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Greg Anrig evaluates our disappointing performance in the Programme for Student International Assessment (pisa) and concludes that our education system is indeed failing because of all the black and Hispanic kids. But it's not because they're dumber. And it's not even because they're poorer. It's because they're more economically isolated:
The differences in skin colour matter not because of crackpot genetics theories, but because blacks and Hispanics remain largely segregated in low-income urban neighbourhoods from the rest of society. Among fourth-graders in 2005, 48% of blacks and 49% of Hispanics attended schools in which more than 75% of the students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. By comparison, only 5% of white students attended such high-poverty schools. Nearly three-quarters of all black and Hispanic students go to schools with at least half the enrollment eligible for subsidized lunch.Around the globe, the Pisa results affirm, the socio-economic background of students significantly affects test performance - the lower the income of a child's family, the worse he is likely to do on the exam. But an even more important factor in predicting any child's score is the collective economic and social circumstances of his classmates. According to the Pisa report: "Regardless of their own socio-economic background, students attending schools in which the average socio-economic background is high tend to perform better than when they are enrolled in a school with below socio-economic intake. In the majority of OECD countries, the effect of the average economic, social and cultural status of students in a school ... far outweighs the effects of the individual student's socio-economic background."If you eliminate the racial -- which is to say, socioeconomic gaps -- and compare like groups, American children compete quite well kids in the rest of the world. But while researchers can eliminate the gaps in their models, we haven't proven able, or even particularly interested, in eliminating the gaps in our country. Far more fun to speculate about whether impoverished children are genetically incapable of intelligence or, conversely, whether we can avoid lifting them out of poverty by letting them bus to new schools.
