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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Canada's always been like this.

I remember as a kid living in a single bedroom basement apartment with my parents and sibling in Vancouver as a kid, but we used it as a backup in case we wouldn't get a GC in the US. The racism was definetly palpable there as well, and education quality was crap compared to my average elementary school in California.

(Eastern) Canadians have a stick up their ass as if their QoL is better than the US, but most of their American experience is usually a rust belt town in Upstate New York or Michigan. Meanwhile, back in BC, almost every family I knew had at least one relative living in Sacramento, Spokane, Portland, Seattle, etc doing construction, municipal jobs, or something.

> Justinas Stankus

Tbf, his research is about ethnic conflict in Myanmar, so he kind of has to be in SEA

Not sure this post is HN related though.

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> and education quality was crap compared to my average elementary school in California.

Even if this was once true - I doubt it is (on average) any more. The recent PISA rankings put Canada above the US in every area - especially so for science and mathematics. The socio-economic status of a student also impacted the quality of education less in Canada than in the US. [0]

[0] https://www.oecd.org/pisa/

US and Canada have a different PISA selection methodology. Canada excludes First Nation/Native heavy provinces, territories, and schools in their PISA assessment [0], while the US equivalent tries to take a cross sample across all races and social classes [1].

It's useless doing a national level comparison of PISA scores when each countries uses a different methodology to select students.

[0] - https://www.cmec.ca/251/Programme_for_International_Student_...

[1] - https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/2018technotes.asp

Americans do well on PISA compared to their ethnic relatives. <https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco...> Asian Americans do better than Asians; whites do better than Europeans; Latinos do better than Latin Americans; and blacks do better than Africans.

Hispanics and especially blacks' scores drag the US average down. Both white and Asian Americans score higher than Canada (and white+Asian is essentially Canada's racial makeup), and higher than New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Norway, and the UK; Estonia is below US Asians but above white Americans. Norway is by far the wealthiest Nordic state but its average is only two points higher than the US national average, despite not having a demographic that is 13% of the population and scores 85 points below the white American average.

(Disclaimer: I have not reviewed this year's PISA results. However, I know of no reason why the above analysis would not still apply.)

For your education:

What area were you in? Could it be that it was a rough area? My experience in the GTA is that there definitely are better/worse schools, but there's less elitism in that doctors/CEOs/lawyers will still send their kids to good public schools and private schools are not especially known for academic eliteness (in fact, the most elite academic schools in the GTA are all public, with the exception of 1)

Vancouver suburbs and also rural BC.

Also, the curriculum is absolutely behind the US. What I learnt in 4th grade in BC was what I learnt in California in 2nd grade.

I actually got pushed up a grade for that reason (and got screwed over when we ended up moving back to the US).

> doctors/CEOs/lawyers will still send their kids to good public schools and private schools are not especially known for academic eliteness

Same in the US. There's a reason why the most expensive houses in the US are in the best school districts. For example, in the Bay Area, houses in San Francisco are cheaper than those in good catchment districts of Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, Alameda County, and Contra Costa County. I ended up in one of those top public HSes in the Bay and my classmates were all extremely well off (middle/upper level management at FAANGs and even a couple CEOs of top tech companies).

It's the same in Seattle (Bellvue, Redmond), Chicago (North Burbs), NYC (parts of NJ and Hudson River Valley), etc.

Markham and Fremont aren't all that different, except Fremont has more Millionaires and Billionaires, and much more pan-Asian. Back in Canada, Chinese, Indians, Pinoy, etc were definitely more segregated than in the US.

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