I like taking my code, especially sql stuff and asking AI a better way to write this and it actually is making me better at SQL because of sql methods i didnt know i could do before. I also like it in vscode to just quickly do the redundant things with auto-complete. now i have 15 years of programming behind me. If i had AI starting out, it would be very bad, I would lack understanding and be a incompetent programmer.
have you seen our school systems, k12. Its terrible and in dire need of a revamp. No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just let kids pass because of feelings. Made schools better, have alternative paths for kids that are not excelling like some of their peers and find school hard to sit through.
It's really not about this - it's that for decades we've been able to draw top global talent to the US. We've cut research funding so heavy that we can't even support post docs who are American citizens now. My friends are going to Europe, Canada, Hong Kong.
>America’s only real competitor technologically is China
this is a very shortsighted view. america's only real competitor technologically right now is china, because america has typically attracted the top talent from everywhere else.
if america is no longer capable of attracting top talent from everywhere else in the world, and other countries can start attracting american talent, it won't be long before america has a whole lot of real competitors.
Ask this again in 40 years. The people we're losing are early career researchers, so this is really a generational loss of talent that we've created. Brain drains can become self-perpetuating once they start.
Germany was in almost this exact situation. It was a self-perpetuating machine for centuries, where ambitious students came to study under the best professors, leading to top students, many of which stayed at those universities to become top professors themselves. Then WW1 put a bit of a damper on that, and the 1930s and 1940s broke it. Germany is still not insignificant in science, but really a shadow of its former self
And that was despite putting an emphasis on education, and the 1930s and 1940s having a lot of science funding. Remove the people and the flywheel stops
America has a very good education system against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration. In the PISA exam, white American kids outperform kids in Hong Kong and Korea, as well as western european kids of non-immigrant ancestry.
The American education system has major and important challenges, such as how to educate the large share of kids whose parents are economic migrants from non-English speaking countries. But those challenges aren’t relevant to the question of whether the U.S. can produce sufficient highly educated people domestically. China, meanwhile, doesn’t even participate in PISA outside four wealthy provinces.
> against the backdrop of challenging sociological factors and mass low-skill immigration
I'm pretty sure that poverty is the issue here. Kids who don't get enough to eat, don't get enough time (or perhaps too much time in some sad cases) with their parents, kids who don't have many opportunities tend to do worse at standardised testing.
This is entirely fixable, but it's not (unfortunately) just a matter of funding schools more.
“Poverty” might be the cause, but it’s not just poverty by itself. Every country has rich people and poor people. The U.S., however, has that normal spectrum, plus subpopulations that have unique circumstances that aren't accounted for just by income level.
Look at NAEP scores: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/some-racial... (Table 1). Asians average 312 in 8th grade math, compared to 293 for whites and 269 for Hispanics. The gap between asians and whites is almost the same size as the gap between whites and hispanics. But the poverty metrics for asians and whites is the same: 8% below the federal poverty line. (While asians are richer than whites on average, the subset of both groups who have kids is more similar. There’s a lot of high poverty asian families in places like NYC.)
Why is there such a big gap in test scores between whites and asians when economically the two groups are similar? There must be some additional sociological factor at play behind poverty in and of itself. One might hypothesize that selective immigration plays a role. The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration. That might have an effect on their kids test scores that’s not accounted for by household income alone. That’s the kind of additional sociological factor that countries like Japan and Korea don’t have.
> Why is there such a big gap in test scores between whites and asians when economically the two groups are similar? There must be some additional sociological factor at play behind poverty in and of itself. One might hypothesize that selective immigration plays a role. The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration. That might have an effect on their kids test scores that’s not accounted for by household income alone. That’s the kind of additional sociological factor that countries like Japan and Korea don’t have.
OK, So I've just actually read your fordham institute link, and you realise that it doesn't argue for this point, instead arguing that it's two parent households and expectations around college that create the gap (which is pretty small, to be fair). This is basically the point that I'm trying to make here, in that parental and broader cultural expectations drive these differences, not selective immigration.
Additionally, for your point to be true, you'd need to observe these kinds of effects for 3-4th generation Asian immigrants, which both seems pretty unlikely to me and difficult to collect data around (as there probably aren't enough Asian americans in this group).
I really think that cultural expectations and poverty provide a more parsimonious account of this data, tbh.
> The majority of the U.S. asian population is foreign born, and is in the U.S. as a result of skilled immigration.
On this point specifically, the percentage for ESL (which normally correlates with 1st generation immigrants) is about 12, which means 88% of the Asians in your sample speak English natively. Again, this article really doesn't support your point.
