Hacker News Reader

This has been debunked. The stats do no support this idea (that because the US has to deal with ESL, etc, it can't perform better). If you factor out ESL students in the US, the US still ranks poorly compared to other nations in the OECD, many of whom are far more multicultural than Finland.

View on HN

There's more to culture than just language, and instructors having to perform in a multicultural environment has more side effects than just the effects on students who are directly challenged by aspects of mainstream school curricula.

Canada, Netherlands, UK all have very multicultural societies. All three consistently outrank the US.

All three are consistently outranked by the Finns, though.

You are comparing Canada which is like 95% of European decent to the U.S......come on be real? While it isn't just race it is also poverty, the U.S. has a lot of ghettos.

You comparison is disingenuous.

You can't factor out ESL,etc students. Resources can't be spent on them without diverting them from others, and there is no way to know what we could have done if we didn't need to divert those resources.

You can factor out their test scores in places where they aren't present, for example, and see that we still fall below our multicultural peers in the OECD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com