That’s the headline for this New York Times Magazine story, which fails to break down America’s math scores on racial grounds. When you do that, you see that Japanese-Americans do about as well at math as the Japanese and America’s other racial groups do the same or better as members of their race around the world.
There’s nothing unique about America’s race problems or education problems. America’s so-called race problem simply reflects the varying average performance of the races all around the world where Orientals (North-East Asians) do best on average IQ scores, educational attainment, income, credit scores, life expectancies, and staying out of crime. Whites don’t do quite as well as Orientals, but they do better than latinos who do better than blacks. Nowhere in the world is this order reversed.
Steve Sailer writes: Sure, the Japanese average higher math scores than Americans on the PISA test. But when you think about the Great Unthinkable, race, recent Japanese math performance doesn’t look too edifying. Here is the top of the 2012 PISA results in Math:
Shanghai-China 613
Singapore 573
Hong Kong-China 561
Chinese Taipei 560
Korea, Republic of 554
Asian-Americans 549
Macao-China 538
Japan 536
So, in the latest international math test, the Japanese do worse than Asian-Americans and worse than other Northeast Asian cultures, even perpetual slacker Macao.
Also, why is the Japanese afterschool math teaching business of Kumon, the essence of Drill and Kill, the most successful export of Japanese educational culture? A commenter points out that from a truth-in-advertising perspective, it’s admirable that Kumon’s logo features an unhappy child.
