If you go to Union City's own newspapers and read the comments of the people there talking about the school situation, there is great rage rising there and the consensus is, the schools are in danger of going the way of Newark and they are scared of this happening. I used to live in New Jersey and watched this happen from 1980-2000, the deterioration of the schools is obvious, most parents who are very interested in saving their kids are increasingly sending them to private schools as I had to do.

A possible explanation for Union City NJ might be the high concentration of Cubans located there and the difference between their achievement and other Hispanics.

Instead of the American dominant culture's emphasis on success as measured on a standardized test as the lens through which to conclude broad sweeping generalizations, why not measure such intangible concepts as happiness, compassion, emotional well being, brotherly (or sisterly) love, creativity, adaptability or resourcefulness? If our culture was less me oriented and more we oriented, would there be a nation wide outrage at the high rates of selfishness and lack of group cohesion? If there was less emphasis on standardization of knowledge as measured through corporatized testing, would there be higher rates of creativity & experimentation with new knowledge emerging? If the ideal learning environment for children was one of complete cooperation and empathy, would we have a less materialistic culture with a narrowing of the gap between financial haves and have nots. Would there be less of a nationwide epidemic of unhappiness causing widespread drug addiction & depression as measured in suicides, murder rates & accidental drug overdoses? What is more important after all, knowledge for the sake of knowledge or knowledge with an intent to improve society for all not just for oneself and one's immediate family?

Several Thoughts:

A) It does resemble a Normal Graph where it takes 3 Standard Deviations to
capture most of the data.

B) Should we not be shocked that African Americans score lower than
"Hispanic" students...for all those who want "Open Borders" what about our
obligation to help those whose ancestors we enslaved and legally discriminated
agains for 400 years...

C) Education, though at times hard to tell, does directly relate on how you will
do in obtaining higher wages. If both your parents take education seriously and
have higher incomes, it may well be the case that their child has inherited genes
that lead him to do better in school and more inclined, temperamentally, to succeed in the work place.

D) If you really, really, really want to help poor students - both in the economic sense and learning skills sense please consider the following:

1) Open Public Schools from 6 AM to 8 PM so that the student who have parents who work long hours have a safe environment to go to and be
mentored/tutored.

2) Reduce class size so the Teachers can spend more time with struggling students.

3) Makes schools absolutely safe places. No bullying, no guns/knives, no gangs,
no attacks on fellow students/teachers.

4) Allow students to begin their schooling in August or January depending on
their age and emotional and intellectual growth. If a child needs to be
"held back" they would only have to slide back a semester not a year.

5) Allow good teachers to teach as they see fit.

Motoko Rich--I read your education pieces with interest.
You have a very, very rare opportunity to benefit millions of children in this country with your investigative and writing efforts.

Please investigate the way URBAN districts (which overwhelmingly serve poor and minority children) take in huge sums of money, only to spend most of it on administrators, consultants, testing infrastructure, vendors, and contractors.

The money isn't going to poor kids in poor districts the way it is in suburban districts where middle class parents have the time and education to closely monitor the spending to make sure the kids have small classes, decent facilities, decent books, and appropriate remediation specialists.

We have school buildings here in Dallas that are as bad as Detroit (see South Oak Cliff HS), but just yesterday, our school "trustees" (ironic) approved the purchase of a high-rise building in a posh part of town for new administrative offices. Typical.

The corruption and mismanagement in urban districts is hurting the weakest and most vulnerable children in our society. Start with Dallas ISD to see the exponential growth in the number of non-teachers compared to the number of teachers.

There's money, but none is being spent on hiring more teachers, getting rid of the thousands of portables so kids can be closer to bathrooms (less wasted travel time), replacing broken furniture, hiring more school psychologists, more nurses, and more reading interventionists.

Also, remember that per-pupil spending is very high in urban districts BUT THE MONEY ISN'T GOING TO THE KIDS.

In most urban districts, the buildings/furniture/supplies/books are a wreck. The teaching staff has been stripped down to bare minimums.

Throwing more money won't help; passing legislation to starve the fleet of bureaucrats in every urban district and diverting the money back to where the children are (school buildings, more teachers for smaller class sizes, unbroken furniture and usable books) will help.

Abbott districts in New Jersey are the most highly funded public schools in the state, and overwhelmingly minority. They remain far below average by many measures. It's not racism.

