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There are a lot of differences between the US and other countries, I suspect the difference is either cultural or a function of the incentives given to teachers

There are a lot of differences between the US and other countries, I suspect the difference is either cultural or a function of the incentives given to teachers. I don't think much more can be read into it... In the US many private schools are religiously affiliated. In the example I cited above, parents send their kids to a religious school in spite of its religious affiliation because they perceive the quality to be higher. However, there are surely many cases in which parents take a youngster out of an adequate public school and send him/her to a religious school because of their religious beliefs, which in this case take precedence over their value of educational opportunity afforded by the public school. Suppose this phenomenon is responsible for the discrepancy you mention. Currently public schools get a huge taxpayer funded subsidy, whereas the school that the religious parents send their kid to does not. Maybe with an additional $8K per year per student, the religious school could afford better teachers, computers, curriculum, etc. Since so many more students attend public school (due to the economic subsidies), private schools do not obtain the same economies of scale or have remotely the same budgets. Many urban Catholic schools outperform the nearby public schools on less than half the money per pupil. Also, note that I'm not arguing that public provisioning is inherently worse than private provisioning, just that the way public education is provisioned today has a lot of problems that stem from the monopoly given to it and the lack of choice and competition -- for reference, suppose that there were two DMV offices next door to one another and employees at the one with lower wait times were paid a 30% salary bonus... how long do you think the line would be? My own preference would be for government provisioned schools to compete with privately provisioned schools so that parents and students could have more options. Right now, private schools are at a major disadvantage... so one would expect even worse relative performance. The main problem with government provisioning thusfar has been that the monopoly granted to public schools has been a target for greedy adults who want to capitalize on the government resources allocated to education. This is why we have seniority based pay, no competition, and why a teacher practically has to assault or molest a child in order to lose his/her job. With private provisioning on at least equal footing (and the explicit prevention of monopolies rather than the granting of one), it is a lot harder for interest groups to hijack the public funding the way teachers unions have. Incidentally, I think it should be illegal for any public official to send his/her child to private school or to receive care in a private hospital.

btilly 17y ago
Incidentally, I think it should be illegal for any public official to send his/her child to private school or to receive care in a private hospital. We have unexpected agreement on that. On the rest, my experience of Canada says that the culture is not very different than the USA. The political culture does have some significant differences, but the people are more similar than not. If education works better in Canada than it does in the USA (my experience and international comparisons suggest that it does), then it can work better in the USA as well. On the religious point, that may be a real factor in the difference. I ran across the one figure in The Homework Myth but don't have the level of detail to break down private schools by type. Another factor that I suspect is that there is a large gap between the factors that parents will see as quality, and factors that actually affect student learning. Private schools that offer a lot of extracurriculars and make good presentations to parents will attract investment, whether or not the students are truly getting a quality education. Personally if I could afford to, I would sidestep the whole mess and home-school. But that is not in the cards any time soon. :-(
- grandalf 17y ago
  Interesting. I'd be curious if perhaps other industries/services are better in Canada... for example, restaurant service, accounting services, etc. There could simply be an aspect of the supply of qualified labor -- if Canada has 5% greater supply of qualified workers for a given position, then some of them will have to work in a job that is beneath them, in which they will overperform. Canada generally has a slightly higher unemployment rate than the US, so arguably this results in some degree of labor under-utilization and overperformance... this may be the case with Canadian teachers and could be enough to explain the superiority. I think your point about the varying attributes of private schools is quite insightful. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, considering how much rote memorization of facts I was put through in the name of "education". I still don't know what I would do to educate a child. I think home schooling would be very difficult to do well, and I do idealize some of the best (public and private) school environments...

btilly 17y ago

Incidentally, I think it should be illegal for any public official to send his/her child to private school or to receive care in a private hospital. We have unexpected agreement on that. On the rest, my experience of Canada says that the culture is not very different than the USA. The political culture does have some significant differences, but the people are more similar than not. If education works better in Canada than it does in the USA (my experience and international comparisons suggest that it does), then it can work better in the USA as well. On the religious point, that may be a real factor in the difference. I ran across the one figure in The Homework Myth but don't have the level of detail to break down private schools by type. Another factor that I suspect is that there is a large gap between the factors that parents will see as quality, and factors that actually affect student learning. Private schools that offer a lot of extracurriculars and make good presentations to parents will attract investment, whether or not the students are truly getting a quality education. Personally if I could afford to, I would sidestep the whole mess and home-school. But that is not in the cards any time soon. :-(

grandalf 17y ago
Interesting. I'd be curious if perhaps other industries/services are better in Canada... for example, restaurant service, accounting services, etc. There could simply be an aspect of the supply of qualified labor -- if Canada has 5% greater supply of qualified workers for a given position, then some of them will have to work in a job that is beneath them, in which they will overperform. Canada generally has a slightly higher unemployment rate than the US, so arguably this results in some degree of labor under-utilization and overperformance... this may be the case with Canadian teachers and could be enough to explain the superiority. I think your point about the varying attributes of private schools is quite insightful. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, considering how much rote memorization of facts I was put through in the name of "education". I still don't know what I would do to educate a child. I think home schooling would be very difficult to do well, and I do idealize some of the best (public and private) school environments...