This whole flag-waving typical Techcrunch rant is based on the assumption that education only serves to feed the economy. Profit is all that matters.
So many of America's social problems can be traced back to a lack of a decent educational system, and if anything, this article inadvertently explains why. If someone really thinks economic dominance is enough to keep an empire from crumbling, I suggest some history lessons.
Well put. They don't realize that a well educated population is a more rational one. It's also one of the reasons why I am against this whole shift in only learning things that are "immediately practical" such as math and science (don't get me wrong, I think math and science are important but other subjects are just as important). It's one of the reasons why I wish philosophy and debate were mandatory courses in most schools. I don't believe making kids memorize multiplication tables when they are in kindergarten is going to help them, especially when they are barely able to comprehend them since they are so cognitively underdeveloped.
In addition: From what I am noticing, the kids that go to college to study degrees that involve dealing with unsolvable or unsolved problems are the kids that understand and not just memorize what they are taught. The education system downplays understanding and focuses on memorization. This obviously comes from America's result based culture. This leads to a population of people that can't think for themselves and only do what they are told. Something that goes against the whole idea of democracy.
TL;DR I believe that at younger ages children should be taught how to think rather than what to memorize.
Pledging allegiance to the flag/country encourage kids to support or fight in for-profit wars and other nefarious gov't activities that mainly benefit the rich. The "under God" part is advertising for religions, again profiting the wealthy few.
Free education is out there for anyone who wants it and has the motivation to get it.
Hint: you're soaking in it.
The Internet gives us access to a significant portion of the accumulated knowledge of the human race, and access to knowledgeable mentors and colleagues around the world. You can get it free at your local library.
True, those educational resources are largely avalable thanks to those evil profit-oriented tech companies, but one can't have everything.
Free education is out there for anyone who wants it and has the motivation to get it.
I think you're oversimplifying.
Thanks to the Internet, today we have the best virtual reference library available in the history of humanity. That solves one problem, but it introduces another: information overload.
Quality of teaching has always been a big influence on the quality of learning, but the emphasis is changing. Teaching has always been valuable because those with more knowledge/experience and the ability to convey that knowledge/experience effectively to someone else can help that other person to learn. Today, with better access to raw information, there is less need for teachers to play that role, but it is more valuable than ever to have a knowledgeable guide who can help the student to navigate the mass of information available and to choose which aspects to prioritise for best results at that stage in their personal development.
Information overload exists, but I don't think it's the problem here. There are plenty of garden paths on the internet, Khan Academy being just one, where a path is set for a student to follow and learn something with their hand being held by a competent teacher. You can also find willing and competent tutors (usually free!) by googling for a forum on the subject of interest.
I think the problem is closer related with bad genetics and laziness, and these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. This isn't the whole picture but it captures a lot more than "information overload".
I don't really disagree with anything you've said there, but I don't think what you're describing scales to the entire population. I believe it's important to give every child a solid foundation to build on as they grow and develop their own specialised interests. I believe that doing that efficiently and effectively requires, and probably always will require, a systematic and professional education system at school age.
Of course it's good for children to have other options and to take advantage of whatever unique opportunities they might have, but if even 10% of children interested in a subject started asking elementary questions about it on Internet forums the way they can in a classroom, the forums would collapse. Likewise, if someone wants to educate their own children in subjects they know well or to hire excellent personal tutors, I'd be the last person to deny any parent the right to do what they think is best for their child, but most children aren't lucky enough to have parents so academically gifted or wealthy and so won't have those particular opportunities.
In fact, it seems to me that the only conceivable way to fix that, so that relying on a specialist teaching profession wasn't as fundamental as it is today and every child could enjoy that kind of personal attention, would be to educate the previous generation who are now parents to a high enough standard and then make sure that they had enough time to spend with their children that they could take on more of the role that school teachers play today. I don't know if that could ever work in practice, but for sure it would require a ground-up rewrite of basic societal norms that would take generations to achieve.
I agree with you on having a systematic base for children, there's also an argument to be made for the prison-aspect of schools where school keeps less well-off children off the streets and not starving. I don't think it should last until 18, though, and I really think it should be nothing more than a base. That means the "four" R's: reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic, and 'rogramming. (This relates to the other topic of HN: can every human regardless of IQ or other genetic factors learn at least the basics of each of these? My answer is currently no, but clearly some students we might want to place in the "no" category really just need more time/perspective than others.)
So here's a solution that builds from the free core competencies program. After competency is achieved in those, give them a free laptop which has access to free public wifi (which may for the Greater Good have certain things restricted (and anyone smart enough to get around the restrictions is probably smart enough we don't have to worry about them)) and can be recharged freely at various charging areas. (e.g. libraries.) Allow corporations to setup and finance trade schools for various professions, and let the market decide what programs people take. If corporation X is in the business of plumbing and needs more plumbing, they can offer incentives to take their plumbing program (lower fee compared to other programs, even zero fee or negative fee (paying to become a plumber), future contract-bound promises of a job, etc.). If corporation Y is in the business of basket weaving and decides they don't need any new workers in the near-or-distant future, they can just not fund any program for basket weavers and no one will spend time trying to become one only to find out later to their dismay that their skills aren't in demand. There's still a place for the classic university of research and discovery and intellectualism (not the modern university of partying and drug experimenting and "get the paper to get a non-minimum-wage job"), but freed from the burden of low-quality students they can operate with less funds and more output. Would this scale? Would it be better than current affairs?
