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US has excellent education by the standard, commonly used international measures. In PISA, for example, white American children score better than any European c

by 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.
- strangattractor 2y ago
  Have to admit the immigration comment also triggered my "blaming immigrants" radar. After a careful reading it was an honest attempt for more information or clarification on how the details might be better interpreted. Something people should do more of when statistics are used as evidence. Actually a very good question.
gotoeleven 2y ago
[flagged]
ivan_gammel 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. Wow. I‘m really impressed with your skill to interpret the data and build a narrative from it. However, let’s face it, it is just a convenient narrative with a faulty logic. You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain advantaged subgroups. It’s logically incorrect and not how efficiency of education system is defined. It is also wrong to compare black Americans and Africans and generally use non-scientific racial divisions which do not exist elsewhere in the world. Most of black Americans are no more immigrants than white people. They are simply Americans and should be compared to Europe the same way as whites.
- xyzzyz 2y ago
  > You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain advantaged subgroups. To the contrary, you could totally conclude from this that US has excellent educational system at least with respect to these, as you call them, “advantaged” groups. At best you could argue that the system is not so excellent for other, less well performing groups. However, these less well performing groups still perform better in US system than matched groups outside the US, so it is indeed the case that for both higher and lower performing groups, US educational system beats all other systems around the world.
  - aerhardt 2y ago
    Why would you compare the advantaged US groups versus the entirety of other populations?
    - xyzzyz 2y ago
aerhardt 2y ago
What is the source on this? All I can find is this Twitter thread, and reposts of this from Reddit. I cannot find any official sources. https://twitter.com/ideafaktory/status/1732095406891282603 https://twitter.com/ideafaktory/status/1732095406891282603
- xyzzyz 2y ago
  The image in this thread you linked has the information about the data source in the bottom right corner.
  - aerhardt 2y ago
    The source he cites is himself, other than the PISA data. I cannot examine the entire dataset right now, but from reading the questionnaires I cannot find a single question on race. The only resembling question is on the birthplace of the parents [1], but you cannot infer the race from that, can you? How would you separate blacks then, most of whom would probably have American parents? How much do you trust the author of this data? [1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/pisa/pisa-2022-datasets/questionnaires/COMPUTER-BASED%20STUDENT%20questionnaire%20PISA%202022.pdf https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/pisa/... Edit: The US version of the questionnaire does ask for comprehensive data on race. I still cannot make sense of some of the elements of the Crémieux source, for example they show the US average (not split by race) in a position which is not what I see in the official data. But it should be entirely possible to analyze the data comprehensively by race.
    - xyzzyz 2y ago
      I have known Cremieux for a long time, and trust him a great deal when it comes to handling and presenting data. In any case, I don’t know what standards you’d find satisfactory. He made the graph out of data he listed on the graph. Anyone can go and verity its accuracy. It being materially wrong would be devastating to his reputation. Thus, if you still don’t trust it, you should just do your own leg work to verify it, instead of asking others, whom you probably don’t trust any more than you trust Cremieux, to do it. Anything more would be unusual and unreasonable, even formal academic peer review does not involve verifying that the graphs are accurately representing underlying data.
mmooss 2y ago
First, where is the evidence for all of that? Second, other than racism, I don't see why we would distinguish between the 'race' of the Americans. The US average is the average. People are no more or less American based on their skin color. Unless you make the racist claim that math skills biologically depend on race, there is no reason to compare some Americans with people in Africa because they have similar skin color - it's absurd. > Not sure what you’re talking about I don't believe that you are unaware of the hate and discrimination against immigrants and minorities, justified by these same and similar arguments. If you said that was not your intent - well, your intent or not, it has the same effect. But to say you don't know is not credible.
- seneca 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - tptacek 2y ago
    This is almost certainly an SES effect; the evidence for biological causation is weak and has gotten drastically weaker with each successive GWAS study. Either way: it's a race war point, and those are unwelcome on HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=race%20war%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
    - seneca 2y ago
      How is this "race war"? No one is saying people should be punished or are inferior. We're talking about why schools perform the way they do in the US, not some "war".
      - tptacek 2y ago
        Look at the antecedents to the 'dang comments I just linked you to.
        2y ago
peterfirefly 2y ago
> In PISA, for example, white American children score better than any European country, European countries also have better scores if we disregard the immigrants. Well, mostly certain immigrant groups. Others do fine. And those groups that do bad do bad everywhere. Those that do well do well everywhere. It's almost as if something else matters more than the local educational systems.
StressedDev 2y ago
The pre-college US education is not excellent. I know because I went to a US public high school. Here are some of my observations: 1. The standards are low. Here are some examples: - My high school calculus class went at half the speed of a college calculus class. Some of the students still complained it went too fast! - I took Spanish for 3 years. Native Spanish speakers laugh at my Spanish because it is extremely poor (poor pronunciation and I cannot read a Spanish newspaper). 2. Students and parents are more concerned with grades than with learning. 3. I know of teachers who have been punished because they had high standards. I know of one English teacher who was made a librarian because he failed half of his class. He was the best English teacher in the school, and he had high standards. I know he was good because I had him. 4. When I went to high school, I was surprised at how many students could not write a coherent argument in English. 5. My physics and chemistry classes in high school looked nothing like the classes in college. Basically, they were relatively easy, and I did not learn a lot. In the case of physics, the textbook also did a poor job of explaining concepts. My main point is my experience with US public education was poor. Classes were easy, students were not pushed, and concepts were not taught. I don't think you can call a school which cannot teach physics, chemistry, or Spanish a good school. I also do not think my experience was unique.
- cutemonster 2y ago
  > The pre-college US education is not excellent. ... The standards are low. If so, might still be a lot worse elsewhere. Maybe the US is not good, but less bad? As an extreme example, think of Haiti for example.
sophacles 2y ago
> Not sure what you’re talking about, but I get the feeling that you’re trying to smear me with allusions and innuendos. To be fair: >> Americans, so as the composition changes, and the whites become less of a statistically dominating factor, the scores are expected to go down, even as the education quality improves. Reads a lot like "Our scores are going to go down because there are more brown people, even when we try so hard to help them.", and without further explanation, suggests a predicate of "brown people are inherently dumber". I understand that you're more likely suggesting that the immigrants are coming from a place with lower educational quality, which means they have a weaker educational background. Particularly though its a litte odd when the only called out groups are "white people" and "immigrants" with no mention of other groups like non-white natural born citizens (not to mention confusing when trying to consider white immigrants). It has a lot of the elements you'd find in dog-whistles: * the immediate framing of results in terms of race/ethnicity * setting up a whites vs the undifferentiated others. * a declaration that white people are propping up the others and describing whites as dominant. (I know you said statistically dominant, but the word dominant has a lot of connotations no matter how it's prefixed). * the use of flat, statistical wording around a seemingly odd juxtaposition (the first point). Doubly so on the internet where it's extremely common to find the person who said the original to be spewing overt racism a bit down-thread. I don't know if you are racist, and I don't think you intended racism in your comment. I'm just pointing out that it's not surprising someone read bigotry into it.
bllguo 2y ago
How insightful could this possibly be if socioeconomic variables are not controlled for? Clearly the socioeconomic makeup of "US Asians" is not the same as, say, the entire population of Korean students. Also, "US Asians" is a silly grouping..

