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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The problem with that “culture” explanation is that white kids in America do fine in international educational comparisons. In the 2018 PISA assessment, 15 year old white american students were near the top in reading (behind only Singapore and some Chinese SEZs) and in the top echelon in science (comparable to Japan). Their weakest performance was math, where they’re around the middle, behind the top asian countries but only modestly behind Finland: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi....

Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.

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> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else. But, on average, they are not the ones who are behind their peers internationally.

Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents. And that, no matter the country by the way, is very closely tied to immigration history and ethnicity.

When parents struggle to afford basic school supplies (to the tune that many teachers have to pay for their students' needs out of their own measly paychecks [1]), that's not exactly conductive to good learning outcomes. When parents don't have the time to sit down with their children and help them with learning because they have to work two jobs to make rent (remember, even two minimum wage jobs is not enough [2]), the kids are put further behind. And they certainly can't afford private after-school tutoring.

The last part is the environment itself - aka the quality of housing (mold, cockroaches and other health impacts) or when gangs lure in kids with the promise of striking it rich by dealing drugs or whatnot...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/teachers-back-to...

[2] https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordabl...

Education outcome massively depends on economic status of the parents

And to bring this point home, because of systemic racism in the US, race is an indicator of economic status.

Anyone intentionally leaving out this context is contributing to the system.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequ...

Skin color isn't it, actually.

I knew (second hand) a teacher in a rural area of a low population state. All white kids, she'd have kindergartners cussing her out. Very little hope for any academic future for the other grades as things didn't get better with the older kids.

I knew a white kid who lived in a trailer park whose mom was upset he was getting tutoring after school for his dyslexia because she told him he'd never amount to anything.

My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.

What do all of those things have in common? Poverty, yes, but blended with hopelessness. The kids were surrounded by people who didn't have much, didn't think they'd get anywhere, and didn't believe the kids would ever have a chance at a better life.

That last part is what separates them from kids in third world countries who still manage to achieve academic success. Hope and optimism aren't guarantees; they aren't a replacement for social support. They are, however, a necessary ingredient for the intrinsic motivation necessary for personal growth.

Rural low population states actually have pretty good test scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...

That's an understatement. Sort that by at or above basic and the top 5 states in the US are: North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Utah, Wisconsin.

Even in those states you mention, the number of students managing basic proficiency in maths fell by over 10 percentage points in the past 10 years. You can use the year selection on the site to see the picture change over the years. Texas dropped by over 20 points.

Interesting! Yeah, this is a significant decline across the board. I'm curious what it is in the US in particular that's driving such sharp declines. Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID, have internet/social media, ongoing obesity epidemics, major immigration from low education sources, demographic/fertility issues, and so on. Yet somehow looking at the latest PISA (2022) [1], the US now sits between Malta and Slovakia in math. And if these scores are any indicator, we're probably looking at a further decline in the next PISA results, which should be released this year.

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...

> Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID

Most of the EU/lots of Europe focused on getting the kids back in school before the US did. I personally think that was the right trade-off, but obviously people differ.

Nationally, seems to be mostly demographic change plus covid. For white 13 year olds, NAEP reading and math scores dipped a point from 2012-2020. Then they dipped 5-6 points from 2020-2023: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/

Pupil teacher ratios in rural states are insanely low. That would impact the below basic group presumably.

Edit: to say pupil teacher ratios are low, not high.

You can almost guarantee test scores in Minnesota and Wisconsin are being carried by the cities and suburbs, not rural areas. They have some of the best (and most expensive) schools in the country, and the highest test scores.

"Poverty blended with hopelessness" sounds about right. I'd like to emphasize that it's not just poverty, since there are plenty of recent immigrant families who live in poverty but the kids are at the top of their class. Unfortunately, though, there's a certain kind of degeneracy some families live in: the parents have largely failed in their every endeavor, and they'll become absolutely furious if they see the kids starting to rise above that, get their lives together, and accomplish things. If you live in communities like that, it's part of the deal: no one is allowed to escape, lest they make the rest of them look bad.

