America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries' High School Dropouts | Hacker News Reader

America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries' High School Dropouts

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297 pointstokenadult359 comments

Of course the US does poorly in this survey. The survey measures life skills. We've spent the last decades changing our schools from teaching life skills to pure college prep. A terrible disservice to young people. Here's some sample questions http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/Education%20and%20Skills_onli... .

One has to wonder...does it really matter what you learn in school? Relative to who you meet, and what brand you get to slap on your resume at the end of the day? Do you remember anything you learned in AP Calc or APUSH all those years ago?

I think it's important to learn how to think. But you can always do that in your 4 years at college, once you get into an ivy league, right? Who needs life skills when you can get a cushy job straight out of school and just pay others to cook, clean, drive, etc. for you?

Isn't it every parent's dream that their child's life be better than their own?

before you care about that question, you should ask yourself, "should it?."

BTW: Am I doing this little american grammatical quirk with the punctuation within quotes right?

Am I doing this little american grammatical quirk with the punctuation within quotes right?

Well, since the question part is quoted, I believe the '?' should go inside the quotation marks in this case. But I think most Americans would put the period outside of the quotes, or leave it off altogether in that case. It's one of those things where I doubt anybody (other than an English teacher) actually knows the formal rule for sure. If there even is a rule. :-)

http://djwonk.tumblr.com/post/29687578295/silly-punctuation-...

If memory serves, style guides suggest putting the punctuation inside the quotation marks, even if the punctuation applies to the larger sentence. This, of course, is dumb if you think about it.

print "What an absurd convention!;"

If memory serves, style guides suggest putting the punctuation inside the quotation marks, even if the punctuation applies to the larger sentence.

Yeah, I've definitely seen that, but I've always thought of that as one of those controversial points where there's no real agreement. I feel like I remember this coming up on HN before and leading to quite a lot of discussion, although I might be mis-remembering.

I've ignored it my entire adult life and haven't been corrected on it. Similarly, my stepmother once insisted I was committing a grave error not using two spaces after a period, but ignoring her advice has been for the best.

Not quite. You need to capitalize the S and remove the period. We don't typically use double punctuation.

Frankly, the whole phrasing of that statement would be very bizarre from an American's standpoint. We would typically say something along the lines of "Is the question worth caring about?" It's more concise and doesn't emulate an inner dialog.

More to your larger point, the placement of punctuation within quotes, while grammatically correct, has the feel of leaving a sentence incomplete.

But to a British ear, the phrasing of your sentence is good. It creates the link between the two questions, not suggesting that the original question is not of value, but placing a qualifier on it.

As a Brit:

You should ask yourself, "should it?".

Or, as another Brit:

You should ask yourself: "should it?"

A colon?! A COLON?! Are you sure that should be there?

Personally, I would go with the em dash.

You should ask yourself -- "Am I sure that colon should be there?".

Should I ask myself, "Do I love this rabbit hole?"?

Edit: The answer is YES.

Depending on the style guide (punctuation in English is unfortunately not universal), all you need to do is drop the period.

Give a few of these pages a read if you'd like to really get into it:

From Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS style), "Q: This may be impossible": http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Pu...

From Modern Language Association (MLA style), https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/03/

From American Psychological Association (APA style), http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/08/punctuating-around...

I'm not sure if your post is sarcastic. Of course I remember what I learned in high school. Just had to waste time repeating orders that 90* is the proper offset so the slope is maximum on one sine wave when the slope is minimum on another.

It'd be really great if they taught kids accounting, net present value calculations, how to clean themselves properly, avoid getting pregnant when desired, and so many other skills. Not everyone is lucky enough to have good parents.

My catholic highschool taught me all of the above and prepped me well for college. Even taught me to question religion and a lot of other things. Point was "think for yourself, come to your own conclusions. Love God for real." I didn't get the last one, got the other two. They were totally fine with the result.

My catholic highschool vehemetly denied condoms work, scared everyone about anything contraceptive, lied and manipulated about a lot of various other things too. Point was "Listen to your betters, sheeple" It was a truly traumatic experience, considering it only reinforced my hate for self-proclaimed-"authority" Imagine how fun it is right now to live, surrounded by lying sacks of shit right and left (obviously not all,but disheartening amount) PS. Yes,I am angry. Very much so

> One has to wonder...does it really matter what you learn in school?

When I'd just finished high school, I thought it was irrelevant. Now, many years afterwards, I can see the incredible influence it had over me and I can wholeheartedly say that it does, to an incredible extent.

Virtually every single element of the foundation of my profession, views about and understanding of art, science and the human spirit in general have been touched by the interaction I had with my teachers, more often than not mediated by what they taught.

I do not agree with everything I learned in school. Many of the things that I do agree with (because there is no objective disagreeing with e.g. Calculus) I now view in an entirely different light than that in which they were taught to me. I passionately hated (and still hate) the idea of schools -- either state institutions, or for-profit private entities -- having a monopoly over intellectual and often ethical concepts, so I went through school challenging it intensely.

As for this though:

> Do you remember anything you learned in AP Calc or APUSH all those years ago?

Calculus is the mathematical foundation of virtually every engineering profession so yes, not only do I remember everything I was taught in AP Calc, I apply a lot of it every single day.

I didn't go to high school in the US so I didn't go through APUSH, but History is one of the most important subjects that was ever taught to me. It is not a tool with which one is able to predict the future, but it is a large set of lenses through which one can look at the present and understand it.

I don't use Calculus every day, but the whole "stop thinking about specific Y-values and start thinking about how functions behave together and influence each other" is just invaluable in a world ruled by numbers that are in constant flux.

To be honest though, I always thought that Linear Algebra would've been a much better AP class than Calculus. Sure Calculus naturally follows Trigonometry, but Linear Algebra has the same sort of "teaches these critical thinking skills" effect and, more importantly to me, was much more visual and easier to get excited about. Especially when our class started futzing about with OpenGL and particle fountains towards the end of the class.

Yeah, I was pretty upset at this, too. In high school, I was taught a very washed-down form of linear algebra (very basic vector and matrix operations), and then in uni, calculus and linear algebra were taught at the same time. I made up for it pretty much by going over a linear algebra textbook all by myself, again, in my 3rd year of university.

I get to use Calculus pretty often because I regularly do both hardware and software work (perks of having an EE degree; according to my diploma, I'm an intruder and should not be allowed to touch computers :-) ). Analog systems have continuous-valued inputs and outputs and you can't really describe those without Calc, and in mixed-signal systems you often describe various properties of the discrete signals by starting from their continuous counterpart.

US isn't doing that well in college prep either... - http://content.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,2043378,00....

I don't agree that this is the problem. I mean, it is a problem at times, but that's a separate issue.

There's quite simply no easy fix here. The best schools (and yes, that includes many public schools) are teaching a variety of skills that help the students whether they're going on to college, a trade school, or straight into work. And I suspect that those schools would be competitive or even beat Japan and Finland.

But just look at the conditions of some schools. --Detroit is making the news for schools that are falling apart and infested with rats and worse. When the government won't even provide funds to provide a clean, safe space for students to learn, just how much can you expect from the teachers and students?

Most of us don't feel good about going through increasingly intrusive screening at airports. Imagine how students at some of the schools in New York feel having to stand in long lines and go through metal detectors every day before class. Do you really expect them to respect an environment when they're put through that?

In Kansas they're trying to defund the state's Supreme Court because they ruled that the funding of public schools was inadequate and distributed unfairly to the point of being unconstitutional.

Look at the Republican candidates all crowing about how they'll shut down the Department of Education if they're elected. Don't get me wrong, like all government agencies, some reform is needed, but there are plenty of examples to show why the department is necessary!

There are other factors in play as well, of course - as much as people would like to pretend otherwise, there are a lot of people living in poverty in the US, and students living in poverty consistently do worse in school than middle and upper class students.

So really, there are a LOT of reasons for the US scoring this way, and unfortunately our country is not doing a good job of addressing these reasons.

The Department of Education issue isn't one of funding, but one of Federalism and returning control of schools to state and local governments. It's about decentralization, not getting rid or even reducing funding for education. If you think about how much money the DoE spends that doesn't actually get to a school, the proposal doesn't sound crazy as people make it out to be.

The following numbers are just for illustration but if you think of the DoE with a billion dollars and some percentage of that pays for the DoE. Then that percentage is education money that is going to pay DC bureaucrats rather than being delivered directly to the states. Each state already has a Department of Education, thus the benefit of the federal DoE is often redundant. The DoE doesn't create curricula, the DoE doesn't hire teachers, the DoE doesn't do anything that State departments aren't already equipped to do.

So yes, abolish the DoE and let the states do what they are already doing.

If we want to improve education, that happens at the state and school board level. A school in urban Detroit has much different needs than a school in suburban Austin, yet a blanket DoE directive doesn't necessarily respond well to dramatic variations between states and localities. Highly centralized control is less efficient than more granular control given the huge variations among communities and states.

The problem with American education is cultural. Comparing a Chinese parent with a south Chicago parent reveals huge discrepancies. I taught in both China and Korea and they provide a fraction of the per student funding than they do in DC Public Schools. They're using old desks, the students are required to clean the school, technology is very limited, teachers are paid less -- yet they kick American ass in things like math and science. After school in China is spent studying -- for hours. Parents have zero tolerance for failure. Schools paddle rogue students. Embarrassment is a very big deal. Yet what happens to the south Chicago kid that goes home after school and spends his time studying: he's ostracized, even being accused of 'acting white.' There's your problem. A culture that puts the Kardashians on a pedestal and parents who are disengaged and teacher unions that put seniority above results. You also have the issue that university schools of education are frequently the refuge of academic rejects. This is incendiary, I know, but have a look at the academic standards required for education majors compared to pretty much any other major. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. Funding isn't a problem -- it's a scapegoat. If you want proof of that, compare per student funding and academic achievement per dollar spent: there's little correlation.

>> I don't agree that this is the problem.

Life skills? I think it is. My sister was substitute teaching and a frustrated math student wanted to know "what this is good for". She said "how will you know if someone is screwing you over?" to which the kid seemed to find a fresh interest is the subject. Learning without application to real life can be boring to a lot of kids.

> Look at the Republican candidates all crowing about how they'll shut down the Department of Education if they're elected.

Please explain to me where in the Constitution the United States are given any authority over the education systems of the individual states.

Really? Article V Section 8:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

The interpretation of "gerneral Welfare" varies of course, but providing SOME sort of standards and funding at the federal level for education is well within accepted US federal authority.

> The interpretation of "gerneral Welfare" varies of course, but providing SOME sort of standards and funding at the federal level for education is well within accepted US federal authority.

You are correct that it is generally accepted, but you are 100% incorrect that it is in any way a faithful reading of the text of the Constitution.

The power granted to Congress in that clause is that of taxation; its powers concerning the common defence and general welfare of the United States (of the states as a whole, that is, not of the people of the United States), are enumerated elsewhere in the document.

Your interpretation — common though it is — implies that there are no limits to what the Congress may do, and that the Ninth & Tenth Amendments are meaningless.

Dialogues like this make me feel like I'm in some surreal universe where all software evolved around one giant mainframe, and now, centuries later, everyone is still programming in COBOL, and it's illegal to not be backward compatible.

> Dialogues like this make me feel like I'm in some surreal universe where all software evolved around one giant mainframe, and now, centuries later, everyone is still programming in COBOL, and it's illegal to not be backward compatible.

Being backward compatible is a feature in a legal system (e.g. forbidding ex post facto laws). Moreover, it's entirely possible to change the Constitution in any way one wishes, simply by passing an amendment. What you can't do is claim that it says what it doesn't, any more than one could run an amd64 Linux kernel directly on a 68000[1].

The Constitution's not perfect. It wasn't when it passed, which is why the Bill of Rights was required. It still wasn't, which is why further amendments were required (e.g., that banning slavery in most cases). Some of the changes were themselves suboptimal (e.g. the 17th Amendment, which has been a catastrophe, or the 18th, which banned alcohol). It's perfectly fine to amend the Constitution to fix it (e.g. the 21st Amendment, which repealed the fundamentally flawed 18th), but one can't just read whatever one wants into the document (c.f. drug prohibition: if an amendment were required to ban alcohol, then one must be required to ban drugs; and yet here we are).

[1] Yes, I'm sure that someone could in fact come up with a bitstream which is both valid amd64 opcodes and valid 68000 opcodes, and that someone could use that substrate to implement some sort of half-assed, tortured 'Linux' kernel. You know what I meant.

Teaching less life skills and more college prep is a common complaint in all education systems and not just the US. I've heard the same complaint from my teachers when I went to school in Germany, and from recruiters in Austria. Grass, greener, etc.

The only way to fix that is with true school choice options. That way when parents realize it's a problem they can send their kids to schools that make a point to include it rather than the ones that leave it out completely.

Yes, but teacher unions and Democrats hate that. The idea of free market competition is contrary to every bone in their bodies. That could lead to actual accountability. Currently the US school system is the Lada, free markets could turn it into a Honda.

