From Globes, an Israeli business publication:
The PISA exam shows substantial gaps between Hebrew and Arabic-speaking pupils. In the math exam, Hebrew speakers achieved a score of 489 points, while Arabic speakers achieved a score of 388 points. Arabic speakers scored 98 points less than Hebrew speakers in the science exam.
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ReplyDeleteFYI, Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox students do not participate in the PISA exams. At least not male ones.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel#Demographics
ReplyDeleteJews from Europe and the former Soviet Union and their Israeli-born descendants, or Ashkenazi Jews, constitute approximately 50% of Jewish Israelis. Jews who left or fled Arab and Muslim countries and their descendants, known as Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews,[378] form most of the rest of the Jewish population.[379][380][381] Jewish intermarriage rates run at over 35% and recent studies suggest that the percentage of Israelis descended from both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews increases by 0.5 percent every year, with over 25% of school children now originating from both communities.[382]
With Ashkenazi scores removed I'd imagine any gap would close.
ReplyDeleteGC
489 still isn't very good. Bad education system? High variance? Too many black hats taking the exam?
ReplyDeleteAhoy, Steve, Razib Khan has pitched up on the Tel's blogs. Do have a look.
ReplyDeleteI clicked through to his longer version where I found a show-stopping joke: "When teaching young children the history of the United States a punctilious adherence to fact is essential". My how I laughed: I hadn't thought of him as a comedian.
White Americans out-score Hebrew-speaking Israelis by 17 points. Who'd a thunk it?
ReplyDeleteA standard deviation of 100 in PISA should be larger than the standard deviations of individual countries/groups.
ReplyDeleteThe WSJ Still hasn't gotten the HBD message:
ReplyDeletehttp://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304355104579236150801599552#printMode
Steve, congratulations on your Taki's piece 'PISA, Piece by Piece'. It seems to be one of your best articles in recent months due to the passion you have toward the PISA, of which you have a genuinely sincere interest in how it affects educational levels at both the national and international levels.
ReplyDeleteAs always, whatever ramifications PISA's 2012 score results for various nations will have on American education policies remains to be seen.
Institutional racism, obviously!
ReplyDeleteThe key distinction in Isreal isn't between Hebrew and Arab speakers. It's between Ashkenazis and everyone else.
ReplyDeleteThe key distinction in Isreal isn't between Hebrew and Arab speakers. It's between Ashkenazis and everyone else.
ReplyDeleteNo, they're both key distinctions. The Arabs are dumb. Really dumb.
Except the Christian ones, who are really smart.
Arabs, even Muslim Arabs, do fine once you get them out of the Middle East. They perform about on par with white ethnics in the U.S. (which makes sense--there's really not much genetic difference between a Syrian, a Greek, and an Italian) and dominate the native populations in the Latin American countries. It's the dysfunctional culture of the Middle East that screws them up at home.
ReplyDeleteExcept the Christian ones, who are really smart.
ReplyDeleteAnd who are really more Greek than Arab.
"Arabs, even Muslim Arabs, do fine once you get them out of the Middle East. They perform about on par with white ethnics in the U.S. (which makes sense--there's really not much genetic difference between a Syrian, a Greek, and an Italian) and dominate the native populations in the Latin American countries. It's the dysfunctional culture of the Middle East that screws them up at home."
ReplyDeleteNo.
The HBD explanation for the gap between Arabs in their countries to Arabs outside is simply selective migration. Just like the explanations for why Indians do better in the US and the UK then in India .
your explanation (dysfunctional culture etc.) is a typical neocon bullshit.
Anon at 10:16 AM, who thinks that Arabs do fine once you get them out of the sandbox: The Arabs that come to the U.S., like the Chinese and Hindus, are not representative samples of their homelands. We can't generalize about the average intelligence of those groups from the cherry picked ones we have here.
