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Comment by harrisonjackson | Hacker News Reader

The school mentioned in the article seems to have a huge lack of top-down control and parental involvement.

Well, as someone deeply involved in education, these statements combined together highlight exactly the problem with America's educational system. Like many American institutions, it is extremely diverse in its methods and primarily focused on providing services to the wealthy. The parent comment here is correct in highlighting a problem that exists at the highest levels in our school system and the topic article is highlighting a problem that exists at the lowest levels. They are very different problems.

However, they have the same root cause. What would actually solve this is a systemic shift in America's education system to a more centralized approach that promotes well researched methodologies and systems to be used across the country. We have phenomenal teachers and phenomenal schools that operate at extremely high efficiency. The problem is that this quality is extremely poorly distributed. This would be very unpopular with the wealthier members of society though, as it would make access to academic silo schools much less of a given for their children. And access to education, and the societal benefits that this access brings, is one of the primary motivators for wealthier Americans. You don't have to look farther than Hacker News. How often do you see titles here like "MIT students launch the Facebook of toilet paper", where MIT student is seen as a meaningful signal. Your child doesn't get the opportunity to be the beneficiary of that headline without first being purchased a top rate education at America's best high schools.

You're being too high-minded.

This is about absent parents and a school board that has already given up on students before they even enroll.

This is not a "systemic" national issue...its an issue for inner city schools where the students are poor and brown.

So in the world you describe, if a parent wants better education for their child (than what the government provides uniformly across the country) - is the only recourse private schools?

So I come from India where the above model is in place - very few government funded schools are considered top ranking. Parents live closer to good private schools and fund the same when possible. But usually this means hours of transit for the child.

At least from my perspective, the US model seemed better. Here you can choose to live in a nice neighborhood if you can and get a lot more benefits than just good schools. These things seem to go together (safety / general wealth of the neighborhood / public services / good schools / accessibility to job locations and so on). I am curious to see why someone would not want this.

If the overall push is that the whole country should grow only at a uniform rate and we should penalize folks who work hard to get these benefits in lieu of folks who can't (or won't), that doesn't sound very American, at least not the American dream I was sold when I moved :).

I live in Germany and private schools are the absolute exception. I'm not a parent yet, but from my experience as a student you just send your kid to the closest school and school reputation isn't really a thing. There are some "rich kid" schools, especially bording schools, but they are really rare and graduates don't really have a lot of benefit when it comes to university applications (German universities operate by taking in many students and make the weak performers drop out or switch to a subject better fitting their skills)

To promote higher achieving students we split kids into three different tiers based on their performance in their 4th school year (around age 10/11). Each tier is actually a completely separate school (location, building, curriculula, even different qualifications for teachers). Students that do exceptionally well/bad can still move between tiers every year.

There is a world where the state provides education and thinking about private schools isn't an important consideration for parents. I would expect it's similar in many other EU countries. So it's not one or the other like you fear.

Germany prohibits homeschooling, which to me distorts the situation.

I'm don't really follow how the possiblity of homeschooling and public school quality correlate? What is your argument here?

I mean. I'll let my political colors fly a little bit here and tell you what I see to be as plain fact: the American dream you were sold when you moved here is a scam. The American dream, as it stands today, is a dead ideological notion that the wealthy in this country use to justify stepping on the backs of the poor in order to attain more, and more, and more.

Saying something like "choose to live in a nice neighborhood" is analogous to saying "if you're poor you won't be given access to good schooling" because poor people can't choose to live in a nice neighborhood, no matter how hard they are willing to work. Not to mention poor children. And you're presenting a false dichotomy here. We don't have to choose between rewarding people who work hard and providing good education to everyone. We are absolutely capable of doing both, we just choose not to because the system in place has clear benefits to the people who are creating/perpetuating that system. Much like the caste system in India. I'm absolutely, in very clear terms, not proposing we implement the Indian education system. That should be obvious.

What you're defining as American is very dangerous. You're saying quite literally "to be American is to have the individual right succeed no matter the expense to others". While that's a very Hacker New mentality, and quite obviously how America operates, I wouldn't call it particularly equal or meritocratic. If hard work was rewarded, the hard working lower class Americans who have three jobs would be given access to these neighborhoods and school-systems. But this is transparently not the case.

You seem to be someone who believes you should seek the rewards of your hard work, and I agree with you 100%. However, what you're missing is that the rewards system in the US is not designed to reward those who are putting in the most effort. Nor is it designed to reward the children who are driven and likely to be successful. The rewards and incentives in the US currently favor anyone who already has money, no matter what they are actually providing to society. And it certainly provides no opportunities to promising young children who happen to be from lower-class backgrounds... but at this point I'm just stating facts.

