You spend enough to have good schools (and good health care). If you don’t, it isn’t a money problem.
This is a complex issue, though most of the thread is devoted to why public schools are weaker than they could be. I’ll come back to public schools, but I want to suggest that there are a few reasons why American universities are dominant in rankings and in demand for spots at them. It was not always so. I suspect that UK and German and other universities would have been considering stronger than US universities prior to World War I, with perhaps the exceptions of Harvard and Yale. Let me lay out a few things that contributed substantially to the current preeminence of elite US universities.
One was a social change as elite universities shifted from being solely training grounds for the social aristocracy and started to value academic excellence among their students. I think this change really began to take place in the late 50s and 60s. You can see for example that the Jewish populations at these schools started to increase significantly in the 60s and beyond. Later the all male schools admitted women in the 70s and the elite school began admitting Asians, etc. So the students were getting better.
Second, US universities benefitted from the influx of European faculty before, during and after World War I. Think Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Eugene Wigner … among physicists, John von Neumann, Richard Courant, Richard von Mises, Paul Erdos, … among mathematicians, etc. You will see the same in social sciences as well (Paul Lazarsfeld, Herbert Marcuse, Erik Erikson, …). So, elite universities were the beneficiary of a great professorial migration as a result of Hitler. Here’s an interesting article on the effects of bringing in German Jewish scientists: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/august/german-jewish-inventors-081114.html.
Third, the way the US finances universities is different from most other major countries. Oxford, Cambridge, the French and German universities are financed completely or almost completely by their respective national governments. In contrast, most of the elite universities in the US and private not for profits, although Berkeley, Michigan and other state universities are or have been great. The consequence of the different funding is that the European governments have been egalitarian or highly political in hiring and promotion and creating slots (Oxbridge less so than other European universities include other UK universities) – I’m overstating a bit to make the point. What they are not really giving weight to or sufficient weight to is quality of research. In contrast, the US private elites compete for quality. The better the quality, the higher the donations they can get. Take a look at a place like the Broad Institute. Because of the initial core and especially because of its founder, it attracted a significant amount of private money. With that money, it was able to attract some of the best people in the field, who by virtue of their skills get the best students, get governmental research funding and begin research projects that attract yet more good people and attract more private money and a virtuous cycle ensues. Funding seeks quality and universities compete for quality to get funding. This is quite different than the model of European universities (I don’t think it is the model of Japanese or Chinese universities, but I am less knowledgeable). As a consequence, US universities end up with a disproportionate share of the best researchers in the world. Oxford and Cambridge have belatedly started to try to seek private funding as well as government funding.
Certain state universities have also sought excellence, like Berkeley, Michigan, etc. and still are outstanding research institutions. However, a combination of weak economies and tea party-like political ideology has led to systematic underfunding of the great public universities as well as in some instances efforts to instigate ideological redirection (this latter part has probably not been too successful). As an example of the former, the (Republican) governors of the states of Illinois and Wisconsin have proposed a $387 MM cut in the U of I’s 206 budget and a $300 MM cut in the U of Wisconsin’s 2015-7 budget. As an example of the latter, Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, very recently tried to rewrite the mission of the state university to take out the search for truth or improving the human condition or the public good or anything that went beyond the borders of the state and instead limited it it to developing students. When this was leaked, he backed down and pretended that the explicit editing was an error. (See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/02/04/scott-walker-wants-to-drop-search-for-truth-from-the-university-of-wisconsin-mission-heres-why/). As a consequence of reduced funding and political meddling, the great state universities are probably in a state of somewhat hidden decline – probably some aging great names are still there but they will be less attractive to the very best people than they would have been otherwise.
