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knb comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong
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This post is popular not because it is accurate, but because it repeats the popular misconceptions about the US education system, and tells both left and right what they want to hear:
American students generally outperform their racial group in other countries. White Americans have higher PISA scores than any European country except statistical outlier Finland. Asian Americans beat every Asian country, and are second only to the wealthy, elite Chinese city of Shanghai (another statistical outlier).
Hispanic Americans are mostly Mexican-Americans, but outscore Mexico by a healthy 41 points. They are only 15 points behind Spain--and note that many Hispanic-Americans are recent immigrants and don't speak English as a first language (but had to take the test in English), while Spaniards take the test in Spanish.
African-Americans outperform Trinidad (Trinidad is a developed country with a high per capita GDP, and has a substantially African population, which makes them perhaps the most comparable group.)
This really seems to disconfirm both the liberal and conservative talking points. The US education system is not underfunded, as liberals say, nor is it underperforming, as conservatives say. It also is not correct that the US is systematically failing racial minorities due to institutionalized racism (as the OP claims).
The picture I have of the US education system is that there are a large number of smart, dedicated, people spending a lot of money trying get the best outcomes they can with the students they have to work with. This is all irreconcilable with the claims the OP makes.
Not so irreconcilable, if you don't suppose that "a lot" means "most."
The current average likelihood of a high school freshman in America making it to graduation is about 78%, and that's the best it's been in quite a while.
At the public high school I went to, it was a pretty big deal if a year passed where someone failed to graduate, and students would ask each other, not if they were planning to go to college, but what college they planned to go to. The only student I ever asked or heard asked that question who said they weren't planning to go to college, went to college. And not a two-year or community college, but a pretty decent state college.
That was a good high school, but it wasn't by any means renowned. With schools like that bringing up the national average, consider the state of the schools dragging down the national average.
Just imagine...there are countries where education can be discussed without bringing in race at all...
The U.S. educational system can be better than most other countries' (assuming higher performance is not due to some other factor) and yet have much room for improvement. The U.S. economy has higher GDP per capita than almost all other countries, and yet it keeps growing, and there are many areas where policy is clearly forsaking GDP.
Doesn't the US spend a lot more per pupil?
The U.S. spends much more per manual laborer, nanny, etc. The wage level is higher, and immigration restrictions prevent wages from equalizing across national borders. You have to ask whether the U.S. has more or better teachers, or textbooks/facilities/amenities, as opposed to paying more for similar or lesser inputs.
Also, spending reflects other factors to some degree, e.g. it is more labor-intensive, and thus expensive, to educate children with learning disabilities or other serious problems.
Wage levels much higher than Northern European countries? Really?
More to the point, teacher's pay much higher?
Here is a chart of teacher salaries as a share of GDP per capita, and here is a tablepercapita) of GDP per capita across countries.
The US spends a lower share of GDP than many other countries, but off a higher GDP base.
Given that there are racial gaps in the test scores, it's not fair to compare the average of white Americans against the nation-wide averages of European countries, since they also have significant non-white populations.
If you follow my first link, you can see the author's analysis is demographically neutralized (it excludes 1st and 2nd generation immigrants in European countries, and compares to white Americans). In this ranking, American whites substantially outperform the European average, and only 2 small European countries (Switzerland and Finland) noticeably outrank American whites. US whites are outscoring the EU-15 (basically the core nations of the EU, before it expanded into Eastern Europe), by a substantial amount.
The second image is not demographically neutralized, but European countries have far, far lower non-white percentages than the United States. For example, Germany is about 10% non-white as of 2010.
The image appears to come from Steve Sailer, who is not the most reliable source in the history of reliable sources. Identifying as anti-establishment media seems to correlate with poor epistemic hygiene.
On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if some version of this is true after correcting for this, as your typical European country has an ethnic majority over 80%.
In states with high Hispanic-American populations, that portion is false.
I don't see that supported by the data, since other countries aren't broken out by race.
Also, how biased is the sample? What percentage of Americans take the test? And Europeans?
PISA website.
In all countries, schools are sampled, attempting to control for some variables. Around 5000 students, 160 schools in the US. Note that schools may/may not choose to participate, and the same with students. PISA has minimum standards for acceptance as sampled selection, in an attempt to avoid the obvious bias that countries would have an interest to produce in their samples.
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/faq.asp
Given the optional sampling, and obvious incentives, I'm skeptical that this is particularly accurate, and an apples to apples comparison.
Also, homeschoolers, one of the strongest demographics for ethnic and intact family reasons, are likely missed by this sample, skewing results in the US down. They appear to be about 4% of the total population, disproportionately white and in two parent households.
They control for schools opting not to participate; see the section under substitute schools.
It's standard research ethics that minors (and their guardians) be given the option to refuse to participate in a study.
Now I'm confused. The original inference Sailer drew from PISA was that American students outperform their racial group in other countries. You're claiming the study will be biased against white Americans. If anything you should be annoyed at Sailer for trying to support his racial performance narrative using a study that didn't really focus on it.
Regarding homeschooling in particular, it'd be nearly impossible to develop an international study on the same scale of PISA (which you already want to reject as too small) merely because homeschooling isn't prevalent in most of the PISA-participating countries.
I'm aware that they tried to control, but the bounds are large and open to exploitation by the countries who so choose to do so.
And the homeschool issue should strengthen his conclusion. I was just noting a factor he hadn't controlled for.
Both factors I pointed to would tend to mean that the relative rank for the US is in reality better than listed, IMO, but the wide bounds of substitution adjustment makes it very hard to be confident in the results.