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Comment by uniqueid | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with the way the article frames the issue.

It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea of "pretty bad" schools.

So, like many other American issues, the argument reminds me of two people in a tiny parking lot squabbling angrily over who is at fault for boxing the other in. If the business that designed and painted the lot allocated insufficient space, neither driver should blame the other.

The premise that there are groups in America who need saving from poverty and lousy schools is true, but why save only a few of them by sending them to a school for gifted students? Deal with the inequality of income and of the school system. Last time I checked, Finland does pretty well with that strategy.

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I'm from Finland and I don't understand what you're talking about. There are no gifted options in elementary school but immediately from high school onwards standardised tests rank students into better and worse schools. Everyone knows which ones are which and the entrance scores are widely publicized in the media.

And you can bet your ass the best schools and universities only have kids from upper middle class parents. Turns out free education just means subsidising rich kids' education with public money here, just like everywhere else.

It's relative. America's disadvantaged are not like Finland's. There's an underclass in the US straight out of Oliver Twist.

The essay stresses the unfairness of depriving a subset of that underclass — ie: strivers — of a chance to pull themselves up.

The goal instead should be universally to lower American inequality. We should bring it closer to Finnish levels, even if Finnish levels are imperfect.

I'm confused - are you talking about inequality of opportunities (social mobility) or inequality of outcomes?

Yes, we have really high income taxes which means our income equality is less in Nordics than in the USA. However, that also means that strivers are unable to get rich. You can't get rich by working.

That means our wealth inequality is just as bad as in the US. Our 1% has just as much of the wealth and power as in the US.

Whereas in the US, that 1% is mostly entrepreneurs with minority having inherited, in Nordics it's the opposite.

Happy to dive deeper into statistics if you want to.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/we...

There is definitely some kind of miscommunication here. I know the area well enough (Sverige lite bättre än ditt land men iaf...) that your comments puzzle me.

I know that you know that poverty in your country, compared to the US, is a non-issue.

I know that you know that citizens in your country don't have basic educational deficits that many Americans have.

I know that you know that your country is very capable of competing in the world market.

As a reminder of the scope of the differences, see: https://youtu.be/YEywCppqeZo or https://youtu.be/JHDkALRz5Rk

So, I too am confused.

Americans, few having visited places like Finland, have a heaven-like perception of the nordic countries. Everyone lives happy lives, powered by public transportation, true equality, and unlimited healthcare unlike almost anywhere else. I'm sure things are great there, but the perception is rarely based on reality. Rather, the Nordics are almost wholly invented by Americans in their minds based on what they imagine them to be.

That's probably a bit too dismissive in my case, but I don't want to turn the thread into my personal travelogue. You could ask tupputuppu whether his/her opinion of the Finnish system is the norm within Finland itself, though.

Unless Finland had similar demographics to the US, which it does not, it's hard to try to transplant policy decisions from there to the US and expect similar outcomes. Maybe as Finland's non-Finnish population grows significantly in the coming decades, the two countries can compare notes more easily.

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

Note: Finland has the population of Wisconsin.

Both have a population of about 5 million.

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

Another fun note:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, but the "pretty good" schools come from kids and families taking academics seriously. In Finland that's the default, but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out. It's no surprise that middle-class white kids are underrepresented and would like to get in without all the hard work and discipline.

> but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out

This comment is unnecessarily and rudely exclusive.

I went to a county-wide gifted magnet school that was a satellite to one of the regular county high schools. The athletes played sports at the main school, and non-athletes took gym classes there. About 20% of each class were varsity athletes, and the athletes fit in quite nicely with the non-athletes in academic and social settings.

It’s sad that you added this line, since your first sentence regarding the need for kids and (most importantly) families to take academics seriously is a very important point.

> > but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out

> This comment is unnecessarily and rudely exclusive.

Indeed. It's also completely wrong about TJ, just as it is about the school you went to. From my experience (graduating in '02), lots and lots of TJ students played sports -- and quite a lot of them were very serious about it and quite proud of how well they did. I believe our crew teams, in particular, were nationally competitive.

This is counter-intuitive to a lot of people who don't expect "nerds" to be interested in sports or "jocks" to be good at math, science, or technology. (Including me when I first got there.)

But I don't think it's a coincidence. It turns out that working hard, showing up, and keeping at it even when things aren't easy is a powerful way to get better at something. That's just as true for a sport as for an academic subject.

The anti-sports stance is deliberate. Pursuing athletics at a high level takes time and money, both of which would better be directed elsewhere in a world of limited resources. It's also sending a message: this is a school, not a sports club; if you want sports, join the sports club, there you get sports.

