Comments on: The First Man On the Moon? Buzz Lightyear!!

By: Subsidy Eye

Subsidy Eye — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 08:49:22 +0000

I should add that France, with a population of slightly larger than 60 million people, has an extremely centralized education system. In both reading literacy and science comes out just barely ahead of the United States. In mathematics, on which the French system puts a great amount of stress, its students’ scores rank 13th, against the 24th for their U.S. counterparts. That does not prove anything, except that “central direction” does not look to have undermined their ability to score at least as well as US students on the PISA exam. Whether French students could do even better under a different system, one less centrally directed, is of course the unanswered question.

By: Subsidy Eye

Subsidy Eye — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 08:37:23 +0000

Here is a table showing scores by country

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment#League_Tables

The United States does not rank any higher than 15th, and in two out of the three categories ranks lower than 20th.

Most of the top-scoring countries — Finland, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan — have established national core curriculums. Of course, several of these countries are relatively small (the population of Greater Philadelphia), so the fact that they have “central planning” as you call it may not be all that different than what takes place in a large metropolitan county in the United States.

My point is, there are many ways that national governments intervene in the education system, and the fact that there may be a national curriculum, for example, does not necessarily equate with disasterous results. It all depends on the mix of policies that are the most appropriate for each country’s population, traditions and geography. Simply pointing to the UK and generalizing from their experience is anectdotal, and not very enlightening.

By: The Elephant's Child

The Elephant's Child — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 18:12:41 +0000

And your examples of successful central planning are?

By: Subsidy Eye

Subsidy Eye — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:12:50 +0000

For comparative international statistics on the performance of school children, see the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reports from the OECD:

http://www.oecd.org/department/0,3355,en_2649_35845621_1_1_1_1_1,00.html

I challenge you to find any (inverse) correlation between performance and the degree of central government in designing or directing the country’s educational system. Of course, the devil is in the details, such as in how politicized is the control, how much discretion teachers are allowed, and the roles played by standards.

One poor performance of the U.S. education system — its appalling record of teaching proficiency in other languages — is itself a problem that closes the country’s eyes to good ideas in other countries. Since few reporters (or analysts for think tanks) are fluent in other languages, they naturally turn to the English-speaking United Kingdom for (bad) examples, be they in health policy, educational policy, or some other area of policy.

So, yes, if you always look to the UK, you are going to find poor performance in a lot of areas. On the other hand, their military is pretty darned good, all things considered.