Sadly, there are a variety of such family, community, and social and peer group motivations and behaviors -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality#See_also

It's not the poverty; it's the learned helplessness.

The causal direction from poverty to learned helplessness is pretty much established, though

Learned helplessness is poverty+some other things, though. Otherwise no one in poverty would ever leave it. Just talking about causal direction elides reality.

>"acting white"

Honestly this is one of the biggest bullshit I've ever heard. Assuming that this mentality is quite widespread(not necessarily universal) among non White, then any attempt to introduce affirmative action or other equalizer practice would be futile. That kind of mentality must be purged hard from yesterday.

Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.

They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.

The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

That must be dealt with full spectrum crackdown on national level.

I'd like to see what a "full-spectrum crackdown" on anti-intellectualism in the US would look like, given that most of its population struggles to discern fact from fiction in the news cycle, healthcare and legal proceedings. The introduction of generative AI has only made that worse, pushing more distrust of any information that didn't come from a source counted among "one of us." Our problem stems from an intentionally poorly educated populace that still heavily relies on idolatry, allowing whatever demagogue with the means to rise and essentially manipulate the masses.

I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.

Media from mainstream to alternative march in tune with pro intellectualism messages. Any works of art that espouse anti intellectualism would be swiftly and immediately canceled (including its authors) without hesitation. Do this for a generation or two minimum.

Get sydney sweeny to date alec radford, make sure there's lots of PDA.

Banning TikTok could have been a great first step, but too may people were cooked by the algorithm to stop it.

FWIW, my friend was accused of acting white probably around the year 2000 or so, well before anything algorithmic.

Not to say that tiktok is innocent, but it certainly isn't the root cause.

Burning books and censoring media has rarely been a path to fostering intellectualism.

You call it an app ban, but really it’s just press censorship.

The irony is that TikTok et al. could also be the very solution GP wants, depending on algorithm.

Imagine kids glued to an app that shows them engaging and intellectually-positive content. (Which at that scale could actually be inferred)

Fast social isn't intrinsically evil: recommendation algorithms that maximize engagement at the expense of other social goods are. (Or even that operate blind to them)

You're ignoring the effect of the medium itself.

Education requires sustained engagement. Books are conducive to that kind of deep engagement with the material. It requires perseverance, an ability to sit with a topic at the expense of indulging all the cheap distractions that may be available to them (the internet furnishes these gladly and easily). TikTok and bite-sized social media is certainly not conducive to that. The train never leaves the station. Social media's very form consists of feeding the impulsive indulgence of distraction. It only produces superficiality and trains the user's attention span to contract, or to never develop in the first place.

Gamifying learning is a fool's errand. Children are easily distracted, because they haven't yet learned discipline. They need something to counteract these urges, like removing the tempting distraction, an environment that is saturated with relationships and habits that enable good behavior and pursuits, or the threat of punishment for straying from good behavior.

Agreed in principle, but you're never going to substantially remove distractions from children, because school doesn't control them at home (nor should it) and most parents are too busy to be involved (DIWK).

They're going to be bathed in the omnipresent social environment radiation for a large portion of their time.

And they're going to form part of their self image and life goals from that.

Better to make it as positive as we can. Or at least prevent it from being explicitly anti-intellectual.

Lack of role models, right? What men do they look up to?

I guess primary school teachers in the US are predominantly women as they are in most countries? So boys without intellectually inclined men at home or in their social circles do not have role models for educated masculinity.

I’m not sure if the gender of teachers is so much a factor as class identity.

Young French author Édouard Louis has written about his experience growing up in an extremely anti-intellectual working class milieu in France. It’s a country where school teachers are traditionally men, and discipline is stricter than in America or the Northern European countries. But that seems to go together with a class separation where the working class boys don’t see the male teachers as role models but more as representatives of the distant authority.

