Quality of US education

[CharonY]

Both are undergoing selective processes as obviously you will meet certain criteria even if you are an US student. Chinese students were chosen as an extreme example (developing country, language issue etc.) but I could easily exchange them with German students (and I have taught in Germany as well, and there is a noticeable difference of first years).

[John Cuthber]

 

Yes it can. 8% of children born in the US are the children of illegal immigrants...thats quite a bit. These children are likely to be born into poverty and in families where English is not the first language. Thats every year.

 

All told, there are ~5.1million children of illegal immigrants in the US, of which 1.1 million are foreign born and illegal themselves. We have around 74 million children in the US.

 

That means that the children of illegal immigrants accounts for ~7% of the children in the US.

 

In the US, students with a migrant background....not illegal immigrants per se...just migrant period, score ~35.5 point lower than the national mean. The caveat, however, is that the national mean includes the scores of children with migrant backgrounds, and so will be lowered proportionally. These children will have a much larger effect in the US, where they constitute a higher percentage, than in nations like Canada, where they are a much lower percentage.

 

So I think it reasonable that this will have an effect on scores. Is it the only reason...certainly not. I brought this specific issue up only to make the point of the complexity of the cultural factors at work in the US compared to very homogenous, low population nations like Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, and even Canada. This again is why the China stats are cherry picking. If you were to treat China like the heterogenous and large population nation that it is....like we treat the US....rather than cherry picking its high performers...then we would have a different result for China.

OK, so lets run the numbers.

Imagine that 100 US kids sit the test given in the first of the tables which iNow provided.

Lets make the absurd, but simple assumptions that

All "non-immigrant" US kids get as many marks as their counterparts in Shanghai (oh yeah- as if...): that's 613

All illegal immigrant kids get zero (again, that's absurd, but it's the biggest difference between US and illegal immigrants that you could get.)

So the 92% who are legal get 613 marks each

That's 56396 marks.

And the other 8 (the immigrants) get zero.

So the 100 kids get 56396 marks in aggregate.

563.96 marks each on average.

That's not a million miles from the estimate I gave this morning (Sorry about the typo- I fixed it)

 

But, in fact, they got 481 marks

 

So, even if the illegal immigrants got the same scores as lumps of wood and their classmates matched the best group in the world, they still couldn't explain how badly he US did.

 

So, when I asked "Even if they were completely ineducable, could 3% of the population really make that big a difference to the test scores?"

The answer is , mathematically clearly "no".

And yet for some reason you seem to have said "Yes it can"

 

Is that because your maths isn't very good and is that because maths education in the US isn't very good?

 

1) I never claimed that migration was the sole or even primary factor...

 

 

3) Let me again reiterate that I am not saying this is the primary cause...

Yes you did.

You said "Yes it can. 8% of children born in the US are the children of illegal immigrants...thats quite a bit. "

in response to "Even if they were completely ineducable, could 3% of the population really make that big a difference to the test scores?"

 

That's the trouble with arguing badly on a discussion site.

We can all see exactly what you said, and you look silly if you later try to claim you didn't say it.

[chadn737]

OK, so lets run the numbers.

Imagine that 100 US kids sit the test given in the first of the tables which iNow provided.

Lets make the absurd, but simple assumptions that

All "non-immigrant" US kids get as many marks as their counterparts in Shanghai (oh yeah- as if...): that's 613

All illegal immigrant kids get zero (again, that's absurd, but it's the biggest difference between US and illegal immigrants that you could get.)

So the 92% who are legal get 613 marks each

That's 56396 marks.

And the other 8 (the immigrants) get zero.

So the 100 kids get 56396 marks in aggregate.

563.96 marks each on average.

That's not a million miles from the estimate I gave this morning (Sorry about the typo- I fixed it)

 

But, in fact, they got 481 marks

 

So, even if the illegal immigrants got the same scores as lumps of wood and their classmates matched the best group in the world, they still couldn't explain how badly he US did.

 

So, when I asked "Even if they were completely ineducable, could 3% of the population really make that big a difference to the test scores?"

The answer is , mathematically clearly "no".

And yet for some reason you seem to have said "Yes it can"

 

Is that because your maths isn't very good and is that because maths education in the US isn't very good?

