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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

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_compiled.pdf 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.

Mountain_Skies 1y ago
Only if the US is a monoculture but we're a diverse multi-cultural society. Different cultural groups have different values and priorities.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 1y ago
  And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.
  - bpt3 1y ago
    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.
  - corimaith 1y ago
    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.
  - dbish 1y ago
    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.
erosenbe0 1y ago
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.
- rayiner 1y ago
  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-rankings-tell-us-about-u-s-schools/ http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...
  - diogenescynic 1y ago
    I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.
    - tankenmate 1y ago
      I'm interested; do you have any good stats for that?
      - diogenescynic 1y ago
        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.
    - chongli 1y ago
weitendorf 1y ago
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-have-improved-in-the-past-15-years-but-many-still-fail-students-researchers-say/ https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-charter-schools-hav... [1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gains-in-reading-math-for-black-hispanic-students https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gain...
- KPGv2 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - nradov 1y ago
    Please stop spreading misinformation. Public charter schools aren't allowed to kick out underperforming students.
aprilthird2021 1y ago
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?
- rayiner 1y ago
  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?
  - atwrk 1y ago
    West Virginia is a nice datapoint here: Almost completely white, but also poor. And one of the worst scores of all.
  - aprilthird2021 1y ago
    > 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?
zdragnar 1y ago
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.
- rayiner 1y ago
  Rural low population states actually have pretty good test scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=2&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2024R3&sscv=MN&sscvsd=desc https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    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.
    - bootsmann 1y ago
      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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mschuster91 1y ago
> 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-school-spending https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/teachers-back-to... [2] https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordable-for-low-wage-workers/ https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordabl...
- dfxm12 1y ago
  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-inequality-in-the-united-states#:~:text=These%20earnings%20differences%20have%20changed%20little%20since,the%20median%20Black%20and%20Hispanic%20families%2C%20respectively. https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequ...
pembrook 1y ago
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.
csomar 1y ago
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.
- fragmede 1y ago
  > We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons. [citation needed]
  - worthless-trash 1y ago
    (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.
eunos 1y ago
>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.
safety1st 1y ago
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.
lr4444lr 1y ago
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.
only-one1701 1y ago
That’s crazy man! Hey, I don’t suppose it was controlled for income as well as race, was it?
kristopolous 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- EdiX 1y ago
  > 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.
- setsewerd 1y ago
  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.
pif 1y ago
> 15 year old white american students Which barbarian idiot included a question about skin colour in an otherwise-respectable test?
idiotsecant 1y ago
Hmmm I wonder if something happened after 2018, it's on the tip of my tongue I just can't quite remember ..
const_cast 1y ago
> 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.
- tristor 1y ago
  > 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.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    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.
- tick_tock_tick 1y ago
  > 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.

Mountain_Skies 1y ago

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

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 1y ago
And different individuals within those cultural groups also have different values and priorities. A good education system supports everyone equally in achieving their goals.
- bpt3 1y ago
  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.
- corimaith 1y ago
  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.
- dbish 1y ago
  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.

erosenbe0 1y ago

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.

rayiner 1y ago
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-rankings-tell-us-about-u-s-schools/ http://hechingerreport.org/what-2018-pisa-international-rank...
- diogenescynic 1y ago
  I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.
  - tankenmate 1y ago
    I'm interested; do you have any good stats for that?
    - diogenescynic 1y ago
      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.
  - chongli 1y ago

weitendorf 1y ago

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-have-improved-in-the-past-15-years-but-many-still-fail-students-researchers-say/ https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-charter-schools-hav... [1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gains-in-reading-math-for-black-hispanic-students https://www.kqed.org/news/11953408/charter-schools-show-gain...

KPGv2 1y ago
[flagged]
- nradov 1y ago
  Please stop spreading misinformation. Public charter schools aren't allowed to kick out underperforming students.

aprilthird2021 1y ago

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?

rayiner 1y ago
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?
- atwrk 1y ago
  West Virginia is a nice datapoint here: Almost completely white, but also poor. And one of the worst scores of all.
- aprilthird2021 1y ago
  > 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?

zdragnar 1y ago

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.

rayiner 1y ago
Rural low population states actually have pretty good test scores: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=2&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2024R3&sscv=MN&sscvsd=desc https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...
- somenameforme 1y ago
  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.
  - bootsmann 1y ago
    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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mschuster91 1y ago

> 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-school-spending https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/02/business/teachers-back-to... [2] https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordable-for-low-wage-workers/ https://www.housingfinance.com/news/rent-remains-unaffordabl...

dfxm12 1y ago
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-inequality-in-the-united-states#:~:text=These%20earnings%20differences%20have%20changed%20little%20since,the%20median%20Black%20and%20Hispanic%20families%2C%20respectively. https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/racial-inequ...

pembrook 1y ago

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.

csomar 1y ago

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.

fragmede 1y ago
> We (all?) know white American have over average performance due to whatever reasons. [citation needed]
- worthless-trash 1y ago
  (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.

eunos 1y ago

>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.

safety1st 1y ago

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.

lr4444lr 1y ago

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.

only-one1701 1y ago

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

kristopolous 1y ago

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.

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EdiX 1y ago
> 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.
setsewerd 1y ago
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.

pif 1y ago

> 15 year old white american students Which barbarian idiot included a question about skin colour in an otherwise-respectable test?

idiotsecant 1y ago

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

const_cast 1y ago

> 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.

tristor 1y ago
> 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.
- const_cast 1y ago
  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.
tick_tock_tick 1y ago
> 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.