The U.S. education system isn’t as bad as you think

It is fashionable to lament American schooling, criticising the teachers, the curricula, the assessment systems, and the outcomes. The prevailing opinion is that the current system is dire. It is not. In terms of international comparisons it is actually quite good.

Consider the component demographics. Sociologist Robert Hauser, using PISA comparisons of reading literacy for 15-yr-olds in 70 different countries, states that: “U.S. Asians ranked fourth in the world, and U.S. whites ranked sixth. Both scored higher in reading literacy than the OECD average. Only Singapore ranked higher than U.S. non-Hispanic whites, and no nation ranked statistically higher than U.S. Asians”.

Hauser continues: “In science as in reading, the average achievement of U.S. non-Hispanic whites and U.S. Asians is world-class”. In mathematics the performance of American whites and Asians is not so outstanding but is “still respectable” (and in line with international norms for Europeans and Asians).

So what is the problem? Well: “The situation is entirely different for U.S. Hispanics and U.S. non-Hispanic Blacks, both of which scored significantly lower than the OECD average”, and: “Simply put, U.S. non-Hispanic whites and U.S. Asians are world-class readers, while U.S. Hispanics and U.S. non-Hispanic Blacks lag much of the world”.

But what is the appropriate comparator for those populations? Looking at Hauser’s tables we see that U.S. Hispanics score better than any of the Latin American countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, and thus better than any other Hispanic population. Meanwhile U.S. blacks outscore black populations in Africa or the Caribbean or anywhere else.

So, in all cases (Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans, sub-Saharans), the American racial group is scoring well compared to the same demographic in other countries world wide. Asian Americans attain outcomes comparable to the best of Asia; European-derived Americans attain outcomes comparable to the best of Europe, and Hispanic and black populations in America outperform the same demographics elsewhere. Doesn’t that show that the U.S. system is, overall, doing fairly well?

The critics, though, average over American racial demographics and compare that average to the best Asian or European countries, and on that comparison America doesn’t look so good. They do that because mainstream opinion thinks that educational outcomes are not about the children, they are all about schools (the kids themselves being blank slates, such that racial demographics shouldn’t matter). Thus outcomes are considered to be very much the responsibility of the school system, and if a child does poorly, then the school has “failed them”.

Thus mainstream opinion doesn’t want to compare U.S. blacks and Hispanics with similar populations elsewhere in the world, it compares them with whites and Asians, and it wants equality of outcomes between all such groups. As they see it, a failure to produce that equity can only be attributed to a gross and systemic failure to care about kids from some demographics.

But, decades of research into education tells us that the mainstream opinion is utterly wrong. Schools, teachers, curricula, and funding levels matter only at the margins (accounting for about 10% of the variation in outcomes across a given country). What actually matters is the intrinsic ability of the child.

For example, Plomin et al (2016) report: “Academic achievement consistently shows some shared environmental influence, presumably due to the effect of schools, although the effect is surprisingly modest in its magnitude (about 15% for English and 10% for Mathematics) given that this result is based on siblings growing up in the same family and being taught in the same school”.

Note that those low percentages are not the effect solely of the schools, they are the total effect of all environmental factors that siblings living together would share, which includes schools but also peer-group culture, parents and family income (and while such findings have been corroborated by multiple studies over decades, they are routinely ignored by popular culture, policy makers, and the social sciences).

Just about every study ever done says that what makes the difference between a “good” school and a “bad” school is actually little to do with the school, it’s all about the cohort of kids that the school gets. That is not saying that schooling doesn’t matter. Of course it does, the difference between sending a child to school versus sending them to work in the fields from age 11 affects their capabilities as an adult (and thus radically different systems in different countries will have a big effect). But the evidence is that (within developed countries) most schools are adequate, and that, once at an adequate level, improving them further is very hard (while most claimed success stories are actually down to selection effects in that school’s intake). Thus education does not close gaps between demographic groups.

American education is branded a failure and a disgrace because it does not result in all demographic groups having the same mean outcome. And yet achieving that is likely not possible. Fifty years of trying, including throwing money at the problem time and again, has not closed the gaps. And short of actively handicapping kids from the higher-achieving groups, the gaps are not going to close. Of course nothing about that implies giving up on any child; education does matter for life chances at all points in the ability range.

The central problem for American education is a refusal to follow the evidence and accept this reality. There’s no reason to expect that different demographic groups will have the same mean intrinsic academic ability. Indeed, we’d expect that they don’t, given that natural selection is powerful enough to drive one-standard-deviation changes in the genes responsible for cognitive ability on a timescale of 10,000 years (Akbari et al 2026), which is shorter than the timescale on which major population groupings have been largely separated. And allowing for differences in group means, at that sort of level, suddenly makes sense of a whole array of facts about the world, which is the hallmark of a good scientific theory.

But that suggestion is taboo. The above-cited Hauser article documents the group disparities but is quick to assert: “The fault here does not lie with minority youth ...” (notice that Asian Americans don’t get called a “minority” even though there are fewer of them than blacks or Hispanics; “minority” is used as a euphemism for “less successful”). Instead Hauser asserts that “achievement gaps ... can be explained to a substantial degree by differences in socioeconomic origins”. But while he has correctly noted a correlation, he has — in typical social-scientist style — not stopped to ask which way causation runs, even though it is obvious that lower academic ability is likely to lead to lower socioeconomic status.

Writing recently in the Boston Globe, Freddie deBoer mixes perceptive commentary with spectacularly avoiding the main issue. He correctly argues that it is not schools or funding levels that cause the gaps: “Imagine swapping the students of Detroit with those of wealthy Bloomfield Hills next door, where the schools have excellent performance metrics. Does anyone believe the students from Detroit would suddenly excel?”, and also: “Simply shoveling money at urban schools is not the answer. In fact, poorer, higher-minority schools in the United States receive significantly more per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools”.

But he then won’t allow himself to ask the central question: “I’m known to be very skeptical about the influence of schools and teachers on test scores, which tend to reflect the socioeconomic conditions of groups and the variation in talent levels between individuals”. See how carefully that is worded?

Attempting to explain outcome gaps deBoer asserts: “The American schools that struggle the worst share no common curriculum, union contract, or pedagogy. What they share is extreme poverty, segregation, and decades of disinvestment — in local labor markets, transportation, and health care.” Well, no, the most salient thing that they share is racial demographics.

Some will regard saying that as distasteful, but reality also matters, particularly for devising effective policy. (Is lack of investment in things like “transportation and health care” really a convincing alternative explanation?) If there were sub-Saharan populations elsewhere in the world that were outperforming black Americans then America could rightfully indict itself for “systemic racism”. If there aren’t then it shouldn’t.

Nothing above says we shouldn’t also pay full attention to pedagogical methods, curricula, and educational policy — and care about children of all ability levels as individuals. It may only affect outcomes at the margins, but that’s still worth doing. But we cannot pay proper attention to all of that if we’re judging the system solely by the single metric of racial attainment gaps.