Both will play a role, and it will differ between societies.

Boys from more intellectually inclined backgrounds will have the role models outside school and that correlates with class (as do attitudes to authority, of course).

The lack of US male teachers (as well as non-white teachers, especially at higher grade levels) is born out by the numbers: https://usafacts.org/articles/who-are-the-nations-teachers/

The share of male teachers has trended downward in the 80s and 90s (by ~ -1%/yr), then slowed in the 00s+ (to ~ -0.5%/yr), and now sits at 22.4%.

The share of white teachers sits at 80%+ for post-kindergarten grades.

So if teachers represent academic achievement, then there are certainly a lot of kids (especially male minorities) who don't see themselves in their teacher (ethnically and gender-wise).

> Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.

"Everywhere" as in "across the world and across time", "because testosterone/teen boys will be boys"?

If so, then I can give you an emphatic no, this is not at all true. It is, as with 99% of things, a cultural phenomenon. The degree to which the "bias against putting in the effort to get good grades" exists varies enormously depending on subculture and time. You may have personally only experienced cultures where this is the dominant case, but that does not make it indicative of immutable nature.

If not, then where and when is your "everywhere"?

Mandatory HRT to improve academic performance time.

> This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

Absolutely not, this is hilariously wrong. I invite you to find any male role models in China and India (or just outside the Western hemisphere in general, for that matter) pushing such anti-intellectualism.

The male influencers here may misguide on communal lines, but you won't find anyone looking down on studying or considering it "unmanly" in any context.

How do you propose to do that?

Not t true. I don’t have the reference, but I read 10 or more years ago about an affluent community in the midwest whose black students greatly underperformed their white counterparts. The parents hired a black researcher and his final report said exactly that, that many black students didn’t want to appear white and also there were negative consequences for trying to do well. The parents thought it had to be racism and wouldn’t accept the results. The guy was a sociology professor at a college in CA.

For more annectdata, this same thing was happening at Berkeley High School around the same time. First hand knowledge from parents of students.

I have seen the pattern with latino students in SoCal as well.

Anecdotally the pressure can be worse with people who have a white parent (either mixed-race or through adoption); I am unsure if the cause more is internal (insecurity about self-image) or external (teenagers can be ruthless when they see differences).

I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion. Now everyone is going to spend time writing knee-jerk responses to you.

At least the parent commenter had the grace to reply with another source instead of falling for it.

The parent commenter’s “source” makes no claims about race related performance whatsoever - it measures by just about everything but that, and then sorts by country. So maybe this is one of those darned reflexive knee jerk responses.

Pages 16, 32, 50 and 62 have breakdowns of mean score by ethnicity actually.

Ethnicity is way too coarse-grained to answer questions about culture and family wealth/connections. That’s lumping together a kid from an old-money family in New Haven with a kid from a trailer park in Virginia.

I'd say it's an incomplete measure, but it's far from useless given the US' continued statistically-significant disparities between ethnicity outcomes. The first step of solving a problem, etc. etc.

I do agree with the general sentiment though and think that too much research/news over the last couple decades has been exclusively ethnically segmented, given the economic segmentation that should always also be involved.

They're perpendicular questions and best triangulate the American experience in tandem.

E.g. what are outcomes for wealthy members of disadvantaged ethnicities? What are outcomes for poor members of advantaged ethnicities?

Those are interesting socioeconomic questions!

> They're perpendicular questions and best triangulate the American experience in tandem.

They are not perpendicular, which is why it's difficult to separate them. You even seem to know this intuitively, that's why they're "interesting socioeconomic questions".

They are perpendicular, in that one does not determine the other.

They may influence each other, but it's obviously physically possible to be a wealthy minority in the US.

It shows correlation, not causation. In the vein of this thread, it's not more or less useful than other anecdotes.