This is the thing that I will never understand. I know a lot of teachers, several of whom I was friends with in college.

They complain about the work environment constantly and every single complaint is one that would be resolved by school choice. Every. Single. One. Yet they're all completely opposed to it.

Usually the entire reason for that opposition is fears of religious schools...which doesn't make sense. If there is that much opposition to religious schools that would mean that there's plenty of parents who would choose the non-religious options so again...a system which works itself out.

I have ONE friend who doesn't complain and that's because his teacher career has been at two of the best schools in the entire state.

In free markets, client is always right, right? Like in... the client is 16 y.o., loaded with hormones, and more interested in the current gossip than in the skills that will change his/her life a decade from now. The client is also interested in not having his/her parents nagging about bad grades those old bookworms like to give because they hate youth and freedom...

I am extremely sure that would work OK.

The client is the parent, not the child. Parents tend to fall all over themselves trying to get their kids into good schools which is why property prices in highly rated school districts are always higher. Your only option is to move there, which essentially is how people of lower incomes actually do get trapped where they are...they can't afford to just up and move because the school was terrible.

Now, here's the thing: to end up with a highly rated school you need good teachers. Good teachers tend to gravitate towards the same factors that any other employee gravitates towards: pay rate and a good work environment. For a teacher, a good work environment usually means administrators who support them at all times - including dealing with parents.

Now this is a hugely important scenario to take into account. If a teacher is pressured by parents and fired by a public school currently...where exactly are they supposed to go? In a school choice scenario, they'd have multiple different options instead of many schools from one central authority. When teachers have more options and can simply walk out the door of a bad work environment with an unsupportive admin, they'll end up getting RECRUITED by other school administrators who know better.

Parents will continue beating down the door of those good schools to get in, but right now if a parent threatens a teacher, mouths off or pressures them for better grades they are doing so with no potential consequence. If you try that at a private school you know what happens? Parent gets a warning and if it happens again the child will have to find another school the next year. The admin isn't going to risk losing a great teacher to appease little Johnny's parents.

This shifts the ENTIRE dynamic of the school system to one in which teachers are in control because teachers are effectively the product.

Just think about what the job market looks like for programmers right now in areas with high demand. That's essentially what the market for teachers would become.

School choice fixes the wrong problem. Those children who have parents smart enough to select the right school are going to be better of in any case. It is those children that are left behind in the bad schools that need the systemic improvements.

That is, if every child getting a decent schooling is what you want.

This misses the point entirely. It theory it should be impossible for any child to be stuck at a "bad school" because if the school was bad they could simply be sent somewhere else.

It's the total lack of school choice that keeps people stuck in bad schools in the first place.

I don't expect the public school system to teach my children anything. Hence why they won't be attending. Most of the schools I attended growing up were completely useless. Filthy, full of drugs and gangs. Sadly I even listened to some of my teachers more than I did my own parents (indoctrination) which I now see lead me down the wrong path.

I don't expect the public school to teach my kids any kind of career skills or path. Think they'll teach them Python or Swift? Even if they did, it'd be boring as heck and wouldn't happen until they're 16 years old. Conversely, I fully expect to start "outsourcing" my web dev work to my children when they are 13. My wife thinks it won't work. I think having them make $60 an hour while their friends make nothing will be a large deciding factor.... And by the time they're 16, I am expecting them to be taking classes at the local community college which is just a few miles from here.

It's not that you have to leave education. But anything would be better than 12 years just to learn the basics so they can re-learn them again in college. Public schools waste way, way too much time. Get kids into college sooner so they can actually learn things.

I was that kid. I went to the "best" high school in all the surrounding cities. It was a mess, sub-pair on every academic, legal, and social level. Teachers taking bribes, drugs, fights, teachers that didn't know their subjects well enough (I helped teach one class).

I dropped out and went to college.

Indeed, the pace of public education is horribly slow. Kids are bored, they need something to do.

This is partially because public schools have to also accommodate kids with disabilities, English learners, and those who simply will never keep up. For these kids, public education is horribly accelerated and they're being left behind.

Yes it's terrible for both sets of students. You don't mean to suggest that equal-opportunity educational failure is in some sense better than only failing one group, do you?

My guess is this depends on the child and the institution.

And what if they don't want to do web dev work, ever?

I agree with not forcing vocations on kids, but I don't think many kids that age really want to do a paper round (or any of the other typical jobs that kids do) either. I certainly didn't want to get a job in a retail store, but it paid me a small amount of disposable money.

Web work pays substantially more and could entail graphic design, copy-writing, backend programming, marketing or all sorts of useful skills. I think we have this idea of the OP forcing his kids to write code in a basement and it doesn't need to be that at all.

>I "expect" they will like what I show them.

Also written by OP, which does suggest they might not have a lot of other options

Yeah, this comment is ridiculous. "Public schools suck so I'll force my kids to do what I never had the chance to." Great logic.

My dad was athletic and supported me in being a nerdy band kid programmer. I will do the same for mine. I will make sure that the school they go to is good, but I won't force them to be passionate about something by bribing them with $60/hr.

That brings up another good thing about sending your kids to school. You owe it to them to expose them to more than just their overbearing parents like. Maybe they end up liking something different than you and that's good!

I "expect" they will like what I show them. If nothing else, they will have a skill they can use down the road. You know all those math classes your kids will take in public school? What if they don't want to be a mathematician? Same logic.

I've worked plenty of other jobs, from clerk, to auto mechanic, to IT, they'll be getting a dose of it all. This is what you do as a parent, you show your kids where you've been, what you've done, and the wrongs you've done.

> I "expect" they will like what I show them.

Have you met a child before?

You want your children to become programmers like you? Not one of the thousands of other jobs? You want to force them to be mini-esayms without their own minds?

You don't want them to make friends, socialize, network with their peers? To explore their own wants and desires in the safety of a school without your constant disapproval?

You want them to spend their 20s in counselling complaining about their bizarre dad who schooled them at home and forced them to work instead of grow?

2 sides to every coin.

You're imagining a world where people go to college and find high paying jobs after following their dream without their parents holding them back.

That is actually a marketing story, dangerous and unrealistic to believe.

Esaym is talking about teaching his kids a real skill they can use. It certainly won't override their ability to learn and persue things- it'll actually make that possible. It'll enable them to make decisions in life without having to pray they can find a way to make money, and they'll have a fundamental skill that'll help them whichever way they decide to go.

People don't generally get good jobs by their own elbow grease. They get them because of their network and connections. Your family is a huge part of that network, and passing on a skill like a trade is one of the surest ways you can ensure your children actually have a future.

Wake-up call, we're a community of programmers and contrary to our echo-chamber, programming is 1 skill of the thousands which make money.

I know a range of different people, none of them are programmers. Do you think only programmers make money?

I am actually shocked and disgusted by his idea of parenting. He wants to isolate them from other children and teach them one skill instead of letting them learn a range and choose.

Re-read what he said, he wants to exclude them from school and get them to work on his business from the age of 13.

I don't expect the public school system to teach my children anything. Hence why they won't be attending.

I fully expect to start "outsourcing" my web dev work to my children when they are 13.

Well, if the US school system is that bad, I'd expect rather extreme solutions to emerge. His plan could be perfectly rational for his situation.

I would've loved it if I never went to school. Especially as a minority living in a white neighborhood -- it was pretty much hell every day.

I didn't see much of a point to my public schooling either. Everything I learned there could've been taught by my parents, except they really had no career skills themselves.

The "minority" issue you speak of is interesting. Up until 4th grade, I went to a small country school where every one was white. There was only one teacher per grade, and each grade had 15-20 kids or so. Then because my mom re-married, I moved to a more city location. It was the complete opposite. I was bullied for the next 4 years for being white...

You assume the problems you had were for being a minority, which may be true. You could however have had a similar hell schooling without having a handy social issue to blame. Many of us (nerds) had that hard time as kids with or without racial discrimination.

I feel like you're reading what you want to read into Esaym's post. And I suspect you don't have kids.

I have two young kids and let me tell you the siren song of mediocrity is strong. Everything that requires a little bit of extra effort is undercut with "Daaaaad can we watch teeveeeee instead of soccer/coloring/math/bubbles/running/programming/bicycling/gymnastics/dancing/karate/naval-frickin'-gazing?"

Obviously what the GP is saying is that he's at least /intending/ to (a) send them to private school (b) teach them a skill he thinks will give them self-confidence and the ability to value their efforts. That's it. That's all ANY parent wants.

My only real caution would be to say that I really don't expect web development to be a shockingly high paying job for my kids' lifetime. But yeah, basically you teach your kids to love solving problems and the world will be their oyster.

So the theory goes.

Why do you think farmers used to have a dozen kids? Extra labor to help around the farm.

If your parent is a minister, you'll be helping around the church as a teenager.

Or how about the common last name 'Smith', as in 'that family of blacksmiths'?

Parents teaching their kids the family trade is as old as history. Maybe there are other ways, but to 'shock and disgust' seems a bit extreme.

Slavery and teachers beating the shit out of children who spoke out of line is as old as history as well. That doesn't mean we made a bad move as a society in moving away from those things.

That is a horrible defense of a horrible sounding parent.

Other comments have made the required comparisons to other idiotic appeals to antiquity, but there's another thing. It seems almost barbaric when we're past the time when people had almost no say in their career path to limit your children's exposure to add many ideas and experiences as you can. A farmer in the 1600's didn't have much choice, but we do now.

You're being intentionally obtuse and vitriolic.

Let's lay it out simply: As a [whatever I am] I have the ability to teach [X]. Therefore, I will teach [X] to my children to help them be a useful member of society.

In my particular case, for example, I have the ability to teach my child about math, logic, critical thinking, problem solving, general computing, and rudimentary electrical engineering. I'll also teach them about hiking, backpacking, a love of nature, fine art, an appreciation of music and storytelling... but as far as "making a wage" skills?

I just can't teach them skills I don't have.

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to teach my child how to be an extrovert, an athlete, a politician, an actor, a doctor, a singer, an agriculturist, a CEO of a major corporation... but... those are not in my skillset.

And to call this guy "a horrible-sounding parent" for doing what he should be doing just means you're not a parent.

"He wants to isolate them from other children and teach them one skill instead of letting them learn a range and choose."

He didn't say this anywhere in his post.

"instead of letting them learn a range and choose"

You should acknowledge the weakness of your children's characters and that without parent's strong influence they will most likely be hype-driven, drown to many interesting but useless, maybe even damaging prospects. They will need your guidance, and hopefully you'll be able to provide a good enough one.

None of those are mutually exclusive with teaching your kids programming at an early age, or even with pulling them out of school.

Many public schools are just fine, if not excellent.. Something like 90% of my 300-student graduating class ended up in college, several dozen at Ivys or "near-Ivy" schools. We had intensive programming classes and maybe 15 or 20 AP options. This was just a random upper middle class district in the Midwest, we were rarely on the list of the 100-best schools in the state.

That doesn't pass the smell test all. Your school sent 10% of its students to elite colleges, that's clearly not common.

It doesn't have to be common. You can move to whatever school district you want to (if you have the money for housing there) and get that same level of education. No one's forcing you to send your kids to sub-par public schools.

Well yes, if you're only option is to send them to a sub-par public school then the government is going to force you to send them to that school. If you don't have the means to move to a better neighborhood, if you don't have the means to pay for private school you have to deal with what you get.

That is a pretty big if.

Surely you don't believe the average American can just up and move to places with great public schools?

I was privileged enough to grow up someplace that allowed me to go to a great public school. It's a great city by many measures, but poor in public transport, affordable housing, and working-class jobs.

Someone who has the capacity to pass on $60/hr work to their 13-year-old children certainly can.

The OP has the means to home-school, so can live off a single income.

The OP has the means to pay their children nearly double the national average income (calculated on an hourly basis).

So, yes, in this case, the OP more than likely does have the means to move.

Or, the OP also has the means to be actively involved in the local schools and try to make them less awful.

My negative opinions on home-schoolers are based mostly on personal experience with home-schoolers in my area. They generally fall into one of two categories: - fanatical Christians (public school is full of heathens and rapists etc) - fanatical libertarians (I got mine, so fuck you)

Unfortunately, for many families that is simply not an option. They're stuck with the horrific local public school or a lottery-based charter.

It does have to be "common" if 'you' (as in the OP) is claiming that "many" schools are excellent, with implicitly comparable graduation rates and destinations.

Oh man.

You should try raising a family in Southern California. See what kind of school district you can afford to live in. See if you still believe that "you can move to whatever school district you want to."

Oy.

There are some excellent charter schools in many districts

To be fair, I'm including UMich in that list which was a state school with preferential admissions for in-state students.

Not at all uncommon for upper-middle class school districts in the mid-West. Think "Chicago suburbs with $500k average houses." I went to one. Great school; fits same rough statistical profile.

Then you have e.g. Chicago Public Schools, which range from comparable at the very top end to "not particularly inspiring" to "attending this school is of comparable danger to being deployed to a war zone."

