To speak in specifics rather than generalities: in this case, we see that White and Asian children do not seem to be having problems compared to their peers in other countries. Thus, we can assign a lower probability estimate to the hypothesis that the problem is the American educational system writ large. It seems to be a problem localized in certain parts of the system and population.

For example, it strikes me as unlikely that these factors are actually caused by race directly. I don't buy into the PC idea that everybody is exactly, precisely the same, but the differences simply aren't all that large.

What seems much more likely is that it's related to poverty. Poverty and race are highly correlated in the US for various historical reasons, and I'd wager that the charts would show just as much, if not more, link between poverty and scores as between race and scores.

But we can't say for certain without a proper analysis of all potential confounding factors. Picking a single one and pretending it's automatically important is the wrong way to do it.

These are things you want to believe, but they are not true. The reality is that race plays a huge role in intelligence. It's totally unfair, but it is what it is. Ignoring it, and believing otherwise does not make it go away, or make it better. It makes it worse.

> Poverty and race are highly correlated in the US for various historical reasons

Poverty is also highly correlated with intelligence. More correlated than it is to race.

> link between poverty and scores as between race and scores.

Of course, because poverty is a proxy to intelligence.

> Picking a single one and pretending it's automatically important is the wrong way to do it.

Pretending that the main one is automatically not-important because it's unfair, and/or huts your world view, is also the wrong way to do it.

I'm going to need some kind of cite for that before we go any further, you know.

I'm sure there is information I'm not familiar with, but I'm unimpressed with the "citations" that have followed this claim in other conversations.

" Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 85 points below the mean score for whites from all income levels, 139 points below the mean score of whites from families at the same income level, and 10 points below the average score of white students from families whose income was less than $10,000."

[1] http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

""" Clearly, one of the main factors in explaining the SAT racial gap is that black students almost across the board are not being adequately schooled to perform well on the SAT and similar tests. Public schools in many neighborhoods with large black populations are underfunded, inadequately staffed, and ill equipped to provide the same quality of secondary education that is offered in predominantly white suburban school districts. """

""" In many cases black schoolchildren are taught by white teachers who have low opinions of the abilities of black kids from the moment they enter the classroom. These teachers immediately write off black students as academic inferiors and do not challenge them sufficiently to achieve the skills necessary to perform well on standardized tests. """

The thing is, we're nerds. We ought to think more critically than "black people are disproportionately poor and perform less well academically, oh well, that's that." Pre-chewed explanations like that ought to be anathema, especially when they're deployed in the service of a cultural agenda.

But there's a disturbing tendency to ignore the US' complex and problematic history with racism. It's lazy. It's a cop-out.

White in lowest income bracket are lower than black in top income bracket.

Unfortunately, this data (from 2003) seems to show a persistent handicap in all but the highest income brackets for black SAT test takers. I'm sure there are a million studies and a million opinions, but my personal view is that it's likely due to historic inequalities still manifesting in current generations, as opposed to anything else.

Many of my friends from the Russian immigrant community came from a very different economic background than I did. For me, my grandparents would never have understood if I did not pursue graduate work in some form. From my friend's parents point of view, college was optional. I'm willing to bet that from ethnic make up, all of us are virtually indistinguishable and may even be related on some level. Different families, different attitudes to education, different SAT scores...

This is the hand the US citizenry has been dealt. Or rather I should say this is the hand the US has dealt itself. If we as a country are behind because we've left a non-trivial subset of our own citizens behind, that's as much an indictment as anything else.

Namely that we need a lot more effort put toward educational success for black children. The unemployment rate among young black males is particularly astronomical, and it correlates directly to failures in education and a skyrocketing in poverty rates. There has been a total failure across all aspects for the black community: education, employment, crime, family formation, etc.

You've got a huge swath of political parasites that abuse the black community, counting on their votes, while having done absolutely nothing to help improve the worsening rate of black poverty.

You've got shyster scumbags like Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton, that also act as parasites on the backs of black people. Always ready to prey on cheap opportunism, while under their supposed community leadership results have gotten dramatically worse.

It all has to change. Separating out the data, reveals where the real problems are, and having a dialogue about it is the first step. So far, very few want to talk about it.

Another glaring problem, is that America has lost its blue collar jobs. That was a core channel for upward mobility from poor > middle class, and a required staple to hold onto a large middle class. The vast erosion of quality manufacturing jobs over the last 40 years has particularly slammed people that were mostly poor to begin with - their ability to move up has been stopped (and all that destroys with it).

If you're comparing white kids in USA with all kids in Germany, then you're comparing apples with oranges - if you're putting a filter that excludes a large portion of poor families in USA, then you should exclude the same portion of poor families from the German results.

And if some other system is handling all social groups decently well, but USA fails with "certain parts of the system and population" as you say; then it's definitely a problem with "American educational system writ large".

I am only saying exactly what I said: it doesn't seem that the US educational system, in its entirety, is significantly defective relative to other countries. Some combination of the attributes of certain American populations and/or the system's effect on them is causing those populations to perform much worse than kids in European and Asian countries. This in no way spells doom for our entire country as the article argues.

It would be interesting to see international test scores from 1960, when the US was ~90% people of European descent. I would bet the US would compare closer to Europe on those. The demographic changes in the US over the last 50 years have been huge, and you can't ignore them in international comparisons.

  Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by   
  instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It 
  includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to 
  perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest 
  arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being 
  bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable 
  of leading in a heretical direction. 

  The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous 
  thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, 
  instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

  He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He 
  presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the 
  earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than 
  water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not 
  understanding the arguments that contradicted them.

ETA: likewise, Asians have not been in charge of the US for the majority of its history. In fact, they have typically been subject to whites' dominance. The WWII Japanese internment camps are a case in point.

But I get the sense that you're not really interested in exploring the complexity of different race relations as you are discounting said complexity with a trivially false equivalence.