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**DISCLAIMER: The numbers don't add up, someone's numbers are wrong see Jesson's child comment >US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and t

**DISCLAIMER: The numbers don't add up, someone's numbers are wrong see Jesson's child comment >US is below the mean for average mathematical performance and this isn't helping. This depends on whether or not you control for race [0]: - Asian (556) - White (531) - Hispanic (481) - Black (448) - Mixed Race (501) Despite the euroworship in this thread, White-American and Asian-American students outperform Europeans and Asians, respectively (although I don't have data that breaks down those countries' scores by race, so take this with a grain of salt). Quite interesting how people in this thread (whom I suspect are mostly white- and Asian- American males given the hours/site) are talking about how bad the US education system is and how their European friends were all learning Riemann sums in kindergarten. The system is only failing black and hispanic students. Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. I would also like to see the scores stratified by income, which my linked paper did not provide. [0]: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compiled.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi...

Tehdasi 4y ago
I'm sure in every educational system you can use some form of metric to exclude low SES students and conclude that the system isn't behind or failing.
- dmix 4y ago
  …or maybe always attempting to look at systems as a whole and fix it as a homogenous unit might be exactly why it’s failing in the first place.
- slackerchews 4y ago
  totally agree with you. was just pointing out a statistical quirk I thought added value to the discussion. I'll even retract my point that the US maths education system isn't failing as a whole. When two demographics (30% of the country and growing) are being left behind by the system, then the system is failing as a whole. I really hope to see this change in the future.
birdymcbird 4y ago
‘The system is only failing black and hispanic students.’ What is “the system”? you mean to say the school is racist or unfair to black kids..hispanic kids? who is responsible in your opinion?
- HWR_14 4y ago
  The system in this case is using property taxes as the primary funding for schools, so children in poorer neighborhoods get worse funding and worse outcomes.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Incorrect. Half of school funding comes from property taxes. The other half comes from state and federal sources to offset the disparity from property taxes. Here is a good breakdown of per student spending in Maryland as an example: https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2019/02/20/funding-per-pupil-charts-for-2019/ https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2019/02/20/funding-per-.... Notice how federal and state funding is used to offset (often more than offset) differences in local funding.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      There's nothing "incorrect" about what the parent commenter said. Compare Frederick Douglas Academy in Austin to OPRF in Oak Park, a 15 minute walk away. Urban schools get state and federal dollars --- but so do wealthy suburban schools. It is in fact the case that wealthy families opt in to de facto private school systems; no jazz-hands about subsidies and mismanagement gets you around that fact.
      - pcwalton 4y ago
        Yes. To give a concrete example, California schools on the whole spend about $14,913 per student [1], while Palo Alto spends $23,038 [2]. [1]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-public-schools/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi... [2]: https://papie.org/about/f-a-q/ https://papie.org/about/f-a-q/
culopatin 4y ago
Does anyone else feel weird about comparisons that match a subgroup of people in the US against whole continents? Why is it normal to smash all the countries of a continent into one? What “asian” or “European” student is making it into these standards? The ones with money to come to the US and be surveyed?
- slackerchews 4y ago
  I agree (and point out in my comment) that this is not a 1:1 comparison.
- adastra22 4y ago
  1. When people compare with “Europe” they usually mean western and northern Europe. Wealthy democratic countries that were NATO members or aligned during the Cold War. 2. These countries pretty much all (to varying degrees) have a strong social democratic movement that has been able to set policy during the 20th century, resulting in fairly uniform (compared with USA) support for universal education, healthcare, and other things Americans can’t take for granted. There is huge variation within Europe for sure, but western/northern european countries do largely cluster together when looked at the world as a whole.
dmix 4y ago
Yes I’ve seen these statistics a number of times and it really goes against so much of the “lol Americans are bad at math” meme all over the internet. America is a society of disparate cultures, regions, communities, and outcomes (often in the same cities) that is far too fine grained to reduce it to generalities (with a few exceptions such as heavily nationally influenced/consistent things like health care insurance, defence spending, Wall St/banking policies, etc). Some people try to minimize it all to “class” like they found some Pandora’s box for all of life’s problems but that’s just as often flawed as any other generalization.
- Jensson 4y ago
