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Did the test collect any data on the demographics of the takers, so that we can check whether the drop is within-group, or whether it’s just artifact of changin

• itishappy 2y ago
  Yes, that's one of the main findings from the article. > The extent of the decline seems to be driven by the lowest performing students losing more ground, a worrying trend that predates the pandemic. > Scores for the highest performing American fourth graders were about the same as in 2019, but the lowest performing students — those in the bottom 10% — saw their scores drop by 37 points in math and by 22 points in science compared with similar students in 2019. The lowest performing eighth graders saw their scores drop by 19 points in math. One in five U.S. eighth graders scored below the low benchmark, meaning they lacked even basic proficiency. > This gap between high- and low-performing students started to widen before the pandemic for reasons that are unclear. Since then, other research into post-pandemic academic performance has found widening gaps across race and income, even as many middle and higher income students are doing well. What do we do with this info?
  • mmooss 2y ago
    Your claim and the GP's are very different: * Yours is that the bottom 10% are declining. That says nothing about who is in the bottom 10%. * The GP says the composition of the population has changed, and blames immigrants.
    • itishappy 2y ago
      > There was also a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and test scores. Students from higher income households and those who attended schools with more affluent students had higher scores.
      • mmooss 2y ago
        That doesn't say the composition changed - that could have been true before - or that immigration status is any factor at all.
      • SkyBelow 2y ago
        The question is what was the delta within that group (and within other groups). Given we know that those of higher socioeconomic status do better than average, did they improve compared to their past selves, stay roughly the same, or degrade despite still maintaining above average results? If, for example, they degraded, then it would indicate there is a problem happening that even the higher socioeconomic status doesn't protect from despite all its benefits (well it might protect relatively better that other SES, but not enough to prevent the downward trend). If, instead, they improved relative to their past selves, it would indicate the problem causing the overall trend is found entirely within other SES groups (well not entirely, as it is possible the impact still hit this group but that other factors more than made up for it, but to keep it simple, we can ignore such a possibility unless we see even better data that can parse out these more complex relationships).
    • DAGdug 2y ago
      The Simpson’s paradox part is factual, and has been known for over a decade courtesy Steve Sailer, who is an immigration restrictionist. A fairer critique of the poster is that they’re unoriginal (rather than that they’re blaming immigrants, which I didn’t see in this post).
      • bryanrasmussen 2y ago
        > While US has excellent education, and immigrant children in America do better than their counterparts in their countries of origin, they don’t do as well as the modal group of white Americans, so as the composition changes... it doesn't say the immigrants are to blame, it just strongly implies that this could be a likely reason, furthermore for some reason to be an immigrant is to not be white which certainly was not the case when I immigrated to America.
  • DAGdug 2y ago
    Make better policy decisions next time around? (Surprise, surprise, poor kids don’t do zoom classes).
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • Glyptodon 2y ago
    It's pretty obvious: our society, because it's based on representative government, requires a baseline of general welfare sufficient that as many citizens as possible have leisure time and are not subject to PTSD-inducing levels of stress. This is at odds with the increasing inequality and increasing cultural and class stratification within our society. As it is increasingly only possible for upper-middle class and up parents to care for children effectively, the rest of the child-age population will continue to be worse and worse off, while the upper middle class pull the ladders up after themselves out of concern and fear over the future welfare of their own children being completely zero sum. The most urgent things that need to happen to stop this are: - Ensuring sick leave, vacation time, and improving wages, especially on the lower end, such that 1.5 incomes are sufficient for 2 child homes so that parents can have time for their children. - Policies that severely disincentivize vouchers, private, and charter education so that there are fewer incentives to try and create "tides that selectively lift boats." - Increasing the housing supply.
    • shiroiushi 2y ago
      None of that stuff is going to happen. Just look at the recent election results: Americans don't want any of that stuff.
      • clarionbell 2y ago
        You seem to be confusing "Wanting that stuff" and "Believing that solution can be implemented by the same people I do" Americans, overwhelmingly, agree that things are not going in the right direction. What they are split on, is how to fix it, and what is the greatest driver.
