Americans living intensely

From French Plan to Add to Already Lengthy School Days Angers Parents and Teachers by Nicola Clark.

Education change is difficult everywhere - goals are too many, too disparate and too lacking in consensus; deferment to emotional decision-making rather than evidence-based decision-making is rampant; distrust in government is too high; overall there are too many oxes that can be gored, to ever make education reform easy.

There are enormous degrees of variation among the OECD countries in terms of goals, means, and structure of educating children. In some ways, fortunately, we are running a huge experiment to see what works where and under what circumstances. We only see through the educational glass darkly.

My anecdotal impression, having been raised, lived and worked in countries in South America, Europe, Australasia and Asia, is that the international comparisons are at best indicative and likely are not particularly accurate. My sense is that all countries do pretty well in educating the top 10% of the population and it is here that the US does especially well. The top 10% of schools in the US, public and private, both K-12 and University, are quite remarkable and have little competition globally. With the next 50%, I suspect the US does about as well, maybe a little better, than most of our OECD peers. It is the bottom 40% where the real differences emerge. All the countries do a pretty poor job of educating the bottom 40% in terms of outcomes. Because of its heterogeneity (in terms of culture) as well as the high proportion of emigrants, the US appears to do much worse than others. However, I think even in this area, the US is probably doing a better job than most. I have seen motivated emigrant children go through disastrous local urban public schools and do phenomenally better than their resident peers. The education is there for the taking, it is a matter of who is motivated to avail themselves of the opportunity. The whole process is not pretty or efficient but until you look at apples-to-apples it is hard to arrive at conclusions on a comparative basis.

A couple of interesting facts from the article.

Despite their four-day week and nearly four months of vacation, French children spend more hours in class than most of their European counterparts: 847 hours a year for third graders, for example, compared with 750 hours on average for children elsewhere in the European Union. (In the United States, the average for students of all ages is around 950 hours.)

In terms of engagement with education and in terms of intensity of work (number of hours worked per year), the average US citizen invests much more in learning and working than their OECD peers, roughly 15-30% more. One consequence is that the US usually records much greater national productivity than our OECD peers. Our closest competitors tend to be France, Germany, the Netherlands against whom we usually measure 5-15% more productive (depending on the study). We are typically 30% more productive than Britain or Japan.

The net is that part of the American exceptionalism is that we study harder, work harder and play harder than just about everybody else. I have heard the argument made, based more on anecdote than data, that part of the reason that the US health care costs are higher than those of other countries is that we live harder than others. We take more risks, we live more intensely, we indulge more risky lifestyles and then we expect to have as good mortality and morbidity results as others at the same or a lesser cost. Instead we do all those things and pay more. If you accept this argument, it is actually kind of remarkable; as intensely as we live, we achieve nearly the same mortality and morbidity results as others, just at a greater cost.

Dropout rates are on the rise, and nearly 40 percent of French 15-year-olds have repeated at least one grade — three times the O.E.C.D. average.

I don't know what the comparable figure is for the US but 40% sure sounds high.