4 ms·

It is silly to compare the absolute expenses for education in different countries, you have to somehow normalize for example the teachers wages with respect to

It is silly to compare the absolute expenses for education in different countries, you have to somehow normalize for example the teachers wages with respect to the purchasing power, since it is much cheaper to live in Vietnam compared to the US in absolute numbers. That is not to say that most likely something cultural leads to the poor performance of US high school education. According to J.Simons (Fields medalist turned hedge Fond billionaire) especially in STEM fields Schools compete with tech companies for talent and can only offer much worse compensation. The other thing is that in the 50-70ties the number of people that studied in preparation for and went to college was somewhere between 8-15% (continuously rising) it is much easier to teach smart students with few good teachers than to prepare basically everyone for college. In Germany my parents almost exclusively had PhDs as their teachers, now 60% of all students prepare for university and we have a shortfall of ~20000 teachers with half of the STEM education majors going to industry.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
To ensure there's no fundamental confusion, the terms you're talking about are "nominal" and "parity adjusted", which are what I gave. Nominal is the "absolute" cost of something. Parity is the adjusted value after compensating for how much things cost in a given region. You seem to be proposing that perhaps teachers in Vietnam are paid well relative to other jobs in Vietnam. This is not the case. A fairly recent government study indicated that some 50% [1] of teachers regret deciding to teach as a career, with the article going into detail on the lifestyle of a teacher - which is horrible, in large part due to dreadfully low compensation. PISA measures the performance of 15 year old students, so that is another topic altogether. This is why Vietnam is such an interesting case study. Like many things, our spending is driven more by intuition than data. And Vietnam shows that our intuition on successful educational outcomes is pretty much useless. [1] - http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/education/25476/50-percent-of-vietnamese-teachers-regret-their-career-decisions.html http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/education/25476/50-percent-...

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

To ensure there's no fundamental confusion, the terms you're talking about are "nominal" and "parity adjusted", which are what I gave. Nominal is the "absolute" cost of something. Parity is the adjusted value after compensating for how much things cost in a given region. You seem to be proposing that perhaps teachers in Vietnam are paid well relative to other jobs in Vietnam. This is not the case. A fairly recent government study indicated that some 50% [1] of teachers regret deciding to teach as a career, with the article going into detail on the lifestyle of a teacher - which is horrible, in large part due to dreadfully low compensation. PISA measures the performance of 15 year old students, so that is another topic altogether. This is why Vietnam is such an interesting case study. Like many things, our spending is driven more by intuition than data. And Vietnam shows that our intuition on successful educational outcomes is pretty much useless. [1] - http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/education/25476/50-percent-of-vietnamese-teachers-regret-their-career-decisions.html http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/education/25476/50-percent-...