[Retric]

An apples to apples comparison adjusted for things like Americans who have English as a second language or other countries removing people from school roles significantly shrinks the differences.

A surprising number of the absolute best schools in the world by those same criteria are US public schools due to the population and resources going to those schools. So the issues are not quite so simple as they might first appear. The US education system isn’t efficient, but it’s also not as bad as generally perceived.

[almostgotcaught]

> An apples to apples comparison adjusted for things like Americans who have English as a second language or other countries removing people from school roles significantly shrinks the differences.

"If I remove all the data that hurts my case, the data clearly supports my case!".

Those people that you want to exclude aren't transients - they're either current or future Americans which are called immigrants. So if you want a well-functioning democracy, economy, society, etc you have to educate them effectively too, not just the people that were born here.

[Retric]

The point isn’t excluding buckets, the point is to have multiple points of comparison.

If we want to know which system you should copy, you want understand the factors that make that system more challenging. America doesn’t need to deal with severe malnutrition, but we may want to copy elements from countries dealing with such issues.

Unless of course the goal is a hit piece for whatever emotionally agenda you you’re pushing.

[almostgotcaught]

I have no idea what this comment means.

I'm pointing out that "an apples to apples" comparison is all of the people in the seats at the schools because all of those people live, work, and (eventually) vote in your country.

[Retric]

I edited for clarity, but an apples to apples comparison means to compare like to like not to compare everything.

I can weigh a bag of groceries, that’s a metric I can collect on everything you’re buying but it doesn’t tell me if you’re making healthy choices at the grocery store.

Similarly I can look at the test grades of everyone in Ukraine right now, but that tells me more about society in general than the countries school system.

[almostgotcaught]

> Similarly I can look at the test grades of everyone in Ukraine right now, but that tells me more about society in general than the countries school system.

I'll repeat for the third and final time: excluding people that speak English as a second language in a country's school system that has been taking immigrants for all time (and vaguely plans to continue) is not the same thing as excluding people affected by a brutal but eventually ending war.

I can't make it any simpler for you.

[huhkerrf]

You're being unnecessarily condescending and combative.

The point that the person that you're arguing in bad faith with is making is not that we jettison immigrants and ESL students. It's that you accept that they will have struggles that the students in Japan do not (because there are much fewer immigrant students). So if you compare the students who are _like_ the ones in Japan and you come out ahead, then you go, great, we don't need to adjust for those students.

It does _not_ mean that you don't adjust for the students who have unique challenges and try to bring them up.

But if you compare two different cohorts, you might incorrectly get the signal that you should also change what you're doing for the students who don't have those challenges.

[Retric]

> excluding people affected by a brutal but eventually ending war.

You just excluded people from these comparisons based on some goal.