American Indian / Alaska Native - 2.5% in 2019 - 1.6% in 2023 - 515 in 2019 - 504 in 2023

Asian - 5.3% in 2019 - 4.3% in 2023 - 586 in 2019 - 571 in 2023

Black - 13.2% in 2019 - 15.5% in 2023 - 494 in 2019 - 468 in 2023

Hispanic - 25.8% in 2019 - 26.3% in 2023 - 508 in 2019 - 491 in 2023

Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander - 1.7% in 2019 - 0.9% in 2023 - 500 in 2019 - 457 in 2023

Two or more races - 5.6% in 2019 - 8.1% in 2023 - 554 in 2019 - 542 in 2023

White - 45.9% in 2019 - 43.2% in 2023 - 559 in 2019 - 543 in 2023

It looks like all groups suffered at least 10 points in loss but these effects are definitely exaggerated by the reweighing of population proportions.

[1] - https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results19/index.asp#/math/achievem...

[2] - https://nces.ed.gov/timss/results23/index.asp#/math/achievem...

It's also the primary medium schools use to communicate analytical reasoning and deductive analysis. If you cut math as a target without fundamentally reworking curricular elements, you'll have a ton of graduates who are much worse at negotiating the validity of competing logical arguments.

That would be news to History and English teachers among others. You need to learn to make a structured and coherent argument based on evidence in many subjects and the evidence for the existence of transfer learning is so weak it seems unlikely basic Math makes the average or even 75th percentile student better at reasoning. Most people follow a formula at best, and forget that much rapidly after the end of school.

ChatGPT would soon do that for you better than you do it yourself. That begs the question - what is the core competency of humans? I see so far only the one - the ability to discover, to dig further into unknown. I think though once we get ChatGPT a bit further, such an ability would be pretty easy to add, and it would do much better than humans as it would be able to generate, prune, evaluate, verify hypotheses much faster and at incomparably larger scale/numbers.

And this is based on..? LLMs suffer from all logical fallacies humans do, afaik. It performs extremely poor where there’s no training data, since it’s mostly pattern matching. Sure, some logical reasoning is encoded in the patterns, but clearly not at a sophisticated level. It’s also easily tricked by reusing well-known patterns with variations - ie using a riddle like the wolf-lamb-shepherd with a different premise makes it fall into training data honey pot.

And as for the main argument, to replace literally critical thinking of all things, with a pattern parrot, is the most techno-naive take I’ve heard in a long time. Hot damn.

>to replace literally critical thinking of all things

Nobody forces you to replace. The ChatGPT would just be doing it better and faster as it is a pretty simple thing once the toolset gets built up which is happening as we speak.

>it’s mostly pattern matching

it is one component of ChatGPT. The other is the emergent (as a result of simple brute-force looking training) model over which that pattern-matching is performed.

Is that really what you'd teach your kids? No need for deductive reasoning, just trust the robot?

ChatGPT is certainly an interesting authority to appeal to, but I believe we as humans have a complicated history with authority.

i already do it when it comes to the translation from the languages that i don't know, ie. almost all the human languages. Soon it will be doing other types of thinking better than me too.

My oldest is in 4th grade now, and the most relevant maths are from 2nd and 3rd grade. Basic division, multiplication, and fractions matters (3rd grade) - but so does adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers (2nd grade) because multiplication/division is now multiple digit (which is the actual, new, 4th grade material). Interestingly, she used almost no adding and subtracting in 3rd grade, to the point where the teacher supplemented required coursework to help stave off attrition, so you could actually get by 3rd grade while being terrible at adding and subtracting.

Her covid year was kinder. It made her cohort pretty bad at writing. But that seems to have largely worked itself out over the past 4 years.

It's not clear to me when these tests were taken, and that kinda matters - were they by people who were starting 4th grade, finishing 4th grade, or completed 4th grade?

It matters because it tells us what they missed due to COVID - if these 4th graders had 1st grade for COVID, I'm not sure if that would be a huge deal. The most relevant bits are also taught in kinder, and they cover adding and subtracting again in 2nd. But if their main COVID year was 2nd, I could see 4th being a huge problem, especially with the general lack of adding and subtracting in 3rd grade.

Are the standards really that low? AIUI in most developed countries w/ the significant exception of the U.S. (and to a lesser extent, other English speaking countries), 4th and 5th grade math are for teaching the earliest elements of pre-algebra. (Meaning that algebraic expressions are very much not used, but the style of reasoning is clearly intended as preparation for that). They may get a lot of practice with fractions or multiple-digit arithmetic, but the basic procedures are not new to them in 4th grade. It seems to me that the U.S. educational system is underserving these kids quite significantly by not catering to their potential and actual skills for mathematical reasoning, which while not fully developed (and very much tied to "concrete" skillsets, as opposed to a real capacity for abstraction) are still quite substantial.

The US has a highly regional system, but as I understand it pre-algebra is taught starting around sixth grade (~11 year olds), which may line up a little closer to your expectations.

In most advanced countries this would be the beginning of Junior High a.k.a. Middle School. By that time the students have been thoroughly introduced to pre-algebraic reasoning already, and are broadly getting practice in it (and being taught some more advanced notions around, e.g. exponents and powers, which are of course foundational for later teaching) as preparation for actual algebraic expressions to be introduced.

In the really old days algebra was A LOT harder too. Look up an old book like Chrystal.

I do not recall it being particularly difficult and most students were able to do this stuff. I'd say that by the end we had 100% success at this out of the 50 students or so in my class. Is this algebra in the US or is it the group theory stuff we studied later on. The group theory stuff was _much_ later (12th standard - 17+ years) and we didn't go too advanced. Mostly simple stuff like proving something is a group or Abelian, etc.

The syllabus I studied was the Tamil Nadu State Board, which is considered less rigorous than the Central Board, so I can only assume the kids elsewhere were studying more advanced stuff. But overall, that sort of timing hasn't hampered me or most of my classmates from then, so one must assume it's not too bad to study group theory that late.

Your parent comment is talking about solving a single linear equation such as "5x + 2 = 1". That's where "algebra" begins in a US pre-university context.

In a university context, "algebra" does indeed refer to group theory, and the basic concept of manipulating a numeric variable goes by the more elevated name "college algebra".

Just in case you think I might be misleading you somehow, here's a cheat sheet product for a "college algebra" course; again, "college algebra" refers to the material that would normally be covered in or before high school, except that it's being covered in college. So the idea of this product is that current college students will buy it to help them understand what's going on in class, or to review for a test.

https://www.amazon.com/College-Algebra-Quick-Study-Academic/...

> RULE: if a, b, and c are any real numbers and a = b, then a + c = b + c.

[later]

> Some equations require more than one inverse operation to solve.

> EX[AMPLE]: Solve the equation 5x + 3x - 1 = 15

at one large public school district -- 80 elementary schools, middle schools and high schools -- almost half of 8th graders cannot do basic elementary school math problems.. (edit) official estimates are that about 13% of the students do not finish high school at all.. that is the local school district here in a crowded port city in California near San Francisco. also note that more than forty unique non-English languages are spoken at homes existing in this school district.. also a non-zero number of homes where serious drug abuse occurs.. things like that..

* reads, writes, sorts and compares natural numbers 0–10,000;

* presents a number as the sum of units, tens, hundreds and thousands;

* reads and writes ordinal numbers;

* adds and subtracts numbers mentally within 100, and in writing within 10,000;

* knows the multiplication table (multiplies and divides by single-digit numbers mentally within 100);

* knows the names of the members and results of four arithmetic operations;

* finds the numerical value of a letter in equations by trial and error or by analogy;

* determines the correct order of operations in an expression (parentheses, multiplication/division, addition/subtraction).

So you have elements of pre-algebra but actual algebra will be covered only in the 4th/5th grade (10-12 yo).

Generally in the US it is:

* K ~5 yo

* 1st ~6 yo

* 2nd ~7 yo

* 3rd ~8 yo

* 4th ~9 yo

* 5th ~10 yos

Give or take of course since birthdays don't align perfectly.

That seems to roughly align to US standards for the same age but not the same grade.

While not a focus, very basic forms of algebra is introduced as early as 1st grade through problems such as "4 + _ = 9".

There was a lot of stuff going on where one has to wonder how much we disproportionately sacrificed the children for disproportionately the elderly. It still deeply bothers me what effect this could have had on my child.

It now is getting to the point where this topic can be discussed without it immediately devolving to attacks.

I agree with your take, humans are also very poor at making long term tradeoffs. Just look at the environment and global warming and what we are doing as a species to stop that. You also have to consider how covid lockdowns further split class divides. Since we didn’t produce as many things for 3 years there are less things to go around which causes the price of things to go up, hence inflation. Those who belong to unions and have higher leverage (tech workers, MBAs, etc) can push for higher wages to keep up for inflation but those who do not have that leverage are left behind and become poorer.

