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I have an 8-year-old child. Over the years she has already been in school in Finland (public), UK (somewhat fancy private), and USA (good public in Manhattan).

• harrisonjackson 6y ago
  The school mentioned in the article seems to have a huge lack of top-down control and parental involvement.
  • earthscienceman 6y ago
    Well, as someone deeply involved in education, these statements combined together highlight exactly the problem with America's educational system. Like many American institutions, it is extremely diverse in its methods and primarily focused on providing services to the wealthy. The parent comment here is correct in highlighting a problem that exists at the highest levels in our school system and the topic article is highlighting a problem that exists at the lowest levels. They are very different problems. However, they have the same root cause. What would actually solve this is a systemic shift in America's education system to a more centralized approach that promotes well researched methodologies and systems to be used across the country. We have phenomenal teachers and phenomenal schools that operate at extremely high efficiency. The problem is that this quality is extremely poorly distributed. This would be very unpopular with the wealthier members of society though, as it would make access to academic silo schools much less of a given for their children. And access to education, and the societal benefits that this access brings, is one of the primary motivators for wealthier Americans. You don't have to look farther than Hacker News. How often do you see titles here like "MIT students launch the Facebook of toilet paper", where MIT student is seen as a meaningful signal. Your child doesn't get the opportunity to be the beneficiary of that headline without first being purchased a top rate education at America's best high schools.
    • anewaccount2021 6y ago
      You're being too high-minded. This is about absent parents and a school board that has already given up on students before they even enroll. This is not a "systemic" national issue...its an issue for inner city schools where the students are poor and brown.
    • SubuSS 6y ago
      So in the world you describe, if a parent wants better education for their child (than what the government provides uniformly across the country) - is the only recourse private schools? So I come from India where the above model is in place - very few government funded schools are considered top ranking. Parents live closer to good private schools and fund the same when possible. But usually this means hours of transit for the child. At least from my perspective, the US model seemed better. Here you can choose to live in a nice neighborhood if you can and get a lot more benefits than just good schools. These things seem to go together (safety / general wealth of the neighborhood / public services / good schools / accessibility to job locations and so on). I am curious to see why someone would not want this. If the overall push is that the whole country should grow only at a uniform rate and we should penalize folks who work hard to get these benefits in lieu of folks who can't (or won't), that doesn't sound very American, at least not the American dream I was sold when I moved :).
      • ascar 6y ago
        I live in Germany and private schools are the absolute exception. I'm not a parent yet, but from my experience as a student you just send your kid to the closest school and school reputation isn't really a thing. There are some "rich kid" schools, especially bording schools, but they are really rare and graduates don't really have a lot of benefit when it comes to university applications (German universities operate by taking in many students and make the weak performers drop out or switch to a subject better fitting their skills) To promote higher achieving students we split kids into three different tiers based on their performance in their 4th school year (around age 10/11). Each tier is actually a completely separate school (location, building, curriculula, even different qualifications for teachers). Students that do exceptionally well/bad can still move between tiers every year. There is a world where the state provides education and thinking about private schools isn't an important consideration for parents. I would expect it's similar in many other EU countries. So it's not one or the other like you fear.
  • jimbokun 6y ago
    Yes and no. There are extensive documented procedures for handling under performing or absent students, defined in great detail at the top level. But seems like there is a disconnect between those bureaucratic processes and actual connections between the teachers making sure the students know where they stand.
  • heterodoxxed 6y ago
    | works three jobs. I wonder why.
• WoahNoun 6y ago
  American schools are not a monolith. There are some of the world's best schools and (first) world's worse schools. If you could afford a fancy school in the UK, you were likely in a nice neighborhood in the US with enough property tax base for that neighborhood to afford a good public school. The US's problem is that school funding is local and most neighborhoods don't have that property tax base to afford a good school. There is very little top down control and parental involvement in poor neighborhoods with poorly funded schools.
  • dcolkitt 6y ago
    100% agree. Middle-class American schools are actually very good by international standards. The reason US test scores are low is because of a long left tail of failing schools in low income areas.
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  • skissane 6y ago
    > The US's problem is that school funding is local Maybe that's the answer then? Abolish school districts, all public schools should be controlled by the state government? Then local taxes won't pay for schools, only state and federal taxes will. That's the system we have here in Australia, and it seems to work okay.
