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Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

Is there any data to back up your claim that immigrant kids are worse at math in US schools?

It doesn't match my personal experience. It is _well known_ in Europe that the American K-12 education system is weak.

Anecdata: All the exchange students from my middle- and high-school (in a third world country in Europe) came back saying they already knew the math that was being taught in the US school.

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Well known and incorrect. If you control PISA scores for demographics, the American education system is fine to great. You can see American Whites outperform most other countries. American Black's outperform parts of Europe, including Greece.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Why would we control PISA scores for US demographics in the first place? Why are the 1st and 2nd generation immigrants removed?

The education system is the same for all the kids, unless US Whites are using a different curriculum from the other demographic groups.

"If we massage this data set the right way, we get the chart we want".

Conjecture, but it may be to focus on the native born population as a better metric for education quality since they have (presumably) been a product of that system for their entire life. Contrast that to a 1st gen immigrant who a major amount of time in a different country's system; testing them after a short stint in the US tells us much less about the US educational system. It's harder for me to think of a reason why 2nd gen should be removed, unless the assumption is the educational attainment/integration of 1st gen parents heavily biases the results of their kids. I don't know if all that holds up under scrutiny, though.

Also, because demographics aren't distributed evenly geographically, I think there is probably a case that the education system is different for different races (to the extent that racial geographic distribution is different).

2nd gen are removed so that there are fewer poor people with uneducated parents who can't help them at home because the school system is bad in the sample.

That's what I was alluding to, but it's unclear how sound of a methodology that is. It seems like a better approach would be to control for parent educational attainment directly, rather than use some imperfectly correlated metric like immigration status.

Yes I agree that might be better, although still not perfect because not all parents are equally involved.

> The education system is the same for all the kids

This is incorrect, certainly an ideal we'd all like but far from reality. The educational experiences and outcomes of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants can and often does differ significantly from native-born students. Seeing the difference in the data/scores should clue you into this and helps us understand the socioeconomic impact on student achievement that immigration has. Language is often a large factor where 1st and 2nd generation students may be speaking a different language at home than they are in school. The US has significantly more immigrants than other countries in the world which is why not controlling for it skews the data disproportionately.

> The US has significantly more immigrants than other countries in the world

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

If that table is to believed, the US is kind of middle of the pack if you sort by percentages, at 15%. It might even be middle of the pack for developed countries, too

As far as I can tell, that table conflates temporary workers with permanent immigration, so I'm not sure how useful it really is in this context.

I've counted OECD countries[1] (roughly 40 developed countries), and the US is in 15th place, on par with Spain. Hardly worth writing home about :-)

[1] This is the fairest comparison because people immigrate to rich countries in general. The only poor countries with lots of immigrants are generally safe poor countries right next to war-torn countries, which get lots of refugees.

Its especially pertinent here that a lot of the countries that outperform the US have significantly higher percentages of immigrants, yet they don't seem to be failing them in the manner that the US education system is:

Switzerland: 30% Sweden: 20% Canada: 21% Germany, Austria etc.

Given how the US does schooling where zipcode matters as much as it does, something tells me you can get from A to B a lot quicker just by controlling for school district wealth or something

Why would we not? If I didn't control for demographics, I probably wouldn't have my kids in our local public schools (in the wealthiest county <? - Santa Clara> in the country) because the Great Schools ratings show only mid-pack achievement. If I do control for demographics, though, I see the white & Asian kids are doing fine and it's the rest who are struggling, primarily for a combination of socioeconomic & immigration reasons. Given this, I'm comfortable sending my kids to our neighborhood schools because I'm in the fortunate demographic where kids will do well no matter where you put them.

It's the same for any educational achievement measures, including PISA. Kids from households with two parents who are working professionals and college educated will do fine most of the time, and kids without those privileges will struggle most of the time.

Are you not concerned with the negative socialization?

Anecdote: I still have a chipped front tooth from “the other demographic” throwing a ball at my face in public high school PE.

Either you have a better sense of humor than I do, or that anecdote is especially not useful.

It kinda makes sense when looking at local schools to send your children to. It makes no sense when comparing countries in a major international study, that's just massaging data to make yourself look good

Every country has immigrants though, you can't just selectively remove them in one country and not the others, that is not an apples to apples comparison.

> Why would we not?

Because it's a random axis to split the data on and you only do it for the US, which makes zero sense to do when comparing entire countries.

What about Tunisian immigrants in France? Maybe they'd be at the very top? What about Whites in all countries? Maybe White kids across the globe are better than White kids in the US, which would put the US at the bottom?

We cannot conclude that "US education is amongst the top in the world" from the chart you presented.

Actually, it mostly turns out that minorities slightly outgain Whites and Asians during the school year.

The problem is that they fall way behind in the 3 months not in school.

How you select immigrants would dramatically affect these results, so it makes sense to exclude them. A lot of East and South Asian 2nd gen achievement is due to them being the children of highly skilled immigrants - they’d thrive in almost any setup. If USA imported only PhDs from Latin America, their kids would be, on average, stellar achievers. For this reason, it makes sense to eliminate them as a group, in the interest of simplicity.

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