America was falling behind in the race against Japan in the 1980s.

America was falling behind in the race against Eastern Europe in the 1950s.

America was falling behind in the race against the Russian communists in the 1930s.

America was falling behind in the race against the Germans in the 1920s.

And in the late 1800s, America created a universal public education system. Why? Because Irish and Italian immigrants were building Catholic schools that offered an education to anyone who wanted one. So American Protestants began to worry that if they fell behind, Catholic priests would brainwash America's children into willing accomplices to an insidious Vatican plot to dominate the world.

I am not kidding. This was published in Harper's in 1875. The artist is Thomas Nast, inventor of Uncle Sam, (the contemporary) Santa Claus, the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey:

http://www.harpweek.com/09cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon-Large....

ETA: Obviously, American education is not perfect. But it would probably be better if we could resist the temptation to panic about it.

While it may be bullshit that America is currently falling behind China and India, the fact that the majority of American adults are not functionally literate is a serious problem. Americans can never ever achieve any real scientific literacy at their current reading literacy levels. It's flat out impossible, and the fact that the authors of this article are complaining about scientific literacy out of context shows you that they don't know shit about the causes of the various problems within our schools.

Hell, roughly half of American adults are so illiterate that they can't even read the one sentence instructions on their medications. That's why you have stuff happening all the time like this:

"A two-year-old is diagnosed with an inner ear infection and prescribed an antibiotic. Her mother understands that her daughter should take the pre- scribed medication twice a day. After carefully studying the label on the bottle and deciding that it doesn’t tell how to take the medicine, she fills a teaspoon and pours the antibiotic into her daughter’s painful ear."

To quote the most recent report on health literacy, "90 million adults with limited health literacy cannot fully benefit from much that the health and health-care system have to offer."

Despite all the media jokes about people researching their own diseases, the fact is that only roughly 10% of American adults are even literate enough to read popular articles about medicine, and only ~3% are able to actually understand the academic literature. When they say that 90 million adults can't participate in the medical system, they aren't talking about adults who can't research their own symptoms and medications and help the doctor on collaborating on a diagnosis and treatment; rather, they're talking about people who literally can't even do what their doctors tell them to do. Roughly 25% of all doctors visits result in the patient not doing what the doctor tells them to do, and a large percentage of the time it's because they literally can't understand the simple instructions the doctor is giving. We spend roughly 1.2 trillion per year on the health system, which means that up to (but probably significantly less than) 300B of that is going right out the window due to poor adherence, especially since those with low adherence have good outcomes roughly 26% less of the time than those with high adherence, so they end up costing a lot more money in the longrun. I forget what percentage of low adherence is due to literacy/education, but I know that it is one of the largest factors.

The fucked up thing is that "among those scoring in the lowest level on the prose literacy scale [1st-ish grade level], only 29 percent reported they did not read well and only 34 percent reported they did not write well. The majority of those performing at this level perceive their reading and writing skills to be adequate. Among those in the next highest level [4th-ish grade level] the results were even more surprising, as only 3 percent said they couldn’t read well and 6 percent said they couldn’t write well (Kirsch et al., 1993; see Chapter 2 for more information on the NALS)."

If you ever actually go into a real science classroom you'll see that if the teacher actually tried to teach science it would be a complete waste of time. Virtually none of the kids would actually be able to understand any of the lessons, let alone transfer them to real life situations. And while it's true science textbooks and the way science is taught is terrible, the vast majority of students aren't going to become scientifically literate no matter how you try to teach it.

Just curious, do you have a citation for this? It seems very surprising to me, and I suspect that whoever cooked up this statistic may have set a very high bar for "functionally literate".

There are a couple example questions in that, but if you want to understand the full methodology you'd have to read this:

http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11267

Basically the situation is that:

According to the National Adult Assessment of Literacy (NAAL), the largest and most authoritative survey of adult literacy in America, only 13% of adults are able to read English at a 'proficient' level. This means that 87% of American adults lack the minimum level of literacy skill necessary to complete simple tasks like comparing the viewpoints in two editorials or computing the cost per ounce of food items. In other words, the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the minimimum amount of education required to participate in the knowledge economy or to contribute anything meaningful to the democratic process. Source: Table 1 on p. 3, Figure 2 on p. 4. Adults unable to read prose at a 'proficient' level, by race/ethnicity: White - 83%, Asian/Pacific Islander - 88%, Hispanic - 96%, Black - 98%.