  But those numbers are a lie, American whites scored 503, just look at the report page 34, it clearly says that white Americans scored 25 points higher than the average 478 at math. 478 + 25 = 503. He must have taken the wrong graph. Edit: Anyway, 503 is pretty average for Europeans, so it means that Americans are pretty average at math, as you'd expect for a large country. So it is still proof that Americans aren't bad, they are typical.
  - slackerchews 4y ago
    I didn't lie... Page 16 of my OECD link shows that the average was 505 for 2018... EDIT:: Nevermind I'm a dumbass. that graph is for reading and literacy.... guess I know how I'd score...
    - tstrimple 4y ago
      We’ve all been there. At least all of us who care enough to argue about shit online and support it with sources.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Bad at math and reading?
  - dmix 4y ago
    Fair enough. Although being the median with such a large country is still pretty divergent from the popular narrative I was comparing to. Those sorts of generalized nationwide numbers wasn’t my point anyway, rather proper data analysis and putting data into the wider context of the various communities/finer demographics/etc leads to far more useful conclusions than national level ones alone. Similar to critiques of the GDP as a metric for success. It’s not surprising the default critique on Reddit/Twitter is always using some European country with a homogeneous culture and a small population centered around ~2-3 major cities at most vs the entire US.
soganess 4y ago
>Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. Wait, what? That is exactly what it means. If the groups that are least likely to get external support (ie a tutor, prep, whatever) are under-performing that implies the _standalone_ system is broken. Sure, it is not so broken that it can't be patched with outside aid, but that is true of many things we consider "a failure." This is akin to saying "Of course my car can get across the country. All I need is the occasional tow-truck, you know, for when it overheats."
- humanizersequel 4y ago
  >If the groups that are least likely to get external support (ie a tutor, prep, whatever) are under-performing that implies the _standalone_ system broken. Is there reasonable evidence to show that whites and asians receive "external support" at a rate high enough to convincingly explain a 50 to 100 point disparity on this test?
  - soganess 4y ago
    One second google search: https://www.edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai21-367.pdf https://www.edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai21-367... I only skimmed it (read the abstract, checked the graphs, reviewed what stuck out as I scrolled), but quick take aways: (1) The # of private tutoring centers has tripled to 10k since 1997! (2) The utilization of the _new_ tutoring centers is primarily by the wealthy (which obviously skews white). In fact, utilization of private tutors by low income folks has gone down in the same period. (3) They have a section summarizing how Asian-American utilization of tutoring center is high. They even summarize/mention other work that implies tutor usage as primary factor for the high test scores of Asian American students. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the second-half of that last point, but finding information from a credible source (Harvard/BU/Brown) wasn't hard.
Jensson 4y ago
Those numbers doesn't add up, USA average was 478, how could whites that are a majority score all the way up at 531? There aren't enough black people to drag 531 down to 478, and only black people are below average here. Edit: Yes, look at page 34 in that report, it says that white kids scored 25 higher than average, so 503. Where did you get those numbers from, those are wrong.
- slackerchews 4y ago
  Yeah I just looked at the two sources. Somethings up will add a disclaimer in my comment
  - hasty 4y ago
    Yeah, somewhat ironically you were looking at the reading comprehension scores.
- pfannkuchen 4y ago
  Whites skew older, and I believe they aren’t majority for younger cohorts. Is the education data from a recent cohort?
option 4y ago
Controlling for race is stupid and is the source of many of our problems. One should control for socioeconomic factors instead such as family income, whether both parents present, parents’ education.
- icelancer 4y ago
  People have done this. It either has no effect or makes the disparities more stark with regard to Asian-Americans.
inglor_cz 4y ago
"The system is only failing black and hispanic students. " Black students of African heritage, unless the group is very specifically selected (Nigerian-Americans come to mind, with their extremely high average education levels), tend to come out on the bottom in all racially mixed societies in the world. Even the Finnish educational system, touted as one of the best in the world, struggles to educate Somali immigrants to Finnish levels. The very opposite tends to be true about East Asians and Ashkenazi Jewish students. I am not aware of a single educational system worldwide where either of those groups would be considered under-achieving and needing government or private help. The standard American answer is that the root cause is systemic racism. I don't believe that; the phenomenon is too widespread and there are other ethnicities that face vicious open racism in their countries, while being extremely successful. Some of the most successful groups in the world are actually direct survivors of genocidal campaigns or lost wars; all that murder didn't break them.
wjnc 4y ago
The upper segment of the US compares favorably to the average of EU. That doesn’t sound fair. Most EU countries have went through massive immigrant shifts in the last three decades. Like for like comparison would exclude the second and third generation immigrants as well for the EU. (I actually don’t think this is a worthwhile comparison. Just point out a flawed reasoning.)