Im a little bit worried about the reverberations of covid which are causing global instability, and possibly war. A second order effect of lockdowns and inflation is that it makes any government which was in power during lockdowns very unpopular, this has and will continue to lead to more dramatic leadership changes across the board which further reduces stability.

The cure may have been worse than the disease. They basically carpet bombed anyone who started a family right at the time the pandemic broke out.

There is general discontent in the population, who would have expected that a CEO being assassinated would be the strongest point of unity for the American people maybe since 9-11.

As more average people get pushed to the margins it will accelerate change. People will realize that it isn’t about left vs right, or race, or creed. It is about class, and those in the higher class echelons don’t want you to know that.

Babies in as diverse of backgrounds as Alaskans to Arabians were raised for thousands of years with significant face-coverings donned before going outside as the norm.

Being worried about "facial expression in strangers in public" because people covered their mouths as a harm to your baby's development is... about 10 steps past absurd. This isn't even making mountain out of a mole hill, this is making a mountain out of a grain of sand.

And of course, compared to the risks of permanently-lowered IQ due to covid brain damage, or permanent lung damage or the various fatigue and other issues millions of people suffered from covid, the risk from the infection to a baby is literally millions of times worse.

I'm not taking the racist bait.

I have no reason to think it causes any more or less issues in Alaskans/Arabians a anyone else. The fact that Arabians or Alaskans did or didn't cover in public doesn't sway the outcome one way or another. There are all sorts of cultural factors that compound outcomes, and both mainstream America and Arabs have some that succeed with in spite of, others they succeed because of.

I'm probably explaining it poorly, but what if IQ was not a test of just 'intelligence', but perhaps some proxy of intelligence, attention, motivation, and other factors combined? Having taken the WAIS-IV myself, I am not convinced the measurements are all they are cracked up to be.

Think about Homer's Odyssey. The entire epic poem was passed down verbally from memory. If I am not mistaken, Homer thought reading would make people less intelligent because reading would diminish the one's capacity for memory. Does not having the ability to recite the entire Odyssey from memory mean we have become less intelligent, or perhaps, maybe we do not need to memorize the Odyssey because our intellectual capacity is better spent on other endeavors?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/why-does-...

Blaming “covid” for learning loss in a group of people who was hardly at risk of any covid issues at all is… well… doing kids dirty. Which is par for course when it comes to the nonsense society enacted during the first half of this decade.

I can't imagine what it is like to be teaching 29 or 30 students and one pops in after crossing the Darien Gap, possibly witnessing people being raped and swept away by the jungle, then having to go on and go straight into learning arithmetic -- and then realize this is happening at mass scale. "What is 5 - 1?" The number of us remaining after we crossed the last stream.

Visa based immigration pathways, especially the non family linked ones, tend to display this effect less prominently since professional visas bring in people who on average paying higher property and other taxes and have had the resources to prepare their children for school in the US.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-19-leaves-i...

The combo of more and more parents who work all the time and/or have delegated parenting to YouTube and mobile devices, plus charter schools (1) moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards and (2) concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools are basically rotting things from the inside out.

"moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards"

When we applied to public schools for my child, the one we were most excited about was a charter school, not one run by the local school district.

As far as I can tell, charter schools have some selection pressure that is absent from government-run schools: if a charter school does poorly, parents don't choose it, and it closes. If a district-run school does poorly, the district will allocate kids there anyway.

The highest achieving charters have also been able to get mediocre non IEP kids to transfer back by setting them up to have trouble keeping up and not supporting them when they struggle.

Edit: And on the lower-performing side, you have schools focused on religion and/or patriotism, which tend to be less concerned about getting low performers out, but which aren't based as much around effective academics so much as ideology, and which do not meet the civic bar for education. Though I've also seen some that are just there to basically act like the charter equivalent of for-profit colleges: give parents in low SES areas a message of hope and then just minimize costs in the classroom.

https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/report/020515_charter...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education...

https://harvardpolitics.com/arizonas-experiment-with-charter...

https://www.12news.com/article/news/education/az-public-scho...

https://azmirror.com/2024/06/06/it-costs-arizona-332m-to-pay...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/...

I also have numerous acquaintances working in various capacities in schools (public, charter, and private) and have to say I regard all the things mentioned in the linked articles as severely under-reported. Retaliation against teachers and staff who try to get kids services at charters is a thing. Public school districts and counties having to foot evaluation costs for parochials is a thing. Refusing and avoiding evaluations for kids in charters so they can be kicked out for behavior and then the publics have to foot the evaluation costs is a thing.

I completely think if local districts (and/or families) had a spine or the right legal resources they could be suing charters who've not even tried to follow or service existing IEPs left and right when those kids are constantly enrolling in publics mid year (with those kids generally exhibiting broad spectrums declines against academic and IEP goals).

The parent comment captures the education system’s attitude toward teachers perfectly. The problem is always due to a shortcoming of the teacher, and the solution is always the responsibility of the teacher.

Do you have pull out programs, self contained classrooms, etc.? How common is it to have manifestation hearings for the kids your wife thinks are risky in the classroom?

The charter school my wife taught at (in CA) had to prove itself to the district and fight for public dollars, hence the inability to lose any kids (and dollars).

The charter school I went to years ago sounds more like the kind you’re talking about. Basically a private school that received no public funding.

To me a charter is just a school that is privately run, usually for either ideological or profit motives, or both, that parents can choose to send their kids to instead of a public school, and which gets money from the state, usually a bit less than a public school would, for each attending child. In turn, the charter school is usually subject to different and less stringent oversight and standards than the public school.

Unlike publics, usually charters do not have to accept mid-term enrollment and parents have to figure out transportation. In demand charters can cap their enrollment and use a lottery for admissions.

The key though is this point:

> gets money from the state, usually a bit less than a public school would, for each attending child

So the charter is under the same pressure as the public school since compensation is directly tied to headcount, the top priority is keeping kids or you won’t survive. I’m not sure how the schools you’re mentioning are able to push kids out and not lose money. Maybe they’re just in affluent areas.

All that to say, I’m not a huge fan of charter schools but I doubt they’re the source of our problem.

One side of the coin is basically softened McCarthyism as a school, which "encourages families to be actively involved in religious organizations of their choice" and [paraphrasing] "supports the national Motto of the United States: In God We Trust."

The other is taking advantage of the angst among professional and white collar parents and runs a curriculum several years ahead of grade level, and takes advantage of filled wait-lists to create high pressure and somewhat rigid environments where kids who don't perform at a high level in even one subject get held back a year and get pressured to leave.

I can't speak to the more "American Exceptionalism" oriented schools as much, despite relative ubiquity - I've heard of them refusing to service IEPs here and there.

But the BASIS style ones are constantly sending kids back to the public schools that are somewhat psychologicaly damaged despite performing at quite a high level. Typical policies are things like "After grade 9, students must maintain an average score of 3 or above on all AP Exams or the student may not receive full financial support for AP Exams beyond the six that are required for graduation." I have the impression that students go back to publics because of things like not wanting to repeat a year because of struggling with Mandarin and developing self esteem issues. I think they (BASIS) also have non required courses available that have extra fees associated and aren't actually included with the state funded enrollment.

Both angles are able to effectively select student populations that cost less to serve than the student population overall and avoid IEP kids and services for them.

Obviously there are others, but anecdotally, other types don't seem to have a lot of longevity.

e.g. the last article is about Arizona's ESAs, which compete with charter schools.

Sadly, when the risk of enforcement is low, many administrators will ignore the law. (This applies to government-run orgs as well.)

If anything, there should be some sort of behavioral/educational reform schools, probably operated in something closer to a military fashion, to help out not only these kids, but the countless others who they'd otherwise be disrupting.

This issue is one (of many) for why if I did decide to have my children go to school in the US it would be at a high performing private school. I'd actually prefer they have the less bubbly experience of public school, but I'm not willing to tolerate having their classes disrupted by kids who are just bee-lining to jail anyhow. I had that upbringing and I think it substantially delayed my 'educational maturity'.

What's really sad is that now the parents are not only paying extremely high taxes to cover the standard school, but now also are having to shell out extra to make sure their child gets the eduction they deserve.

Why this is shocking is that Denmark (the whole nordics) has an extremely strong public education tradition which is being very quickly eroded. Just 20 years ago private education was seen as something for the elites (e.g. Royalty) but now it's becoming an expected expense.

Almost everyone is frustrated by this: teachers, parents, students, as well as their special needs counterparts. The only people winning are the politicians who get to morally grandstand.

I was doing my best, but with others' constant attention seeking behaviour (shouting, interrupting the teacher, and other more insane things) it was impossible for the teacher to teach and me to concentrate.

If it wasn't for my last year at a private school I wouldn't be where I am now.

I understand they want to create an environment where the kids may feel guilty or something else, but the problem isn't with who they're with in school, most likely. And by problem I mean the CORE problem. That is in most cases a deep issue at home.

We're basically running social experiments on kids.

