Education in the U.S.

John Stossel recently did a show about American education, questioning why we lag behind so much compared to other countries:

American high school students fizzle in international comparisons, placing well behind countries, even poorer countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and South Korea. American kids do pretty well when they enter public school, but as time goes on, the worse they do. Why?

Stossel's major goal is to show that extra spending on public education is not needed, because other countries are far more efficient.

Matt Yglesias responds by, in essence, saying that diminishing returns have set in, and because we are such a rich country we need to spend more proportionately to have the same level of education. Logically, I'm not entirely certain how this is supposed to work to make education proportionately expensive (as opposed to making each new increment in "goodness" cost more), but it seems to be an interesting argument.

Of course, all of this ignores the real elephant in the room: the U.S. has more students of sub-Saharan African descent and of Latino descent than most, if not all, European countries, and also many, many more than the super-homogenous East Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan. And, as Edwin S. Rubenstein shows, the entire score gap between the U.S. and the average high income country is due to the low scores of Latinos, blacks, and immigrants (the categories do overlap).

Whether one believes that this gap is due to innate characteristics or to racism and other environmental ills, there is no way to address the gap between U.S. and other countries' test scores without addressing the fact that the score gap occurs almost entirely within these two populations (I say "almost entirely" because there may be a few other ethnic groups that contribute to the gap, although fixing the black and Latino gap [i.e. bringing their average scores up to those of non-Hispanic whites] would by itself correct the gap), and that much of the gap is also due to the fact that so much of our Latino population consists of unassimilated immigrants.

That is all.