And sometimes part of the reason a family has a lower social status than their neighbor has to do with inheritable learning disabilities, such as dyslexia. If you have dyslexic grandparents who barely set foot in school back when schooling wasn’t the default, dyslexic parents who left it as soon as legally possible without ever having managed to learn to read, the dyslexic children won’t have anybody who can help them with either learning to read or their homework (actual situation for one of my classmates; luckily she and her elder sister managed to learn to read and later generations get checked for dyslexia as soon as they grab a book).
Including the students. This is why it’s pointless to compare Finland or Germany or China or Japan to the United States. They are largely homogeneous societies while the U.S. is easily the most diverse among them. You can’t just take another country’s system, one that no doubt works very well for them, and apply to the entire United States.
Yes, Finland, a country with the population of Minnesota, does great. And guess what, Minnesota does great with education too!
Germany has enormous social differences and very complicated issues, as well as a long history of internal division with so many little sides they make my head hurt. Your ignorance is not a measure of their reality.
To ease your head pain:
I’ll grant you those results are over a decade old and Germany has certainly accepted more immigrants than the others I mentioned, but it is still a much less diverse country than the U.S.
I can relate. After being required to do a PhD in MATH which I dislike, I feel disgust for work. I am disgusted by math.
Doing too much unpaid and unwanted work makes one feel like <self censored>.
You’re only taking one measure of diversity, though. In the US English is the same across the country; German exists in a variety of quite distinct regional dialects. 87% of Americans consider themselves “middle class”; Germany is, or at least perceives itself as, a much more socially stratified country. I don’t claim to know Germany well, but from my limited observation social and cultural differences are much more marked between the different regions than seems to me to be the case in the US. And so forth.
I don’t think it’s meaningful to say that one country is more “diverse” than another unless you are quite specific about the specifica characteristic whose diversity you are measuring.
If you check the cite you’ll see differently. There are two studies, one measuring two characteristics of diversity (ethnic and cultural) and one measuring three (ethnic, linguistic, religious). So, that’s more than one measurement of diversity.
So you refute the studies I cited with your own observations of a country you admittedly don’t know well. Obviously, I disagree.
Really, we don’t need to get hung up on Germany. If it’s more comfortable, we can just exclude them from the conversation. But my point stands that comparing the U.S. education system to those of much smaller, more homogeneous societies is comparing apples and oranges.
Internally and historically as well, did you even read my post? Color isn’t the only measure of difference there is.
The studies I cited include, as I mentioned in the post above yours, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious diversity.
The answer to this weighty question is not just $$$.
It is the ability to learn as well, which differs markedly among various population groups.
Note in your article, for example, that normalizing for socioeconomic status does not erase the achievement gap. This is a well studied, very consistent observation.
Good teaching makes a difference, as does the ability to be taught.