        • shiroiushi 2y ago
          No, I'm not at all. If you really think the GOP is going to promote legislation to "[Ensure] sick leave, vacation time, and [improve] wages, especially on the lower end", then you are seriously delusional. You'd have to be a complete idiot to think that GOP politicians are going to push for any of this stuff, because they've never done so in the past, and it certainly isn't part of their current platform. Those goes even more for disincentivizing private school, vouchers, etc., since those are things the GOP has been actively promoting for ages. They've also said nothing about wanting to increase housing supply.
• mmooss 2y ago
  > While US has excellent education By what measure? As far as I know it is poor, in absolute terms and relative to its peers. For the rest, do you have any evidence for the statements, or that the outcome depends on race (and not, for example, income, local school quality, etc)? A very large portion of the US population is neither immigrant nor white. And blaming the immigrants for undermining 'white' people is also part of a hateful disinformation campaign, so I think we should be very careful with statements that might be used to spread that hate. Edit: Even if immigration status were correlated, that doesn't mean that immigration causes people to be worse at mathematics. It could be, for example, that immigrants suffer disrcimination and a lack of resources - like some other groups that have lower scores.
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    US has excellent education by the standard, commonly used international measures. In PISA, for example, white American children score better than any European country, and are only outscored by a handful of East Asian countries. These are all in turn outscored by US Asians, putting US on top yet again. US has a bunch of lower-performing population groups, who bring the overall average down, but even these perform better than their foreign counterparts. US blacks perform better than blacks in any African country, immigrants from South America perform better than kids in the countries they came from etc. > For the rest, do you have any evidence for the statements, or that the outcome depends on race Not sure what you’re asking for. Did you not know that there are large differences in means of test scores between various ethnic and racial groups in US? This is a commonly known fact, I don’t think really require me to provide specific evidence. > And blaming the immigrants for undermining 'white' people is also part of a hateful disinformation campaign, so I think we should be very careful with statements that might be used to spread that hate. Not sure what you’re talking about, but I get the feeling that you’re trying to smear me with allusions and innuendos.
    • hervature 2y ago
      I knew that you were going to get attacked because someone would take your statement as hateful. Unfortunately, it takes longer to collect data than it does to write a dumb comment. They took your factual statement of Simpson's paradox being able to drive one global summary (lower overall scores - a bad thing) counter to the local summaries (increased scores by all groups - a good thing) explained by shifting population proportions as you "blaming immigrants" for the bad outcome when the logical extension of your statement is "hold on, we may have a good thing going on". Ignore @mmooss.
• hervature 2y ago
  Thank you for the high quality comment. I'll try to add some insight here for race. Using the reports [1] and [2], the difference for Grade 4 students are: American Indian / Alaska Native - 2.5% in 2019 - 1.6% in 2023 - 515 in 2019 - 504 in 2023 Asian - 5.3% in 2019 - 4.3% in 2023 - 586 in 2019 - 571 in 2023 Black - 13.2% in 2019 - 15.5% in 2023 - 494 in 2019 - 468 in 2023 Hispanic - 25.8% in 2019 - 26.3% in 2023 - 508 in 2019 - 491 in 2023 Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander - 1.7% in 2019 - 0.9% in 2023 - 500 in 2019 - 457 in 2023 Two or more races - 5.6% in 2019 - 8.1% in 2023 - 554 in 2019 - 542 in 2023 White - 45.9% in 2019 - 43.2% in 2023 - 559 in 2019 - 543 in 2023 It looks like all groups suffered at least 10 points in loss but these effects are definitely exaggerated by the reweighing of population proportions. [1] - https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results19/index.asp#/math/achievement https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results19/index.asp#/math/achievem... [2] - https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results23/index.asp#/math/achievement https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results23/index.asp#/math/achievem...
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    Thank you for looking it up! My personal hunch is that COVID related disruption in schooling is responsible for most of the within-group drop, and the rest is mostly a result of changes in educational policy, where many places deemphasize objective measures and standards, causing students to care less for these on the margin.
    • trhway 2y ago
      i think the impact of COVID lockdowns and de-SAT-ing would be harder to reverse than to build logical and mathematical reasoning into ChatGPT. The former is political and the latter is technical problem. Our whole industry, great at solving technical problems, is throwing tens of billions today, and it will be hundreds tomorrow, to solve the latter. So the math skills for the majority of the population is probably going the way of the "paper map" skills, etc.
