> While US has excellent education, and immigrant children in America do better than their counterparts in their countries of origin, they don’t do as well as the modal group of white Americans
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.
Comment is true of immigrants as a group, but it’s a remarkably heterogeneous pool. When you break immigrants down down into East/South Asians versus White/Jewish versus others, the differences in educational outcomes between these splits is large.
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.
It's strange to split whites into those two categories since Jews represent a trivially small group, why not Italian/Greek and German/Scandinavian ancestry that is somewhat similar to East/South Asian split?
This is idiotic. I lumped Whites and Jews into one category (since there is a subset of Jews that don’t consider themselves white), East and South Asians into another. Read more carefully before you cast aspersions.
I think a lot of racists (or race realists, depending on your perspective) are today a lot more concerned about the influx of southern natives than about the blacks. The black proportion of the population has been steady for a long, long time. The disparities there are a big issue, and people on all sides are concerned about it for different reasons, but I wouldn’t be surprised if GP is actually referencing immigrants in this case.
>I think a lot of racists (or race realists, depending on your perspective) are today a lot more concerned about the influx of southern natives than about the blacks.
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.
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 nominally “diverse” cast without any real storytelling commitment to the racial diversity of said character(s) and there was a pronounced bias in these characters (constructed to be "diverse") towards a particular sliver of racial diversity).
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.
That is exactly my point. Our parent commenter was disputing the fact that the broad stripe of “immigrant” populations are responsible for our reduced and over all disappointing scores. My comment is meant to insinuate that the overly broad (and thereby meaningless) redirect to a vaguely monolithic “immigrant” population (one invariably implied to “not yet be assimilated!”) is exactly that - a redirect from
the genuine problem group in this country (an unnervingly underperforming one), a group which is not comprised of immigrants.
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.
Which is another way of saying that there's nothing being done about inequality, the problem is worsening. Hard to teach poor kids, hard for kids to get out of poverty when the government literally removes anti-poverty measures because it wants an underclass of workers to do shitty jobs for shit pay or alternatively populations it considers reserve labor (to keep wages down for employed people) or expendable.
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.