[ei8ths]

have you seen our school systems, k12. Its terrible and in dire need of a revamp. No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just let kids pass because of feelings. Made schools better, have alternative paths for kids that are not excelling like some of their peers and find school hard to sit through.

[jmcgough]

It's really not about this - it's that for decades we've been able to draw top global talent to the US. We've cut research funding so heavy that we can't even support post docs who are American citizens now. My friends are going to Europe, Canada, Hong Kong.

[rayiner]

How important can that be? America’s only real competitor technologically is China. And they’ve had essentially no immigration of “top talent.”

[notatoad]

>America’s only real competitor technologically is China

this is a very shortsighted view. america's only real competitor technologically right now is china, because america has typically attracted the top talent from everywhere else.

if america is no longer capable of attracting top talent from everywhere else in the world, and other countries can start attracting american talent, it won't be long before america has a whole lot of real competitors.

[jmcgough]

Ask this again in 40 years. The people we're losing are early career researchers, so this is really a generational loss of talent that we've created. Brain drains can become self-perpetuating once they start.

[wongarsu]

Germany was in almost this exact situation. It was a self-perpetuating machine for centuries, where ambitious students came to study under the best professors, leading to top students, many of which stayed at those universities to become top professors themselves. Then WW1 put a bit of a damper on that, and the 1930s and 1940s broke it. Germany is still not insignificant in science, but really a shadow of its former self

And that was despite putting an emphasis on education, and the 1930s and 1940s having a lot of science funding. Remove the people and the flywheel stops

[dboreham]

China has 3X more people, and America has a relatively terrible education system, so they have to import talented people who were educated elsewhere.

[rayiner]

America has a very good education system against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration. In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry.

The American education system has major and important challenges, such as how to educate the large share of kids whose parents are economic migrants from non-English speaking countries. But those challenges aren’t relevant to the question of whether the U.S. can produce sufficient highly educated people domestically. China, meanwhile, doesn’t even participate in PISA outside four wealthy provinces.

[disgruntledphd2]

> against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration

I'm pretty sure that poverty is the issue here. Kids who don't get enough to eat, don't get enough time (or perhaps too much time in some sad cases) with their parents, kids who don't have many opportunities tend to do worse at standardised testing.

This is entirely fixable, but it's not (unfortunately) just a matter of funding schools more.

[rayiner]

“Poverty” might be the cause, but it’s not just poverty by itself. Every country has rich people and poor people. The U.S., however, has that normal spectrum, plus subpopulations that have unique circumstances that aren't accounted for just by income level.

Look at NAEP scores: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/some-racial... (Table 1). Asians average 312 in 8th grade math, compared to 293 for whites and 269 for Hispanics. The gap between asians and whites is almost the same size as the gap between whites and hispanics. But the poverty metrics for asians and whites is the same: 8% below the federal poverty line. (While asians are richer than whites on average, the subset of both groups who have kids is more similar. There’s a lot of high poverty asian families in places like NYC.)

Why is there such a big gap in test scores between whites and asians when economically the two groups are similar? There must be some additional sociological factor at play behind poverty in and of itself. One might hypothesize that selective immigration plays a role. The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration. That might have an effect on their kids test scores that’s not accounted for by household income alone. That’s the kind of additional sociological factor that countries like Japan and Korea don’t have.

[gregorygoc]

> In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry.

Translation: rich kids have better access to top education in America. Got it.

[rayiner]

White people in the U.S. aren’t just the “rich” subset of the whole population. They are reflect a complete spectrum, from poor to rich. They’re equivalent to Koreans in Korea or Japanese in Japan. Other groups in the U.S. aren’t just economically different, they’re sociologically different in dimensions that don’t really exist in Korea or Japan.

For example, 71% of hispanics speak Spanish at home. That reflects a group that’s comprised mostly of immigrants and their children. That poses additional challenges to education, beyond the economic differences. Poor whites in the U.S. and poor Koreans in Korea may have educational challenges from being poor. But that poverty isn’t layered with being raised in a household with immigrant parents who are in an unfamiliar country and probably don’t speak English fluently. That’s an additional layer of challenges that needs to be accounted for in comparing across countries.

[lugu]

You are wrong at so many levels. Your argument is factually incorrect and logically flawed. And you know it.

[rayiner]

The facts are in the PISA data collected by the OECD. If you drill down by subpopulation, the majority group in the U.S. goes toe to toe with the majority groups in Asian countries, and beats the majority groups in western european countries: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

National competitiveness and distributional equity don’t go hand in hand. China has made tremendous achievements by focusing investment on key provinces instead of trying to bring everyone up together.

[chaostheory]

Maybe you should actually prove him wrong. Making a claim without evidence doesn’t help anyone.

