[dmix]

Yes I’ve seen these statistics a number of times and it really goes against so much of the “lol Americans are bad at math” meme all over the internet.

America is a society of disparate cultures, regions, communities, and outcomes (often in the same cities) that is far too fine grained to reduce it to generalities (with a few exceptions such as heavily nationally influenced/consistent things like health care insurance, defence spending, Wall St/banking policies, etc).

Some people try to minimize it all to “class” like they found some Pandora’s box for all of life’s problems but that’s just as often flawed as any other generalization.

[dr_dshiv]

Poverty is different from class. The poverty achievement gap is 2x the race achievement gap. The following article describes a study that claims that poverty “entirely accounts” for racial gaps.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/achievement-g...

[paisawalla]

I can't read the article, but does it control for race within poverty? A lot of poverty conclusions are confounded by race, yet even within poor cohorts you will find significant disparities by race. For example,

> Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 993. This is 130 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.

https://www.jbhe.com/features/53_SAT.html

This chart visualizes that point: SAT scores of whites in the poorest segment exceed those of blacks from all but the richest segment, and Asians exceed them no matter their income:

https://resources.corwin.com/sites/default/files/singleton_2...

[simplotek]

I'm not sure you read your own source. It seems you just cherry-picked a couple of passages that support racist views and decided to ignore everything else.

Your own source mentions not only the correlation between income and SAT scores, but it also points out a link between quality of the education services provided to some communities and social pressure. It's also telling that the outliers are explained in a way that boils down to "they succeed in spite of everything we throw at them".

[derangedHorse]

It seems like you’re projecting racist views onto the parent comment. It never discounted the possibility of other race-related factors being the cause of the achievement gap, it was just challenging whether all of it could be accredited to wealth disparities.

[simplotek]

> It seems like you’re projecting racist views onto the parent comment.

What? OP's argument was purely race-based. OP made absolutely no point other than underlining race-based correlations. If you remove all race-based remarks from OP's post, nothing is left.

> It never discounted the possibility of other race-related factors (...)

In your own words, you describe OP's post as focusing on "race-related factors", and even then you try to accuse those who point that out of "projecting racist views"?

Are you serious?

[anonymoushn]

For example, the differences in scores that is not explained by income could be caused entirely by disparate treatment of children by adults based on the child's race. That would be a race-related factor.

[paisawalla]

That's quite some stretching you're doing.

1. I'm pointing out that poverty and racial factors often confound each other. The comment I was replying to made it seem like racial effects disappear when you control for income. If you care about racial equality, then I would think it's in your favor to argue against someone who says racial effects don't exist.

2. It's not racist to point out that certain outcomes correlate with race.

[dmix]

Sure but I’d still rather not use that as the defining metric. Unless there’s some evidence throwing money at public schools in lower class neighborhoods is the solution to the problem. Every time I’ve looked into that subject in the US the biggest complaint by the teachers on the ground, in those neighborhoods, say they feel like they need to be teacher + daycare + parent for a subset + law enforcement officer etc. I grew up in a small town in Canada with mostly poorer lower/lower-mid class student but my school never had such an obligation (not overt expectation) to be parental replacements/invested psychologist/serious enforcers.

At a pretty sudden level focusing on education alone is the fault not the solution. When teachers actually get to be teachers it seems US schools do just fine or better than most of the world (not simply comparing to subsets of small homogenous European countries).

[dr_dshiv]

It may point to issues that are not race or class but structural in a way that suggests deeper issues. Indeed “throwing money at schools” is unlikely to improve situations at home. But poverty has a big effect on kids ability to learn. It isn’t just money—poverty is a multidimensional deficit in wellbeing. Kids who are stressed, abused, neglected, etc — it’s hard for them to learn effectively.

[908B64B197]

> say they feel like they need to be teacher + daycare + parent for a subset + law enforcement officer etc. [...] When teachers actually get to be teachers it seems US schools do just fine or better than most of the world

Some of it is definitely because of the lack of a support system at home (poverty, absent fathers...). But I think a lot of it boils down to culture. And if we're to look at it based on race, White Blacks and Hispanics could all improve.

There's a lot of families where school is seen as unimportant, and where education isn't as valued as it could be.

[simplotek]

> Unless there’s some evidence throwing money at public schools in lower class neighborhoods is the solution to the problem. Every time I’ve looked into that subject in the US the biggest complaint by the teachers on the ground, in those neighborhoods, say they feel like they need to be teacher + daycare + parent for a subset + law enforcement officer etc.

You wrote this down yourself, and you still didn't get it?