I'm not sure where you arrive at forums collapsing under questions. What is StackOverflow? Would it collapse if it had an order of magnitude more questions? I also think students are more likely to ask questions when they're behind a computer than in a classroom based on my observations as a student from K-12 and college that students don't tend to ask many questions in class.
Your idea of improving parental responsibility of parents today is interesting and I could see forcing responsibility upon parents having a large effect in the near-term--we don't have time for generations. The viable methods of force are probably too unpalatable for most people unfortunately. Apart from mandatory education standards for the parent and spending time with children, breeding restrictions could also be put in place as well as making it harder to get divorced. Breeding restrictions are also easy to enforce because RISUG for men is quick and easy and lasts ~10 years. But I doubt the US government in its current form would ever do such a thing. One thing it could do that would help the people-who-shouldn't-be-having-kids problem is not letting children be seen as a tax credit / welfare check.
Also not the poster, but study after study finds that education and income inequality is correlated with everything from crime rates (unsurprisingly, poor people are more likely to commit, or at least get caught committing, crimes) to mental health (the less money you have, you are likely to be mentally ill and less likely to have access to good care). Then there's obesity (again, the rich are more likely to eat healthy food) and other similar physical health issues.
Could you explain the causal link between any of the factors you've mentioned and education?
Among other explanations, the correlation between these factors can easily be explained by irresponsibility (more precisely: high discount rate) of the people exhibiting these factors. There is very little evidence that a lack of education causes these other negative things.
I.e., do you have evidence that educational interventions can actually prevent criminality, gluttony and craziness?
Not the person that you are responding to but I made this point in my response to him. America's education system only cares about the results. I.E. how well can he do on a standardized test, how good are his grades, etc.
This leads to people taking the easy way out and just memorizing everything without understanding or thinking critically about what they are doing. These people aren't thinking for themselves and instead are just taking everything told to them as fact and regurgitating it when they are asked. This obviously leads to a problem when they become adults and need to make decisions on who is to lead them. Instead of coming to their own conclusion they will listen to their parents, preacher, neighbor, etc. All of whom might have come to their conclusion of who is the best leader faultily.
In Addition: Just to give you guys an example of where this is being most blatantly done, literature classes. I remember in my lit classes that almost 90% of the class did not read the book. Instead they just took the spark notes and memorized key points taking nothing out of the text. As soon as the exam was over they forgot everything.
The most common critique of the US system is the lack of focus on testing and measurable results. Bureaucrats and teachers unions have fought this push for decades and only now has it taken hold. Even if you are right that the American educational system now focuses too much on standardized tests, this focus pales in comparison to almost any other industrialized nation. And even then, this focus on testing is hardly even a decade old.
Speak to a student from China, Japan, the UK, or Ireland and get back to me about focuses on standardized testing.
But from what I've heard, their tests are more focused on demonstrating learning. The standardized tests I took (here in the US) were laughably easy and not always connected to actually learning anything.
>The standardized tests I took (here in the US) were laughably easy and not always connected to actually learning anything.
Standardized tests are measured relatively. If you score in the top percentile the test was easy for you, but so long as there is enough variation in scores to classify students into percentiles, the test is hard enough, i.e, if 50% of students answer everything correctly it's too easy, if only 0.1% do then it's hard enough.
>But from what I've heard, their tests are more focused on demonstrating learning.
Chinese schools are notorious for their emphasis on rote learning, so I'm not sure where you're getting your information on their standardized tests.
Basically screw 90% of the population. Let private schools educate the rich and if they can't hold up the weight give out student visas to people who actually got legit primary education.
I moved to the states when I was 13 and wasted 5 years in subpar new york city schools. If not for the decent education that I received prior to moving here, I would probably be in a similar position as a good portion of my high school classmates. I'd be finishing up a worthless CC degree and have little hope of getting a job that pays much above the minimum wage.
> The U.S. holds roughly 17% of the world’s International students, compared to 2nd-place Britain (~12%) and far more than education powerhouses, Korea, Switzerland, and Sweden (all below 5%).
Considering the U.S. has a population of 300 million vs. the UK's 63 million (and Sweden's 9 million), aren't these numbers actually damning? Or are they just saying "size matters"?
Well since the UK is so close and economically/politically connected with other large developed countries you would expect their rate of international students to be greater than the US all things being equal.
I think the majority of the uk's international students are from less developed countries. Historically they were from the countries in the Empire, although recently there are more from Europe as our universities are better than many other countries.
The US compensates its bad education system by attracting external talent through other factors ? Yeah, I agree with that. But saying "we need not to be scared into trying to be like other countries" is a recipe for disaster on the long term. Because it works until some other country becomes more attractive than the US (not likely right now, but it's imaginable). And, if anything, having a good education system will give you more talent. There's no way it will give you less, since people aren't coming for the education anyway.