I'd say that is believable. There is a strong correlation between parental income and a child's SAT score. So you could probably get a rough estimate of a public high school's average SAT scores by looking at the average income in the surrounding areas. I was looking at a couple public high schools in California, and there some where it looks like the average senior is graduating with test scores close to the top 10%. I'd expect some schools have uncommon success placing seniors into elite colleges because they have a very talented student body.

That's great for you, but it is NOT typical and I suspect that many of the 100 best were private schools.

Nah, most were public, Michigan had good public schools in general. There were certainly bad public schools as well, but I'm just pointing out that many millions of kids go through excellent public schools and are better for it.

What point are you trying to make exactly? Or are you just inserting meaningless anecdotal pseudo-data?

I have a similar plan. I'd like to hear more about yours. My email is in my profile temporarily. Please get in touch.

Adopt me and I'll undercut your children for $50/hr.

I'm overseas and happy to do it for only $40/hour if I can be adopted remotely.

Why don't you just move to a nicer neighborhood that has nicer schools?

And have you managed 13 year olds?

I'm sure they will be well-incentivized at $60/hr., the question is whether you will have an incentive to put up with them.

Public schools aren't the greatest when it comes to accelerating social mobility - a lot of my graduating class is still in my hometown. If you can afford it, a private school will put you on a more focused track to success.

Still, plenty of people make it through and go on to achieve great things. Plus, they are grounded in the realities of what is commonly referred to as the 99%

"Public schools aren't the greatest when it comes to accelerating social mobility - a lot of my graduating class is still in my hometown."

<sarcasm>"Social mobility" doesn't necessarily mean moving upwards only. Public schools therefore may indeed contribute to public mobility and even be an accelerating factor to it!</sarcasm>

The fact that the graduates of your class are still in your hometown does not really say much about social mobility, it does only about mobility.

Good point, I need to provide better context. In my hometown, there aren't a lot of opportunities, and a significant portion of what's there is service / labor. So by staying in my hometown, I'm implying that a lot of them are working unskilled jobs.

As a publicly educated kid who started working when he was 15-1/2 (the legal minimum age in CA for a work permit at the time), I'd encourage you to rethink the importance of child-like innocence.

Not that I regret my choices, but that 13 is just a little too young to be career-oriented, and 16 is probably the bare minimum. I was into computers at that age, but if my decisions were based on profitability or professional viability they would have been very different.

Don't underestimate the role of a crappy jobs and bad bosses, either. Hard to say you'd want anyone to experience that intentionally, but a wide perspective is priceless and can't be taught by explanation alone.

Great perspective. I didn't start work until I was 16, and the dishwashing jobs (with both good and bad bosses) I had really set me up to appreciate what a great gig programming can be.

A hundred times this. I don't think perspective can be taught by explanation alone. You know else comes with perspective? Often humility, empathy, and emotional stability.

I once had a "lifeguarding" job that was 20% making sure people didn't drown, 60% janitorial work and pool equipment maintenance with toxic chemicals, and 20% listening to snotty members of the country club say incredibly tone-deaf things. I cried more than once. The life lessons were invaluable.

I agree completely. The summer in college I spent working on an assembly line screwing the same four screws in for 8 hours a day for $8/hour taught me nothing about building software. However, it gave me a great perspective then and now on how lucky I am to get paid (well) to do something I actually love doing (write software).

See, I did do web design work when I was 13 (and for a lot closer to $6 than $60 per hour), back in the days when "web designer" was a cool job and teenagers wanting to experiment with websites got a book on HTML rather than tweaking WordPress templates. The key part was that I was offered the work because I'd started to experiment entirely of my own accord.

In the grand scheme of things, I don't think it made a huge difference to my life choices either (you can learn a lot about crappy jobs and bad bosses in a couple of weeks' "work experience")

> As a publicly educated kid who started working when he was 15-1/2 (the legal minimum age in CA for a work permit at the time), I'd encourage you to rethink the importance of child-like innocence.

Only adults think that any such thing as child-like innocence actually exists. Children see and hear everything.

That's the point, their innocence is lost too early.

Clearly we'd better raise them in child jail to preserve our illusions.

Are you serious? Seeing and hearing everything doesn't mean understanding everything.

"Don't underestimate the role of a crappy jobs and bad bosses" This a 1000 times.

As someone who's done his fair share of shit jobs before working in the relative comfort of the "tech industry", this was a valuable lesson in what is the reality of any work relationship (that is: "I work x hours and you give me x monies", that's really all there is to it...).

Lots of tech companies wouldnt get away with their "We're all a big family so you have to do unpaid overtime because we're all a family" bullshit if their employees went through dishwashing or other menial jobs before.

(Simplifying a lot for emphasis, but you get my drift)

So you are just going to teach them what you think is important?

Home schooling has to be one of the most ridiculous ideas ever.

Doesn't state approved home schooling (in the USA) usually include aptitude testing at a local school? My impression was that the curriculum was set by the school, and the teaching was done by the parent.

Not universally, but laws vary widely by state so there may be somewhere that that's true. In our case we have a once a year peer review session to go over what we did but we choose all the material ourselves and aren't given any particular material or requirements from the local schools.

There's an expectation that we are providing an education, but until our kids want to enter the system in one way or another, they won't be tested against its requirements.

Whose judgement do you trust enough that you're willing to outsource this decision to? Would you let esaym teach your children what he thinks is important? What if he was your child's teacher?

At the end of the day you're placing your trust in someone. They are just going to teach your kids what they think is important. Are you not willing to have an opinion on whether they are choosing the right things to teach?

No, wrong. They are going to teach what a large association of actual experts in education think they should teach. Of course you should trust the people that put as much or more effort into education as you did in becoming an expert in your field.

I think I heard something about how people that get a lot of expertise in one area like doctors, lawyers, programmers, tend to far overestimate their skills in unrelated things. Sounds like you and the OP fall into this logical trap.

The vast majority of people who style themselves as experts in education are worse than useless. You've chosen a poor discipline to outsource your critical thinking to.

And you're basing that on... ? You being an expert? This is exactly the problem I'm talking about. You don't know what you don't know.

Whether the teachers are good or have good resources or have a class too heterogeneous to teach effectively is a different matter. But people who assume they know so much more than the experts need a humility and reality check.

As my grandfather once said:

  "Those that can work, work. Those that can't, teach."

I may get down-voted for this, but here it goes...

Parenting rights can be revoked if there is enough evidence of potential damage to be inflicted upon the subjected children. I think the same should go for a lot of other things. People should not be let to freely teach or heal or whatnot without some minimum qualification when stakes are high enough, even it it's about their own children. Not when an actual free and qualified alternative option is available. You think you know better for your children, but if your children get damaged it's the society that will support the consequences when they'll grow up. The freedom to inflict damage upon others has to be limited even when others are our own children.

Great. After they're done working for you, they can work for my children, who'll be taught some social skills.

Home schooling does not mean no social life.

If you're able to teach your children your skills for spotting opportunity like you do here, then you're my roll model parent!

That's depressing... poor kids.

Not for long, at $60/hr

That's what they'll spend on therapy after having Python inflicted on them!

I'm actually a Perl dev (for now)...

I was being nice...

How so? As a parent I shouldn't teach my kids what I know? (oh and btw, I know plenty more than just 'web dev' stuff)

What's depressing is "parents" that think complete strangers are responsible for the upbringing of their children.

The responses to this comment seem like everyone took this seriously, but I read it as complete sarcasm.

As a publicly educated kid from Eastern Europe. We had programming classes as on-school extracurriculars in Pascal when I was 12. In the late 90's.

We started with Logo at 9. In 1996.

Do public schools in other countries not do this kind of stuff?

Programming classes are uncommon in American high schools:

> "There currently are just over 42,000 high schools in the United States. But only 2,100 of them were certified to teach the AP computer science course in 2011"

http://www.exploringcs.org/resources/cs-statistics

edit: Wish I could find the numbers for public high schools, but I'd wager that they're much lower than 5%, with public middle schools smaller still.

Just because a school doesn't offer a college level computer science course doesn't mean they don't offer programming classes.

Most of the schools in my area have offered some kind of technology class in middle school or high school that has basic programming modules, but only a few offer AP CS.

I remember programming a robotic arm in middle school almost 20 years ago.

I think that teaching your children how to make money while they are still young is one of the most valuable things you can do for them. This, along with the ability to learn independently, will allow them to avoid a lot of misery for the rest of their lives.

There are many people who are doomed to stressful lives living paycheck to paycheck because early in life they didn't learn a lucrative trade and they didn't learn how to learn. Once you are out of school and have a job and maybe a family, just the day-to-day demands of living can drain most of your energy and time.

There are a lot of things one should learn for a content life. As parents, we are tempted to ignore in our teachings many things that we've already mastered and not struggling with, but which are very important nevertheless. I'd be cautious to tag something specific as "the most valuable thing" only for this reason. There's always a balance, trade-offs all in between.

For your example, you can teach your children how to be very successful at making money and achieve an accomplished financial situation, then they still may get abused somehow through some weakness you left them out with in your parental education.

Look, I was homeschooled, and it's possible to do it right. Don't get me wrong. The way I was homeschooled, however, wreaked total havoc on my long-term mental health (though you better believe I ran the equivalent of "lock your child in a basement with an Apple II and a book of documentation on Applesoft Basic" on myself and learned what a sweet hack looks like). I ran headfirst into college with poor social skills and no practice working under actual pressure. It's taken a nasty toll on my body and I'm still struggling to keep my weight from dipping even more. I learned a lot of lessons really, really quickly. I'm a natural extrovert. It was a special hell.

I'm not saying you're wrong. Sounds like a pretty good idea, even. _Please be damn sure you know what you're doing._ And I'm here if you've got questions.

Wow, what happened?

I didn't get regular social interaction for a really long time. Think on the order of 10 years. Turns out that people really need it. I spent most of about 5 years mostly holed up in my room teaching myself about programming, crypto, bits of math, reading, playing games, and breaking and fixing my pet Linux install. I don't regret teaching myself that much for an instant, but I do realize that my entire life probably would've been much better much earlier if I'd gone to school. I could've just skipped all the depression and loneliness I felt between the ages of 8 and 15.

I did go to school, and while I wouldn’t prefer having been homeschooled by my parents, I however think the school did harm my mental health (from bullying, for one example) and I would’ve benefitted from. Note: not in US, but from what I can glimpse US schools are similar or worse in relevant regards.

I’ve come to think that going or not going to school is unlikely to be the deciding factor, and it’s rather up to parents and the overall environment. Homeschooling or sending your kid to school—neither seems ‘easier’ by itself, they just pose somewhat different sets of challenges to parents. The answer probably depends on given school system, the specific school, parents’ and kid’s personalities, etc.

In other words, one can go to school—and be bullied w/o the skill to handle it and w/o parental notice due to neglect, or grow up dysfunctional/struggling due to whatever else unhealthy family circumstance such as NPD of a parent due to them being an object of childhood abuse, etc.; and one can also be homeschooled—and be adequately prepared by parents, lose less time doing boring things, and have the necessary social interaction with siblings and friends. Now switch that around and there are indeed a lot of things that can go wrong with homeschooling, and an attentive parent can be able to help their kid deal with school just as well.

This. My experience was nowhere near as extreme, but I was homeschooled and started college full time at 14. It's taken me years to catch up socially, and I still struggle sometimes. Do not underestimate the importance of traditional social exposure typically experienced in public school. I'm grateful for my experience. I feel like it gives me a unique outlook that is valuable, but for my kids I think I'd prefer the social aspect.

Sorry you've had a rough go of it nfd.

Please don't fall into the "math is useless, why do we have to learn this?" camp.

The math taught in high-school is pretty simple stuff and if we frowned upon innumeracy as much as we do illiteracy, people would just learn it. Reading is hard but we spend the time and make the students do it anyway. We don't give them the "who needs this reading crap" script.

Math skills are life skills for a thinking citizen of a democracy.

Every term I have game development students who struggle with basic arithmetic (fractions, exponents), but somehow want to make a game.

Sadly I'm not that good a math either. I'm trying to figure out ways to make it fun for my kids. The only thing I can think of would involve programming or electrical engineering.I think making a game would be one way. Or doing the math to build a charge pump circuit so you can charge capacitors and zap your friends might be another.

I think getting them into a community college is brilliant. Make sure they stick with it though.

While I didn't have to worry about gangs, or really even drugs in high school; for myself, and my little sister--we learned absolutely nothing in high school. Actually, I had a good biology teacher, but that's about it. My sister only achievement in high school was being voted best looking. She was there so little, I'm suprised the students noticed her.

That said, I made up everything I missed in high school, and a lot more, in two semesters at a community college. (Complete honesty. It was two semesters. I actually enjoyed school again.)

I think I'm older than a lot of you, but going to high school was a waste of time, and even left emotional scars on my own psyche? I hated high school. I hated the different groups. I hated the after school fights. I hated showing up to class tired, my skin inflamed, hormones seemingly off the charts; all to a teacher who obviously didn't care to be there.

