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Comment by BriggyDwiggs42 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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