How Low You Can Go in the Third World

Zambia's PISA school achievement test scores show that, by global standards, African Americans do pretty well in school.

The PISA exam is the huge project undertaken by the OECD, the rich countries’ club, to test 15 year olds in reading, math, and science every three years. Really poor countries seldom take the PISA test because they tend to score as dismally as my readers would expect. (India had two of its states take the PISA once, only to find that they scored like sub-Saharans, and then gave up.)

So, in 2014-2018, PISA developed a PISA-D test with easier questions (but similar scoring) for developing countries and got seven poor countries to take it, with Ecuador doing best and Zambia worst:

Think of the scoring as being much like an SAT subtest, with 500 as the target average for First World OECD countries and 100 as the target standard deviation.

The U.S. federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics reported that on the 2022 PISA:

White and Asian students, on average, had higher reading literacy scores (537 and 579, respectively) than the overall U.S. average score (504). Black and Hispanic students had lower average scores (459 and 481, respectively) than the overall U.S. average score.

African-Americans averaged 459 on the regular PISA in reading, while Zambians averaged 275 on the PISA-D (Senegal scored 306). The scoring is intended to be equally difficult on both.

The gap between African-Americans and the 5,273 Zambians tested at 200 different schools is roughly 1.84 standard deviations, which is a lot. The average Zambian would score at about the 3rd percentile among African-Americans, roughly speaking.

As I’ve been pointing out since 2002, the huge gap in cognitive test scores between African-Americans and today’s sub-Saharans can’t be wholly explained by genetic differences. The 20% or so of African-Americans’ genes that come from whites wouldn’t come close to closing the gap. Genes aren’t everything.

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