The immigrants aren't coming for the middle and high school education, they are coming for college/graduate level education, which is top-notch in the US, atleast in the best schools.
Combine with that the multiplier effect of significantly better economic opportunities post-college, and its clear why immigrants are willing to jump through hoops (one of the worst immigration systems) to come to the US.
I think it is the fact that we have such a ``weak" education system that America is capable of institutions such as Google, Apple, and the whole startup culture. Lately, this has been less and less relevant due to the Internet (as long as you have uncensored Internet, it probably doesn't matter which locality you're in).
Nonetheless, I don't think there is anything inherently so wrong about the US college/university system. People outside of the US wouldn't be spending buckets' loads of money to send their kids here. And lately, Canada seems to be absorbing a lot of influence as a tech powerhouse.
I think it is the lack of structure and social order that allows anyone to question any values. As long as America keeps the best and brightest from all over the world in the country, America will stay on top.
However, the Internet has been the great equalizer. It is probable and possible to build great companies anywhere, especially if your products are digital.
It's misleading to look at Google and Apple and decide things are fine. These companies are being run by top-of-the curve people who would have succeeded no matter what the education system was. Instead, look at the middle 90% of the curve. What is the state of a 25th %-ile person in the US versus say Germany? That's just as important to look at.
And no, the internet does not solve everything. It doesn't even begin to solve many of the problems that plague Americans who aren't already privileged in some way. Here in Chicago, the internet doesn't help all the black kids who don't even have safe schools to go to, much less good ones.
If that's true, why is disproportionate number of companies such as Google and Apple and Microsoft thriving here if they could be anywhere? I believe there is a secret sauce in the US or Google would have been from elsewhere.
Nonetheless, I don't think there is anything inherently so wrong about the US college/university system. People outside of the US wouldn't be spending buckets' loads of money to send their kids here. And lately, Canada seems to be absorbing a lot of influence as a tech powerhouse.
Specific education systems in the US are on-par with the best in the world. People outside the US are not sending their kids to inner-city New Orleans, Detroit, etc. - they are sending kids to Boston suburbs and private schools. The problem is not "all our schools are terrible", the problem is the massive variance in outcomes.
From a purely educational perspective, going to the US doesn't make any sense. You can get the same thing in Europe for about 10 times cheaper. Of course, European universities don't have the marketing budget to compete, so it's not how things appear.
PhD-level education in the US seems to be worth it, because you get more resources than elsewhere in the world. Below that level, an education in the US is either social signaling, or a way to "have a foot in" to be able to work in the US afterwards.
> Nonetheless, I don't think there is anything inherently so wrong about the US college/university system. People outside of the US wouldn't be spending buckets' loads of money to send their kids here.
Like MIT and Berkeley? Yep, those are said to be quite nice, but I don't know anyone who on their own free will would go to the US for a degree there. At leas here (Central Europe) it has the the image of being bad and expensive.
Actually it appears like you misunderstood me, because what you just said proves what I wrote, which is that there are exceptions like the MIT. However, I know enough Americans personally to know that most universities aren't at this level.
EDIT: Sorry, I just reread it. I really didn't point out well, that I consider the MIT or Berkeley an exception, but saying that they are good university and doubting anyone here would say they are not doing a great job I falsely amused that would be clear. Yep, the MIT and Berkeley are great university and like a lot of other people I'd love to go there, but that's not what I was talking about and that's what I wanted to make clear mentioning them.
But also think about why elite universities have such a percentage of foreigners.
Do you know the percentages of other universities? I am curious, because when I think about the university I study at, which currently is in a huge mess, because a governmental coalition we had for two periods (for the first time in history) changed the laws regarding its financial support in a way that it was against the constitution and therefor was killed off. Since nobody acted upon this on time and there are now no appropriate laws and most universities are struggling with big debts (for the first time). Still universities here are free, still the universities here are pioneering in many fields, winning international awards, etc. If the financial situation doesn't change (the laws aren't fixed in what way ever) this situation is going to change, but despite strong restrictions 22.57% (just checked on this year) of the students here are from other countries. This is for computer science on one of the worse universities here (I for myself am thinking about going to another state for a better one), which isn't really the best field. Most people come here to study medicine here. That's a famous field here. Lots of international politicians come here for health related stuff, so I am sure the numbers there would be different. They are also the ones that are always the first in transplanting various organs, world records when it comes to the number of them, etc.
What I want to say is that the fact that you have one or two very famous universities in the field of technology doesn't say your system is good. I can study here too, research whatever I want, pioneering in various areas, get everything I need, still I know very well how messed up our system is (and was for at least a decade now). So I really don't think that the comment about everyone going to the US is true, just because you have 23% Europeans at your elite university. The reason by the way could also be that they have rich parents coming from Europe, because as a matter of fact forty(!) percent of Ph.D. scientists working in the United States were born abroad[1].