Yes you did.

You said "Yes it can. 8% of children born in the US are the children of illegal immigrants...thats quite a bit. "

in response to "Even if they were completely ineducable, could 3% of the population really make that big a difference to the test scores?"

 

That's the trouble with arguing badly on a discussion site.

We can all see exactly what you said, and you look silly if you later try to claim you didn't say it.

 

Yes....the trouble with discussion sites is that we have the record. We now have a record of you quote mining me. Lets look at the rest of that post and see how well you can read:

 

 

"So I think it reasonable that this will have an effect on scores. Is it the only reason...certainly not. I brought this specific issue up only to make the point of the complexity of the cultural factors at work in the US compared to very homogenous, low population nations like Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, and even Canada. This again is why the China stats are cherry picking. If you were to treat China like the heterogenous and large population nation that it is....like we treat the US....rather than cherry picking its high performers...then we would have a different result for China."

 

So no....that's not what I claimed. You took me out of context and the quoted portion makes that clear.

 

EDIT: Now having settle the fact that you quote mined me, we can actually calculate from the previous study the effect of that these scores had in the study.

 

The mean for all students, based on an observation of 3242 students was 496. So 3242*496=1608032 total

The mean for migrant children, based on an observation 559 students was 464.9. So 559*464.9=259879.1 total

 

Now we subtract the migrant from the rest. 3242-559=2685. 1608032-259879.1=1348152.9

 

That gives us an average for non-migrant children of 502.1

 

So the effect of migrant children dropped the score by 6 points. So based on those stats, it does have an effect, however a very minor one.

 

However, I made it clear in my posts that I never considered this the only factor and that I used it only to illustrate a point about the cultural complexity of the US. You quote mined me and falsely accused me of xenophobia.

Edited February 4, 2014 by chadn737

[imatfaal]

!

Moderator Note

 

OK. Before this becomes silly, the brewing "you said, I said, no you said..." back-and-forth stops as do implications of personal ignorance, xenophobia, inability to read posts etc. Everyone can read all the posts and members will make their own judgments on what was said and whether it was refuted.

 

This is a good discussion - let's try and keep it that way.

 

[John Cuthber]

559 is not 8% of 3242

so you have chosen a data set that massively exaggerate the effect of immigrant children on the population as a whole by assuming there are a lot of them.

 

Lets run the real figures again, based on the numbers you have supplied.

Once again take 100 children

Of those 100, 8 are immigrants and score (by your figures) 8*464.9 giving 3719.2

The other 92 are non-immigrants and get 92*502.1 which is 46193.2

 

So the whole group of 100 got 3719.2+46193.2 = 49912.4 between the 100 of them.

That's 499.12 each on average.

Now, if the group were composed entirely of non-immigrants, the average score would be 502.1

So the difference is 502.1-499.12 = 2.976 (out of 502.1)

 

That's about 0.6%

 

Looks like there's some way to go before you can explain the difference between, for example, the US and Korea.

That's 481 vs 554

About 13%

 

So immigrants are responsible for roughly 0.6/13 or 5% of the difference.

Feel free to try to explain the other 95% of the difference.

Edited February 5, 2014 by John Cuthber

[chadn737]

559 is not 8% of 3242

so you have chosen a data set that massively exaggerate the effect of immigrant children on the population as a whole by assuming there are a lot of them.

 

Lets run the real figures again, based on the numbers you have supplied.

Once again take 100 children

Of those 100, 8 are immigrants and score (by your figures) 8*464.9 giving 3719.2

The other 92 are non-immigrants and get 92*502.1 which is 46193.2

 

So the whole group of 100 got 3719.2+46193.2 = 49912.4 between the 100 of them.

That's 499.12 each on average.

Now, if the group were composed entirely of non-immigrants, the average score would be 502.1

So the difference is 502.1-499.12 = 2.976 (out of 502.1)

 

That's about 0.6%

 

Looks like there's some way to go before you can explain the difference between, for example, the US and Korea.

That's 481 vs 554

About 13%

 

So immigrants are responsible for roughly 0.6/13 or 5% of the difference.

Feel free to try to explain the other 95% of the difference.

 

There is a major flaw in the calculations you just did.

