Stay focused - New research on how to close the achievement gap

This also seems like a strong argument for Australian/Canadian skill points immigration. I don't think there would be a problem with 50mm immigrants who were one sigma smarter/richer/etc. than the current US population, provided they had to spend 3-7 years of residency before citizenship/voting, and ideally if there were some way to spread them out over time or geography to avoid overloading local services (which have funding which lags population growth). Maybe give the states a say in how many immigrant visas they will sponsor, on top of a federal pool. I can imagine Michigan would love to have a lot of high-skill entrepreneurial immigrants move in.

The author's main point seems to be found in the opening paragraph serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "What I have learned recently and want to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students."

But this is factually incorrect.

1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr...

and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.

Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr...

shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.

2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,

http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L...

which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely equal American levels of achievement in national-language reading, in mathematics, and in science, with additional knowledge of English as a second language, that is already an impressive achievement. As long as international educational comparisons don't include comparisons of second language ability acquired by schooling, it will be easy for the United States to rank misleadingly high in those comparisons.

3. Moreover, the author's conclusion is suspect even on the basis of the PISA mathematics scores, correcting thoughtfully rather than crudely for demographic factors. More experienced educational researchers who published a peer-reviewed popular article, "Teaching Math to the Talented"

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

dug into the same PISA 2009 data and reached a differing conclusion: "Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests."

The PISA program itself has published summary reports suggesting, based on the same 2009 data, that the United States schools underperform relative to levels of public spending on the school system,

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf

with the report noting that "successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritize the quality of teachers over the size of classes," which is not the policy in most states of the United States. Based on those data, a scholar commented, "There are countries which don't get the bang for the bucks, and the U.S. is one of them,"

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2003-09-16-edu...

The PISA program issued another report on how disadvantaged students overcome their backgrounds in national school systems,

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf

and the United States underperforms the average of OECD countries in this regard too.

4. The blog author suggests comparing countries as "Asian" or otherwise belonging to a United States "race" category with students in the United States classified by the current official federal "race" categories. The latest TIMSS report,

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013009_1.pdf

consistent with a previous TIMSS report available when the author wrote his blog post, shows that the "Asian" average score in the United States in eighth grade mathematics (568) indicates American students underperform, not "tie with" students from Singapore (611), Taiwan (606), and Korea (613). The group average comparisons understate the large gap in the percentage of students who reach the highest level of performance in the high-performing countries, which is visually quite apparent in the national comparison tables (e.g., Table 4, page 11 of the link immediately above). Similarly, "white" United States students mostly tie with, not "outperform" students from a variety of countries mostly inhabited by people of European ethnicity.

This methodology is "crude," to use the author's term, because the categories "Asian" and "black" in the United States do not have the same composition of persons from varying ethnic and language backgrounds as the categories "from an Asian country" or "from an African country."

The Census Bureau says

"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm

5. The blog post author is counting on readers not to challenge his assumption that "once we correct (even crudely) for demography" is correct procedure for comparing varied national populations with culturally distinct historical experiences and differing school systems. The author's argument appears to be based on a discredited hypothesis built on poorly collected data about the origin of group differences in IQ, with the peer-reviewed refutations of the hypothesis published well before the blog post.

Dolan, C. V., Roorda, W., & Wicherts, J. M. (2004). Two failures of Spearman's hypothesis: The GAT-B in Holland and the JAT in South Africa. Intelligence, 35, 155-173.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/dolanSH2004.pdf

Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence, 38, 1-20.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/wicherts2010IQAFR.pdf

Anyway group differences of the kind to which the author refers are, according the most up-to-date peer-reviewed research, based mostly on environmental factors,

Nisbett RE, Aronson J, Blair C, Dickens W, Flynn J, Halpern DF, Turkheimer E. Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. Am Psychol. 2012 Sep;67(6):503-4. doi: 10.1037/a0029772.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...

so they still raise the question of how learning environments may be improved for learners in some social groups in the United States.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

That's an understatement. Links to his blog and other edits inspired by his blog have been a plague on Wikipedia for years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...