      • lanternfish 2y ago
        The problem is that mathematics education isn't just about learning times tables. It's also the primary medium schools use to communicate analytical reasoning and deductive analysis. If you cut math as a target without fundamentally reworking curricular elements, you'll have a ton of graduates who are much worse at negotiating the validity of competing logical arguments.
• optymizer 2y ago
  Is there any data to back up your claim that immigrant kids are worse at math in US schools? It doesn't match my personal experience. It is _well known_ in Europe that the American K-12 education system is weak. Anecdata: All the exchange students from my middle- and high-school (in a third world country in Europe) came back saying they already knew the math that was being taught in the US school.
  • cm2012 2y ago
    Well known and incorrect. If you control PISA scores for demographics, the American education system is fine to great. You can see American Whites outperform most other countries. American Black's outperform parts of Europe, including Greece. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F300g9wczxm4c1.png%3Fwidth%3D971%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dfb3d7d8d9ac87026cd84ff683d0863922bdbd38d https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
    • optymizer 2y ago
      Why would we control PISA scores for US demographics in the first place? Why are the 1st and 2nd generation immigrants removed? The education system is the same for all the kids, unless US Whites are using a different curriculum from the other demographic groups. "If we massage this data set the right way, we get the chart we want".
      • bumby 2y ago
        Conjecture, but it may be to focus on the native born population as a better metric for education quality since they have (presumably) been a product of that system for their entire life. Contrast that to a 1st gen immigrant who a major amount of time in a different country's system; testing them after a short stint in the US tells us much less about the US educational system. It's harder for me to think of a reason why 2nd gen should be removed, unless the assumption is the educational attainment/integration of 1st gen parents heavily biases the results of their kids. I don't know if all that holds up under scrutiny, though. Also, because demographics aren't distributed evenly geographically, I think there is probably a case that the education system is different for different races (to the extent that racial geographic distribution is different).
• dylan604 2y ago
  > While US has excellent education, and immigrant children in America do better than their counterparts in their countries of origin, they don’t do as well as the modal group of white Americans My experience does not track with this at all, especially in the context of the very wide brush you're applying it. I was involved in a lot of extracurricular events around math/science in school, and it was not the white kids winning those events. There were some pretty racist comments about it as well which makes it stand out even more in my memory.
  • daseiner1 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • dylan604 2y ago
      I think you're limiting your color palette, but otherwise, I agree with the sentiment.
      • daseiner1 2y ago
        You are correct, a trivial piece of evidence is the invention and (limited) popularization of a new label [1] beyond “minority”/non-white 1: https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html For anecdotal flavor I’ll mention that I briefly worked in Hollywood and casting requests trended towards “BIPOC” rather than “non-white”, including in roles that had no evident racial component (i.e., the request was indicative of an apparent desire to have a nominally “diverse” cast without any real storytelling commitment to the racial diversity of said character(s) and there was a pronounced bias in these characters (constructed to be "diverse") towards a particular sliver of racial diversity).
    • bilbo0s 2y ago
      I don't know man? I could be misunderstanding HN User dylan604, but I suspect the kids winning those competitions were not white or black. I could be wrong, but I think we all know who we suspect were winning those competitions. And it wasn't white or black kids.
• BeetleB 2y ago
  > and immigrant children in America do better than their counterparts in their countries of origin, they don’t do as well as the modal group of white Americans East and South Asian immigrants probably beg to differ.
  • anon291 2y ago
    We don't exist because it's politically inconvenient to remember.
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    Of course you’re right that children of US Asian immigrants are ahead even of US whites, I mention this in my different comment in this thread. However, since there are few of them relative to other groups, they don’t affect the distribution much, so I didn’t mention this for the sake of clarity, as it didn’t detract from my main point.
    • aprilthird2021 2y ago
      There are not few of them relative to other groups. In fact there are more of them than several, more native groups, like Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and Mixed Race people
  • samatman 2y ago
    Well no, East and South Asian immigrants to the United States do tend to outperform the median in their country of origin. Acutely, in the case of South Asians. So that's half of the statement, the other half is that those two groups are not a large fraction of the total immigrant population. As such, they affect the conclusion, in the sense that removing them from consideration would make the difference in question starker, but they do not change it, because it's a statement about a whole of which they are but a part.