[WillPostForFood]

The article and study are a lie. It leave out Asians because when you them then poverty stops explaining the achievement gap. They are blatantly cherry picking their data.

[derangedHorse]

Which part of the article and study are a "lie"? Hand-waving wealth as being irrelevant to achievement by highlighting Asian success ignores other resource-related factors.

One easy factor to distinguish is the percentage of immigrants in the Asian population."Around six-in-ten Asian Americans (57%), including 71% of Asian American adults, were born in another country"[1]. The background of a lot of these immigrants made them well-qualified to succeed despite their American socio-economic status on arrival [2].

If you compare that to black people in America, many of who's ancestors were brought here in unsavory ways, only "One-in-ten Black people in the U.S. are immigrants". There's no comparison of the ingress of black people in this country when compared to Asian populations, and consequently we don't see the same US immigrant selectivity boosting the numbers of an already disadvantaged race in the same way.

This is not to say that culture has no effect, since I doubt the high participation rate of Asian children in after-school tutoring necessarily hurts those children [5], but it may represent a smaller part of the overall picture than most people think. Choosing minority races from opposite sides of the success spectrum and underlining some of their differences in a data-driven way may help us better understand and combat the problem of equity.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-a...

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/04/authors-discu...

[3] https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/aap-aap0000069.pd... (A more in-depth research paper from the authors of the referenced book in [2])

[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/27/key-finding...

[5] https://www.edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/ai21-367... ("Third, even conditional on income and parental education, private tutoring centers tend to locate in areas with many immigrant and Asian-American families")

[rayiner]

> The background of a lot of these immigrants made them well-qualified to succeed despite their American socio-economic status on arrival

Immigration filtering explains a lot, but the general trend holds even for subgroups that aren’t subject to those filters.

Some Asian groups, like Vietnamese, came to the US as refugees, not skilled workers. In 1980, poverty rates among Vietnamese people were among the highest off any ethnic group. Today, Vietnamese have similar income levels to non-Hispanic whites.

Moreover, the kids of poor Asians have much more income mobility than the kids of similarly placed whites. Asian children who grow up in the bottom 20% of the income distribution have a 25% chance of ending up in the top 20%, compared to an 11% chance for white kids. These poor Asians are typically in America as a result of family reunification. Thus, neither the kids nor the parents are subject to filters such as H1B job requirements.

How do you escape the conclusion that culture makes the difference?

[908B64B197]

Asians are actually a huge problem for Critical Race Theory supporters, because almost every measurable statistic about them contradict CRT.

Hence, some scholar coined the term "white-adjacent" so they can conveniently cherry-pick and ignore Asians when it's convenient. [0] [1]

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/critical-race-theory-has-no-idea-wh...

[1] https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego...

[tedivm]

Your examples are two opinion pieces that seem to not actually understand what critical race theory even is. Asians aren't a problem for the people who study critical race theory, it's really only a problem for people who have no clue what they're talking about.

[rayiner]

I also think the CRT worldview naturally produces a prejudice against Asians. For example: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Alison-Collins-San-F...

The CRT worldview makes slavery the central event of history, and oppression by whites the central theme. That’s what’s going on in the Nikole Hannah-Jones quote above. How do those folks perceive immigrant groups that come here and tell their kids to shut up and work hard? I think that leads straight to the idea that Asians are complicit in “upholding white supremacy.” And even white people like John Oliver get in on that narrative.

Of course from our perspective we are just raising our kids according to our culture. In broad strokes, both east and south Asian cultures tend to be deferential to authority and emphasize an internal locus of control. If you ask my mom why bangladesh is poor, she’ll point to corruption and other moral failings, not British colonialism. Whether that is accurate or not, that’s completely at odds with the CRT worldview, which emphasizes an external locus of control—blaming oppression by whites for everything.

[derangedHorse]

I put a lot of work into my citing the data sources from my comments so that the numbers can be vetted by the institutions they were reported by. Do you have any sources you can reference that show where you get your numbers from?

[Jensson]

But those numbers are a lie, American whites scored 503, just look at the report page 34, it clearly says that white Americans scored 25 points higher than the average 478 at math. 478 + 25 = 503.

He must have taken the wrong graph.

Edit: Anyway, 503 is pretty average for Europeans, so it means that Americans are pretty average at math, as you'd expect for a large country. So it is still proof that Americans aren't bad, they are typical.

[slackerchews]

I didn't lie... Page 16 of my OECD link shows that the average was 505 for 2018...

