My sons attended a well-funded high school with a splendid chemistry lab, did many fine experiments and wrote lab reports. All chose science and engineering in college.
I'm a little tired of some snooty British guy claiming their bad inner-city experience is typically American, then holding up their Public School (which in Britain means Private School here) experience as proof of the superiority of something or other.
My British friend in Computer Science at Iowa got his degree, then went on to study at Manchester (England) because nobody in England would respect his American degree. Once he got there the profs shook their heads, poor guy got an American degree, he'll have to repeat almost everything. They wrote a study plan for him (without his being consulted at all).
Long story short, he didn't attend any class, do any homework, ever really attend anything except his exams. He was top student that year, of course. Of course he was! He'd already been well educated and had work experience.
So, there's my counter-story. And to avoid hypocrisy, I won't claim its typical of anybody, except maybe good Iowa students going to study at Manchester.
The author explicitly calls out his school was a comprehensive (i.e. a state run school) - no public school experience in sight. Why the flight to class warfare when this is a discussion about the merits of approaches to education?
The real question is why do the British call it "public school" when it's not run by the public?
Sounds like they need better English education...
In reply to this (dead) comment, it's worth noting that while it doesn't seem to make sense now, it did in the past. The term "public school" (which incidentally doesn't apply to all private schools - they are all "independant", they aren't all "public") dates back to when many or most schools were aimed at specific groups of people, such as a local church, or a specific trade. Public school, therefore, meant that it was open to any paying member of the public - as long as they could pay, it didn't matter who they were.
So did I, so did my sons. State schools in America vary, sure. Maybe we were lucky. But the author's conclusion is, British schools are all better than American schools. I call BS.
I don't think this is about the schools, but more the curriculum. The author's argument is that children should be taught all the disciplines at once rather than sequentially; the fact that he's sending his daughter abroad to achieve that is tangential to the core point.
The University experience is of course based on the high school experience. Pretty much that Brit's point was, he has to ship his prodigy overseas to have any hope for her education.
My anecdote (for that's what both are) contradicts that.
I also wonder why I didn't start to learn physics until 12th grade (this was back in 1995). I hate to post an xkcd but I think this is appropriate: http://xkcd.com/435/
Starting them all at once is a great way to go about it too. But I wonder if 13 is too late? Why not start at 8 or 9, or even earlier? Do they still think that young children wont get it?
Education is a success when students are engaged and want to learn. Let them see how amazing this stuff is as early as possible and they will get hooked!
--EDIT-- I came back to add that teaching mathematics in the context of science as early as possible should help a great deal. Mathematics as an isolated subject can be foreign to students. In the context of early science it has applications. Want to apply Ohms law? Get moles in a solution? Understand cellular division rates? etc.
> Why not start at 8 or 9, or even earlier? Do they still think that young children wont get it?
My wife teaches kids around that age in a UK state school, and they teach some kind of combined science in the curriculum - there was a whole sequence on 'forces', which to me sounds like physics...
I was at a private primary school, and did a qualification at 13 called Common Entrance, which we prepared for from 9, which examined chemistry, biology, and physics separately (although we were taught chemistry and physics in the same classes).
So in answer to your question: I think (in the UK at least), they start combined sciences early
Private schools in the UK get a fair bit of flexibility in what they do, some (I believe) will even start doing separate physics/chemistry/biology before CE.
But state schools... well I've honestly no idea, the last time I was attending one was when I was 7. But I would never presume to guess what they do based on my experience of what private schools do - they're far too different.
> I came back to add that teaching mathematics in the context of science as early as possible should help a great deal
I think this hits the nail on the head. The first time I realized that science == math, I was in late high school.
I wonder how my absorption of the material would have changed had I made that connection earlier. I know that being able to apply math to chemistry and physics made it much easier for me to learn algebra and calculus, if only because it now had an applicable purpose beyond being its own abstract set of concepts.
In my highschool, (to graduate) everyone had to take calculus, normally in 12th grade. Unfortunately, physics (required in 11th grade) makes a hell of a lot more sense if you have some basic calculus first. All the kinematic equations are just random terms until you see that they're all derivatives/integrals of each other.
On the other hand, My wife went through the british school system, and didn't have any math or science after age 13. It was all languages and such.
The american system delays specialization for a long time, generally till the second half of college. (or even into grad school). The UK specializes way earlier, and you can get away with a small handful of related subjects after A levels.
My school system spends the first 7 years teaching that "math" is arithmetic with some vague hinting at algebra, and the next 3 teaching that "math" is matching the problem to one of maybe 30 types, remembering the "correct" algorithm, and executing it on paper.
