Via the Daily Dish, Natasha Loder in the Economist:

Although Asian Americans do often come from better educated and higher income families, socio-demographic factors could not explain the achievement gap between Asians and whites. … Being brainier isn’t the answer either. When the pair looked at cognitive ability as measured by standardised tests, Asian-Americans were not different from their white peers. Instead Dr [Amy] Hsin and Dr [Yu] Xie find that the achievement gap can be explained through harder work—as measured by teacher assessments of student work habits and motivation. (Although the authors warn that this form of assessment will capture both true behavioural differences as well as a teacher’s perception of differences.)

What might explain harder work? The authors point to the fact Asian-Americans are likely to be immigrants or children of immigrants who, as a group, tend to be more optimistic. These are people who have made a big move in search of better opportunities. Immigration is a “manifestation of that optimism through effort, that you can have a better life”. Added to this mix is a general cultural belief among Asian-Americans that achievement comes with effort.

Talking about broad racial categories is inevitable in discussing education, and we should be clear that while economic class and parental education explain much of the variation within between the racial groups, they don’t explain all of it. That said, think about what “Asian American” entails here. There are, if you define Asia to exlude Turkey, Russia, and the Oceanic countries, 46 countries in the continent. There are thousands of languages and ethnic groups. And it turns out that American students from different Asian backgrounds are not a monolithic educational block. If we check the facts, we find out, for example, that Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, and Khmer American students don’t perform nearly as well as the general category “Asian American.” These students, too, are likely to be immigrants or children of immigrants. Do they lack a similar culture of optimism? I don’t take such definitions of cultural attitudes too seriously, but if we were to, I wouldn’t be surprised if these groups had less cultural optimism. Immigrants, after all, include the sub-category refugees, of which those countries have produced hundreds and hundreds of thousands in the not-so distant past, often because of wars that were the direct result of Western imperialism. Never trust sociology that comes bereft of history.

Now the study in question is seen as a vindication of Amy Chua, and she does indeed subdivide racial categories into ethnic and country backgrounds. Presumably she would think that you can chalk enduring educational problems for Cambodian American students up to a lack of that cultural special sauce that she and her husband endorse. But you can predict my objection: if the millions of people in the category “Asian Americans” are too varied and diffuse to be a meaningful cultural category, then why should we imagine the category “Korean Americans” to be much more meaningful? If we look at upper class Korean Americans only, we are sure to find significant differences from the broader population, just as we would if we looked at Korean American children of Google employees, or however thick or thin we want to slice these groups. And we could always find exceptions even if we acknowledge the broad demographic groupings. Cultures are lived in very different ways even by families from very similar circumstances. My point is that you can easily imagine a No True Scotsman type of situation here– Cambodian and Laotian Americans don’t count because they aren’t what we mean when we say Asian, the poorly performing son of a Korean grocer isn’t what we mean when we talk about Koreans, and so on.

Also, I really, really worry about teacher assessments of student work habits and motivation. Loder mentions this in a parenthetical, but it’s worth expanding on. There’s a deep, vexing question of whether teachers come into their perception of hard work– especially when we’re talking about race. We have lots of extant evidence to demonstrate that educator perceptions are distorted by preconceptions. For example, teachers perceive students they think of as uglier to be worse students. Robert Merton’s Matthew Effect has had its methodology repeatedly challenged, so I don’t want to endorse it uncritically, but I think the broader notion of teacher perceptions as self-fulfilling is critically important for teacher-reported attitudes. I don’t think teachers are lying about who they perceive to be more motivated, but I also don’t trust them to be unbiased observers or motivators.

I don’t pretend that I have a better take on these differences than the study authors. But all of this talk about cultures of achievement or hard work strike me as vague, potentially non-falsifiable, and in the wrong hands, a kind of victim-blaming or ethnic fatalism. Racial differences in educational outcomes are real, even when controlling for social class or parental education. But I think we should give arguments about “culture” deep scrutiny.