 

The 8% of US children applies only to illegal immigrants. The paper where we get these figures from does not calculate the scores for illegal immigrant children, but of all children with a migrant background. Once again, it helps to actually read what is stated. That number is actually much larger than 8%. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 23% of US Children have immigrant parents...legal or illegal.

 

In that study, 559/3242 = 17.24% of the children in the study. So my previous calculations would be an underestimation of the effect, not an overestimation. Your calculations, however, make an even bigger underestimation because you assume the 8% figure.

 

If we redo the calculations you just did (I am not convinced this is a valid method of comparison) we end up with 1.7/13 = ~13% of the difference. Nearly 3 times higher than what you calculated. That leaves 87% of the difference unexplained.

 

Secondly, you still seem to not understand the argument that I was making. As I pointed out several times, I don't think that the effects of immigration alone can explain this. I never meant it too. My only real point was that the US has a larger and more complex cultural situation than most of the nations that are ranking high. The use of immigration, which I am all for (I have to make such disclaimers because people tend misconstrue such things), was simply to illustrate the complexity of education in the US compared to other places of the world. It was never my intention to explain 100% or even 10% of the difference with immigration.

Let me restate my original argument. We compare the US to these other nations and assume that the US is failing, but are we really? It is such comparisons with nations like Finland that has policy makers wanting us to copy Finland and apply it universally to the nation. While I am certain we can learn something from Finland, my problem is with the assumption that what works in Finland, works equally well in Massachusetts as it does in West Virginia, as it does in Southern California. A nation like Finland has a population of 5.4 million (~a million less than Massachusetts). 96.6% of its citizens were born there. Finnish is the native language for over 90% of its residents. It has only 1.2 million children. Massachusetts has ~1.5 million children

 

Massachusetts as a state is larger in both population and number of children and more diverse than Finland. The needs that Massachusetts has educationally are not going to be identical to Finland.

 

If the needs of Massachusetts is not identical to Finland, then what about a state like Arizona or New Mexico? What about a state like Texas or Alaska? We can't even compare the needs of southern California to those of Northern California.

 

We cannot treat the US and its educational success, failure, and/or needs as if it were a singular entity that can be fix by universal policy measures from on high. We can learn a lot about improving education from other nations, but the idea that we can copy them in mass and universally will not solve anything. Such scores, obscure the complexities of the United States. Even if we ignore the different cultures due to recent immigration, the cultures of the South differ vastly from the cultures of the Midwest, West Coast, North East, etc.

 

These scores treat different parts of China differently, that is not an attempt to put down China. Rather I think it highlights the fact that within a very large and diverse nation like China, you have a lot of variance. Obviously what works in Shanghai is not being applied or doesn't work in other parts of China. So why do we make the same mistake with the US. People have gotten that the wrong impression of what I have tried to argue, but I am only trying to illustrate that it is not reasonable to think of the US in such universal terms.

[John Cuthber]

"23% of US Children have immigrant parents"

Are we holding this discussion in Cherokee or some such?

 

You seem to forget that I'm citing the 8% figure because it's the figure you gave.

If it's not the right number, don't blame me.

 

The fact remains that the extent of the effect of immigration is somewhere between small and tiny.

 

Why did you bring it up ?

[chadn737]

"23% of US Children have immigrant parents"

Are we holding this discussion in Cherokee or some such?

 

You seem to forget that I'm citing the 8% figure because it's the figure you gave.

If it's not the right number, don't blame me.

 

The fact remains that the extent of the effect of immigration is somewhere between small and tiny.

 

Why did you bring it up ?

 

The 8% figure was for illegal immigrants. I actually made that very clear when I first brought it up:

 

" 8% of children born in the US are the children of illegal immigrants"

 

I also made it clear when I referred to the children of immigrants, that this was for all immigrants, not just illegal:

 

"In the US, students with a migrant background....not illegal immigrants per se...just migrant period"

 

I don't have data on how illegal immigrants alone score, so the difference in scores is only valid for immigrant children as a whole, requiring us to use the 23% figure to be accurate.

 

I am not sure where the disconnect in communication is coming from then, because its all right there in the original posts....just as earlier when you said I was claiming that this was the only effect. If there is some aspect of it that I can change to avoid such obvious miscommunications, then I will. If its not me, then its you. Either way, I am getting annoyed at the quote mining of my posts.

