> Doesn't it strike you that poor Hispanic reading performance might actually be largely related to Spanish vs. English-language proficiency?
Hispanic != non-native English speaker
There is pretty clearly something going on that causes the results upthread, but there is nowhere near enough data in this thread to figure out what it is.
Pew Research Center says that over this period, 2000 to 2024, 78% (2000) to 68% (2024) of Hispanics spoke Spanish at home. To me, that sounds more than sufficient to explain a 20pt NAEP 8th-grade reading gap.
FWIW, until 2024, the US treated the state of being Hispanic differently from race, which seems like it could be a confounding factor. (Not that I believe that it explains any of the educational outcome data, but it’s still bizarre and IMO messy.) Here’s the updated guidance:
That's real. Asians show a massive (compared to anything else that moved) NAEP score increase over the 25-year period, which is presumably tied to changing English-language competency as a group. It matters less for the overall average score as their population share is much smaller.
If you want more data on something or other, you should state the hypothesis that you are trying to test. Mine is pretty simple and was easy to test like I did in the first post: in a world of mostly static in-group NAEP 8th-grade reading scores (like the one we live in) large shifts in population shares (like we see) dominate the overall average.
Hispanic != non-native English speaker
There is pretty clearly something going on that causes the results upthread, but there is nowhere near enough data in this thread to figure out what it is.