Something that many HNers will probably be embarrased to admit being surprised by is how higher education attainment rates for immigrants don't exclude African immigrants. In fact, black immigrants from Africa and the West Indies have among the highest degree attainment rate of any group. This belies the lower college-and-advanced-degree attainment rate for black Americans as a whole.
All of this seems to suggest that there is something about the American education system - and perhaps our overal culture - that is failing our children, and our black children in particular.
This also makes me wonder if there's data about the mobility of native vs immigrant blacks. If it's similar, it would align with other data that show that degree attainment only serves to partially overcome the barriers to upward mobility placed in the way of black workers.
I'm of the opinion that many of the impediments that punish or withhold assistance from minorities often bleed over into mainstream American life. The specific drum I'll keep beating is that if, perhaps, the infrastructure to battle the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health issue had been allowed to be built to a robust state, the opioid epidemic would not have become so dire. The apathy towards these issues, even as they encroach upon "mainstream" middle class life, must be part of the mechanics of the calcification of class in America.
Black SWE here, grew up on the west side of Chicago, I don't think most white people understand how bad the literacy situation is. I could read competently before I even got to school and I went to grammar school in the 90s. First day of first grade, I found out no one could competently read a sentence. In fact, whole school (which has closed) was on this remedial education program called Advanced Directives or something. I'd never seen a book where the words were broken up syllable-by-syllable before I got to this school and I'm like 7 years old, and kids struggled with that. Making this a little more personal, I ultimately had to be separated from the other kids, and you can imagine why: you can't have one kid making all the others feel embarrassed and inadequate. But this also was a major source of resentment and ostracization that I'm still dealing with to this day.
This. Systemic racism ... aaaand ... loser gangster culture. Would love to see the numbers on whether it's easier to become a chartered accountant or a rap artist.
I'm seeing the other side of this, recently (disadvantaged white people). It's astonishing the loser mentalities and habits that many disadvantaged children learn from their early caregivers and peer group. As middle to upper middle class people, we often have no idea how many little bits of knowledge we pick up to work the system (legally), from those around us.
I think of it more as the bullying culture. I got bullied a lot for simply looking “nerdy” and doing my homework. Affects me to this day. It was “cool” to be dumb and flunk out. That’s a recipe for a system that holds people down.
I went to school with those loser gangster children. I tutored a lot of them. I'm still friends with a few of them through social media. While I was being insecure about my grades, physical size (I was a pipsqueak), and typical teenage angst. Some of those loser gangsters had real insecurities about society. Being treated poorly by a family, school, and country that did not want them there.
No. You have parents that are not able to attend to pre-school education, whether it's a time or money issue, or even an education issue themselves. And then you have children, let down by parents who were let down by society, who are ashamed of how far behind they are.
The idea that you can further shame people into "shaping up" is farcical. Please stop being part of the problem.
I have family that dealt with these issue, I live in and near communities that are fighting it, and I live a version of it, transposed from the pre-school->school transition to the college->postgrad/working world transition.
> First day of first grade, I found out no one could competently read a sentence.
Isn't the standard expectation that children enter first-grade completely illiterate? I remember learning how to read and write letters one per lesson in first grade.
I'd guess that maybe 5% are taught to read by parents?
I think schools even discourage parents teaching their kids to read, even in wealthy suburban, college oriented districts. But some do anyway, and it could be more than 5% especially if you only count those that end up being strong readers.
A theory my parents had was that the limiting factor in teaching a child to read is not the mental capacity, but their eyesight - supposedly it's normal to start out relatively farsighted and unable to focus on small print close up. So they started me and my sister on words printed in very large letters and gradually reduced them.
For the places that have it, I think kindergarten is where you're expected to first learn. Mine was in the same building as 1st through 6th grade.
(I was taught by my parents before even that, and when I started school they didn't believe my parents' claim - had to prove it by reading a new book aloud to them)
This is definitely worth thinking about, and in particular to put it into today's political context, Nigerian-Americans have the most PhDs per capita of any immigrant or native-born group -- and yet Nigeria was just put under travel restrictions.
