Originally Posted By: Tempest
Having to move to a more expensive area in order to go to a better school is hardly competition. This is an "outside" expense that has nothing to do with education. If parents could decide what was a good school for their kids, there would be a vast array of types of schools to go to.
Then the problem is the US' geographical based education system rather than test score / achievement based education system that's at fault. I've pointed that out long ago, that the biggest problem in K12 education is "where you live" rather than "how hard you work" that decide what school you go to and what opportunities you get.
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Not all kids are the same, but a "universal school" curriculum enforced by the local school district assumes so. The district could have 10's of thousands of kids in it and the people at the top couldn't possibly know what an individual child or parent wants...nor do they care. If parents had choice and competition, they could make up their own minds and the schools that provide education the parents actually like, would thrive.
You do not know how lucky US students, at least in high school, are already. Compare to the rest of the world students can decide what classes to take in school, i.e. geometry vs algebra vs AP calculus, rather than the rest of the world where everyone just go to the same classes regardless of how well prepared they are.
Ultimately, the universities decide what should be taught in K12 as parents of students not getting in will force the school to adapt to the "standard curricula". Letting parents decide is bad, because they may not be good at what is important and decide that education is useless anyways. See how the Duggars are all homeschooled and NONE of them enter a reputable, real university.
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Per Unckel, governor of Stockholm and former Minister of Education, has promoted the system, saying "Education is so important that you can’t just leave it to one producer, because we know from monopoly systems that they do not fulfill all wishes".
We have more than 1 producer. We have a lot of school districts, states, private schools, all competing for good students with good parents as well as correcting the bad parents that happen left and right. What we do not have is the way to opt out of education completely just because parents do not want to get at least the minimum level of parenting responsibility done, and like I said before: the crooked system in the US force you to move in order to switch between Public school, rather than force you to tutor your kids in order to enter a better Public school as the rest of the world do.
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Most of which are much smaller, homogenous populations. Buster listed Finland, which has 5.3 million people.
LAUSD:
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During the 2007-2008 school year, LAUSD served 694,288 students, and had 45,473 teachers and 38,494 other employees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Unified_School_District
It alone has over 10% of the entire country of Finland in students. Do you think individual students get ANY attention by the policy makers at LAUSD? The kids are just numbers that they want attending so they can get their state and Fed funding.
I am not getting at what you are trying to hint. Are you saying that our population is not homogeneous enough that students are not doing well? or are you saying that our education system is just way too big for all the students to get all the attention they need?
When you have the size of population of the US, you will see lots of good and bad spots, but the point is, there are choices and there are good schools. The biggest problem is that your choices are limited and tied to where you live, and the biggest problem we have is a non-performance based admission system, so we are not encouraging parents to do what they should have done (i.e. spending time with students to improve their academic performance).