The school where my two children spent their entire education was then a place where the majority of kids went to college and were academically advanced. Fast forward almost 40 years later, and it has all changed. The academic abilities of the majority of students have declined in their abilities not because of race or economics, as it is the fact that the parents are often younger, often single mothers, divorced several times, and the parents just don't have the innate intelligence or interest in parenting, as it was before females left the home, and put the kids in day care. You cannot have children born to females who are young and often either without a high school degree or one that had little in the way of academic success themselves, and expect that their kids will end up much differently. There is also the unspoken truth about innate genetic intelligence. When Laotians moved to the town 40 years ago, their kids were interested in academics and expected to do well, respect the teachers, and go on to do well, whether in a job or school, as that was not only a part of their culture but I believe a part of the DNA. Society as a whole has continued to go down in the home environment which only adds to the innate component. You can't take a minus 1 and a minus 1 and get a 3 or 4 as that just is not going to happen. You can throw all the money, and political reorganization of academic learning at all of this, and you will see little change.

What is the answer to the most interesting data on this page (chart 3)?

That the system is must, somehow, be racist.

It's really an indictment on the culture of universities that this is the explanation the Stanford researcher saw fit to give. It's quite obvious that - generally speaking - certain cultural academic expectations are associated with particular races. It's no secret that blacks have had - through the tragedy of their history - a culture of poverty where education was not emphasized because it simply wasn't available or wasn't a good investment. This shouldn't be a controversial statement, but it's at least a risky one if you're in academia or running for democratic office.

And people still wonder why Trump is popular.

Occam's Razor suggests a simple explanation using the fundamental concept of regression toward the mean for why there are large racial gaps in elite districts: children regress partway toward their races' means. Due to complex interactions of nature and nurture, different racial groups have different means in terms of intelligence and work ethic.

The website of La Griffe du Lion has a number of superb essays on understanding the relevance of regression toward the mean to racial gaps in test scores:

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/index.html

Education gap is the result of many different factors. Before coming to this point, there were generations of discrimination, income disparities, and other systematic segregations. And as long as I see, American social system is not looking for ways to bridge the gap between the two extremes. If public school system is funded by local tax, there is no mystery that rich areas are better funded. While rich kids are encouraged to excel more, poor kids learn clear signals from the government and family that they are not going to succeed. It' sad.

I teach in an urban school. Regardless of race, my students are poor.

Asian students, though no more affluent than the other students and with parents who rarely speak English, outscore all other students at my school and in my district.

Affluent white children generally outscore all other demographics, except Asians of any income level. Why?

There are a number of factors that impact outcomes.

One major factor is stress. That stress reduces cognitive function is well-established in the scientific literature. A recent article indicated that adults living in poverty had reduced cognitive ability due to the stress of poverty that was roughly equivalent to attempting to function without sleep the prior night.

One way to improve the situation is already proven with longitudinal studies that taught vulnerable children (poverty and high minority) skills that increase resilience and followed them for more than a decade and compared the results against a control group. Teaching the children skills that increased resilience increased high school and college graduation rates and reduced violence, crime, drugs, and teen pregnancies. This wasn't just one study, the same results were observed in multiple studies. I was so angry when I realized we knew how to help these kids and weren't doing it across the board that I am doing all I can to raise awareness. If you want the citations, let me know.

Increasing resilience reduces stress because one of the factors that increases resilience is optimism, which is far less stressful than pessimism.

Yes, there are many factors that impact outcomes.

One thing we know for sure is that 1/3 of children raised in adverse environments go on to do okay or even well. By studying what allowed them to thrive, we learned how to help the 2/3, but we need to do it.

I'm so sick and tired of hearing that the reason minority kids don't do well in school is because their parents don't value education. It's not true! As an ESL teacher, I taught kids whose families came from all over the world, including many whose parents were not well educated themselves. Every single one of those adults wanted their children to succeed. Every. Single. One.

But when parents and other caregivers don't know how to navigate the American educational system, and/or are two busy working two jobs to put food on the table and clothes on their kids' backs, or working third shift and aren't home to help with homework, then it's no surprise that a lot of kids are going to flounder and lose their way. Combined with the low quality of the teaching force in many poor areas of this country--because, let's be honest, only a saint would be willing to work for the low salaries and in the poor conditions prevalent in many of the lowest-achieving school districts--it's no surprise that students coming from a low socio-economic background are at a disadvantage compared to their better off peers. Deal with poverty and its attendant consequences and then students will be able to achieve to their fullest potential.