There are studies that school districts that dropped sports have better academic outcomes: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-cas...

Especially, what's with the focus on competitive sports? At school you absolutely want to reach the unfit kids because school sports is the only time they get any kind of exercise. You have to be inclusionary, the purpose is public health, individual fitness, not competition, but competitive sports is exclusionary.

Also, what's with the focus on team sports? American schoolkids have a staggering need for conformity, and team sports seem to feed that need.

> There are studies that school districts that dropped sports have better academic outcomes: [link]

I don't see such a study described in that article. After not finding it, I searched for "study", "studies", and "research", and still didn't. Can you perhaps quote a key sentence from the bit you're thinking of?

There is a story about one district that dropped football (not all sports), under severe budgetary pressure. Seems like the right choice. I should add some context that may not be obvious outside the US: that district is a small town in Texas, and Texas and especially its small towns are where high-school football is a really especially big deal. (My dad grew up in a small town in Texas.) In the rest of the country it's generally not so extreme as it was in that town.

The article is quoting a study saying that team sports may improve outcomes for the players but not for the rest of the students. The obvious doesn't need saying: organized sports is a moneysink that takes funding away from the core mission, which is academics.

The kids that really cause trouble aren’t usually “jocks” because in many states you have to pass classes to play sports. To play sports you also have to be disciplined and listen to instructions, and not get caught with drugs or arrested for armed robbery.

Can’t you fail them during the previous year, where they don’t have enough grades to graduate ?

That’s the system in France, where public schools can’t refuse kids, but those kids can only move classes if they passed. If you aren’t interested in studying you’ll spend your life in middle school until you’re 16 and just drop out.

In the US, graduation rate is seen as the primary metric of public school quality, so policies that encourage people not to graduate aren't feasible. (One of our most famous educational reforms was named the No Child Left Behind Act, on the principle that in an ideal world not a single child would fail to graduate high school.)

> Can’t you fail them during the previous year, where they don’t have enough grades to graduate

Theoretically this can happen, but in practice it is very rare.

A school not graduating a child essentially admits its teachers are not good enough to put some basic knowledge into this child's head.

No school wants to be in such position.

That's surely where the financing model is important. Schools here get money based on the number of students, and the dispatch of teachers is done at a region level depending on the needs.

A school with "bad" teachers would just get better teachers if it was warranted (in practice, everyone understands why kids are failing, and they'll send low experience teachers instead, because fuck them, I guess)

Are you saying that the students bear no responsibility, or that it’s our current attitude that teachers can somehow coerce people to learn?

The really scary thing is that world-wise bloggers like Scott Aaronson and Siderea think that bullying is an inevitable fact of going to school. Those of us that grew up outside the US know different.

Where, pray tell, do you live that bullying is nonexistent?

The surveys that I've seen show that bullying is pretty universal. About ⅓ of students worldwide are bullied at some point in their education, and these rates don't change all that much from country to country, although the form of bullying does have drastic differences. (Notably, Europe and the US tend to have less physical bullying and more psychological bullying compared to the rest of the world).

Fairfax County has excellent schools. In the 2013, the county participated along with several others in a cross-country PISA comparison. Herndon High school, which is not in a particularly wealthy area, performed right between Germany and Canada, and a bit below Finland: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/OECD%20Test%20for%20Schoo... (see page 104).

> It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea of "pretty bad" schools.

Ok, sure, but we don't need to destroy the great schools in order to work on making more pretty good schools.

If you want to turn bad schools into pretty good ones, please leave the great ones alone, while you go about that.

Students need to be clustered according to their abilities and interests. Not doing so is impractical at best and wasteful at worst.

Different subsets of students require different amounts of attention, different specialties, different classes, etc. Go too fast and the bad students fall behind. Go too slow and good students will get bored and act out. One of my top students failed my class for missing too many lectures -- because attendance was written into the student contract to motivate the lower-performing students.

Certainly, and, to the extent that it (ie: separating into classes according to aptitude) doesn't railroad disadvantaged students into bad schools, I have no issue with that.

I think you've gotten faulty information. Finland's high schools are explicitly tracked, as is common in Europe; about half of students attend vocational schools that don't offer college preparatory education.

Agreed. I think schools that turns bad students into good ones deserve more funding and publicity than schools that turns good students into excellent ones.

Finland has a major advantage of being full of Finns, as opposed to American demography. In broad swathes of the country there are not enough "good students" to go around.

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