I posited a causation based on how the anecdotes countered the general trends in the data. I welcome counter arguments better than "I'm ignoring you because you don't have numbers".

Were I being paid to research this more deeply, I would. I'm not, and if someone doesn't like my argument, they're free to find one of their own.

Test scores improve with income among all groups, but the gaps between groups remain relatively similar at each income level.

Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".

The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.

To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.

Anecdotes are not a very useful tool in discussions about generalisations. They provide little evidence aside from saying that it's a category of event that can exist. No one at any point has said citations are gospel. Just that anecdotes aren't adding much to the discussion at hand. If you've got issues with the cited data, be precise instead of casting general aspersions on academia.

Given that this is just a discussion between random strangers on an internet forum, I personally find both statistics and clear anecdotes, which GP provided, valuable in creating the richest perspective.

This isn't Proceedings of Hacker News or parliament: we're writing ephemeral internet words and trying to enrich each other.

Cited data on broad human population shows correlation at best, not causation.

I posited a cause based on the lived experiences people shared with me.

You're free to disagree with my conclusion, or to suggest an alternative cause. None of the cited data has actually done either of those things.

Then argue the methodology and data; anecdotes are great tools for sharing narratives, but a narrative based on bad data doesn't help anyone achieve good outcomes.

> Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".

The history of human civilization.

I disagree. Were this an academic symposium I would agree. But this is the internet where folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon. Fortunately, I do appreciate the author's thought and contribtions to observation data, and, tongue in cheek, as a utility monster my appreciation more than negates your lack of appreciation.

There is nothing hn doesn’t understand. There are just a lot of juniors, which is important.

Was your comment meant for me or someone else? I don't follow.

Just responding to: “folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon”

There may be more folks on hn with said skills than you presume.

This may well be true in terms of absolute rate, but still satisfy "uncommon."

Were this an academic symposium on lung cancer I would agree. But this is the internet where folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon. As a utility monster my appreciation reading about the author's grandma who lived 'til 90 smoking a pack a day more than negates your obsession with medical data.

The irony of this being every discussion of education on HN.

Must consume more utility, rawr.

> I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion.

So does the linked PDF address this proposed "hopelessness" factor, or is it that once someone cites something the discussion becomes restricted to only things that have published study results?

Also, if someone were to cite https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094 on the effectiveness of parachutes, are other commenters then forbidden from citing anecdata that disagree with the findings?

The cited findings, don't refute the culture argument though, and maybe even reenforces it. In US culture being illiterate is bad, being bad at math is not looked down up on. The stats show good at reading and bad at math.

While there are STEM (Science Tech Engineering and Math) initiatives, I have yet to see one that actually includes math. You see results in science but not math.

The U.S. isn’t “bad” at math. I found some updated charts that break down the data for 2022 (the underlying data is all from OECD and NCES). White kids in the U.S. outperform non-immigrant kids from every European country except Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Estonia: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1732244690408214720?s=4.... Though to be fair, the US and Europe are all notable behind the developed asian countries (Singapore, Japan, Korea) which may indicate a lesser cultural focus on STEM.

I cannot think of any single ethnocultural group in the West that highly values education and, at the same time, has bad outcomes doing so. We have invested a lot of money and effort into our educational systems.

Even traditionally oppressed groups like the Jews or the Chinese (Chinese Exclusion Act anyone?) or descendants of Russian muzhiks or Indian untouchable castes do have good outcomes if they actually motivate their kids to learn.

The groups that are systematically out (in Czechia, the part of the Roma that lives in ghettos - contrary what people tend to think, a lot of the Roma marry into the wider society, mix with it and live quite comfortable self-sufficient lives) tend to be the ones that despise schooling, and it will take a century or so of concerted efforts to change the attitudes.

Jews were motived to achieve because they were oppressed.

How do Indian low castes do compared to higher castes in the same country? They often continue to suffer from discrimination from higher castes in the west. I can believe they do better than some other groups, but how to they compare to higher caste Indians?