 

As for why I brought it up....again, that is in my posts:

 

"I brought this specific issue up only to make the point of the complexity of the cultural factors at work in the US compared to very homogenous, low population nations like Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, and even Canada."

 

I am highlighting only a singular factor NOT because it is the only factor, but to illustrate a point about how the US differs in important aspects other than mere test scores. Again...its in my previous posts. I really don't know where the disconnect is coming from because I don't know how to make it any clearer.

Edited February 5, 2014 by chadn737

[John Cuthber]

I suspect that most of us know that there are cultural differences between , for example, the US and Finland.

 

There are also differences in the fraction of the population that are "immigrants".

Why did you choose such an obviously rubbish example?

Why did you continue to try to defend it when I pointed out that, even if immigrants were totally brain dead, they couldn't explain the effect we were discussing?

and, as I pointed out, if you are going to complain about me citing figures for illegal immigration I will remind you that you brought the subject up.

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/81558-quality-of-us-education/?p=790080

 

That's not a strawman, it's an observation.

 

The overwhelming bulk of the explanation, whether it's 95% or 87%, is due to something else.

You already had the figures at hand to calculate that and yet you didn't.

 

Why did you pick "immigrants" as the first part of the cause of the "problem" you mentioned, even though you had the data to show that they are, at best, a small part of that cause?

 

That's a valid question, btw, I'd like an answer to it.

[chadn737]

I suspect that most of us know that there are cultural differences between , for example, the US and Finland.

 

There are also differences in the fraction of the population that are "immigrants".

Why did you choose such an obviously rubbish example?

Why did you continue to try to defend it when I pointed out that, even if immigrants were totally brain dead, they couldn't explain the effect we were discussing?

and, as I pointed out, if you are going to complain about me citing figures for illegal immigration I will remind you that you brought the subject up.

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/81558-quality-of-us-education/?p=790080

 

That's not a strawman, it's an observation.

 

The overwhelming bulk of the explanation, whether it's 95% or 87%, is due to something else.

You already had the figures at hand to calculate that and yet you didn't.

 

Why did you pick "immigrants" as the first part of the cause of the "problem" you mentioned, even though you had the data to show that they are, at best, a small part of that cause?

 

That's a valid question, btw, I'd like an answer to it.

 

I did answer it, which you would know if you bothered to read what I actually say rather than jumping to conclusions.

 

"I brought this specific issue up only to make the point of the complexity of the cultural factors at work in the US compared to very homogenous, low population nations"

 

1) I never claimed it was a majority cause. That is a strawman.

2) And as our subsequent calculations have shown, it does have an effect. That this effect only accounts for a part of the difference does not make it insignificant or irrelevant.

3) I brought it up to illustrate a point. You jumped to conclusions because you seem to just quote mine posts rather than trying to comprehend what is actually said. That you are doing this now in two threads tells me that you are someone more interested in attacking strawmen rather than the actual claim.

[John Cuthber]

"1) I never claimed it was a majority cause. That is a strawman."

Oh, come on.

I never said you did

What was that about a strawman?

 

"2) And as our subsequent calculations have shown, it does have an effect. That this effect only accounts for a part of the difference does not make it insignificant or irrelevant."

At best it's 87% irrelevant.

"3) I brought it up to illustrate a point."

And, as I pointed out, it's a very poor illustration

Why did you choose one that's somewhere between bad and awful rather than something that is a good example.?

( that's the second time of asking, and you have not answered it)

[chadn737]

"1) I never claimed it was a majority cause. That is a strawman."

Oh, come on.

I never said you did

What was that about a strawman?

 

Actually yes you did:

chadn737, on 04 Feb 2014 - 12:02 PM, said:

 

1) I never claimed that migration was the sole or even primary factor...

 

 

3) Let me again reiterate that I am not saying this is the primary cause...

Yes you did.

You said "Yes it can. 8% of children born in the US are the children of illegal immigrants...thats quite a bit. "

in response to "Even if they were completely ineducable, could 3% of the population really make that big a difference to the test scores?"

That's the trouble with arguing badly on a discussion site.

We can all see exactly what you said, and you look silly if you later try to claim you didn't say it.

