i did not read the article, just quickly scanned through. but the answer to my best knowledge is:
1) it isn't always that bad, if you pay the premium for private education you can get some of the best education available in the world
2) the people who pay for private schools also pay a significantly larger share of the taxes
3) those taxes pay for the public schools
thus: public teaching is bad because the ones that proportionally pay more for it, don't make use of it.
i live in a country (NL) where public schools are the norm, we all pay for what we (almost) all consume.
It might be that trickle-down only works if the people from whom it trickles down are in some real way dependent on the trickling-down. Which seems not to be the case here, as cies said.
I'm not following the cause and effect of your logic. Are you missing a point or two? Perhaps "The ones who are paying for it are paying less than they need to"? or maybe "The ones who apportion those taxes have no financial incentive to apportion them wisely"?
Even in those cases, there should be enough distance between those paying the tax (in whatever portions) and those spending the tax to ensure that the government runs without interference and can provide the best service at that price point. If the service isn't good enough, then increase the price point. If you don't want to increase the price point, then reduce the quality of your service.
Either way, I think the argument falls into the category of "Wealth redistribution is a broken concept", and that's a whole 'nother ball game that any discussion on schools just isn't big enough for.
As I understand what the parent post's author wrote, the ones who pay for the US school system aren't the ones who use it: their kids go to private schools.
Perhaps this point was missing or too implicit: contrary to what occurs in Europe, there is no "How is my money being spent?" effect as a result of this.
I'm still not getting it. Are you saying that some taxes should be ringfenced and only used for the specific purpose of education (and by extension other taxes to other things), and that taxpayers get to see precisely how their proportion of taxes are being spent on that particular thing?
In any representative democracy that I know of, the budget (including tax income and government outgoings such as education) is handled by elected representatives of the people. There is no direct connection between a specific tax dollar and a specific public service. Rather, these things are budgeted for in aggregate.
The elected representatives are accountable to their electorate for these budgets, not to individual taxpayers. The concept of "How is my money being spent?" is a feature of this aggregated budgeting rather than any specific tracking from specific taxpayer to specific service. Going back to the parent posting, which implied an accountability of legislation (or at least educational administration) to its funders, I don't see how this works in representative democracies such as the US, because the funders are not stockholders in the traditional sense: Their extra tax dollars do not give them extra voting rights. The only way I can imagine that they would have more voting rights is through lobbying and other such methods that bypass traditional electoral accountability.
In short, an argument in the form of "Higher net tax payers are not net consumers of government spending, therefore government spending that does not help them does not efficiently help others" assumes either that citizens have an electoral power relative to the tax they pay (which is undemocratic) or that wealth redistribution is broken (in this case or in general).
In Europe, the main group of tax payers are eating their own dog food by sending their kids to public schools. When the public schools their kids go to sucks, they know first hand and lobby to get it fixed.
In contrast, the main group of tax payers in the US are sending their kids to private schools. When the local public schools sucks, it doesn't have the slightest immediate impact on their kids and they therefor will not care much.
I still fail to see the influential connection between the taxpayer's opinion and the service his tax pays for. A rich guy who pays tax and doesn't avail of the state's education is in a minority, regardless of how much tax he pays.
As far as I can see, the only way the argument works is if money is what's doing the electing, rather than individual voters (as in, we don't have "one man one vote" but rather we have "mo' money mo' votes" like in private companies). If that's the case, then that's a way bigger story than "rich guy doesn't care that his tax dollars make good public education".
But public education is not a service used primarily by the poor unless you have an extremely broad definition of poor. I believe the figure is around 10% of children are in private education.
This is dishonest. Education is segregated by geographic proximity to school in the states. Of course, poor people live in poor areas and rich people live in rich areas so there is a strong correlation. Within a given school system, which is at the county level in this state (and I think most states), the same amount of tax money is generally spent per student so the rich schools get the same amount of the poor schools. The rich schools just have parents and PTAs that can collect more money than the poor schools.
Is there a good solution though? I've seen kids bused across town to try and fix this. Of course if you're the family who is getting bused across town to go to a worse school you're angry, but if you're moving to a better school you're probably pretty happy. Other counties have school choice plans where you can pick your school from a small list and they hope that it evens out (Hint: It doesn't).
Both options suck. What is better? Do other countries provide funding at the national level so that poor counties can educate at the same level as rich ones? In America, that'd probably require a change to the constitution.
You are either igonorant or are being dishonest. Most states don't have county-level school districts; and definitely heavily populated ones do not. The district is either rich or poor. Example: mercer island is just across I90 from Seattle in king county, and is one of the richest districts in the nation (since mercer island is rich). The PTA BS is just made up libertarian propaganda (blame the poor people for being poor).
Bussing solves racial disparity within a district, not economic disparity. Course, these often correspond but not always.
Most first world countries fund educations out of the federal budget so it is more equitable; course, the libertarians would call that socialist, but you reap what you sow.
I live in the 10th most populated state and our school districts are at the county level. I know the 24th most populated state also has districts at the county level.
I tried to find statistics based on state, but could not find any data. (A quick google seems to imply that CA, NY, and WA do not do it based on county, but it's hard to say that most states do with only 5 measurements.)
I'm not really sure why your posts are so angry about this topic, but your original assertion was that schools were segregated by wealth, which is obviously not how are schools districts are devised. I understand that your jaded worldview may keep you from accepting this fact.
School districts and towns that they correspond to are often setup explicitly to prevent equitable distribution of resources. It is very human nature to do that in the "got mine get lost" way. property taxes are just s bad way at it (and WA does much better than most states).
So you're really hitting on the different qualities that can exist inside of public education here, and it's definitely a state-by-state issue (although universally I'd say there are systemic differences between the quality of public urban education vs. suburban vs. rural). While that's definitely a topic of concern and a big problem, the fact remains that that is still publicly funded education. "Rich districts" are still funded by state & county tax funding, where those tax payers are directly taking advantage of their tax dollars at work. My objection was just this notion that public education is just some fringe social benefit for the poor, because outside of the mega-wealthy, its one of the few places in government that society is very deeply invested.
There is thst: society benefits from educated kids, but we've managed to create a system segregated by socioeconomic factors that tend to inhibit social mobility, which then describes why the US can simultaneously have the best and worst schools in the developed world at the same time.