Adults unable to read prose at a 'proficient' level, by educational attainment: High school graduates - 96%, College graduates - 69%, Graduate studies/degrees - 59%. In other words, the majority of graduate students are incapable of fully understanding a newspaper, let alone an academic journal article. And virtually all high school graduates are functionally illiterate. (And again, being 'proficient' does not mean being able to read academic journal articles, which is sort of the minimum requirement for being an independent thinker in society. In fact at least 2 / 3rds of those who score 'proficient' still do not possess this more advanced measure of literacy.)

John Taylor Gatto also gives his analysis of the situation here based on the 1992 data. (The data I cited was 2003)

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3b.htm

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm

Gatto throws in a couple weasel words, and I think sometimes his analysis is a bit reaching, but overall it seems to be generally accurate. Even if you don't fully buy into the idea of an enormous decline over the last 100 years, the current methodology of the National Adult Literacy Survey seems pretty solid. (That's currently the gold standard for literacy estimates in the US.)

But what about the CIA World Factbook, which estimates that the United States has a 97% literacy rate as of 2002? Where do these figures come from? To quote from Jonathan Kozol's book Illiterate in America, "For one hundred years, starting in 1840, the census posed the question of the population's literacy level in its ten-year compilations. The government removed this question from its survey in the 1940 census. The reason, according to a U.S. Census Bureau publication, was a general conviction that 'most people [by this time] could read and write ...'

In 1970, pressured by the military, the Bureau of the Census agreed to reinstate the literacy question. Even then, instead of posing questions about actual skills, the census simply asked adults how many years of school they had attended. More than 5 percent of those the census reached replied that they had had less than a fifth grade education. For no known reason, the government assumed that four fifths of these people probably could read and, on this dangerous assumption, it was publicly announced that 99 percent of all American adults could read and write. These are the figures which the U.S. government passed on to the United Nations for the purposes of worldwide compilations and comparisons." You can read the rest of chapter 5 here, which further explains the methodology and how the CIA figures are propaganda rather than science:

http://eserver.org/courses/spring97/76100o/readings/kozol.ht...

According to this study, a non-proficient person can: consult reference materials to figure out which foods contain a certain vitamin, calculate the cost of ordering supplies from a catalog, or figure out what they are permitted to eat before a medical test.

In India, we actually have a significant number of people who are functionally illiterate. Most people can't leave a note saying "please make sambhar" note for the cook.

If people can only read well enough to be consumers but not producers then it's only so long before society collapses, regardless of whether or not they're getting their vitamins.

As for society collapsing, I think you grossly underestimate the value low intelligence people can provide when suitably directed. Consider walmart - it's a vast command economy which employs about 1% of the US (mostly taken from the bottom percentiles) and has improved the standard of living for millions.

A bunch of morons couldn't create walmart themselves. But they can still create great value when directed by a small number of intelligent people.

  we'd just bar morons from voting.

This lead not only to a total political gridlock for years, but to actual death and mayhem.

You can't have a semi democracy where the elite decides, who's eligible to vote. It's either all or nothing.

The problem with the term "moron" is that it is too easily applied to mean, "people who I don't think should be allowed to vote, no matter how intelligent they might actually be."

The fact that racists favor a corrupted version of a certain policy does not imply that the policy is bad.

Historically, that's just an oligarchy or plutocracy.

Heck even being governed by a "council of elders" is a semi-democracy if not all elders are approved by the council to join their ranks.

A standardized test would be hard to impose, since how does one measure someone's ability to make good judgments about something?

Then, the next step would be preventing them from having kids...

You know it's a very, very bad idea. Morons are part of the society and deserve to have their voices heard. Any democratically elected government mirrors the society it came from.

