> against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration

I'm pretty sure that poverty is the issue here. Kids who don't get enough to eat, don't get enough time (or perhaps too much time in some sad cases) with their parents, kids who don't have many opportunities tend to do worse at standardised testing.

This is entirely fixable, but it's not (unfortunately) just a matter of funding schools more.

“Poverty” might be the cause, but it’s not just poverty by itself. Every country has rich people and poor people. The U.S., however, has that normal spectrum, plus subpopulations that have unique circumstances that aren't accounted for just by income level.

Look at NAEP scores: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/some-racial... (Table 1). Asians average 312 in 8th grade math, compared to 293 for whites and 269 for Hispanics. The gap between asians and whites is almost the same size as the gap between whites and hispanics. But the poverty metrics for asians and whites is the same: 8% below the federal poverty line. (While asians are richer than whites on average, the subset of both groups who have kids is more similar. There’s a lot of high poverty asian families in places like NYC.)

Why is there such a big gap in test scores between whites and asians when economically the two groups are similar? There must be some additional sociological factor at play behind poverty in and of itself. One might hypothesize that selective immigration plays a role. The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration. That might have an effect on their kids test scores that’s not accounted for by household income alone. That’s the kind of additional sociological factor that countries like Japan and Korea don’t have.

> Why is there such a big gap in test scores between whites and asians when economically the two groups are similar? There must be some additional sociological factor at play behind poverty in and of itself. One might hypothesize that selective immigration plays a role. The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration. That might have an effect on their kids test scores that’s not accounted for by household income alone. That’s the kind of additional sociological factor that countries like Japan and Korea don’t have.

OK, So I've just actually read your fordham institute link, and you realise that it doesn't argue for this point, instead arguing that it's two parent households and expectations around college that create the gap (which is pretty small, to be fair). This is basically the point that I'm trying to make here, in that parental and broader cultural expectations drive these differences, not selective immigration.

Additionally, for your point to be true, you'd need to observe these kinds of effects for 3-4th generation Asian immigrants, which both seems pretty unlikely to me and difficult to collect data around (as there probably aren't enough Asian americans in this group).

I really think that cultural expectations and poverty provide a more parsimonious account of this data, tbh.

> The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration.

On this point specifically, the percentage for ESL (which normally correlates with 1st generation immigrants) is about 12, which means 88% of the Asians in your sample speak English natively. Again, this article really doesn't support your point.

> “Poverty” might be the cause, but it’s not just poverty by itself. Every country has rich people and poor people. The U.S., however, has that normal spectrum, plus subpopulations that have unique circumstances that aren't accounted for just by income level.

Culture is a thing, as I'm sure you know (we discussed it some time ago here). Like, in general, (many) Irish people value education above and beyond what would be expected of similar socio-economic groups, which lead to their descendants doing better than might naively be expected. The Asian thing is almost certainly similar, given all the memes that exist around demanding Asian parents. Jewish people have similar cultural beliefs.

However, you can't really aggregate up to an White level, as these factors will vary massively. Same with Asians, you'd need to control for a lot of factors.

Fundamentally though, it's better for society if everyone gets a chance to develop their potential, and my argument is that this doesn't happen to the same extent in the US as it might elsewhere, because of large gaps in income inequality and social forcing functions (if everyone you know drops out of school early, or doesn't take it seriously then most people will too).

> “Poverty” might be the cause, but it’s not just poverty by itself. Every country has rich people and poor people. The U.S., however, has that normal spectrum, plus subpopulations that have unique circumstances that aren't accounted for just by income level.

I get that you're more familar with US society, but this is a thing basically everywhere. Like, African descendants in the UK are probably one of the most successful immigrant populations, rather than less succesful than the average in the US. I honestly think that the US "unique circumstances" are cope for the lack of decent income mobility and social safety nets that prevent a larger proportion of people from realising their potential.

For purposes of this discussion, I'm not trying to identify the causes of the differences between the sub-populations. My point is that if you are talking about the quality of the educational system--which is what this discussion is about--you need to compare apples with apples between countries. And to do that, you need to account for the fact that the U.S. sub-populations aren't equally situated.

For example, Asian Americans outscore Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese students in PISA, including math. That's not a cultural difference. That's because Asian Americans aren't a random sample of Asians. The vast majority are within one generation of a very tough selection filter that screens for high skill, high intelligence, and high motivation. If the point is comparing schools, it doesn't make sense to include Asian Americans in the average.

> I get that you're more familar with US society, but this is a thing basically everywhere.

It's not a thing in the east Asian countries that top the educational charts, like Japan and Korea. Poor Japanese and Koreans still belong to the majority ethnic group, speak the national language at home, etc.

Say you transplanted Japanese or Korean schools into one of the many majority-Hispanic school districts in the U.S. where most of the kids are children of low-skill, non-English-speaking immigrants (often illegal immigrants). Would those Japanese or Korean schools have higher test scores than the American ones? I suspect they'd actually be worse, because they'd be totally unequipped to deal with a large student population from a non-native language background.

My wife's aunt's kids go to a school in a more rural part of Oregon. Many of the kids are children of agricultural workers. Many of these kids don't even speak Spanish at home. They speak one of dozens of different indigenous Latin American languages. Japanese and Korean schools educate the children of poor agricultural workers too, but those kids still speak Japanese and Korean at home! If the goal is to measure school quality, is it really fair to just put those kids into the average and fault American schools for doing worse than Japanese or Korean schools?

> I honestly think that the US "unique circumstances" are cope for the lack of decent income mobility and social safety nets that prevent a larger proportion of people from realising their potential.

Even if that were true, that would be more a point about the fairness of U.S. society rather than the quality of the educational system. I don't think it makes sense to conflate those two questions in a discussion of the U.S.'s competitiveness against China.

Moreover, income mobility in the U.S. doesn't break down by sub-population the way you might think. For example, while Hispanics have lower incomes because most are immigrants or children of immigrants, they have higher income mobility: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Children of Guatemalan immigrants in the U.S. have higher income mobility than children of native-born Americans. Household incomes for Hispanics converges on the household income for whites within a few generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353

So focusing on PISA scores for "whites" isn't really about race or culture. It's just a proxy for "people whose families have been in the U.S. long enough to dispel the effect of immigration filters." If you were conducting the same analysis 100 years ago, you might try to exclude Italians or Irish from the analysis. Again, the point is to compare schools, not all the other sociological factors that are involved when dealing with immigrant populations.

> In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry.

Translation: rich kids have better access to top education in America. Got it.

White people in the U.S. aren’t just the “rich” subset of the whole population. They are reflect a complete spectrum, from poor to rich. They’re equivalent to Koreans in Korea or Japanese in Japan. Other groups in the U.S. aren’t just economically different, they’re sociologically different in dimensions that don’t really exist in Korea or Japan.

For example, 71% of hispanics speak Spanish at home. That reflects a group that’s comprised mostly of immigrants and their children. That poses additional challenges to education, beyond the economic differences. Poor whites in the U.S. and poor Koreans in Korea may have educational challenges from being poor. But that poverty isn’t layered with being raised in a household with immigrant parents who are in an unfamiliar country and probably don’t speak English fluently. That’s an additional layer of challenges that needs to be accounted for in comparing across countries.

The facts are in the PISA data collected by the OECD. If you drill down by subpopulation, the majority group in the U.S. goes toe to toe with the majority groups in Asian countries, and beats the majority groups in western european countries: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

National competitiveness and distributional equity don’t go hand in hand. China has made tremendous achievements by focusing investment on key provinces instead of trying to bring everyone up together.