I recall going to the school counselor, and asking to drop out. He looked at me for a few awkward seconds, and said, "------, I know it's a joke. Just finish. Get that diploma. College will be different. I give you my word. Just finish. Just show up."

Well I finished, and I'm glad I did. If I was able to do it over again, I would definetly have gone to a community college as as soon as possible though.

Community college has it's downfalls, but for myself I really enjoyed my two years there, actually 2.5 years. If you are young, and reading this, I think going to a community college is a great idea. While in that community college, your main goal should be trying to transfer into a four year college.

Yea, I know. College is a lot of bs, but this rediculious society still judges people on wether they went to college.

I see that changing though. If you are interested in computer programming; I honestly don't see the need for college, but I'm nobody. Actually, I take that back. You need a diverse backround. Some of you have parents that can point you to the right books, but I didn't.

Again, I loved going to a community college. I saved a fortune, and learned a lot.

> Think they'll teach them Python or Swift?

Those will not be a career path for much longer.

> Conversely, I fully expect to start "outsourcing" my web dev work to my children when they are 13.

Child labor got outlawed long ago, which is one of the reasons a lot of countries have mandatory education. High school is about much more than learning programming language or marketable skills, that's what you have secondary education for. Social interaction and other related skills are one of the big take-aways from regular school that are hard to replicate, also, that big bad world will still be out there when your children reach adult age and they then won't be prepared to interface with that.

Maybe consider moving to a place where schools are not useless, filthy, full of drugs and gangs if you really wish to solve this. And if the high schools are full of filth, drugs and gangs today what guarantees do you have that the community college won't be the same?

(And if the community college can keep it's grounds clean today, why can't the highschools?)

I don't think parents making their children work for an incentive is child labor.

That depends on the degree.

> children

> work

Yes, child labor.

Yeah children working on home work is child labor I guess.

Python made a nice nest in many places what makes you say it won't last ?

Who knows, it might be a favorite language when the AI programmers rise up.

"Those will not be a career path for much longer."

How can you tell?

EDIT: Swift being dependent for the most part on someone's ecosystem - maybe, but Python?

So why do you think only listening to your parents is a "good" thing - thats not going to produce a well rounded Adult at the end is it?

What the hell? "My kids are gonna be web devs by 13 and they're gonna like it!" Is this considered normal with you stylish, American, Silicon Valley types? Do you think children are like Pokemons or Sims or RPG characters who you control from a 3rd person perspective?

Do you think 13 year olds should be treated like 5 year olds who are not suitable to do anything except having people laugh at their reactions?

The criticism is not of having them work, it is of having them do a specific job, apparently whether they like it or not.

13 year olds should be treated like 13 years olds: they go to school and after they leave they get to go hang out with their boy/girlfriends, do sports, ride their bikes around or play videogames with their friends.

Mozart at 13 was not hanging out with his friends partying around.

Newflash: Not all kids are like Mozart

I remember my musical teacher mentioning me about Mozart being over-solicited in his childhood and that that affected his adult life. He died young, after years of health issues.

And was that good for him?

You do realize that has only been the norm for the last 50 years right? And IMO, the last 50 years has been some of the worst.

They (as parents) are probably looking at it as other parents do when are asking for menial house work that should be good for the family and for the child's readiness for the life ahead. I would rather prefer something like "you can do this dumb thing each day or I can teach you how to program something to do it for you" approach.

Exactly

I suspect that the op is not a normal SV resident I suspect that they come from a culture where child labor is stil Dickensian.

No, I come from rural America, where my family did have family businesses...except they did not teach me any of it... They assumed sending me to college would be the best thing for me. Yet compared to running your own business, corporate American jobs are normally terrible and make no sense.

They paid for my college which I wasted by going to vocational schools. I eventually paid my own way through university for a CS degree. Then I moved back closer to home and "work from home" mostly.

Not just SV. Children working in the family business is quite common, and there's an exception for it in US child labor law.

IMO it's more common among farmers and blue collar businesses than SV types.

This is satire right?

I'm glad that in my country there are laws that prohibit homeschooling to replace regular education. Also I see what problem they solve, to prevent people like you ruining a child's mental health.

The public school system is more about socializing than gaining knowledge. But how could a person like you understand that, when you think that: "I think having them make $60 an hour while their friends make nothing will be a large deciding factor" is a deciding factor.

Also, I've never heard or seen any kid that listens more to their teachers than their parents. That says more about the parents than it says about the teachers or the school system.

You are truly a dangerous person.

The public school system is not without its flaws. For many, it can be battling constant abuse by their "peers" -- people neither their social nor mental equals, the like of whom they'll never interact with as adults -- under the guise of "learning social skills". Additionally, it's full of outdated, half-false, and irrelevant curriculum & busywork, pandering to the lowest common denominator and increasingly focused towards passing standardized tests.

All of the things you mentioned are true and still homeschooling is worse. You know why? Our society is not without its flaws either. So unless you can provide a full alternative reality experience to your children, I'd say stand back.

And by the way, who's preventing you to teach your children to identify(and thus ignore) the flaws of this system?

What you're suggesting is the nuclear option and I don't see any reason for that.

It's a big country, and there's room for both approaches.

Ideally, the parents will choose the method that lets their child learn most effectively. In reality, some of them will make bad choices and stunt their children's education. Which sucks, but life is not fair.

I'm no expert, but when I was teaching college I had a few homeschooled students. They were usually younger (still high-school aged) and better students than the traditional students in my classes. So I saw a select group.

It seems to me that homeschooling is a great option for kids well away from the mean of the 'bell curve' - in either direction. It's difficult for the schools to properly handle kids that are far from normal. So for the kid who just needs to learn life skills as well as the kid who is taking the college physics class at 15 years old home schooling seems like a reasonable choice- if the parents are up to it.

I think tokenadult has a lot of interesting insight on this subject.

Kids that are far from normal was not the topic here though.

Also, why should it be only the one or the other? These are not mutually exclusive. Personally, I went to school and I was homeschooled at the same time.

Removing regular school from the equation is almost always a bad idea.

>And by the way, who's preventing you to teach your children to identify(and thus ignore) the flaws of this system?

What do you mean 'ignore'? If children are forced to go to school, they can hardly 'ignore' that they are being bullied or 'just go away' if a teachers is incompetent.

Most children are perfectly capable of identifying the flaws, they are just impotent and can't do anything about it which causes additional misery.

The children are incapable. The parents are not.

If they don't know how to handle those things then maybe: 1) they should have thought better before deciding to have children and 2) seek help on how to raise them?

We used to live in the fucking jungle and you think that today's society is cruel? What's the matter with you people?

>The parents are not.

True. Some parents see those problems and deal with them by, for example, homeschooling their children.

Homeschooling doesn't strike as a thing an 'incapable' parent would choose to do. It takes deliberate thought and lots of work.

Lol, there were centuries without mandatory education before us, do you assume all kids ended up being stupid and incapable?

And socializing, give me a break. Looks like you were never a victim of bullying, discrimination or racket.

Ah, you're talking about the middle ages right? Yeah those were the times.

And by the way public education was institutionalized even in the Ancient Greece era.

So what about bullying and discrimination? This is your response? Close your eyes and hide? The only kids that I saw getting bullied were weak kids whose parents were overprotecting them. Instead of encouraging them to join a team sport(or a similar activity), they were trying to steer them away from being exposed to social activities. You see their kids were special, so they shouldn't mingle with the "plebe". It didn't work out well for them.

I'm not saying that bullying is not something you shouldn't be aware of, but this is not how you deal with it.

> Also I see what problem they solve, to prevent people like you ruining a child's mental health.

Strange comment. I'm thinking of all the girls I knew in public high school that would cut themselves. The boys did other kinds of self harm; severe drug use, and if they couldn't get drugs, they'd go huff gasoline.

What I expect from my children is that they do a few hours of work in the morning, a few chores after lunch, and then they can do what ever they want the rest of the day (like help me at work if they want since I work from home). Is that such mental anguish?

Of course none of my kids are over 5, so this is all my pipe dream. Might work, might not.

As far as socialization, that is a human trait. Some have more of it, and some have less. Environment does play a small factor. But thinking your child will get great social skills by hanging out with teenagers is...unfortunate.

Well if you think that by not hanging out with kids of their age is going to be better, that's even more unfortunate.

We get it, you had some bad experiences and now what? You're going to isolate them from the rest of the world? And when did that ever work?

> As far as socialization, that is a human trait. Some have more of it, and some have less

Well, yeah if you make them anti-social, I suppose they're going to have less of it.

> and then they can do what ever they want the rest of the day (like help me at work if they want since I work from home)

What?!! Why would a child want to help you with your work in their free time? Are you serious? A child must play, play play!! Preferably with other children of their own age. Please talk to a professional about those issues. This is not even remotely a good way to raise your children.

You've probably also seen little kids - elementary school aged kids - running drugs for older siblings. People in your school were more than likely terrified of going to school unless they were aligned with the right gang. These experiences are extremely traumatic. So, I can understand why you have such a strong opinion about public schools.

If you're still in that community, please get out. It'll change your perspective when you realize that your experiences are not the norm by a long shot.

My daughter goes to public school. Her experience couldn't be further from my memories. Granted it's only elementary school, but there is no bullying. There's no fighting. Kids form their own groups like everywhere else. But, they live and let live. The school has good academics, a theater program, and a homegrown after school program for parents who can't afford a private one and and can't be there for pick up when school ends.

There's a wide spectrum of public school experiences. But, the ones my daughter is having are more the norm than your own.

Why do you think social skills aren't heavily influenced by environment and experience? I'm curious because my intuition is the opposite: that it's mostly based on experience and practice.

I only have in support anecdotes, but I've met several people who were homeschooled, and they had a really hard adjustment to high school / college. All of them ended up being loners because of how different they were from everyone and how hard it was for them to relate. In the opposite direction, the person with the most impressive social skills I know is someone that had to overcome a childhood of poor social skill development and consciously train for it as an adult.

Honestly, as someone who is mediocre at socializing, I really wish I had more of it growing up (I lived in a neighborhood without other kids). It's a pain to improve as an adult.

Holy personal attacks, Batman!

I am glad I am not your child.

"I even listened to some of my teachers more than I did my own parents (indoctrination)"

Why is being indoctrinated by parents any better?

for one, parents have a different incentive structure than teachers do

while parents aren't perfectly incentivized, they have a larger stake in you growing into a happy and healthy adult than teachers do

I believe that this (for want of a better phrase) perfect economist picture of parents is so swamped by culture and superstition and politics and all the rest of it that it's effectively invalid.

Many parents do want their children to be happy and healthy, but I believe the number who do this because they assess what their stake in "Project Children" is and conclude that their expectation value is higher with happy healthy children is vanishingly small.

I think it is part of school education to not only learn stuff you'll need in work per se. Stuff like, say, history, or getting to know at least a few major works of literature. A rough understanding of the foundations of modern science does not hurt, either.

I learnt those things, and while I really did not want to learn most of it back then, I am glad now that I did.

"Non scholae, sed vitae", as they used to say back at my school.

And even if you restrict the use of a school education to "preparing you for work", I for one did not know what I wanted to do until I was roughly 17-18. And then, I was spectacularly wrong about it and took a few years to find my calling in computers at about 22.

On the other hand, school is - let's face it - where kids learn a huge percentage of their social skills and make friends. That is not to be underestimated.

Wow. I honestly feel bad for your kids.

Have you heard of the term 'Premature optimization is the root of all evil'.

You seem to prematurely optimizing your kid's lives. It can backfire very bad. Programming or any profession in general is way lower in priority before learning Math and other stuff.

Career returns are always non linear, getting to greedy at the start can cost a lot in the long term.

My observation of kids with good jobs in high school was they would give up school for the money. (See also: college.) Why would your child want to be in boring old school when they can make $60/hour?

Here is a link (hosted by the United States National Center for Educational Statistics) to the study report referenced in the news story submitted to open this thread, that is "Skills of U.S. Unemployed, Young, and Older Adults in Sharper Focus: Results From the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2012/2014: First Look". The report includes a summary of findings, including findings about numeracy and technology skills:

"In numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments, the United States performed below the PIAAC international average. In numeracy, the U.S. average score was 12 points lower than the PIAAC international average score (257 versus 269, see figure 1-B), and in problem solving in technology-rich environments, the U.S. average score was 9 points lower than the international average (274 versus 283, see figure 1-C). Compared with the international average distributions for these skills, the United States had

"• a smaller percentage at the top (10 versus 12 percent at Level 4/5 in numeracy, and 5 versus 8 percent at Level 3 in problem solving in technology-rich environments, see figures 2-B and 2-C), and

"• a larger percentage at the bottom (28 versus 19 percent 6 in numeracy, and 64 versus 55 percent in problem solving in technology-rich environments at Level 1 and below)."

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2016/2016039.pdf

When it comes to technology skills, the story gets worse. The U.S. came in last place — right below Poland.

The study looked at basic technology tasks: things like using email, buying and returning items online, using a drop-down menu, naming a file on a computer or sending a text message.