Maybe I’ll have time to think about public schools, but just highlight three thing that weakens US K-12 schools: First, we finance them through local property taxes, which implies significant inequality in funding from wealthy to poor school districts. Second, state regulation may contribute to the extent regulators get captured by ideologues or the faithful – a number of states have tried to ban or downplay the teaching of the theory of evolution and substitute in some cases creation science. This can’t be good for science education. It is really not clear that we need different science curricula in different states. Hopefully, we are teaching them all chemistry and physics etc. Third, while there are a lot of great teachers in unionized school systems, I believe unions in recent year have done significant harm to the quality of schools by reducing motivation (one of my relatives is an enthusiastic teacher who would stay well after school and organize events for his kids and the union rep told him to stop working so hard and doing extra things as it made the other teachers look bad) and making innovation and flexibility harder.
school bond funding is not all about school bonds There is a lot of state and federal funding for schools In california about 55 per cent of school funding is from the state and 20 per cent is from the feds It is been shown time and time again that if you want better schools you need more money which means higher taxes. That is a choice. Sorghum where is your evidence that we spend enough?
The UK has two clearly top universities (Oxford and Cambridge) for a population of about 60 million. I don’t think the US top 10 can fully match that quality. The typical strong US university is no better or worse than a typical strong British university. In terms of rankings of research output (for example based on citations), Britain does at least as well as the US (with less spending).
The US is unmatched as a combination of population size and modern industrial power, but it is not intellectually dominant in the world.
I think the main reason that the US (and even more so Australia) are attractive for foreign undergraduate students is that there is a relatively feasible path to permanent residence (compared to current UK policy anyway).
If spending more money is all that’s needed to ensure good public schools, then Wash DC sbould have the best public school system in the country.
Corporations in public schools: testing industry, textbook industry (profit means TX and NH get same science book), sports industry (AstroTurf and helmets), building industry (brick often is easier to fund than services), tech (millions of computers with little data that they change learning outcomes). I’m sure I could come up with more, but I’m off to work.
“Africa, is actually a continent, which consists of 58 states, territories or countries.”
-What it has to do with the fact that most countries there are underdeveloped and my example was referring to one of them?
Are we into geography lessons here or we are into adult discussion about a shameful condition of the k - 12 system. Anybody can bully me as much as they wish, I will never change my opinion, I know how school education should work, and it is not the way the American k - 12 is. Not facing the problem is the main obstacle in resolving it. Any drunk who says that he does not have a problem, will have no chance at quitting drinking, everybody knows that. Well, if head is in a sand, then eyes do not see anything. I guess, this position works for some, congrats on finding a proper solution!
And yet the states with strong teachers unions have some of the best high schools in the country, along with some very bad schools. Generally speaking, the worst schools are in areas of grinding poverty and their problems are very challenging.
Of more concern for overall performance, is the vast middle. There is a somewhat strong current of anti-intellectualism in parts of this country. While testing has been a standard for HS graduation since the No Child Left Behind, the level of testing in many places was incredibly low. Nothing like the “leaving tests” kids take in other countries. This is in contrast to the top US HS where the work load is probably too intense. But when we push our kids we get the “Race to Nowhere” backlash. When tests become harder, like the Common Core tests, parents complain about teaching to the test. Teachers experience everything from parents who don’t even show up at back to school night or respond to requests to discuss their children’s progress, to parents that come in to argue over a few points on a test. Kids, parents and the community, tend to give more attention and support to the top athletes than the top students.
There is also an attitude that kids are born with certain abilities and can’t do much to change that. The “I am terrible at math” mantra that is very common, rather than if I work harder I can be successful. In many other countries, hard work (sometimes to a ridiculous extent) is valued over innate ability.
There are bad teachers and certainly it should be easier to fire them. But the reality is that most teachers do a decent job. Districts could fire every single bad teacher and still see very little change in achievement, unless there is an overall change in what is required of students and a change in attitude of students and parents, especially for the kids in the middle.
I think the use of “FIRST,” means the author wasn’t saying “ALL that’s needed”. It is one factor listed in the post you quoted.
