There's something a little creepy about saying there's nothing wrong with the American education system by only looking at those in the US of European descent and excluding all others.
Controlling for exogenous variables is "creepy"?
African Americans (and Asians) are excluded from comparison simply because Finland doesn't have them. Similarly, when comparing the US to Asian schools, the author excludes whites as well. The point here is to compare like to like.
African Americans and Asians Americans are people. I heard that Finland has people (though I'm not really sure). So, their school systems seem comparable. Because after 1st generation immigrants, race is more linked to identity within a society.
Asians perform better on tests when they are reminded beforehand of their heritage because it reinforces their own stereotype of themselves. African Americans perform worse. There are racial subgroups in most diverse nations (including Japan) that have the same effects going on, despite the fact that to a foreigner there would be no appearance on
But to say that in some way African Americans are "comparable" to people in Africa, or to say that of non-1st-generation Asian immigrants, doesn't really seem fair.
Frankly, on a more personal note, I found this analysis to be structurally unsound.
What I take away is that America spends more money on its schools than any country vs. Luxembourg, but doesn't have the highest test results. So throwing money at the problem may not be the right way to fix it. Or it may have some impact, but its going to be like running water through a leaky fire hose.
We haven't developed the right educational system yet. A lot of smart people are working on this issue, and probably the right solution is to throw more money at them specifically.
I see that the problem is not the money but how to use it, the main problem is deciding where to put the money in and i think you're right , and i also think that there are different problems in different parts of the USA. In Spain,being much smaller than USA , they don't have the same problems in a school in the center of Madrid than in Barcelona or Bilbao, different problems need different solutions, but it must be a nightmare to find solutions for each area in a country as big as the USA
And you don't find the idea that in terms of education potential, the author's assumption that there is something fundamentally different about Americans of Asian, Caucasian or African descent just a little bit creepy?
Like I said: I totally buy into the immigrant argument (including the language barrier) but to only compare Whites from the US to Europe (for a supposed "like for like" comparison), you're going beyond language and culture and introducing race as a variable.
And no this isn't some kind of crypto-racist accusation. I just don't see how you can reasonably differentiate between someone of Chinese descent whose ancestors came here in the 19th century to build the railroads to someone of Irish descent who came here a century ago.
And you don't find the idea that in terms of education potential, the author's assumption that there is something fundamentally different about Americans of Asian, Caucasian or African descent just a little bit creepy?
That's not an assumption, it's just a possibility the author is attempting to control for.
I just don't see how you can reasonably differentiate between someone of Chinese descent whose ancestors came here in the 19th century to build the railroads to someone of Irish descent who came here a century ago.
The simplest way to reasonably differentiate between them is to look at them:
You seem to be asserting that allowing for the possibility that cultural or biological factors might affect educational outcomes is creepy. Is that an accurate assessment?
A lifetime of people looking at you and reacting to you causes you to perform differently. Performance can change surprisingly quickly. Researchers have found that reminding people of their ethnic identity before they take a test will affect their performance on the test in accord with racial stereotypes. (Asians improve, blacks get worse.)
While it is politically correct to try to be colorblind, reality doesn't cooperate. You can be PC and pretend those effects aren't there. Or you can be intellectually honest and honestly look at how big an impact they have.
(That said, we can and should reduce the size of those effects. However we can't even begin to have a proper discussion of how to do that as long as we shoot the messenger that tells us that the effect is there.)
Hopefully not much. The visual differences simply demonstrate that they are separate and mutually distinguishable groups.
The numbers quoted in the main article demonstrate that these groups do differ in some characteristics which affect education, although they don't illuminate which ones in particular.
>And you don't find the idea that in terms of education potential, the author's assumption that there is something fundamentally different about Americans of Asian, Caucasian or African descent just a little bit creepy?
Actually, I find creepy your suggestion that this is creepy. It's obviously true that there are differences between ethnicities, both genetic and cultural, and the notion that we should pretend this isn't the case is a bit Orwellian.
Controlling for exogenous variables is not creepy, but I find the focus on "ethnicity descent" a bit weird when it is the sole parameter being checked. For example, how does this study make sure that there is no other explanatory variable hidden in the country of origin (like e.g. household income) ? He mentions that the US spend a lot of money on education, but since he removes a big part of the students in each country, conclusions are much more difficult to draw: I would expect the money spent per student to be significantly different depending on demographics, for example.
Also, the text uses all encompassing categories with straw man arguments about PISA tests comparison. For example, I can tell you that when the scores went out last year and was discussed in French news, nobody was bragging about how smarter we were compared to the US given how bad the results were for France. He makes some interesting points, but it is hidden within too much authoritative argumentation, which weakens his analysis IMO.
IOW, I think it is an interesting starting point, but it is too crude to make any conclusion, especially the ones he is trying to draw.
Controlling for exogenous variables is not creepy, but I find the focus on "ethnicity descent" a bit weird when it is the sole parameter being checked.
I'm guessing it's less creepy when you take into account that it's just an easily googleable factor.
By the way, the fact that you exclude lots of students is irrelevant, as long as you keep enough to be statistically significant. That's true even when he throws away all non-asian students in the US.
As for household income, that's an even shadier factor to include, since the US is significantly richer than most European nations. Holding income equal, you'd be comparing our 60'th percentile to Sweden's 40'th percentile (numbers made up, but something along those lines).
I don't understand how excluding students is not relevant when discussing about money spent per student: the point is indeed to keep enough to be statistically significant, but w.r.t. what is measured. If money spent by student varies significantly within different demographics, systematically ignoring some demographics alters the validity of the comparison. Maybe it does not, but that needs to be controlled, otherwise it is nonsense statistically speaking.