There are problem kids, but the effect of concentrating them is much worse than the effect of distributing them, much like piling things on one section of net is more likely to break it than distributing them.

There is, in IMO, a ceiling to the percentage of behavior and academic IEP kids you can have in one classroom without it impacting regular kids substantially. (Though for very extreme kids it might just plain not be viable or safe at all.)

Historically reform schools have not been an effective model, but they were also often basically just a way to keep problem kids away from more normal ones and would have treated teen pregnancy the same as severe autism the same as emotional disorders.

You do see more and more self-contained rooms in publics for severe case kiddos that can't be in normal classrooms, which is a bit similar.

Which is to say one child really can ruin the experience of other children. But making it so that private schools and charters have means to keep down the ratio of destructive traumatizers, IEP time wasters, etc., compared to publics doesn't solve anything. It just artificially makes public schools seem worse, cost burdens them, and creates more social stratification.

You basically end up with a tiered system where most public schools have turned into bad reform schools that can't avoid underperforming. Meanwhile, it's not that charters are good, it's just that they've been able to take advantage of two layers of selection to filter out cost centers that decrease performance.

And in turn you are now damaging the prospects of any kid whose parents aren't interested in keeping them out of the public school compared to the other options.

Being from Arizona and having some experience with the charter schools there, I'm curious which ones you have in mind

Note that their "officially" Christian schools are private: https://christos.greatheartsamerica.org/

So in theory their charters are more secular, but they're going to get as far up on the line as they can.

I have (a not close) relative who is sending his kid to a different charter where their whole website is about how much patriotism and flag rah rah is in the curriculum and how they adhere to traditional gender roles, but for the life of me I can't remember the name.

Another chain focused on God and "Patriotism"

That is an interesting contrast with the British equivalent. Religious schools are generally academically much better, so much so that people lie about their religion (and start turning up to church etc.) to get in (IIRC it is a condition of state funding that a minimum proportion of students are followers of the religion).

I'm sure there are outliers in either school type, but categorizing religious schools as lower performing doesn't to fit my experiences at all.

On top of that, they are quite generous and inexpensive as non-state schools. Listed tuition does vary considerably, as some elite Catholic schools are truly very expensive. However, they're not representative of typical tuition costs, and in either case, they usually offer financial assistance. They even lower tuition for each subsequent child you send to their school. Some schools (like Regis in NYC) are completely free, if you get in.

On top of that, Catholic laity have been founding schools independently in the last ~20 years or so (that is, these are private schools that are not under the direct authority of the bishop of the local diocese). These tend to emphasize a return to classical curricula (like the trivium and quadrivium), updated and supplemented accordingly.

(Those with a prejudice against religious schools as a whole also fail to understand that a guiding worldview is always present in any school. This cannot be avoided. In fact, it is nonsensical. It is the backdrop that determines the organization and structure of curricula in the first place. State schools in the modern liberal state naturally insinuate and teach a liberal worldview, one that bona fide Catholics merely tolerate as a matter of practicality, but utterly reject as a matter of principle, as the liberal worldview along with its liberal anthropology is at odds with the Catholic worldview. Education is ultimately a matter of intellectual formation which is something that entails some measure of moral formation as well. The liberal arts are first and foremost about freeing a person to be able to reason and reason proficiently, not about producing economic actors first and foremost, though you could naturally expect someone with this formation to be well-prepared for the world of work as well as a consequence of having been formed intellectually and morally.)

When I read this, I thought there was no way it could be true.

When I Googled it and looked at the first few search results, I thought “It must be just a few schools.”

It’s not.

I have always thought that equality of outcome is an unrealistic goal, but I was wrong. You get equal outcomes if you just give everyone an “A.”

Reminds me of Bart Simpson coming home from school with an “everyone gets a trophy day” trophy.

He believed radio carbon dating was a lie and the earth was literally ~5k years old.

There are confounding factors that SAT scores don't surface.

An interesting question is, would that person in your example answer a question about radio carbon dating correctly on a test? It's possible they know the correct answer to mark but have separate philosophical beliefs. This would further support the idea that the religious schools have high academic achievement even if the beliefs differ.

Self directed learning, reading comprehension, maths skills, critical thinking skills, ability to identify and reject sophistry, these abilities have some overlap perhaps but can each be skilled up separately and impact how a person can later function in roles that depend on the ability to identify true/false propositions.

Do you view the utility and practice of having overlapping confirmations and methodologies for radiometric dating (radiocarbon, potassium–argon, uranium–lead, etc.) to be a philosophic belief?

Do you think that it is wise to spend time and money formally training "high potential" people to have such deeply systemic errors in reasoning to the point that they flat reject peer reviewed, high confidence data and methods as a positive?

We aren't talking about being a Theist, Deist, ETC. We aren't talking about religious beliefs as most christians support radiometric dating, we are talking about educational materials for the young that reject following the data in pragmatic, well documented, well confirmed, high utility fields and rejects them out of pocket with untestable unobservable and sometimes demonstrably false alternatives. I don't want my curriculum to be the blind (or the sophists) leading the blind and to pretend these are equivalent because this self selected group trends towards higher SAT scores seems to miss the point.

I am pro-homeschooling and private schools generally and have multi generational exposure and participation in these things. Let a family believe whatever it wants to believe intellectually, I generally believe these variations to be positive in ensuring the human race is more diverse in exploring the "search space".

That being said, one of the smartest people I know, with all the raw materials in the world became a PHD scientist in molecular biology and bioinformatics and got nerd sniped by his YEC background, the years he's spent spinning his wheels due to an inability to follow the conclusions of his cognitive dissonance means he might as well not have become a scientist at all. It's enough that his family did that to him and it's fine or whatever, but we shouldn't have tax paid educators and curriculums participate in the cognitive crippling of children if our goal is to have a functional and productive society.

There are many people who hold beliefs that run contrary to the evidence on a variety of subjects from all educational backgrounds.

"...because this self selected group trends towards higher SAT scores seems to miss the point."

If it does, it's a point that hasn't been made yet. This entire post is about test scores, which is the way education is measured. If you're contending that public schools produce better reasoning than religious schools, then please provide that data.

"but we shouldn't have tax paid educators and curriculums participate in the cognitive crippling of children if our goal is to have a functional and productive society."

This part left me unclear, as this is also the same sort of complaint many parents are having about some of the ideologies being taught (or how they're being taught) in public schools, which are publicly funded. Most states do not publicly fund religious/private schools.

"Do you think that it is wise to spend time and money formally training "high potential" people to have such deeply systemic errors in reasoning to the point that they flat reject peer reviewed, high confidence data and methods as a positive?"

So how did your example achieve a PhD if he contradicted the peer reviewed evidence? I assume the review board and degree was from a secular school and you have implied the secular school process doesn't permit these sorts of reasoning flaws. Perhaps their reasoning on most subjects is solids and they have a few blind spots. This is generally true of most people, including those from public schools. Also, let it be known that many successful scientists have challenged existing positions successfully to discover new things. Science encourages challenging existing positions as part of the process to make new discoveries. This is one of the reasons there are so few "laws" in science and so many "theories".

"We aren't talking about religious beliefs as most christians support radiometric dating, we are talking about educational materials for the young that reject following the data in pragmatic, well documented, well confirmed, high utility fields and rejects them out of pocket with untestable unobservable and sometimes demonstrably false alternatives."

Ok... so what is your point? The vast majority of religious schools support radio cabon dating just as you admit that most religions do. I'm pretty confident that my comment chain has been using qualifiers to indicate that there may be outliers, but that in general religious schools do not have lower academic standards as indicated by the test score data. There may be outliers in any of the various school types, but the data is pretty clear that the current measures of academic success are test scores and post-secondary education, for which religious school score at least as well on. This refutes the original comment that religious schools have academically lower standards. Unless someone has actual data and not just anecdotal that says otherwise.

Unless you have well designed co-hort studies most of the data just isn't really useful. The SAT, like any other measure that becomes the standard, is going to be gamed. I'm trying to highlight why a shallow and cursory glance at any data can be misleading and adding specific observations as food for thought.

Take it as you will. Test scores surely are directional and with universal declines that is worrying, but that isn't the sole topic of discussion in the thread is it?

The intial ellipses is pretty indicative, it seems clear that radiometric dating is a charity belief and is not something one thinks is a valid mechanism for acquiring accurate data and facts that map to observable, testable reality.

I think most people wouldn't have so much difficulty distinguishing philosophic positions and fact acquiring methodologies, I mean some people view physical reality as not existing and all material endeavor and observation to be a waste, surely that's an equally valid worldview to inculcate and spend tax money on, so as long as mandatorg testing scores are within the margin of error these beliefs have no downside to fund with tax dollars?

I mean if we draw no lines than why teach math or have an SAT at all? Being able to identify and record observable facts are not a critical part of education in some people's estimation it seems.

Unless you have well designed co-hort studies most of the data just isn't really useful."