EDIT:: Nevermind I'm a dumbass. that graph is for reading and literacy.... guess I know how I'd score...

[tstrimple]

We’ve all been there. At least all of us who care enough to argue about shit online and support it with sources.

[ipaddr]

Bad at math and reading?

[dmix]

Fair enough. Although being the median with such a large country is still pretty divergent from the popular narrative I was comparing to. Those sorts of generalized nationwide numbers wasn’t my point anyway, rather proper data analysis and putting data into the wider context of the various communities/finer demographics/etc leads to far more useful conclusions than national level ones alone.

Similar to critiques of the GDP as a metric for success.

It’s not surprising the default critique on Reddit/Twitter is always using some European country with a homogeneous culture and a small population centered around ~2-3 major cities at most vs the entire US.

[simplotek]

> Those sorts of generalized nationwide numbers wasn’t my point anyway, rather proper data analysis and putting data into the wider context of the various communities/finer demographics/etc leads to far more useful conclusions than national level ones alone.

What conclusions would those be?

> It’s not surprising the default critique on Reddit/Twitter is always using some European country with a homogeneous culture and a small population centered around ~2-3 major cities at most vs the entire US.

If you'd prefer you could compare whatever nation you'd like with individual US states. You have plenty of US states to pick and choose from.

Regardless, I don't see this sort of statistics rigour when comparing the US to "Europe" as a whole, in spite of the heterogeneous nature of the whole continent (some countries even have regions where people speak entirely different languages) and the fact that the population of "Europe" is well over twice that of the US.

But I guess the point might just be to shut down discussions to avoid conclusions and introspection.

[bandrami]

There is an entire education consultancy industry whose financial viability depends on convincing people that American public education is in some kind of crisis when it isn't; it's actually a little above average, as we see.

Now, would I like it to be way above average? Sure, and I'm willing to make the public investment to make that happen. But starting from the premise of "we're failing miserably" is going to lead to the wrong conclusions.

[monero-xmr]

America also accepts way, way more immigrants than any other developed nation. Japan? None. Norway? Zilch. Netherlands? Come onnnn. They get handfuls but as a percentage of population the USA takes in boatloads and bus loads of immigrants every month.

When you look at statistics that say the US is lower in this or that, remember that America takes in millions of dirt poor immigrants each year, and their circumstances skew the numbers. However they get assimilated and integrated, and a generation later their kids are going to the Ivy League and starting businesses.

[monocasa]

I'm not sure the data matches that line of reasoning. Looking at number of immigrants per capita for various countries, the US is beat out by some of the countries you wouldn't expect from your conclusion. Notably Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Austria, Iceland, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and Norway all have more immigration per capita than the states it seems. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...

[AlchemistCamp]

An Austrian who immigrates to Germany or even a German (or other EU national) who immigrates to Switzerland has a very different experience, both in terms of legal hurdles and likely relative earnings than someone immigrating from Latin America to the US.

How about if we look at immigration into the US as a whole vs immigration to the EU as a whole? What do the numbers look like, then?

[himlion]

Ironically, as a Dutch tech worker without a degree the USA is one of the very very few countries I can't emigrate to.

[bandrami]

The US tech obsession with degrees is stupid and self-defeating. You'll regularly see ads for a web programmer requiring a BS in computer science. Somebody with a BS in comp sci should be able to write a (very simple) operating system, which is not what you need. It's even weirder because some jobs simply require any bachelor's degree, whatsoever, which is how I became a sysadmin after being a classics major. This is just explicit class gatekeeping.

[localplume]

If anything I feel like the US is an outlier in qualification requirements. It feels like every European country requires degrees for every single tech job, whereas in the US you can get by without one or just a BS. The amount of jobs I have seen in the EU that require an MS even though it really shouldn't is insane. I think every single technical ESA role requires an MS at minimum, whereas you can easily work at NASA with just a BS, which doesn't really make much sense.

Also you can still go to community college/a state school to get a BS? Or join the Army or something, take a low risk MOS, get them to fund your bachelors. The US is way less class prohibitive and has far more class mobility than the EU as a whole so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

[twiss]

According to https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index..., the US ranks 27th in social mobility, behind 21 European countries, and ahead of 14 of them.

On the "Education Access" pillar, the Netherlands scored highest, while the US ranks 40th. So I don't think your conclusion is accurate.

[bandrami]

The US has significantly lower social mobility than most of Europe, though I think people kind of ignore that and pretend the opposite is true.