As for household income, I was not suggesting to use raw numbers, it should of course be normalized, e.g. something like purchase parity, although there may be better ways to do so. It seems difficult to argue that this is shadier than anything related to ethnicity which has no clear definition that I know of.
That is significantly alter the outcome does not make it relevant - it only suggests it may be relevant. The typical example is explaining education success in terms of tv hours views/days during primary education. The variable has a strong prediction power, but it is not really explanatory, as proved when you control with involvement of parents. I feel the same weakness in his analysis.
As for the PPP numbers you gave, they are average, but the whole point of the analysis is to go away from the average, and look at specific demographics. There is no reason to believe they split the same ways in different countries for the same demographic. Maybe the variable is not relevant, but I would be surprised not to see it controlled.
(I would also challenge the fact that US are cheap, but I don't think it is so relevant to the discussion).
Explanatory is a subset of relevant. Furthermore, using a correlated factor as a proxy for the explanatory one is perfectly legitimate if you are attempting to make an unrelated comparison.
(I.e., if "European descent" is correlated with "good home environment" or other exogenous predictors (the data shows it is), and you are comparing EU schools to US schools, it's utterly reasonable to control for "European descent" if data on those exogenous predictors is unavailable.)
As for PPP numbers, the gap often becomes larger when you compare like to like. The same blog did a very good job of this (focusing on not only European Americans, but actually narrowing down to Swedish Americans) a while back:
I don't understand "explanatory is a subset of relevant". If it does not (partially or not) explain the observed result, how can you decide whether it is relevant ?
As for the other links, I don't see numbers related to PPP, but maybe I misunderstand those graphs (I don't understand income per unit of consumption). I also don't see how he can deduce the difference is coming from gvt differences. I am only familiar with statistics, so I may be missing the subtlety of a field I am unfamiliar with (economy), but those analysis seem quite superficial to me. Certainly, they don't warrant such strong conclusions.
Statistically, probably not much of a difference if you subscribe to the theory that there would be. I was just correcting the implication that there were none.
Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're enough to influence education statistics. It could mean, for example, that Finns are just easily riled up in general.
The Finland-Swedes are essentially Finns anyway, so you are talking about 99% homogenous population.
I moved to Finland a couple of years ago and have two kids at school. The key differences I see (compared to Aus) are:
- later start (7 years old grade 1)
- hot lunches
- every kid gets the same education, almost no private schools, no advantage in going to a different school
- multiple languages are taught
- teaching is quite a prestigious and reasonably well paid occupation
- lots of small schools (they scale wide, not high, from a hardware perspective)
Of course these are basic observations, not a study. I have no idea how they get such good results, but they do.
Yes, I think that there are significant cultural and economic differences and it is quite complex, and of course dollars spent on eduction doesn't equal dollars spent on teachers.
A hypothesis: In a social democracy like Finland, you will probably join the large middle class. So when you choose your desired vocation before university you may be more likely to apply your excellent skillset to teaching rather than something else, as that's what you want to do and are suited for, and you'll probably earn close to everyone else anyway.
In some other countries, you may try to get in to law/medicine/business first, and use teaching as a fallback as it is much lower paid. The net result is that teaching can be seen as a second choice profession and not valued as highly socially. Saying "I'm a teacher" at the barbeque sends a signal that you maybe didn't do so well at school as you wanted, and got your second choice at uni.
I know of a couple of data points where this is true in Aus (and also where it is not), but I don't know if it is really widespread. Just a thought.
I don't think dollars spent correlates with the prestige of teaching - perhaps not even with compensation, given the bureaucracy inherent in the system, though that's pure speculation.
Teachers are given freedom to design curriculum and choose textbooks, i.e. quite entrepreneurial approach
No national tests of learning outcomes
No school league tables or rankings
Plenty of (early) attention focused on individual support for the struggling learners
The best students could be underserved, because they advance at the pace of the average (or worst) students.
The prevailing social norms have some drawbacks. Equal opportunities is a good starting point, but too often we like to punish success as a way of keeping the perceived inequalities at minimum. In some way, we can't handle success. There's not enough competition to reach the top. Quite the opposite, envy and such emotions are often not agents for activating people (as in the American dream). More often they create passivity. We're only too happy to be all middle class.
oh, you didn't indeed. I just thought we were arguing here whether Finland had enough immigrants for them to make a dent in education statistics. And the answer is resounding yes.
also, Helsinki clearly isn't the whole Finland, but most African and Asian immigrants do live in Helsinki.
income. As noted elsewhere in this thread, many of the ascribed self-defeating attitudes are endemic to indigenous (>1 generation) lower socio-economic strata across the 'racial' spectrum. Yes, there are vestiges everywhere, I'd start there.
Comparing light-skinned Americans with light skinned Finns is not comparing "like to like", it is making an arbitrary comparison based on false assumptions. "race" as we tend to think of it isn't a very scientific concept.
that has no bearing on the discussion of the validity of comparing people who look alike but live in different countries. a white finn might look like me, but i have no idea how i would go about modelling my behavior on them.
And now that I try to rephrase it in my head, I see that you're right about the relevance (or lack thereof). I was trying to say that there can be a difference between, say, blacks and whites (and Asians and...) even though they aren't "races"; but of course that doesn't have much to do with the subject in this comment thread.
Controlling for exogenous variables is "creepy"?
African Americans (and Asians) are excluded from comparison simply because Finland doesn't have them. Similarly, when comparing the US to Asian schools, the author excludes whites as well. The point here is to compare like to like.