I can’t speak to the rest of the country but in Ohio the wealthiest districts are, generally, the best. Whether that’s due to their willingness to pass levies to fund schools or the fact that their kids eat well, read books at home, have educated parents, don’t have to have metal detectors or dodge bullets walking to school or whatever, is part of the debate.
We live in one of the best districts in the state and we do pay high property taxes for it. Also housing in general costs more here than it does 5 miles down the road in a poorer district where dropout rates are high and few kids go on to college.
Spending “enough” money is a relative term. You have to compare that to cost of living. That means from country to country, state to state …
@GMTplus7, maybe our school systems are failing us. Here’s the paragraph from which you pulled out one sentence to react to:
Clearly, I was saying that there are a number of contributing causes. Here’s what you pulled out to disagree with as if it was the only proposed explanation:
In the extreme, $10 per kid for poor districts and $20K per kid in rich districts, funding inequality would clearly impact outcomes. The question is all other things equal, does more money help? I think the answer is “It depends.” If it is wasted by a corrupt system as in say Mexico, then no, or by horrible administrations as may be the case in some inner city systems, not a lot, but I think the data are pretty unequivocal, for example, that fully funding full day early childhood education in the inner cities would improve outcomes.
@sorghum, I think your description of US versus the UK is off in two dimensions. The US dominates the UK on quantity/quality of research output and quality of graduate education. On the first count, the UK has two very strong schools. The US has many. In the Shanghai ranking (which I just pick because it was the first on my Google search), the US has 8 of the top 10 (Cambridge is 6th and Oxford is tied for 9th) and 16 of the top 20 while the UK has 3 in the top 20. The UK has 5 in the top 50 while the US has 32 of the top 50 (see http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2014.html)/. On quality of graduate education, students come from all of the world to get PhDs in the US not because it is easier – my impression is that D Phil students have fewer courses to take and get on to thesis more quickly but the required one to two years of coursework in the US gives PhD students much broader and deeper training than DPhil students. I think of the D Phil as a PhD lite – if you want a quick degree, get a D Phil but if you want the best training possible, get a PhD. That doesn’t mean that phenomenal people don’t come out of the D Phil programs – they clearly do – but I think the programs provide lesser education.
Also, the poor districts have to spend a lot more money on things that rich districts do not. More kids are classified, more security, more money on remedial education and ESL, and often more administrators to deal with disciplinary issues. It is easy to say that big city district spends more per pupil than suburban paradise district, but the suburban school likely gets quite a bit of additional funding from the parent organizations or fundraisers that are not possible in inner city schools. Parents also are able to pay for tutors, music lessons, and athletic teams that help more affluent kids succeed.
And there is only so much spending money on schools can do if the child’s home life is dysfunctional. My daughter worked with a 7 year old boy a couple of years ago (she was a reading aide at the time), and she used to call me crying because this child was doomed. Both parents in jail, he lived with an elderly grandparent who had 3 other kids in a 1 bedroom apartment, clothes were dirty, he was always hungry…
We haven’t found many ways to deal with that societal problem, although education can help.
While I think it’s a shame we don’t get the best and brightest to be teachers, I really think the biggest problem is that too many kids are coming to school from dysfunctional homes. I have a friend who was a teacher in the Bronx. She had a 10 year old in her 3rd grade class that got no special ed, but who could not read at all. My friend did not manage to get her to read either. The next year she moved into a suburban district and suddenly all of her kids were reading at grade level or above. She didn’t suddenly become a great teacher - in fact she may have been a better teacher in the Bronx, but it was burning her out.
Even functional but very poor families can have a hard time supporting their kids as students. If a parent is working several jobs, they may have no choice but to have little supervision after school. They may not be able to respond to teacher requests. Life on the street will be much more alluring if life at home is so difficult. We may not be able to solve these problems, but there are certainly ways to make things better and give kids a chance to succeed.