• zozbot234 2y ago
  > While US has excellent education The US has excellent post-secondary education. K-12 seems to be a mixed bag at best, especially in bang-for-the-buck terms.
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    K-12 education is also leading international charts, but I agree that we are most likely massively overspending on it.
    • pishpash 2y ago
      By what metric?
      • rendang 2y ago
        PISA scores as per a commenter above: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F300g9wczxm4c1.png%3Fwidth%3D971%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dfb3d7d8d9ac87026cd84ff683d0863922bdbd38d https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
        • xyzzyz 2y ago
          We spend more on education that practically anyone else, and we spend more on it that we had in the past, with very little difference between now and then.
        • bjourne 2y ago
          Figure created by arbitrarily massaging the data to reach the desired conclusion.
          • rendang 2y ago
            How's that?
            • 2y ago
• briandear 2y ago
  Asian immigrants seem to do just fine.
  • ramon156 2y ago
    Something something wealth
    • aprilthird2021 2y ago
      I am Asian, born in the US, and it's definitely the wealth aspect. You can only end up here in the US legally as an immigrant from Asia if you've completed some type of advance degree (or are going to do that in the US) or are extremely wealthy. So the cream of the crop of Asia is competing against everyone of the native born population and you then obviously get this kind of disparity here. Asians love to talk about how we focus more on education, our culture is better, blah blah. But go back to India or China and you will find lots and lots of people who don't value education and don't have much care for discipline or culture or frankly any sort of society. There's a reason India has had a Trump-like leader for multiple years and it's not because of a focus on education.
      • throweau 2y ago
        [flagged]
      • throw2826284 2y ago
        I disagree, I know many Asians that came here and worked in restaurants to survive. They definitely were not wealthy at all. All of their children did exceptionally well in school because the parents were very involved in their schooling. These kids were often the first in their family to ever get into college.
        • aprilthird2021 2y ago
          And congrats to them and their families. The stats still show that Asians who move to the US are overwhelmingly likely to be moving here to go to college, to go to graduate school, to continue their established skilled career, or with already significant assets. All of which make them usually in the top 10% (if not 1%) of their respective countries. Asians just cannot get visas to move here to work in restaurants. The only ones who can are ones who come here as refugees or in other such ways which make then the minority of Asian immigrants to the US
• sangnoir 2y ago
  > they don’t do as well as the modal group of white Americans, so as the composition changes, and the whites become less of a statistically dominating factor How do poor whites compare to the rest of white people, as well as other races in their socio-economic strata? I suspect test scores corelate more strongly with household income and wealth than with race. However, in America, income/wealth and race are also correlated, which may make one an inadvertent proxy for the other.
  • bko 2y ago
    > • Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000 https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.htm...
    • sangnoir 2y ago
      This is tenuously related to what I asked.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • bko 2y ago
        I'm confused. Your first sentence was how do our whites compare to others and this comment addresses. You suggest the driving factor is socioeconomic class, which the child post directly addresses.
        • sangnoir 2y ago
          I asked a very specific question, and I fail to see what's confusing about my first sentence. I asked how poor whites compared to other non-poor white people, as well as poor people of other races (i.e. controlling for income). Your reply provides a link comparing how non-poor black people compare to white people across all income levels, leaving my question unanswered. If I were at a Toyota dealerships and I asked you "How does this Corolla hatchback compare to other Toyota models on the lot, as well as other brands in the same 'compact car' category?", and your response is that the Nissan Pathfinder (a mid-size SUV) has worse gas milage than all Toyota models. That doesn't answer my question at all, because non-Toyota SUVs were never under consideration.
• dyauspitr 2y ago
  You have you differentiate within immigrants too. East Asian and Indians do significantly better than white Americans. White Americans are usually a distant third.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• throwawaygmbno 2y ago
  Just say that you think white people are special, it doesn't matter how they actually do, and Asian immigrants don't count except when comparing between non-white groups.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• ein0p 2y ago
  > While US has excellent education The US has absolutely abysmal primary education while spending eye watering amounts of money on it. This is plainly obvious to anyone who has ever lived abroad with kids.
  • bormaj 2y ago
    I think the parent comment here is referring to the quality of education relative to the immigrants' countries of origin.