It's not until Physics and AP Chemistry (first accessible junior year) that anyone tells you what calculus is, much less lets you glimpse the incredible beauty of what it can reveal about nature. When Precalculus started to introduce derivatives, I had the same thought as binarymax: you could have told me that years ago. When we first started working with slop and x^2 in 6th grade, it occurred to me that a curve's slope must be an equation instead of a nmuber, but the school system wasn't going to develop that thought for 6 years.
I definitely agree with teaching math inside science. That's where a lot of it was invented, anyway, and it's a lot easier to stay motivated when you can what the skills you're working towards will let you accomplish.
Science is on the British school curriculum from age 5. 5-7 year olds will be taught four broad scientific topics - "Scientific enquiry", "Life processes and living things", "Materials and their properties" and "Physical processes". We start teaching the scientific method as soon as a child can take a measurement and record it.
I went to public school in Iran until the age of 12, private school in the UK from 12 to 15, and spent my final year in public school in the US.
Observations:
Math: what I was learning as a junior or senior in the UK/US was what I'd already covered as an 11-12 year old in Iran. The only new subject we covered was calculus. That really sucks and is a big concern for me since my kids go to public school in the US.
Science: was very hands-on in the UK (lots of experiments and labs). Much better for learning than the text book approach in Iran. I only had 1 year in the US, but it was much less hands on as well.
The writer seems to be generalizing the entire US system based on his daughter's experience in one US high school, which he admits is "overcrowded, under-resourced [and] doesn’t think much of science".
Is this really a problem of the US system as a whole or is it this particular school?
Seems like a bit of a "the grass is always greener on the other side" thing.
Many have been underfunded for much longer than that. It's only after the GFC that we realized how bad it has gotten. When it was only the schools in the poor districts the middle class didn't complain (and didn't care) but as the crisis spread to even upper-middle class districts it was hard to ignore.
Now, overworked parents are blaming overworked school teachers about their underperforming kids.
The thing is that this is an extremely common sentiment that's echoed by virtually everyone. You will occasionally get someone who says they turned out fine, or that they had this one great teacher... but they also tend to be the exception that proves the rule.
This post struck a nerve with me as I'm agonizing over the decision of moving to the US while my daughter is about to enter her final year of GCSEs at a great school.
I really worry that moving her will seriously damage her chances of going to university in the UK, but the thought of leaving her here while the rest of her family move to the US is just too heart breaking to contemplate.
The area around San Francisco we're looking to move to has great schools but the final 2 years of the US high school curriculum is totally different to the UKs A-Levels and I fear she will struggle to adapt.
For some reason I end up in a lot of debates on relative school quality between countries across the world (presumably because I live in another country than I was born in, and because I work with academics a lot...) Many have an opinion on country X's school system being better than country Y's. Most of the time, this opinion isn't based on results, it seems (from my off-the-cuff analysis) that school are generally considered 'better' if they are 'stricter' (i.e., place more emphasis on discipline and respect, for example school who let people eat in class must be horrible), and the amount of hard science they teach everyone from a young age on (e.g., teaching everyone hard science more than the basics is better than just teaching those with an affinity for it, and teaching it starting at 6 is better than teaching at 12).
However, people can seldom back that up with evidence. For example, using artificial metrics such as scores in the various Olympiads (math, physics) or more 'utilitarian' metrics such as GDP (because people do use the prosperity of a country, for which GDP is a rough proxy, to justify their preferences, or rather they use it as a driving factor in the optimization function that use to determine which country's school system is 'best').
I get into a bitter argument with my mother, of all people, over this, with her unmovable stance being that in my home country, education is better because schools are strict, pupils address teachers with an honorific, etc; while in the country that I live in, that is much less important. (I'm not Asian and this is not an East vs West debate :) ) Yet in my current country, GDP is higher than in my home country, with many other things being similar; while I have no hard proof that the school system is the only or even a major driver of this difference, wouldn't it make sense that I'd send my daughter to a school in a system that has proven its real-world effectiveness, even if aspects of it go against the common wisdom or 'cultural intuitions' that I was brought up in, and that many in my old country still adhere to? While I guess it would be hard for many to admit that they've believed in things that turned out to be wrong for decades (I personally had that problem less because I never quite identified with the ethos of my old country that much), I'd say rationally that it's more likely that that part of the culture is wrong, rather than there being some extreme coincidence in which, despite having a substandard schooling system, many of the effects of that schooling system in my new country turned out better than those of the old country.