I think this indicates a serious problem with the study. While I'm sure there are exceptional cases where someone could graduate from a post-graduate program as functionally illiterate[1], every other non-exceptional case is able to function quite well in our society. You don't need to know every word in the newspaper (you can get those through contextual clues) or if there are 8 ounces in a cup or a pint (I'd Google it) in order to function in our society or to interact with other people writing the same language.

[1] Using the common sense definition found at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_items.asp

They're setting the bar pretty low. Not so low you can't bear to look at it, but still, wow.

OK, immigrants also do a little poorer, especially informal immigrants. And some states are wealthier than others. But this is all stuff that other countries deal with as well.

The US seems to allow large areas of their cities to become extremely poor. Maybe it's a hold-over from the semi-apartheid days before the civil rights act, when there were black areas and white areas; I don't know.

Maybe the solution is for local councils to try and mix up the communities more, encouraging low-income housing to be dispersed throughout the city. Yeah, it sucks to have a few poor families in the neighbourhood, but it's better than having whole neighbourhoods of poor people.

> OK, immigrants also do a little poorer, especially informal immigrants. And some states are wealthier than others. But this is all stuff that other countries deal with as well.

Just stop beating around the bush with PC euphemisms and say what you mean - "blacks and Hispanics are much worse off than whites, to the point that they have their own set of statistics. The states that have lots of them are significantly worse off than ones who don't."

> The US seems to allow large areas of their cities to become extremely poor. Maybe it's a hold-over from the semi-apartheid days before the civil rights act, when there were black areas and white areas; I don't know.

> Maybe the solution is for local councils to try and mix up the communities more, encouraging low-income housing to be dispersed throughout the city. Yeah, it sucks to have a few poor families in the neighbourhood, but it's better than having whole neighbourhoods of poor people.

Yeah, that doesn't work in America. Unlike those "other countries" you mentioned, we have virtually unlimited space, and the minute (poor) blacks or Hispanics move into a neighborhood, you get white flight all over again.

http://www.umich.edu/~rdytolrn/pathwaysconference/presentati...

http://www.jstor.org/pss/2963200

In other words, you want to choose a definition of SES that predicts how the parents interact with the children before age five, as it's not (mostly) income or race that creates the achievement gap. E.g. just separate the parents into welfare, working class, or professional, like Hart & Risley do in Meaningful Differences. I think in order to understand how SES effects the achievement gap, you need to choose a definition of SES that is broad and qualitative rather than quantitative and limited.

And race does correlate with peer SES, as whites (and asians, and most hispanics, and well-off blacks) flee schools once there are too many low-SES blacks.

The question is - how big a problem is "white flight" / segregation. If it is seen as a huge cause of inequality, then there are ways to reduce it.

The problem is that, as the Coleman Report showed us in the mid 60s, while this is in theory the best solution it requires you to have 12-15 high-SES people for every one low-SES person. And U.S. society no longer has anywhere near enough high-SES people left in order to socialize the low-SES people. So a long decline is essentially inevitable at this point due to simple math and demographics.

While there are theoretically other solutions, they are too complicated for the average person to understand, so they have very little chance of being implemented.

Informal immigrants? What does that even mean? Like the kind who wear tie-dye shirts on Fridays?

I'm not defending health illiteracy, but let's look at this rationally. What is the most logical and efficienct solution to half of Americans being unable to read labels on medicine?

A) Try to educate all those people

B) Make the damn labels easier to comprehend so that this problems wouldn't exist in the first place.

When the directions say "must be administered orally," can you really expect their meaning to be fully conveyed to every adult who reads them? Why can't we just change it to "drink it"?

Sure, it doesn't use the technical terms that healthcare professional are taught with. But despite all its scientific underpinnings, in the end, healthcare is about providing a (vital) service to customers. And if they lack the necessary skills to understand something, then the healthcare industry needs to respond to that deficiency, not the other way around.

The solution is threefold: education, simplifying directions/processes, and changing culture. Changing the labels and creating things like extended release pills (so you only need to take one per day) is definitely the most low-hanging fruit in terms of fixing adherence, but it doesn't actually fix our democracy, economy, or culture.

