I am quite sympathetic about too much administration; however, the difference is more fundamental.
America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress.
We see what this does even here in the US. Every charter school always manages to claim to be "cost effective"--except that they always manage to do this by effectively flushing the lower performing (read "expensive") students back to the public schools. When you force the charter schools to accept via lottery so they can't cherry pick only the decent students, their cost effectiveness vanishes.
And, by the way, the Gates Foundation actually had solid research about this from following several programs. For middle school age and below students, you need to spend roughly $15K per student (and that was 5+ years ago--so adjust upward), hold class sizes at about 15 students maximum, and have 2 adults in the room. This allows you to bring poorly performing students up to average over several years.
ALL of those programs were eventually cancelled for lack of money. Everybody wants "educational excellence" until somebody hands them the bill--then everybody pisses and moans about cost.
The only people who don't moan about cost are the upper class--they fund the hell out of the schools their kids go to. Funny that.
The comparisons of education systems measure everybody, no matter how you track them. If measurements of a "tracking" system shows better results (measured on as average of everybody) than teaching everyone together, that doesn't imply a bad measurement, that implies that tracking may be beneficial.
Also, you yourself provide explicit examples of de facto "tracking" in USA, just the separation is based on parents' financial means instead of educational attributes.
America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress.
This study was about 13-year olds. Most countries "flush away" (thank you for using a gratuitously denigrating term here) their students after 13, not before.
America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress.
We see what this does even here in the US. Every charter school always manages to claim to be "cost effective"--except that they always manage to do this by effectively flushing the lower performing (read "expensive") students back to the public schools. When you force the charter schools to accept via lottery so they can't cherry pick only the decent students, their cost effectiveness vanishes.
And, by the way, the Gates Foundation actually had solid research about this from following several programs. For middle school age and below students, you need to spend roughly $15K per student (and that was 5+ years ago--so adjust upward), hold class sizes at about 15 students maximum, and have 2 adults in the room. This allows you to bring poorly performing students up to average over several years.
ALL of those programs were eventually cancelled for lack of money. Everybody wants "educational excellence" until somebody hands them the bill--then everybody pisses and moans about cost.
The only people who don't moan about cost are the upper class--they fund the hell out of the schools their kids go to. Funny that.