I disagree. Were this an academic symposium I would agree. But this is the internet where folks who know how to establish causality and understand research methods and proper citing are uncommon. Fortunately, I do appreciate the author's thought and contribtions to observation data, and, tongue in cheek, as a utility monster my appreciation more than negates your lack of appreciation.

Whose to say "cited findings" have any more value than "anecdata".

The institutions that build these national and international statistics do so with bias and goals, or without complete data. For example, how can a bureau make a national statistics on crime accurate when cities intentional report crime incorrectly to look better in statistics.

To think "cited findings" is gospel truth is naive. I know it's highly desired here, but I stand by what I'm saying. Data is lovely, but garbage in, garbage out, and most national-level data is complete garbage with an agenda or bias or naivety.

> I don't appreciate reading anecdata in response to cited findings. It cheapens the discussion.

So does the linked PDF address this proposed "hopelessness" factor, or is it that once someone cites something the discussion becomes restricted to only things that have published study results?

Also, if someone were to cite https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094 on the effectiveness of parachutes, are other commenters then forbidden from citing anecdata that disagree with the findings?

The cited findings, don't refute the culture argument though, and maybe even reenforces it. In US culture being illiterate is bad, being bad at math is not looked down up on. The stats show good at reading and bad at math.

While there are STEM (Science Tech Engineering and Math) initiatives, I have yet to see one that actually includes math. You see results in science but not math.

The parent commenter’s “source” makes no claims about race related performance whatsoever - it measures by just about everything but that, and then sorts by country. So maybe this is one of those darned reflexive knee jerk responses.

Sadly, there are a variety of such family, community, and social and peer group motivations and behaviors -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality#See_also

It's not the poverty; it's the learned helplessness.

That's an understatement. Sort that by at or above basic and the top 5 states in the US are: North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Utah, Wisconsin.

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Teenage boys everywhere have a widespread bias against putting in the effort to get good grades.

They might call it "gay" or "sissy" or "acting white" or whatever, but the root cause is usually their perception of what masculinity should look like.

The men they look up to are anti-intellectual. This exists in all communities, race is not the main problem here.

Not t true. I don’t have the reference, but I read 10 or more years ago about an affluent community in the midwest whose black students greatly underperformed their white counterparts. The parents hired a black researcher and his final report said exactly that, that many black students didn’t want to appear white and also there were negative consequences for trying to do well. The parents thought it had to be racism and wouldn’t accept the results. The guy was a sociology professor at a college in CA.

For more annectdata, this same thing was happening at Berkeley High School around the same time. First hand knowledge from parents of students.

I have seen the pattern with latino students in SoCal as well.

Anecdotally the pressure can be worse with people who have a white parent (either mixed-race or through adoption); I am unsure if the cause more is internal (insecurity about self-image) or external (teenagers can be ruthless when they see differences).

How do you propose to do that?

Jews were motived to achieve because they were oppressed.

How do Indian low castes do compared to higher castes in the same country? They often continue to suffer from discrimination from higher castes in the west. I can believe they do better than some other groups, but how to they compare to higher caste Indians?

> And yes, skin color itself is irrelevant, it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences

No, its a terrible identifier.

If you group people by genetic similarity (which is of dubious usefulness) you essentially end up with three different black African races, one Australian, Pacific and Native American, and one everyone else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering

> it is simply a convenient identifier for underlying significant biological differences

It's actually not. Skin color does not correlate well with the genetic diversity among humans at all. It's just one particular trait that is very easy to identify by eye.

> There is absolutely zero reason one would rationally conclude that biological differences would somehow magically stop at the brain.

There is absolutely zero reason to rationally conclude that a random physical trait that happens to be easy to distinguish by eye correlates with brain function at all.

On the other hand, there are massive socioeconomic disparities that arise from the history of slavery, which easily explain both the disparities and the reasons why racists such as yourself want to boil things down to skin color.

It is a poverty problem, and black people are much more likely to be in poverty. That doesn't mean that white people can't also be in poverty.

A lot of people just don't understand what privilege is. Who has more upward mobility - an impoverished black person, or an impoverished white person? Who is more likely to face systemic factors that influence poverty and outcomes - black people or white people?

And before I hear "well not everything is about race!!1!" Uh, the US has a long history of systemic racism that does continue to this day.

Obviously if you just integrated a few decades ago you're not going to just magically have equal outcomes. People don't move like that, systems are sticky, and the US isn't evenly distributed.

And, of course, race is correlated tightly with culture and with average income and levels of poverty.

No, you can't just ignore race. Well you can, if that's easier for you, but it's dishonest and incomplete.

And, because I know it's coming: yes I'm white, no I don't have white guilt, I just think about the world we live in. Its easy not to think about things. I prefer thinking about things.

I think one of the biggest factors comes down to single parent vs intact families.

Id ask you for a citation, but I know it doesn’t exist.

(I'm not american) so I don't have a horse in this race.

These reports are becoming to find because measuring racial differences is considered racist, so you'd be asking for something that would not be acceptable in modern studies.

Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools?

GP didn't say that, but educators of course see schools as an important area to address the gap. The literature is pretty clear on this being a complex problems with schools being an important wedge to break the vicious circle.

Schools are the only tool we have at hand to reliably solve it.

Hell no. Making attendance optional sacrifices way too much.

It's like reducing incarceration rates by never jailing people for anything short of murder. Sure, it improves on that one metric. Obviously. But the adverse effects elsewhere make it a nonstarter.