Tehdasi 4y ago

I'm sure in every educational system you can use some form of metric to exclude low SES students and conclude that the system isn't behind or failing.

dmix 4y ago
…or maybe always attempting to look at systems as a whole and fix it as a homogenous unit might be exactly why it’s failing in the first place.
slackerchews 4y ago
totally agree with you. was just pointing out a statistical quirk I thought added value to the discussion. I'll even retract my point that the US maths education system isn't failing as a whole. When two demographics (30% of the country and growing) are being left behind by the system, then the system is failing as a whole. I really hope to see this change in the future.

birdymcbird 4y ago

‘The system is only failing black and hispanic students.’ What is “the system”? you mean to say the school is racist or unfair to black kids..hispanic kids? who is responsible in your opinion?

HWR_14 4y ago
The system in this case is using property taxes as the primary funding for schools, so children in poorer neighborhoods get worse funding and worse outcomes.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Incorrect. Half of school funding comes from property taxes. The other half comes from state and federal sources to offset the disparity from property taxes. Here is a good breakdown of per student spending in Maryland as an example: https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2019/02/20/funding-per-pupil-charts-for-2019/ https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2019/02/20/funding-per-.... Notice how federal and state funding is used to offset (often more than offset) differences in local funding.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    There's nothing "incorrect" about what the parent commenter said. Compare Frederick Douglas Academy in Austin to OPRF in Oak Park, a 15 minute walk away. Urban schools get state and federal dollars --- but so do wealthy suburban schools. It is in fact the case that wealthy families opt in to de facto private school systems; no jazz-hands about subsidies and mismanagement gets you around that fact.
    - pcwalton 4y ago
      Yes. To give a concrete example, California schools on the whole spend about $14,913 per student [1], while Palo Alto spends $23,038 [2]. [1]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-public-schools/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi... [2]: https://papie.org/about/f-a-q/ https://papie.org/about/f-a-q/

culopatin 4y ago

Does anyone else feel weird about comparisons that match a subgroup of people in the US against whole continents? Why is it normal to smash all the countries of a continent into one? What “asian” or “European” student is making it into these standards? The ones with money to come to the US and be surveyed?

slackerchews 4y ago
I agree (and point out in my comment) that this is not a 1:1 comparison.
adastra22 4y ago
1. When people compare with “Europe” they usually mean western and northern Europe. Wealthy democratic countries that were NATO members or aligned during the Cold War. 2. These countries pretty much all (to varying degrees) have a strong social democratic movement that has been able to set policy during the 20th century, resulting in fairly uniform (compared with USA) support for universal education, healthcare, and other things Americans can’t take for granted. There is huge variation within Europe for sure, but western/northern european countries do largely cluster together when looked at the world as a whole.

dmix 4y ago

Yes I’ve seen these statistics a number of times and it really goes against so much of the “lol Americans are bad at math” meme all over the internet. America is a society of disparate cultures, regions, communities, and outcomes (often in the same cities) that is far too fine grained to reduce it to generalities (with a few exceptions such as heavily nationally influenced/consistent things like health care insurance, defence spending, Wall St/banking policies, etc). Some people try to minimize it all to “class” like they found some Pandora’s box for all of life’s problems but that’s just as often flawed as any other generalization.

