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Comment by adamt | Hacker News Reader

But doesn't schooling pretty much scale horizontally? Is schooling 84M really any more complex then schooling 1.5M?

If anything, I'd suggest there is a fairly large fixed overhead for a country to set up a school system (teacher training, set curriculum, exam structure etc) and beyond that it becomes fairly cookie-cutter to scale out each school.

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I found this scale excuse used multiple times (in European countries as well, and for all kinds of topics) but never got any proof for it, rather the opposite. If scale was an issue, how could the US have become such a technology leading nation? Usually, that's is just another way to tell "we don't want to know about it, we have no will to change anything because we hate change, or we screwed up but we don't want to acknowledge it."

My thoughts exactly, the article does explain that US schools are managed on a state level, and then it becomes much more comparable.

It doesn't work that way. Students in South Los Angeles, for instance, need a different curriculum than students in wealthy Cambridge. Students at the former still struggle with English, while the latter are scions of Harvard and MIT.

I bet students in Finland start off with a lower English level than students in South Los Angeles.

I bet students in South Los Angeles start off with a lower Finnish level than students in Finland.

Well, that's an easy bet to settle. 97 percent of Finns have either Finnish, Swedish, Russian or Estonian as native language and only 0.26 percent of Finns are native English speakers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Finland

It's as easy to settle as your bet. That was the point I was demonstrating with my sarcasm.

Sorry. Got lost on me :-)

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