Variation in US education

[LaCroix]

I stumbled over this, and thought it might be interesting:

[Raw Shark]

Okay, I knew it was bad in places, but I didn't know it was that bad. Of course, I grew up in the state that gets compared to Norway, and currently inhabit the one that gets compared to the Netherlands (for multiple reasons! /rimshot) so that probably explains it.

[Darmalus]

I don't know it it's just me, but all I see is:

I stumbled over this, and thought it might be interesting:

and nothing else in the OP.

[LaCroix]

Big picture in the OP - maybe your browser is blocking it?

[Elheru Aran]

Georgia is on the same level as Libya? Damn.

[Ace Pace]

Georgia is on the same level as Libya? Damn.

Don't forget that since your state area is so big there are huge differences even inside the state.

[Welf]

I'm a bit confused on how this map works. It uses the graduation rate to compare to the education index? How is that comparable? Does the education index also use graduation rates? Because if so, those are bollocks. The easy way to get higher graduation rates is by lowering standards.
And the map looks strange, it seems to me the majority of the US population has a lower education standard than the USA, which seems a bit odd.

Maybe it is just me, but I like my anti-Americanism with more reliable data. I went to an European school.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Georgia is on the same level as Libya? Damn.

Worse, Oklahoma's on par with Syria. We even have our very own ISIS.

[LaCroix]

I'm a bit confused on how this map works. It uses the graduation rate to compare to the education index? How is that comparable? Does the education index also use graduation rates? Because if so, those are bollocks. The easy way to get higher graduation rates is by lowering standards.
And the map looks strange, it seems to me the majority of the US population has a lower education standard than the USA, which seems a bit odd.

Maybe it is just me, but I like my anti-Americanism with more reliable data. I went to an European school.

It uses the same metrics as the UN report, but applies them to each state seperately instead of the US as a whole.

And it's only the majority of US AREA do have a lower education standard than the US as a whole. The urban megacities and dense populated areas of the northern east coast do rank as high as Norway does. There is a sizeble chunk of the US living there, and they are educated well above the 'american average'. That's how an average works. If you were looking for the index value of a truly "average" american, you'd have to find the median value, which is most likely far off the "average" for the whole US. (That's how statistics work out - averages are highly unreliable.)

Even for the States, the Syria/Lybia label is only the average over the state - If you were to break down this map even further, you'd probably see a few glowing lights hovering over every major city, while the most of the rural areas are a more or less uniform "not so well lit" areas. So once again, breaking that map down to say, precincts, would mean that vast swathes of these areas would be downgraded even more, while the cities would be raised (probably to high east-coast values).

And this is not Anti-americanism - this is simple statistics at work, and this holds true for most countries (even in Europe, you will find significant differences between rural and urban education levels in most states). It's just that nobody did such a map for other countries, yet.

[AniThyng]

I'm not convinced, unless the HDI is measuring high school graduation rate, the graphic is poorly worded as it implies they are comparing HDI against high school graduation rate. And that seems to utterly fail as a comparison since there is no normalization for the actual standard of the diploma...

[LaCroix]

I'm not convinced, unless the HDI is measuring high school graduation rate, the graphic is poorly worded as it implies they are comparing HDI against high school graduation rate. And that seems to utterly fail as a comparison since there is no normalization for the actual standard of the diploma...

True. But he says that he's comparing it to the Education Index of the HDI.
This is a sub-set of the HDI and is basically a Average years of schooling/max years of schooling index (e.g. how many did finish school)
http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-de ... -index-hdi

For the US, this is reported by using the high school graduation rate. The index is not measuring quality of education, but ratio of completion of the available education.

It is also a system that usually closely approximates quality. If only few people finish (public) school in a country, you can be sure that the schools are pretty bad, on top. If a lot do finish, the level of education will gradually improve as schools do tend get better in an environment where people are educated (e.g. educated parents seek best schools for their kids and private schools adapt 'up', or countries correct the curriculum ocasionally to ensure quality).

[Simon_Jester]

There are a few complicating factors.

Urban education in the US tends to be relatively bad; it's suburban education which is good. Most of the lowest-performing school districts are inner-city districts, from the statistics I've seen.

This is because urban school districts have massive populations of low-income ethnic minorities and because of the large numbers of relatively rich people who've "fled" the cities to live in the suburbs... and who form the local tax base that supports local schools. It's to the point where "urban education" is almost like a catch-phrase for "how to educate students who lack good pre-school preparation, half of whom come from broken families, and most of whom are chronically short of money." And the US doesn't have a nationally integrated educational system or much of a welfare system, so there's no major coordinated federal effort to combat this trend.

So in a lot of cities you'd actually see 'doughnuts' of high educational attainment, surrounding an urban core of low attainment, and then the rural areas.

Another point is that honestly, I suspect the correlation between high school graduation rate and school quality breaks down somewhere around 90% to 95%. Because, as noted, the easiest way to increase graduation rates is to lower your standards and dedicate a disproportionate amount of your faculty's energy to the lowest-performing 10% of your students. It's debateable whether you get a better school system that way.

