Immigration Has Wiped Out Education Gains
The New York Times reports on stagnating test scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress:
Despite gains that both whites and minorities did make, the overall scores of the United States’ 17-year-old students, averaged across all groups, were the same as those of teenagers who took the test in the early 1970s. This was largely due to a shift in demographics; there are now far more lower-scoring minorities in relation to whites. In 1971, the proportion of white 17-year-olds who took the reading test was 87 percent, while minorities were 12 percent. Last year, whites had declined to 59 percent while minorities had increased to 40 percent.
The dramatic change in demographics is almost entirely the result of immigration (some change would have happened without immigration since pre-Columbians and blacks have higher birth rates than whites, but that change wouldn’t have been anything near that caused by the last four decades of mass immigration). Keeping the scores from not drifting downwards will likely continue to be an uphill struggle as the share of students who are will continue to shrink, quite possibly forever.
Whether the stagnation in aggregate scores matters depends on how indicative they are of aggregate future economic success.