Have you talked to immigrants much? I was in the English as Second Language class in my somewhat mediocre high school. Lots of immigrant children, no fancy connections and all pretty poor by US standards. And yet some of them ended up in the high quality universities, and likely got a well paying job.

Please don't say things like "US currently favor anyone who already has money", as it completely ignores the achievements of first and second generation immigrants. They had no money, only hard work, and while they are not billionaires, many of them are in the middle class, earning more than a median salary.

This is an absurd straw man. Not only have I talked to immigrants, I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. One of my tasks this week was to write a recommendation letter for a "DREAMER" that was deported to Mexico two years ago at the age of 18, to a country that she has never lived in that speaks a language she doesn't speak. I also grew up in a single parent household that made way below poverty wages. I now have my PhD. "some of my immigrant peers went on to be a success" is not the same as saying "my immigrant peers were provided great opportunities to succeed". If you grow up in a wealthy suburb in the United States 80% of your class will go to college. If you grow up in a wealthy community, nearly 40% of your class will go to an elite university. If you grow up in a poor community, less than 40% will even attend a 2 year community college. [1]

Just because I am a success, or an immigrant is a success, doesn't mean we have created an optimal system. I'm not ignoring the achievements of anyone, I'm plainly stating "just because some people manage to survive a poorly constructed system of hierarchies and go on to be successful, doesn't mean we can't do wildly better than we are.". The US favoring anyone who has money is a plain fact, clear as day. Just because someone is successful in spite of that doesn't mean it's not true.

For every person that survived the odds with hard work and some luck, there are 5 brilliant people here who don't get that chance. People who are relegated to the lower class because the system didn't give them the opportunity to succeed, and all our lives are worse for it. These people go on to commit crimes to alleviate their socioeconomic problems, or at best generally less productive than they could be. A society should be measured by the opportunities it provides for people to remove themselves from poverty. The United States does a quantifiably miserable job at this, both through education and social welfare.

It's simple enough to look at the statistics for upward class mobility and to see that the United States is worse than ever in these regards. And we are the wealthiest country in the world. Something is wrong, and a large part of the problem is the financial, educational, and social incentives provided to the wealthy and the cyclical nature of poverty.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/23/feds-release-...

Some of what you say is likely the case but it should be noted that wealth isn't fixed. It didn't start with some families when time begin and doesn't remain static through the proceeding generations.

So there are obviously other factors besides wealth.

At the end of the day someone, somewhere, had a need and put in the effort (for good or ill) and obtained wealth.

But mostly I'm curious what you would do differently?

I agree that education system US is not the best and could definitely improve, and that the situation in poorer cities is broken. But you are saying things like:

> Your child doesn't get the opportunity to be the beneficiary of that headline without first being purchased a top rate education at America's best high schools.

Does this mean I should say, “hey, earthscienceman only has PhD because his parents has purchased him top rate education in the America’s best high school”?

No. You should say exactly the words I wrote, which is "earthscienceman only has a PhD because he managed to survive a mediocre system through pure grit and determination"

My grit and determination is not a metric that shows that the system functions.

What is the American Dream? The ability to work hard and be rewarded.

That dream has a name and it is class/social mobility. That's something we can measure and the US does not come out well in that measurement.

There are many countries that are much better for class/social mobility than the US. We may be better than the poor (often exploited third world) country that immigrants come here from, but we are not the best by far.

We're not even in the top 20. The World Economic Forum puts us at 27, between Lithuania and Spain.

http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/socia...

I agree with you. In the US, looking at the lowest 20% earning men; 42% of their sons are still in the lowest 20% compared to below 30% in Nordic countries. Looking at those going from bottom 20% to top 20%, the US is at about 8% compared to 14% in Denmark

Where in the world is it easiest to become rich? The Nordic countries, of course! Iceland, Norway and Sweden have the highest proportions of billionares in the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9UmdY0E8hU

The US model only seems better because we're much, much wealthier than India. If you compare our model with other first world countries, it's a different story.

In fact, some of the countries with the best education outcomes outlaw private schools entirely. This forces the wealthy to send their children to public schools, which means they become powerful advocates for improving the education of ALL students.

Yes and no.

There are extensive documented procedures for handling under performing or absent students, defined in great detail at the top level. But seems like there is a disconnect between those bureaucratic processes and actual connections between the teachers making sure the students know where they stand.

| works three jobs.

I wonder why.

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