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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

One factor behind decreasing US literacy rates and reading performance is the uptick of immigrants who don't speak English well.

While analyses of reading and literacy skills are generally intended to reflect how our educational system is doing.

So obviously, we need to control for immigration rates in these analyses. For assessment of our educational system, ideally we'd only be reporting for children and adults born in the US. (And then breaking out non-native speakers in their own categories to measure their ESL performance rates.)

Because a child (or adult) might have superb literacy in Spanish, but show up as illiterate in English. And these studies generally aren't accounting for that at all.

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This is a good point, though at the time of my comment it's already attracted several "that's racist" type responses. I think generally you might be getting at Simpson's Paradox[0] where an aggregated trend is in one direction when all the relevant subgroups are in a different direction, and it's just that the makeup and proportions of those subgroups has changed.

My father in law is a guidance counselor in Florida. He told me about a school in the county that was ranked very poorly 10 years ago, but is now one of the top. I was curious how they did it, but it apparently had nothing to do with changes in curriculum, but the fact that somehow that area had become a destination for wealthy Chinese international students, and the student body had become dominated by them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

Sounds plausible, but what's the source of the claim?

This'll do it - https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/focus_on_naep/student_grou...

From 1998 to 2022 "English learners" (as its their term) tripled from 5% to 14%. They do offer accommodations, but are tested.

And fwiw I think they should be, just as are students with learning disabilities. It's because this is your student body, which will become the society of tomorrow. Knowing how that society might look, and in which direction it is trending, can inform decisions being made today to help shape a better society for everybody tomorrow.

This is just plainly and grossly misinformed.

Immigration rates, and their children come no where close to affecting regular educational metrics.

The reading comprehension is just that bad, and the people in the know understand why it is that way but bureaucracy props it up while everyone waits for Superman.

Something like 14.3% of the current US population is foreign-born, and we can assume that the proportion of school-age children is somewhere around that as well. About half are from Latin America.

That's absolutely going to affect regular education metrics.

And it's going to affect it increasingly, as the proportion of foreign-born has risen continuously from 4.7% in 1970 to 14.3% today.

There's nothing misinformed about any of this.

It's quite possible reading is getting worse among native speakers as well. Or not at all. My point is that you can't tell unless you separate out the two populations in the literacy statistics.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/key-findi...

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