Comment by luu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by luu | Hacker News Reader

I'm never sure what to think about these articles. I've been seeing these since I was a kid (20 years ago), and yet, U.S. adults seem to do fine; the U.S. continues to be a hotbed of innovation. Not only is SV an unrivaled center of gravity for CS/EE type innovation, the U.S. also has world class ME, ChemE, biotech, etc. innovation.

Furthermore, U.S. students seem to do fine on exams that require creativity (IMO, Putnam, etc.).

If you want to dig into the data itself, there's a passable interface to it here: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/international/ide/

A large part of the "problem" seems to be because we're comparing a very large country to much smaller nation-states. Massachusetts outperforms almost the entire world [1]. Ignoring variance and how it relates to group size is a well-known problem. It is, for example, the reason the Gates Foundation erroneously spent $1 billion funding small schools [2]. It's a reasonable thing to think about doing, because small schools outperform large schools. But, small schools aren't only at the top, they're at the bottom, too! Small schools have higher variance. Small countries do, too.

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/results11_Massachusetts_Math.pd...

[2] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the...

The U.S. looks bad compared to other countries because we have more poor children than they do. If you compare our middle-class and upper-class children to theirs, we look a lot better.

The U.S. does not have an education problem; it has a child poverty problem.

This is exactly right. The US system has it's flaws, but other systems are just as bad or worse.

The problem is the divide between rich, middle class and poor. Poor kids just don't score nearly as high on tests than middle class and wealthy kids.

Of course, I don't have the stats or evidence, but I suspect if you took out our (USA) bottom 20% and the other countries bottom 20%, you would see a much more even comparison.

Just a theory.

In turn, the child poverty problem is related to whether a child has both parents in the household.

http://www.heritage.org/childpoverty

The socioeconomic impact on students is definitely incredibly important.

While I know this is anecdotal, my wife is a reading/psychology teacher at a high school in Florida that is widely considered one of the worst, if not the worst, in the state. It's incredible the ways in which the students socioeconomic state plays into their ability and/or desire to learn. Everything from the students parents not being capable of or not willing to contribute to their educational growth to peer pressure from other students to not stand out (which includes appearing smarter than others, sadly).

My wife is lucky to be in a position where she can teach them in small groups of 1-3 students and get them away from that peer pressure. In these circumstances, and when someone is believing in their ability to do better, they really do excel and are incredibly bright. It's just like you said, their socioeconomic position has stacked the cards against them for a very long time and it becomes easy to fall into the same rut everyone else is in within those areas.

How much of that innovation and world-class industry is created from immigrants? The business-friendly policies of the United States can be thanked too, but those business run on the labor of immigrants.

Glibly, all of it. Immigrants make up 98.9% of the United States population as of the latest census.

If you continue to extend your time scale, immigrants make up 100% of the US population.

(Assuming that "immigrant" != "first-generation immigrant, of course, which seems to be in line with your comment.)

That's true of all non-african countries.

It's probably true of most African countries, with the possible exception of Kenya and the surrounding countries.

IMO and Putnum are comparing the best of each nation. This article is comparing the median of each nation. I wouldn't expect a strong correlation there. Both matter.

Putnam is just a US competition.

IMO is international. And while the US does well, we haven't won since the mid-90s. In that same period of time China has won it like 15 times.

And the last time the US won the ACM Programming Contest is probably equally as long. And there we typically will only place one or two schools in the top 10 at best (although it's not a collection of our best programmers -- it is by school).

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