[HarryHirsch]

They imported top graduate student talent that went to the us and might have wished to stay but could not or wouldn't put up with the H1-B indentured servitude or was better paid back home or just patriotic.

Also - less financialization. In US, a statistician goes to work for any 3-letter agency or high finance. In a less financialized economy they might devote themselves to crystallography instead.

[brightball]

Don’t forget campaigning to remove standardized testing from admissions processes even leading to UCSD having to create remedial math classes for their engineering students.

[specialist]

Yes and: USA has been reverting education to its pre-Sputnik arrangement since the end of the Cold War. Without an external motivation, our domestic reactionaries have regained the advantage. Its been a generations long fight to roll back the New Deal (including public and hogher education). I have no clue if / when the pendullum will swing back.

[rayiner]

> No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just let kids pass because of feelings

The whole point of no child left behind was to actually measure student performance instead of relying on feelings: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-child-left-behind-wo...

If you try to disaggregate the effects of e.g. immigration, you can see that American education is actually good: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/18bzkle/2022_pi....

White students in the U.S. do comparably to students in Korea in the international PISA test, and better than students from western europe (excluding the immigrants in those countries).

You have to compare like with like. A huge fraction of American kids grow up to parents who are not native speakers of English. That’s not true in Japan or Korea.

[autoexec]

Over half of the adults in the US can't read at a 6th-grade level. They aren't all immigrants. Clearly American education is not actually good.

[rayiner]

Even looking at the entire population, the U.S. has higher reading scores on PISA than the big western european countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy): https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2019/12/pisa-2018-resul.... In reading, the U.S. was basically tied with Japan and the Scandinavian countries.

That is consistent with other international measurements: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1. For example, the U.S. is one of the top performers in the world in the 4th grade literacy--behind Hong Kong but ahead of Macau. In 4th grade math, the U.S. isn't as good, well behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. But still comfortably ahead of Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.

[jimbokun]

TLDR: Western Europeans are dumber than an American 6th grader.

[Fricken]

I read my first Stephen King novel in grade 6. That seems to me more than sufficient aptitude for reading the things an average person needs to read to get through life.

[autoexec]

Was it assigned to you in school? Just because you read something in the sixth grade doesn't mean it was written at a 6th grade level.

[almosthere]

They should have gone the voucher route many years ago - competition for the best schools.

[autoexec]

You don't want there to be good schools that some people can get into and and garbage schools for everyone else. What you need is a high minimum standard that every last school in the nation has to adhere to and it shouldn't be possible to graduate from any of them without being able to read at grade level.

[rayiner]

Whether you want that or not depends on what you're trying to achieve. China has pursued basically the approach you're talking about: focusing on key province to advance them to the cutting edge. The last time China participated international high-school testing, they published scores only four Beijing and three other wealthy provinces: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... And those scores were spectacular! Clearly that approach has some merit if your concern is competing with other countries rather than domestic equity.

[autoexec]

I do think it'd be smart to support programs for gifted students and to screen for them. Those programs should be available to anyone in the US who qualifies regardless of where they live or what kind of money they have. Every student should be allowed and encouraged to reach their potential.

[chaostheory]

The way it works now is that 20% of the bottom students eat up 80% of a teacher’s time and resources. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing depending on what your goals are. What I am saying is that you can’t have everything. You have to choose. This system this comment describes and the system your comment below describes cannot coexist.

[autoexec]

That just means that we need to move the bottom 20% of students into their own classes where they can get the extra attention they need. That means they can get a high quality education and so can everyone else. You do not have to choose. You can have both.

[almosthere]

Yeah, actually you do. What you think Ivy Leagues don't exist? (even though they're crap now because they DEI'd everything)

[autoexec]

They're a good example of why we shouldn't have that. It wasn't DEI that made them crap it was letting people buy their way in and shifting the focus from education to networking for nepo-babies. George W. Bush is a prime example of a massively uneducated idiot who had no problems getting accepted to and graduating from Ivy Leagues.

[zbentley]

Or train (and appropriately credential) more teachers and pay them like the critical specialists they are.

[rayiner]

If teacher pay made a big difference in outcomes, expensive private schools would have very well paid teachers. But private schools typically have lower teacher pay than public schools.

[autoexec]

Teacher pay doesn't have as large an influence on student success as it does on how many people are willing to enter the occupation and stay there. Private school teachers typically deal with far fewer students in the classroom and in much better conditions. They also don't typically have to spend as much of their own money on basic school supplies. Improving conditions at public schools and lowering classroom sizes would help to attract teachers too.

[zbentley]

You need to have both. Training/credentialing and pay. Just one is insufficient.

Longer/better educator training both increases skills/outcomes and is a gate for the poorly-suited. Higher pay makes the training seem worthwhile and increases stickiness/tenure.