ReplyDeleteThe reason the numbers for non-Arab Israelis are so low in comparison to the widespread perception of Ashkenazi Jews as being smart is because there are very few pure blooded Ashkenazi Jews left in Israel (outside the black hat groups, who don't participate in PISA at all). Half the Jewish population is Sephardic, who perform similarly with the Arabs (or maybe slightly better). Of the remaining 1/2, many are either the product of Ashkenazi-Sephardic marriages or in the case of Israelis of Russian descent, many are less than 1/2 Jewish. And secular Ashkenazim have very few children. I don't know what the #'s are, but it wouldn't surprise me if full blooded secular Ashkenazim were less than 20% of those taking the test.
ReplyDeleteK
Half the Jewish population is Sephardic, who perform similarly with the Arabs
ReplyDeleteThis is really far from the truth. The two populations aren't in the same league.
The Arab population of Israel is really astoundingly underachieving. It's almost like they do it on purpose to make us look bad.
IHTG , stop denying that the Mizrahim have lower mean IQ!
ReplyDeleteAnyone who lives in Israel with two eyes open can immediately tell that. Also the Israeli SAT results are consistent with that observation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Jews_in_Israel
ReplyDeleteEthiopian Jews make up 1.75% of the population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah#Demographics
The number of non-Jews among the immigrants from the former USSR has been constantly rising ever since 1989. For example, in 1990 around 96% of the immigrants were Jews and only 4% were non-Jewish family members. However in 2000, the proportion was: Jews (includes children from non-Jewish father and Jewish mother) - 47%, Non-Jewish spouses of Jews - 14%, children from Jewish father and non-Jewish mother - 17%, Non-Jewish spouses of children from Jewish father and non-Jewish mother - 6%, non-Jews with a Jewish grandparent - 14% & Non-Jewish spouses of non-Jews with a Jewish grandparent - 2%.
HTG , stop denying that the Mizrahim have lower mean IQ!
ReplyDeletePoor reading comprehension is evidence of lower mean IQ, you know
Doing the math based on the article. One can calculate the Arab part of the test sample is 23%. Assuming the ratio Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews of roughly equal (say 38% and 39% of the sample.) And making the educated guess that Sephardic comes in at around 432 on Math which is around Kazakhstan, we can then derive Ashkenazi Math score to be around 546 which is between Japan and Korea. I think this is pretty close to the real result and would make sense.
ReplyDeleteIf Sephardi really score much lower than equivalent Ashkenazi, it's a serious problem for Greg Cochran's theory, because their relevant social customs were the same. In fact, unless the education system is terrible beyond words, these Ashkenazi scores are a big problem for that theory anyway.
ReplyDelete"The HBD explanation for the gap between Arabs in their countries to Arabs outside is simply selective migration. Just like the explanations for why Indians do better in the US and the UK then in India .
ReplyDeleteyour explanation (dysfunctional culture etc.) is a typical neocon bullshit."
I'm not a neocon. And Arab immigrants to the US and Latin America have never been particularly elite--certainly not like the doctors and programmers of India. Look at Carlos Menem of Argentina. He came from a family of Sunni Syrian traders and made it all the way to the presidency (converting to Catholicism along the way.) Or Carlos Ghosn, from an undistinguished Lebanese-Brazilian family, who ended up heading Nissan.
Arabs, even Muslim Arabs, do fine once you get them out of the Middle East...there's really not much genetic difference between a Syrian, a Greek, and an Italian
ReplyDeleteThe Middle East is not a genetically homogeneous place. The Levantine Arabs, who represent the source population for most of the Arab overachievers in Latin America, are genetically closer to southern European populations than are the peninsular Arabs or Gulf Arabs. Levantines also have less sub-Saharan admixture than those other Arab groups. Still, there are detectable genetic differences between southern Europeans and Levantines. The successful Arab immigrants are also a selected group, and their performance may not be generalizable to Arabs from their region who didn't emigrate.
jews of Israel, more than half of whom are Ashkenazi.
