Edjuhcayshun

Again so grateful we were led to homeschool our children. One of our sons didn’t read until he was 11 and would surely have been labeled retarded if he’d been in school. He graduated first in class from his Navy school and is now serving as a sonar tech on a submarine, getting letters of commendation from his captain for his superior performance! Our youngest son couldn’t sit still so I let him wander around as needed. When he did attend public school his band teacher said he had the most perfect rhythm he’d ever seen, and when our son was absent the band didn’t stay together as well. Our son didn’t pursue music, but began a nursing program after HS. He is still curious about science and medicine and can tell you all sorts of interesting things about the human body. He serves as a medic in the National Guard, currently deployed in Qatar. My parents were worried about our daughter because she couldn’t read fluently at age 7; she not only reads now, but she writes too (fantasy and sci-fi), graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BFA in creative whriting; now in an MFA program and teaching Freshman English. The other two boys are just as talented in their fields and have servants hearts, helping others by fixing, repairing, and building things of all sorts.
In my opinion the best thing to do is teach children how to learn and encourage their natural curiosity, find their talents and skills and let them pursue them! Schools can be so evil and squashing to children, despite the many good teachers (my husband is one of them!). I think education should be completely privatized, taken out of the hands of government and given back to the parents. When education isn’t mandatory there seems to be more value attached to it. When it is more difficult to obtain, it seems more worthwhile.

Michael Booth in his book The Almost Nearly Perfect People, about the Nordic countries, argues that the success of the highly rated Finnish educational system is due to the fact that teaching is a highly regarded profession and teachers are treated accordingly. Also, students who fall behind are given extra help, including one-on-one tutoring, while maintaining a consistent curriculum.

Countries with a Confucian heritage also treat teaching as a high status profession.

Being a teacher in the U.S. is not easy and generally not well rewarded.

Leo,

Teachers are Delusional About Their Value to Society

I haven’t looked at this in a while, but when I did my impression was that children of Scandinavian descent did about as well in American schools as Scandinavian children did in Scandinavian schools

My comment was not about Scandinavia, but about Finland, which is Nordic, not Scandinavian, probably the poorest of the Nordic countries with few natural resources, only 103 years of independence, and considerable losses to Russia in WW II. Yet Finland’s educational system is ranked nr. 1.

https://www.studyinternational.com/news/finland-best-higher-education-system-world-rankings/

Nokia didn’t come out of Michigan Tech. (The UP is the center of Finnish America.)

You get what you pay for.

My comment was not about Scandinavia, but about Finland, which is Nordic, not Scandinavian, probably the poorest of the Nordic countries with few natural resources, only 103 years of independence, and with considerable losses to Russia in WW II. Yet Finland’s educational system is ranked at or near number 1 in the world.

See, for example, the Universitas21 rankings of higher education, the UN’s Education Index, and the PISA study.

Nokia didn’t come out of Michigan Tech. (The UP is the center of Finnish America.)

You get what you design and pay for.

Utah spends almost the least per pupil and has some of the lowest paid teachers in the country but has better educational results.

In America there is no correlation between spending and educational outcomes. You do not get what you pay for

Utah makes my point that status is important. LDS culture gives education high status, even if it isn’t financially rewarded. And LDS parents do a lot of heavy lifting.

That said, I wish Utah ranked higher on this list:

https://www.thebalance.com/state-ranking-by-education-4589755

or this one:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

or this one:

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&sfj=NP&st=MN&year=2019R3

Maybe if Utah spent more and paid more, the state could lift its rankings. There is no reason why Utah can’t do better or even be number 1. There is no reason why Utah shouldn’t be number 1. It might even benefit the local economy.

Utah shouldn’t brag about low spending. As Dickens wrote: “Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it.”

But then again, if you believe there is no correlation between spending and outcomes, then you should believe that spending and salaries should be drastically slashed accordingly.

Actually you do always link to Scott Alexander, in the sidebar. Just sayin’.

I recall an experience in Lexington, MA, talking to a family that had moved there the year before from Provo valley. They described how surprised they that the local school had a pep rally devoted to the math Olympiad team.

The middle school child expressed his shock in going from an A+ Utah student to a B- Massachusetts student with a move.

A teenager who had moved from South Ogden to Westford would express an almost identical sentiment to me a few months later.

I sympathized; I had a similar, albeit less dramatic experience moving from New Mexico to Minnesota as a teenager. I went from being the best in my high school to not even in the top 20.

This is one of the reasons Ivy league schools rely so much on feeder schools. Not all A’s are created equal. Quality control. A valedictorian from a New England school will almost always be a more impressive academic performer than her counterpart in the Southwest or the Mountain West.

Between middle school and high school I moved from a town where the local industry was nuclear laboratories to a normal midwestern suburb. I went from being from being merely one of the 30 or so smartest kids in the class to top 2 or so (by test scores). I didn’t notice a meaningful change in the level of instruction, the kids in my old school were just smarter.