Finland is officially bilingual. (The minority official language is Swedish, which is not even cognate with the Suomi language that is usually "Finnish" in English.) Because schools in Latin America, and particular in Mexico, are notoriously underperforming (the reason for that is the role of schoolteacher trade unions in national politics), it is not surprising that first-generation immigrants to the United States from the largest source country, Mexico, start out disadvantaged in school compared to native-born children from English-speaking families. But the latest PISA results look separately at the issue of how the surveyed OECD countries do in helping the least advantaged students in each country's school systems,

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2009/48165173.pdf

and the United States is not a conspicuously strong performer by that standard, even though the United States has a level of public school spending.

http://www.oecd.org/pisa/49685503.pdf

For more information on the "race" issue, see the user bibliography "Anthropology, human biology, and race citations"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...

which links to better sources than those considered by most Wikipedians so far.

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...

The early situation during my lifetime is well summed up by a quotation from America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible

http://www.amazon.com/America-Black-White-Nation-Indivisible...

by Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom (which is a thoughtful book about the history of relations between the "white" majority and black Americans). Its description of public schools in the south sets the scene for today's legacy:

"The poverty of the South and the blindness of its planter-dominated leadership to the need for an educated labor force made the region the educational backwater of the country. School expenditures per pupil in Georgia in 1940, for example, were 42 percent of the national average; they were even lower in Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Those were figures for both black and white students; blacks of course fared worse than whites. Thus, in 1940, Alabama spent 3.2 times as much per pupil on whites as on blacks; Georgia 3.3 times as much; South Carolina 3.8 times as much; Mississippi a staggering 7.2 times as much. In the most heavily black counties of the Black Belt (so-called because of the exceptionally rich dark soil), per-pupil expenditures for black children were less than one-thirteenth of what was spent on whites. A pamphlet documenting such inequalities issued by the National Conference of Fundamental Problems in the Education of Negroes in 1934 observed wryly that 'if we assume the democratic principle of equal educational opportunity for all children, it would appear that it takes seven times as much to teach a white child as a Negro. As Booker T. Washington used to say, it is too great a compliment to the Negro to assume that he can learn seven times as easily as his white neighbor.'"

As that book points out, and as Roland Fryer points out in his more recent publication, today spending disparities are nowhere near that large (although they still favor "white" students in most jurisdictions), and now cultural factors and specific school practices are most at issue in the current divide. But the divide is narrowing, and has narrowed quite a bit in my lifetime, and there are identifiable improvements in United States schools that could make it narrow further.

On the language background of Americans, see

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/are-we-real...

for a recent report, based on the United States Census data, and an earlier Gallup Poll result

http://www.gallup.com/poll/1825/about-one-four-americans-can...

with different methodology. I had three grandparents, all born in the United States, who spoke a language other than English at home. The United States has long relied on immigrant families keeping their heritage languages (as in the case of my grandparents' families) to have people in the population who speak a language other than English. I have been a contract English-Chinese interpreter for the United States government and other clients. By test, I reached a high level of proficiency in a second language. But I would see highly proficient English in use among mixed groups of young people from other countries throughout the time I lived in Taiwan, and there is no comparable phenomenon of anywhere near as many Americans who grow up in English-speaking homes learning a second language of any kind. Singapore, by contrast, has four official languages from four different language families, has a population that spoke NONE of those official languages at home as recently as a generation ago, and yet has achieved good educational results in English (the sole medium of primary and secondary schooling) during my lifetime. Singapore is a very diverse country that has been more successful in getting good schooling results for that diverse population than the United States has. Similarly, repeating my previous comment here, my wife used a second language (Mandarin) to receive all of her schooling, and then learned a non-cognate foreign language (English) beginning in secondary schooling, and so is genuinely trilingual, a rare condition among Americans in her generation.