I don’t know about low caste indians, but a good data point might be vietnamese. They are generally looked down on by other east asians. Their poverty rate in 1980 was higher than among black people. Today (where 60% are still foreign born) their median income and poverty rate is right around the national average, about 10% behind white americans.

> Skin color isn't it, actually.

Is contradicted by this

> My mixed race friend mentioned he was accused of "acting white" in school because he actually tried to get good grades.

Unless you are taking skin colour very literally, which is obviously not it (someone's academic performance is not going to change if they get a heavy tan or use s kin whitening cream or take a drug that changes skin colour etc.).

I interpreted "white" to mean an ethnic identity, not a literal description.

How might we formalize these anecdotes and prove them out from a systemic issue?

All this demonstrates is that outcomes are not uniform, not that the culture explanation is necessarily wrong.

Schools in many urban districts where we see this same disparity control for teacher qualifications and per pupil student funding. In fact, various anti-poverty measures and intensive interventions on low performing schools even tip the scale in their favor on thr "supply" side.

Education isn't just something "delivered" like manufactured product; it is something that had to be properly received and used.

We have to start asking some better questions to uncover what's going on, and they will be a lot tougher to quantify.

>culture averse to education

Remind me when Vivek told his followers that American education need ti be more rigorous to compete with China and other Asian nations he got owned so hard, practically quiting from DOGE before it started.

I don't think that disproves the culture argument. American culture is segmented. (Modern marketing and politics have leaned heavily into this segmentation by the way.) For example, if you grow up exposed to ghetto culture you will probably not value education. The PISA assessment doesn't tell us that white kids who grew up in the ghetto are magically competing with Singapore's best. And we know that the ghetto is less white than the rest of America. Ergo in aggregate, US whites outperform. There are of course a million exceptions to this i.e. grow up in a certain type of Asian immigrant household and you will probably do great on these tests and maybe learn piano, violin etc. as well.

Now whether ghetto culture or ghetto economics is the main contributor to poor academic performance... I will leave that finer point up for debate, but my point here is the US has big differences in educational outcomes based on NEIGHBORHOOD, if your neighborhood is high crime and the schools are broke, your educational outcomes tend to be bad.

If there is a culture related problem, I think it's that the people pushing this trashy culture, for example music that glorifies rape, drugs and gangs, code it as black culture and use that as a way to deflect criticism. You're a racist if you don't like hip hop! It would be an understatement to say that many black Americans want nothing to do with that lifestyle or image and have evolved well beyond it, yet it still gets called black culture. It is a cultural weakness that we don't see rape, drugs and gangs as bad stuff to promote and reward, full stop, and not a thing we should be educating the next generation with, regardless of the skin color of the performer, or its roots.

BTW for whatever it's worth I'm white and I grew up in the ghetto. My parents forced me to take a public bus for an hour each morning to a magnet school in the rich part of town. Years later I met up with my white childhood friend from down the road who had gone to our local high school. I had a bunch of academic achievements and a college scholarship, he had a gunshot wound in his stomach. He was a smart guy when I knew him but the ghetto had its own plans for him.

That’s crazy man! Hey, I don’t suppose it was controlled for income as well as race, was it?

> Insofar as the US had a “culture averse to education,” surely that affects white americans as much as it affects anyone else.

Its like you've never lived in America.

Obviously white people are extremely privileged and also have a different culture. Keep in mind that schools in predominantly black areas are typically significantly less funded than those in white areas.

> Obviously white people are extremely privileged and also have a different culture.

Why is this obviously? It's like /you've/ never lived in America, not outside of some coastal city. Go to anywhere in the Midwest or Southeast and tell me that white people are privileged in some unique way. It's a poverty problem and a problem of cultural priorities, not about race.

It is a poverty problem, and black people are much more likely to be in poverty. That doesn't mean that white people can't also be in poverty.

