Petaurus_australis t1_j8c4rr5 wrote on February 13, 2023 at 5:04 AM

Reply to comment by acdha in Study links Covid-19 vaccination hesitancy in Africa to the use of media platforms that spread misinformation. The spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa was accompanied by unprecedented and recurring waves of misinformation and disinformation. by Wagamaga

>It’s not. American education quite closely tracks the parents’ socioeconomic status, and we have a disproportionate level of poverty for a rich nation, however. Once you compare children of similar status things tend to be a lot more similar than you’d expect based on our political discourse.

But comparing children of similar status is not indicative of the overall state of education. If there's a lot of poor people, and poor people have worse education accessibility, then the country isn't likely going to be very well educated. If money is intrinsically tied to education in your country... that's still a factor in how educated the country is overall, and the quality of the education people receive.

We don't consider Ethiopia a very well educated country, and most of that is because of the abysmal socioeconomics, I mean what is the other explanation for the difference? That they are an innately stupid race of human? I think that kind of thinking is about three centuries past it's expiry date. If the top 5% in Ethiopia have similar education to the top 5% in New Zealand, that's all and good for the top 5%, but high quality for one small percentile bracket, does not translate to the quality of education for the overall population.

The even worse quality of that system is that it essentially maintains a dynamic where the poor remain uneducated, and therefore remain poor because education is tied to income, the poor go on to have more kids than other demographics (because that's what the demographic transition model shows) and the kids grow up poor, and soon you find the system becomes dominated by that demographic and the educated portion grows into a ever more concentrated elite. Exactly what you see in the USA, and exactly why countries where the highest quality education system is accessible to pretty much the entirety of the population tend to score higher overall nationally, than the USA, IE, Sweden.

acdha t1_j8d2815 wrote on February 13, 2023 at 12:19 PM

First, I was specifically responding to the “abysmal” characterization — I think there's plenty of room for improvement. The main point was that when making comparisons across countries we have to perform some corrections if we're looking for ideas about where we could improve. Since wealth isn't evenly distributed across countries or within them it's easy to find a smaller country which looks like an outlier, run some editorials about how they've discovered the secret to education, and not really have learned anything other than that life easier if you're not poor.

What we'd want to look for in setting goals are the countries with high social mobility because, as you mentioned, it's better when students can do markedly better than their parents. The results of that comparison likely also ideas outside of the educational system itself: for example, if the child of poor immigrants in Scandinavia does better it might be that their teachers and curriculum are about the same but the better social support system means their parents aren't working 3 jobs to make rent or asking their oldest child to stay home to watch their siblings while they work.

Part of why I mentioned immigrants in that previous example is that this is also a complicating factor for the U.S. because we have a relatively large number of immigrants compared to many of our peers and a large fraction don't arrive speaking English. Many older children score poorly that way due to language proficiency, so using those figures to attack the educational system is a disservice to both sides.