Jensson 4y ago
But those numbers are a lie, American whites scored 503, just look at the report page 34, it clearly says that white Americans scored 25 points higher than the average 478 at math. 478 + 25 = 503. He must have taken the wrong graph. Edit: Anyway, 503 is pretty average for Europeans, so it means that Americans are pretty average at math, as you'd expect for a large country. So it is still proof that Americans aren't bad, they are typical.
- slackerchews 4y ago
  I didn't lie... Page 16 of my OECD link shows that the average was 505 for 2018... EDIT:: Nevermind I'm a dumbass. that graph is for reading and literacy.... guess I know how I'd score...
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    We’ve all been there. At least all of us who care enough to argue about shit online and support it with sources.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Bad at math and reading?
- dmix 4y ago
  Fair enough. Although being the median with such a large country is still pretty divergent from the popular narrative I was comparing to. Those sorts of generalized nationwide numbers wasn’t my point anyway, rather proper data analysis and putting data into the wider context of the various communities/finer demographics/etc leads to far more useful conclusions than national level ones alone. Similar to critiques of the GDP as a metric for success. It’s not surprising the default critique on Reddit/Twitter is always using some European country with a homogeneous culture and a small population centered around ~2-3 major cities at most vs the entire US.

soganess 4y ago

>Really tough problem to solve, but the data does not support the conclusion that the American maths education system is "behind" or "failing" as a whole. Wait, what? That is exactly what it means. If the groups that are least likely to get external support (ie a tutor, prep, whatever) are under-performing that implies the _standalone_ system is broken. Sure, it is not so broken that it can't be patched with outside aid, but that is true of many things we consider "a failure." This is akin to saying "Of course my car can get across the country. All I need is the occasional tow-truck, you know, for when it overheats."

humanizersequel 4y ago
>If the groups that are least likely to get external support (ie a tutor, prep, whatever) are under-performing that implies the _standalone_ system broken. Is there reasonable evidence to show that whites and asians receive "external support" at a rate high enough to convincingly explain a 50 to 100 point disparity on this test?
- soganess 4y ago
  One second google search: https://www.edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai21-367.pdf https://www.edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai21-367... I only skimmed it (read the abstract, checked the graphs, reviewed what stuck out as I scrolled), but quick take aways: (1) The # of private tutoring centers has tripled to 10k since 1997! (2) The utilization of the _new_ tutoring centers is primarily by the wealthy (which obviously skews white). In fact, utilization of private tutors by low income folks has gone down in the same period. (3) They have a section summarizing how Asian-American utilization of tutoring center is high. They even summarize/mention other work that implies tutor usage as primary factor for the high test scores of Asian American students. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the second-half of that last point, but finding information from a credible source (Harvard/BU/Brown) wasn't hard.

Jensson 4y ago

Those numbers doesn't add up, USA average was 478, how could whites that are a majority score all the way up at 531? There aren't enough black people to drag 531 down to 478, and only black people are below average here. Edit: Yes, look at page 34 in that report, it says that white kids scored 25 higher than average, so 503. Where did you get those numbers from, those are wrong.

slackerchews 4y ago
Yeah I just looked at the two sources. Somethings up will add a disclaimer in my comment
- hasty 4y ago
  Yeah, somewhat ironically you were looking at the reading comprehension scores.
pfannkuchen 4y ago
Whites skew older, and I believe they aren’t majority for younger cohorts. Is the education data from a recent cohort?

option 4y ago

Controlling for race is stupid and is the source of many of our problems. One should control for socioeconomic factors instead such as family income, whether both parents present, parents’ education.

icelancer 4y ago
People have done this. It either has no effect or makes the disparities more stark with regard to Asian-Americans.

inglor_cz 4y ago

"The system is only failing black and hispanic students. " Black students of African heritage, unless the group is very specifically selected (Nigerian-Americans come to mind, with their extremely high average education levels), tend to come out on the bottom in all racially mixed societies in the world. Even the Finnish educational system, touted as one of the best in the world, struggles to educate Somali immigrants to Finnish levels. The very opposite tends to be true about East Asians and Ashkenazi Jewish students. I am not aware of a single educational system worldwide where either of those groups would be considered under-achieving and needing government or private help. The standard American answer is that the root cause is systemic racism. I don't believe that; the phenomenon is too widespread and there are other ethnicities that face vicious open racism in their countries, while being extremely successful. Some of the most successful groups in the world are actually direct survivors of genocidal campaigns or lost wars; all that murder didn't break them.

wjnc 4y ago

The upper segment of the US compares favorably to the average of EU. That doesn’t sound fair. Most EU countries have went through massive immigrant shifts in the last three decades. Like for like comparison would exclude the second and third generation immigrants as well for the EU. (I actually don’t think this is a worthwhile comparison. Just point out a flawed reasoning.)