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have you seen our school systems, k12. Its terrible and in dire need of a revamp. No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just

• jmcgough 8mo ago
  It's really not about this - it's that for decades we've been able to draw top global talent to the US. We've cut research funding so heavy that we can't even support post docs who are American citizens now. My friends are going to Europe, Canada, Hong Kong.
  • rayiner 8mo ago
    How important can that be? America’s only real competitor technologically is China. And they’ve had essentially no immigration of “top talent.”
    • dboreham 8mo ago
      China has 3X more people, and America has a relatively terrible education system, so they have to import talented people who were educated elsewhere.
      • rayiner 8mo ago
        America has a very good education system against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration. In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry. The American education system has major and important challenges, such as how to educate the large share of kids whose parents are economic migrants from non-English speaking countries. But those challenges aren’t relevant to the question of whether the U.S. can produce sufficient highly educated people domestically. China, meanwhile, doesn’t even participate in PISA outside four wealthy provinces.
        • deleted 8mo ago
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        • lugu 8mo ago
          You are wrong at so many levels. Your argument is factually incorrect and logically flawed. And you know it.
          • rayiner 8mo ago
            The facts are in the PISA data collected by the OECD. If you drill down by subpopulation, the majority group in the U.S. goes toe to toe with the majority groups in Asian countries, and beats the majority groups in western european countries: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F300g9wczxm4c1.png%3Fwidth%3D971%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dfb3d7d8d9ac87026cd84ff683d0863922bdbd38d https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.... National competitiveness and distributional equity don’t go hand in hand. China has made tremendous achievements by focusing investment on key provinces instead of trying to bring everyone up together.
          • chaostheory 8mo ago
            Maybe you should actually prove him wrong. Making a claim without evidence doesn’t help anyone.
        • gregorygoc 8mo ago
          > In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry. Translation: rich kids have better access to top education in America. Got it.
          • rayiner 8mo ago
            White people in the U.S. aren’t just the “rich” subset of the whole population. They are reflect a complete spectrum, from poor to rich. They’re equivalent to Koreans in Korea or Japanese in Japan. Other groups in the U.S. aren’t just economically different, they’re sociologically different in dimensions that don’t really exist in Korea or Japan. For example, 71% of hispanics speak Spanish at home. That reflects a group that’s comprised mostly of immigrants and their children. That poses additional challenges to education, beyond the economic differences. Poor whites in the U.S. and poor Koreans in Korea may have educational challenges from being poor. But that poverty isn’t layered with being raised in a household with immigrant parents who are in an unfamiliar country and probably don’t speak English fluently. That’s an additional layer of challenges that needs to be accounted for in comparing across countries.
    • HarryHirsch 8mo ago
      They imported top graduate student talent that went to the us and might have wished to stay but could not or wouldn't put up with the H1-B indentured servitude or was better paid back home or just patriotic. Also - less financialization. In US, a statistician goes to work for any 3-letter agency or high finance. In a less financialized economy they might devote themselves to crystallography instead.
    • jmcgough 8mo ago
      Ask this again in 40 years. The people we're losing are early career researchers, so this is really a generational loss of talent that we've created. Brain drains can become self-perpetuating once they start.
      • wongarsu 8mo ago
        Germany was in almost this exact situation. It was a self-perpetuating machine for centuries, where ambitious students came to study under the best professors, leading to top students, many of which stayed at those universities to become top professors themselves. Then WW1 put a bit of a damper on that, and the 1930s and 1940s broke it. Germany is still not insignificant in science, but really a shadow of its former self And that was despite putting an emphasis on education, and the 1930s and 1940s having a lot of science funding. Remove the people and the flywheel stops
    • notatoad 8mo ago
      >America’s only real competitor technologically is China this is a very shortsighted view. america's only real competitor technologically right now is china, because america has typically attracted the top talent from everywhere else. if america is no longer capable of attracting top talent from everywhere else in the world, and other countries can start attracting american talent, it won't be long before america has a whole lot of real competitors.
• rayiner 8mo ago
  > No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just let kids pass because of feelings The whole point of no child left behind was to actually measure student performance instead of relying on feelings: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-child-left-behind-worked/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-child-left-behind-wo... If you try to disaggregate the effects of e.g. immigration, you can see that American education is actually good: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/18bzkle/2022_pisa_scores_by_country_and_us_racial_group/ https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/18bzkle/2022_pi.... White students in the U.S. do comparably to students in Korea in the international PISA test, and better than students from western europe (excluding the immigrants in those countries). You have to compare like with like. A huge fraction of American kids grow up to parents who are not native speakers of English. That’s not true in Japan or Korea.
  • autoexec 8mo ago
    Over half of the adults in the US can't read at a 6th-grade level. They aren't all immigrants. Clearly American education is not actually good.
    • rayiner 8mo ago
      Even looking at the entire population, the U.S. has higher reading scores on PISA than the big western european countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy): https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2019/12/pisa-2018-results-volume-i_947e3529.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2019/12/pisa-2018-resul.... In reading, the U.S. was basically tied with Japan and the Scandinavian countries. That is consistent with other international measurements: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1. For example, the U.S. is one of the top performers in the world in the 4th grade literacy--behind Hong Kong but ahead of Macau. In 4th grade math, the U.S. isn't as good, well behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. But still comfortably ahead of Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.
      • jimbokun 8mo ago
        TLDR: Western Europeans are dumber than an American 6th grader.
• brightball 8mo ago
  Don’t forget campaigning to remove standardized testing from admissions processes even leading to UCSD having to create remedial math classes for their engineering students.
• specialist 8mo ago
  Yes and: USA has been reverting education to its pre-Sputnik arrangement since the end of the Cold War. Without an external motivation, our domestic reactionaries have regained the advantage. Its been a generations long fight to roll back the New Deal (including public and hogher education). I have no clue if / when the pendullum will swing back.