I see, so you think the education problem in america is down to people who aren't descended from europeans dragging the side down.
It is my belief that the US is marginally better than Denmark at educating people of European descent. The data supports this belief.
I have no data on whether the US is better or worse than Denmark at educating people from other groups. If you have data on income I'd love to see it.
I don't know what you mean by "education problem". The main "education problem" in the US is cost, and this has little to do with the quality of the students.
When I moved to Sweden from the US, I was surprised to see that children born in Sweden, but with one parent from outside the country, were considered 'foreigners.' One of the books we read in Swedish class had a character who had a single grandparent from Chile. That contributed towards her dark eyes and complexion, so that another character asked "are you really Swedish?". I was astonished even, since my personal belief (being brought up in Miami during the 1970s and 1980s) is that nationality is not so stingy. My father and his parents were born in Canada, but Dad became a US citizen when he was a teen. I can't count the number of friends of mine whose parents are both from Cuba but consider themselves patriotic US citizens. Compare that to my dad's mother's mother, who forbade her daughter from dating my grandfather because she's a Norwegian Lutheran while he's a German Baptist. Those being very different cultures, you know.
These memories come to mind because the author, who is raised in the Swedish system, uses this same definition of 'foreign;' and it's a view I find rather un-American.
So when I read that essay, which excludes from consideration the rather large sub-population of people whose distant ancestors came to the US as slaves in the 1800s, who are by now fully part of the American system, with basically zero language or cultural ties to any ancestral lands, I can't help but think "so what?" I don't care if there's a sub-population which did better ... and why is race used in one place and immigration status used in another? Is the correlation with relative income more significant? It's easy to see how doing just one simple factor analysis isn't enough on its own to be anything more than suggestive.
BTW, the re-analysis on that blog shows that "the mean score of Americans with European ancestry is 524, compared to 506 in Europe, when first and second generation immigrants are excluded." Because the original analysis shows that Europe overall did better than the US, then I think it's equally reasonable to interpret the re-analysis as saying that Europe does a much better job of educating its first and second generation immigrants than the US does at educating its citizen with non-European ancestry.
In other words, since most of the excluded populations are black, the US seems much worse at educating citizens of African descent than of European descent. I would like that to change, so that all children have access to a good education, as well as to social services to help with nutrition, health, housing, and other factors that strongly affect the education and well-being of children.
Again, the difference between the two populations "Danish" and "US minus non-whites" is that the latter neatly excludes a lot of society's poorest, whereas the former does not. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
You seem to be implying that the non-white poor in the US somehow lift whites out of poverty.
The objection I'd make is that unless non-white Danes are a small fraction, "white Americans" vs "all Danes" should be instead vs "white Danes" (that is, the motivation in slicing out a subpopulation of the US is not to exclude the poor, but to control in a coarse way for the influence of genetics, via the proxy "European" (really, "white").
Non-whites in the US are heavily overrepresented amongst the poor. Excluding them excludes much of the poor from the US figures, which would raise the average performance - specifically given that the author is saying that it's the kind of homes you find in places of poverty with high crime that reduce PISA scores.
Also, claims of genetic intellectual differences between the races are dead as a dodo. No real genetic difference has been found, and if there was any, it is so small that it's utterly swamped by cultural issues. Claiming that you want to cleave off a different race to 'make the comparison fair' is tantamount to saying 'blacks are intellectually inferior to whites'.
Poverty, crime, and broken homes are presented as the thesis for poor performance in school, then the author removes a large amount of those people from the US results citing this rather racist "but, genetics!" idea.
The main "education problem" in the US is cost, and this has little to do with the quality of the students.
I partly agree with you there, the administration costs are atrocious. However, as a percentage of GDP you are low down the list on education spending even while you are near the top on spending per capita, so economically the US could afford to spend a lot more while at the same time what is being spent seems to be spent rather badly.
Personally I suspect spending a fair bit more, but firing three quarters of the management staff would be not a bad start. I also think that raising both the wages and required qualifications of teachers would be a good idea, with paid for education available to current teachers who don't yet meet those standards, and job reviews and some redundancies for those teachers who really can't hack it.
Teaching at a state school should be a very well paid, highly sought after, difficult to get into and thoroughly respected profession.
It is my belief that the US is marginally better than Denmark at educating people of European descent. The data supports this belief.
I have no data on whether the US is better or worse than Denmark at educating people from other groups. If you have data on income I'd love to see it.
I don't know what you mean by "education problem". The main "education problem" in the US is cost, and this has little to do with the quality of the students.