Kevin Huffman has a very good response to this morning’s Samuelson op-ed. The ‘we’re pretty good except for them’ argument is troubling and you hear it a lot. Disaggregating data to get better visibility into a problem is one thing, implicitly (or explicitly) saying there isn’t a problem because of skewed results is another.
A different aspect of this that I don’t think gets enough attention is all the various non-school factors that determine competitiveness. America was a great place to do business in the 20th Century because we enjoyed stable government, respect for contracts and property, lots of workers, etc…etc…But the world is changing. That’s why these retrospective arguments are not that interesting. The more pertinent question to debate is: Given the way the world is changing, at least insofar as we can tell, how does this country need to educate its citizens to maintain quality of life and fidelity to our avowed goals – for instance social mobility.