Yes, but many European countries engage in so-called tracking of students, putting them in separate tracks for tradeswork, skilled labor, and university such that the "dumb" ones aren't taking university entrance exams.
In the US this has become increasingly frowned upon by (perhaps) well-meaning administrators who feel that to do this is unconscionable. In my freshman year of high-school they had advanced academic and standard groupings in the same school, but removed this my sophmore year. They re-branded all the base-level courses as "College Prep," with "Honors" being the former advanced-track classes, AP and IB courses already being branded as such.
Of course, if you were in the advanced group the counselors and teachers would all push you into AP and IB courses but they also encouraged everyone to take the SAT and ACT tests, to apply to university, and discouraged enrolling in the trades program that the county offered (half-day academic, half-day trades classes).
This type of "everyone goes to college" mentality is why the SAT is a poor academic bellwether.
https://os.unil.cloud.switch.ch/tind-customer-edudoc/aa7b2aa...
Because it is unconscionable. I dropped out of high-school at 16. I was able to go back and earn a degree in computer science at the age of 28 at a Canadian school. Under the European system where your life path and career trajectory is decided for you at 14 years old, I wouldn't have been able to do this.
Insofar as I'm aware, one can change tracks in most tracking systems. It just isn't entirely common, likely because it puts most on a path where they should be.
Because the "dumb" students are pushed into trades instead. And good luck going back to university when you don't have a long chain of prerequisite courses from age 14 onwards. In the states you can just get a GED and take the SAT (along with individual selection) to prove you belong in university.
Assigning a person a career based on a test they take at 14 seems awfully reductive and like it would segregate students based on the social standing of their parents. Wouldn't surprise me if the German system reduces social mobility.
Should students have their entire lives mapped out for them at 14? And if so, why at 14? Why not at 10, or 6, or at birth?
> Assigning a person a career based on a test they take at 14 seems awfully reductive and like it would segregate students based on the social standing of their parents. Wouldn't surprise me if the German system reduces social mobility.
That's not how tracking works. They don't assign you a vocation.
Nothing necessarily precludes it but does it really happen that often? I couldn't find any data on this. Is there any evidence that "changing careers" is easier and more likely under the German VET system as opposed to the US system? In fact, evidence suggests that the permeability between the academic and vocational tracks is quite low in actuality [0]. One would logically think that making long "on the track" prerequisite chains a requirement for a career change would add significant barriers to entry. And there is some evidence that supports my theory that VET-like systems increase social stratification and socioeconomic inequity [1][2]
>They don't assign you a vocation.
A difference without a distinction IMO. They assign you a track of schooling which will leave you qualified for only a certain subset of jobs.
[0] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/a-skills-beyond-scho... page 38
[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40461-016-0033-0
[2]: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-social-stratificat...
Does it happen often in the alternative system? You started with saying that you left school at 14, then went to university at 28. No matter the system that's going to be an unusual situation.
Would tracking you differently have perhaps resulted in you being able to graduate high school?
Err, this is a positive thing? Personally I found the AP classes and SATs to be pretty useless beyond getting into college. We should just admit anyone who wants to to.
If the point of this is to justify high international test scores, there’s a much better argument there to test either nobody or everyone.
Well, the problem was not only that anyone could enroll in the higher-track classes but teachers and counselors pushed many to take courses they weren't prepared or willing to take. I myself was heavily pressured into taking higher-level Spanish courses than I was capable of, or even willing to take. I was explicitly told I had to because I wouldn't get into any universities without it. They really wouldn't take no for an answer, and I ended my senior year with a 40 / 100 grade, but thankfully had a high enough GPA and enough credits to take the hit without issue.
In almost every class one could expect the population to be bi-modal, you would have the flunkies with no desire or hope to succeed and you would have the students who wanted to be there. This resulted in the teachers often having to meet the lowest-common-denominator.
We had a programming course (Visual Basic) that after the first month they switched to one of those "learn-to-program" visual building-block languages, but then myself and a few others raised hell so they allowed everyone to choose which they wanted to do in the same class of 30 or so. The reality was the counselors pushed the students to take the course, and most figured they would get a free 90 minutes of fucking around on the internet, and the teacher ended up giving the lower-end of students low-but-passing grades.
As it were, I'd had that same teacher several years in a row and ended up as something of his assistant because I was already a competent programmer. They're not able to do anything, it's all a metrics / numbers game.
To be clear, my point isn't about the benefits of tracking as it is a rebuke of a broken system of metrics-appeasing administrators cloaked in the lie that everyone is equally capable of the same things.
Not at all, this is largely false.
In various countries in Europe where I lived there are no laws preventing people from taking university entrance exams.
If you look at [0], It looks like the parent is right.
> However, the PISA’s results are drastically over simplified. For instance, as noted in a report by Dr. Martin Carnoy of Stanford and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, American students actually perform better than the much higher ranked Finland in algebra in general, but worse in fractions. More importantly, when you normalize the results between the countries, adjusting for the relative poverty of the students taking the PISA tests, the U.S performs significantly better, ranking 6th in reading and 13th in mathematics, a drastic jump in both categories.
> Dr. Carnoy and Rothstein further note in their report What Do International Tests Really Show About U.S. Student Performance? that when you divide the kids based on family wealth, the actual gap in performance isn’t so stark between any country, with a not insignificant portion of the ultimate ranking of each nation being based on how many impoverished vs. middle class vs. wealthy students are taking the tests.
[0] http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/01/kids-get-sum...
We're doing better than that. When you break the results down by race, the US generally ranks second or first. (US whites do better than whites in Europe; US asians do better than asians in Asia, US blacks do better than blacks in the few countries with a large black population that aren't afraid to take these tests in the first place...)
2012, reading/science/math reported separately: https://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/overall-pisa-rankings-in...
2015, average of reading/science/math: http://www.unz.com/isteve/2015-pisa-mean-scores-in-perspecti...
This is not the stuff of an "educational crisis".
You can pretty easily observe the difference by looking at school performance in the x largest suburban districts in your state and comparing it to the x largest urban districts.
Not being in the field (and not really caring much about it TBH) I don't know how to evaluate the controversy or even its legitimacy.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/2015-pisa-mean-scores-in-perspecti...
That sounds like a cherry picked criterion to make a point.
In any case, looking at GDP per capita, Singapore is similar to the US, and also similar in terms of racial/ethnic diversity. Yet Singapore (as a whole) tops your rankings, and the US as a whole is way down in the list.
That's extremely different than the US.
72.4% White, 16.3% Hispanic, 12.6% African American, 4.8% Asian
In the US, the Asian "tiger mom" is seen as an odd peculiarity. That alone speaks volumes.
That's the entire point though Africans and Hispanics score lower than Asians and Whites, as shown in his link.
Citation? All countries have a mix of wealthy, educated students, working class students, students whose parents are drug addicts, immigrants who don't speak the local language, etc. In my experience the US isn't that different from other wealthy countries I've lived in.
SAT isn't really used for international comparison; a system like PISA does cross-sectional studies of countries, not elites. The results are not encouraging for the USA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/