    • medium_burrito 6y ago
      We already spend a shitload of money on education here, and it's crap. Same with healthcare. Our spending is not the problem. Spending more money on schools will not fix a social problem.
      • skissane 6y ago
• hc-taway 6y ago
  > The American school is striking in its emphasis on externally managed curricula, state-wide tests, etc. It feels like the teachers are competent but nobody trusts them. One of the most important things to understand how America works, I think, is to appreciate that blame-avoidance is the #1 priority of basically all actors who matter—which itself isn't that unusual—and also that we also have a bizarre cultural blindness to same, such that we'll give people a pass when they plainly are responsible just because they set something up in advance to shift the blame (to e.g. a system of rules or a committee). The flip side of this is that we crucify people who can have mistakes pinned on them, or admit to a mistake. "No-one got fired for buying IBM" is practically a national motto for us. We'll tolerate a chronically-broken and ineffective system far, far longer than we will an individual making one bad choice for every ten good ones they make. Keeping this in mind makes a lot of how our institutions and "decision-makers" operate much clearer.
  • khrbrt 6y ago
    Way off topic for a discussion about schools, but your comment reminds and enrages me about Abu Graib and how they court marshaled a few low level enlisted soldiers and nothing happened to the colonels, generals, and high level DoD officials who were responsible for, and well aware of, the conditions at that prison.
• Grustaf 6y ago
  Clearly parental involvement was exactly the problem here. It took her 4 years to notice he was failing every class. Maybe she was very busy, but still.
• ars 6y ago
  You can't compare Finland and the USA because this is a race problem, not a school management or teacher trust problem. If you compared Finland to only white students in the USA you'll see one result, if you compare to only black students you'll see very different results.
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    There are a lot of reasons why making comparisons between Finland and the US is not appropriate. Just one of them: there are more school kids in Brooklyn and Queens than in all of Finland. Comparing to Finland is just cherry-picking. Of course, then there are the systemic/societal reasons you allude to. In America having a child for many people means losing your job and your health care. In Finland they give you a year off and a complete wardrobe for your kid. In Finland they ended homelessness entirely. In America at this very moment they are debating on the senate floor whether repealing eviction moratorium would incentivize single mothers to get a job. There's really no comparing.
    • prepend 6y ago
      Finland pays its teachers less: 42-51k (US$) [0] vs 57-71k (and cost of living is higher in Finland than the US). [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-teachers-around-world-where-100300817.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-teachers-around-world-wh...
  • heterodoxxed 6y ago
    40 years ago, Finland was a backwater nothing of a country and by actual investing in their children and education and teachers equally across the board, they went from that backwater to #1 in education. We in the US have never even tried that for anyone but our wealthiest, let alone our poorest. If we took this problem seriously on a federal level, and put all our options on the table, we absolutely could fix it.
• StillBored 6y ago
  This is one of the things that changed over the past 20-30 years in an effort to boost the US international rankings. Every level in the system has attempted to remove control from the lower layers. At this point the teachers are mostly functioning as little more than preprogrammed robots. Even in the less restricted classes, you have district level mandates/guidance on what kind of CAD software/etc can be taught, and how much time is given to each part of the subject, generally down to the day. I had a middle school English teacher who spent a couple weeks at the beginning of the school year teaching a basic calligraphy style. His general idea was to instill a respect and love for penmanship believing that would extend to the words being written as well. I can honestly say that in my 14 years of English education (including a few mandatory college classes), I both enjoyed and probably learned more in that single English class than any other single English class (which was generally my worst subject). I happened to run across some of his pictures a few years back, and had a short online conversation where I learned he had been forced out of education after 30 something years teaching because the school refused to allow him any flexibility to extend the curriculum. That particular school where he taught, and I attended was likely the worst school I ever went to (and still today has very poor rankings) yet, it had five teachers who I consider to have some of the largest affect on my education. Including one that encouraged and helped me to enroll in her C programming class at the local JC when I was in middle school. So, I haven't any idea how those teachers that used to have the largest affects on some kids survive without the flexibility to diverge from the curriculum to make the subject interesting for their students.