See, I don't want to talk bad the educational system in the US, but when a lot of US American citizen go to Cuba, which is basically the enemy of the united states, has huge financial problems, which due to a large part are because of economical sanctions that would even mean the end for a country like Germany then saying the US educational system appears to just be wrong (also see PISA). This doesn't mean the US doesn't have some damn fine universities like MIT, Berkeley, etc. or that many European countries are doing so much better (I explained how really messed up the university I am going to is - even if there are many that are off worse), but if you look to Scandinavia or Asia then things could be _way_ better.
At leas here (Central Europe) it has the the image of being bad and expensive.
American tuition is astronomical: $40,000-per-year tuition levels are now the norm. Including room, board, books and expenses, most families cut out $60-70,000 per student, per year, because most of the best universities are in extremely expensive locations.
Educational quality, I think, is actually pretty good in US colleges and universities. If you want to learn a lot, you can. If you want to dive in to cutting-edge research, or to learn an incredible amount about a topic that interests you, the people and resources are available.
The students? Not as much. The focus in a lot of undergraduate colleges (and this goes the whole way to the top) is on networking and partying and drugging and fucking much more than on learning. It's not the professors' fault: they love it when they get good students, but there aren't many of them. (I went to a liberal arts college where many of the students were dedicated, but a lot of my friends, even at prestigious universities, found that real students were a minority: maybe 10 to 30 percent are really good and the rest are just there for the scene and stamp.) Undergraduate college has become a finishing school for the well-to-do, and business school is way worse (the students are terrible and their sense of entitlement is extreme; professors have been chastised for refusing to move classes to accommodate individual students' social lives).
You can learn a hell of a lot in a US university, but no one forces you to do so, and a lot of people squander the opportunity outright.
Rich people from all over the world send their kids to school here because rich people from all over the world send their kids to school here. At one time, it was "studying at Oxford". Now it's studying in America. If you have a top-50 U.S. university degree, when you go back you will be one or two levels below the CEO in your first job.
That has value to the U.S. and it obviously pumps a lot of money into American universities, but it has more to do with social signaling than quality of education. That's not to say that the top American universities aren't very good (they are) but that's not what it's really about.
I know Techcrunch posted this...but why is it on HN?
This has nothing to do with technology, hacking, or really anything that is remotely interesting.
This thread is just going to turn a giant shitfest about government vs free market, why collegiate education is the root of all evil, etc etc. Same tired old debates.
Has anyone here had a positive educational experience?
The article brings up the USA and china and although I had to supplement my usa education (we used the same textbook for 4 years in my elementary school) and saw that my cousins in china were learning calculus while my class was still on extremely basic algebra, I never envied them their Chinese education steeped in rote memorization.
My impression is other countries might test better but they have their own problems. My cousins in China had the curiosity beaten out of them and had no time to really understand what they were studying or pursue what really interested them. The cutthroat testing environment really harmed them psychologically as well. I consider myself really lucky. The first rule of education should be "do no harm" and often that just means being more hands off.
Many of my friends learn better on their own and at least the USA lets smart kids do that more than many other countries do.
I have a bias in that I tend to think most problems can be solved by technology. Maybe this whole conversation is on a problem fast becoming obsolete due to the great equalizer: the Internet. That's my hope, anyway. (btw the best open courseware stuff comes out of USA universities.)
Only caring about the top quartile (aka ignoring the majority) is dangerous, because it has been proven that humans are not very good at judging the relative intelligence of people more intelligent than they are.
Thus, a dumb population will elect dumb leaders who make dumb decisions. One has to wonder if we currently see something related to that.
I think everyone would agree that it's pointless to send children into a public education system and then act like it doesn't matter what the outcome is for the majority of them. Unless you are totally indifferent to the wastage of tax revenue.
American schools don't lag behind other countries... American demographics lag behind other countries.
If you break down the PISA scores by american demographic groups then you'll see that whites do better than whites in almost every European country... Asians better than practically every Asian country... and the same goes for Blacks and Latinos.
The article says, "While the United States has a dismal track-record of inequality, we treat our brightest minds quite well."
And the second part of that statement is baloney. While everyone knows that the United States does badly in educational equality, the idea that we do well by able students is directly disagreed with by scholars who have spent years studying the issue.
"Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. Moreover, while the percentage of students scoring at the advanced level on NAEP varies considerably among the 50 states, not even the best state does well in international comparison. A 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, succinctly put the issue into perspective: 'Although many people assume that the United States will always be a world leader in science and technology, this may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist throughout the world.'"
The full report underlying this online article can be found here:
"The findings, out today from the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank that champions "progressive ideas,' analyze three years of questionnaires from the Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress, a national test given each year.
Among the findings:
•37% of fourth-graders say their math work is "often" or 'always' too easy;
•57% of eighth-graders say their history work is 'often' or 'always' too easy;
•39% of 12th-graders say they rarely write about what they read in class."
The claim is also implausible on the basis of comparisons of the national score distribution in a variety of countries on the TIMSS and PIRLS data on achievement in mathematics, science, and reading.
(Exhibit 1.1 in this PIRLS document shows reading achievement distributions for fourth grade, not including eighth grade data as in the two charts linked above.)