Perhaps medicine should be labeled with a word problem. "Jimmy takes medicine on all prime-numbered days, plus one."

America today is loosing because of totally different reasons. And nobody but America as a nation is to be blamed for that. The way I see America is loosing out jobs that have earnings directly accounted by number of hours worked or volume delivered(In other words manufacturing kind of jobs). And for that every single aspect of the American society is responsible. Don't get me wrong, I'm for capitalism. But there is huge difference between mindless consumerism that goes on in America and what happens in the rest of the world. Coupled with high standards of living. It is, but impossible to provide manufacturing and other process based jobs at rates similar to that in China and India. And given the conditions under which most people are made to work is unthinkable in America.

There is a saying here, that if you don't want to do a particular job somebody is always out there who will do it.And will do it better over time, and during the same time begin to lead that market. This is what has happened, back then when America was not into pointless wars, and the tax system was sane. A lot of Americans didn't to the very same jobs which are today being shipped(And why would they, when you are paid well to do better jobs. And sometimes paid to do nothing at all - read social security benefits).

We have no such social security/medicare benefits alternatives here. Here either we slog and earn or just get wiped out.We don't enjoy/get vacations/trips. Most of us can't eat at restaurants everyday. We can't spend like hell, just to buy a new version of the iPhone.

Here in India, Its all about struggle to livelihood to its bare minimum necessities - Food, Clothing and Shelter.

We have no other option but to beat you. That's what we have to do to survive here.

Nitpick, but widespread public schooling in the U.S. dates back more to the early 1800s; Horace Mann (1796-1859) is one of the education reformers often associated with it. It's true that they became more formalized into school districts in the late 19th century; before then, the "common schools" had been somewhat more ad-hoc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_school).

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw (video)

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=1500338 (text)

The American education is far from perfect - it will always be far from perfect. Even for those who fully go through it, you have to question, at least up through basic college, what kind of an education they are really getting for the price they are paying.

Unfortunately, a solid education system in most every part of the world (especially in places like India and China) requires following a rigid architecture with little room for creative thinking. But this, with some exception, by and large creates a population of drones.

Creative thinking is what is required for innovation - and innovation creates new industries and employment. It's one of the reasons we've done so well despite a relatively lackluster basic education system.

I do hope our system improves somewhat - I've felt a better educated population would make better decisions when they are voting, although I'm not as convinced of that anymore - but a good education begins at home, not in the schools, and until people realize this, nothing is going to change.

Why: Because reading is key. What I learnt on my own reading books in one year was more than what I was taught in all these primary years. They have helped, but even if I didn't take these classes that wouldn't be a roadblock.

How I envision a successful education:

1. Language is priority: Reading, writing and communicating. Dedicate long hours for reading and daily writing. This is better than science or math. I need to be able to read, and also communicate effectively with others (forums, chat...)

2. Math: Math is also important. Dedicate a good amount of hours for a solid math education.

3. Others: It includes science, geography, history... What does the average person need of information to be relatively literate? Give it that amount of information; only. The bare minimum so he can understand things like nuclear radiations, ADN, therapies...

And then? Let people decide. Science is not for everyone. There is a writer, designer, business analyst... They don't need science, but they are in need in the society. Let everyone decide what he wants to be. You allowed him to read and communicate effectively. Don't worry about what will happen next.

neither of those could be farther from the truth.

If I understand correctly if we measure qubit that is in 10/90 superposition of 0 and 1, we have 0.1 and 0.9 chance of it becoming 0 and 1 respectively. We can predict, that it would probably be 1, but it is still random.

Or am I wrong?

The TIMSS study is another international study to look at for information about science education in various countries. Most studies of education policy suffer from the same defect of not having a truly experimental design:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that is, most of those studies don't have random assignment of students to treatment and control groups, but rather look for correlations between academic performance and other observations, with nothing in the study design being able to give assurance of causation.