If you could trust self-selection to only ever stop the "lost causes" from attending? The absolute worst, most disruptive, least likely to ever benefit from education students? Then maybe.

But in practice, for every student like this there would be ten more who would benefit from school education if they attended, but wouldn't attend if it was optional.

And for those missing students, the difference between getting the classes and being left to their own devices might be the difference between becoming functioning adults, low in income but stable, and being locked in a vicious cycle of poverty, substance abuse, violence and crime.

Which is bad for the students in question, and even worse for the society.

> At least near me the biggest problems facing the "urban" district compared to suburban ones is declining student populations as long time homeowners age in place and the maintenance costs of 100 year old buildings compared to 10-20 year old ones in the suburbs

The building maintenance is a red herring. I believe in my district, it's about 10% of the budget on average.

Every urban district I'm familiar with has higher per-pupil funding than ~90th percentile suburban areas. (Seattle versus suburbs, Detroit versus smaller towns)

Wouldn't a declining student population mean more money per student? And it seems like it would often (but not always) be cheaper to maintain existing buildings vs building new ones? I'm also wondering how much of the new suburban buildings are financed with debt, and the costs just haven't really caught up to them yet.

The only reason I became anything today is because my parents who were poor but cared very much were able to "opt out" of the shit-tier local public school that pandered to the kids who would rather not learn before it was too late for me.

Just a couple disruptive kids per class can ruin an entire generation of students for a grade level. And there were far more than just a couple. Not to mention kids who had no business being in those classes - when the class is half full of low-performers they drag the rest of the kids down with them as the environment completely changes.

The focus these public school districts have put on the low performing and low achievers at the expense of those there to learn is astounding and perhaps civilization-ending if it continues. More resources should be spent on those there to help themselves vs. trying to shovel ever-more resources at people that will never provide a return on that investment.

At this point the local district here spends magnitudes more on special education and catering to IEP students than they do any AP level classes or other high performer programs. In fact they continue to destroy any advanced track segmentation in the favor of equity, and the teachers union nearly killed public magnet schools off entirely recently. They will try again until they are successful.

It's an obviously bad strategy, and apparently results don't matter. Dragging everyone down is not a plan for success.

This is the single political hill I will die on. Removing the ability for poor but high functioning families to give their kids a chance to get out of their circumstances because it raises uncomfortable questions is downright evil.

Other western countries everyone loves to champion so much have this figured out. Student tracks are a good thing. Put high achievers on an advanced track earlier than later and get them out of the general population of students before it's too late for them.

And yes, it's obvious to anyone who's ever been to a decent number of different types of schools that the only thing that truly matters is the other students (read: parents) that go there. Anything else is a rounding error.

As bad as it was 30 years ago when I was going to school, it's infinitely worse now from watching nieces and nephews attending their local public schools. Until they were able to transfer out to magnets at least.

> the schools are able to kick out any underperforming students

Being able to kick out disruptive students has a pretty big influence on the remaining students.

How do you distinguish between underperforming-non-disruptive students and under-performing-disruptive students, especially as the almost all the disruptive students are going to be underperforming anyway.

I don't consider myself right wing, but I guess in this case I wouldn't care even if it were nominally right-wing, because it's more important to give students good educations than it is to perpetuate institutions (eg giant school systems with awful performance) that might ideologically better align with my beliefs but are clearly not working.

Also, while I don't think students should be pushed out of charter schools purely for bad performance (if they are putting in the effort), I do think that poor minority parents should have the right to send their kids to schools that don't force students to share classrooms with disruptive or way-behind-grade-level students. When educational outcomes under the local public school system are really bad I think school-choice just makes a lot of sense as a way of figuring out what policies are popular/effective/unpopular/harmful.

Why wouldn’t I want a school to be able to kick out bad kids? Violent and disruptive kids need to be warehoused away from actual future productive members of society, rather than forcing 90% of kids to have their education ruined by 10% of bad kids

Please stop spreading misinformation. Public charter schools aren't allowed to kick out underperforming students.

OK, here's a question. Should every sportball team in the US be prohibited from being selective? Everyone, regardless of their capability, should be able to play on the same field. Including paraplegics because it's not their fault.

It's a lofty ideal, don't you think?

> Is it unfair to compare the median white american to the median Japanese, just because the U.S. also has a large Hispanic population that mostly descends from low-education post-1970 immigrants from impoverished Latin American countries?

It's a bit unfair because the average white American is wealthier than the races you excluded from American. The average Japanese person includes everyone from all classes, it does not skew towards the wealthier. If it did, you might see a different result.

Like I asked, does the comparison hold if you segment the results by economic class?

West Virginia is a nice datapoint here: Almost completely white, but also poor. And one of the worst scores of all.

Take that to its logical conclusion and we'd have individual, personalized tutors for each student. We don't have the resources for that, so some groups are going to get shafted. The question is which.

And when those goals are orthogonal to educational achievement, then what?

The greatest predictor of academic success is the education level of a student's parents.

eh no. a good education system educates the populous. if a student's goals are to play sports and never learn to read, that is irrelevant, they are measured on the education aspect. if their goals are to become a professional streamer, or they value "fame" over anything else, also irrelevant.

we have and should set clear and high education goals. you can adjust teaching strategies towards those goals based on the student and aim to drive those goals even higher, and things like advanced classes are clear ways to do so.