Interesting that you claim the data isn't really useful, but then are forceful about a narrative being wrong. This seems like the issue you are complaining about - holding beliefs without facts or contrary to facts.

1. "Religion" is not a monolithic category. It is effectively synonymous with "worldview". The content of a given worldview matters. So, pace modern doctrines of "tolerance", not all worldviews are equal. The notion that they are is simply absurd, as they all vary and differ and make different claims.

2. Doctrine is inevitable. As the Chestertonian quote goes, there are only two kinds of people: those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it. A person cannot function without doctrine. The trouble is that the liberal order has managed to convince us that its doctrines aren't doctrines at all. They're just taken to be "obviously true" or "obviously neutral", which they are not.

3. Since doctrine is inevitable, then all schools at the very least insinuate the doctrines of the governing worldview in the manner things are taught and structured and in the way the school is run. In state schools, these are typically liberal doctrines. That is obvious: why would the state propagate doctrines of a worldview other than the one that it is governed by? It may demonstrate a certain tolerance for other worldviews, but the limits of this tolerance are determined by the doctrines of the governing worldview. This is inescapable, and it is dishonest to deny it.

4. Teaching doctrines is not opposed to knowledge. In fact, if a doctrine is true, then learning it is learning knowledge.

5. Now, among schools we classify as "religious", Catholic schools certainly teach both religious subject matter as well as all the sorts of subject matters you might expect to be taught in a school. We're not talking about some weird American Protestant sect here. Fides et ratio.

Too many lean into the crude caricatures of their imagination.

I have to say, however, that it seems slightly tendentious of you to pick out liberalism (albeit in broadest possible sense of the word) in this manner. Is there anything to justify seeing this issue as being specific to, or concentrated within, liberalism? Prior to your comment, liberalism has not been an issue in this discussion.

On the other hand you have more traditional religious private schools, whether Catholic, segregation academies, etc., and these kinds usually have good academic standards and are probably more comparable to what you refer to. They are also rarely intersecting with the charter system.

Any child of any ability, race, socioeconomic background has a right to an education.

That is promise of public education.

The charter school can be selective. They can deny education.

The charter school - better for your child? Sounds like it.

Better for society, no.

Charter schools cannot be selective.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ch/cefcharterschools.asp

  A charter school is a public school that may provide instruction in any combination of grades (transitional kindergarten through grade twelve).

  A charter school shall admit all students who wish to attend the school; however, if the number of students exceeds the school's capacity, attendance shall be determined by a public random drawing.

[1] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/administrative-failures-pl...

[2] https://www.legalaiddc.org/blogs/client-spotlight-unemployme...

Public education is notoriously bad at addressing the situation when some particular child frequently disrupts education of twenty others who would like to make use of their right. This is something that the noble proclamations like yours tend to just ignore.

Better for society, no."

I'm curious how you think this is true. If it's better for the children in them, then they should have a better education and be more likely to contribute to society yo their maximum potential. So there's the positive side. What we would have to show is that there is a significant negative side for the students still in public schools that was not there before. The only real argument I've heard from this was about how to reduces funding from public schools. However, it also reduces costs for the reduced number of students, so it doesn't seem like a big factor. In fact, most studies show public schools having significantly higher per student budgets than the charters. So what is the negative impact on society?

Don't these scores sort of suggest a negative impact? We've been leaning further and further into charter schools in the US and I don't see where education is thriving.

If there are positive impacts on society, I would think you could very easily show us over the past 20 decades. We have more than 10x the number of charter school students today than in 2000.

==In fact, most studies show public schools having significantly higher per student budgets than the charters.==

I thought charter schools were public schools.

You are presenting a generic correlation between downward trending test scores and prevalence of charter schools. Are there any studies with a real correlation that corrects for other factors? Let's remember that correlation is not causation. Especially consider that achievement was already on a downward trend and that 10x number you quote is only resulting in 6-10% of all public school students today. Even if there is a correlation with the number of charter school students and a decrease in test scores, what is the actual reason or mechanism? Just saying overall scores are still going down and charter enrollments are up doesn't show anything.

The outcome for society is that every single student got a sub-par education, because things moved at a glacial pace, had constant interruptions, students felt unsafe, the pace was so slow that students felt bored, etc.

A far better outcome would have been to make a small public school for the highly-academically oriented students (top-10%, future doctors and engineers) a disruption-free normal curriculum (middle-80%) and a special-needs school for all the students who had learning disabilities, behavioral issues, etc which prevented them from being able to thrive in a conventional classroom.

What about the students that fit into more than one group? I did not "thrive" in any classroom nor would I still. I had behavioral problems and a learning disability (though I was still an A/B student). I still became a software engineer, but I didn't know I had a learning disability until my 20s. Had I know when I was a kid, where would I have been placed? I had special needs, which were completely ignored (and still are), but I turned out average to above average enough.

Well actually, I did have one instance of being in an 'under the table' special needs program when I was in 6th grade. I was never told why I was in this program for part of every school day, and my parents were never informed. Idk about anyone else, but I did not enjoy being treated like a 'lesser person' because of something I could not control.

Also, what good are these special needs programs for students with learning disabilities when there is no place for many such people in the working world? If anything, I find these programs set people up for more failure than success. The golden rule of non-visible disabilities is to never mention them to any prospective or current employer. Often times, it's a one-way ticket to an eventual PIP/lay-off/firing. 1.5x time on tests is cute, but virtually no employer is giving someone 1.5x on a deadline because they are disabled.

2. Religious private schools do not need to meet the same educational requirements as public schools.

3. Charter schools have some selection pressure, but public schools dont have a profit motive.

4. "Charter Schools" as a category is wildly varied, with some excellent institutions, and others that are grifting off the taxpayer dollar.

The most important thing however, is the vicious cycle they introduce. Public schools are required to educate every child, regardless of the expense of doing so. Charter schools face no such requirement. So when charter schools exist in that system, every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them inherently makes life more difficult for the public school they're leaving. This in turn increases the incentive for every other high achieving student to leave, which makes the public school's situation worse and worse each time.

Charter schools where I live are required to educate every child. Admissions is via lottery. Is that not the case where you live? (Of course, this doesn't apply to private schools, which definitely cherry pick students, but we're talking about charter schools.)

Re: "public schools don't have a profit motive", this is technically true, but there are plenty of people working for public school districts who contribute little yet draw large salaries and lifetime pensions. A charter school that doesn't make ends meet is forced to shut down. A government-run school district that doesn't make ends meet gets given more money. (This is true in San Francisco at least. I realize that teacher and admin compensation varies widely across the US.)

BTW in most places (even places like Arizona which are relative pro school choice), the per-pupil funding of charter schools is much much less than the per-pupil funding of government-run school districts.

Because charter schools (at least here in California) have to accept any student, just like any other public school, they don't contribute to the cycle you describe. (Obviously private schools do, but I don't think you're advocating outlawing privately-funded schools.)

In AZ also keep in mind that the funding difference is complicated by education scholarship accounts, which are bankrupting the state.

Here they’re required to educate BUT they can do a lot to deter expensive students. If they don’t have support staff, kids with special needs won’t apply. If they require a test to advance grades, those kids will leave. If they require lots of homework, anyone without a nanny or stay-at-home parent and lots of support will leave.

My wife used to teach at one of those schools and it followed an arc over a decade where they started claiming they were cheaper but once they added the legally required support staff they were only cheaper to the extent that they paid their staff less by hiring young teachers and burning them out before they got old enough to expect better pay or have major health insurance expenses.

That is basically the arc of every charter school: every few years you’ll hear about someone doing miracles on a tight budget, but over time it’ll either disappear as regression to the mean sets in or turn out to be some form of selection to avoid expensive children. There just isn’t one weird trick an entire profession has somehow missed.

Is this a state thing? In California, I don't get to stop paying taxes if my children go to a charter school. Or, am I just not understanding the point you're making re: "funding?" Are charter schools not also public where you live?

  * NOT subsidizing private schools
  * NOT determining school funding based on child count

Which is entirely not how things are run right now. Government inefficiency frequently relates to 'yearly budgets' and places that look to continue to spend a given year's budget because otherwise it'll go somewhere else. Rather than just doing what's necessary when it's necessary irrespective of how much or little doing the most effective and efficient thing costs.

> (btw for the acronym haters: "Individualized educational program". Those of older gens may know it as "Special Education")

Thank you for spelling this out. I've spoken with some educators in the charter system and was always a bit confused by what they meant with IEP.

As a taxpayer I hate waste. As a long-serving business owner I accept that some level of waste is a cost of doing business.

There are several problems with the concept of "waste".

firstly it's most obvious in hindsight. It's much less obvious in foresight. We spend money with an objective in mind, and in some number of times we fail to meet that objective.

Take marketing as an example. It costs money to attend an event. Will we get a return? sometimes no.

Of course the easiest way to avoid waste is simply not to take risks, not to spend anything. If we prioritize "avoid waste" we create an environment where "nothing is attempted".

