> Finland <snip> the public education system is superb This has been looked at extensively. At the most basic level it boils down to the structure of governme

> Finland <snip> the public education system is superb This has been looked at extensively. At the most basic level it boils down to the structure of government/politics, culture and unions. Taken in reverse order, unions in the US had plenty of justification to exist decades ago. From my perspective, except of for a limited set of domains, they have been doing more harm than good for a very long time. Education is one such domain. If one were to dig down through problem areas in the US educational system one would find the dirty, ugly, stinky intersection of teacher unions and politics. Culture is another factor. The US is very different culturally from lots of countries. I mean, not to go too far, look at the ridiculous rejection of masks in the middle of a pandemic. Anyone who doesn't understand just how different the US is from a place like Finland need not go much farther than the cultural differences as they apply to this pandemic. Finally, government. Unlike Finland (and lots of other countries) there is no unified US-wide educational system. The federal government does not run the show. What we have is fifty mini countries, each with their own idea of reality. Even worse, we have thousands of teacher unions, each, in turn, with their own ideas of reality. This all leads to a f-ing mess where some schools want to teach such nonsense as intelligent design while others focus on science. No, we can't compare the US to Finland (or anyone else) other than to say that we definitely need to sort this out. How? Isn't that the question.