Something to consider about your users.

Why can't I help but feel the "our users must never be forced to learn" and "our children must never experience discomfort" mindsets are related, and contribute to the US coming in last place.

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to start the company that makes the only product that has it as part of its philosophy to make their users learn in order to be able to use it efficiently. That being said you are probably right and the dumbed down UIs we see more and more with low information density are annoying and underline what you are saying. Everything is catering to the lowest common denominator.

It depends on the product... Photoshop's did pretty well and it's learning curve is almost vertical.

It's all about reducing pain. If you're automating something simple (like a TODO list), it better be stupid-friendly. But expert-oriented UX is fine for complex expert-level problems.

Photoshop's UI is developed for a market of people who have particular skills in... Photoshop's UI. Their learning curve is vertical because they have a large user base of people who have invested significant time and effort learning that arcane UI. They're also dominant in the market - any new designer had better know their way around Photoshop's UI or they're unemployable (at least until recently).

A new product in that market, aimed at the same audience, say.. Sketch... needs a friendly UI because it doesn't have the same invested user base.

In other words, Photoshop's UI can be difficult because it's always been difficult and its always been the dominant player in the market, not because it's expert-oriented.

I think catering to the lowest common denominator is the wrong strategy though. If you're writing a tool that isn't trivial, you want to cater to the perpetual intermediate, which is where most people end up. No one wants to be a beginner forever, but most people don't need to become power users either.

So you allow beginners to board, give them features they can use, and slowly show them more and more complex things till they feel confident using your product. That should be inherent in the design of the product. Then start adding features for experts that may screw things up if you don't know how to use them, but hide them a bit further in the tree.

Of our peer nations in the survey, some are known for very intense childhood expectations and others for being more nurturing than us. I'd suggest the answer is probably elsewhere.

I was at a Walgreens a little while ago, and there was a lady buying some sort of cable for a camera. I remember her literally asking the store clerk, "Will this work with a laptop, or does it have to be a computer?"

I bring up this anecdote whenever someone else asserts "<simple technological skill> is common sense, no one could be confused by it".

Help your parents with tech support at least once a year (or your friends' parents if yours are technologically competent). It helps you keep a healthy perspective of how other people see our trade :P

Thanks for saying this! I work with phones and it's sad to hear people talk about the ever-widening gap technology places between them and their children.

Too many people from younger generations make fun of their parents for being technically illiterate. I spend an hour a week at least bringing my mom up to speed on Google Photos, iOS content management, etc.

It feels good seeing somebody learn how to do things for themselves, and you should hear your parents brag about you for your minor assistance.

I work with phones and it's sad to hear people talk about the ever-widening gap technology places between them and their children.

Meh. It's not an age issue. Anybody who's the parent of a contemporary teenager is probably a gen X'er themselves and when we were teenagers people said the same shit. Except back then it was "parents can't program their VCR's but the teenagers can". It was bullocks then and it's bullocks now.

It's an attitude / interest / personality thing (or something like that) not age. Remember, the oldest generations still hanging around include people who built the first computers in existence, and slightly younger ones include the people who created UNIX, VMS, C, etc.

Some people are interested in technology and have a natural inclination to poke around and figure out how shit works, and some don't.

Indeed. My parents never had to use computers much, and only got a smartphone 2 years ago, but by now they can send GPG encrypted mail, can install apps — and understand why an app requesting permissions it shouldn't need isn't trustworthy, etc.

If you want to, you can always learn.

Most people just don't want to learn.

Sort of parallel to mindcrime's comment: the thing that makes me sad is not necessarily the knowledge gap, but the pride people take in it. "I'm just not a computer person" is too often said happily, when being able to usefully interact with a computer is already a must-have skill for most decent jobs.

Forget about tech supporting your parents to see the gap.

I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to explain to my wife (elementary school teacher) why I need to spend much of my spare time on my laptop to try to keep up in the IT/tech industry. She just can't understand how I can 'train' myself new, marketable skills when she just has to go to official training sessions in class/lecture settings a few times per year.

Pretty frustrating.

Its important to point out that school teaching is a churn and burn field. 17 to 19 years of training followed by a half life of 6 years in the classroom. Not a recent problem either, goes back decades. If your career is shorter than a pro football player, no need for continuous development on a large level, or "most teachers sit in a classroom for a day" is enough if most of them will be out of the field in a couple years regardless.

The career structure, much like the rest of the country, is extremely pyramidical. So teaching in the slums requires a clean(ish) criminal record and frankly not much else, at least to get hired. On the other hand, civilized low crime areas are hyper competitive. So training and advanced degrees translate into nicer working environment.

There will be survivors even 3 or 4 half lives out in teaching, much like programming, but use em up and throw em away as a national policy does not encourage serious system wide training efforts.

> Help your parents with tech support at least once a year

I did that for a while, then once, when she had a basic problem with her printer, we spent a rather tense evening while I walked her through how I think through technical problems piece by piece and google stuff I don't know. She ended up figuring out a solution that I was unaware of.

She told me several weeks later she'd been able to solve a bunch of (to me) tiny problems and how proud she was.

In my experience, it seems like often the biggest thing standing between people like her, and technology is their own believe in their inability and tendency to give up.

Some of that falls on us, every time we step in a solve a problem for them in (to them) an incomprehensible manner rather than helping them find the information the need to understand and solve the problem themselves, we help reinforce that belief.

I used to work support for an agricultural telemetry company, and on helping a user with a laptop-based problem over the phone, he said "lucky we have you smart guys, I'm so dumb". To which I said "I know about computers, but I couldn't concrete in a post. The stuff you find trivial around the farm is stuff I'd struggle with"

I meant every word, too. I mean, I could describe the basic actions of concreting in a post, but I'd do a terrible job of it from both lack of interest in building and lack of practice. If you want a farm to fall apart, give it to me to maintain :)

The difference, of course, is that the vast majority of the population never has to concrete in a post, but they do have to use computers.

It's not like we're expecting people to have a specialized skill in technology. They don't need to program.

Basic technical literacy should be treated like basic literacy: treated as a basic requirement of being a functioning adult and as something you would never outsource to others.

Maybe not "concrete in a post" specifically, but doing basic construction and home maintenance tasks are very useful skills for almost anyone, and I'm totally helpless at them. So I try to have empathy for anyone lacking "basic technical literacy".

> She told me several weeks later she'd been able to solve a bunch of (to me) tiny problems and how proud she was.

My mother does this sometimes too, it's really nice. She'll call me and tell me how she needed to add an additional email to her iPad. "Wait, needed? Past tense?" "Yes, I figured it out. I went into settings, then Mail, then..."

PCs never stuck with her. I still to this day have to explain the difference between left-click, right-click, and double-click. Why you need to double click on the desktop, or in a folder, but only single click from the Start Menu or quick-launch bar. Etc... But since getting her an iPad, she plays with it, and explores it the way I remember doing when we got our first computer with Windows 3.1.

People think like this because of companies like Apple who make proprietary everything. Confusion is a natural byproduct of this practice

Perhaps somewhat, but I think the main factor is that computers change much faster than these people expect. "No [family member], this Bluetooth mouse isn't going to work with your XP era desktop."

Sorry to have to tell you this, but Bluetooth mice worked fine with Windows XP.

When I was in college I had a top-ranked CS major ask me if the Borland compiler would work on her laptop as well as on a desktop. I told her it would. Her response was, "But isn't there a special chip in the desktop that compiles the program for you? Does my laptop have that too?"

Clearly it was a concern about CPU architecture differences.

This is very true. If you are a developer or a designer, I highly recommend you go to the Apple store and hang out for a few hours by the Genius Bar. It is eye opening to see the questions that people ask. I have a lot of respect for Genius Bar employees who calmly explain how to use email, their iPhone, or their laptops. You learn so much about UX and user's thinking by spending some time there.

The study looked at basic technology tasks: things like using email, buying and returning items online, using a drop-down menu, naming a file on a computer or sending a text message.

Do they realize that the average American High-School aged student would consider almost all of those activities to be archaic relics of a bygone age? Young people don't use email or drop-down menus, and even texting is "so 2000's". American teens have moved on to Snapchat or whatever is after that.

Am I missing something? In what world does the average young person not use a drop-down menu? Also, doesn't Snapchat require an email to register? Do young people not use iMessage or any other messaging app to send text messages?

Are you making a joke that went over my head?

In what world does the average young person not use a drop-down menu?

I'm thinking in terms of "old style" drop down menus, as in ones you'd see in a browser on a desktop PC. As opposed to the newer style that replace those in smartphone apps and browsers.

Also, doesn't Snapchat require an email to register?

Probably, but that doesn't mean many young people actually use email, at least not on any regular basis. Heck, the stuff about young people not using email is so old now, I feel like I'm dating myself by mentioning it!

Do young people not use iMessage or any other messaging app to send text messages?

But is that what this study looked at?

Are you making a joke that went over my head?

Not really, but I may have been engaging in just a smidgen of hyperbole.

If they get an office job they are going to have to use drop-down menus, rename files, send emails, etc. If schools only taught teenagers the skills that teenagers deem relevant... there wouldn't be much need for schools.

I grew up in Poland and both mathematics and technical skills were pretty high among my peers. Did the education system go down that much in the past 12 years?

Yes, reformed education system is THAT BAD.

I always wish these reports would break out the average vs. the distribution. America, more than any other developed country, tolerates a high level of poverty. And poor kids just don't have the resources to do well in school, and bring the average down. The single largest predictor of how well kids will do in school is not any in-school factor, but rather the socioeconomic status of their parents.

I always wish these reports would break out the average vs. the distribution.

The report does that for you, if you trouble yourself to look it up, and I quoted that part of the report in a comment I posted yesterday. Here is a longer quotation for you.

"• a larger percentage at the bottom (28 versus 19 percent in numeracy, and 64 versus 55 percent in problem solving in technology-rich environments at Level 1 and below)."

There is more detail for you to read about if you are interested in the details, in the study report published by the international study group, with the report linked here hosted by the United States National Center for Educational Statistics.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2016/2016039.pdf

This study does not surprise me. All four of my grandparents were educators for their entire career. And as a result, my parents decided to unschool my brothers and I.

In trying to be as objective and self-aware as possible, it is clear to us that the homeschoolers/unschoolers we built a community with are vastly better prepared for adulthood, regardless of level of general intelligence. There is a reason the acceptance rate at Stanford is ~27% for homeschoolers vs. 5% for those who went to school. [1]

Regardless of the pursuit, it seems like our friends who went to school the whole time are stuck in this weird immature pergatory where they can't make decisions or stick to things.

For the most part, the unschooler/homeschoolers are similar demographics, and from all different "walks of life", and yet invariably omit this issue of accepting adulthood.

Our thesis was always that school spoon feeds you, and you have to learn the pain of learning independently to be successful and learn a real growth mindset. But who knows. It is a complicated issue.

[1]: http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1011320109.html?FMT=AI&pubn...

I was a failure in public school because of A) poor social interaction B) focus on testing instead of learning and C) not fitting in the mold.

I did private school, independent study, public school in two states (CA and TX), and Homeschool.

Homeschool and public school can be the most easily abused. It's hard to abuse private schools since there is usually more focus on the students.

However, it's clear to me that homeschooling is the winner for most people. You can completely customize the curricula and learning methods to help people learn the best.

The social interactions in homeschool are also far better. Rather than learning how to deal with childish peers only (being locked in a classroom for 8 hours a day), you can actually go explore the world and learn how to interact with every age level. There are thousands of homeschool groups though if you really want to have that peer-pressure stuff.

> There is a reason the acceptance rate at Stanford is ~27% for homeschoolers vs. 5% for those who went to school.

Is it selection bias?

If Stanford were ineffective at selecting qualified students they wouldn't be an effective school.

I don't think that that is what he was referring to.

I think this is due to self-selection. Generally, children who are homeschooled have parents who are obviously extremely active in their child's education - an important factor in long-term academic success. Also, homeschoolers tend to be a special group of people on either end of the intelligence spectrum which led them to decide they need the specialization not offered in regular schools. The kids applying to Stanford would be on the high end of the spectrum.

American academia is the envy of the world.

I haven't met a single ambitious person in the US who dreams of teaching in a high school.

It's kind of sad that secondary ed isn't high-prestige in today's American culture, but it's not.

I haven't met a single ambitious person in the US who dreams of teaching in a high school.

Maybe there's a problem here with how you define "ambitious"

Maybe his comment doesn't have the best wording, but it's true. I'd love to teach high school, but the way that teaching is structured and the compensation make me completely unwilling. My dream is to start a school simply where I can teach without the hamstringing of the modern education grinder, hopefully before my kid reaches high school.

I once had the ambition to teach high school. I'm forever glad I did it, but that experience comprised the 2 most intense years of my life. My experiences in an Ivy League grad school and as professional engineer don't even come close.

I wrote quite a bit in the process: https://alanjayteaching.wordpress.com/?order=asc

This is why the college situation is so dire these days.

