AspiringRationalist comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong

65 Post author: ThinkOfTheChildren 08 April 2013 09:29PM

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Comment author: knb 09 April 2013 11:57:02PM *  18 points [-]

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:

Of course, the biggest myth that the media reporting of PISA scores propagates is that the American public school system is horrible. The liberal left in U.S and in Europe loves this myth, because they get to demand more government spending, and at the same time get to gloat about how much smarter Europeans are than Americans. The right also kind of likes the myth, because they get to blame social problems on the government, and scare the public about Chinese competitiveness. We all know that Asian students beat Americans students, which "proves" that they must have a better education system. This inference is considered common sense among public intellectuals. Well, expect for the fact that Asian kids in the American school system actually score slightly better than Asian kids in North-East-Asia!

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.

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 10 April 2013 04:24:00AM -1 points [-]

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).

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.

Comment author: knb 10 April 2013 05:21:54AM *  10 points [-]

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.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 April 2013 05:06:33AM *  2 points [-]

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%.