A lot of people just don't understand what privilege is. Who has more upward mobility - an impoverished black person, or an impoverished white person? Who is more likely to face systemic factors that influence poverty and outcomes - black people or white people?

And before I hear "well not everything is about race!!1!" Uh, the US has a long history of systemic racism that does continue to this day.

Obviously if you just integrated a few decades ago you're not going to just magically have equal outcomes. People don't move like that, systems are sticky, and the US isn't evenly distributed.

And, of course, race is correlated tightly with culture and with average income and levels of poverty.

No, you can't just ignore race. Well you can, if that's easier for you, but it's dishonest and incomplete.

And, because I know it's coming: yes I'm white, no I don't have white guilt, I just think about the world we live in. Its easy not to think about things. I prefer thinking about things.

> Keep in mind that schools in predominantly black areas are typically significantly less funded than those in white areas.

Spending per student is not partially predictive of education outcomes in the USA.

Finnish people in Finland and Japanese people in Japan also have “white privilege” in the way you’re talking about—they don’t suffer from whatever disadvantages are associated with being black in America. White Americans have the ordinary range of privileges and disadvantages of people in any country (some are richer, some are poorer, etc). If you trying to evaluate American educational culture and schools in general, it makes sense to compare white people in the U.S. with Finnish people in Finland or Japanese people in Japan or non-immigrant French people in France. To the extent we have this data, Americans perform very well in such comparisons.

If what you say about racism, etc., is true, that is actually an argument against the cultural explanation. That would mean that educational underperformance compared to other countries is caused by internal racism in the U.S., not some anti-educational trend across American culture as a whole. If you somehow erased racism and brought everyone up to the scores of white Americans, then the U.S. would be right behind Japan in educational outcomes—even though the Americans care more about football than reading.

Also, only about 5 states have significantly more funding for white students once you consider federal funds. About twice as many have significantly more funding for black students: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2022-10/Measuring%... (see page 22).

Culture argument can be argued effectively as follows:

If a cohort in Japan has a median score of X at median household income Y, the American cohort with same median score X has income closer to 1.25Y or 1.5Y.

Whether you want to define your American cohort based on geography or ethnicity doesn't really matter-the result will be preserved up to a point.

That’s just because Americans are richer across the Board than Japanese. But would we expect PISA scores to track absolute income across different developed countries? I don’t think that follows. For example, Sweden’s median household income (PPP) is 2.6x higher than Poland’s. But the two countries had very similar scores on the 2018 PISA: http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...

I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.

I'm interested; do you have any good stats for that?

I am on my phone but you can Google and find lots of data that shows dual parent/intact families correlate positively with a bunch of other factors like income, college graduation, etc. More parents=more resources. More resources is generally better than less. Having kids myself, I can barely imagine being able to do it by myself... and even if I could it would certainly be to a lesser quality.

Sweden has the highest proportion of single-parent households at 34% whereas Poland is near the bottom at 9% [1].

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/e...

One possible synthesis is that the high incomes in Sweden make up for the high number of single-parent households.

I almost noted in my prior comment that income is the second biggest factor but left that out. Totally agree that income is a big part of the equation. I also bet because it's Sweden it also has to do with public services like childcare being available.

"Single-parent households" in Scandinavia doesn't mean the same thing as it does in most of the world. There is usually still a high degree of coparenting.

This isn't a culture argument or even a sound/good argument for anything. Americans are just wealthier and you can't compare like that.

When you compare groups of students within the same country and adjust for both household income and intelligence you find that (again, even within the same intelligence brackets and income levels) some ethnic groups simply study more while others spend more time on things like unprovoked violence.

Id ask you for a citation, but I know it doesn’t exist.

If you compare a country where most people are one ethnicity or where wealth and race are not as correlated as in the US, then it's a bit of an unfair comparison.

Does the comparison hold if you segment the white Americans, Chinese, Singaporeans, Japanese, etc. by economic class?