 

I quoted the entire context of the response, so tell me how I misinterpreted it.

2) And as our subsequent calculations have shown, it does have an effect. That this effect only accounts for a part of the difference does not make it insignificant or irrelevant."

At best it's 87% irrelevant.

 

So you admit it has an effect, but now you are just trying to dismiss the fact that there is an effect. Nice. If something explained 49% of the effect, would that make it irrelevant? 13% is not insignificant or irrelevant.

"3) I brought it up to illustrate a point."

And, as I pointed out, it's a very poor illustration

Why did you choose one that's somewhere between bad and awful rather than something that is a good example.?

( that's the second time of asking, and you have not answered it)

This is irrelevant. Why I chose something has no impact on the argument that the US faces different challenges than small homogenous nations. This line of questioning is obviously a witch hunt.

However...I chose it for simplicity sake and the fact that there is easily accessible data on the matter, such as the studies and statistics I cited earlier. Furthermore, there is a more direct association of other factors like socioeconomic status and language barriers with immigration, particularly illegal immigration. It's much harder, if impossible, to find statistics on factors such as cultural attitudes towards work and learning in rural regions. I could give anecdotal tales about the culture of the rural Midwest and its effect on education, but I hate anecdotal evidence and I cant reference it.

So theres your answer....quite irrelevant to the discussion, but I fully expect that it will somehow be twisted into an ad hom argument.

And how something accounting for 13% of the difference is a bad way to illustrate my point is beyond me. In many fields, finding a single factor that explains even a couple of percentage points is considered significant. There are a lot of genetic studies that report alleles that explain 1-2% of the variance and that is significant.

Edited February 6, 2014 by chadn737

[overtone]

The Finns have indigenous minority cultures, and the entire country was rural and poor not too long ago. Likewise the Norwegians - cold ocean fishing and raiding and hardscrabble farming on rock are the backgrounds of anti-intellectual and illiterate folks, by presumption. The US does have significant populations of children with background handicaps of one kind or another, but so does everyone else.

 

The educational systems of the US are organized by State - these States are generally comparable in size and ethnic diversity, and superior in financial and physical resources, to countries of superior educational attainment found all over the planet. They just don't educate their children as well.

 

In addition, the college level education in which the US shows well is strongly supported by foreign and specialty systems or cultures - not only in the students, where US colleges skim off the cream of the educational systems of the rest of the planet for undergraduate and graduate students and TAs and so forth, but in the professors and research opportunities, and over a century or more of development. Those high achieving intellectuals who fled Europe in the twentieth century - many came to the US. The doctor who was educated in India or Pakistan and came to the US for medical school is almost a cliche now.

 

I dont' mean to dump too hard on the US - those tests we do poorly in are not the end all of educational system evaluation. But

 

when the marketers of a Hollywood movie based on a famous English play and important Western historical figure decide not to name it "Henry VIII" because they fear losing significant sales when people mistake it for a sequel to something they missed,

 

when a large fraction of the political landscape is told that bailing out huge and dominant private banks with loans from taxpayer funds is socialist policy, and does not laugh at the claim,

 

when an entire slate of major Party candidates for President raises their hands on TV and professes to have serious doubts about the validity of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution in order to avoid offending their voting base,

 

the country has an educational problem.

[physica]

Although this is very interesting I’m going to muddy the water by adding in another concept. I’ve had experience at Imperial college London (when I entered it was 5^th in the world) I was in medical research but now doing a degree in physics simply out of frustration. Marketing and funding plays a big role and the education in one university differs dramatically as well as the research. In the UK medical schools are funded by the NHS. Needless to say NHS throws its money around very carelessly. Because of this medical schools within universities will mass produce post-grad degrees and research in which the NHS will mass buy. One friend did a masters in clinical research (NHS funded) at Imperial and his stats module was how to use excel. He tried to use the masters to get a job in industry they looked at his syllabus and said it was a joke and he would get nowhere with it. They have now started awarding surgical trainees a masters if they complete a surgical rotation without having to publish or sit an exam. It makes their surgical rotation more competitive to get onto as people will get a masters for nothing so then they can boast at how competitive their surgical rotations are. I’ve worked with medical professors who get confused over the concept of distribution and can only calculate the mean of their outcomes. I’ve come across a jr dr from Imperial who passed her exams by remembering letter associations, like: L is for low lives so LDL cholesterol is bad, H is for heroes so HDL cholesterol is good.