The United States certainly has societal advantages that result in better economic performance than could be expected from the results of its school system. The United States is internally peaceful, stable, free
enough to attract immigration from all over the world, and several United States immigration categories strongly favor persons who received strong primary and secondary educations in their native countries. The "brain drain" is a phenomenon of long standing, and helps the United States make up for what it doesn't do for its own native-born students.
AFTER EDIT: The Hacker News management writes in the Hacker News welcome letter about how to write a good comment:
"The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience."
And I just remembered, as I am about to do an activity with my son, that my personal experience includes running an ongoing course in advanced mathematics (prealgebra mathematics for elementary age pupils) that draws client from throughout the native-born and immigrant community in Minnesota, a state with strong public schools. My course location is in one of the very best school districts in Minnesota. But parents who are American-born and graduates of MIT, and first-generation immigrant parents from China, from India, from Poland, from Romania, from Ghana, from Korea, from Pakistan, and from other countries I may have forgotten sign up their children for my courses, even though they already live in school districts that are considered good school districts, because they know very well that American schools don't do as good a job teaching foundational mathematics as schools in many other countries.
I learned this in Taiwan, where the school system in general does better at lest cost than in the United States. It is the basis of my current occupation that people living in the United States who are actually aware of the situation in other countries seek mathematics education besides that which is poorly provided by United States public schools.
Thank you for a very thoughtful critique. The nature piece talks about number of students, not percent. The US has 300 people people, so we have a lot more high performing students, as a result.
I'll chime in here to say that indeed we don't treat our brightest minds quite well. For one, by trying to let no child be left behind, and raise average test scores, our schools are spending most of their time trying to raise the bottom half to the standard. Kids who can easily pass the tests are left to languish. And I mean this literally. My son has been relegated to the corner of the classroom to spend hours poking around in the meager classroom library while the teacher worked intensively with the laggards. Programs for "gifted" kids are unpopular with parents because they seem "elitist" so schools have to go to crazy lengths to obfuscate them and make them as low-profile as possible. You're unlikely to even hear the term "gifted" in a school nowadays. They have to use euphemisms like Early Learning Program. Even in high schools where it finally becomes politically workable to sort the smarter kids into AP classes, the "best" schools use those classes and the bright students as a factory farm of AP credits earned, which raise the rankings of their school system, and make it easier to justify continued budget increases. So rather than encouraging critical thinking, writing, and creativity, they're teaching to the test.
I actually agree with many of the facts that the article lays out. I actually don't think that there's much point in getting heartburn about the US's standing in the ratings, because a lot of the ratings are probably useless or easily-gamed metrics. And it's critically important for US interests that we make it easy for the world's best and brightest to continue to immigrate. The big problem with the article is that, as other readers point out, it's a self-defeating argument. The reason that our poor education outcomes don't matter is that we import the top performers from other countries? Well, it's a good thing that we import the top performers (in a selfish way of seeing things). But that's beside the point.
I think that one of the factors contributing to our education challenges is that we have a large and diverse population, but we also have naive notions of what equality means, and we too often think that correlation equals causation. Going to college correlates with success later in life. That's because smarter, harder-working kids tend to go to college. It does not mean that sending dumb lazy kids to college you'll make them successful. If you send dumb kids to college, you end up with dumb kids with no college degree and $40,000 in student loan debt the incurred before they dropped out. I'm using the term "dumb" to make a point, but the truth is that there's nothing wrong with not being cut out for the academic life. In fact, if you are prepared in childhood to be determined, hard-working, and creative, you can become a very successful person without having ever been an academic type. I spent three years doing carpentry, and I got to know a lot of tradespeople who did important things, enjoyed their work, and lived comfortable middle class lives, and sent their kids to college. But we're allergic to the idea that people are cut out for different kinds of life purpose because some people are more academically oriented than others.
Yes, we've got to get past this "elitism" nonsense. The fact is, we all do better when the best students are allowed to soar.
Is it really anti-elitism, or just general anti-intellectualism? We have no problem with "elitism" in sports -- we fall all over ourselves to identify and develop the most talented kids. Maybe I'm out of the loop since I don't have kids, but is there anyone who argues that we should spend most of our efforts on the unathletic and uncoordinated, and leave the high-performers to their own devices? If they do, I sure don't hear about it; it seems quite the opposite. So why does this argument carry the day in the academic sphere?
> We have no problem with "elitism" in sports -- we fall all over ourselves to identify and develop the most talented kids.
Except we don't necessarily even do that. Youth sports programs in the US usually emphasize teamwork and winning over developing individual talent, while the approach in European youth academies for, say, soccer is the exact opposite.
There's also the additional problem, from my memories of the school system, that our educational system emphasizes quantity over quality. I could never have passed an AP Calculus class because of the sheer quantity of work they pile on in the attempt to be "rigorous". Yet, when I got to university, I averaged an A- on my intensive advanced mathematics/computing courses: Differential and Integral Calculus, Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Discrete Math, Formal Languages and Computability and Complexity Theory. I've ended up doing some amateur type theory as research because, as it turns out, once you stopped piling on pointless busy-work, I'm pretty good at math.