What is the most interesting is the gap between white students from wealthy families with highly-educated parents, and blacks students from wealthy families with highly-educated parents.

When I worked, I knew a couple of black professionals who had a lot of trouble with their kids. They told me they didn't know what to do, their teenagers just wouldn't pay attention in school. They spent all their time on sports, music, and TV.

Of course, there are many affluent white teenagers like this too. With modern culture, affluence, and technology, lots of young people fall behind and never catch up.

Educational outcomes are directly proportional to the value parents and community place on education.

Living in New England, I attended a school full of people who considered attending Ivy League schools normal. While there, the standard for participating in sports and extracurricular activities was simple. Straight A report card. Anything less, study more, no time for anything else.

After moving to Florida halfway through high school, I went to school with students that couldn't have passed 2nd grade in my old school. The school produced the best athletes I had ever seen and graduated illiterates. When the school system implemented a mandatory 2.0 GPA for participation in sports, parents literally rioted.

Resources, teachers, and schools in general don't matter a bit compared to parental expectations. Academic excellence is born or dies at home.

Fascinating research and interactive graphics. The findings are both "not surprising" and "shocking" at the same times. As a former educator, educational policy specialist and teacher of both vastly underachieving and overachieving poor minority students, I know the issues of academic achievement, affluence and race seem inextricably intertwined.

There are many areas to delve into, but I think the primary one is, "Is there a an authority figure at home who has high expectations of the student's behaviour and achievement in school?" Years ago, I taught very poor and high achieving (almost completely African American) at a program for gifted students in Washington DC. These students lived in public housing but were learning at advanced levels. My 5th grade students learned calculus. What I noted was that (1) almost every student had someone (frequently a grandparent) who dropped them off at and picked them up from school (a proxy for "parental involvement"?), (2) threatening to "call their mothers" always resulted in good student behaviour and (3) the students who were surrounded by other brilliant students were not afraid to be labeled "nerds."

The point is, regardless of race or affluence, when teacher and parent expectations of students are high, students are in an environment where there are no distractions (e.g., misbehaving students, poor building infrastructure, family hardships) and teachers are motivated to teach their students, all students can learn.

One should note that not all asian-americans are well-off families. A lot of these families struggle just the same as african-americans and latino families. What sets them apart, in so many cases where their parents can't even read and write, yet their second-generation offsprings all go off to college and professional careers, is the parental expectations and support that the kids receive. The parents pool all their resources together just for the sake of the children's education, so that they can get a better shot in life. While that kind of hope is not unique, the willing sacrifice and uncompromising expectation can make all the difference.

How do we change the familial culture of complacency in those african-american and latino families? Is throwing more money into failing schools going to reverse the trend?

The larger question is, if these kids are 3-4 grades behind their peers, is it really a right remedy for college to just lower the standards so that they can get in, even if they can't meet the cut, simply because of financial conditions or color of their skins? No doubt it'll make us all feel better to see more diversity on college campus, can they really keep up? Is there any wonder why their dropout rate is so high?

The more fundamental philosophical question is, can systemic change in government change the culture in families if they don't want to help themselves?

I was the victim of a very poor quality education. What I always read in the comments on any article about education is people who had a high-quality education saying that those who are receiving a bad education simply need to do the school work and everything will be okay. The problem is that when you're in a classroom that is considered low-achieving, the teachers are under-achievers also. They fail to give any assignments. They fail to speak using big words. They fail to give structure to the day. I, personally, never took a classroom quiz or exam until seventh grade and was only given instruction or assignments on rare occasions.

The brain is like a muscle. It needs extensive training and used to function.

As CBJ wrote, we've heard all this before. But we're doing exactly the wrong things. We allow poverty to get worse through systemic inequities in our economy, then we by penalize the underperforming schools and their teachers.

First off, awesome graphics. Kudos to your analysts. Secondly, at some point you have to stop subtly blaming White people (and Asians) for eating all of the educational pie. Everyone has the same books to read, classes to attend and chairs to plant their tush in. Some communities value that opportunity and, on average, make the most of it (Whites, Asians), while others historically do not.

How many Black or Hispanic parents but their kids math workbooks for their birthdays or stacks of books and ban Playstations until they're twelve? Until these parents are taught how to value education, and how to practice it at home (we could all use this by the way), these communities will continue to struggle while those that value education will continue to pull away.

That's reality, and nothing short of lobotomizing white children and their parents can stop it.