Your suggestion to criminalize this with personal accountability makes things worse. What you'll get is no money spent at all, because the risk of spending -any- money could see you in jail.

Secondly, in order to criminalize waste you need to detect it, measure it, prosecute it, defend it, and so on. None of that comes cheap. So you spend money to save money?

Of course we already do this to some extent. We keep books. We have audits. If we detect waste we might examine it, consider alternatives, learn lessons to avoid it. But that's a long long way from the costs of criminal prosecution.

Thirdly you create perverse incentives for bad actors. Don't like a teacher? Accuse them of waste. You can probably find some cause. Your competitor got a contract at a local school? Be sure to loudly proclaim that as waste because you "would have done it cheaper". Sure you would do a crap job that may have failed in 2 years instead of 20, but who's to say?

Send a few teachers to jail - does that increase or decrease the likelihood of people growing up wanting to be teachers?

So yeah, I dislike waste. But preventing waste comes with a price, not just in money. Be careful in what you choose to optimize.

In a system with a mixture of public and private schools, the public schools will always be a necessary feature of the selectivity of private schools. Not only to accept "problem" kids, but also to operate in areas where it's not profitable to run private schools, or in cases where private schools run into financial and management problems and must be bailed out.

So it's not so much that the private schools are "better" but that they both function as interdependent parts of a system.

On the other hand, there will always be a need for special education... mainstreaming all kids in one classroom hasn't worked very well either.

This article is good and its conclusions are mostly[0] sound:

https://open.substack.com/pub/sfeducation/p/wanted-careful-a...

[0] I strongly disagree with the conclusion that, if government-run schools have excess capacity, then we should prevent charter schools from being opened or expanded.

Any source for this? My understanding is that most states have criteria for what needs to be taught in a primary and secondary school, regardless of public or non-secular. In my experience (attending, touring, friends who are teachers), the non-secular schools had higher standards.

"concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools"

Public schools in many areas are increasingly doing this by sending G-IEP to entirely separate schools. Indirectly, they are also doing this by increasing school population. Smaller communities tend to better self-police. The biggest issue is the lack of appropriate involvement followed by the lack of leverage the school has. In some areas, some non-public schools even get district IEP resources for their IEP students, so they aren't all avoiding it.

IE public school has to pay but the money goes to the non-public.

Aside: Your 2 comments are sounding alarm bells in my head, and I can't pinpoint why. Especially when the numbers seem to demonstrate the exact opposite of what you're describing in your first comment (scores amongst white students seem to shift downward).

Schools in much of the US were closed longer than many of those around the world.

Doesn't mean it hasn't happened elsewhere, but that may be a cultural issue due to many of the social safety nets that exist in other countries simply not being a thing in the US.

It's Australian and more specifically focused on Victoria, a state with some of the longest global lockdown periods, while more generally comparing to other global educational research on the pandemic effect.

No one paper has all the answers you seek, but a handful of nodes in an interlinked web might do the trick for you.

* The indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and adolescents https://www.mcri.edu.au/images/documents/migrate/mcri_4_rese...

The government certainly seems teachers as babysitters to some extent. There has been a push for more time in school, from having breakfast at school to more after school activities. More parenting being taken on by schools (I just read about "supervised toothbrushing" in schools on .gov.uk).

How well schools coped with it varied too. My older daughter's school (a well funded sixth form college) had relatively good IT, enough laptops to give them to kids who did not have computers at home, headsets and cameras for teachers etc. My younger daughter was home educated so it was easier to adapt but she still missed out on quite a lot of things, or had to do them online instead of in person and while she came out of it OK, its must have done some harm.

"if parents can’t afford after school minding but really need to hold down a job"

i.e. if you want to expand the workforce by providing child minding on the cheap through schools.

Kids are riddled with ADHD auto immune diseases like psoriasis or eczema, obesity, depression

I think the skin and mental health conditions are the canary in the coal mine

I'm hearing about adults dying to colon cancer all the time, some hit very close to home

Peak intellect requires a stable physiological basis

| American Indian / Alaska Native | 2.5% | 1.6% | -0.9% | 515 | 504 | -11 |

| Asian | 5.3% | 4.3% | -1.0% | 586 | 571 | -15 |

| Black | 13.2% | 15.5% | +2.3% | 494 | 468 | -26 |

| Hispanic | 25.8% | 26.3% | +0.5% | 508 | 491 | -17 |

| Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander | 1.7% | 0.9% | -0.8% | 500 | 457 | -43 |

| Two or more races | 5.6% | 8.1% | +2.5% | 554 | 542 | -12 |

| White | 45.9% | 43.2% | -2.7% | 559 | 543 | -16 |

I did notice many of the top countries have this fun footnote, "National Defined Population covers less than 90 percent of National Target Population (but at least 74 percent)". Which probably translates to they didn't measure the worst performing kids which likely gooses the numbers pretty decently...

The U.S. has this one, "Met guidelines for sample participation rates only after replacement schools were included." Which means some schools declined to participate so they had to ask others.

I am not a race or genetics expert, but I think "Asian" is not a race.

Asia includes the Indian subcontinent, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Natives of the subcontinent are different from Orientals, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, for example, but both are Asian.

Are Amish white? People from Turkey? Sicilians? Argentinians?

I find the whole concept of "race" perplexing and catering to the lowest common denominator.

Same with "whites" (whatever the definition is and for the life of me I just dont understand). An Australian moving to Canada has a culture shock that is inversely similar to a Japanese going to Paris.

Americans are weirdly still clinging on to the race concept

> Americans are clinging

Yeah, I’m not buying that race is a uniquely American construction. It’s probably the place where discussing race has the least social tolerance.

No. the rest of the world doesnt discuss it because it makes the least sense. I gave you examples above. It doesnt make sense to put an Aussie and Canuck in same bracket, neither does it make sense to put a Thai and Japanese in same bracket for whatever data point you want.

Even within India a sikh has nothing in common with naga has nothing in common with Tamils.

Race is an absurd abstract. Why not hair color? or eye color? or eye shape?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology

Phrenology is a pseudoscience that involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.[1][2]

And that’s true for most people which is why editors fight so hard to control it.

If it’s so obviously false, can you share the landmark study or experiment that disproved it?

>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42384308

And I quote two of your words from that comment:

"trivially" and "probably"

to show what I mean. See those words in the context of the sentences in which they occur, and it can be seen that you are not giving any evidence for your claims either.

Do your own research, if my comment is so important to you.

Also this is HN, a forum, not a court of law. Tons of other users on here, regularly and casually make comments which may seem false to others, without giving evidence for their statements.

Notice what charged label on the page [1]? By common sense logic of conversation, if you considered that I was using a "charged label" (whatever the heck that means) in my argument, the onus was on you to, at a minimum, mention that label, which you clearly did not do, although I think I can guess which one you mean.

>If it’s so obviously false, can you share the landmark study or experiment that disproved it?

How about you first sharing "the landmark study or experiment" that proves it?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology

And I wonder if you read the whole article, seeing that the word "discredited" (referring to phrenology) appears at least 5 or 6 times in the article, in many cases with citations.

Don't try to mislead, by using words like "charged label". The conclusion is clearly made by the Wikipedia page, not by me. I merely quoted it. Anyone who doubts that can go read it first, before making "absolute conclusions".

> It doesnt make sense to put an Aussie and Canuck in same bracket,

Of course it does? If you’re talking about their common ancestors groups.

There’s also skull shape and nose length. But what’s the point of binning by these traits? US usual racial division is nonsensical (and I’d say offensive if I was american) and no one dares to question it. You literally blow the question of genetical origin to 100x size compared to the rest of the world. And yet don’t even do it in a way that could make sense instead of being a phenomenon similar to racism but by ignorance and meaningless overgrouping. And then avoid talking about it cause it’s a taboo. It is uniquely American.

That's exactly what I implied by my above comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42383753 ), which means the same as this part of yours: (i.e. you can still identify them trivially. There are common physical traits that form a family resemblance.).

But mine was referring to the differences between Indians on the one hand, and East Asians (and some others) on the other hand.

Here, the ”East Asians” includes Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and Koreans, among others, and the "some others" also includes Tibetans, Nepalese, Bhutanese and Sikkimese, and Burmese, and people of the North Eastern states of India, such as Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, and Tripura.

All of these above people can easily be distinguished from (the rest of) Indians by their narrow eyes.

I don't know what is so difficult to understand about this. Nor is it discriminatory. It is simply stating obvious facts, that anyone can visually ascertain for themselves.

It is the people who behave in a discriminatory way towards anyone, based on where they come from, or their ethnicity, who are the real racists, not those who talk in an innocuous way about distinguishing visual characteristics of various categories of people.

>Yeah, I’m not buying that race is a uniquely American construction. It’s probably the place where discussing race has the least social tolerance.