I also enjoyed an education from public schools in The Netherlands (NL) but I feel this article is more about the teacher than the system. Besides, the NL system is also district-based and we recently started "grading" schools according to standardized tests and then publishing the results. This will probably (and already has to a certain degree) result in parents wanting their children to go to the schools that score highest, in turn, those schools request more "bijdrage" (extra cost, for supposed 'school trips' and 'books'), in turn making those schools less diverse (i.e. more "white") and in turn making schools that used to perform nominally, worse.
The teacher is what makes the student, and unfortunately I have also witnessed PABO students barely able to pass basic spelling/math tests. Those students will probably only go on to teach toddlers/basic grades, but due to teacher shortages it is conceivable that they will eventually move on to teach higher grades as well.
In my opinion, there is no easy short-term solution to the problem of adequate teacher-levels due to regulation/unions etc. We parents should try our best to partially circumvent the entire issue by avoiding "permanent damage" is done by staying up to date with what the child learns and focus on rote-skills that are hard for teachers to supervise in large class-rooms but immensely important when those kids grow up: maths and writing.
Perhaps this will get easier as teaching/assignments are increasingly interactive, allowing the parent to gain a better view of the child's performance and problems. Here's me hoping this e-learning thing takes off as soon as possible, with teachers perhaps evolving to simply guiding their pupils with extra support (if necessary), social interaction (digital age might not be all thats cracked up to be with encouraging social skills), learning techniques, and job planning as kids these days have no idea what they realistically are going to do for work later.
EDIT: Added some perhaps off-topic personal vision of what a teacher should do in the future when MOOCS/e-learning takes off.
The article didn't directly address private v. Public education, but rather that our teacher preparation methods are crap. You may be able to argue those who graduate from the best programs for creating educators may be skimmed off the top by the resources a private institution hasavailableto them in terms of provided salary and other issues, but the more direct issue is that teaching is hard.
One may be an expert in ones field, and not be a teacher. Saldly one may be a teacher, but over the years we've also gone and built a system which actively discourages teaching.
So the issue isn't necessarily one of money, but of how we approach the problem of building teachers.
(1) Many poor school districts are urban
(2) Many urban dwellers are not owners, they are renters
(3) Schools are funded by property taxes payed by owners
(4) Often, the owners are large corporations, that do not involve themselves in anything about how the schools are run.
Basically, poor, urban schools are largely funded by faceless corporations holding hundreds of apartments paying taxes, not random rich families with luxury condos in the city sending kids to private school.
because politicians, nor school administrators, nor teachers, are required, to send their own children through the system.
It certainly isn't a lack of money. Some city school systems spend more than it cost to get an college education per student. We simply spend too much money on everything but having more teachers. It is not about paying teachers enough, its about hiring enough teachers. Instead it goes to administrators, counselors, and etc, heavy in nepotism and cronyism.
Then add in...
The Federal Government setting standards on punishment, effectively now requiring a quota system. So if one group is over represented in being disciplined the system cannot take action without threat of losing federal funds. The Federal government allowing select schools to ignore standards set by NCLB and subsequent programs provided they are politically well connected.
TL;DR
Spending too much money on hiring someone other than teachers. Having the Federal government dictate standards but excuse groups from them, dictating who you can discipline and how often, and finally the corrupt nature of hiring in many school systems.
Spending on schooling is not equitable across school districts. So poor schools get less funding per student than rich schools, and predictably do much worse. On average there doesn't look there is a problem with funding, but that is deceptive.
I went through a period of time where I thought I wanted to teach. I took it as far as completing a 1 year education program that would allow me to be seek certification at the end.
The article has a paragraph that describes my experience perfectly:
"American education schools are often derided as overly theoretical, inscribing an arcane vocabulary about education and few real skills for delivering it. But these institutions actually teach a hollow and decidedly anti-intellectual brand of theory, as many critiques of education schools have concluded. Future teachers receive a warmed-over set of homilies about preparing “the whole child” and “student-centered learning” (with the requisite homage to philosopher and education theorist John Dewey) instead of a serious intellectual initiation into the subjects in which teachers will have to instruct students."
I imagine it is because all the other countries close to the US in population size are even worse.
Granted, it is not based on very much, but i sort of feel that the US has gained the dominance it has today by being really big, and not horribly corrupt or impoverished.
Their (good) universities are very good and not all their schools are bad. A percentage of kids in the US do go to genuinely great schools, and then there is another group that due to various factors manage to get a decent basic education despite the school system. Due to the large US population, in absolute terms these two groups are quite large. Now feed these people through a genuinely world class higher education system and you end up with a quite large number (again in absolute terms) of genuinely smart and and well educated people.
Add to this the fact that the US has historically been very good at attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to move there and you end up with probably the largest collection of 'leading' people in the world.
I think there's also an important bit of learning attached to independent thinking and problem solving. Some programs, like many Asian countries, overly-rely on rote learning. The schools that I went through - NJ public schools in the 80s and 90s - had many teachers that focused on teaching me/us how and why to learn in good balance with factual rote learning.
Now with all of the focus on standardized testing, I worry the focus on independent thinking and problem solving is all but destroyed. Teachers now have what I consider "mandatory sentencing" with no room to inspire - only time to teach the test and shuffle kids through.
You might see some of that US magic fade away this generation. I hope not.
1) The big issue is inequality. America is a terrible place to be poor. A fairly large majority get a fairly decent education by European standards. But a large minority get a terrible education. America's engineering and business schools aren't filled up with kids from impoverished backgrounds.
2) Our post-secondary education is the best in the world.
3) Even counting poor schools, the American education system isn't even that bad. America is better than Italy, Spain, Austria, and even Sweden. It's about as good as the UK.
American's just think we have to have the best system.
Not to mention that even with all the H1B nonsense the US is still able to attract many of the worlds best-and-brightest (or nearly so) from other countries. There are definitely large network effects in play as well.
Easy access to capital helps a lot. In Europe, we've plenty of good schools and universities, but capital is so much more readily available across the pond that entrepreneurs who need it readily flock to the SV or NYC in order to get it.
It also helps a great deal to have a consumer society that is on a constant lookout for the latest or greatest gadget, product or service. This helps to quickly identify the better options amongst the gazillions that see the day and die each year.
Currently in my first year teaching in an urban school. It's hard to describe how physically/mentally/emotionally draining it is. I went through an alternate certification program and was put in front of a class after a six week summer program. I am amazed that this is acceptable.
You've been given the task of controlling lots of kids, squishing their natural learning desires and ways. This should be draining as it is against the ways of how we evolved.
Despite your best intentions, coercive schooling is not a good thing. There are better ways, such as Sudbury schooling, that are both respectful of children and actually prepare them for the world that we live in.
Arguments like this make me wonder whether we should pursue homeschooling. My kids are 2 and 4, and we've been going back and forth on the decision. We couldn't afford private school, and my wife is already staying home. Our county's educational system is one of the best in the state, but it still suffers from the bad practices that plague our national education system.
If you do make damn sure your kids socialise with other kids a significant amount (e.g. clubs, friends, etc). It is anecdotal but a lot of home school kids I've met are a bit "off" socially (e.g. young for their age, anti-social, don't do well in group settings, etc).
Efficiency isn't the question, of course it isn't efficient. You're giving up one person's salary to teach a couple kids. The effectiveness of homeschooling is what's important, which, I think, is largely determined by the education of the parent. I've met several non-college educated parents who don't seem qualified to teach their children through higher grade levels, but others who quit engineering jobs to homeschool who I know are always on the ball and will produce great results in their kids. With a well-educated and energetic parent, the results of homeschooling will far surpass that of the public school system. Research into homeschooling effectiveness is still in early stages, but the studies produced by my google results show homeschooling producing sociable, independent kids who do well in college.
A lot of the result depends upon how much energy your wife has to devote to homeschooling, after childcare and housekeeping. Unless she is above median/average, the answer is usually "not much energy". From the way you wrote, it sounds like you leave the house to work. Even if that is not the case, our field is competitive enough that even an easy "lifestyle business" will see you devote half a day every three days at a minimum to your work, making it challenging for both parents to be heavily involved. If you work at home, like most around here (including myself) you probably work a full 40-50 hours per week if not much more. The erratic nature of much at-home working also wreaks havoc upon the routine many young children crave to establish the level of trust they require; there is some clinical evidence that the successful children in the Stanford marshmallow experiment were successful because they trusted parents, which translated into trusting adults, and hence trusted the adult who told them they would get an additional treat in the future). So really homeschooling on a practical, continuing basis comes down on the shoulders of one of the stay-at-home parents (or the one stay-at-home parent).
I can tell you what worked for me, and leave it up to you to collect sufficient data samples to judge your own situation. We bring in a nanny 12 hours a week, on three separate days (8 of those hours are with a nanny who speaks a second language for an immersive experience for the children). My SO taught at home from pre-verbal stage to 4; we turned what most houses would be the "living room" into the school/playroom for the children.
Our local homeschool groups don't meet frequently enough to offset some of the lagging social development cues we suspected that were not aligning with our 4-yo's advanced verbal skills (assessed to at least a year ahead of peers), so we placed (for 15 hours per week) our 4-yo into a pre-school that specializes in Precision Learning and Direct Instruction methods (these terms are sometimes associated with developmentally delayed children, but they work even better with developmentally appropriate children). The rest of the time we continue with our homeschooling. Results: within six months, our 4-yo leapt from average to a year ahead in math and reading, and (our suspicions were correct) went from being uncomfortable in groups to being the class clown (never knew the child had that in them).
I will tell you straight up front: this is expensive. There is no way around that. Since you mention a state, I assume you are in the US. Using private resources means you will likely pay property taxes partly for a public school system you will not use. One decision we took to mitigate that was to hunt for a house that was only assessed county property taxes, and still as close-in to the metro area as we could manage. We gave up the amenities of urban living, but our city is not densifying and is growing rather dysfunctionally IMHO so I consider moving away a net positive for our particular situation.
Between the nannies, part-time pre-school, and third-party activities we signed up for that we don't have the equipment to teach (swimming and gymnastics), it is a significant chunk of change. However, I consider my children my most important investment, ever, and my capital allocation reflects that. As the children grow older, we do anticipate not having to spend quite so much on the nannies / housekeepers, so the situation does improve, but there are no easy answers here.
I would say that homeschooling is better than traditional schooling, but it really lacks the freedom, responsibility, independence, and socializing that Sudbury schooling has to offer. A good article trumpeting this up is http://blog.sudburyvalley.org/2014/02/sudbury-schools-unscho...
I was fortunate to discover the model a year ago with a functioning school. They are fairly rare so probably not an option for you, but if it is, they are often in a price range of 6-8k. Before that, I was going to homeschool my daughter (she's 3.5). Now I work for Baltimore's urban Sudbury school and the place is fantastic.
I have had some past association with an education franchise, and I'd say that the biggest thing stopping an American teacher from doing better in specifically math and science is probably classroom logistics.
When you are paired 1:1 with a young person of peer-ish intelligence, the speed at which you can teach them specific math skills and principles can be exciting for both involved. But most people cannot afford 1:1.
I can't help but think there's a Submarine[1] effect going on with reporting on public schools in the U.S.
The U.S. is a huge country with a heterogeneous population spanning a wide swath of the socioeconomic continuum. To say "teaching is bad" as a blanket statement is intellectually dishonest, to the point where I think some organization(s) intentionally push this meme in the media to further their own purposes.
I agree with taking the profession of teaching more seriously (as if anybody is opposed to such a thing). How best to do that is what we'll probably never agree on.
As with many things I'm reminded of the west wing:
"Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet."
Rather than pretending it could ever be the case, I like to imagine that there's an alternate universe where it happens :)
… which will be paid at a much higher level for decades by the adults who received a solid education even if their parents couldn't have afforded it. This is hardly a zero-sum game.
As with many things, it sounds flowery and perfect but the implementation would be a disaster.
- You have to build/renovate schools. That alone on a national scale is almost unworkable. In more densely populated areas there simply might not be room to expand.
- You have to agree on the "right" way to teach, as if there is such a thing. Pedagogy is constantly evolving, and frankly you don't want the One True Way to teach any more than you want the One True Way to write computer programs.
- You have to accept that children are coming into school from wildly different starting points. I'm not just talking about poverty; the U.S. has huge influxes every year of people speaking languages other than English.
- In areas of concentrated poverty you need to keep the schools safe and the children engaged when every other aspect of their life could be immensely more stressful than yours and mine.
- You have to completely overhaul how we find, recruit, and retain teachers, accepting that many mistakes will be made along the way.
And you're somehow going to do all of this from a centrally managed federal department run not by the intelligentsia but from rank-and-file bureaucrats.
I support strong public education, I really do. But I think we lose track of how intractable of a problem that is on the national level. People hold up Finland (population 5.4 mil., 93% ethnic Finn) as an education utopia, but no one likes to talk about how different they are from the U.S. (population 318 mil., much greater ethnic diversity and 12% foreign born).
Agreed. I'm married to a teacher and wince almost every time I read something about what's wrong with education because most of the problems I hear about are caused by social problems (usually symptoms of poverty). The public education system gets blamed for the effects but has very little funding or ability to fix the causes.
There are two main drivers: the most obvious one is that teachers are one of the largest unionized groups so there's going to be a certain level of attack just from that particular culture war.
The less appreciated one, however, is the number of companies and investors who benefit from changes. A major policy change means billions of dollars in new textbooks, curriculum materials, etc. — and almost inevitably follows this cycle where test scores drop (boosters: "see how bad it was"; teachers: "these kids have had the new approach for one year"), improve as everyone has time to get used to the new system and then plateau at roughly where they'd been under the previous system. Each time you repeat, textbooks companies make billions.
The rise of charter schools gives an even greater benefit to attacks. Each student who switches is $10+K/year and there's a lot less oversight on where that money is spent so you have room for modern CEO salaries, dividends to investors, etc. so there are plenty of people trying to jump in.
Attacking public schools also turns out to be a good strategy for a charter school to show results: the marketing appeals to the more motivated, generally higher-income parents, whose children were already likely to perform above average anyway. That helps the charter school and, if this happens enough like it does here in DC where this is about 40% of the students, lowers the public school ratings at the same time.
This isn't to say that there aren't real problems in public education but rather that there are both no simple fixes and many people who stand to profit from ignoring the root causes.
Wouldn't you agree that, in a society where kids are primarily parented by third parties in practice, teachers and educators ought to get their fair share of the blame for not being good role models and keeping kids protected from that mess?
And frankly, no. It is a classic case of treating the symptom rather than the disease. When what you need is stronger parenting and better social structure and safety nets, substituting that with additional responsibilities and workloads for teachers who are arguably often already burdened outside of what could reasonably be expected of them is not going to be a recipe for success.
I'm asking teachers nothing, actually. Just wondering and asking the parent post's author...
And frankly, I've no idea what ought to be done about it.
What I do know is this much: in broad strokes, the US went from a household with a pop at work mum at home 50 years ago, to a pop and mum at work or single parent at work nowadays. In other words, it turned into a society where parents don't have the material time to parent their own children. Who should do so in their place?
I heard about something called "parental rights" - is it something that depends on the individuals having "the material time to parent their own children" or is it me understanding things wrongly?
How do you propose a teacher protect a student who they just met Day 1 of the school year who is heavily indoctrinated in gang culture? You can blame the teacher the year before but that teacher never saw the student much because he wasn't in class. It's not about role models it's about survival.
I grew up in a rural area. Farmland. I now live in NYC. This place breeds a hardened tougher person and in the impoverished areas education and schooling are often second fiddle to money that is here, now, that will keep food on the table.
No. Not even remotely. Teachers do provide a good example for their students, but it's not their responsibility to watch children 24hrs a day to ensure good behavior, to inspect their home to make sure it's suitable, to watch their parents and ensure that they're not abusive or setting a bad example. If we give them a "fair share of the blame," then their share would be exactly 0%, because they are not responsible for the problems they and their students have to deal with.
> Wouldn't you agree that, in a society where kids are primarily parented by third parties in practice,
No, I would not agree that children are parented by teachers. A child has multiple teachers each year and many, if not all of them, change year-to-year. What more could we ask for such a transient figure to do beyond being a good role model?
> not being good role models
Where has anyone every said educators shouldn't (or aren't) be role models?
> keeping kids protected from that mess?
Yes, my petite, 110# dripping wet friend will protect her kids from gang violence. By the time school security responds, the damage is done.
Additionally, how does a teach protect their kids when they're not in school? How do they protect them from gang violence in their neighborhoods?
These are big issues. Seriously, huge issues that cities and our society face. Expecting teachers to be able to build a bubble is ludicrous when children are selling drugs or worse on the streets to stay fed, when they're being shot and beat in and out of school over gang affiliations.
As I wrote in my reply to mkohlmyr, methinks the bigger problem is that parents no longer have the material time to parent their own kids.
Who should step in to fill the gap? Gangs? Militarized cops? Someone else?
It seems to me that teachers and educators spend the most time with kids apart from parents (or one would hope), and are the least bad candidates to second parents in parenting kids.
This isn't about your friend specifically. In elementary school, it's common for kids to only have two teachers for the entire school year. My sister, on one occasion, moved up in the grade she taught and ended up teaching the same kids for two years. Many of these kids spend more awake time around their teachers than their parents. Given how the government forces kids to attend schools I don't see how one can't think that they and their employees share a huge part of the burden.
On the other hand, my sister makes it seem like there are just a lot of bad parents out there. Even the ones that mean well, will often act in a way destructive to their child's education. Many of them are rude and self-righteous. Honestly I no idea what to do about that.
You cannot be a proper parent to 20+ kids (hell, I'd argue 5+ kids of elementary school age would be difficult) simultaneously. I just don't know what more you expect out of teachers. Additionally, teachers only have children for 3/4 of the year and then the parents have them, and then a new teacher has them.
Parents are important; if you see your parents acting bad, neglecting you, are even encouraging you to act in these manners, then what can someone who spends 1/2 of 3/4 of a year with you really change that?
> You cannot be a proper parent to 20+ kids (hell, I'd argue 5+ kids of elementary school age would be difficult) simultaneously.
Agree wholeheartedly. But that's the sorry reality today.
> Parents are important; if you see your parents acting bad, neglecting you, are even encouraging you to act in these manners, then what can someone who spends 1/2 of 3/4 of a year with you really change that?
But you're missing my entire point here: parents nowadays spend very little time with their children compared to a half century ago. Where they used to get half a day of parenting (typically from house moms), kids are now only getting a few hours per day -- and that's provided whichever parent comes back from work first don't sit them in front of a TV while making dinner.
Blaming bad society or whatever is akin to sticking one's head in the sand. The kids need to be parented somehow, and it's pointless to blame the parents considering they both need to work in both households to make the mortgage, tax burden, and various other fixed cost work out; but nobody has stepped in to fill the gap left by societal changes. Who should?
Even stepping back from this teaching aspect and into the abstract, making essentially mid-level staff employees responsible for factors that are well out of their control and above their pay grade is the sign of an unhealthy business. As a developer, is it my responsibility when product drops the ball or the business mis-invests its money and goes under? Teachers play a very important role in a child's development, and there are rockstar teachers that will truly turn a child's life around and put it on a different trajectory than where it would have been otherwise. But it's not in their job description to be able to do that for every child, regardless of how seriously they take THEIR job of being a student, or a parent's job of raising a child that is prepared for the real world.
Hmmm - you certainly make a strong case for social problems. But both halves of the equation could be true, right? Teaching and society could both be bad.
My understanding, from this article and other reports, is that the percentage of teachers drawn from the top tier of graduates is dropping (top tier measured by GRE scores, grades, and rigor of the undergraduate program). The top 10% of math majors, for instance, rarely become teachers.
I think the US is putting so much emphasis on a plan. My take on it is if you draw your math teachers from the top echelons of math students, and provide support for learning to teach in a classroom, you really won't need to micromanage the curriculum. Sure, a general plan is a good thing, but at that point you can give the teachers pretty broad autonomy in the classroom.
Still, the problems you've described are extremely serious and could completely derail an education and life regardless of the talent and devotion of the teacher. Strong teachers and a stable social environment are both pretty critical for a kid trying to excel in school.
It's not. It's on par with the rest of the western world[1], maybe except Finland which is an outlier whether you include the US or not. At least as of 2009, I doubt it somehow collapsed since.
Not to mention higher education, where Americans lead. Although judging by tuitions perhaps a little too far in the diminishing returns region.
This thread seems already to have aged off the front page, but it is dismaying to see that lazy blog post from 2010 still cited here on Hacker News years after other participants have pointed to better sources on international educational comparisons. The author's main point seems to be found in the opening paragraph serving as the thesis statement of his blog post: "What I have learned recently and want to share with you is that once we correct (even crudely) for demography in the 2009 PISA scores, American students outperform Western Europe by significant margins and tie with Asian students."
But this is factually incorrect.
1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely ...
A recurring theme here seems to be the bottom 10%, or bottom 20%, or what have you, scores in the US are dragging down the other scores. If those were ignored, the US would presumably be way up top.
But that is not the case. If you compare the top 10% of PISA scores in Japan, Singapore, South Korea etc. - or Finland, Switzerland, Holland - to the top 10% in the US, the US top 10% is below their top 10% as well.
That kind of study is really hard for non-experts to draw conclusions from because the process is full of confounds. Even before you look at the test content you'd want to compare across demographic profiles (i.e. parental education levels or income) to see whether that trend holds up. In the case of the PISA scores, there's 2013 paper claiming that some percentage of the differences are explained by a sampling bias over-representing low-income students: http://www.epi.org/publication/us-student-performance-testin... That could have an effect on the top-end scores as well if it reduced the percentage of top students in the pool.
The other big problem you get is that this is a very narrow test of a single subject and Goodhart's law reigns supreme in this kind of comparison. The total difference being discussed is a 2% delta between the top US decile and Shanghai, which was the world leader. Even if that's not just random fluctuation, it could be explained entirely by something as simple as Singapore making that test a priority whereas it's largely off the radar in the US. That's not an accusation of cheating – it could be as simple as whether kids have drilled as heavily on a specific skill which is used more in one national curriculum than the other.
EDIT: To clarify: this shouldn't be read as criticism of PISA – I'm sure they've made considerable effort to address this challenges – but simply that this kind of comparison is a HARD challenge.
I was surprised teacher salaries did not come into it. From my relatively uninformed viewpoint, I would think offering more money would give you a better choice of candidates. Look at investment banks. They offer lots of money, and they get the pick of a large proportion of the top graduates.
Here's a conversation I had with a young man in Switzerland:
Me: You seem like a smart, well educated guy (Kid speaks 4 languages, and can talk about interesting stuff at age 20). So, what do you do when you're not helping out at your dad's shop?
Him: I've got an apprenticeship at Credit Suisse. So I work there a few days and study some other days.
Me: Cool. My banker is at CS, and he started at 16, just like you. He's a smart guy, been sent to NYC as well. Probably doing quite well out of it. I guess that's your path then?
Him: Nah. I like it and the pay is good. The work is interesting, but I want to get into teaching.
Me: So, no rat race I guess?
Him: Well, I know you can make good money in banking, but I figure I can help out young people make the most of themselves.
Me: Sounds like quite a paycut. I remember going into finance thinking how on earth I could ever change back out.
Him: Well, you do get paid 120K CHF a year after a few years. (That's 125K USD.)
Me: [Jaw Drops]
I don't know a whole lot about the system here, but I do feel more comfortable knowing that it's actually competitive to become a teacher.
Getting better candidates is not the only problem. Keeping them is the real trick. I have several friends who've ventured into teaching out of various more or less idealistic reasons. Most of them quit for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with the terrible working conditions. Constant micromanagement, zero control over lessons or lesson plans, endless stream of tests they had to teach to, reams of pointless paperwork that sucked up all their supposed lesson planning time. That is what drives many young, smart, talented people away from teaching in my experience.
This sounds right. The guy I was talking to seemed to think conditions were good. A lot of debate in certain countries carries an undertone that teachers are lazy, which can't be useful for retention.
My wife is a teacher in China. She taught me that the difference is 2 things: One is the single child is pushed into competing by the parents who fear the other parents are pushing their child. Second is she says the Chinese children can "see" the future is bad without something to change it and that is getting an education. She says we just don't see that here in America - the child that is.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread1) it isn't always that bad, if you pay the premium for private education you can get some of the best education available in the world 2) the people who pay for private schools also pay a significantly larger share of the taxes 3) those taxes pay for the public schools
thus: public teaching is bad because the ones that proportionally pay more for it, don't make use of it.
i live in a country (NL) where public schools are the norm, we all pay for what we (almost) all consume.
Even in those cases, there should be enough distance between those paying the tax (in whatever portions) and those spending the tax to ensure that the government runs without interference and can provide the best service at that price point. If the service isn't good enough, then increase the price point. If you don't want to increase the price point, then reduce the quality of your service.
Either way, I think the argument falls into the category of "Wealth redistribution is a broken concept", and that's a whole 'nother ball game that any discussion on schools just isn't big enough for.
Perhaps this point was missing or too implicit: contrary to what occurs in Europe, there is no "How is my money being spent?" effect as a result of this.
In any representative democracy that I know of, the budget (including tax income and government outgoings such as education) is handled by elected representatives of the people. There is no direct connection between a specific tax dollar and a specific public service. Rather, these things are budgeted for in aggregate.
