between people of the same ethnicity who received their primary and secondary education in different countries.

You overstate your case again. US students of Asian origin slightly underperform Asia in math (but outperform all non-Asian nations). Also, US students of European origin outperform all but 6 countries with similar demographics.

The other participant did not verify that it was caused by school underperformance, merely that I misread the numbers. The correction puts Asian Americans at #5 in the world rather than #4. It does not change the fact that Asian Americans are still 32 points higher than the first non-Asian nation (Hungarians). Nor does it change the fact that European Americans are #1 among European nations + Anglosphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...

Incidentally, any claims one makes to the inherent superiority of Asian education systems must be limited to math and science. Asian Americans are #1 in combined literacy (#2 if you consider Shanghai as a separate group), and European Americans are #2 among primarily European-descended nations.

(See tables R1 and R3. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004_1.pdf )

(As before, I'm only posting this so others are not misled by tokenadult's logical fallacies and intellectual dishonesty.)

Have these ethnicity-based differences within the US been constant over time?

I appreciate your research here, but I hope HNers don't downvote rubashov's unsourced but more-or-less true statement because you've thrown up some links to articles.

You point to the fact that Asian Americans underperform most all east-Asian countries. This is certainly interesting, but it hardly shows that the US's underachievement isn't mostly explained by ethnic make up. In particular, one would expect that a hypothetically strong group to perform worse when educated in a diverse system than when that group is educated in a system designed just for it.

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