> “Poverty” might be the cause, but it’s not just poverty by itself. Every country has rich people and poor people. The U.S., however, has that normal spectrum, plus subpopulations that have unique circumstances that aren't accounted for just by income level.
Culture is a thing, as I'm sure you know (we discussed it some time ago here). Like, in general, (many) Irish people value education above and beyond what would be expected of similar socio-economic groups, which lead to their descendants doing better than might naively be expected. The Asian thing is almost certainly similar, given all the memes that exist around demanding Asian parents. Jewish people have similar cultural beliefs.
However, you can't really aggregate up to an White level, as these factors will vary massively. Same with Asians, you'd need to control for a lot of factors.
Fundamentally though, it's better for society if everyone gets a chance to develop their potential, and my argument is that this doesn't happen to the same extent in the US as it might elsewhere, because of large gaps in income inequality and social forcing functions (if everyone you know drops out of school early, or doesn't take it seriously then most people will too).
> “Poverty” might be the cause, but it’s not just poverty by itself. Every country has rich people and poor people. The U.S., however, has that normal spectrum, plus subpopulations that have unique circumstances that aren't accounted for just by income level.
I get that you're more familar with US society, but this is a thing basically everywhere. Like, African descendants in the UK are probably one of the most successful immigrant populations, rather than less succesful than the average in the US. I honestly think that the US "unique circumstances" are cope for the lack of decent income mobility and social safety nets that prevent a larger proportion of people from realising their potential.
For purposes of this discussion, I'm not trying to identify the causes of the differences between the sub-populations. My point is that if you are talking about the quality of the educational system--which is what this discussion is about--you need to compare apples with apples between countries. And to do that, you need to account for the fact that the U.S. sub-populations aren't equally situated.
For example, Asian Americans outscore Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese students in PISA, including math. That's not a cultural difference. That's because Asian Americans aren't a random sample of Asians. The vast majority are within one generation of a very tough selection filter that screens for high skill, high intelligence, and high motivation. If the point is comparing schools, it doesn't make sense to include Asian Americans in the average.
> I get that you're more familar with US society, but this is a thing basically everywhere.
It's not a thing in the east Asian countries that top the educational charts, like Japan and Korea. Poor Japanese and Koreans still belong to the majority ethnic group, speak the national language at home, etc.
Say you transplanted Japanese or Korean schools into one of the many majority-Hispanic school districts in the U.S. where most of the kids are children of low-skill, non-English-speaking immigrants (often illegal immigrants). Would those Japanese or Korean schools have higher test scores than the American ones? I suspect they'd actually be worse, because they'd be totally unequipped to deal with a large student population from a non-native language background.
My wife's aunt's kids go to a school in a more rural part of Oregon. Many of the kids are children of agricultural workers. Many of these kids don't even speak Spanish at home. They speak one of dozens of different indigenous Latin American languages. Japanese and Korean schools educate the children of poor agricultural workers too, but those kids still speak Japanese and Korean at home! If the goal is to measure school quality, is it really fair to just put those kids into the average and fault American schools for doing worse than Japanese or Korean schools?
> I honestly think that the US "unique circumstances" are cope for the lack of decent income mobility and social safety nets that prevent a larger proportion of people from realising their potential.
Even if that were true, that would be more a point about the fairness of U.S. society rather than the quality of the educational system. I don't think it makes sense to conflate those two questions in a discussion of the U.S.'s competitiveness against China.
Moreover, income mobility in the U.S. doesn't break down by sub-population the way you might think. For example, while Hispanics have lower incomes because most are immigrants or children of immigrants, they have higher income mobility: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Children of Guatemalan immigrants in the U.S. have higher income mobility than children of native-born Americans. Household incomes for Hispanics converges on the household income for whites within a few generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
So focusing on PISA scores for "whites" isn't really about race or culture. It's just a proxy for "people whose families have been in the U.S. long enough to dispel the effect of immigration filters." If you were conducting the same analysis 100 years ago, you might try to exclude Italians or Irish from the analysis. Again, the point is to compare schools, not all the other sociological factors that are involved when dealing with immigrant populations.
White people in the U.S. aren’t just the “rich” subset of the whole population. They are reflect a complete spectrum, from poor to rich. They’re equivalent to Koreans in Korea or Japanese in Japan. Other groups in the U.S. aren’t just economically different, they’re sociologically different in dimensions that don’t really exist in Korea or Japan.
