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US Educational Scores Not So Abysmal
DavidHumus writes "The much-publicized international rankings of student test scores — PISA — rank the U.S. lower than it ought to be for two reasons: a sampling bias that includes a higher proportion of lower socio-economic classes from the U.S. than are in the general population and a higher proportion of of U.S. students than non-U.S. who are in the lower socio-economic classes. If one were to rank comparable classes between the U.S. and the rest of the world, U.S. scores would rise to 4th from 14th in reading (PDF) and to 10th from 25th in math."
Poor people can succeed, rich people can fail academically - money alone doesn't "fix" anything in education, it just makes it look nicer.
You're partially right. Poor people CAN succeed, but rich people are much, much more likely to.
I grew up dirt poor and succeeded, academically and otherwise. But I'm the only one in my family -- and nearly the only one in my high school -- who "succeeded" by any normal definition of the word. Now look at the average SAT scores of folks that the Rockefeller's and Bush's of the world grew up with -- almost nothing but successes.
Surely you're not suggesting that there's not a VERY strong correlation between money and academic success? Money's not the cause of that success, but it's a massive, massive contributor.
This just means that the US has extremely rich kids, who are smart. And extremely poor kids, who are dumb.
No, it means the US has rich kids receiving a good education, and poor kids receiving a poor education.
It's more complicated than that. You can't just put the poor kids in the same school as the rich kids and expect them to suddenly do a lot better. I went to a really good high school, and while I was taking the AP and honors classes, the poor kids in the same school were, for the most part, not.
There's a whole lot of built-in advantages that come from having educated parents. Before you even go to school, they've generally taken the time to teach you a great deal of things, which gives you a leg up against your classmates. When you first start taking math, and you have problems understanding basic arithmetic, they're going to be able to help you with that homework, whereas other kids go home, and their parents don't have the knowledge to help them. Your parents might take the time to involve you in their electronic hobbies where you get to learn something they don't teach at the schools, while the other kids' parents don't have any hobbies other than watching TV, because buying random electronic parts to build something doesn't really fit in their budget...
Basically, the problem needs to be approached from a socioeconomic perspective, not just a quality of schools perspective.