It's a lot easier to get in to college in the US than in most of Europe, but it costs a whole lot more (like requiring a degree in the first place, it's a kind of social gatekeeping). I think nowadays like 60% of high school grads attend some amount of college, but only about half of those get an actual degree.

[lxgr]

Are you serious? There are quite a few more developed nations other than the three you've listed (and I'm not even sure if the claim is accurate for all three, when adjusting for size).

Just last year, Germany has accepted more than a million Ukrainian immigrants – at a population of under 100 million. Yes, exceptional circumstances, but there have been a lot of these in the past decade (consider e.g. the Syrian war). And the number the US accepted in the same year? Just short of 2000. Yes, two thousand, not two millions – at four times the population.

Looking at the statistics, the balance is something like half a million in net(!) arrivals per year in the last decade. (I couldn't find comparable numbers for the US, but granted green cards seems like a reasonable proxy, and that's also less than a million per year, and that's not even accounting for people moving away.) And if you look at the larger EU, the "more than any other developed nation" claim completely falls apart.

The US also gets to cherry-pick immigrants based on skill to a much larger extent than the EU does due to geography alone (requesting asylum generally requires physical presence, and the EU's land and sea borders are a lot easier to cross).

[klipklop]

Pretty intellectually dishonest to ignore the massive amount of “undocumented” immigration happening in the US. Nobody absorbs more immigrants. Full stop.

[lxgr]

I'm willing to believe that that number is (much) larger than granted green cards or visas – but are there any reliable estimates? Otherwise it's just a baseless claim.

One number I've found puts the estimated number of unlawful entries to the US per year at under 100k, for a total population of around 10 million. The EU sees around 2.5 million immigrants, vs. around 1.5 million emigrants, per year.

GPs claim of "millions of dirt-poor immigrants per year" skewing the numbers doesn't seem realistic to me.

[ren_engineer]

Border patrol has averaged around 200K apprehensions per month for 2 years now at the southern border, that doesn't even account for the people they didn't apprehend. Not sure where you got the 100K annual number but it isn't even close to accurate

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-border-crossings-us...

[arcticbull]

Well the question is what is the number who make it through? The number captured isn't relevant. If they captured 100% then the undocumented immigration number would be 0. Then we also need to know how many self-deport back over the border.

[bandrami]

It's estimated to be net negative (more people leave illegally than enter illegally). It peaked late in George W Bush's 2nd term and has been falling steadily ever since, crossing the zero point some time during Obama's admin.

It's an entirely made-up "crisis", but a reliably effective one politically.

[arcticbull]

Not to mention Obama deported almost 1% of the entire American population (some 2.5M between 2009 and 2015) - more than any other president either in actual numbers or as a percentage of the population.

[bandrami]

I mean, no. Net illegal migration has been negative since Obama's second term. It's basically an entirely made-up "crisis" and has been for a decade now.

[simplotek]

> Yes I’ve seen these statistics a number of times and it really goes against so much of the “lol Americans are bad at math” meme all over the internet.

I never came across any of the sort.

What I come across frequently is the extension of the American exceptionalism mindset that leads some US natives to believe they are exceptional at math in spite of evidence failing to support their exceptionalism views.

> America is a society of disparate cultures, regions, communities, and outcomes (often in the same cities) that is far too (...)

I also see this all too often: the follow-up to the exceptionalism mindset failing to support their beliefs in a rational basis, and proceeding to cherry-pick subsets that suit their exceptionalism views.

It's like claiming that Americans are all tall athletic and exceptional basketball players, and supporting that exceptionalism view by pointing out that Michael Jordan and LeBron James are US citizens. Meanwhile, ignoring that the average us citizen might have more in common with Danny DeVito.

The US population is over 330M people, and its an unrivaled economic and technological powerhouse. Of course you can find hundreds of exceptional individuals. But being able to find a champion among the masses is not the point of a statement like "Americans are good at math". Baselines matter a lot, and even you admit that the US does not look great by attempting to cherry pick your way out of that.

[rhaway84773]

Other societies are also societies of disparate cultures.

Most other societies also don’t tend to have every group at average, but some groups above average and others lower.

If you break other societies with higher average scores down by groups along fault lines in those societies, the top groups in those societies will also be doing much better than the bottom groups, and considering they have higher average scores, the top groups will likely be doing better than the top groups in the US.

[heywhatupboys]

> America is a society of disparate cultures, regions, communities, and outcomes (often in the same cities)

There are cities in Europe with histories spanning thousands of years, but were apart until only 30 years ago. There are countries with multiple ethnicities, multiple official languages.

[misssocrates]

I bet everyone can guess who leads the US Math league to victory?