For example, 71% of hispanics speak Spanish at home. That reflects a group that’s comprised mostly of immigrants and their children. That poses additional challenges to education, beyond the economic differences. Poor whites in the U.S. and poor Koreans in Korea may have educational challenges from being poor. But that poverty isn’t layered with being raised in a household with immigrant parents who are in an unfamiliar country and probably don’t speak English fluently. That’s an additional layer of challenges that needs to be accounted for in comparing across countries.
The facts are in the PISA data collected by the OECD. If you drill down by subpopulation, the majority group in the U.S. goes toe to toe with the majority groups in Asian countries, and beats the majority groups in western european countries: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
National competitiveness and distributional equity don’t go hand in hand. China has made tremendous achievements by focusing investment on key provinces instead of trying to bring everyone up together.
They imported top graduate student talent that went to the us and might have wished to stay but could not or wouldn't put up with the H1-B indentured servitude or was better paid back home or just patriotic.
Also - less financialization. In US, a statistician goes to work for any 3-letter agency or high finance. In a less financialized economy they might devote themselves to crystallography instead.
Don’t forget campaigning to remove standardized testing from admissions processes even leading to UCSD having to create remedial math classes for their engineering students.
Yes and: USA has been reverting education to its pre-Sputnik arrangement since the end of the Cold War. Without an external motivation, our domestic reactionaries have regained the advantage. Its been a generations long fight to roll back the New Deal (including public and hogher education). I have no clue if / when the pendullum will swing back.
White students in the U.S. do comparably to students in Korea in the international PISA test, and better than students from western europe (excluding the immigrants in those countries).
You have to compare like with like. A huge fraction of American kids grow up to parents who are not native speakers of English. That’s not true in Japan or Korea.
Even looking at the entire population, the U.S. has higher reading scores on PISA than the big western european countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy): https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2019/12/pisa-2018-resul.... In reading, the U.S. was basically tied with Japan and the Scandinavian countries.
That is consistent with other international measurements: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1. For example, the U.S. is one of the top performers in the world in the 4th grade literacy--behind Hong Kong but ahead of Macau. In 4th grade math, the U.S. isn't as good, well behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. But still comfortably ahead of Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.
I read my first Stephen King novel in grade 6. That seems to me more than sufficient aptitude for reading the things an average person needs to read to get through life.
The assignment was to read lots, and lots of 6th graders read Stephen King, because that was the cool thing to do. The size of a typical Stephen King novel is intimidating but the writing is usually straightforward and clear.
You don't want there to be good schools that some people can get into and and garbage schools for everyone else. What you need is a high minimum standard that every last school in the nation has to adhere to and it shouldn't be possible to graduate from any of them without being able to read at grade level.
Whether you want that or not depends on what you're trying to achieve. China has pursued basically the approach you're talking about: focusing on key province to advance them to the cutting edge. The last time China participated international high-school testing, they published scores only four Beijing and three other wealthy provinces: https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/are-chinas-students-re.... And those scores were spectacular! Clearly that approach has some merit if your concern is competing with other countries rather than domestic equity.
I do think it'd be smart to support programs for gifted students and to screen for them. Those programs should be available to anyone in the US who qualifies regardless of where they live or what kind of money they have. Every student should be allowed and encouraged to reach their potential.
Your first point is in tension with your last point. A large fraction of the student population has a low ceiling of potential, and it’s very expensive to try and push them past that ceiling. The focus on doing so sucks up vast amounts of money and teacher attention that then gets pulled away from gifted kids.
That’s why sober and clear-eyed countries like Germany conventionally sort students into tracks starting around age 10.
> Your first point is in tension with your last point.
It really isn't. Every student should have access to quality education that meets them at their level and challenges them. Money spent doing that is not wasted on the vast majority of students. We do not need to have trash tier schools for the majority of the population so that a select few can get better ones.
Identifying where students are at and what their needs are is a good idea that would enable kids to be moved to classes where teachers can work with them at their level. It doesn't necessitate refusing a quality education to anyone. Even students with special educational needs and disabilities deserve a good education.
When students are placed in classrooms according to their level it means that no teacher is pulled away from gifted kids, because those gifted kids have their own teacher working with them. It doesn't mean that children who aren't gifted can't get a high quality education. Putting kids in a class too far above or below their level is not delivering a quality education to them.
Giving every child an environment where they can learn to the best of their ability is expensive, but it's nowhere near as costly as not doing it. Uneducated illiterate children become uneducated illiterate adults and voters. It's not a coincidence that most prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Having a good education enables more children to have a successful future.
