[rfrey]

It seems like every attempt to learn from other systems when discussing American issues, from education to public transit to healthcare to gun control, is met with a wave of “yeah that could never work here because we’re too [big, diverse, spread out, individualistic]. Have some humility and consider that other countries might have better outcomes in some things due to better policy choices, not just because they’re smaller, more homogeneous, colder, warmer, or whatever.

[epicureanideal]

Note: Finland has the population of Wisconsin.

Both have a population of about 5 million.

And even Wisconsin is more diverse at 86% white to Finland's 96%.

Another fun note:

The population of Finland is only 20% bigger than the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, California Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is 4.1 million. If we add in the San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale, California MSA at 1.9 million, what we tend to consider the "San Francisco Bay Area" has a greater population than Finland.

[ericd]

How is this relevant? None of those areas you describe are uniformly academically excellent.

[yostrovs]

Is Finland uniformly academically excellent? Are Finns in America performing similar to Finns in Finland? Wouldn't it matter?

[stephenhuey]

Yes, there might be better policy choices. However, even with good policy decisions we would have to see them through while grappling with the extremely different demographics and other widely varying conditions. One of my education professors at Rice felt strongly that the USA needed a "Marshall Plan" for educational funding across the nation. I've always thought this sounded like a dream come true, but even I have to admit that one thing that makes wrestling with educational reform in the USA so different from most places is that Americans have historically been highly opposed to centralized control of how children are educated and favor more local decision-making and funding. It seems very messy compared to the streamlined top-down approaches in many other countries. So somehow one would have to win Americans over to accepting more centralized control and funding of schools, or get them to somehow ensure that schools in under-funded districts get the resources they need to enjoy whatever we all decide is the baseline for an excellent education. It seems like it would be much easier to go with the first option since we have over a thousand school districts in the country, but millions and millions of people feel that would be an overreach by the government. I'm all for learning from other places, but when those other places don't have to overcome the same problem it's hard to figure out how to replicate the things they are doing right.

[rayiner]

What makes you think that "educational funding" is a problem, or that other countries have "centralized control and funding of schools?"

In all but a few states, poorer school districts receive similar funding to rich ones: https://hechingerreport.org/in-6-states-school-districts-wit.... In several, poor school districts receive more funding.

Also, the U.S. is more comparable to the EU than to any individual EU country. Obviously, EU countries make their own funding decisions. But many EU countries push funding decisions even further down to individual localities. Germany and Sweden, for example, have highly decentralized education systems. The same is true for Canada. Indeed, in Canada, an even smaller percentage of school funding comes from federal sources (just 2%) compared to the US (about 5-10%).

[analog31]

I'd guess that poor kids are likely to be more expensive to educate, but maybe it's a toss up. Some factors I'm aware of in my locale:

* Poor kids are more likely to require special-needs programs and other kinds of extra attention.

* The district has different maximum class sizes for lower and higher income schools.

* On the other hand, the system lets teachers apply for transfers while keeping their seniority, so the higher income schools (where it's easier to teach) end up with higher salary costs.

So I'd have to see a breakdown on actual costs to know whether the general level of funding is actually a measure of whether rich and poor schools are receiving comparable funding relative to their actual needs.

[stephenhuey]

Wow, rayiner - you're almost at 100,000! Well, that's interesting how decentralized Germany is. I'm not an expert, but I live in the 4th largest city in the country and am aware of a lot of problems. Texas is not one of the ones mentioned in your link - no danger of the poorest getting the most here!

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/15/texas-school-funding...

This article mentions multiple times how some funding calculations have not been adjusted in decades and ends with, "Most agree that the patchwork set of calculations for how to distribute money to Texas’ schools is ready for a major facelift." Convoluted formulas are piled on top of one another without achieving the goal of well-funded school systems, so I'd be all for throwing those out and going with something straightforward.

[darkhorse13]

I am not American but the parent comment definitely has a great point: homogeneity, population size, and various other factors can drastically affect the outcome of such policies. So this may not be a lack of humility, but simply naivety on your part.

[uniqueid]

I've heard people use the two rebuttals — but America's bigger; but America's more diverse — to justify many of America's failings. They're effective, not because they are clearly correct, but because a good counter to them requires answers to many difficult-to-answer questions:

How does a large population affect policy? How much do economies of scale make things easier? How much does bureaucracy make things harder?

What does diversity mean? How much is in the eye of the beholder?

To what extent does diversity cause division? To what extent does diversity spark innovation?

In addition to these questions, the debate entails comparisons and contrasts of nations, most of which you hasn't visited. You end up trading pairs of statistics, without intimate knowledge of their correctness and equivalence.

For such reasons, I just avoid arguing about size and diversity. I'd have to write a book to provide a solid answer.

[rfrey]

Certainly, but blanket, reflexive dismissal of other experiences is just exceptionalism. I’m not saying every foreign approach would work without modification, or even at all, but sheesh... at least have a look at them.

[zepto]

As someone who moved to the US from Europe and has spent decades living in both, I would say that it’s not a lack of humility driving these comments. The US really does have different characteristics and a different society, based on different values. It’s very easy to overlook the complexity of US society and culture.

It’s a trope in itself to see the US as dumb for not simply adopting ‘sensible’ policies that seem to work elsewhere.

[ericd]

Yeah, frankly I think it’s because we do a horrible job of maintaining a basic level of economic security and opportunity for huge swathes of our population. Western European countries generally do a much better job of that.

[kyrieeschaton]

Explanations that are explanatory tend to be used to explain things.