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Why America's School "Lag" Has Never Mattered
The Organization for Economic and Cooperation and Development (OECD), a forum of the top 34 developed economies, has released an annual education report, and guess what? The U.S. has once again ranked poorly in relation to many other developed countries. An article at TechCrunch argues that we needn't worry because it doesn't matter: "However, the report implies that education translates into gainful market skills, an assumption not found in the research. For instance, while Chinese students, on average, have twice the number of instructional hours as Americans, both countries have identical scores on tests of scientific reasoning.
'The results suggest that years of rigorous training of physics knowledge in middle and high schools have made significant impact on Chinese students’ ability in solving physics problems, while such training doesn’t seem to have direct effects on their general ability in scientific reasoning, which was measured to be at the same level as that of the students in USA,' wrote a team of researchers studying whether Chinese superiority in rote scientific knowledge translated into the kinds of creative thinking necessary for innovation."
Quality of life.
That's what HDI measures, which I why I quoted the rankings.
Buying power.
As it happens the GDP numbers I quoted are adjusted for purchasing power but if they weren't, the adjustment would work in favor of the USA as the cost of living in Germany is higher.
Divide by number of people in the country.
Seriously? 60 versus 5? USA population is only about 3.7 times greater than Germany's.
national debt share per capita
Ok, USA: $50K, Germany $57K
Literally every sentence you said is wrong and yet you are calling others blind morons.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Ah, but the inequality adjusted HDI (you know, the one that measures the quality of life based on the median, not the mean) has Germany at #7 and the US at #23, according to this. We're only 3 spots above Greece, and their economy has completely collapsed. It's great that there's a bunch of total wealth in the US, but if I never get any of it it doesn't do me much good.
GDP is not a measure of purchasing power.
HDI measured by mean couldn't be more stupid, and is just the sort of parameter I'd expect from someone educated in America.
University ranking needs to stop confuddling undergraduate education quality with research output. The US and the UK still come out on top at the top for academia, no doubt, but any average high school or university graduate in the US/UK is ignorant as pigshit.
German innovation tends to be in manufacturing, energy, etc. i.e. stuff people need to live. And one does not solve problems by throwing more money at them.
Even with big geographic and demographic advantages, Germany is still lagging behind the USA and the reason is that the burden of the heavy regulation, taxes, welfare state and the unions is too much even for the German worker to carry on his back.
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Socialism is slavery.
Lame. I see you're not here for an argument, but to preach. Go back to America - your dying empire needs you.
The normal quoted newborn survival statistics are in fact from the CIA world fact book, which is quoted as "the number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year", thus not really warped at all.
The US comes in at 174 from 222 (222 being the best), slightly better than Croatia, but worse than (say) the EU (by one-and-a-half lives per year, in this case). The US is still significantly better than Afgahnistan though, by about 115 lives/year.
You can lie with statistics easily enough, but sometimes what's in plain sight is just that.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Having taught in a few places, I can tell you that the UK university system is considerably better. Germany, France, etc are at least peers. The US university system has some good points,it has a few stars who have at least their equal in Europe (Oxford/Heidelberg/Paris/Cambridge etc etc) and a lot of mediocre state schools which are significantly below their European counterparts. When we take on US grad students we have to send them to Junior/Senior level classes for a year or two before they are ready to start the DPhil like the European students are when they come in.
What always fascinates me about this debate is how much cherry-picking of statistics is involved. In all cases, someone in the media or on a blog, cherry-picks some statistic out of the PISA test, then writes a headline like "Oh no! The US is falling behind and we're DOOMED!"
I've actually read the results of the PISA test. The results are surprising. The US is approximately average among the OECD countries, virtually indistinguishable from France, Germany, or the UK. Even the vaunted German education in science, is only modestly better than US education in science: 539 vs 502. Even Japan, which has a reputation for non-stop studying and cram schools and so on, scores 539 on science, vs 502 in the US. I'm using science as an example because it's the middle case: the US performs slightly better relatively on reading, and slightly worse on math, but not to any significant degree.
Most industrialized first-world countries are not very different from each other on the PISA test. China is much better, however China is widely known to cheat on this test, and they cherry-pick students from an elite high school in Shanghai rather than randomly from the population, so the Chinese results were prefaced by an asterisk on the PISA results until recently. Aside from the Shanghai Chinese results, most industrialized countries are not very different from each other. Take the science test as an example. Spain performs very poorly, at 489; and Japan performs very well, at 539. Almost all large, industrialized countries are within this range. There are one or two outliers (Finland is an example) but not many.
The only way in which the US educational system is demonstrably inferior to any other large, industrialized country is the proportion of students who score a 6 (the top score) on the math test. In this regard, a few countries (like Japan, Switzerland, and Korea) have ~7% of their students which score in the very top category of the math test while the US (and most other countries) has about ~2%. This is the only worrying statistic. China (Shanghai) has a fantastic score in this regard, but again it is cherry-picked.
The lesson of the PISA test is this: most rich countries are quite close together in almost all regards. However a few of them (Japan, Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan) have a small portion of their populations (less than 10%) who score very well in math.