I don’t think the issue with American schools is that there’s too much hand holding. If anything, it’s the opposite; teachers at drastically underfunded schools don’t have any time to help the students of their 50 person class through the confused curriculum.

Here, we have to go through 4 state exams just to get to university. The first when you’re 11, the second at 14, then two consecutive ones at 17 and 18. There’s a national curriculum that the exams will be about, although the schools are free to add to it. So however you feel about the school or the teacher, you have to master the subjects enough to go through. And that means paying attention in class, cram before it, or hoping you can cheat. We have our own problem too, but the consensus among all the people I know that have moved to the US is that classes are easy there. Not a bad thing per se (better explanation, better understanding instead of rote memorizing).

Yeah you’ll never convince me that one-time exams are a good system to determine the rest of a student’s life, but I don’t disagree our schools are much easier. I’m just arguing the issue is less on a behavior of teachers level and more on a funding and incentives level. If I recall correctly, one issue is that schools are incentivized to lower educational standards to prevent students from repeating grades so that that receive more funding.

Baltimore would be a counterexample. They spend $22k per student, with a student-teacher ratio of 15 to 1. This still results in remarkably poor performance, with only 8% of students proficient in math and 22% in reading.

Culture and genetics would be next obvious explanations.

> obvious explanations

I'd want to assess a few lessons first.

Genetics lmao come on man.

The mean IQ score is 100... Unless you are in some elite school for the top 10% it is not reasonable to use genetics as a justification. It sounds more like a thinly veiled form of specifically American racism.

An instructional challenge at the Ivy end, is incoming students having had such clear teachers, that they lack the attitudes and skills for wrestling with information to extract understanding.

> Not to disparage American school system (my country’s is worse) but it’s very much easy mode

I used to be very upset about how low the bar of the US school has when it comes to STEM subjects. There was a meme that contrasted the difference between maths in 1970s and 2010s. In the meme kids used to learn how to find the area of an irregular shape, while now the kids are asked to color a regular shape.

But then I made peace, as I realized that the US people simply didn't think that it was that important to push everyone to be good at STEM -- just some level of general understanding is good enough. To most people, the level of STEM as in IIT's JEE or in various national entrance exams in Eastern European countries is for elite students. The US school systems would rather have kids spend more time on sports, on ECs, on APs of kids' own choices, and etc. That's really just different trade offs. For parents like me, that means I don't have to worry about ECs, but I'll have to find tutors, serious tutoring schools like AOPS, and private teachers for STEM subjects. Or if my kids are truly talented, I'll guide them to find the right study groups, summer camps, and college courses.

I used to feel pain as I believed that the students in the middle, which were the majority, would be left behind. But I realized, especially after I've got kids, that the majority of the students were not into STEM anyway. If they had a choice, they'd rather spend time watching YouTube channels and hang out with their friends.