by xyzzyz 2y ago

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.

strangattractor 2y ago
Have to admit the immigration comment also triggered my "blaming immigrants" radar. After a careful reading it was an honest attempt for more information or clarification on how the details might be better interpreted. Something people should do more of when statistics are used as evidence. Actually a very good question.

gotoeleven 2y ago

[flagged]

ivan_gammel 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. Wow. I‘m really impressed with your skill to interpret the data and build a narrative from it. However, let’s face it, it is just a convenient narrative with a faulty logic. You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain advantaged subgroups. It’s logically incorrect and not how efficiency of education system is defined. It is also wrong to compare black Americans and Africans and generally use non-scientific racial divisions which do not exist elsewhere in the world. Most of black Americans are no more immigrants than white people. They are simply Americans and should be compared to Europe the same way as whites.

xyzzyz 2y ago
> You cannot conclude that USA has excellent educational system if it delivers the great outcomes for certain advantaged subgroups. To the contrary, you could totally conclude from this that US has excellent educational system at least with respect to these, as you call them, “advantaged” groups. At best you could argue that the system is not so excellent for other, less well performing groups. However, these less well performing groups still perform better in US system than matched groups outside the US, so it is indeed the case that for both higher and lower performing groups, US educational system beats all other systems around the world.
- aerhardt 2y ago
  Why would you compare the advantaged US groups versus the entirety of other populations?
  - xyzzyz 2y ago

aerhardt 2y ago

What is the source on this? All I can find is this Twitter thread, and reposts of this from Reddit. I cannot find any official sources. https://twitter.com/ideafaktory/status/1732095406891282603 https://twitter.com/ideafaktory/status/1732095406891282603

xyzzyz 2y ago
The image in this thread you linked has the information about the data source in the bottom right corner.
- aerhardt 2y ago
  The source he cites is himself, other than the PISA data. I cannot examine the entire dataset right now, but from reading the questionnaires I cannot find a single question on race. The only resembling question is on the birthplace of the parents [1], but you cannot infer the race from that, can you? How would you separate blacks then, most of whom would probably have American parents? How much do you trust the author of this data? [1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/pisa/pisa-2022-datasets/questionnaires/COMPUTER-BASED%20STUDENT%20questionnaire%20PISA%202022.pdf https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/pisa/... Edit: The US version of the questionnaire does ask for comprehensive data on race. I still cannot make sense of some of the elements of the Crémieux source, for example they show the US average (not split by race) in a position which is not what I see in the official data. But it should be entirely possible to analyze the data comprehensively by race.
  - xyzzyz 2y ago
    I have known Cremieux for a long time, and trust him a great deal when it comes to handling and presenting data. In any case, I don’t know what standards you’d find satisfactory. He made the graph out of data he listed on the graph. Anyone can go and verity its accuracy. It being materially wrong would be devastating to his reputation. Thus, if you still don’t trust it, you should just do your own leg work to verify it, instead of asking others, whom you probably don’t trust any more than you trust Cremieux, to do it. Anything more would be unusual and unreasonable, even formal academic peer review does not involve verifying that the graphs are accurately representing underlying data.