 

Now this doesn’t mean that every medical graduate from Imperial is like this but the quality varies a lot from department to department and factors like funding play a role. Academics from the USA get paid more than academics in most other countries. I’ve worked with Oxbridge grads and they are like most other grads expect posher.

 

The economist points out that because of the USA pay scale there is competitiveness which increases cherry picking in their research etc.

 

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong

 

I know in the NHS when applying for a job if you have a publication it will add points on the point scoring system. I won’t be read but it will put you above someone who isn’t published. Because of this I have lost count of how many people I’ve met who will do anything to get any publication in any journal so they can get the clinical training job they want. One of my favourite papers that our department published was in a hospital setting. It found that if a patient was witnessed to go into cardiac arrest by a doctor/nurse they will have a better chance of survival than if they went into cardiac arrest when there was nobody around and were found some time after.

This poses the question. Are these league tables showing how good the university is or how good they can market themselves?

[John Cuthber]

Re. ". I’ve come across a jr dr from Imperial who passed her exams by remembering letter associations, like: L is for low lives so LDL cholesterol is bad, H is for heroes so HDL cholesterol is good."

While at Oxford I learned a mnemonic for the lanthanides:

late college parties never persuade Samantha's european girls to dispense hospitality, even though you linger.

 

Does that tell you

1) something about the quality of education in the UK or

2) that people are better at remembering mnemonics if they are a bit silly.

 

Actually, don't bother to answer. It has little or nothing to do with the topic.

[physica]

I appreciate the point more than the tone; although you don’t comment on the other concerns made my main notion still stands. It’s interesting to look into what schools are the best and question why they are but we also have a look at the validity of the scoring. There was a study done in the USA of the effect of a university education. They sat a verbal reasoning and logic/ critical thinking exam at the start of their university life, then sat another at the same level when they finished. Up to 45% of the students showed no significant improvement over 2 years and 36% of students showed no significant improvement over 4 years. At face value someone could assume it would be that the lower universities would have the majority of the students that showed no significant improvement. However, there was more of a variance between different departments within a university as opposed to difference between universities.

 

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much

(this is a link to the book, posted it anyway as I’m trying to reply quickly to keep the flow going, will post the paper when found)

 

What you get out of education is generally what you put in, but we have to ask the question what makes a good university? I make the point that the starting comment for this thread raises the question on quality of US education based on the fact that the US has the highest number of universities worldwide. Last year Queen Mary’s university London physics department took a lecturer from Imperial, a professor from oxford and a lecturer from Harvard. Queen Mary is ranked 114th in the world so it isn’t in the same league. So are these three academics burnouts or did they go there willingly? After going behind the scenes at Imperial I’d be the first to say it isn’t full of geniuses. It’s more likely that Queen Mary doesn’t have the same amount of cash to market itself as well as other universities above it.

 

There’s education and there’s learning how to play the system. The book posted above sparked a lot of debate on reforming the educational system in the USA. The original question for this thread was based on education at a university level. However, it quickly got changed as people said that there isn’t a big debate on this. Well there is. This is me speculating from anecdotal evidence but I’m putting it in to illustrate my stance on this. You’d most probably find a stronger coloration between students’ parents’ bank accounts and league tables of universities as opposed to how much the student has developed and quality of staff to the league tables.

Edited March 6, 2014 by physica

[CharonY]

I actually do think that most agree that the quality of education one receives pre-PhD is more dependent on the student rather than the school (if we disregard potential extremes, e.g. schools with no practical courses for natural sciences and suchalike). The training as a PhD student is far more specialized and highly lab-dependent in natural sciences. There the group is more relevant than the school. However, research-oriented studies will be funding-dependent and if you are a student in a teaching uni with no funds for high-end equipment, you will not receive technical training or expertise in them. As I mentioned earlier, one cannot conflate undergrad with grad training.