(

>American

Say the word right, dude. USian, not American. :)

)

Discussing race may have the least social tolerance in USA (or not), but when it comes to actual behaviour, i.e. racism?

See:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States

What a huge amount of racism there is there, from the origin of the country until today. George Floyd, anyone (as just one example, as late as 2020)?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd

If a poor neighborhood in a major city is failing math it is the a combination of the neighborhood being poor as opposed to race.

Race is never a good demographic period.

Thanks for sharing the data, but your own data doesn't appear to support that comment.

If I'm reading correctly, the overall drop in US scores was 18 points. The drop in US scores of the two largest populations were 16 points and 17 points respectively. This isn't Sampson's paradox at all. This is exactly what it looks like, each subpopulatuon dropped significantly in score between the pre-covid test and this one.

To call a difference in score of 17 vs 18 (the overall average) an "exaggeration due to reweighting" is quite a misleading stretch of interpretation.

At most hypothesis may be false, or unsupported by the evidence, but never is a hypothesis by itself "bigotry".

TLDR: Not all suppositions are hypotheses.

To consider, represent, or cause to appear as larger, more important, or more extreme than is actually the case; overstate.

As you point out, the weighted difference is ~17 which you can clearly see in the data. Increasing this by a full point is quite significant and most people do not even have the intuition that it is even mathematically possible to increase 17 to 18. This is why we teach Simpson's paradox. I also posted the data so people could come to their own conclusion. Just because you use a definition of exaggeration to mean some nonsensically large difference, that does not make my claim misleading.

> The extent of the decline seems to be driven by the lowest performing students losing more ground, a worrying trend that predates the pandemic.

> Scores for the highest performing American fourth graders were about the same as in 2019, but the lowest performing students — those in the bottom 10% — saw their scores drop by 37 points in math and by 22 points in science compared with similar students in 2019. The lowest performing eighth graders saw their scores drop by 19 points in math. One in five U.S. eighth graders scored below the low benchmark, meaning they lacked even basic proficiency.

> This gap between high- and low-performing students started to widen before the pandemic for reasons that are unclear. Since then, other research into post-pandemic academic performance has found widening gaps across race and income, even as many middle and higher income students are doing well.

What do we do with this info?

* Yours is that the bottom 10% are declining. That says nothing about who is in the bottom 10%.

* The GP says the composition of the population has changed, and blames immigrants.

it doesn't say the immigrants are to blame, it just strongly implies that this could be a likely reason, furthermore for some reason to be an immigrant is to not be white which certainly was not the case when I immigrated to America.

American immigrants are no longer white, overwhelmingly.

That doesn't make this argument credible. Is there any credible source?

> rather than that they’re blaming immigrants, which I didn’t see in this post

We know well that the talking points of racism are formed to create ambiguity and use dog whistles. That goes back half a century and probably much longer. These are the talking points.

If, for example, they degraded, then it would indicate there is a problem happening that even the higher socioeconomic status doesn't protect from despite all its benefits (well it might protect relatively better that other SES, but not enough to prevent the downward trend).

If, instead, they improved relative to their past selves, it would indicate the problem causing the overall trend is found entirely within other SES groups (well not entirely, as it is possible the impact still hit this group but that other factors more than made up for it, but to keep it simple, we can ignore such a possibility unless we see even better data that can parse out these more complex relationships).

The most urgent things that need to happen to stop this are:

- Ensuring sick leave, vacation time, and improving wages, especially on the lower end, such that 1.5 incomes are sufficient for 2 child homes so that parents can have time for their children.

- Policies that severely disincentivize vouchers, private, and charter education so that there are fewer incentives to try and create "tides that selectively lift boats."

- Increasing the housing supply.

Americans, overwhelmingly, agree that things are not going in the right direction. What they are split on, is how to fix it, and what is the greatest driver.

About #2 (disincentivize charter education): parents created charter schools because they disagreed on the choices that was made for them in public education. It is very hard to fight this, as 1- they see a huge difference in test results 2- they want to give their children the best chances in life.

Finland solution was to ban all private education. Once rich kids were forced to go to public schools, then suddenly education became a larger part of the gov budget, those parents spent more time asking for reforms, volunteering etc.

They have one of the best performant school systems in the planet. And all it takes is not allowing a percentage of the population think of education as optional

How does the existence of private schools enables this thinking?

Or that's how I interpret what GP said. Happening a bit where I live: richer families don't want their kids go to school in problematic suburbs.

> noisy school-is-boring kids sabotaging the classes for everyone.

It seems that those parents realize that if the system does not care about ensuring that kids in school actually learn things, then they better leave than trying to fix the kids of others (i.e., parents who does not care).

I would argue that it is a net positive for those public schools: those parents still pay local taxes while making sure that there are fewer students -> better student/teacher ratio.

And yes, schools are funded by local taxes, but it doesn't have to be that way: if states really wanted to, they could take that power away from municipalities. The constitution gives the states broad powers to run themselves as they like.

Here is a simple example. There is a family with a combined 6k income, their expenses are 2k on rent and 1.5k on child private school, grocieries etc account for 500, savings another 500 and the remaining 1.5k goes on taxes.

Now the goverment proposes a 10% tax raise to improve public schools. Do you think this family would vote for or agaiinst that bill?

Now lets propose a counter example. Same salary, same expenses minus the private school, which gives the family 2k of savings per month. Now due to shortages in public schools they have volunteered at their kids school, helped with field trips, met other parents and families in their neighbourhood. Now the goverment does a 20% tax raise for public schooling. Would this family be more or less willing than the other family to vote yes?

By simply being involved you and your vote become resposinble for it. If you can pay your way away, specially if you stretch your finances to afford it, then investing in the system goes against your own interests regardless of the social externalities of your position.

We could have a society were parents of privately educated kids voted for a public school improvement, but psicologically and economically we know they by and large dont. Therefore the existance of private schooling comes at the expense of a fair, well resourced, and functional public education

My experience does not track with this at all, especially in the context of the very wide brush you're applying it. I was involved in a lot of extracurricular events around math/science in school, and it was not the white kids winning those events. There were some pretty racist comments about it as well which makes it stand out even more in my memory.

I would go a bit further and say that Asians should be in their own group altogether and not compared to anyone else until the other groups are remediated. They are so far off the scale, especially on the high end, that I'm not sure comparisons help until we can get everyone up to, at least, their neighborhood.

(There is also a North/South divide in Europe but Northern Italy is in the high IQ group.)

1: https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html

For anecdotal flavor I’ll mention that I briefly worked in Hollywood and casting requests trended towards “BIPOC” rather than “non-white”, including in roles that had no evident racial component (i.e., the request was indicative of an apparent desire to have a “diverse” cast.

I could be misunderstanding HN User dylan604, but I suspect the kids winning those competitions were not white or black. I could be wrong, but I think we all know who we suspect were winning those competitions. And it wasn't white or black kids.

Evidently “immigrants” is a popular term of convenience for all folks – left, right, and center.

Maybe I'm reading the data wrong, but it seems to say that Pacific Islanders are the lowest performers, blacks the second lowest, and Hispanics the third lowest? Again, if I'm incorrect, please do correct me.

So I add up, say, Pacific Islander and Black population percentages, and it's maybe 16.5%. I mean, the weights... well put it this way, again, I could be wrong, but when I remove them from the data, I can see only one group that meets the target mark for being ready to learn more advanced concepts.

ETA:

- Misread charts initially and mistakenly said that two groups met the mark. Nope. Only one group met the mark. Point being, even if we drop Pacific Islanders and blacks from the numbers, the US wouldn't even make the top ten. We should be, at least in the top five in my opinion, but that's not happening right now. And that problem is occurring very much across the board. Again, someone correct me if I'm wrong.

- Also, not sure if it is well known or not, but the target TIMSS mark is 550 for being able to process next concepts.

Don't forget, American Black people speak American English (albeit frequently with a dialect, but they're capable of code-switching to standard American English). New immigrants from south of the border do not. It would make sense for many people, even if racist, to consider Blacks a part of their "tribe" since they share a language and culture, to an extent, whereas Spanish speakers from the south would be seen as a different tribe.

But I agree, blacks and Pacific Islanders combined don't comprise enough of the population to be causing the drop in numbers. I removed the lowest performers from the data entirely, and could only count one group that actually performed on a level indicating a readiness to process next concepts. And that group, I'm assuming, is comprised of a large number of immigrants.

So, until it can be explained why no one other than asians performed satisfactorily, I'm just not sure the data supports this drop being about immigrants. We obviously have a lot of work to do fixing the education system in this country, and the people out here talking about immigrants or blacks are, for whatever reason, trying to get in the way of doing that work.

The data is clearly stating that there is a problem here. And, in the US anyway, that problem exists in every demographic but one.

ETA: Again, the level for readiness to process next concepts is set at 550 for TIMSS.

It doesn't match my personal experience. It is _well known_ in Europe that the American K-12 education system is weak.

