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Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there. I wouldn't rule out there being some difference in IQ-mediating genes between races because it would be extremely weird if there was net zero selection effects on intelligence everywhere, but I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds. That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage. Someone on the motte once suggested breeding brahmins and Ashkenazi's to see what would happen and I have to admit that it would be the funniest possible twist if actually mass immigration was because some secret society of benevolent galaxy-brained racists decided to take the idea of eugenicizing their way to peak human performance seriously, instead of constraining themselves to nazi dog show fanatic inbreeding retardation.
If there was an effect like that it should be apparent in admixture studies on IQ, like this one on european/african admixture. Instead performance just scaled with percentage european ancestry.
I think the PISA results would mostly just reflect the specific racial composition, where the majority of multiracial-identifying people in the U.S. are "White and Hispanic" and often have little or no genetic difference from the people identifying as just "White". Looking at this Wikipedia page 13.8% of multiracial people identify as black and something else. If we assume they have 40% black ancestry (since regular African-Americans average 80% black ancestry), then by comparison the U.S. is 14.4% black so people who identify as multiracial have half as much black ancestry as the average American. There's also 7.2% of multiracial people who identify as "White and Native American", but most people who identify that way have much less than 50% Native ancestry. 6.1% identify with 3+ races, but that shouldn't shift aggregate ancestry that much. Since biracial self-identification is unreliable, there could also be a bias where more intelligent families are more aware of their family history or more likely to belong to communities where biracial identification is high-status.
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I suspect that it's some amount of selection bias as well. Specifically, being multi-racial is higher class than being single-race, so people with X% of their genes from one race and Y% from another would answer differently on the survey based on their class.
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Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive." Despite the hate facts that racist neo-Nazis like to spread (such as the PISA score graph with US broken out by race), everyone knows childhood deprivation can explain those outcomes. That's why anyone who's walked around the US and Vietnam can tell you how thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are, and why US blacks and whites of the same SES background perform similarly on standardized tests.
Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis, and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatist hypothesis. Bonus: A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates.
I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.
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I'd assume it's a selection effect. Think Amy Chua the Tiger Mother marrying a Jewish law school professor. Assortive mating is being driven by higher education and people moving to cities. Cities and colleges are both more racially diverse than towns/neighbourhoods.
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