Science textbooks used in the United States have long been very lousy,

http://www.textbookleague.org/

and as I have had a chance to see science textbooks from other countries, particularly Taiwan, China, and Russia, I hazard the guess that improving textbooks in the United States would help more learners learn science more successfully. General improvement of teaching technique along the lines discussed in another current HN thread

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2960085

would probably also be helpful, but the policy incentives needed to improve teacher performance are not easy to come by in the United States.

After edit: To answer a question asked in another comment below the submitted article, scientific illiteracy is an important public policy issue because scientific illiteracy in a democratic republic results in voters voting for stupid policies because they don't understand science. The reason to know science isn't just to get a job, but to be a more thoughtful citizen and voter.

If this is the case, why don't we strip the scientifically illiterate of the right to vote, or perhaps give their votes a lower weight? Similarly, we could rejigger our immigration policies to raise the average level of scientific knowledge (e.g., deport all low skill immigrants, eliminate family reunification immigration, and give immigration preferences to engineers).

If our main purpose in increasing education is to improve the signal/noise ratio in the electoral process (rather than preparing people for more productive jobs), it seems far cheaper to reduce noise than to increase the signal.

Note: I'm not advocating this policy, I'm merely asking why it isn't a cheaper way to achieve the stated goal.

And what happens when the official government position on a bit of science, upon which your voting rights rest, turns out to be wrong because science, in its capacity as an ever-changing best-current-snapshot of our best guesses has moved on? Oh, and it turns out it is in the best interests of some interest group to keep it wrong just the way it is, because otherwise it might let entire battlefield states sway the other way in the next major election because more of the "wrong people" will now accidentally get that question correct on the next voter survey. Not to mention creating the ultimate "teaching to the test" situation for the voters.

Interesting question, BTW.

For immigration: Isn't that actually our official, legal policy? I don't think we officially import low-skill immigrants. We unofficially do it, wink-wink nudge-nudge.

Simple solution: stick to non-controversial science. There is plenty of it, after all. Focus on atoms and molecules, electricity, archimedes principle, newtonian motion/gravitation, things like that.

It is quite possible to test basic understanding of science without delving into areas where political/religious/tribal beliefs cause cognitive dissonance (e.g., vaccinations, racial disparities in intelligence, evolution).

Even better, one could merely test the ability to follow scientific inference on the basis of hypothetical experiments. That would make it more difficult to "guess the teacher's password".

I don't think we officially import low-skill immigrants.

The majority of immigrants to the US come in under family reunification visas.

http://www.migrationinformation.org/usfocus/display.cfm?id=1...

I thought of that approach to the science problem, but I just don't think you can hand the big "disqualify voters en masse" stick to the political world and not expect them to use it. It absolutely would start out as you describe, but the pressures to exploit the non-scientific views of any of the major political orientations would just be too strong, and any attempt to fix those problems with further rules cause their own problems. (The first one that leaps to mind is "kick out any question that 60% of the population doesn't get right", but I can still play a lot of nasty political games within that constraint.)

On the other hand, if you are "individual with exceptional ability", but were born in India/China, too bad, we cannot admit you without long wait times of 5+ years.

Thus, while US might provide amnesty (in future) to lot of low skilled labor, it hardly shows any enthusiasm for admitting entrepreneurs or skilled people.

Obviously there are a lot of different types of testing. But I think Alfie Kohn does a pretty good job covering the literature of competition, intrinsic motivation, standardized testing, etc. Obviously each different style of test has its own strengths and weaknesses, but if we are talking about the types of tests that are most commonly used in school today then I think the statement is generally accurate.

"most of those studies [of educational policy] don't have random assignment of students to treatment and control groups"

There are several different types of studies used in education. The studies that don't have random control groups are just as useful as the ones that do, they just tell us different things. E.g. compare the psychology research in Alfie Kohn's books with the research in Riordan's book Equality And Achievement. Completely different types of research, but both are essential for determining education policy.

Also remember that the "competition" also has access to the same free information.

Even if you ignore the visual/textual/etc. distinctions, they have other properties as media; for example, textbooks are easier to use in a random-access/skimming manner than videos, and can be more easily taken outside or marked up. It could just be my concentration, but I also can't get through watching a YouTube video, while somehow I have no trouble reading through a book.