There's more to this...Bronx Science is one of the best high schools in the country. And white students make up only 25% of the students. 45% of students qualify for free or reduced price lunch. Stuyvesant High School, another superb high school, is 24% white, with 44% qualifying for free or reduced lunch.

Both these schools have a majority of Asian students. Many are the children of immigrants, from poor homes. But they do extremely well academically. Why these students are routinely left out of articles like this one is an important question.

Well hum, haven't I heard all of this before, like thirty of forty years ago?

For those of us seeking to learn about race and class disparities in America. articles like this one often offer the promise of insight, but fall short because they ignore Asians, a prominent minority group. Many Asians have struggled at the bottom rungs of society at some point. Suffered through racism too. Yet it's rare to see Asian struggles and successes analyzed in articles about race. Whites vs blacks and Hispanics seem to be the only worthy journalistic explorations. Why are Asians being left out of the race conversations? Is it because Asians don't neatly fit into the standard poor minority narrative, one that involves minorities being kept down due to institutional racism and systemic deprivation of resources? Also examining those who have succeeded despite the well documented disadvantages can very well enrich the public discourse on race.

Surely some of this difference is due to unconscious and sometimes even conscious bias by some teachers and administrators about what students of different races can achieve. But a far larger component is likely the 75% of every school week that a student spends outside of the classroom, namely their home environment. If racial bias was the most significant factor in these differences, you would expect that in a majority-white country with a majority-white teaching force, Asian students would lag behind their white counterparts, but the opposite is well studied to be true (although unfortunately the Times does not have data from Asian students in this study).

The values that a family, community and culture place on education, both implicitly and explicitly, do far more to influence these statistics than even the most innovative curriculum or educator (invaluable as they may be). We need to work to change the perception of education in our minority communities, to make the possibilities they offer seem like a tangible goal rather than a pipe dream. At the same time, I recognize that white America did play a huge role in creating the problems and social perceptions that minorities face, and it would be wrong to look at those communities today and admonish them for their failure to self-regulate. We all need to have a hand in changing this picture. But now?

Fascinating. The most interesting data point is in the second chart. Go to Detroit City School District--it's the only one of the hundreds I saw at a glance where white students had a lower socioeconomic status than a subset of minority students, in this case Hispanic students. And here Hispanics did have a very slightly higher grade level than whites, which demonstrates that, at times, socioeconomic status is the determinative factor in educational outcomes. At other times, as is obvious in the third chart, race/ethnicity is more determinative than socioeconomic status in educational outcomes. Another data point I just stumbled upon, also in the second chart, is the Atlanta Public Schools district. The gap is unfathomably enormous between minority students and whites in terms of both socioeconomic status and educational outcomes. Wow...

There is no silver bullet for improving education results across all socioeconomic communities. Wealthy kids living in successful and high achieving school districts will obviously benefit from being around other high achievers. Competition breeds better results and the additional financial resources available to wealthy children can certainly make a difference in results. However we've proven in numerous studies that despite spending WAY above average in many low income public school districts, results have not improved because we haven't changed the economic status of the children. Throwing more money at the problem is not the best solution. However, getting children and families out of poverty and in a better economic status will have a better chance to narrow the gap and improve results. Ending poverty and improving family conditions will have the biggest bang for the buck in education. When a mother or father can concentrate on more than where their next meal is coming from then there is a better chance that they will be more involved in their children's school life.

Integration and the voucher program, although promising, has failed to produce equal results across the country.

We also need to stop telling all kids that they have to go to college to succeed. We need to make sure that other public school options exist and steer those kids towards available training to become plumbers, electricians, mechanics, welders, and building contractors.

Why are we even surprised by these studies anymore. Of course whites do better, the majority of the systems that control outcomes are built and work so that they excel and have access and they work to keep a lock on it. Let's start new conversations on what to do about it.

Very interesting and policy relevant statistics. Seems related to David Brooks' column today. Is our society increasingly rigged so that the rich succeed?

The large gaps in our community exactly reflect the first chart - it's one of a handful of places with economically and racially integrated schools that are attended broadly by all racial and economic groups in equal mixture at every school. And the grade differences exist despite sitting in the same classroom every single year. The range of grade level in a single classroom - even at a single group of 4 desks - can be 3 grade levels.

Why is it that there is no statistics for asians?

NYT editor: In small type with the graphic, it says that "Reliable estimates are not available" for Asian-Americans.