This article fails to specify exactly to what end "it has never mattered." Assuming that the reasoning of the article is correct (the other comments have sufficiently questioned this issue), it still "matters" that the U.S. public education is subject glaring inequalities, that low-income schools often fail to graduate the majority of their students, that income level is so positively correlated to academic achievement, that students can be trapped in classrooms with 40+ students with no hope of individual attention. Addressing and reforming these problems is independent of the privilege and success of elite students.
There are some reasons for US economic power (e.g. WWII) but the main reason is companies got larger and more successful than elsewhere because until China it was the largest domestic market.
Don't forget the very important fact that in the US companies are allowed to get massive (modulo a few antitrust cases) and keep their profits, of which there is no artificial limit. Both the companies and the citizens are, to a large extent, left unmolested by the government. This is not the case everywhere. There are many other factors as well.
Granted by view is limited, but I'd assume companies are allowed to get massive in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and elsewhere too. What these countries lack is a large domestic market - with Japan the second largest, and Japan the second largest economy for most of the 20th century after WWII. The UK was large when it had the empire as a domestic market.
The article assumes that given that the U.S. thrived in the post-war environment with a K-12 system subpar on a given set of metrics, those metrics don't matter. It fails to acknowledge that today's environment of several emergent, competitive countries viably aspiring for at least global significance is very different from one where every viable competitor raced to outdo each other in the orgy of self-destruction that bombed much of the first world to the third.
An educated population, as measured by PISA scores, "has powerful effects on individual
earnings, on the distribution of income, and on economic growth," e.g. a "one country-level standard deviation equivalent to 47 test-score points in PISA 2000 mathematics higher test performance [yielded] around one percentage point higher annual [per capita GDP] growth rates", with broader evidence quoted in the same paper pointing to a 1.5 to 2 percentage point effective size. From a social perspective, test score inequality and earnings inequality across OECD countries have a simple correlation of 0.85 [1].
The link between schooling and test scores is not 100% causal, with the aforementioned study [1] conceding that "cognitive skills may be developed in formal schooling, but they may also come from the family, the peers, the culture, and so forth.". That said, the data suggests that "strong accountability systems that accurately measure student performance; local autonomy that allows schools to make appropriate educational choices; and choice and competition in schools so that parents can enter into determining the incentives that schools face" have been shown to have a significant positive effect on the economically relevant metrics of cognitive skill. It should be noted that there is little evidence of education expenditure per pupil and any relevant metrics being related.
TechCrunch quotes a Nature article that asserts that the “average test scores are mostly irrelevant as a measure of economic potential". Unsurprisingly, the original article [2] is mis-represented. Far from arguing that we can sit on our laurels the commentary in Nature argues that given "90% of the variance in the scores is within countries rather than between countries" we need not drill our students for hours as they do in Singapore or India, but "should [instead look] at how our best schools educate top performers". The argument is thus on how we improve our education system rather than whether we need to.
TL;DR Just because we got to market in a jalopy for the last half century doesn't mean a tune-up isn't in order. Even if we have a larger population that hedges against trashing up a good portion of our human capital so long as a lucky few succeed, an under-performing school system, hinted at by the U.S.'s PISA scores, leaves potential growth on the table. This is unfair and inefficient.
> That said, the data suggests that "strong accountability systems that accurately measure student performance; local autonomy that allows schools to make appropriate educational choices; and choice and competition in schools so that parents can enter into determining the incentives that schools face" have been shown to have a significant positive effect on the economically relevant metrics of cognitive skill.
That's interesting because that is almost the opposite of what many of the comments here are suggesting we change.
TL;DR summary: we're not good at educating people, but that doesn't matter because (a) only the top few percent matter, and (b) we can import talent to make up for domestic shortfall.
I don't agree with either of these.
Only the top quartile matter, and therefore the bottom three-fourths can wallow in ignorance and stupidity? We don't have universal healthcare because of this fucking attitude. If you have ignorant people, you end up with an ignorant, fucked-up culture. We pay for the ignorance of average Americans in so many ways that it infuriates me even to get into this discussion.
Secondly, I don't think we can count on being a destination country forever. Our immigration policies are getting worse over time, while European countries and Canada are becoming increasingly attractive. The gap is narrowing. There was a time when the smartest in the world wanted to come to the United States-- not necessarily New York or Silicon Valley, but even central Ohio. Now, they're equally attracted to Canada, Australia, Scandinavia, and even Japan (which is less xenophobic than its reputation would indicate).
I don't think the smartest and hardest-working people come to "America" anymore. They go to star cities, industries, and companies: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and U.S. research academia are top-notch, and happen to be in the U.S. People come to the U.S. because a few currently-leading locations are here, but what does this do for the rest of the country?
Also, New York is arguably the world's best city and Silicon Valley is the world's best suburb, but these places are also ignominously expensive. Living in the star cities, we can easily delude ourselves into believing that we're insulated from the decline in "flyover country", but the bare fact is that we suffer every day (when we pay rent or make mortgage payments, the prices being so high because it's so hard to get a high-paying job outside of a few locations) for what has happened to the rest of the country.