At most, 50% of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi. As commenter K has noted in earlier comments, there has also been a lot of mixing with Sephardim and Mizrahim, so it is likely that full-blooded Ashkenazim make up less than 50% of the Israeli Jewish population.
I am argentine, and this days i am thinking about the geopolotical problems around the world. please spologize for my bad english grammar, i feel very stressful right now. well the Middle East is a place where almost all civilizations, race, and people have been right there. Alexander the Great, Napoleon , the english , the Ottoman Turks, all of them passed right Gaza. the mediterranean sea is interesting because it was there that civilizations have become ( sumerians, akkadians, assyrians, etc) and where culture evolve. with my opinion, an argentine called Mariano Jose Sampaño ( but i must say that i not look anyone at the mediterranean race ); the mediterranean race was many times ago the best , in intellectual terms talking about. first the civilizations, Cartago , Persia, Ancient Greek, Rome; even the chinese with their high culture, ( they were for example the first who used burocratic exams for government officials ) ; cannot mached this semitic cultures. their contributions to civilization do not stop there, but still going right now in the Middle Ages, where arabs or the islamic culture preserved the works of Aristotle, Plato, etc ( for example this holidays in Argentina i want to read a lot of books, especially the classics one ) . they were the premier achievers in science, and after then Spain, who many of all of you would agree that is for the most part of mediterranean race extraction; after defeat the arabs in the famous Reconquista and expelled the jews ( sephardic jews, of course, many of them went to the Ottoman Empire ); started to conquer around the world. this sentences i have seen in the words of jewish anthropology Seligman, in refutation for nordicist ideals
ReplyDeletefollowing my analysis, well , first i think that arabs and maybe jews have suffered a lot of mixture in their blood. of course i have not trained in biology and please forgive me if i say stupid things ( i am studying history in the stupid University called Buenos Aires; i hate this country becase i found my fellow argentines lacking in cultural ambitions, i am not catholic but i am atheist / agnostic ( the correct definition for me in agnostic because atheist is the negation of "believin god "). their collectivist culture make me sick and i also have the opportunity to do a litte of empirist research, not in the science one, but with my eyes, seen hasidic jews, ( i think Satmar Hasidim maybe Chabad ) in the Barrio of Once. but this another talking about. no one would doubt ever that askhenazi jews 100 years ago and maybe only 30 years ago were the best in intellectual powers; anyone who has seen the academics in Hungary, Poland, Germany , Russia, the Austro-Hungarian empire would agree with me. an analysis of the Abitur high school diploma who habilitates to go to university after passing the gymnasium Gotz Aly, a german historian, has found that jews graduated at eight time greatest than the christian population, and the disparities were greater comparing jews ans catholics. this does not say that all jews were educated but their a premier example that we are living in an over promoted society ( 56 % of jews have a high school diploma but 44 percent dont and for the achievement in the professions, only 14 % worked in liberal professions ). their overrepresentation must be understand that the university was elitist BUT not in the terms that most people think right now, i say an " elitist culture ". for example, humanities 100 years ago were much more harder than today . for example in the Ministry of Education of America; this you can found in a pdf that called schoolwork simplification. for example, in 1870 only 2 percent of americans have a high school diploma. after an expansion in the matricula, the professors replace the books with less difficult words, take out and reduce words per sentence and asking les wrriten papers for their students. in this correlation, the pace of instruction was made lower. this happen after the Civil war and after the world wars. their analysis of 800 books revealed that the most difficult texts were found in 1918. so for me in conclusion the askhenazim intellectual achievement, who in Argentina never happened at all ( well in Argentina intellectuals cannot work ) , in the Vienna Circle, Nobel Prizes Hans Kelsen, Han Krebs, Landau, Brandeis, Einstein, and all hungarian jews ( Kantor, Edward Teller the father of hydrogen bomb , etc); has declined this is my conclusion and can be far from the truth; and i think the primary cause is that right now jews in Western Nations have a lot of more accest to political power than anyone before
ReplyDelete