Public schools where I live in Texas are great. Much better than the $33k per year school we had in Silicon Valley. The places were they seem broken are in big city districts where certain political factions, specifically teacher unions, get outsized influence on policy. I saw this up close when I lived in Jersey City and was considering a run for school board on Mayor Fulup’s slate of candidates. After being warned about “crossing the unions” and getting into tiffs with the NAACP representative, I discovered that many of these groups don’t care a lick about education, only money and power. And it isn’t about funding: look at the per pupil expenditures in DC or New York, and compare them to Austin suburbs like Leander, or Houston suburbs like the Woodlands. Those suburban districts spend less than the districts that perpetually fail. There are policy problems, not financial ones.

>And it isn’t about funding: look at the per pupil expenditures in DC or New York, and compare them to Austin suburbs like Leander, or Houston suburbs like the Woodlands

Spending per pupil can be a deceiving statistic due to the vastly different needs between poor/middle-class/wealthy students

For people not aware of the geography referenced here: Leander and The Woodlands are both affluent areas outside of the major cities referenced.

I would suggest that the students here are doing well due to a combo of the following factors:

Smart parents live here, and they have smart kids

Rich parents spend less time fretting about paying bills and more time helping kids with homework

One (rich) parent works, one stay-at-home parent takes care of the home -> more time with the kids

One parent is involved with the PTA, which correlates well with student success

And to he clear, I'm not casting judgment. I live in Frisco, Tx. We are enjoying ALL of the above benefits

As someone who lives in Leander, I would say Westlake is the affluent area of Austin and Leander is the up and coming suburban middle to upper middle class area. Leander ISD has some great schools and some bad schools and historically wasn't great.

Adding on:

Well educated parents are more likely to have the skills themselves to help with homework and are more likely to put more emphasis on academic performance.

> They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD.

Functional isn't what should be aimed for: excellent should be the mark. Right now, the majority still forces their students into thought boxes (e.g if you fail maths at school, you're supposedly balls at engineering for the rest of your life), pretends that spending 12 years memorizing facts is the pinnacle of education, employs unmotivated teachers with below-average salaries, and teaches topics from the last century.

My university experience was simply a continuation of highschool and being treated like a child. Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding, attendance was obligatory, tech was sometimes >20 years old, and so on and so forth.

Even the systems and curriculums within states (!= country) can vary pretty heavily. The bologna reform supposedly made comparing degrees between countries better, but a bachelor in mechanical engineering may mean something entirely different in Poland and Spain.

Better doesn't automatically mean good.

Wow I studied in France and live in Hong Kong. What you describe is so very close to HK where I have a daughter to raise.

In France, school is relaxed. It's more about making you an aware citizen than a calculator. The parents always feel the schools are mediocre because they fail all sort of international grading competitions.

Universities are inexistant on the Shanghai Index. You go to class if you want, exams can be compensated by good personal projects (I hated theorical geometry but loved OpenGL so much, that I passed the 3D geometry class with a 10% mark at the exam and a 95% mark at the OpenGL 3D engine semester project that implemented the concept I could not find pleasure in memorizing formally).

Now I have a choice to put my kid in the HK/Chinese system, the French system or the UK/American one, and ... frankly Im so shocked by the lack of focus on kind citizenship, political duty, critical thinking and no alternative to the ever-parent-scaring french "school is not to give you a job, but to give you knowledge" that I still put her in the French system which I used to think was shit.

But well it's not public and some of the things you said on public school apply to France too (unmotivated teachers, often manipulated by unions to think they're so underpaid they have no choice but to interrupt and sacrifice their kids education to fight for their stolen basic rights)

> Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding

This was the biggest part that got me. I thought university was a place to actually learn things.

It turned out that it's a place for you to rote learn all the required material without any understanding. I saw it firsthand with my friends, who only knew how to follow the steps they'd been taught to solve problems.

"Excellent" is a relative term. The average school is going to be average by definition. If you focus on excellence, you are focusing on the best-performing schools and ignoring the rest. If you are interested in the quality of the education the majority of kids are receiving, you should pay more attention to the average unexceptional schools, where most kids meet the expectations but do not excel in anything. If the expectations are too low, there is probably something wrong with the administration or the level of funding, or with the status of teaching as a profession.

Are you aware that most of the San Francisco Bay Area is not actually in the city of San Francisco?

The fundamental problem is that formal schooling is basically a waste of time for a reasonable fraction of the population.

Do you need any more than basic literacy and numeracy to be a retail worker, cook, laborer, driver?

These students would be much better off learning a hands-on trade, or in the workforce.

The school leaving and employment age should be moved to 14. Expulsions should also be properly enforced, including for non-White children.

This is kind of the approach that Switzerland is taking (disclaimer; I'm Swiss), although I would not formulate it as drastically. It depends a bit on the region but school is required until 14-ish, after that there's a split for "gymnasium", which is continued full-time-school, around 20% of the students do this (again, varies by region). The remaining 80% start an "apprenticeship", where they work 40-60% on a job, and spend the rest of the time in school (where there's about a 50-50 split between general education and job-specific education). Whenever someone doing an apprenticeship figures out that he wants to go back towards higher education, there are plenty of routes to do so.

In my opinion it works quite nicely. The 80-20-split for gymnasium (which requires an entry-exam, but again, region-dependant) ensures a certain level for students in gymnasium, and the "job schools" for the apprenticeships allow for job-specific education. All in all, I consider it a pretty decent system.

The USA is actively ending those programs because all of the people in the 'gymnasiums' are Jewish/White/Asian, and this is seen as politically/socially unacceptable.

What’s the cut-off though? Kindergarten is clearly too little and 12th grade Calculus is used by so few.

Furthermore, there are intangible social outcomes of having kids in school for 12-13 years that can’t simply be ignored.