Why are our universities world renowned but our high school system is not?

[shawbridge]

@GMTplus7, maybe our school systems are failing us. Here’s the paragraph from which you pulled out one sentence to react to:

Maybe I’ll have time to think about public schools, but just highlight three thing that weakens US K-12 schools: First, we finance them through local property taxes, which implies significant inequality in funding from wealthy to poor school districts. Second, state regulation may contribute to the extent regulators get captured by ideologues or the faithful – a number of states have tried to ban or downplay the teaching of the theory of evolution and substitute in some cases creation science. This can’t be good for science education. It is really not clear that we need different science curricula in different states. Hopefully, we are teaching them all chemistry and physics etc. Third, while there are a lot of great teachers in unionized school systems, I believe unions in recent year have done significant harm to the quality of schools by reducing motivation (one of my relatives is an enthusiastic teacher who would stay well after school and organize events for his kids and the union rep told him to stop working so hard and doing extra things as it made the other teachers look bad) and making innovation and flexibility harder.

Clearly, I was saying that there are a number of contributing causes. Here’s what you pulled out to disagree with as if it was the only proposed explanation:

First, we finance them through local property taxes, which implies significant inequality in funding from wealthy to poor school districts.

In the extreme, $10 per kid for poor districts and $20K per kid in rich districts, funding inequality would clearly impact outcomes. The question is all other things equal, does more money help? I think the answer is “It depends.” If it is wasted by a corrupt system as in say Mexico, then no, or by horrible administrations as may be the case in some inner city systems, not a lot, but I think the data are pretty unequivocal, for example, that fully funding full day early childhood education in the inner cities would improve outcomes.

@sorghum, I think your description of US versus the UK is off in two dimensions. The US dominates the UK on quantity/quality of research output and quality of graduate education. On the first count, the UK has two very strong schools. The US has many. In the Shanghai ranking (which I just pick because it was the first on my Google search), the US has 8 of the top 10 (Cambridge is 6th and Oxford is tied for 9th) and 16 of the top 20 while the UK has 3 in the top 20. The UK has 5 in the top 50 while the US has 32 of the top 50 (see http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2014.html)/. On quality of graduate education, students come from all of the world to get PhDs in the US not because it is easier – my impression is that D Phil students have fewer courses to take and get on to thesis more quickly but the required one to two years of coursework in the US gives PhD students much broader and deeper training than DPhil students. I think of the D Phil as a PhD lite – if you want a quick degree, get a D Phil but if you want the best training possible, get a PhD. That doesn’t mean that phenomenal people don’t come out of the D Phil programs – they clearly do – but I think the programs provide lesser education.