[overtone]

 

 

I actually do think that most agree that the quality of education one receives pre-PhD is more dependent on the student rather than the school

That's not fair to children - blaming US children for the outcomes we see from the State run high schools and grade schools of, say, Louisiana or Mississippi or Texas, is not reasonable.

[swansont]

I actually do think that most agree that the quality of education one receives pre-PhD is more dependent on the student rather than the school

 

I think the studies show the opposite. Poor test scores correlate with poverty. That's not all on the schools, since parental involvement also correlates the same way.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/poverty-test-scores_n_4298345.html

[Unity+]

That's not fair to children - blaming US children for the outcomes we see from the State run high schools and grade schools of, say, Louisiana or Mississippi or Texas, is not reasonable.

I would agree and disagree on this particular topic. Children seem to reflect the habits of their parents and, therefore, the decisions of their parents do affect children rather much. However, there is some choices of the child as well that are involved.

Edited March 13, 2014 by Unity+

[CharonY]

 

I think the studies show the opposite. Poor test scores correlate with poverty. That's not all on the schools, since parental involvement also correlates the same way.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/poverty-test-scores_n_4298345.html

 

I apologize, I should have been more precise. I meant once you get into college. The correlation with school performance and poverty at lower level schooling is pretty much established and I did not mean to confuse that. Actually, I should also retract part of my statement for college as I would think that poor students would also have a harder time to excel at exams as they may lack the support structure that more affluent students may have access to.

 

My comment was actually meant to state that the same student is not likely to receive a vastly different quality of education when visiting an ivy league or a "regular" university.

[swansont]

 

I apologize, I should have been more precise. I meant once you get into college. The correlation with school performance and poverty at lower level schooling is pretty much established and I did not mean to confuse that. Actually, I should also retract part of my statement for college as I would think that poor students would also have a harder time to excel at exams as they may lack the support structure that more affluent students may have access to.

 

My comment was actually meant to state that the same student is not likely to receive a vastly different quality of education when visiting an ivy league or a "regular" university.

 

OK. Yes, I agree. The phrase "you get out of it depends on what you put into it" comes to mind. While there's some self-selection going on with prestige allows for selecting better students, a student wouldn't automatically learn more at a "top" school. The big benefits of Ivy league seem to be more in alumni networking.

[overtone]

 

That's not fair to children - blaming US children for the outcomes we see from the State run high schools and grade schools of, say, Louisiana or Mississippi or Texas, is not reasonable.

I would agree and disagree on this particular topic. Children seem to reflect the habits of their parents and, therefore, the decisions of their parents do affect children rather much. However, there is some choices of the child as well that are involved.

Children choose from available options, and "available" includes the child knowing about them and not having to battle opposition from adults to choose them.

 

It's the role of the community, starting with the family and out, to set up the child's choices - to load the dice. Consider the choices available to children here http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/state-tries-to-right-east-st-louis-school-district/article_1d0fcb15-78a6-50e2-8f6f-bb6de23e534c.html

 

vs here: http://finland.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=162937

[SlavicWolf]

I would say that an old Soviet or German style education with a rigid curriculum to separate less talented students from smarter ones makes much more sense to me than the education practiced in Scandinavia. Aside from, maybe, good financing, there is nothing exceptional in Finnish education.

[overtone]

 

 

Aside from, maybe, good financing, there is nothing exceptional in Finnish education.

Except, of course, its stellar and unmatched quality of outcome.

 

The Finnish system is much cheaper than the American one, btw - even before subtracting the free hot lunches and dozens of field trips and recreational physical activity in the early grades, and the free college for the older kids. If you just compare the "core function" teaching and classwork etc, it's about half price. It's also cheaper than the German, French, and British setups it regularly outclasses.

 

 

 

I would say that an old Soviet or German style education with a rigid curriculum to separate less talented students from smarter ones makes much more sense

That's what they had in China also, back in the Imperial era. It's sometimes blamed for China's odd five hundred year intellectual stagnation into the Industrial Age. It worked OK in Europe, but one wonders how it would have stacked up in Germany and the USSR without the populations of Jews boosting its upper levels.

 

One thing about the Finnish setup - people say they don't have the handicap of diverse and poorly performing cultures (by which they mean black people, usually), but they don't have the populations of Chinese, Japanese, Iranians, and Jews that are keeping the US curve above water either.