
Overpaying for Educational Underachievement - robg
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/overpaying-for-educational-underachievement/?hp
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tokenadult
This is an aspect of education policy discussion that gets too little play in
the United States: bang for the buck. I've been concerned about this since
living in Taiwan in the early 1980s, back before Taiwan had officially
"graduated" from the Third World into the newly industrialized world. I
observed a poor country, a country in which the great majority of
schoolchildren were not native speakers of the sole language of instruction in
the country's schools, and where class sizes were typically sixty pupils per
classroom, produce a lot of smart, capable young people. They could mostly run
rings around me in math and science, and they were a good bit more
knowledgeable about Western history and geography than most Westerners are
about Asian history and geography. And, yeah, they did all that while being
instructed in school in a second language, and then learning a foreign
language (which happened to be English) beginning in secondary education. That
was quite remarkable. A lot of the excuses I see in the United States for poor
performance of the school system have been unconvincing to me since those
days.

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falsestprophet
When you weigh the costs by per capita purchasing power parity, the results
are somewhat different. This approximation is crude as well, but I think it is
much more meaningful.

    
    
      Italy 248
      Portugal 221
      Austria 180
      Denmark 178
      France 168
      Switzerland 165
      United States 165
      Belgium 155
      Japan 153
      Iceland 150
      Sweden 148
      Spain 146
      Australia 141
      Canada 133
      Norway 131
      Korea 131
      Germany 130
      Finland 129
      Mexico 129
      Poland 129
      Hungary 125
      Netherlands 119
      Greece 113
      Czech Republic 92
      Ireland 91
      Slovak Republic 63

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tokenadult
It's interesting that the Netherlands comes out particularly economical that
way, because for a century Dutch schools have been funded on a per-capita
enrollment basis, even if they are religious schools or schools with
particular educational philosophies (e.g, Montessori or Waldorf). Parents
choose what schools in which to enroll their children, and the funding follows
the learner. The guess of Charles L. Glenn, author of Choice of Schools in Six
Nations

[http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordD...](http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED316478&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED316478)

was that Dutch schools would be especially expensive because of that, but it
seems they are actually more cost-effective than United States schools. Glenn
liked the Dutch system for its freedom of choice--he didn't know that it
provides better efficiency too.

