Why It's Never Mattered that America's Schools Lag Behind Other Countries
There are some pretty interesting facts presented by the author. I was never aware that the US students as a whole have never ranked particularly well, but that the US has a large percentage of top tier students.
In particular:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Gregory Ferenstein
Most importantly, the innovators at the helm of an economy come from the top quarter of students. While the United States has a dismal track-record of inequality, we treat our brightest minds quite well. The “average test scores are mostly irrelevant as a measure of economic potential,” write Hal Salzman & Lindsay Lowell in the prestigious journal, Nature, “To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.”
The United States, they find, has among the highest percentage of top-performing students in the world. Whether the abundance of smart students is a product of U.S. culture, an artifact of the genetic lottery, or some unknown factor hidden in our education system is anyone’s guess.
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This plot from the cited article in Nature has some interesting implications.
What's the marginal economic return of adding 1% to that top tier? And how difficult is it motivate/teach 1% of students?