Anecdata: All the exchange students from my middle- and high-school (in a third world country in Europe) came back saying they already knew the math that was being taught in the US school.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

The education system is the same for all the kids, unless US Whites are using a different curriculum from the other demographic groups.

"If we massage this data set the right way, we get the chart we want".

Also, because demographics aren't distributed evenly geographically, I think there is probably a case that the education system is different for different races (to the extent that racial geographic distribution is different).

This is incorrect, certainly an ideal we'd all like but far from reality. The educational experiences and outcomes of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants can and often does differ significantly from native-born students. Seeing the difference in the data/scores should clue you into this and helps us understand the socioeconomic impact on student achievement that immigration has. Language is often a large factor where 1st and 2nd generation students may be speaking a different language at home than they are in school. The US has significantly more immigrants than other countries in the world which is why not controlling for it skews the data disproportionately.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

If that table is to believed, the US is kind of middle of the pack if you sort by percentages, at 15%. It might even be middle of the pack for developed countries, too

[1] This is the fairest comparison because people immigrate to rich countries in general. The only poor countries with lots of immigrants are generally safe poor countries right next to war-torn countries, which get lots of refugees.

Switzerland: 30% Sweden: 20% Canada: 21% Germany, Austria etc.

It's the same for any educational achievement measures, including PISA. Kids from households with two parents who are working professionals and college educated will do fine most of the time, and kids without those privileges will struggle most of the time.

Anecdote: I still have a chipped front tooth from “the other demographic” throwing a ball at my face in public high school PE.

Because it's a random axis to split the data on and you only do it for the US, which makes zero sense to do when comparing entire countries.

What about Tunisian immigrants in France? Maybe they'd be at the very top? What about Whites in all countries? Maybe White kids across the globe are better than White kids in the US, which would put the US at the bottom?

We cannot conclude that "US education is amongst the top in the world" from the chart you presented.

The problem is that they fall way behind in the 3 months not in school.

By what measure? As far as I know it is poor, in absolute terms and relative to its peers.

For the rest, do you have any evidence for the statements, or that the outcome depends on race (and not, for example, income, local school quality, etc)? A very large portion of the US population is neither immigrant nor white. 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.

Edit: Even if immigration status were correlated, that doesn't mean that immigration causes people to be worse at mathematics. It could be, for example, that immigrants suffer disrcimination and a lack of resources - like some other groups that have lower scores.

Did you assess every other school system "at its very top" and compare? This seems to be very clearly a double standard. Consider that IMO numbers are going to be biased due to the US's larger population compared to other highly developed countries.

Of course, another aspect of the education system are the resources given to the average student, and I don't think there is much debate that the US could do better here.

8th,9th,10th,11th & 12th graders = 20 million.

So 20 million students are eligible for AMC10/AMC12

Of them, only 300K took the AMC10/AMC12

Of them, only 10K were invited to take the AIME

Of them, only 500 were invited to take the USAMO

Of them, only 50 went to the MOPs

Of them, only 6 went to the IMO & won.

The article is about 4th & 8th graders, of which we have 8 million.

Now, suppose those 4th graders get to 8th grade, then the 8th graders would be in 12. That makes both cohorts eligible for AMC10/12. At that point, they become 8 million out of the 20 million. So 120K of them take the AMCs, 4K take the AIME, 200 get into USAMO, 20 get invited into the MOPs, and best case 2 kids make it into the IMO.

So from this grand experiment, 2 kids will emerge the victor, and we are supposed to back-extrapolate that 8 million kids do ok. Aaalright then.../s

> 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.

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.

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.

It's still weird, probably lacking rigor and methodological soundness, to split American races out and compare them to the bulk of other populations.

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/datasets/pisa/...

If you pick random data points you can support with them any theory. Comparing white Americans (a random group of people defined by a subjective criteria, rather than by anything scientific) to a whole European country is random.

Now, speaking of the choice of subgroups. If you select best performing subgroups to see which country can support the best talent, why are you not looking at the results of international olympiads?

IOI - China, Russia, then USA. IPhO - China dominates the list of winners. IMO - USA has some wins, but China won more.

“White Americans” is very much not a “random group defined by subjective criteria”. Self-identification as white is extremely highly correlated with objective, measurable metrics like percent of European ancestry, and this also makes US whites directly comparable to population of European countries, which as it happens still are overwhelmingly comprised by people of European ancestry.

I am not selecting best performing group for the sake of comparison, I’m just comparing various natural and obvious population clusters that have been understood and distinguished by everyone completely unrelatedly to the discussion of educational outcomes. The category of white Americans has not been invented to show how great US education is. I am totally interested in comparing educational outcomes of white Americans with other major ethnic or ancestral populations in other countries, it’s just white Americans come out ahead almost every single time.

It correlates extremely closely with objective measures like percentage of genetic ancestry from a given continent or historical population, so close in fact that for statistical purposes, it is justified to regard these two as virtually identical.

> Races do not exist, it is a scientific fact.

I’ll happily use different term like “ancestral group” if you like it more, but the (scientific) truth of the matter is that it’s just splitting hairs. I know that in recent years activists worked hard to obfuscate and misinform people on these topics, so I will happily accommodate you.

It doesn’t make this clustering less arbitrary.

> I’ll happily use different term like “ancestral group” if you like it more

I do not care what term do you use for it as long as I do not see any scientific argument for having it. Politics and whatever activism have nothing to do with it.

1. https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5

I don't know why you deny genetics.

Races do not exist in the same sense that the periodic table does not exist. Both are constructs over reality, and they are both informative (i.e. science).

In Europe we do not have that system and we don’t miss it.

The 4 clusters in the K=4 column are pretty much just Black vs White vs (east) Asian vs Amerindian

Second, even if in the study you use, it’s „east Asian“. Where you would put Indians? How about southeast Asian people with black skin? Why this clustering is even necessary when the rest of the world is doing fine without it?

Nice of you to acknowledge genetics.

> At K=4 and clustering by genetic distance, they would likely represent two clusters while the rest of Africa would fall into one of remaining two.

I suppose they would.

> Not even close to what average American would understand.

The average American would understand if those two branches lived among us today. The value of science is to inform us of what is occurring now and to predict what will occur next, including the impact of immigration on test scores.

Shall I break the news or you find out yourself?.. ok, I will do it.

Those two branches do live among Americans. Afro-American people have the biggest genetic diversity in America and their genetic subgroups are so distinctive that they require separate testing in clinical studies. I bet you won’t be able to tell the difference between them from their appearance though. Now good luck redefining the concept of race with this knowledge.

If you were not referring to extinct branches I don't know why you thought "they would likely represent two clusters" if they did not already in the clustering given.

> Afro-American people have the biggest genetic diversity in America and their genetic subgroups are so distinctive that they require separate testing in clinical studies.

Yes, and?

> I bet you won’t be able to tell the difference between them from their appearance though.

Maybe, and?

> Now good luck redefining the concept of race with this knowledge.

Good luck trying to deny biological race when you've just listed more evidence for it.

Read the study with the clustering. I did it, so you should too.

This is my last reply to you. If you need more answers, there’s already more than enough facts for you here to verify and learn something new in the process.

I don't know why you're talking about "culture"?

Maybe you at least read Wikipedia to educate yourself?

Biological race models are informative (i.e. scientific). See "The Ideological Subversion of Biology" for an overview.

> They remain in the mostly American conversation as sociocultural constructs.

What the American conversation will tolerate is not relevant to the reality.

> Maybe you at least read Wikipedia to educate yourself?

Wikipedia LOL

Whenever these debates about the US education system arise it's important to clarify that when people who complain about the system do so, they're really complaining that the lack of a social safety net is keeping the doors open in public schools for kids whose families (and themselves) don't see value in formal education, can't maintain daily attendance for various reasons, may not have internet access at home, don't have food safety, may have health and developmental issues, and may not even have one parent caring for them.

I don't care whether science shows a differentiation in IQ between racial groups, because that is so much less important than addressing how well a kid will be able to learn when they are being raised in poverty by a single parent without a college education who doesn't speak English natively and may not even be in the country legally. That is the problem.

I think that, to the contrary, the US educational system goes to great lengths to accommodate students for whom English is a second language. Second, I can scarcely think of a way the US education is designed for the children of educated parents. Obviously they do better than children of uneducated parents, but it is hard to even imagine the system where this would not be true; certainly it’s not true anywhere else in the world. Finally, I think that regarding the full time employment of the parents, literally the opposite is true: it’s designed with the opposite assumption. For example, elementary school is not 10 hours long, as it would have been if it assumed that both parents are occupied for 8 hours every day.

Wouldn't the educational system being geared towards these groups be an advantage granted to those groups?

What does that mean?

This is not what he did. He just explained to you that the outcomes for all those subgroups are basically better in the US than elsewhere.

Even that is a moot point though, because the aggregate US score is already perfectly comparable to e.g. EU level. Even if you cherry-pick EU nations for GDP/capita (Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark), you can see that they are pretty much exactly on US level (with the EU leaning a bit more toward math).

