Another brilliant post by a government school grad.
A few things. First, the US public school system is actually about 14k school districts + almost 35k private schools. If you start looking at education on the level where decisions are being made - the district, or school level - you see a wide variety of outcomes and metrics. Even just breaking it down by state and looking at international PISA scores (a pretty standard international metric) you see that many portions of the US are doing well above the international average, and even would be ranked within the top 5–10 if ranked as countries (
Bringing it back home: Why state comparisons are more useful than international comparisons for improving U.S. education policy).
As a nation, as a whole, we have the problem of public education being available for all in a diverse country with tons of immigrants. A huge part of the education gap is the fact that about 10% of our students are learning the language of instruction at any given time (
English Language Learners in Public Schools). That means that they are trying to learn math, language arts, science, history, etc in a language that they do not speak natively and are in the process of learning to fluency.
In addition, the US, unlike many other countries, is philosophically very much anti-”tracking.” That is, we don’t have different basic course requirements and outcomes goals based on whether we think you are “college material” or should instead be taught a skilled trade. Many countries, particularly in Europe, have a model where students are tracked and usually the students in the non-college-bound tracks are not counted in international comparisons (
Stopping German students in their tracks? - Marketplace). This complicates education as you try to be “all things to all students” and/or prepare kids (even mainstreamed “special ed” kids) that have no interest or aptitude as if they are all going to college.
The Universities, however, don’t have the same constraints as public schools. International students usually have to take an English proficiency exam prior to enrollment, and you better believe that admissions requirements “track” students into schools/programs according to test scores/past grades/other measures of ability. To turn a popular quote and comic on it’s head:
Public schools in the US are told “teach everyone to climb that tree!” Colleges and universities are told “pick the test, and then pick the students to try and take that test.” Naturally, the latter has much better outcomes!
As for why the US has so many of these schools - we have a history of (relative to other contemporaries) high literacy rates, at least a nominal cultural meme of being a meritocracy, and we dodged most of the at-home infrastructure damage of two World Wars - letting our colleges and universities explode with students on the GI bill, filled with funding to race the Soviets in science and tech, and expanding rapidly while Europe was digging out the rubble (the US had a baby boom while the UK was still under strict rationing guidelines until 1954).
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