Having friends & colleagues from both American Black and African and Black Caribbean backgrounds has given me a tiny glimpse into some of the difference in background and treatment. A Caribbean friend who came here for her PhD in mathematics mentioned to me that she was shocked at how she was treated here in the US -- in her home country, she was universally respected as an educator and a professional, while in the US she was... respected in the classroom, but not on the street. A different friend whose family has been in the US longer than mine, on the other hand, talked about being discouraged from a career in the National Park Service: his grandfather in particular had stories of the violence inflicted on black people in the woods, and felt it would be a very unsafe career. There's a really complex interaction of history, current economics, and personal choice, mediated by our schools. Just looking at the numbers, the US education system is not doing well by black students in particular and many children overall. Rural white kids are also not being served well. No one is getting good math education. And as long as we continue to divide against each other in a fight for artificially limited resources, we won't do better as a nation.
I was with you until the last point. The resources are not artificially limited. The US spends almost a trillion tax dollars each year on education. We’re at over 4.1% of GDP spent on education (excluding private money), well above Germany, Spain or Italy (about 3.6%), about the same as the UK (4.2%), and not too far below France (4.6%). https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/public-spending-on-educati... Those are the five largest EU countries comprising more than 2/3 of the EU population. We also spend more than Japan, Ireland, and about the same as Korea.
I think we absolutely need to spend money to address disparities in the experience of African American kids in this country. I think the wrong way to do that is to funnel more money into disproportionately white teachers and school administrators. Direct cash payments to inner city families I think would go a lot further.
> I think we absolutely need to spend money to address disparities in the experience of African American kids in this country. I think the wrong way to do that is to funnel more money into disproportionately white teachers and school administrators. Direct cash payments to inner city families I think would go a lot further.
We should do both, while sourcing more black teachers and administrators for schools from within those communities. The reality is that the history of impoverishment has set of cycles of negligence and trauma in these communities that money alone can't fix, though it can help change the direction.
Treatment from within the community is needed. Practically, the school is where that happens for the children. It would be great if the families would be able to afford to pay for their own treatment like more well off people do, but realistically, the direct payments would primarily be used pay for basics, like food and the roof over their heads.
But the vast majority of our primary and secondary school funding comes from local property taxes, no? That creates situations where wealthy districts have excess resources, while poorer districts are artificially limited.
Something as simple as bundling up school funds to the state level and redistributing similar per-pupil funds back to districts might help to close the gap - with no change in total expenditure.
> The paper then examines changes in finances over time—both within and across states— and evaluates how spending levels have changed for school districts that serve students of different races. Spending differences have largely disappeared. Spending levels across districts have converged; most remaining differences in spending are between rather than within states.
Obviously Kansas still spends less than California, but everything is much cheaper in Kansas too.
The report you cite from the tax policy center indicates that 30% of variation in school funding is still within-state between districts, so I'm not sure why they feel comfortable asserting that "spending levels across districts have converged". The authors also point out that district-level funding analyses gloss over large spending disparities between schools within districts.
The gap is there in DC, which gets special federal funding. DC is spending over $30,000 per student. DC schools are so bad that you should wonder if excess funding somehow makes things worse.
In addition to what I said earlier, I'll add that though $30,000 sounds like a big scary number, it's not so much when realizing that private schools with similar student support programs in DC go for $40,000-$60,000 a year.
As for DC public school performance, aside from the challenges that attending students often face, it should be known that DC has unfortunately served as a testing ground for a number of unorthodox education philosophies, to the detriment of the students. For at least the last two decades, during which I've been aware of the circumstances, we've had several high-profile school system admins attempt to radically reshape how DC schools "work", leaving a constantly shifting landscape in their wake. Multiple school closures, mass teacher firings and mutinies, charter school scandals, and more, while the basics (building maintenance and suitability, teacher professional training and support, resource access, etc.) are neglected.
If there's any truth to your assertions, it really doesn't have anything to do with the people who just want to provide students with traditional, stable learning environments and the support necessary to take full advantage of them.
Most of the reason for immigrant children doing so well is the fact that immigrants are often more driven, ambitious, and at the top of their peer group. So the USA gets a biased sample of immigrants from countries like Nigeria. None of this is happening in a vacuum, and interpreting it as such is misguided propaganda.
It is simultaneously the case that those African immigrants benefit from intact family and community structures, just like other immigrant groups. For example, they have people in their community they can trust to care for their children, or to offer them job opportunities at businesses that serve their communities specific cultural needs, like a Nigerian grocery.
Trust networks are extremely valuable, and they underpin a lot of the wealth, or lack thereof, in communities.
Poorer African Americans often have limited community and cultural support systems and the implied access to trust networks.
They instead have to contend with the massive and continuous structural damage inflicted upon their communities through the history of the country, including Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, social isolation, and the war on drugs.
