Do American Rich Kids do Worse on International Tests than Rich Kids from Other Countries?
Do American Rich Kids do Worse on International Tests than Rich Kids from Other Countries?
Stephen Krashen
Hanushek, Peterson and Woessmann (2014) claim that when we examine students from "advantaged" families, American students do poorly in math: Our rich kids do worse than rich kids from other countries. Hanushek et. al. conclude that this shows that poverty is not the only factor affecting school performance. Their conclusions are based on their analysis of data from the 2012 PIRLS examination, tests given to 15-year-olds in a large number of countries.
Berliner (2014) argued that Hanushek et. al. used an invalid measure of "advantaged": at least one parent who graduated college. He also argued that a more valid measure is income. Many college graduates, Berliner pointed out, are not in high-income professions.
I present here a secondary analysis of the PISA data presented by Hanushek et. al. to determine the relative influence of parental education and poverty on math and reading achievement, as measured by PISA. For the most part, the results support Berliner's claim.
Method and Results
Measures of poverty
Two measures of poverty were used in this analysis, one for poverty in the individual states of the US and another for poverty in other countries. Both measures are based on parental income. Berliner (2014) points out that parental income and school achievement are strongly related: SKrashen: Do American Rich Kids do Worse on International Tests than Rich Kids from Other Countries?:
