Comment by no_wizard
20 days ago
>Most parents either are not interested or don’t have the time and resources to provide the at home educational support kids need. Teachers cannot do everything, and they are already stretched thin and underpaid (~1600 school districts across 24 states in the US are on 4 day weeks to attempt to retain teachers).
My central question is what are other countries doing that we aren't? Because other countries aren't seeing such a dire and systematic drop in student's academic ability. Germany being the most notable for how it directs its resources, even though its a fairly rigid in many respects.
I don't get the sense that parents in Europe are overwhelmingly more involved in the schools either, but I have limited purview into that specifically, having only had the pleasure of meeting europeans of different backgrounds (UK, Sweden, Germany most specifically) via work, its a limited subset of understanding, however most of the folks I've worked with who grew up in any of these European countries really seemed to believe in hands off parenting even more so, and experienced it often in kind.
I have one theory, which is that education is highly politicized in the US in a way that perhaps its not in other western countries. This has been happening since the 1960s but it really accelerated in the last 30 years or so.
You're assuming a difference between the U.S. and Europe that's not there. Looking at the 2018 PISA scores, for example, U.S. 15-year-olds do fine in reading: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2018/pdf/PISA2018_compi.... Slightly ahead of Norway, Germany, Denmark, and New Zealand.
The U.S. does much worse in math, but I don't know why any of the explanations being discussed here (parental involvement, etc.) would result in good reading scores but bad math scores.
I think a far more relevant set of statistics would be post graduate outcomes for students, such as university achievement (including graduation rates)[0]
[0]: https://www.ijbmcnet.com/images/Vol3No3/2.pdf
By this metric, United States is doing very well. Over 50% of Americans aged 25-34 have completed tertiary education, putting us at the 5th position within OECD, well ahead of countries like Germany, Sweden, France, Italy, Denmark, or Poland.
I don't think it's a meaningful metric, though, because most tertiary degrees are a waste of time, and higher university graduation rate can be worse if that translates to more people getting useless degrees.
Is there any reason to think that these differences are not entirely explained by immigration in the USA?
As a country -
We spend 50% more on education than our peer countries, and our outcomes are worse.
We spend twice per person on healthcare as our peers, and our health outcomes are worse.
We cannot build anything (roads, houses, etc) at anywhere near the cost or quality of our peers.
We spend, in addition to our tax revenue, an additional 40% that we borrow, and we will soon be paying over half of our tax revenue just for the interest on our growing debt.
We are not pleasant to be around
We are fat, stupid, broke, and churlish. Not very good marriage material.
These are all issues with varying degrees of seemingly personal interjections or non related pieces of information that don’t address nor seemingly relate in any meaningful way about what I’m asking.
If I take this at face value, you believe the US education is failing only because Americans are fat, stupid, and broke and simultaneously spend too much on education for worse outcomes, which contradicts being broke.
Yet there could be no other, more specific reasons such as leveraging education and specifically school boards for partisan purposes? A practice of which that has only increased in frequency over the last 30 years?
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They often pay teachers really well and they give them a lot of autonomy. In contrast, the US pays teachers really poorly and gives them little autonomy. They also give kids better food, better classrooms, more access to supplies, and more opportunities for enrichment so there is something to reach for.
So if you want to replicate the european system you have to treat education like it's more than just a daycare, and you have to make teaching a prestigious professional job instead of babysitting with math. And you have to pay for it.
I think the primary difference is other countries track their students. Not just in separate classrooms, not a self-selected honours programme, but actually different high schools for people who score higher on the entrance exams.
There are different kinds of autonomy. In every European country I am familiar with there's a fairly rigid curriculum (national or otherwise) that needs to be followed, but there's often a lot of autonomy about how individual lessons are delivered. I think in the US, you might argue that the opposite situation exists.
What makes you think that other countries aren't seeing the same decline? In France, as far as I can tell, the situation is similar.
For instance, I've seen a lot of interviews like this https://youtu.be/7Pl4rvZ9amc?si=RMm8B1BmSSdNt0vq
My brother, who is a high school teacher in Canada tells me similar stories from his first-hand experience.