History echoes and echoes and echoes. Redlining is still huge in its effects on generational wealth: housing is the single largest mechanism for wealth transfer in American families, and systematically and intentionally excluding black Americans has resulted in billions in dollars of vanished wealth. Go back in history and look at the Freedman's Bank: established during Reconstruction for freed slaves, it was placed under different oversight than other banks of the time and was used by Henry Cooke (a white guy) to give unsecured loans to his other foolish investments. He wiped out the bank, losing $57 million dollars (mildly inflation adjusted) of black American's money in 1874. Imagine if black families from 1874 had retained their $57 million dollars and been able to invest -- the capital they'd have today would be dramatically different. Then look again at today: in Detroit, families are still losing their homes because of confusing tax rules. Many families were exempted from property tax, but didn't get the paperwork properly completed and renewed every year, so they didn't pay property tax as they thought they had the exemption, but now the city is foreclosing on them due to back taxes even though they're now exempt and -- AND -- the city owes them a refund for overstating the same taxes when these families did pay!
It's amazing when you stack up the numbers from redlining, the Freedman's bank failure, these tax shenanigans, and the impact of differential sentencing for minor drug offenses propagating through to inability to access student loans and housing assistance.... (remember, if you rape someone, you can get government student loans, but if you had a baggie of marijuana, you cannot). So much money. And immigrant families, because they're coming here now, have not faced the same systematic impacts.
> [...] So much money. And immigrant families, because they're coming here now, have not faced the same systematic impacts.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying immigrant families are in a better financial situation than the discriminated-against blacks, because they weren't discriminated against in the same way? Many immigrant families bring very little with them and have to start from scratch.
> Many immigrant families bring very little with them and have to start from scratch.
However, what they usually bring is intact community and family support structures. Trust is one of the most valuable and scarce resources there is. It can even make up for a lack of money, because valuable services are often provided reciprocally to members of the community at low or no cost, and people tolerate sharing resources more easily with people they trust.
But if there's neither trust nor money, it's a much harder struggle.
I hear this a lot, but I don't know if it's particularly true. For black immigrants, I find more compelling the notion that their comfort with, and belief in, pursuing higher education isn't rocked so profoundly by white supremacy, as is so for native blacks. They're simply not as exposed to anti-black messaging, from the history of discrimination in America to the demographically disproportionate reporting of crime in American media. Add to that the arguably superior education of black Caribbeans, who are free to support higher standards with the requisite resources and are not stymied by regressive funding policy, and you have a population that is often more prepared for the rigors of higher education.
Which is pretty damning of the way America treats its own people.
Edit: I want to add that this is not simply my own speculation; this is the explanation that I've heard in part from several friends and acquaintances. They're often horrified by the leniency of standards for even high performing American students, and they will often state that they are not "black" in the way that native African Americans are, and are therefore not subject to the same biases and limitations.
African immigrants can have racist beliefs about black Americans just as much as anyone. (Including black Americans.) Kendi's "How to be an Antiracist" gets into this in a way I found to be eye-opening.
Immigrants are also forced to develop their own peer communities and support networks since mainstream culture, stores, and media don't cater to them. Growing up I was surprised by how low the expectations were for my American classmates from their parents.
A "goof off" from my community would be struggling to get Bs while a goof from the non-immigrant groups would be struggling to pass at all. And being a "straight-A student" was a baseline expectation rather than a marker of being a rare and special talent. The bar for how many sacrifices parents are willing to make to set their kids up for success is higher too. I got a B- in Math ONCE and my parents immediately hired me a tutor and started forcing me to do remedial exam drills, which is a reaction I don't think I would have seen in the average or median American household among my peer group.
I don't think it's any special level of intelligence among the immigrant community, but I think there is sort of an "Overton window" of cultural expectations for what are normal ways to spend your time, what's an appropriate spread for grades to be at, or what things you should be prioritizing in life. I think immigrant communities maintain an Overton window that prioritizes scholastics over the mainstream culture.
This is probably in large part due to selection bias since the immigration process chooses the cream of the crop, but the durability of this tendency across generations is probably set up by the higher standards I talked about.
That educational attainment was a priority for my extended family, and that there are high-profile fights for educational equity in cities across the country, lead me to believe that even non-immigrant black families and communities do have similar values. I wonder how much resource access, rather than intention, matters.