It used to be that a high school diploma meant something, and guaranteed a certain level of literacy and basic familiarity with mathematics and other useful basic skills. Now there are virtually no jobs where the core requirement is literacy or basic math skills etc. which one can get as only a high school graduate. The credential of a college education, or even just having spent some time in college, is the new high school diploma. Except whereas the public funds high school, it does not completely fund college.

And even though total government outlays to colleges have actually increased, admissions have increased even more, and spending on administrators has as well, so per student costs not covered by tax payers has gone through the roof.

> She offers a sample math problem from the test: You go to the store and there's a sale. Buy one, get the second half off. So if you buy two, how much do you pay?

> "High school-credentialed adults, they can't do this task — on average," says Carr.

High school graduates can't do what is basically a middle school level math problem. It's no wonder employers don't want to hire them. As a society we spend hundreds of thousands of tax dollars on K-12 students as they pass through the school pipeline but when they graduate they aren't educated and they have very little to show for all that time, effort, and expenditure.

This is unquestionably a national tragedy that will haunt our country for decades to come. We've got a "lost generation" already with millenials who were vastly underemployed for several years after the big financial crash (which would be expected to have a lifetime impact on career and wealth development). And we're seeing that there's a new lost generation of young adults who have been ill served by the educational establishment.

Edit: even worse, HS education does a poor job of preparing students for college, leading to the double whammy of debt + dropping out of college without earning a degree.

The purpose of school is to equip students on how to teach themselves, not to spoon feed them facts. For that reason, philosophy, rhetoric, logic, music, literature, and mathematics should be the priorities. Students who are well-versed in those areas WILL figure out the rest of it a million times faster than some kid who drilled on history, science, or other facts. Teach the kids how to study history, don't feed them names and dates. Teach the kids how to research, don't make them regurgitate someone else's results. Teach kids how to comprehend and analyze a text, don't make them read Homer and then regurgitate the events. Modern education is bullshit.

This was probably the biggest demotivating factor in school. Trying to force feed me a bunch of biology terms for every species isn't going to help me learn biology. There is little purpose in memorizing a bunch of random subjective names that people named things.

>We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The purpose of elementary and high school is to create obedient workers that can follow a schedule and respect authority.

I agree that the purpose of university is what you say though.

You're kidding yourself if you think that this purpose doesn't also extend to the Universities. High School graduates don't design missile guidance systems, nor do they work with FBI to break TOR, etc.

'Science' is also a method - one that took a long time to develop - and is fundamental in understanding the universe. It should also be included in your list of essentials...

I believe science as method would be included with philosophy, given the direct relationship between the two. I imagine in a proper school, there would be a "philosophy of science" course of some sort, but it wouldn't look like the science courses we have today. Instead, it would be focused on allowing students to pursue research projects, letting them learn a baseline of information on a topic, propose a project, and then do their own research and analysis. The problem is that today, they are given textbooks and told to memorize data they won't use and that they can find on Google in five minutes. It isn't teaching them science the process or asking them to engage in questioning the validity of one study over another, which is the true-to-life test of a person's understanding of science.

How great would it be for a kid to ask "why does rain slide off of leaves?" rather than be told all the different leaf shapes and tree types? How excellent would it be to have a kid spend time documenting all the different types of clouds and offer a hypothesis on their purposes rather than just telling them the formal names and descriptions? Teach them the process, don't make them memorize. No one ever said, "wow, I really am glad they taught me the difference between cumulus and cirrus clouds in middle school science."

This is what happens when no child is left behind. How can EVERYONE graduate from HS without lowering the bar?

Absolutely utterly agreed. Trying to pull along students who want to fail pulls down the ones who want to succeed.

The American dream used to be about letting those who work hard succeed, and letting those who didn't fail. And anyone could choose to more from the fail to the succeed pool.

NCLB deals with very few kids who "want to fail." It mostly deals with kids with learning/communication disabilities. Those kids don't have the choice of just "moving from the fail to the succeed pool"; they have to be given the opportunity to succeed you're talking about by giving them increased assistance. Which takes budget and teacher-time away from other students, which decreases class performance.

If you really want to fix education, don't repeal NCLB; amend it to state that special-needs kids get education vouchers with for going to a school specifically enabled to help them, with at least one state-funded school so enabled in each state; and then drop the requirement that any other school handle them in normal classes.

This would be better for the student, for the teacher, and for all the other students. The only people it would negatively affect are the parents, who would be forced to either homeschool, or move the family to a place where schooling for their child is available.

This isn't true at at all. I worked at the NYCDOE for 3 years planning, implementing, and executing NCLB. NCLB deals with passing tax dollars to private companies - plain and simple. Superintendents/Schools/Teachers no longer create their own curriculum - it's all purchased and has to be to meet the regulatory requirements of NCLB (amongst other regulations which benefit corporations).

To clarify - I think corporations should profit as much as possible. I do have an issue with companies profiting from making shit products that comply with regulations and acting like they are making a positive contribution to society.

> The American dream used to be about letting those who work hard succeed, and letting those who didn't fail.

I've never heard the latter. When was this true? According to one history I read, one of the appeals of the New Deal programs in the 1930s is that we would be better than the Old World (i.e., Europe) and not leave our own citizens in the gutter.

Based on which facts have you arrived at that conclusion?

That appears to be an unfounded assertion. The US graduation rate is well under the OECD average.

http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=1653

Appearances can be deceiving. Secondary education is compulsory in the US, whereas it's not in every OECD country. In some countries such as Japan, high school is not only optional but you have to take exams just to get accepted into a particular high school. This effectively stratifies students such that you end up with much more homogenous classrooms and allows for more consistent teaching.

Many countries also offer vocational alternatives over academic classes at the secondary education level. While some districts in the US offer vocational "tracks", they still have to abide by the federal and state academic mandates, so they're not usually purely vocational.

Not that the structure of the US system isn't a problem in itself, but the fact that we have compulsory, academic-based secondary education that requires public schools to accept all students zoned for it leaves the US in a tight spot. We'll already have a lower graduation rate simply from people dropping out that would otherwise never have started if it wasn't compulsory here. But it's even worse since we don't optimize it to the students (such as the purely vocational options and competitive high school entrance acceptance that allows for a more homogenous student body and more tailored teaching that I mentioned previously)

Rather than this conclusion, perhaps, look at what other countries are doing? Are they leaving children behind? or do they have better techniques for making sure everyone does well?

Germany, in fact, does leave people behind.

But it doesn't leave them without perspective.

The tiered school model of Germany sorts you into one of three tiers based on your abilities with the age of 10, which gets even more specific over the years after that.

Only people finishing from the highest tier can go to a theoretical university, people from the tier below can at maximum go to a university of applied sciences, and people from the lowest tier can only go to a trade school.

Obviously, these tiers have different lengths of education (5 years, 6 years, 8 years), and you can always switch up a tier if you believe you can do it, but most people take what's recommended for them.

And this is necessary.

We, as a society, have to accept that some people won't be able to study maths. Or computer science.

For some people, applied sciences, or even a more technical job might be more ideal.

The solution isn't to get everyone into college, but to accept the fact that not everyone can do so, and to also value the job the manual workers are doing.

There is this nice advertisement campaign from 2014 from the German association of craftsmen, "What would the world be without craftsmen?": https://youtu.be/YfgqIWwxk2g

Ah just like the old System the UK had with Grammar schools for the middle class and Secondary modern for the working class kids whose role in life to leave school at 15/16 and work in industry.

It's got nothing to do with "working class kids" and their "role in life". I've had classmates from very affluent parents move into vocational training, and I've had poor friends complete a university degree.

That the US and UK fail in this matter doesn't say anything about the rest of the world's ability to provide equal opportunity for all children.

Lol that wouldn't fly in this country (UK) vocational training is for the "Plebs".

And from what a German HN contibutor said here its funny how all the "dark skinned" Germans get put into the vocational track.

Germany is unfortuntly an outlier.

Students from technical high schools can attend theoretical universities and just need to do some remedial prep work first.

It's necessary not because of what some people can't do, but because:

1. It doesn't make sense to send people, who want to work in hospitality for example, to a school that has to pay for physics, chemical engineering, medical labs, etc.

2. Reducing the shopping mall quality of the American-style university -- and equally respecting technical and trade schools for the education they provide -- results in a more even distribution of attendance and probably healthier personal debt.

A lot of the German school routing is directed by desire as well; the solution is to help youngsters explore and express the skills they have most strongly.

The architecture is a bit complicated, though the picture on Wikipedia does an alright job explaining it, I think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany#Overview

That's a great advertisement.

I've just moved to Germany from the US about one year ago. So far it's made me realize how under-developed the US society is. As I learn more about how Germany operates, I constantly have those, "that makes so much more sense", moments. Of course this isn't always true, but in general I feel that they are just doing things a little better here.

I agree that society has to change how we view jobs that don't require education from a university. It makes no sense that we should value an engineer from a tech company more than a farmer that provides our food.

Also, I find that people in Germany are more aware of what role they play in society and how it operates.

As a German I have to say, while this sounds nice, Germany is still horribly inefficient, trains and busses are always late, and a lot of bureaucracy is useless.

I’m not sure yet if Germany is just the least worst country, or if it’s just all PR.

some more things to note (granted, I don't know how things work in the rest of the world):

the sorting after the age of 10 is simply a recommendation. It is simply an estimation of the Teacher if the Student will get accepted by a school of certain tier. For example, I recieved a mid-tier (Realschule) recommendation, but was accepted by a highesthtier (Gymnasium) school due to musical skill and passing some kind of intelligence test.

Skills taught by the scools vary by tier. A friend wo went to a lower tier school tended to have more practical subjects such as "mechanics" or "crafting". They learned how to assemble a solar array, how a transmission or factory line works etc.

You can get to any tier of education if you want. If you want to become a baker and are on a highest tier school you can drop out after getting your low-tier certificate in 9th grade and go to a trade school, and that's totally fine. If you are in a low-tier school you can either have grades good enough to get accepted by a mid-tier school and then by a high-tier school. You can also go to school in the evening if you want a better certificate, but have a job.

Because education is not a zero-sum activity?

The resources allocated to education are not infinite.

They don't need to be infinite; education just needs to be taken more seriously. And the public in general needs to understand that social programs they like need to be funded, and that sometimes means more taxes (education is basically a social program).

The US has a very high wealth per capita - if other countries with similar resources can do it, so can the US.

You can say that when your school can provide 2 or more teachers per class of 20 pupils in high school, but as far as I know, in contrast to the schools where I'm from, in the US that doesn't happen.

With growing class sizes, and less teachers, US schools don't have the resources to focus on individual students' needs. The best they can do is trying to get some students through.

They could adopt the more modern concepts, where small groups of pupils get a task they can't do yet "derive a function", each group gets given some hints in which way to try it (each group in a different one — one going via limits, the next doing it numerically, the next graphically), and then each group presenting their concept to the others, and comparing.

Those, more modern teaching concepts, also allow for good teaching for every student with a low amount of teachers (and teach independent understanding, research, etc), but they're rare in most countries.

by extending the time one has in school? by not pushing kids through the ranks because too many would stay back otherwise? by better funding schools, and providing safer environments for kids to work/live in?

did you want actual suggestions?

Slightly more complex than that: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/12/12/370057298/big-drop...

Outcomes vary greatly by school, zip code, and socio-economic class. Are children in the wrong zip code just lazy? Why do the children in poor families perform so much worse than in rich families? It doesn't, by any measure, appear to be a consequence of the children's efforts.

>It doesn't, by any measure, appear to be a consequence of the children's efforts.

What basis do you have for saying that?

The best ranked public schools are consistently in the richest neighborhoods, and the worst ranked ones are consistently in the poorest neighborhoods. I don't think this can be disputed. So, what's more likely?

1. Rich neighborhoods result in well-funded schools with the resources to provide a superior education, better than the not-well-funded schools that are in poor neighborhoods.

2. A superior education comes from "children's efforts" and kids that put in a lot of effort coincidentally all live in the same school districts, which also coincidentally are located in the richest neighborhoods?

Or 3. The humans who are smarter become richer and have children who are also smarter (and thus do better in school).

Why would you think that similar people living near each other is the result of a coincidence?

Abject poverty is likely to have way more impact on kids performance in school than any level of school funding. Whether you want to lump that in with "children's efforts" or not, it's certainly exogenous to the school.

It has more to do with parent involvement and support, and after that, community support. If the family does not value education, then the likely kids wont. Poverty in and of itself plays a role. Poorer families have other stressors that distract from school, and poorer families tend to not know the benefit of education (they may have been told education is a ticket out of poverty, but few see it happen). And it spreads out of the home. In poverty stricken areas, the majority of peers will shun those who are academically excellent as some kind of sell out. There have been successful schools in poor areas like Harlem when the majority of parents and students care about their education. On the flip side, excellent schools pull in families that value school performance and those families support and push the students. Annecdata: I grew up very poor and made it well into the middle class, it can be done, but the cards are stacked against you.