Sorry that this turned into such a long post - I just find it frustrating that, in this debate just like in so many others ;), it's common for people to ignore any evidence-based analysis of this question, or restrict themselves to that evidence that is favorable to their standpoint; and I do think that general prosperity is a direct consequence of a well-performing educational system.
Is GDP a realistic comparison - wouldn't a normalized measure like per-capita-GDP be more useful?
I really question whether any of the evidence you mention (strictness, GDP, etc) are anything of a real measure of the educational systems. Would you say GDP is a measure of the medical health of the country?
Yes, sorry, I meant per capita gdp, otherwise big countries would win out easily by sheer numbers.
I'm not definitively saying any of these are measures of that - the study of the effectiveness of education is a whole field of academic study on its own. What I meant was, many people use subjective measures that are grounded in cultural traditions as a metric for it, but I think that more objective measures of 'success' (such as prosperity, both individual and of the country as a whole, and for which I use per capita gdp as a proxy, with the caveat that said per capita GDP should probably be distributed roughly normally and have a not too large standard deviation - although I'm not prepared to quantify that, that's a whole other discussion...) are better criteria.
The reason I propose GDP, and this also answers your second question, is the assumption that people get educations to better their lives, at least in part in the material sense. So, the measure of the success of the educational system is in to what extent people actually better their lives in that aspect - to put it bluntly, how much (more) money they make. Of course making money isn't the only driving factor for many people when choosing what to study, but then again, for a majority of students it's a matter of weighing three factors: what do I like, what am I capable of, and what kind of a lifestyle will it provide me with. Since the first two are more or less fixed, the financial prospects of an education become a substantive decisive factor when it comes to study of choice.
So, in that line of reasoning, GDP is not a measure of the medical health of a country; since medical health is a goal in itself, while education is (partially, and in the aggregate, I'm not interested in nitpicking on the absoluteness of my phrasing...) a means to an end, to bettering ones life (at least partially) in the material sense, which is expressed by proxy in per capita GDP.
Well by 'evidence' I mean, metrics that quantify the quality of the educational system. As I explained in another comment in this thread, I think a substantial part of the goal of education, for many people, is in bettering their lives in the material sense; so, if we define 'quality' as 'the extent to which something fulfills its purpose', then the quality of education can, in some aspects, be measured by the amount that it allows people to better their lives; for example, to put that more concretely, in a country where a big enough portion of the people receives an education, and if we attribute an increase in GDP at least partially to an increase in education (a not unreasonable assumption, imo), and if other factors remain relatively stable, then we can measure the success of the educational system by using prosperity as a proxy for it.
I proposed per capita GDP in the example above, there probably are others; maybe the weighted for cost of living median wage of those who actually got educations, for example. But analyses or data like that aren't that easy to come by, so if enough people get an education, we could use overall GDP as a proxy. I acknowledge fully that there are many more factors at play here, so I'm not proposing this as a one-size-fits-all measurement; but just as cash-on-cash-return can be a useful first-order indicator in some contexts and for some purposes to get an estimate of the performance of an investment; and just like lines of code can be a useful first-order indicator in some contexts and for some purposes to get an estimate of the complexity of a code base; GDP can be (I'm arguing) a useful first-order indicator of the extent to which an educational system fulfills its goals - which I'd argue is the 'quality' thereof.
But, to answer your question more directly, I guess that any metric on the material (or maybe even mental) prosperity of an educated subset of a population would be 'good evidence'. It depends on what one defines the goals of education to be; but realistically, I think that the material part should be a sizable part of any such definition.
There's a lot in your post that implies that the distribution of education is irrelevant; that there's no need to rate the quality of an education system according to how many people are being educated, but just that whoever manages to get any education is being educated well.
I didn't really include distribution, I used 'educational system' and 'education' as the same things (which was fine in the context I did, but which are not the same when used in the context you are pointing at), and more or less assumed saturation or near-saturation of the demand for education. As was evidenced by the qualification in one of my posts that country-wide per capita GDP can only be a proxy when a sufficiently large portion of the population has received an education.
So I guess you're correct, that I was talking about the quality of the education itself, and that I wasn't talking about quality of an educational system (as opposed to: quality of the education). But then again that's not what this discussion was about anyway, nor do I have any special thoughts on that, so I'm not really interested in going off on a tangent in that direction.
Because schools are not the first in line for funding. Wars are. Elderly health-care and pensions benefits are. Other stuff as well.
Why are schools tied to local property taxes? I could never understand that. That is all kinds of messed up. Schools funds should be first in line in the federal budget, alongside with the new "surgical strike weapons" and the new "aircraft carriers".
Also, the politicians who are can vote and effect changes are sending their kids to private schools so they really don't care what everyone else does.