One of the books that I read last year, I can’t remember which [1], said that the greatest contributor to wealth over the long run is education. My unfounded assumption that explains the reasoning of why you did not experience American families reacting the same way that yours did is: the American belief in rugged individualism. I think that most Americans would say that “hard work” is the biggest contributor to wealth [2]. Being an immigrant, I guess that your family, and probably society they are from, adhered to the former belief, and that is why they took your education so seriously?
[1] Could have come from: Can American Capitalism Survive?, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, maybe Enlightenment Now.
How long in the family history does it take to lose that ambition/motivation? The colonists back in the day had to have had those same qualities. Maybe even more so with all the added risk and dangers of the time.
Indeed. While you're covering multiple topics, I wanted to touch on the education specifically.
I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
Beyond that the US education system, and the EPA works this way too, is that as we find the numbers don't add up to what we want, we lower the standards until we're at a point we think we can achieve some goal.
If they simply made standards that were wwaaaay higher, they would be forced to realize everything is underfunded.
>If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
This a false dichotomy. For one, teachers in SV can make 100k. Second the skills required to be an effective teacher are not the same as a good math major. They just aren't. We've all had the brilliant professor who can't teach. But we should pay teachers because good teachers are professionals and they should be rewarded appropriately.
The problem with education is that we treat each kid the same. But actually every kid is different and has unique needs and thus requires a personalized learning program. When they are young these are social and behavioral. As they get older they can be subject specific. An individualized program could be aligned with a cohort in a class setting but you really need individual tutoring to address the child's specific needs and deficits. A good teacher is able to recognize these needs and give them the education they need.
The classic school system was designed for the industrial era. We train you like a factory because you're going to work in a factory making 1 cog/minute. Now, those factory workers have been replaced with automation, simple AI, and robots. And the schools are woefully unprepared for it.
> I think a huge reason for our problematic education system is lack of competition for teaching jobs. If there's a job at a startup that's willing to pay someone for math at $100k (avg in mixed locations) - $300k (avg in silicon valley) how are we ever going to have excellent math teachers. The people competing for a 50k teaching job are not even qualified to have that 100-300k job.
I don't think the two have much to do with each other. being a good k-12 teacher is much more about the teaching skills than the subject mastery. anyone who can complete a stem major should be able to understand all the concepts they would have to present in a high school math class.
sure, but someone with a BA in english would do a fine job teaching writing intensive courses. outside of stem, people aren't facing the huge pay differential from industry anyway.
I think you see a similar phenomenon across many aspects of contemporary American life. We've found inferior-yet-workable ways to route around the increasingly dire financial situation of the average family, often by lowering standards, paying with debt, or simply with outright theft. 30 years ago, Sheila may have driven her new car to college (both of which she's paying for with a summer job), picking up a few new cassette tapes along the way. Today, she'll drive her used car, financed for 5 years, to a college she's paying for with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and she'll just pull up some YouTube videos or songs that she's pirated to pass the time.
I don't know if "competition" is a panacea, but there is definitely something wrong with how a lot of our institutions function.
> Today, she'll drive her used car, financed for 5 years, to a college she's paying for with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and she'll just pull up some YouTube videos or songs that she's pirated to pass the time.
Education aside, this is an odd comparison. She can have access to a big chunk of all the songs ever recorded, on-demand and for FREE (ad-supported Spotify). Comparing this unfavorably to "a few cassette tapes" is beyond absurd. Similarly, the used car she buys now is leagues better than the one she'd buy back then; not just for her, but environmentally and in terms of safety.
The cost of education is a real shift. But if these are the best examples you can think of to extend that to describing the average family as having "declining standards", you're proving the exact opposite point.
>She can have access to a big chunk of all the songs ever recorded, on-demand and for FREE (ad-supported Spotify).
Which she could afford to pay for (albeit at a much lower price than the cassettes would have commanded, appropriate for the advances in distribution efficiency) in a parallel today.
>Similarly, the used car she buys now is leagues better than the one she'd buy back then; not just for her, but environmentally and in terms of safety.
But it's not anywhere near what a new car offers in terms of fuel efficiency and especially safety. So there is a relative QoL loss there.
>The cost of education is a real shift. But if these are the best examples you can think of to extend that to describing the average family as having "declining standards", you're proving the exact opposite point.
They're not, they're just the first that came to mind that fit in a neat illustration.