The elected representatives are accountable to their electorate for these budgets, not to individual taxpayers. The concept of "How is my money being spent?" is a feature of this aggregated budgeting rather than any specific tracking from specific taxpayer to specific service. Going back to the parent posting, which implied an accountability of legislation (or at least educational administration) to its funders, I don't see how this works in representative democracies such as the US, because the funders are not stockholders in the traditional sense: Their extra tax dollars do not give them extra voting rights. The only way I can imagine that they would have more voting rights is through lobbying and other such methods that bypass traditional electoral accountability.
In short, an argument in the form of "Higher net tax payers are not net consumers of government spending, therefore government spending that does not help them does not efficiently help others" assumes either that citizens have an electoral power relative to the tax they pay (which is undemocratic) or that wealth redistribution is broken (in this case or in general).
When all (or nearly all) schools are public, then everyone pays for what they get.
In Europe, the main group of tax payers are eating their own dog food by sending their kids to public schools. When the public schools their kids go to sucks, they know first hand and lobby to get it fixed.
In contrast, the main group of tax payers in the US are sending their kids to private schools. When the local public schools sucks, it doesn't have the slightest immediate impact on their kids and they therefor will not care much.
As far as I can see, the only way the argument works is if money is what's doing the electing, rather than individual voters (as in, we don't have "one man one vote" but rather we have "mo' money mo' votes" like in private companies). If that's the case, then that's a way bigger story than "rich guy doesn't care that his tax dollars make good public education".
Is there a good solution though? I've seen kids bused across town to try and fix this. Of course if you're the family who is getting bused across town to go to a worse school you're angry, but if you're moving to a better school you're probably pretty happy. Other counties have school choice plans where you can pick your school from a small list and they hope that it evens out (Hint: It doesn't).
Both options suck. What is better? Do other countries provide funding at the national level so that poor counties can educate at the same level as rich ones? In America, that'd probably require a change to the constitution.
Bussing solves racial disparity within a district, not economic disparity. Course, these often correspond but not always.
Most first world countries fund educations out of the federal budget so it is more equitable; course, the libertarians would call that socialist, but you reap what you sow.
I tried to find statistics based on state, but could not find any data. (A quick google seems to imply that CA, NY, and WA do not do it based on county, but it's hard to say that most states do with only 5 measurements.)
I'm not really sure why your posts are so angry about this topic, but your original assertion was that schools were segregated by wealth, which is obviously not how are schools districts are devised. I understand that your jaded worldview may keep you from accepting this fact.
The teacher is what makes the student, and unfortunately I have also witnessed PABO students barely able to pass basic spelling/math tests. Those students will probably only go on to teach toddlers/basic grades, but due to teacher shortages it is conceivable that they will eventually move on to teach higher grades as well.
In my opinion, there is no easy short-term solution to the problem of adequate teacher-levels due to regulation/unions etc. We parents should try our best to partially circumvent the entire issue by avoiding "permanent damage" is done by staying up to date with what the child learns and focus on rote-skills that are hard for teachers to supervise in large class-rooms but immensely important when those kids grow up: maths and writing.
Perhaps this will get easier as teaching/assignments are increasingly interactive, allowing the parent to gain a better view of the child's performance and problems. Here's me hoping this e-learning thing takes off as soon as possible, with teachers perhaps evolving to simply guiding their pupils with extra support (if necessary), social interaction (digital age might not be all thats cracked up to be with encouraging social skills), learning techniques, and job planning as kids these days have no idea what they realistically are going to do for work later.
EDIT: Added some perhaps off-topic personal vision of what a teacher should do in the future when MOOCS/e-learning takes off.
One may be an expert in ones field, and not be a teacher. Saldly one may be a teacher, but over the years we've also gone and built a system which actively discourages teaching.
So the issue isn't necessarily one of money, but of how we approach the problem of building teachers.
Basically, poor, urban schools are largely funded by faceless corporations holding hundreds of apartments paying taxes, not random rich families with luxury condos in the city sending kids to private school.
It certainly isn't a lack of money. Some city school systems spend more than it cost to get an college education per student. We simply spend too much money on everything but having more teachers. It is not about paying teachers enough, its about hiring enough teachers. Instead it goes to administrators, counselors, and etc, heavy in nepotism and cronyism.
Then add in...
The Federal Government setting standards on punishment, effectively now requiring a quota system. So if one group is over represented in being disciplined the system cannot take action without threat of losing federal funds. The Federal government allowing select schools to ignore standards set by NCLB and subsequent programs provided they are politically well connected.
TL;DR
Spending too much money on hiring someone other than teachers. Having the Federal government dictate standards but excuse groups from them, dictating who you can discipline and how often, and finally the corrupt nature of hiring in many school systems.
The article has a paragraph that describes my experience perfectly:
"American education schools are often derided as overly theoretical, inscribing an arcane vocabulary about education and few real skills for delivering it. But these institutions actually teach a hollow and decidedly anti-intellectual brand of theory, as many critiques of education schools have concluded. Future teachers receive a warmed-over set of homilies about preparing “the whole child” and “student-centered learning” (with the requisite homage to philosopher and education theorist John Dewey) instead of a serious intellectual initiation into the subjects in which teachers will have to instruct students."
You aren't doomed to failure just because one facet of your society is sub par (education in this case, allegedly).
Granted, it is not based on very much, but i sort of feel that the US has gained the dominance it has today by being really big, and not horribly corrupt or impoverished.
Add to this the fact that the US has historically been very good at attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to move there and you end up with probably the largest collection of 'leading' people in the world.
Now with all of the focus on standardized testing, I worry the focus on independent thinking and problem solving is all but destroyed. Teachers now have what I consider "mandatory sentencing" with no room to inspire - only time to teach the test and shuffle kids through.
You might see some of that US magic fade away this generation. I hope not.
2) Our post-secondary education is the best in the world.
3) Even counting poor schools, the American education system isn't even that bad. America is better than Italy, Spain, Austria, and even Sweden. It's about as good as the UK.
American's just think we have to have the best system.
It also helps a great deal to have a consumer society that is on a constant lookout for the latest or greatest gadget, product or service. This helps to quickly identify the better options amongst the gazillions that see the day and die each year.
See for example http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damag...
Despite your best intentions, coercive schooling is not a good thing. There are better ways, such as Sudbury schooling, that are both respectful of children and actually prepare them for the world that we live in.
I can tell you what worked for me, and leave it up to you to collect sufficient data samples to judge your own situation. We bring in a nanny 12 hours a week, on three separate days (8 of those hours are with a nanny who speaks a second language for an immersive experience for the children). My SO taught at home from pre-verbal stage to 4; we turned what most houses would be the "living room" into the school/playroom for the children.