Even if you do learn reasonably well from video, you:

* Need to know what to look for

* Need to somehow know which videos are made by people who know what they're talking about

The same applies to text.

I am not American so please tell me if it's just a prejudice but looking from outside, Americans seem to be very reluctant to learn from other nations.

Certainly there is a good portion of Americans unwilling to learn from other nations or change or care about anything else, yes, they exist. But there exist Americans of the other kind, too. And this doesn't just apply to America, it applies to any group of humans, really.

I mean, look at the Olympics. The US wasn't winning the most golds anymore so the news media actually changed the metric to use "most overall medals" so the US could be number 1 again.

Horrifying conclusion!

seriously do the commenters on HN have to debunk an article of this format every day?

It's also worth noting that the people who generally tend to be anti-science in America are typically not anti-law-of-gravitation or anti-atomic-theory-of-matter types.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_principl...

Another way to state the point I was attempting to make: while modern physicists can derive many new insights from ages old equations (or manipulations thereof), Newton was tasked with creating the equations from scientific first-principles. It is this skill (the ability to formulate scientific frameworks) which would be lost if scientific education is neglected.

The advancement of biology is driven by the development of algorithms and equations and to suggest that it is somehow less dependent on them than other branches of science does it a disservice.

My guess would be that most "equations" in biology curriculum are not really related to biological or physical processes directly, but rather to statistics, experimental setup, i.e. data interpretation and manipulation.

Now, of course, stats are very important and are probably basic knowledge is key in reading and critically analyzing any scientific paper. So I am not criticizing that. However my opinion is that mathematics is not as critical to biology as it is critical for physics.

Any real advance in biology will require a well written paper for example. Also, if the person wanted to have access to the best minds, they will need to be accepted in to a good school at a minimum.

Math and English are great places to focus as amazing building blocks.

This is formulaic.

I have seen this article, or radio stories like it, over and over again over the past few years. As I understand the situation, in the United States we decided to have common tests for reading and writing -- you cannot manage what you do not measure -- and since then, the people being measured have written dozens or hundreds of variations on this theme.

The formula goes something like this: pick a topic not covered by the tests. Could be music, history, science, or civics. Demonstrate how poorly students are doing in this area. Demonstrate (or just give a good rant) about how important this area is for the future of our society. Complain about teachers having to teach so much to the tests and how bad that is. Argue that getting rid of the tests would free up time and resources so that we could regain some of what we desperately need.

There are many logical problems here. First there is the problem of limited resources. We must make funding decisions and choose some things to emphasize over others. Governance is about making choices. Second, and it amazes me that this isn't obvious, unless you can read and write effectively your choices in life are severely restricted. A good reader and writer who shows an interest in science, art, underwater basket weaving or whatever? They can go learn more. They can choose a subject, dive in, and self-educate. Somebody who is functionally illiterate but loves Beethoven? Aside from a kid with nice tastes, whose life is probably a tiny bit happier, we're not accomplishing much. Reading and writing are multipliers in a way other subjects are not. If you don't like or agree with that position, fine. Then choose something else you want to stress. Then measure it. Waving your arms around about how important each and every subject is does not constitute a system of making choices.

I am especially befuddled with this argument about teachers teaching to the tests. It's as if we are using the way teachers act as some kind of rationale for justifying the testing -- which is exactly backwards. Obviously we've had teachers create literate students over the past several hundred years without testing, and they didn't teach to the test. Why do we assume that because teachers are acting a certain way now that it is in their best interests to do so? Maybe most systems of teachers just don't know how to educate kids, and focusing on testing is the only thing they've got? If so, then we need to improve education systems, not eliminate the measurement. You don't make people better basketball players by taking away the scoreboard. I have no idea why this reasoning passes as informed logic in this debate.

My opinion as an interested observer is that once we actually starting measuring how poor of a job we do, all hell has broken loose. Not surprisingly, there's a huge push to stop measuring. This is not a good idea.