I think it’s the opposite—it is a fairer comparison. White Americans are a relatively homogenized population that reflect the entire spectrum of economic class, where immigration effects have been attenuated by time. Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impoverished Latin American countries?

West Virginia is a nice datapoint here: Almost completely white, but also poor. And one of the worst scores of all.

> Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impoverished Latin American countries?

It's a bit unfair because the average white American is wealthier than the races you excluded from American. The average Japanese person includes everyone from all classes, it does not skew towards the wealthier. If it did, you might see a different result.

Like I asked, does the comparison hold if you segment the results by economic class?

The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and incompetent for anybody to be able to really effect significant change.

I'm not sure I support charter schools as a universal good, but they've actually proven to be pretty consistently effective at improving the educational attainment of low-income black/hispanic students [0-1]. When the local school system is a political quagmire and objectively failing in its mission to educate students, it's probably the only way out.

The meta-problem is that the people most actively involved in improving the racial educational achievement gap are precisely the type of people to reflexively dislike charter schools (because it's "right wing", although I see it more aligned with the centralization vs decentralization axis) and maybe even feel overtly threatened by them (because of their union job). Also, charter schools have to actually figure out how to get buy-in from low-income black and hispanic parents, figure out how to serve this community better, and can't hide behind the excuse of cyclical poverty + orwellian bureaucracy anymore.

I think a lot of educators really would rather work in a system where bad outcomes are guaranteed and thus not their fault, than one in which they actually have the ability to make more than just performative progress in serving the needs of their underprivileged student body.

[0] https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-charter-schools-hav...

[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gain...

At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs. Teachers tend to get paid the same or less in the city district and administration counts are higher but fairly close on a per student basis compared to the burbs.

This is before you get into the socioeconomic factors that make one student population more susceptible to starting and falling behind.

Wouldn't a declining student population mean more money per student? And it seems like it would often (but not always) be cheaper to maintain existing buildings vs building new ones? I'm also wondering how much of the new suburban buildings are financed with debt, and the costs just haven't really caught up to them yet.

A school's budget is tied directly to attendance. Less students = less budget.

> At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs

The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.

Every urban district I'm familiar with has higher per-pupil funding than ~90th percentile suburban areas. (Seattle versus suburbs, Detroit versus smaller towns)

Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools? For example, Asian students perform much better than white students. We don’t say that indicates a problem with how schools educate white kids. Instead, most people see it as a predictable consequence of asian immigrants being filtered for higher education. By that same token, why would we treat Hispanic students having lower scores as indicative of a problem with the schools? The U.S. Hispanic population is subject to the same immigrant filtering effect, but in the opposite direction. Both immigrant groups largely arrived in the last 50 years. Why would we assume the effects of the initial filtering would disappear so quickly?

Here’s a modest proposal: American schools are actually quite good across the board.

Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools?

GP didn't say that, but educators of course see schools as an important area to address the gap. The literature is pretty clear on this being a complex problems with schools being an important wedge to break the vicious circle.

Schools are the only tool we have at hand to reliably solve it.

I wouldn't trust any data about charter schools that came from the Hoover Institute. Plenty of red states with weak labor laws have awful educational systems.

There is no shortage of young naive newly minted teachers who are eager to go into those low performing urban schools and help turn things around. But very few of them last more than a few years in those schools, they get badly burned by reality. The ones who last almost inevitably become callused and bitter, having lost all of the hope they had at the start. The biggest problem with those schools is the students themselves, and the families of those students. They're incredibly dysfunction and stymie all well intentioned efforts to help them.

Insofar as charter schools can help, it's because giving enough of a shit to apply for and go to one weeds out enough of the lost causes that would only disrupt everybody else. In fact, I think the best ways to improve those public schools is even simpler; make attendance optional. Families who give a shit will still attend, while all the trash will voluntarily stay home.

Hell no. Making attendance optional sacrifices way too much.