American decline is real, and it's shitty, and it has everything to do with a lack of education and culture. Hours of schooling are just a proxy measure and not a very good one, but the lack of attention paid to education in this country is a big fucking deal.
>American decline is real, and it's shitty, and it has everything to do with a lack of education and culture.
What does lack of culture even mean? We have plenty of culture, in fact we export it to the rest of the world. It may be different, but just because you don't like it, you can't say it's not culture.
>...but the lack of attention paid to education...
How can you possibly say that. We spend more money per student than all but a few countries. And we are constantly worried about our students falling behind. This stuff is regularly all over the news--nearly every politician ever elected talks about improving education.
So, yes we definitely "pay attention" to education.
Obviously the problem is not with the attention we pay, but with something else.
For example, the US also spends more healthcare (per capita and percentage of GDP) than any other country, yet our healthcare is not noticeably better. That's putting it politely - many would argue that it is in fact much worse than comparable countries.
So I agree with your point, that it isn't the amount of "attention paid" that determines quality, but throwing money at the problem is also not the solution.
Sadly, education will never improve until it is nationalized. As long as states can influence the coverage of something like evolution they are unfit for making choices for those children.
Not all states push creationism on the curriculum, and some states, like California, are both economically productive enough and populous enough to be their own nations. Despite that, California has some of the worst average educational attainment in the nation. How, exactly, would nationalizing improve the situation?
This is happening to an extent with the wide adoption of the Common Core. Unfortunately, at least with regard to math, this curriculum is not better than all of the state versions it's replacing. I'd rather see something like tying funding to evidence that a particular strategy might work.
Except that education has gotten worse and more expensive as it's be centralized. I in fact would prefer a much more distributed form of education where school vouchers allow schools to compete for students and parents can choose a school that educates in the way they'd prefer.
American culture is extremely variable, and that's a good thing. It's a strength. The mean is low but the variance is extremely high so we hit quite a good share of the high notes.
However, we still live in a society where bullshitting, useless rainmakers get more respect than engineers, scientists, doctors and professors who actually build, fix, make, and understand things.
That last sentence is true for every single country I've ever lived in or spent time in. Wether it's highly paid footballers, cricket players, Starcraft players, or some other form of celebrity. Don't pin that as anything remotely close to uniquely American.
But everything is a matter of degree, and America's got quite a severe degree of antiintellectualism. For example, in most countries, if top scientists say the globe is warming because of CO2 emissions, people simply accept it and start trying to find ways to lower their CO2 emissions. In America, whole organized fronts start claiming that the scientific method is a conspiracy concocted to bring certain politicians to power.
We don't have universal healthcare for a variety of reasons, most of which highly educated agree with. Many people don't seem to understand that federalism is slower and the idea is to see what works. The problem is that healthcare reform is not being appropriately worked on at the state level - primarily due to huge interventions at the federal level that prevent experimentation.
Anyway, there are tons of high paying jobs outside of NY and SF - people choose to live there because the like the culture and the cities -- that's why the rent is high.
When you really start looking at US healthcare you find most of the problems are associated with bureaucracy and a tiny fraction of people dominating healthcare costs. Which is why it's impossible to fix healthcare at the state level or you have the vary sick flocking to states where healthcare has been 'fixed'.
PS: The US government pays more per person for healthcare than any country with universal healthcare. Instead, the free market's focus on passing the buck adds more overhead than any 'free market' efficiency gains. 'Medical Billing' is practically the definition of dead weight. Random inspection of 5% of clames will rapidly catch outright fraud, instead we get the worst of both worlds with plenty of fraud AND overhead costs.
Vermont is going to go single payer and MA already has Obamacare - neither of which imho are good models, but I don't see people flocking to them for health care.
Most of the educated do not agree with the reasons we don't have universal healthcare. Most of the proponents of federalism don't understand economics well enough to realize the huge conflict between federalist policies and economic reality.
there are so many things wrong with this that it's painful, but most of all: people do not agree because they share a certain level of intelligence; they agree because they share a certain culture.
Rent is high in New York and Silicon Valley because the markets are warped by regulatory corruption and the extreme illiquidity of the market. Right now, local incomes can support those levels (just barely) but that can change, and when it does, urban decay will set in. Urban decay starts at least a decade before prices start to drop, because people hoard real estate rather than selling it when the market softens.
The problem with real estate markets is that there's extreme demand inelasticity, which means that declining conditions (reduced effective supply) actually cause aggregate prices to go up, in the same way that a hurricane in the Gulf drives up gas prices even though it's not a good thing.
The idea that high rents come from "desirability" is hopelessly naive. Very rich people can live whereever they want, so the difference between a $50-million apartment vs. a $10-million one is driven by those factors: how old the building is, how many third-world despots and celebrities live there there, whether it has a view of The Park. For the rest of us, the rent we pay is dictated by scarcity conditions rooted in regulatory corruption and the slow reaction of new housing construction to economic forces (i.e. that 10 jobs can be created faster than 10 houses)-- not "desirability". Real estate agents want you to believe that the reason The Rent Is Too Damn High is that New York is such an awesome place to live, but economics don't bear them out. Supply-side disruptions and failures push up prices much more than actual value increases or income improvements.
