Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

I know we’re not supposed to think about this, but is this controlled for region of origin? That has been changing, and so if that impacts school performance (schools designed by westerners, mind you, in a societal model designed by the same), then we would expect this to change as well right?

View on HN

> not supposed to think about this

Not supposed to think about it according to whom? Who's telling you that? Why are you listening to him?

The US has some of the best public schools in the world. The US also tops the world on spending per student, especially in poorly performing areas. The education crisis disappears when you control for demographics.

It's right to notice that and remains right no matter how much pushback you get from people who've been pushing the same broken solutions for 50 years.

Congratulations for adopting an independent perspective here. We need more of you.

Sounds like we need to spend even more on those “demographics” to get their performance up!

Are you serious? Because I've heard it argued that this is one of the fundamental differences in the approach between left and right. The left thinks money can solve all problems if we just spend more of it in the right place. The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.

I'm generally quite progressive but I am beginning to appreciate that the right may have a good argument.

> The right thinks there is a cultural problem to be solved.

That's also the left. The right holds the differences are genetic, not likely to change, and the only problem to solve is how to keep them out of the country.

What do you think you mean with "cultural problem to be solved" that doesn't involve "putting money in the right place"?

It does. I went down a rabbit hole for this once and yes children of immigrants underperform for math and reading testing v immigrant groups. Can go dig up the .gov links assuming they didnt go away

Is that signal, or is it just mean-reversion, because first-generation immigrant groups tend to have strong academic performance?

Every immigrant I've known that's around my age has told me basically the same story. When they came to the US as a child, and got put into public school, they struggled with reading (they could barely speak English, much less read it), but they excelled at math. I've heard this from people born in China, Taiwan, Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Japan, etc.

Is every immigrant you've known about your age someone you met through work / school and do you work in tech / on a STEM degree? If so then your sample is obviously biased.

That’s a strange one. The highest performing public schools are generally where Chinese and Indian origin kids are a significant minority - I.e. around 20-30%.

Chinese and Indian kids being above is outweighed in this case by others. Look at the volume of immigrants and whatever countries they come from. The east asians are the exception not the norm.

It depends, is this a federal problem, or a local problem? Because I don't see the federal department of education has really done anything to improve scores. So this may be a local issue, and of local resources.

There are very large regional effects. We talk about Finland's scores being great, but I have no idea what France's scores are... We should compare US scores to all of the EU if we want to fair comparison.

Net immigration has been trending down for a decade, but I'm not cynical enough to think we're not churning out some pretty smart kids of our own!

Perhaps, but the percentage of Americans foreign-born is at a 100 year high. And the percentage of under 18s who have a foreign-born parent is at an all-time high (25.6% of students, the previous peak was 21.6% in 1920).

And if their children are underperforming in schools it would be important to know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com