The overall point is that we're no longer capable of paying outright for things we used to be able to. We have to rely on workarounds (ad support, used goods, debt, theft) to maintain a semblance of the same QoL. Our standards haven't declined perceptionally because we have those tools, but their use is anywhere from unsustainable to morally-objectionable. And if you take them away, you have a far poorer American than one or two generations ago.
You can have plenty of great math teachers for $50k/yr in the US, or you can require most teachers to have a masters degree and still make $50k/yr, not both.
Plenty of people home school their children, and reportedly those children have great academic ability. I'm willing to wager the vast majority of those home schooling their kids aren't graduates of a teaching program.
Thanks to common core, I successfully taught a younger family member how to do long division, since common core doesn't teach long division for whatever reason, at least not at the age that we used to learn it. It was simple, intuitive, and I have no math teaching background. It took about 120 seconds to demonstrate the technique for the kid to get it and do it on their own.
It's not a question of funding, it's a question of policy. People want their cake and eat it too. Kids failing in basic mathematics all over the country? Maybe we should overhaul the education system, get rid of useless subjects like science, history, art, 'every kid learns a second language now,' and focus on literacy and mathematics.
I disagree on the comprtition argument. In Eastern Europe competition for teaching jobs could not be lower. It's one of the lowest paying and most stressful jobs out there.
However, everyone I know from there thinks that American level of school education is lower, especially in STEM. So they send their children here in NorCal to extra math classes.
If education in the USA is underfunded, then education is underfunded in pretty much every country. The USA pays more per student than Japan, Sweden, Germany, and Korea. Look:
So that isn't the problem, at least relative to the rest of the world.
The worst schools in the USA seem to spend the most. Maybe the money is anti-educational, being used to purchase distractions. DC is spending well over $30,000 per student. At that rate, DC could easily pay 300k for a teacher. It would only require the funds from 1/3 of the class.
Funding models differ greatly. Often those sky-high prices-per-student are because the schools are taking care of several meals a day for students, as well as before/after care, extracurriculars, and special needs programs, where all these initiatives are a necessity but unable to be provided by parents. In America, all of these are provided at higher cost and higher quality by wealthier parents themselves; in other countries, more robust social safety nets, more lenient workplace and parental leave policy, and occasionally higher real income/wealth per family allow parents to take on those needs at lower cost.
When combined with the prevalence of social intervention in the lives of poor families - up to and including removal of the children - you see that there is a profound and toxic distrust of these parents and of their ability to take care of their own children. We've allowed a model to grow where, instead of ensuring people make enough to take care of their families, we shift the burden onto the state. This is inefficient in education for a number of reasons, least of which the central conceit as described above, which undermines the effort at its core.
The countries you cite are all relatively homogenous. The U.S. has greater disparities in education funding due to funding coming primarily from local sources rather than national.
Sweden and Germany are no longer homogeneous at all, and anyway isn't diversity supposed to be a strength?
The specific example I gave, DC, simply destroys the argument that local funding is the problem. DC is very well-funded from national sources, and it has horrific schools.
> All of this seems to suggest that there is something about the American education system - and perhaps our overal culture - that is failing our children, and our black children in particular.
You're missing a huge cause before jumping to this conclusion. African immigrants don't just differ from African-Americans in that they weren't born here; they're also a subpopulation that's gone through the dramatic filter of the US's legal immigration policy. If you have a filter that is explicitly trying to select for the educated and economically productive, it's practically a tautology to say that the outcome of that filter will consist of a more educated and productive population than your control group.
I can't imagine the same dynamic wouldn't hold for recent immigrants from most regions vs their many-generations-American counterparts.
In all my years browsing HN I don't remember reading anything racist, overt or implied. If your first paragraph is true, I think it would have more to do with the media's portrayal of people of African American and Hispanic descent.
All of this seems to suggest that there is something about the American education system - and perhaps our overal culture - that is failing our children, and our black children in particular.
This also makes me wonder if there's data about the mobility of native vs immigrant blacks. If it's similar, it would align with other data that show that degree attainment only serves to partially overcome the barriers to upward mobility placed in the way of black workers.
I'm of the opinion that many of the impediments that punish or withhold assistance from minorities often bleed over into mainstream American life. The specific drum I'll keep beating is that if, perhaps, the infrastructure to battle the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health issue had been allowed to be built to a robust state, the opioid epidemic would not have become so dire. The apathy towards these issues, even as they encroach upon "mainstream" middle class life, must be part of the mechanics of the calcification of class in America.