The way it works now is that 20% of the bottom students eat up 80% of a teacher’s time and resources. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing depending on what your goals are. What I am saying is that you can’t have everything. You have to choose. This system this comment describes and the system your comment below describes cannot coexist.
That just means that we need to move the bottom 20% of students into their own classes where they can get the extra attention they need. That means they can get a high quality education and so can everyone else. You do not have to choose. You can have both.
No, you do have to choose because money for education (or anything) isn’t unlimited.
There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.
I saw this play out when I was in school: profoundly intellectually disabled students getting 1:1 or even 2:1 teaching, trying to get an 18 year old to be able to read 3 letter words, while AP classes were bloated to 30+ students.
> No, you do have to choose because money for education (or anything) isn’t unlimited.
The US is the richest nation on Earth. It can easily afford to educate its people. If you really think we'd need to find new sources of tax dollars to fund that, I have a whole lot of suggestions for where to start and I'd bet that you can easily think of a few low hanging fruit yourself.
> There’s a real question of how many resources and what kind of ROI you’d get from trying to educate that bottom 20% to the same level.
The ROI is massive. As I've said elsewhere, uneducated children become uneducated adults. Adults who vote. Adults who, if they lack the education needed to live successful lives, end up costing society in many ways over far more years than they spend in school.
I don't know about you, but I want to live and work with people who are educated and literate. If I were looking to move to another country for work, I'd want to move somewhere where the people were educated and literate. Especially if those people were going to be my boss, or my neighbor, or handling my food, or in charge of my visa application. Having a well educated population is pure win. The cost of ignorance and a lack of the kinds of skills a good school teaches is staggering.
The US already spends significantly more (both in absolute terms, and as a percent of GDP) than other developed countries, but with worse outcomes (particularly for non-white, non-Asian students).
The question is whether anyone actually expects the outcomes to change if we throw even more money at the problem, or if it'll just get gobbled up by teacher's unions, administration, and silly things like non-phonic instruction or DEI programs.
We are in a record amount of debt and we are about to go to war again. That’s not including the fact that we have a shortage of teachers who are underpaid. As for “new” sources of taxation, increasing the burden on the middle class is yet another way the bottom 20% eats up 80% of the resources. Tax the rich? Unfortunately, if you tax them high enough, they will just leave. They haven’t been patriotic since the last century.
> We are in a record amount of debt and we are about to go to war again.
Isn't it funny how nobody ever worries about how much that's going to cost, no matter how unnecessary there's never any effort to make sure that our warmongering is funded before burdening taxpayers with it. Seems like a ripe target for some tax savings.
People did worry about the cost pre-Biden because they were unnecessary. Unfortunately, for everyone both Putin and Xi exist. Even if you put your head into the ground, it’s not going to change their intentions or behavior. Only missiles and drones will. Your comment is over a decade out of date.
They're a good example of why we shouldn't have that. It wasn't DEI that made them crap it was letting people buy their way in and shifting the focus from education to networking for nepo-babies. George W. Bush is a prime example of a massively uneducated idiot who had no problems getting accepted to and graduating from Ivy Leagues.
If teacher pay made a big difference in outcomes, expensive private schools would have very well paid teachers. But private schools typically have lower teacher pay than public schools.
Teacher pay doesn't have as large an influence on student success as it does on how many people are willing to enter the occupation and stay there. Private school teachers typically deal with far fewer students in the classroom and in much better conditions. They also don't typically have to spend as much of their own money on basic school supplies. Improving conditions at public schools and lowering classroom sizes would help to attract teachers too.
Washington state has the highest public school teacher pay in the country (over 100k/yr). It also has educational outcomes which are middle of the pack. That correlation doesn't hold in many cases. Oh, and the fact that half of the funding for the district goes to administration doesn't help either.
You need to have both. Training/credentialing and pay. Just one is insufficient.
Longer/better educator training both increases skills/outcomes and is a gate for the poorly-suited. Higher pay makes the training seem worthwhile and increases stickiness/tenure.
I've built something similar, not as cool as certkit, but using acme.sh i generate a wildcard and then internally my servers can pull the wildcard generates an md5 so i can track if it changes, put the certs where they need to be and restart the services they need that use it. Linux and Windows. It works.
I hope OP can get his account unlocked. This is a good reminder for everyone else, backup your cloud data to a local drive. But thats just one part, the social / email OAUTH side of things, phone accounts etc..., terrible situation. It should be easy enough to walk in a HQ / office and show credible ID and get your account unlocked.