mmooss 2y ago

First, where is the evidence for all of that? Second, other than racism, I don't see why we would distinguish between the 'race' of the Americans. The US average is the average. People are no more or less American based on their skin color. Unless you make the racist claim that math skills biologically depend on race, there is no reason to compare some Americans with people in Africa because they have similar skin color - it's absurd. > Not sure what you’re talking about I don't believe that you are unaware of the hate and discrimination against immigrants and minorities, justified by these same and similar arguments. If you said that was not your intent - well, your intent or not, it has the same effect. But to say you don't know is not credible.

seneca 2y ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 2y ago
  This is almost certainly an SES effect; the evidence for biological causation is weak and has gotten drastically weaker with each successive GWAS study. Either way: it's a race war point, and those are unwelcome on HN. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=race%20war%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - seneca 2y ago
    How is this "race war"? No one is saying people should be punished or are inferior. We're talking about why schools perform the way they do in the US, not some "war".
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Look at the antecedents to the 'dang comments I just linked you to.
      - 2y ago

peterfirefly 2y ago

> In PISA, for example, white American children score better than any European country, European countries also have better scores if we disregard the immigrants. Well, mostly certain immigrant groups. Others do fine. And those groups that do bad do bad everywhere. Those that do well do well everywhere. It's almost as if something else matters more than the local educational systems.

StressedDev 2y ago

The pre-college US education is not excellent. I know because I went to a US public high school. Here are some of my observations: 1. The standards are low. Here are some examples: - My high school calculus class went at half the speed of a college calculus class. Some of the students still complained it went too fast! - I took Spanish for 3 years. Native Spanish speakers laugh at my Spanish because it is extremely poor (poor pronunciation and I cannot read a Spanish newspaper). 2. Students and parents are more concerned with grades than with learning. 3. I know of teachers who have been punished because they had high standards. I know of one English teacher who was made a librarian because he failed half of his class. He was the best English teacher in the school, and he had high standards. I know he was good because I had him. 4. When I went to high school, I was surprised at how many students could not write a coherent argument in English. 5. My physics and chemistry classes in high school looked nothing like the classes in college. Basically, they were relatively easy, and I did not learn a lot. In the case of physics, the textbook also did a poor job of explaining concepts. My main point is my experience with US public education was poor. Classes were easy, students were not pushed, and concepts were not taught. I don't think you can call a school which cannot teach physics, chemistry, or Spanish a good school. I also do not think my experience was unique.

cutemonster 2y ago
> The pre-college US education is not excellent. ... The standards are low. If so, might still be a lot worse elsewhere. Maybe the US is not good, but less bad? As an extreme example, think of Haiti for example.

sophacles 2y ago

> Not sure what you’re talking about, but I get the feeling that you’re trying to smear me with allusions and innuendos. To be fair: >> Americans, so as the composition changes, and the whites become less of a statistically dominating factor, the scores are expected to go down, even as the education quality improves. Reads a lot like "Our scores are going to go down because there are more brown people, even when we try so hard to help them.", and without further explanation, suggests a predicate of "brown people are inherently dumber". I understand that you're more likely suggesting that the immigrants are coming from a place with lower educational quality, which means they have a weaker educational background. Particularly though its a litte odd when the only called out groups are "white people" and "immigrants" with no mention of other groups like non-white natural born citizens (not to mention confusing when trying to consider white immigrants). It has a lot of the elements you'd find in dog-whistles: * the immediate framing of results in terms of race/ethnicity * setting up a whites vs the undifferentiated others. * a declaration that white people are propping up the others and describing whites as dominant. (I know you said statistically dominant, but the word dominant has a lot of connotations no matter how it's prefixed). * the use of flat, statistical wording around a seemingly odd juxtaposition (the first point). Doubly so on the internet where it's extremely common to find the person who said the original to be spewing overt racism a bit down-thread. I don't know if you are racist, and I don't think you intended racism in your comment. I'm just pointing out that it's not surprising someone read bigotry into it.

bllguo 2y ago

How insightful could this possibly be if socioeconomic variables are not controlled for? Clearly the socioeconomic makeup of "US Asians" is not the same as, say, the entire population of Korean students. Also, "US Asians" is a silly grouping..