Our local homeschool groups don't meet frequently enough to offset some of the lagging social development cues we suspected that were not aligning with our 4-yo's advanced verbal skills (assessed to at least a year ahead of peers), so we placed (for 15 hours per week) our 4-yo into a pre-school that specializes in Precision Learning and Direct Instruction methods (these terms are sometimes associated with developmentally delayed children, but they work even better with developmentally appropriate children). The rest of the time we continue with our homeschooling. Results: within six months, our 4-yo leapt from average to a year ahead in math and reading, and (our suspicions were correct) went from being uncomfortable in groups to being the class clown (never knew the child had that in them).
I will tell you straight up front: this is expensive. There is no way around that. Since you mention a state, I assume you are in the US. Using private resources means you will likely pay property taxes partly for a public school system you will not use. One decision we took to mitigate that was to hunt for a house that was only assessed county property taxes, and still as close-in to the metro area as we could manage. We gave up the amenities of urban living, but our city is not densifying and is growing rather dysfunctionally IMHO so I consider moving away a net positive for our particular situation.
Between the nannies, part-time pre-school, and third-party activities we signed up for that we don't have the equipment to teach (swimming and gymnastics), it is a significant chunk of change. However, I consider my children my most important investment, ever, and my capital allocation reflects that. As the children grow older, we do anticipate not having to spend quite so much on the nannies / housekeepers, so the situation does improve, but there are no easy answers here.
I was fortunate to discover the model a year ago with a functioning school. They are fairly rare so probably not an option for you, but if it is, they are often in a price range of 6-8k. Before that, I was going to homeschool my daughter (she's 3.5). Now I work for Baltimore's urban Sudbury school and the place is fantastic.
I also recommend reading Zero to One and think about in the context of traditional schooling. I am working on a series of posts highlighting the connections starting with http://blog.aisudbury.com/post/102537221611/educational-prep...
When you are paired 1:1 with a young person of peer-ish intelligence, the speed at which you can teach them specific math skills and principles can be exciting for both involved. But most people cannot afford 1:1.
The U.S. is a huge country with a heterogeneous population spanning a wide swath of the socioeconomic continuum. To say "teaching is bad" as a blanket statement is intellectually dishonest, to the point where I think some organization(s) intentionally push this meme in the media to further their own purposes.
I agree with taking the profession of teaching more seriously (as if anybody is opposed to such a thing). How best to do that is what we'll probably never agree on.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
"Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet."
Rather than pretending it could ever be the case, I like to imagine that there's an alternate universe where it happens :)
- You have to build/renovate schools. That alone on a national scale is almost unworkable. In more densely populated areas there simply might not be room to expand.
- You have to agree on the "right" way to teach, as if there is such a thing. Pedagogy is constantly evolving, and frankly you don't want the One True Way to teach any more than you want the One True Way to write computer programs.
- You have to accept that children are coming into school from wildly different starting points. I'm not just talking about poverty; the U.S. has huge influxes every year of people speaking languages other than English.
- In areas of concentrated poverty you need to keep the schools safe and the children engaged when every other aspect of their life could be immensely more stressful than yours and mine.
- You have to completely overhaul how we find, recruit, and retain teachers, accepting that many mistakes will be made along the way.
And you're somehow going to do all of this from a centrally managed federal department run not by the intelligentsia but from rank-and-file bureaucrats.
I support strong public education, I really do. But I think we lose track of how intractable of a problem that is on the national level. People hold up Finland (population 5.4 mil., 93% ethnic Finn) as an education utopia, but no one likes to talk about how different they are from the U.S. (population 318 mil., much greater ethnic diversity and 12% foreign born).
There are two main drivers: the most obvious one is that teachers are one of the largest unionized groups so there's going to be a certain level of attack just from that particular culture war.
The less appreciated one, however, is the number of companies and investors who benefit from changes. A major policy change means billions of dollars in new textbooks, curriculum materials, etc. — and almost inevitably follows this cycle where test scores drop (boosters: "see how bad it was"; teachers: "these kids have had the new approach for one year"), improve as everyone has time to get used to the new system and then plateau at roughly where they'd been under the previous system. Each time you repeat, textbooks companies make billions.
The rise of charter schools gives an even greater benefit to attacks. Each student who switches is $10+K/year and there's a lot less oversight on where that money is spent so you have room for modern CEO salaries, dividends to investors, etc. so there are plenty of people trying to jump in.
Attacking public schools also turns out to be a good strategy for a charter school to show results: the marketing appeals to the more motivated, generally higher-income parents, whose children were already likely to perform above average anyway. That helps the charter school and, if this happens enough like it does here in DC where this is about 40% of the students, lowers the public school ratings at the same time.
This isn't to say that there aren't real problems in public education but rather that there are both no simple fixes and many people who stand to profit from ignoring the root causes.
* One or more of her students will be shot to death each year
* Many of her kids get pulled out of class and beaten by rival gangs each year
* Many of her kids will go to jail for a portion of the school year for drug charges each year
* Many of her girls will be out due to pregnancy each year
How is any of that the fault of the teachers? We need to fix our society before kids will have any chance of learning.
And frankly, no. It is a classic case of treating the symptom rather than the disease. When what you need is stronger parenting and better social structure and safety nets, substituting that with additional responsibilities and workloads for teachers who are arguably often already burdened outside of what could reasonably be expected of them is not going to be a recipe for success.
And frankly, I've no idea what ought to be done about it.
What I do know is this much: in broad strokes, the US went from a household with a pop at work mum at home 50 years ago, to a pop and mum at work or single parent at work nowadays. In other words, it turned into a society where parents don't have the material time to parent their own children. Who should do so in their place?
I grew up in a rural area. Farmland. I now live in NYC. This place breeds a hardened tougher person and in the impoverished areas education and schooling are often second fiddle to money that is here, now, that will keep food on the table.
No, I would not agree that children are parented by teachers. A child has multiple teachers each year and many, if not all of them, change year-to-year. What more could we ask for such a transient figure to do beyond being a good role model?
> not being good role models
Where has anyone every said educators shouldn't (or aren't) be role models?
> keeping kids protected from that mess?
Yes, my petite, 110# dripping wet friend will protect her kids from gang violence. By the time school security responds, the damage is done.
Additionally, how does a teach protect their kids when they're not in school? How do they protect them from gang violence in their neighborhoods?
