Why It’s Never Mattered That America’s Schools ‘Lag’ Behind Other Countries

[Ian Curtis]

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:

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.

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?