American universities reached unprecedented heights thanks in part to the fact that the most educated people on the planet – the Europeans – slaughtered one another twice in the past century. As result, the US became an attractive haven. Combine that with a post-war economic boom, progressive policies (GI bill, etc.) which encouraged higher education and its affordability, and the uniquely American tradition of widespread alumni support/donations – and all of the sudden you have America as an astounding, and very wealthy, educational power.
Fast forward to today. The Europeans have caught up (and in many ways exceed) the US economically. Asia is booming and pumping astounding amounts of money into their education and infrastructure, while we’re cutting back constantly. We’re increasingly poor, and increasingly stratified. Our poor are poorer than those in most developed countries. Our rich are richer. Any attempt at lessening these staggering gaps is shouted down as socialism, or worse.
Why shouldn’t these very significant changes be reflected in our public schools and how they succeed (and fail) our kids? It’s only a matter of time before our excellent universities – particularly the public ones – fall in world rankings as well.
But if one problem is that the rich get richer and the poor poorer, should we no wonder why our cost of tertiary education has increased in a multiple of inflation and much faster than the wages of the parents sending kids to college and the wages of the student who attend the colleges for a number of years?
Could this be case where we spend ourselves into oblivion and the remnants will be none other climbing rock walls, peanut and gluten free cafeterias, 24/7 entertainment hookups, and a bunch of manuscripts nobody outside a peer journal ever read?
We keep talking about the demise of our schools when the stories happen to be about the inability to raise sufficient revenues to cover the running wild expenses. Our “American” approach is to focus on reworking the sources of revenues as the reduction of expenses does not fit our progressive vocabulary.
The real story about US education is not found in Cambridge or Berkeley nor found in Syosset or any other high prized district that has attracted the people who could vote with their feet. The real stories are written in Detroit or Washington, DC where the performance of their ISD is evident. The stories are also written in places like El Paso where the local version of the UT system is following a model to accept everyone (or 99 percent) of applicants and graduate a tiny fraction of them in a correlation to the drying up of federal loans and grants.
Perhaps there is something to learn from a no-frill model of education that rewards austerity and performance. But then, our students would have a whole less amount of fun and freedom.
The real stories are also written in Berkeley – where the vast majority of middle class kids attend private schools 
You’re right, or course. When it comes to universities, the rich will have their fabulous schools with climbing walls and gluten free cafeterias, the rest of us will have to be satisfied with the no-frills models that seem to do just fine by, for example, the youth in Europe.
Isn’t part of this simply a struggle over the actual purpose of tertiary education?
Is it a training ground for careers? Is it a place to allow people to grow as individuals? Is it a place to allow professional and personal networks to develop? Is it a place to help individuals become skillful enough to improve their own or others’ situations? Is it a place to weed through people to decide which are apt enough to merit recognition as intelligent and/or skilled? Is it a system of certification? Is it a place to warehouse potential skilled workers so that they enter the job market a bit later in life?
The truth it that it’s all of these (and many more!), particularly in the US system. Unfortunately, way too many debates about higher ed, including in the debate going on in this very thread, seem to assume that it is and can be only one thing. This leads to a huge issue—quite often, including in the debate going on in this very thread, various participants presume, consciously or not, that their own idea of the purpose of tertiary education is The Only True Purpose, and then develop conclusions or critiques that work given their own assumption but not given others’.
Isn’t it many of the above: to educate students beyond the secondary level in a way that will prepare them for 21st centrury jobs? Not sure I would agree that is a place to “weed through” or to warehouse potential skilled workers (since most 18 yos are not really all that skilled).
Xiggi you are correct. It makes no sense why college has gotten so expensive when the salaries of professors have not increased nearly as much. Less frills, and lower cost, would be very appealing to many.
In many poor school districts, however, there already is a “no frills” approach due to lack of funds. But the barriers to real learning there are difficult and may not respond to a no frills approach.
Cracking down on for profit colleges or other colleges that take high levels of Pell grants and other federal dollars for little return seems like low hanging fruit in trying to fix some of the problems at the college level.