These are big issues. Seriously, huge issues that cities and our society face. Expecting teachers to be able to build a bubble is ludicrous when children are selling drugs or worse on the streets to stay fed, when they're being shot and beat in and out of school over gang affiliations.
Who should step in to fill the gap? Gangs? Militarized cops? Someone else?
It seems to me that teachers and educators spend the most time with kids apart from parents (or one would hope), and are the least bad candidates to second parents in parenting kids.
You mean the hour, maybe two they see a child during the day?
> are the least bad candidates to second parents in parenting kids.
No, they're not even a candidate.
On the other hand, my sister makes it seem like there are just a lot of bad parents out there. Even the ones that mean well, will often act in a way destructive to their child's education. Many of them are rude and self-righteous. Honestly I no idea what to do about that.
Parents are important; if you see your parents acting bad, neglecting you, are even encouraging you to act in these manners, then what can someone who spends 1/2 of 3/4 of a year with you really change that?
Agree wholeheartedly. But that's the sorry reality today.
> Parents are important; if you see your parents acting bad, neglecting you, are even encouraging you to act in these manners, then what can someone who spends 1/2 of 3/4 of a year with you really change that?
But you're missing my entire point here: parents nowadays spend very little time with their children compared to a half century ago. Where they used to get half a day of parenting (typically from house moms), kids are now only getting a few hours per day -- and that's provided whichever parent comes back from work first don't sit them in front of a TV while making dinner.
Blaming bad society or whatever is akin to sticking one's head in the sand. The kids need to be parented somehow, and it's pointless to blame the parents considering they both need to work in both households to make the mortgage, tax burden, and various other fixed cost work out; but nobody has stepped in to fill the gap left by societal changes. Who should?
My understanding, from this article and other reports, is that the percentage of teachers drawn from the top tier of graduates is dropping (top tier measured by GRE scores, grades, and rigor of the undergraduate program). The top 10% of math majors, for instance, rarely become teachers.
I think the US is putting so much emphasis on a plan. My take on it is if you draw your math teachers from the top echelons of math students, and provide support for learning to teach in a classroom, you really won't need to micromanage the curriculum. Sure, a general plan is a good thing, but at that point you can give the teachers pretty broad autonomy in the classroom.
Still, the problems you've described are extremely serious and could completely derail an education and life regardless of the talent and devotion of the teacher. Strong teachers and a stable social environment are both pretty critical for a kid trying to excel in school.
Not to mention higher education, where Americans lead. Although judging by tuitions perhaps a little too far in the diminishing returns region.
[1] http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
But this is factually incorrect.
1. American students are not outperforming Western Europe by significant margins nor are they tied with Asian students. The blog post is based on data from the PISA 2009 survey. But the United States National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) International Activities Program displays results about high-performing students from PIRLS 2006, TIMSS 2007, and PISA 2009,
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-hps-mr...
and shows European, Asian, and Oceanic countries outperforming the United States in producing high-performing students in reading, in mathematics (especially), and in science.
Looking at the comparable chart about low-performing students
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/reports/2012-lps-mr...
shows, especially in the teenage age range after longer exposure to formal schooling, that the United States has much higher percentages of low-performing students in those subjects than countries in several other regions of the world, again especially in mathematics. Comparing national averages with United States population group averages in the manner proposed by the author is misleading, and he should have considered other data sources.
2. The author, a person who did not grow up in the United States, has acquired English as a working language for his personal writing and scholarly publications after growing up knowing two other Indo-European languages. It amazes me that he didn't even point out that young people in the United States are especially unlikely to have strong foreign-language instruction in school. Way back in the 1980s, the book The Tongue-tied American: Confronting the Foreign Language Crisis,
http://www.amazon.com/The-Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-L...
which I read soon after it was published, pointed out that the United States appears to be the only country on earth in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without acquiring working knowledge of a second language. In those days, one way in which school systems in most countries outdid the United States school system, economic level of countries being comparable, was that an American could go to many different places and expect university graduates (and perhaps high school graduates as well) to have a working knowledge of English for communication about business or research. I still surprise Chinese visitors to the United States, in 2012, if I join in on their Chinese-language conversations. No one expects Americans to learn any language other than English. Elsewhere in the world, the public school system is tasked with imparting at least one foreign language (most often English) and indeed a second language of school instruction (as in Taiwan or in Singapore) that in my generation was not spoken in most pupils' homes, as well as all the usual primary and secondary school subjects. At a minimum, that's one way in which schools in most parts of the world take on a tougher task than the educational goals of United States schools. So if learners in those countries merely ...
But that is not the case. If you compare the top 10% of PISA scores in Japan, Singapore, South Korea etc. - or Finland, Switzerland, Holland - to the top 10% in the US, the US top 10% is below their top 10% as well.
http://educationbythenumbers.org/content/top-us-students-far...
The other big problem you get is that this is a very narrow test of a single subject and Goodhart's law reigns supreme in this kind of comparison. The total difference being discussed is a 2% delta between the top US decile and Shanghai, which was the world leader. Even if that's not just random fluctuation, it could be explained entirely by something as simple as Singapore making that test a priority whereas it's largely off the radar in the US. That's not an accusation of cheating – it could be as simple as whether kids have drilled as heavily on a specific skill which is used more in one national curriculum than the other.
EDIT: To clarify: this shouldn't be read as criticism of PISA – I'm sure they've made considerable effort to address this challenges – but simply that this kind of comparison is a HARD challenge.
Here's a conversation I had with a young man in Switzerland:
Me: You seem like a smart, well educated guy (Kid speaks 4 languages, and can talk about interesting stuff at age 20). So, what do you do when you're not helping out at your dad's shop?
Him: I've got an apprenticeship at Credit Suisse. So I work there a few days and study some other days.
Me: Cool. My banker is at CS, and he started at 16, just like you. He's a smart guy, been sent to NYC as well. Probably doing quite well out of it. I guess that's your path then?
Him: Nah. I like it and the pay is good. The work is interesting, but I want to get into teaching.
Me: So, no rat race I guess?
Him: Well, I know you can make good money in banking, but I figure I can help out young people make the most of themselves.
Me: Sounds like quite a paycut. I remember going into finance thinking how on earth I could ever change back out.
Him: Well, you do get paid 120K CHF a year after a few years. (That's 125K USD.)
Me: [Jaw Drops]
I don't know a whole lot about the system here, but I do feel more comfortable knowing that it's actually competitive to become a teacher.