[natnat]

I think poverty may have a bigger effect on test scores than race. If you break down the PISA scores by state, the three lowest performing states are Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia. While Mississippi has a huge black population, New Mexico is only 2% black and West Virginia is only 3%. While New Mexico is 44% hispanic, West Virginia is almost entirely white non-hispanic. One thing these three states have in common, though, is that they are all very poor.

There is definitely a correlation between a higher population of blacks and lower test scores. But there is also a strong correlation between higher rates of poverty and lower test scores, and a very large number of hispanics and blacks are poor.

Black students in Massachusetts perform much better than black students in Mississippi. Virginia, which is nearly 20% black, is one of the top-performing states, while West Virginia, which is 96% white, is near the bottom.

While the US is richer than most of Europe, our income inequality means that we have a much higher poverty rate. When you control for poverty, the U.S. outperforms every other country tested.

[yarian]

But "controlling for poverty" is the same as saying "if you assume that the US was something else without some of its key flaws then"... Do you see that this line of thought goes nowhere?

[cema]

It may be a flaw, but it appears not to be a flaw in ''education'' but elsewhere.