Yes, science literacy is a great thing. Let's work on general literacy first, then take whatever resources we have left over and instill a love for science. General literacy will get you a lot farther than scientific literacy will. (I also have some serious questions about what passes for scientific literacy which I'll save for another day.)

1. Kids probably know more today when they leave school, but they must. The bar has been raised significantly since say a century ago. What worked a century ago is insufficient now; there aren't any jobs for the illiterate anymore.

2. I think teachers used to optimize a different function than they do now. Currently, they try to minimize the number of fails; the curriculum is designed to allow say 90% to pass, so teachers direct their attention at the 20%-30% range of students. With fewer repercussions on the absolute number of fails, teachers used to sort-of optimize for maximal average improvement. That meant that they would help all kids, and take pride both in getting the less bright to pass exams, and in getting bright kids to rise above themselves.

#2 is pure opinion, but I do not think it is completely besides the truth.

It's a fundamental tool, but by itself it is pretty worthless. You can say anything but will have nothing really to say.

My entire problem is that all of the data-points I've seen used so far are extremely questionable, and there doesn't seem to be enough people questioning them.

The fact that US students have dismal scientific knowledge to a naive person suggests, but in reality in no way proves, that the US has, or will one day have, a shortage of scientifically qualified people.

I hope there are enough intelligent people who are uncomfortable about making the leap of faith from 'US students have bad science grades' to 'the US will experience a shortage of scientifically-qualified people'.

Any redesign of the education system needs to be grounded in science, not fashionable rhetoric.

How about the leap of faith from "there are heaps of scientific and technical jobs for which no qualified candidates can be found" to "science education in the US sucks?" And also the fact of increasing reliance on immigrants to fill those roles when a suitable local (i.e. native) doesn't appear?

Seems falsifiable to me.

edit: basically what I was getting at is that your original statement: "As things stand, to me it seems that there are tens, if not hundreds, of qualified people for every possible job opening" is false afaik.

Not sure about Google and Microsoft, but it does say something that 50% of Google's founders were foreign born.

Anecdotally, in graduate school I have noticed a troubling trend. 10 years ago, foreign students would come to the U.S. to get advanced degrees and then stay in the U.S. to get good paying jobs. Today, many of those students are returning to their home countries for work...

In other words, the U.S. is riding a wave that was started by the educated class in the 1940s and 1950s and was increasingly supported by the immigrant class in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. When the immigrants stop coming, if the educated class is found to be missing...then, yes, the U.S. is screwed.

Here in India, Going to America is very fashionable and earns a lot of respect in society. A lot of friends went to America for further studies for just 'America returned' brand factor.

Indians have a lot of misconceptions about America. Some of the most ridiculous economic assumptions.

a. Everybody in America is ultra rich. b. There are no poor people in America, Everybody in America is a millionaire. c. Everybody owns a car in America. d. In America all houses have gardens, beautiful parks around them. e. If you are in America you are in heaven.

Thereby the mad rush to get settled in America, somehow. Some people take ridiculous loans to study there. Ultimately leaving no other option but to stay back in America work there even for throw away prices just to pay of the massive debt back home.

People back here in India, find it very difficult to believe that there are a lot people in America who have to work very hard just to make ends meet.

And let me put it this way, while we were hiring, the number of qualified candidates we saw was mostly foreign. In fact, the last 3 hires we made before I left was all foreign - not out of preference, but because that's where the supply sits.

I'm personally Chinese-Canadian, and something my folks said to me when I was younger has really stuck with me through the years: people who have suffered work harder. Much, much harder - not 20% harder, more like 1000% harder. Hard work pays off.

> Not sure about Google and Microsoft, but it does say something that 50% of Google's founders were foreign born.

I'm not sure it says anything beyond the point that brilliant people will be successful regardless of where they were born.

Unless by "doing something right" you mean "continuing to provide an environment where the already-successful can have successful children." :-)

That's not to say Apple hasn't raised the bar of industrial design (and made some folks very rich), but I'm not sure that Apple is a critical piece of Anerican's science landscape.