It's like reducing incarceration rates by never jailing people for anything short of murder. Sure, it improves on that one metric. Obviously. But the adverse effects elsewhere make it a nonstarter.

If you could trust self-selection to only ever stop the "lost causes" from attending? The absolute worst, most disruptive, least likely to ever benefit from education students? Then maybe.

But in practice, for every student like this there would be ten more who would benefit from school education if they attended, but wouldn't attend if it was optional.

And for those missing students, the difference between getting the classes and being left to their own devices might be the difference between becoming functioning adults, low in income but stable, and being locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, substance abuse, violence and crime.

Which is bad for the students in question, and even worse for the society.

But going to jail and getting an education are completely different things...nobody wants to go to jail.

You'd be surprised. America is an incredibly fucked up society. Free meals, Healthcare. Hell, even cheaper tattoos. There is a certain segment of the population where "jail" does not have the same meaning as it does for you or I.

Some evidence that progress can be made within public school systems, though perhaps less bureaucratic than northern cities: https://www.the74million.org/article/the-last-reformer-houst...

Hmmm I wonder if something happened after 2018, it's on the tip of my tongue I just can't quite remember ..

That's not what the article is discussing (decline over time). We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons. The question is: Are they declining alongside the overall group. That might suggests that the reason(s) for this decline is cross-culture/ethnic/race.

> We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons.

[citation needed]

(I'm not american) so I don't have a horse in this race.

These reports are becoming to find because measuring racial differences is considered racist, so you'd be asking for something that would not be acceptable in modern studies.

Agreed, "culture" is a symptom, not a cause.

All humans are the same species, and in a vacuum, have no ideas or inherent behaviors beyond base instinct.

Culture is simply a byproduct of the environment around a segment of humans.

Hence, filtering by white kids in the US simply measures the result of higher average economic status (same as filtering by Asian kids).

American outcomes would look better if the populations they economically disenfranchised historically stayed in other countries like Europeans did with the colonial system (vs importing populations as slave labor domestically in the US). The economic class stratification that still lingers as a result of this in the US is such a unique factor as to make comparisons that don't take this into account worthless.

Wow it's almost like racism is systemic.

It's pretty wild how you can show lower achievement scores for any countries definition of "black" while changing who belongs in that group.

For instance, Italians were considered black in the early 1900s and wouldn't you know it, there was an achievement discrepancy for Italians so long as that definition held.

Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups.

The discrepancy follows the social category and power asymmetry and not the actual people. It's a social artifact, not some biologically inert trait.

> Or you can look at apartheid and post apartheid South Africa - when the political structure flipped, so did the academic scores of the groups

Do you have a source for this. As far as I can verify this is not true, the gap in achievement persisted and the cause is usually attributed to the legacy of apartheid.

I won't get into the larger point your comment is making about power structures + definitions as I don't know enough about those histories to get into your assertions, but wanted to point out that the parent comment didn't seem to suggest these discrepancies were "biologically inert" as you were refuting (I'm also assuming you meant "inherent"). They were commenting on the a racial difference in educational outcomes. From my understanding that's largely a systemic issue, and regardless of shifting definitions/categorization, not a conversation about biology anymore.

Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.

And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.

And when those goals are orthogonal to educational achievement, then what?

The greatest predictor of academic success is the education level of a student's parents.

Take that to its logical conclusion and we'd have individual, personalized tutors for each student. We don't have the resources for that, so some groups are going to get shafted. The question is which.

eh no. a good education system educates the populous. if a student's goals are to play sports and never learn to read, that is irrelevant, they are measured on the education aspect. if their goals are to become a professional streamer, or they value "fame" over anything else, also irrelevant.

we have and should set clear and high education goals. you can adjust teaching strategies towards those goals based on the student and aim to drive those goals even higher, and things like advanced classes are clear ways to do so.

> 15 year old white american students

Which barbarian idiot included a question about skin colour in an otherwise-respectable test?

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