The problem is multi-fold. If you have a bunch of low quality high schools pumping out borderline illiterate "graduates" just due to dumb bureaucratic inertia and politics then that devalues the high school diploma as a credential (which we've certainly seen). Now we have a lot of HS graduates who can't get a non-minimum wage job without going on to college, and all the enormous problems we've witnessed that causing.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151216082154.h...

"the influence of genes on intelligence varies according to people's social class in the US, but not in Western Europe or Australia. "

"That is, the relatively robust healthcare and social-welfare programs in Western Europe and Australia may buffer some of the negative environmental effects typically associated with poverty."

One reason those studies are so controversial is the fear that people will horribly misapply them. Their fears are confirmed regularly, even among regularly sophisticated audiences such as HN.

What you write is not applicable, for many reasons.

> "Why do the children in poor families perform so much worse than in rich families?"

Coping skills and resources. Reminds me of

Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/privilege-and-inequa...

This also demonstrates the drastic disparity of quality.

You can either be getting a world-class education in the best high schools, or apparently a terrible one. I'm glad I went to a good high school. I never knew how good my education was until my first year of college, in my first writing class. Yeesh.

I'm also a bit tired about hearing about how great Finland & Japan's schools are.

How many illegal immigrants do these countries have in their school system? How many with minorities who dont speak the main language at home? How many kids in Japan/Finland dont eat properly because their families can't afford food? Of course the American's student's results are going to be worse on average.

I love how you act like these are inevitable or aren't America's issues.

The fact that poor children aren't getting enough food in a affluent Western country is abhorrent, the fact the US refuses to provide comprehensive language classes to the children of immigrants is intentionally meant to disadvantage them, the fact that the US school system has a massive disparity of funding is on purpose so that those in rich neighborhoods get a better quality of education.

Of course America's students results are worse when the American people seemingly don't care about them. Maybe you should bring in a better class of politician and instead of constantly whining about your "high" taxes you pay MORE tax and help the disadvantaged. Or heck you could cancel all of your corporate welfare and ultra-rich subsidies and use that money to help the poor...

The US prides itself on being a Christian country, but they don't act like it. Christians are socialist in nature[0].

[0] http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2011/08/12/from-jesus-soc...

I think OP's point is: given our obvious economic equality differences, of course you can expect different educational outcomes. Economic inequality as an indicator of social issues seems an obvious point by now.

As a parent of a school-age child, I hate studies like this. It's exactly the sort of thing that leads to mandated programs like common core.

Here's the thing, my son spends more time doing homework and studying for tests in elementary school than I ever did throughout my entire public education.

I have worked internationally. From my own anecdotal experience, I didn't see a difference in intelligence or ability to do the job between cultures.

my anecdote: I have seen a huge difference in ability (of developers). I think it's more due to geopolitical differences though, not just education.

>It's exactly the sort of thing that leads to mandated programs like common core.

What exactly is wrong with the common core?

I thoguht the article was very positive:

> Americans who went to college and graduate school did well. They scored above their peers with similar degrees in other developed countries.

The problem is that the bottom half does badly. I think this is largely due to poverty, culture and low expectations rather than poorly resourced schools. Maybe its also that its so easy to get a job in America that working classes really dont need to study hard.

And in this age of information and technology, many of these people are voting to decide the next leader of the only superpower left on Earth.

This may sound grossly elitist, but democracy can be super scary sometimes.

Maybe Trump is the only politician with the knowledge/freedom to act on that realization, leading to landslide victories by appealing to the lowest common denominator in US voters. I guess that's exactly what democracy is.

In theory that's why we have delegates. Unfortunately the delegates are now bought and paid for by the same corporate interests that have our country in its current state...

And ultimately the electoral college in the event it's believed voters made an egregious error in electing their president. Don't think we'll see that happen regardless of winner this cycle.

Voting is considered holy, a sacred ritual immune from criticism. There exist alternatives like sortition - I favor a combination of sortiton and standardized testing.

As it stands, the American populace has been expertly prepared to engage in our political process to the fullest extent possible. That is, to spectate the circus act for a while, and then with great certainty and condescension, choose one of two preselected options.

Democracy is a really shitty form of government. It prevents tyrants, and it prevents a single party from holding power for too long. Which are great benefits over, e.g. monarchies. But the average voter isn't informed enough to really understand all the issues. So who wins isn't really correlated with who is best or who is right.

In my ideal form of government, the representatives would not be elected, but randomly sampled from the population. There would also be an education and IQ test, and it would only take from the top 5% of the population or so.

A "representative democracy" is one specifically where the average voter doesn't need to be informed enough to really understand all the issues, and that's supposed to be its advantage. In contrast, direct democracy is best when all the voters (have the time to) understand the issues. But that's not very pragmatic, so we do representative democracy. But of course, that has its own issues, as what to understand moves from "the issues" to "the candidates".

Somehow, this reminded me of this bit by Douglas Adams From "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" (in part):

    "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much
    assume that the government they've voted in more or
    less approximates to the government they want."
    "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
    "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
    "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again,
    "why?"
    "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said
    Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162557-it-comes-from-a-very-...

I understand the purpose of representative democracy. In theory voters vote for representatives instead of policies, but in reality they do vote for policies. And in practice representatives to pander to voters, and various other interests.

With the infrastructure available today we should be able to do a hybrid direct-representative model and also have multiple representative delegations that we can change on an ad-hoc basis (i.e. not just at elections).

For example, on some issues, I might like to do the research and make my own decision, while for other issues I might trust and delegate to a representative for that set of issues, and for a third set of issues I might trust and delegate to a different representative.

That reminds of this excerpt:

“For the last century, almost all top political appointments [on the planet Earth] had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As one shrewed political commentator had remarked: “We want a President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White House — but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior.”

― Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth

Or have the next version of AlphaGo run things.

AlphaGov

A large part of being a politician is the social skills to get people onside. A random sampling based on education and IQ isn't going to give you that.

But that's exactly the problem. It selects for people who are charismatic and good at playing political games. Rather than people who are good at selecting the best policies.

Arguably, those political games should be necessary in a system where compromise is essential to forming policy.

I don't mean to be snarky here. I am honestly just trying to put these issues in context by pointing out that if you believe today's "uneducated" people being able to vote is "scary", then you should take a gander at the average level of education of voters in 1960. Even fewer college grads, even fewer high school grads, even MORE people that we would today term "dropout". Additionally, the further back that you go timewise, the more poorly educated the populace was.

I'm just saying that if you believe it to be bad today, then you would have certainly believed it to have been much worse in the 50's or 60's before the protocols for avoiding certain types of war had been fully established and implemented.

But we, as mankind, survived. And I think it's fair to say that we, as mankind, thrived.

There is a lot of negative information out there about the world today, and it can be demoralizing. But it's not about how many negative things happen to you, or your nation, or your world. It's more about our reactions to these things.

In this particular instance for example, do you say... "Hey... let's educate more people!" ?

Or do you say "Hey... let's take away the right to vote!" ?

It's not really what happened to you that determines your future... it's your reaction to it that determines your future.

Here's a historical table of literacy rates:

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#attainment

The current estimate is 14% - and it hasn't changed for a decade.

The disparity makes me wonder if the figures are right, but it's nearly impossible to find reliable research on literacy in the US.

You'd think it would be assessed annually, but it isn't. The NAAL data is the most recent definitive survey, and that was done in 2003. I can find one survey since, but the National Institute for Literacy which is quoted in it seems to have closed in 2010.

The fact that there seems to be so little federal interest in rigorously tracking literacy is even more amazing to me than the nominal rate.

That's one of the biggest reasons why we do and should have universal public education. And why we should invest the resources to make it a high quality education (for instance, pay teachers salaries that make teaching as attractive a profession to intelligent people with student debt as finance or consulting is -- or at the very least better than a guarantee of near-poverty).

Well one thing to keep in mind is that some American States alone are the same size in terms of population of some of these entire countries being praised for having better education systems than the US. Sure we can learn from some of the small nuances of their systems, but infrastructurally we are in a much different situation than most of these examples (Finland/Japan)

Nothing on creativity. I wonder why?

"creativity is essential to successful civilizations" http://www.amazon.com/dp/1907794883

http://larstvede.com/lars-on-creativity

Hard to quantify?

I won't go into much detail because I would wind up ranting and only be somewhat understandable..

However, as an American citizen who went to public schools as a child/teenager and am now finishing up at a public state university, I'm inclined to say that the education system here is a complete wash.

It works for some people who fit the one-size mold that the system here seems to target, but there are a large number of children/teenagers/college-aged students for whom it does not.

That isn't to say one set of students are anymore gifted than the other. Just that the approach to education is deeply flawed. It works for the type of student it is set up for, and has little to no appreciation for other types, least of which if they even exist. The approach needs a serious revolution in order for our country to have a successful academic system.

source: I am from California and the state university I currently attend and am almost graduated from is in CA as well.

How would you suggest it change/whats the biggest problem.

This may be true, but oddly enough it might not really matter. If math such as investigated here is required then those skills can be outsourced to those who are so gifted. The most important thing is the gift of enterprise and entrepreneurship which schools around the world are desperately trying to pick up from the US. Math is great, but ultimately it must be used as a means to some ends and that is where US students continue to excel.

Or perhaps it does matter, middle and lower incomes in the US have been stagnating for a long time.

There are a few different ways in which the public education system doesn't work for people.

Some students want to learn but don't do well in the "system" of public education. This is a pedagogy issue; we're not teaching those kids in the way that they will learn the best. Those kids might benefit from "unschooling", homeschooling, or other forms of self-directed learning.

Some students, mostly in areas of concentrated poverty, are going to struggle in school because of the emotional turmoil of living in poverty. Unsafe neighborhoods, neglectful homes, etc. The school system can't "fix" that by itself.

Lastly, there are students that are simply not smart enough to thrive in academic learning. If you accept that some kids are smarter than others, the natural corollary is that some kids are not as smart. That doesn't mean their worth as human beings is less. It just means we should not be shoehorning them into this terrible "everyone must go to college" meme.

The single largest factor in determining how well a student does in High School is poverty.

Poor kids don't have the support nor the means to excel. They typically have to worry about other things. Like earning money or working the farm or just trying to keep the family together anyway they can. While other kids have computers, you didn't even have a desk to do your homework. Other kids get dinner, you go hungry. When your mom was sick it meant staying home to take care of her.

The potential that is lost to poverty is no different than the potential lost to Wars. Millions of people who could have changed the world never get a chance.

"""things like using email, buying and returning items online, using a drop-down menu, naming a file on a computer or sending a text message."""

Way to measure stuff! How about using instant messaging, swiping and dragging stuff, taking pictures with a phone and sending them and doing tasks with Siri/HG instead? We're taking about HS-level students, right? They seem to be measuring stuff for older folks :P

Not able to send a text messsage? That I don't believe.

The study is about comparative data, and I can well believe (having lived in another country) that there are countries where a larger percentage of adults than in the United States can use commonplace technology of today. The math literacy (numeracy) advantage for other countries I absolutely believe, as I have read the textbooks from other countries (I am an American who can read Chinese), and the textbooks are simpler better in other countries than they are in the United States.

How are the textbooks better? Can you provide some examples?

Thanks for the follow-up question. Here is a link to a LONG article about Russian textbook that I learned about from a fellow HN participant years ago.

http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf

I think part of the issue is the corporate lobbying culture that exists in America.

I read an article a while ago about what goes into selecting textbooks in American schools apparently textbook companies lobby the education departments to use their brand of books so rather than getting the best textbook schools get the book from whichever company "bribed" the officials the most. Because it all goes through politicians they can push their own agendas into textbooks hence you get books trying to teach kids intelligent design or whatever.

From someone like me outside of America it seems absurd.

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about better textbooks for university, but high school textbooks are even worse. Total nonsense[1]. It's a shame. Hopefully OER can improve things a bit...

[1] Richard Feynman has a revealing story about how textbooks are selected by comitee http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

Oh I bet you'll love this:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/21/business/math-book-salted-...

Excerpt:

> But a spokesman for McGraw-Hill said the publisher received no payments from companies whose products appear in the book. ''We have no commercial or promotional arrangements to use particular brands,'' said the spokesman, Neal Allen. One of the book's authors said that the well-known products were included simply to make the math problems more relevant to sixth graders.

[...] For example, the 1995 edition, still in use in many places, introduces a decimal division problem as follows: ''Will is saving his allowance to buy a pair of Nike shoes that cost $68.25. If Will earns $3.25 per week, how many weeks will Will need to save?'' To the right of the text is a full-color picture of a pair of Nikes. Another word problem, this one in the 1999 edition, gives a plug to Oreos, made by Nabisco: ''The best-selling packaged cookie in the world is the Oreo cookie,'' it begins. ''The diameter of an Oreo cookie is 1.75 inches. Express the diameter of an Oreo cookie as a fraction in simplest form.''

To conclude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK0BMaUMmGw

textbooks themselves are the problem. If you've ever wanted a reductionist, watered down way of memorizing terminology, study from a textbook. During my time in undergrad, I learned the best way to learn is by paying attention in lecture and conversing in a subject. Subjects should be mentally digested by working with the concepts, not by merely reading about them.

