The difference in the quality of primary and secondary education between the US and Europe has long since become one of the standard items in transatlantic comparisons. The received wisdom is that the US system underperforms Europe in educational achievement. A recent UNICEF study seesm to confirm this, as the US ranks 18th out of 24. It's certainly not a stellar performance, but looking at the scores the striking thing is that the countries that the US beat out are Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal. Beating the southern European countries really should not be too much of a problem, but Germany and Denmark? The top scoring countries are Korea, Japan, Finland, Canada and Australia. I don't know much about the education systems in those countries, but it would seem to me that they must be doing something right, at least as measured by scores on standardized tests. But what else can you use to compare? The problem with primary and secondary education in the US is not going to be solved by throwing more money at it. Figure 10a in the report on page 14 shows that the US is already the second-highest spending country as measured by average expenditure per child from the beginning of primary education till age 15, at around $70,000. Top-ranked Korea spends less than half that.

There's a whole lot more interesting information in the report, and I haven't yet had the time to go through it as thoroughly as I would have wanted. Their main conclusion is that the best explanatory variable of educational achievement in children is their parents' level of education. Given the good scores of Asian countries (see also the chart on page 27), it is tempting to conclude that their educational systems might be worthy of copying. Yet the insane pressure that parents put in their children < ahref="http://qsi.cc/blog/archives/000103.html#000103">in Japan cannot be healthy either. Perhaps a better role model would be the Canadian, Australian or Finnish system, which might make a better fit; at least it's worth exploring how they manage to score so much better and then experiment with the findings. There are many, many school districts in the US, so it should not be too hard to find a system that works better. It's a sad commentary on the state of public schools in the US that this has not happened yet.