Regarding high-paying jobs outside of those locations, they exist but there aren't as many as there should or could be. The near-impossibility of getting funding for a new technology business away from the coasts is a real problem. Venture capital is ugly and I'd really like to see us, as a society, come up with something better, but it's the only option for a lot of companies in the global marketplace.
As for universal healthcare, we would have had it in 1948 if the Dixiecrat racists (who were afraid that a universal plan would require them to desegregate the hospitals) hadn't threatened to destroy Truman by stonewalling everything he did. Universal healthcare plans have problems-- Canada's system is far from perfect, and the UK's NHS has some serious flaws-- but all of those plans are leagues better than the horrendously shitty system that we have in the U.S.
You make an extremely good point. NYC and SF rents would not be nearly as high if there were more supply, and there isn't more supply because the housing market is so over-regulated. Manhattan is cramped, but outside a few places in the UES and Financial District, it's filled with block after block of low/mid-rise construction, mostly 80+ years old. The reason is that it's extremely difficult to tear down this crap and build new high rises because of regulations.
Also because of our property-tax regime. Tearing down a depreciated/ing low-rise to put up a fresh new high-rise will cause a reassessment of your property value, and because the building is new you'll get hit with a massive tax increase based on your property value shooting up.
The problem being that real-estate property values are only liquidated on selling a building, so you just end up passing the tax on to renters.
A tax on land-value or space usage tends to work better for allowing high-value construction to be done rather than continual depreciation of a whole city.
The Techcrunch article is just outright racism and elitism, dressed up in business-speak. If written in 1930, it would probably lament on the "white mans burden" and how our averages are dragged down by those wretches in society who just cannot move forward.
There was a time when the children of european peasants could get a great education in an urban school, go to well-regarded public colleges for little or no money, and do great things. That's why NYC is a great city today.
There's certainly some proto-racist implied nationalism (of the bad kind) in saying that the USA can avoid having to educate its own children by exploiting a continual flow of immigrants.
Racist Point 1: Americans do not really matter to America. In fact, the American populace mainly exists to supply America with peasants and servants (as in: workers in service jobs), not serious value-creators who receive good compensation.
Racist Point 2: Foreigners all love America and want to come to America and form its elite. The notion that non-Americans might prefer to live in their own countries, or that there's a point to their existence other than immigrating and forming the American elite, does not occur.
Hmm, sounds more like la-la-hands-in-the-ears denial.
It's not just schools. The tide's have turned in general.
Before the 17th century Britain wasn't much. Afterwards, it was the world's superpower (with France by the side).
Before the 20th century, the US wasn't much. After WWI, WWII especially, the exchanged the role of superpower with Britain. Now they're falling by the wayside too. It's not something that happens overnight, might take several decades, but it's not like the world looks to the US as it once did anymore (or will again: those things are not normally reversible).
It's also worth noting that the British made a deliberate decision to not challenge America's ascendency to dominance. I think it's fairly obvious how that decision has benefited both nations.
I don't think the same can't be said about Sino-American affairs today. I worry about that.
There isn't a national superpower anymore, and that may be a good thing. No one can predict the future, but I can't see any nation ever being as globally relevant as the U.S. was in 1945-95. That wasn't just the peak of U.S. power but also the peak of nation-state power. If I'm right, no national government will ever attain it again. Not the European Union (technically a multinational government), not China, and definitely not India. I think China will be doing very well economically in 2100 (and people will be surprised to learn about the extremely widespread 20th- and early-21st-century Chinese poverty) but I think the influence of national governments will have waned by then.
I'm actually pretty bullish about the long-term American future, because I think the global trend is not only positive but going to accelerate in the next 20 years. I think the Bush years were a nadir, and I think we're in a long U-shaped valley, but I think the 2020s will be slightly better than the 2010s, which will shape up to be better than the 2000s were. "Decline" for us is going to look like it did for the British: the average Briton is still a hell of a lot better off (happier, wealthier, and healthier) in 2012 than in 1900. People don't actually think about national dominance much when they don't have it, and by 2050, I think that concept itself will be pretty well outmoded.
To put it frankly, I don't care if the U.S. is geopolitically #1 or #14 in 2050, but I hope they've done something about cancer.
Innovation is never the primary factor to obtain a good education for oneself. One only learns of innovation once one has a good education.
The conclusions of this article are atrocious and frankly, appalling. When just about all of the problems in the US and US policy abroad come because of an uneducated populous how can one claim that this is not important?
A lot of immigrants don't really want to come here anymore and many are leaving or planning to leave because of the conditions caused by the horrific education in the US. It's ironic that this is one of the problems that we have it in our power to fix, yet one of the things that keeps the status quo thus removed from politicians' agendas.
So many of America's social problems can be traced back to a lack of a decent educational system, and if anything, this article inadvertently explains why. If someone really thinks economic dominance is enough to keep an empire from crumbling, I suggest some history lessons.