This also tracks with anecdata I have from family (central europe) that did a year at a US highschool (east/west) and both described the math curriculum as "joke".

To reiterate: Describing the US education system as "bad" (=> compared to peer-nations) is just objectively wrong.

He literally said that USA has excellent educational system. The explanation with statistical gerrymandering and random comparisons followed.

>Even that is a moot point though, because the aggregate US score is already perfectly comparable to e.g. EU level

EU level isn’t great. Besides, EU recently experienced major influx of immigrants (on the scale of millions). USA is #18 in the latest rating, 7-15% difference in the score with top 5%.

And yes, American math curriculum is indeed a joke.

> Describing the US education system as "bad" (=> compared to peer-nations) is just objectively wrong.

I didn’t say it is bad. You are replying to my comment where I basically say that you cannot say it’s excellent based on THAT data.

If group B has characteristics that make education more difficult relative to group A (e.g. lower mean IQ), then if there are two countries with identical educations systems, the one with more students of group B will end up with worse educational outcomes, just because group B are harder to educate regardless of the system.

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

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/...

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.

1) kids with two married parents at home

2) kids of parents with a college or professional degree

3) kids of parents who work white collar salaried jobs

4) kids of parents who are native English speakers

If you check all those boxes you're going to see that the resulting subgroup does very well on all standardized tests, including PISA. It will also be predominantly white/European-American & Asian/Asian-American. Those four attributes make the biggest difference in educational attainment, and brown & black families are the ones who are being left behind.

For the next thought exercise, consider what can be done to address this shortcoming in our political, social & education systems.

Sorry, what do you mean by “evidence”? I clearly said that I am talking about PISA results, and described what these look like. You can look these up yourself if you are curious about more details.

> Second, other than racism, I don't see why we would distinguish between the 'race' of the Americans.

For better or worse, this opinion is not shared by the mainstream American culture and policy-making circles. We take great efforts to distinguish between these groups in the context of educational outcomes. It is not surprising, because these different groups very much exist in very objective sense, and quite objectively have different educational outcomes, which makes it useful to distinguish between them for the purposes like the original question, which was whether the educational quality went down recently. My original point that in order to answer this question, you have to distinguish between these groups so that you don’t fall victim to composition fallacy, is largely orthogonal to any discussion about the causes of these disparities, because it still stands regardless of whether the causes are 100% biological or 100% cultural or 100% result of systemic discrimination or whatever.

> 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.

You are creating a really weird straw man, because I don’t think that even extreme KKK-style racists have much of an issue with skin color per se. Who are you arguing against here? I am extremely confused.

> I don't believe that you are unaware of the hate and discrimination against immigrants and minorities, justified by these same and similar arguments.

Ah, here comes smears and innuendos that by open discussion of clear, objective facts that are relevant to policy making, I’m causing some kind of nebulous harm to some unnamed people via some proxies. Just stop it, I don’t care, and nobody cares anymore either.

Math skills correlate with IQ, and average IQ varies by racial groups.

Calling facts you don't like racist doesn't erase them, and coming into discussions just to accuse everyone of heresy has gotten pretty old for most people.

These may be uncomfortable facts, but pretending they don't exist and brow beating people for discussing them keeps us from understanding the world more fully.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

There is clearly a cohort effect, of students we identify as Black, with markedly lower educational success. Again: that's almost certainly an SES effect. Which shouldn't surprise anybody, given all the other SES effects that apply to that same cohort of people.

Assume for the sake of argument that intelligence is 100% heritable, and is a result of additive heritability of thousands of variants. Pre-GWAS tools would in that case find something like 0.9 heritability (due to attenuation because of measurement error). Now imagine you run a GWAS that includes only 1% of SNPs of the entire genome, and your intelligence proxy is “has any university diploma”, instead of more accurate measures like eg IQ. In that scenario, you would never expect the GWASes to get even close to actual heritability.

This is where we are today: our genome coverage is relatively low (especially around rare variants), while the metrics we have are crude. Of course we are not even close to heritability estimates! If someone told you that low explained variance of GWASes is consequential for classical heritability estimates, they were either confused themselves, or deliberately tried to misinform you (extremely common problem in the field, with a long tradition from people like Lewontin and Gould back in the day, to people like Gusev today).

> Again: that's almost certainly an SES effect.

You just repeat it this without in any way substantiating it, despite me being very clear that the effect does not disappear even when you match by SES.

It's funny, I can point to comments from IQ-fixated people on this site from 10 years ago saying that GWAS was going to settle heritability stuff. All that's gone now, of course. Now the work is apparently fatally flawed.

> It's funny, I can point to comments from IQ-fixated people on this site from 10 years ago saying that GWAS was going to settle heritability stuff.

Please, do, and bring receipts! You should refresh your memory as to where the whole debate was 10 years ago. At the time, many people still hopelessly argued that intelligence have nothing to do with genes, and the “IQ-fixated” people replied that GWASes will conclusively show that they do. Now that they have, the goalpost has shifted, and people who argued that intelligence has nothing to do with genes are, similarly to you, arguing that it doesn’t have as much to do as “IQ-fixated” people have claimed. Of course, in 10 years, the goalpost will move again.

I'll do my best to back those points up tomorrow.

It's a little weird that you called out Gusev, above; on this topic Gusev, though a geneticist himself, seems more like a popularizer of current research than someone going out on a limb with his own. But check his references: the scientists whose studies he cites seem to be saying the same thing he is.

It is not at all established that there are meaningful, coherent IQ differences between "races", and the process of hashing that out on this thread will be an attractive (and tedious) nuisance that will attract awful comments --- for instance, like one suggesting "brain size" differences between races are explanatory.

The OP pointed out a highly informative and important point and the majority of the negative responses to it have been from people who want to bash the American education system.

They are using cries of racism and bringing in irrelevant topics like IQ intentionally so that they can shut down legitimate conversation because they want to continue to bash the American education system.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also, "US Asians" is a silly grouping..

East and South Asian immigrants probably beg to differ.

So that's half of the statement, the other half is that those two groups are not a large fraction of the total immigrant population. As such, they affect the conclusion, in the sense that removing them from consideration would make the difference in question starker, but they do not change it, because it's a statement about a whole of which they are but a part.

The US has excellent post-secondary education. K-12 seems to be a mixed bag at best, especially in bang-for-the-buck terms.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

So the cream of the crop of Asia is competing against everyone of the native born population and you then obviously get this kind of disparity here.

Asians love to talk about how we focus more on education, our culture is better, blah blah. But go back to India or China and you will find lots and lots of people who don't value education and don't have much care for discipline or culture or frankly any sort of society. There's a reason India has had a Trump-like leader for multiple years and it's not because of a focus on education.

All of their children did exceptionally well in school because the parents were very involved in their schooling.

These kids were often the first in their family to ever get into college.

How do poor whites compare to the rest of white people, as well as other races in their socio-economic strata? I suspect test scores corelate more strongly with household income and wealth than with race. However, in America, income/wealth and race are also correlated, which may make one an inadvertent proxy for the other.

https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.htm...

If I were at a Toyota dealerships and I asked you "How does this Corolla hatchback compare to other Toyota models on the lot, as well as other brands in the same 'compact car' category?", and your response is that the Nissan Pathfinder (a mid-size SUV) has worse gas milage than all Toyota models. That doesn't answer my question at all, because non-Toyota SUVs were never under consideration.

> I suspect test scores corelate more strongly with household income and wealth than with race.

The question of whether people in higher socio-economic class score higher in standardized tests is obviously true and uninteresting. The real question is if the correlation trumps other factors like race (which you hinted at by your next sentence). Kind of like asking "is this SUV safe for a Toyota". Obviously its safer than smaller Toyota vehicles, the pertinent question is whether its safe compared to other SUVs.

So yes, students in higher economics. You can google 'socio-economic test scores'. Here's a top result:

> Socioeconomic status (SES) and SAT scores are positively correlated: Students from higher income backgrounds generally achieve higher scores, and “21.2% of variance in SAT scores is shared with SES, as measured here as a composite of mother’s education, father’s education, and parental income.” The researchers note that the “source of the SAT-SES relationship is likely due to some combination of educational opportunity, school quality, peer effects and other social factors.”

https://journalistsresource.org/economics/ses-socioeconomic-...

Indeed, it's uncontroversial and that is why I used it to set up the second half of my question, which hopefully is more thought-provoking.

> Obviously its safer than smaller Toyota vehicles, the pertinent question is whether its safe compared to other SUVs

We're finally on the same page! This was the second, and more interesting part of my original question that is yet to be answered.

In the US, socio-economics is obviously a confounding factor that should be controlled for when comparing by race or by immigration recency.

The US has absolutely abysmal primary education while spending eye watering amounts of money on it. This is plainly obvious to anyone who has ever lived abroad with kids.