You'd be surprised.

My mom can't figure out how to send a text message (even though I have shown her several times) and can't tell if she has new messages or not.

Has anyone ever studied the history of the "school system"? It was invented in Germany to help standardize away individualism and help promote "patriotism".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okPnDZ1Txlo

There's a presentation by Stephen Krashen where he talks about the latest research he wrote about in his book, "The Power of Reading".[0]

He addresses the problem of education and the ways it is being done. One really important remark he has made was that one of the biggest differences between children of well off families and others less fortunate is the availability of books: kids of comfortable families have access to more books since they are very young, contrary to their peers. The more important remark is the follow up: libraries tend to offset the impact of economic differences.

It's an interesting talk.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSW7gmvDLag

>when it comes to technology skills, we're dead last compared with other developed countries.

Maybe because the education model in the US (and elsewhere) relies heavily upon Ludditism.

Student's intelligence is measured on a single linear numeric scale based on paper-and-pencil administered examinations and are strictly limited to using computer technology (calculators) that was invented 40 years ago[1] even though they posses in their pockets computers that are millions (billions?) of times more powerful.

"Never memorize something that you can look up."

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_Business_Ana...

"Americans who went to college and graduate school did well. They scored above their peers with similar degrees in other developed countries.

For young adults with a high school diploma or less, things did not look so good. These Americans performed significantly worse than those in other countries with the same education level."

Doesn't that just mean that smart kids in America are more likely to get a higher education than in other many other countries?

Stats!

See the details on race/social rank and performance of high schoolers that went on to college vs the ones that stopped after hs to fully understand the data.

the US has layers, you have a first world country, a second world country and a third world country intermixed, skewing all these data sets. well-off whites perform as well in the US as everywhere else. Asians too. no need for homeschooling or other panic modes.

if you're poor, you're fucked. just like anywhere else.

This is news? We have been devaluing education for decades as we pay teachers less than a poverty level wage (unless you are in that unnecessary branch-administration). Witness the populist appeal of Trump. Anyone with common sense (which our school system has been so effective in extinguishing) would recognize a demagogue even without the prior example of Hitler.

Solution: Khan academy. let them issue diplomas.

I had to laugh when I got to this:

> She offers a sample math problem from the test: You go to the store and there's a sale. Buy one, get the second half off. So if you buy two, how much do you pay?

It doesn't even seem answerable. The closest I can think of a way to answer that question is "75%".

It should not be judged so easily.

However I have to say when I was in MBA course in US, I don't know why the teacher needs to teach the students how to calculate a linear equations of two unknowns. In China that is a question in elementary school and less than grade 5. I wonder how they graduated from high school and learning business.

Linear equations of two unknowns are taught at grade 7 or 8, not less than 5 in China. Although still significant younger than MBAs.

Virtually everyone in your class learned to solve systems of equations in middle school or high school, and again in college math.

The reason the teacher explained it is that for many students in an MBA program it has been many years since they had to use that particular skill.

But! Maintaining brain drain from the third world and the UK, negates this effect on the US economy.

As a non-native speaker this sentence actually got me a bit unsure (perhaps because I looked too much at it):

"Buy one, get the second half off."

Is that meant as the second unit you buy, you get half off? Don't know if this is a common way to phrase a discount like that in the US..

Not a native speaker either, but I spent a fair amount of time in the US and Canada; and I don't think I've ever heard that phrase. Usually it's "buy one, get one free" or some variation of that.

The phrase you mentioned would mean that you receive 2 units and pay for 1.5.

ISTM basic English comprehension was part of this test? That isn't a common idiom as compared to BOGOF, but one will see it sometimes.

Yes and yes. You interpreted it correctly, and that is a common way to phrase such discounts in the U.S.

Not just any "other countries". PIAAC measures against other European and East Asian countries.

To put it politely, the US has much greater demographic diversity, with its associated implications for IQ and consequently, all associated g factors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

How else are you going to educate kids for a Donald Trump world....

I'd be much more interested in a study that compares the top 1 percentile of graduates between countries.

Of course the bulk of US graduates are going to be unskilled... that's just how the bell curve works, and the US has the resources to support lots of unskilled laborers.

It's the top of the bell curve that matters. How do the smartest engineers and scientists in the US compare to their counterparts in other countries?

Eventually we'll have a basic income so if people don't want to learn, they won't have to.

> It's the top of the bell curve that matters.

I think that this attitude has gotten us into a pretty big mess.

You can't force somebody to learn.

Sure, but environmental factors play a pretty big factor in how much people will want to learn.

But you can sure as hell discourage/demotivate them by standardizing all classes into a game of 'guess the question', all work into mechanical problem solving, and all tests into multiple-choice bubble filling.

The first class where I experienced true critical thinking was 10th grade English. By a teacher who was ejected the next semester for giving the school jocks a hard time when they acted up in class.

I had the luck and very good fortune to get out of public school and attend a boarding school on a fully funded scholarship.

In my earlier years I went from Minnesota where they were experimenting with teaching algebra to 4th grade students who tested high on intelligence assessments, and where we were practicing basic physics in Science class in 6th grade.

To Colorado, where my school didn't even teach Science and we spent most of the day screwing around and playing card games. Middle school was light on content and dominated by a culture of bullying/bullies. High school was all about 'getting into college' and bullying was replaced with popularity contests and jocks.

Ironically, I took all useful classes where I learned skills that I've used a lot since. Metal Shop, Wood Shop, Graphic Arts, and Computer Programming. All of the shop, graphics, architecture classes were on the chopping block despite the school having 5 baseball teams 3 softball teams, the 3 usual football teams, a state-winning marching band, and many teams for various other sports including tennis, volleyball, soccer, basketball, etc...

Well the top 1% in the US will look decent I think. The US had, at some point, decided they wanted the school system to be unequal when they associated funding with property taxes from each region, thereby ensuring rich neighborhoods have well funded school, and poor neighborhoods poor schools. This enshines inequality into the system, so the top will have comparatively more resources.

And you're far too optimistic about the basic income. It's far from a certainty, especially in the US.

Funding doesn't help enough by itself, and the poor school districts get supplemental funds from federal and state governments bringing their total funding on par or higher than richer school districts. I went through poor public schools and richer public schools. Resources were not very different. If anything less competition at poor schools gave me an extra edge.

"the poor school districts get supplemental funds from federal and state governments bringing their total funding on par or higher than richer school districts"

Citation needed.

Just a casual web search for your claim seems to be yielding the opposite conclusion.

My anecdotal experience from moving around a lot (over half a dozen public schools from kindergarten to 12th grade) also contradicts your claim. Competition at richer schools has definitely given me an extra edge. The phrase "competition at poor schools" is also oxymoronic. What competition? Competition in classmates ignoring teachers and fights constantly erupting?

The gulf between poor schools and rich schools is ridiculous. Some schools offer several Advanced Placement courses, several International Baccalaureate courses, and partnerships with multiple nearby colleges for college courses. Students at poorer schools don't even know what AP and IB courses are. You don't know competition until the top 10% of your graduating class are either all going to Ivy League and prestigious colleges or all already have credit for college courses before even applying to college.

And I was just talking about the insane competition from fellow students. School resources and personnel are another matter. State-of-the-art SMART Boards. Laptops. Tablets. Multiple fields for multiple sports. Paid field trips. Study abroad. A robust student exchange program. Multiple year foreign language programs in around half a dozen languages. Teachers with multiple/advanced degrees. Several guidance counselors. Multiple vice/assistant principals. Multiple coaches.

I am genuinely curious what edge you think a poor school gave you.

Google LCFF California

> If anything less competition at poor schools gave me an extra edge.

How so? Are they curving grades? Smaller class sizes because of more drop-outs? More teacher attention because you cared more than the 'poor' kids?

Obviously OP meant it is easier to get higher class rank/valedictorian at poor noncompetitive schools than at rich competitive schools. Many colleges use class rank when deciding admittance.

The wonders of the US education system never cease to amaze me.

Are tests not standardized that class rank matters? When I first entered university here, grade average was all that mattered. Certain grades even guarantee university acceptance...

I would suggest two things. First, you have seriously underestimated the variation among secondary educational institutions in USA, a mistake that no USA college admissions process would make. Second, even in the context of the fortunate realm in which you attend university, a "good grades guarantee acceptance" policy probably somewhat underestimates the variation among secondary educational institutions there.

Probably because the country I live in has much less variation in the quality of secondary education.

The fact the US hasn't figured out how to offer a consistent level of K-12 education is, quite frankly, mind-boggling (along with the lack of health care, and many other things we take for granted in the rest of the 'western' world).

It's probably because USA is inferior to your nation in every way. b^)

Don't believe everything you read.

The US may also have bulges at both ends of the spectrum. With lots of children of undereducated domestic and specially poor immigrants our average will suffer.

Public schooling is trash in USA. As an Asian parent I can tell you it is more than worthless. That is what happens when you put government into too much of control.

Americans as a society have clearly traded job safety of teacher for good quality education.

Stossel's Stupid in America : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw

> That is what happens when you put government into too much of control.

This doesn't make any sense, most of the leading countries have far more governmental control over education than the US does.

If "governmental control" is your metric of choice, the US would need to increase it badly.

If the government bureaucrats responsible for education in other nations had performed as poorly as their American counterparts, they would have been fired decades ago. (In China and similar polities, the firing might have been done by a squad.) When people decry government control in the USA context, the focus of the complaint is the complete lack of accountability by government personnel for the results of their actions and decisions.

The test checked literacy, numeracy, and IT skills. US did fine on literacy, so-so on numeracy, and last on IT skills. Which is interesting given where most tech comes from.

Here's an example of the sort of task you had to complete (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2016/2016039.pdf):

> Level 3: Meeting rooms (Item ID: U02) Difficulty score: 346 This task involves managing requests to reserve a meeting room on a particular date using a reservation system. Upon discovering that one of the reservation requests cannot be accommodated, the test-taker has to send an e-mail message declining the request. Successfully completing the task involves taking into account multiple constraints (e.g., the number of rooms available and existing reservations). Impasses exist, as the initial constraints generate a conflict (one of the demands for a room reservation cannot be satisfied). The impasse has to be resolved by initiating a new sub-goal, i.e., issuing a standard message to decline one of the requests. Two applications are present in the environment: an e-mail interface with a number of e-mails stored in an inbox containing the room reservation requests, and a web-based reservation tool that allows the user to assign rooms to meetings at certain times. The item requires the test-taker to “[u]se information from a novel web application and several e-mail messages, establish and apply criteria to solve a scheduling problem where an impasse must be resolved, and communicate the outcome.” The task involves multiple applications, a large number of steps, a built-in impasse, and the discovery and use of ad hoc commands in a novel environment. The test-taker has to establish a plan and monitor its implementation in order to minimize the number of conflicts. In addition, the test-taker has to transfer information from one application (e-mail) to another (the room-reservation tool).

Basically, users are given an intentionally badly designed user interface in which they receive no training, and a task that is impossible to accomplish within the obvious constraints of the interface, and asked to accomplish a goal. It simulates the experience of being a low paid customer service rep in the third world using crappy software and seeing if you can handle it or not. If one has common sense, intelligence, and a sense of valuing their own time, they will recognize this tasks as useless BS and refuse to cooperate further in the test.

> Basically, users are given an intentionally badly designed user interface in which they receive no training, and a task that is impossible to accomplish within the obvious constraints of the interface, and asked to accomplish a goal.

This is a gross misrepresentation of the test. The task is to manage incoming reservation requests. Having to decline such a request does not mean the "task is impossible to accomplish". It just means that the correct answer is to deny the incoming request within the framework of the test. Also, the test simulates an entirely realistic simulation. In everyday live, I often have to decline meeting requests and propose alternate dates. Also, having to use badly designed user interfaces without training seems very realistic to me. Being good at handling that is a relevant skill in modern life.

That's really funny.

On average

yeah just talking to elementary school kids from America vs. Korea was an eye opening experience. I couldn't help but feel that the future is kinda bleak for American society because so much of it is centered around jock/warrior culture that places far more emphasis on physical education whereas in South Korean kids who study and is intelligent is revered as the alpha male model.

Kinda explains why South Korea ranks #1 for the most innovative economy. There's no hazing of nerds although bullying and suicide due to over studying is a definite problem....it just follows the trend that American kids are seriously being left behind by other countries.

Can you give a reference for "South Korea ranks #1 for the most innovative economy"?

On the other hand, Korea's work culture is amazingly bad, so we're probably safe for now.

I've heard a conspiracy theory that it is a way to ensure reproduction of social class. Students of lower class have fun in the environment where jocks are most revered, and grow to have little economic power (barring the few who become sports stars). Students of upper class are educated in highly competitive private schools or top public schools, where the culture is similar to Asian ones, reproducing their upper class status when entering society.

Yet America, has lead and continues to lead the world.

Maybe we are barking up the wrong tree, maybe school isn't as important for a country as what we take as just fact.

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