As a society we allegedly claim that children are the most precious things we have and yet when it comes to education, our actions seem to betray our words.
Everyone always blames it on money. It's more complicated than that. My city (Washington, DC), spent $29,000 per pupil on public schools last year. By that metric, it's one of the best-funded school systems in the country. Test scores here are mediocre at best, to the point that most families with the means to do so move out to the suburbs once they have kids.
There are a wide variety of reasons for this phenomenon, and they'll vary depending on who you ask (urban schools are generally expensive to run, special-needs students are disproportionately expensive to educate, teachers' unions have a lot of clout, etc.).
Not to disagree with anything you say, but it's not just funding. There's also an immense, yawning lack of consensus on what and how children should be taught.
For example, I would expect much, much more science to be recommended by the typical HN commentator than by the typical teachers' union.
The consequence is that the "traditional" high-school curriculum, which was invented well over a century ago, has barely changed since because nobody can get all the stakeholders to agree.
Start with funding. Pay teachers well. Make being a teacher the same as being a lawyer or a good engineer.
> For example, I would expect much, much more science to be recommended by the typical HN commentator than by the typical teachers' union.
Great point. I understand that some teachers wouldn't really understand a bad science text book/curriculum vs a good one, because they are not that good at it. Associate schools with local universities. Ask university math and physics professors to rate a curriculum., don't just rely on English majors being influenced by book publishers to determine how science should be taught
Fundamentally education is so far down the list after wars spending, elderly care and other issues that it just gets the short end of the stick. If they approached it with the same budget and interest as they approach a new aircraft carrier fleet we'd have a world-class education system.
If the goal is science literacy wouldn't it make sense to use a scientific approach to determining whether there is a correlation between spending and achievement in schools?
Where I live, there is a school district with exactly 1 elementary school, in the richest part of town that is funded at a rate of nearly 2x the dollars per student as the other school district (where the rest of the schools are).
Maybe science just isn't the thing his daughter wants to do. I hope that the problem isn't really him forcing his daugher to be someone she isn't (like the stereotypical "you can be any kind of doctor you want" parents...).
Apparently this school has an emphasis on sports and the arts. Couldn't he have chosen a different school? (I know next to nothing about the U.S. system, and Wikipedia doesn't help me.)
That is actually a large controversy right now. Generally speaking you have to attend the government school in the same tax district as your residence. Unless of course you have enough money to go to a religious or independent school but those can cost $20,000+ per year.
There is a push for "school vouchers" that allow you to move between government schools or use government funds to pay for tuition at a non-government school. This is opposed by the teacher's union as it will "drain funds from schools that need most" (schools are funded by property tax with per-student funds from the state and federal government). Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_choice#United_States
It's complicated. Government funded schools (they are funded by a combination of local, state, and federal funds) are tied to a district.
Some districts have multiple schools, in which case you have a school based upon your address that you are supposed to go to (typically based upon highly gerrymandered boundaries since school quality has a large affect on housing prices), but you can usually apply to go to a different school within the district, for which there are various rules that decide which requests are approved assuming there are more transfer requests than the school can accommodate.
Where I grew up, things weren't quite so bad, since the school-system was county wide, but you still got things where parents "in the know" would have their kids transfer from less desirable "school A" to more desirable "school B" based upon manufactured reasons like "My kid wants to take Japanese, and school A doesn't offer it.
Where I live now, things are much worse. For example:
1) The wealthiest part of town has a school district with exactly one school in it. As a large fraction of school funding comes from local property taxes (split among the district), the budget for that single school is much larger than all other schools in the town
2) The boundaries for determining your school in the main school district are badly gerrymandered. There are many cases in which people living in traditionally hispanic parts of the town will have to cross-through a the region for a more desirable school in order to get to the school to which they are assigned.
My sons attended a well-funded high school with a splendid chemistry lab, did many fine experiments and wrote lab reports. All chose science and engineering in college.
I'm a little tired of some snooty British guy claiming their bad inner-city experience is typically American, then holding up their Public School (which in Britain means Private School here) experience as proof of the superiority of something or other.
My British friend in Computer Science at Iowa got his degree, then went on to study at Manchester (England) because nobody in England would respect his American degree. Once he got there the profs shook their heads, poor guy got an American degree, he'll have to repeat almost everything. They wrote a study plan for him (without his being consulted at all).
Long story short, he didn't attend any class, do any homework, ever really attend anything except his exams. He was top student that year, of course. Of course he was! He'd already been well educated and had work experience.
So, there's my counter-story. And to avoid hypocrisy, I won't claim its typical of anybody, except maybe good Iowa students going to study at Manchester.