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🎓 Are America’s kids dumb?

The short answer: no - we

But, yes, the American K-12 system has plenty of things we should fix:

• Funding: (Public) Schools need more funding and resources for teachers’ wages and classroom materials

• Inequality: Schools need to close the gaps between different racial groups’ test scores

How do we know that ~the youths~ are actually pretty smart?

Look at how they do compared to other countries’ kids via the two main standardized, widely-implemented tests: TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).

To summarize the results:
On average, American kids do better than Scandinavian kids (!!!) and many wealthy European kids on math. They even do better than countries with a reputation for churning out brainiacs, like Hong Kong and Israel, in science.

However, when we look at the score results by racial group, you can see how unequal our system is. 

Asian Americans and white Americans score near the very top globally, but Black and Hispanic Americans score lower.

However, Black Americans do better than most Eastern European countries, like Romania, Bulgaria, and even Greece.

And Hispanic American kids do better than countries like Slovakia, Iceland, and Serbia.

This means that even the racial groups that score lower in America do better than many other countries - that’s good!

So how can we help kids do better in school? We know it’s possible to get American kids to do really well on tests, so let’s try:

1. Focusing resources on the kids that are struggling the most in school since they’re the ones who need the help.
   

2. Removing the few but VERY disruptive students in class.

   1. This is an extreme comparison, but it’s kind of similar to crime: the vast majority of crime is committed by a small, repeat-offending group — you just shouldn’t let this small group ruin it for everybody else.

   2. How do we do this? Not sure tbh - maybe by putting the trouble makers into their own specific group + more discipline?

Here’s more good news: the U.S. government doesn’t even spend a crazy amount of money per student in public schools, yet we STILL manage to get above-average results.

Per student, we spend a little more compared to other wealthy countries, but we get better results, on average.

There are problems to fix, like mentioned above, but let’s define who the “people” complaining about the system are.

As seen above from this Gallup poll, it looks like parents have been satisfied with their kids’ education at the same rate since before 2000, despite all the culture war talk about teachers brainwashing students, school shootings, etc.

Think about how odd this is: most U.S. adults say they aren’t happy with the K-12 system, but most PARENTS (the people who are actually dealing with the system) say they’re satisfied with it.

Here comes the “surprise”: there’s a divide in satisfaction along political parties — most Republicans report record low levels of satisfaction with the K-12 system.

Yet another example of Americans’ opinions divided by political lines.

I’d say we can chill out about our schools falling apart, despite the problems we need to fix.

A final note: when evaluating the quality of something in America (or any country), I think it’s always a good idea to compare the thing you’re looking at to other countries, just like we did with education, but also other stuff — like crime, housing, safety, construction costs, etc.

Still curious?

• Here’s economist Noah Smith’s longer post on how our U.S. education system gets decent value for money

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Zach

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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.