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A comment on Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators. Parent comment

Re:Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators by samfoo on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @07:02AM (#1978804)
Not to be too much of a pedant, but: Turkish-Germans make up only 2.1% of the German population and while France doesn't have hard numbers because it's illegal to survey on the basis of race/ethnicity, estimates are around 7% of the population.

American blacks make up nearly 13% of the population in the US. That's a pretty significant difference and if you include all minority groups, America's a significantly less homogeneous place than any country in Europe or Asia that I'm aware of.

I agree with your (unstated) premise that this isn't the point, though.

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Re:Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators by maxklein on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @07:09AM (#1978815)
Actually, to be more precise, the difference in Pisa scores in Germany is not exclusively turkish, it's between people with "Migrations-background" and people without. I.e, ethnic Germans vs non-Ethnic Germans. According to this article, the difference is 56 points now (http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/wissen/0,1518,733188,00.h...). It was 90+ points previously.

Non-ethnic germans make up 20% of the population, far greater than the 2.1%. See here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland#Demografie

Same goes with France, I just used 'arabs' for demonstration, but the actual non-ethnic French percentage is higher than the ethnic blacks in the U.S.

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Re:Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators by bioh42_2 on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @10:06AM (#1979222)
Well, clearly this means moving to Germany makes you stupid. Being born in Germany clearly provides some kind of immunity.

Or am I drawing erroneous conclusions from the data?

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Re:Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators by rogulogu on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @10:36AM (#1979325)
1. Some/many (?) Germans do not accept all children born in their country as native Germans. So a person with 'migration-background' may be born in Germany, but one of the parents has immigrated. 2. I interpret the PISA data as: If parents have a low education, then in Germany their children will probably get a low education, too.
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