From your linkd article:
"So much for the bigoted notions that Americans are dumb and Europeans are smart." > "There are 3 parts to the PISA test, Reading, Math, and Science."
There is more to an education than reading, math, and science. The US is particularly famous for frequently forgetting that other countries even exist. Most of the Anglo world (including, but not just US) is seen with some derision in Europe for being so proudly monoglot. A comment of "My god, that person was so dumb" is usually about their lack of worldliness, not their skill with calculus.
Quite the opposite - take a student from anywhere in the world, and on average, he or she will receive a better education in America
The people that get to immigrate to the US are the best and brightest, otherwise they don't get in. It's unsurprising that their children perform well. Yes, the US education system is far better than the third world's (what a boast!) but even if you're talking about Finnish immigrants, they're not going to be unskilled louts. The mere fact that they're allowed in means that they have already passed a bar.
I agree that the real problem is the disparity and locally-sourced funding for schools, but that doesn't mean that there's no problem with the curriculum across the board. There are squillions of articles out there bemoaning all aspects of the US school system's race to teach the test rather than provide an education.
I think that probably the most telling is when you hear of tertiary educators saying that they have to dumb down intro subjects and teach students the skills they used to get in high school - things as simple as how to construct an essay (which doesn't sound like it's an objective 'reading, math, science' measure)
> There is more to an education than reading, math, and science. The US is particularly famous for frequently forgetting that other countries even exist. Most of the Anglo world (including, but not just US) is seen with some derision in Europe for being so proudly monoglot. A comment of "My god, that person was so dumb" is usually about their lack of worldliness, not their skill with calculus.
I won't deny the lack of language learning in the US, which is something that I find disturbing, particularly with the "flattening" of the world in recent years. However, I firmly believe that it has nothing to do with the education system. The real problem (if you can call it that) is that Anglophone countries don't need to learn any other languages. The reason why Europeans can speak foreign languages (most often English) is because they need to.
Moreover, if you live in an Anglophone country (particularly America, and I'd expect Australia is similar too, due to its linguistic isolation), there just aren't very many chances to practice a language even if you learn it. I know the public schools where I grew up required students to learn foreign languages (and they usually learned Spanish), but most of them forgot the language within a year of stopping classes, because they never got a chance to use it. This situation may very well change with the rapidly growing Hispanic population in the US.
OTOH, if you live in a non-Anglophone country, you're constantly bombarded with all kinds of media in English - on the web, in print, and on the silver screen. This effect is amplified in countries that speak languages with relatively small numbers of speakers. For example, the postage stamp-sized countries of northern Europe are more fluent in English than southern European countries such as France, Spain, and Italy, and a big reason for this is that their small size means that there is less domestic media to consume, so they turn to Angolophone content.
> There are squillions of articles out there bemoaning all aspects of the US school system's race to teach the test rather than provide an education.
Once again, I think this is largely a function of the quality of the school. Having graduated from a public high school in an affluent district after the turn of the millenium, I can say that contemporary US public schools do not solely teach to the test if the students are primarily wealthy suburbanites. We received plenty of stimulating education and in college we were thrown straight into the deep end of the pool, with lots of graduate-level material that we didn't understand for quite a while, a far cry from the reteaching of high school material that everyone says is happening. Then again, that's only my personal experience.
There is more to an education than reading, math, and science. The US is particularly famous for frequently forgetting that other countries even exist. Most of the Anglo world (including, but not just US) is seen with some derision in Europe for being so proudly monoglot. A comment of "My god, that person was so dumb" is usually about their lack of worldliness, not their skill with calculus.
Quite the opposite - take a student from anywhere in the world, and on average, he or she will receive a better education in America
The people that get to immigrate to the US are the best and brightest, otherwise they don't get in. It's unsurprising that their children perform well. Yes, the US education system is far better than the third world's (what a boast!) but even if you're talking about Finnish immigrants, they're not going to be unskilled louts. The mere fact that they're allowed in means that they have already passed a bar.
I agree that the real problem is the disparity and locally-sourced funding for schools, but that doesn't mean that there's no problem with the curriculum across the board. There are squillions of articles out there bemoaning all aspects of the US school system's race to teach the test rather than provide an education.
I think that probably the most telling is when you hear of tertiary educators saying that they have to dumb down intro subjects and teach students the skills they used to get in high school - things as simple as how to construct an essay (which doesn't sound like it's an objective 'reading, math, science' measure)