Even for the States, the Syria/Lybia label is only the average over the state - If you were to break down this map even further, you'd probably see a few glowing lights hovering over every major city, while the most of the rural areas are a more or less uniform "not so well lit" areas.

To be fair, you'd probably see the same in Libya itself, as you point out a bit further down. People in Tripoli are probably a lot better educated on average than people in a random village in the hinterlands.

[LaCroix]

Another point is that honestly, I suspect the correlation between high school graduation rate and school quality breaks down somewhere around 90% to 95%. Because, as noted, the easiest way to increase graduation rates is to lower your standards and dedicate a disproportionate amount of your faculty's energy to the lowest-performing 10% of your students. It's debateable whether you get a better school system that way.

Short term, no.

Long term, you get more people through school with a decent education. People with lower education might accept bad schools, for they are the best they can get. Often, they cannot even discern if a school is good or bad.

Well-educated parents do not tolerate bad schools. These people will try to get the best education for their children, and will know if a school is doing their job or not. So in long term, getting more people into school will change the general social layout, and result in overall school quality getting better by heightened demand.

Of course, this will have the most impact in countries with low education standards, and will ease up once your graduation rate approaches 1. But it serves as a system to prevent quality from deteriorating, as parents will protest against damaging policies or simply remove their children and put them in a better school if things get bad.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes to a point. Basically, what I'm saying is that there is definitely a big difference in system quality* between a 60% graduation rate and an 80% graduation rate. But there isn't necessarily much difference between a 90% and a 95%, and the 95% system might actually be better than the 97% system.

*Or a difference in underlying factors that controls and dominates the situation. School districts that operate with equal skill and effort may not achieve the same results if their student populations aren't the same.

[Welf]

It uses the same metrics as the UN report, but applies them to each state seperately instead of the US as a whole.

And it's only the majority of US AREA do have a lower education standard than the US as a whole. The urban megacities and dense populated areas of the northern east coast do rank as high as Norway does. There is a sizeble chunk of the US living there, and they are educated well above the 'american average'. That's how an average works. If you were looking for the index value of a truly "average" american, you'd have to find the median value, which is most likely far off the "average" for the whole US. (That's how statistics work out - averages are highly unreliable.)

Even for the States, the Syria/Lybia label is only the average over the state - If you were to break down this map even further, you'd probably see a few glowing lights hovering over every major city, while the most of the rural areas are a more or less uniform "not so well lit" areas. So once again, breaking that map down to say, precincts, would mean that vast swathes of these areas would be downgraded even more, while the cities would be raised (probably to high east-coast values).

And this is not Anti-americanism - this is simple statistics at work, and this holds true for most countries (even in Europe, you will find significant differences between rural and urban education levels in most states). It's just that nobody did such a map for other countries, yet.

I actually do know a bit about statistics.
The problem is, it can't work. The Northeastern US have about 5 million inhabitants. Texas, rated with Turkey, and California, rated with Cile, combined have 62 million inhabitants. So the northeast can't have that huge effect.
And within the northeast, 41 million live in the Midadlantic states. New York is rated with Slovakia, Pennsylvania with Kyrgistan and New Jersey with USA. From that I would assume the northeast alone has an average of the USA. But if that region is average already, how can it lift the average of the rest of the USA?
In the end it doesn't add up, and I suspect a lot of US states should be rated higher.

[Raw Shark]

5 million in the Northeastern U.S.? What are you counting as that region? Massachusetts alone has over a million more than that.

[Imperial528]

The US Census pegs the Northeast at almost 56 million. This includes New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware.

[Darmalus]

Decided to look up the comparative rates, apparently the USA is around 80% graduation (our peak was 82%).
From 2012, which had the cleanest graph I could find.


But it's not surprising it's low, considering US highschools have graduation rates between 98% and 30%!

[Welf]

5 million in the Northeastern U.S.? What are you counting as that region? Massachusetts alone has over a million more than that.

A typo; I meant to write 56. That's why I later wrote the subset of the midatlantic states has 42 million inhabitants.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Decided to look up the comparative rates, apparently the USA is around 80% graduation (our peak was 82%).
From 2012, which had the cleanest graph I could find.
<snip chart>
But it's not surprising it's low, considering US highschools have graduation rates between 98% and 30%!
<snip other chart>

Nothing for Peach County, or any of the other school systems in the other Georgia? Having graduated from Peach County High in a much younger day, and knowing how crap that school was(their only claims to fame were the $2M auditorium, and that they hadn't had to paint the walls since the school had been built in '73), I was just curious.

Also, I've lived in South Georgia, and while not all of the region's Deliverance country, still, one could almost hear the strains of "Duelling Banjos."

[Ziggy Stardust]

That's how an average works. If you were looking for the index value of a truly "average" american, you'd have to find the median value, which is most likely far off the "average" for the whole US. (That's how statistics work out - averages are highly unreliable.)

This is a bit of an aside, but averages are only unreliable in the case that you have a heavily skewed distribution. That is, if you suspect that there is a greater density of individuals on one side of the population average compared to the other; i.e., that there are more people with very very low levels of education than with very very high levels of education, or vice versa. If the distribution is even reasonably symmetric, the average is more reliable than the median due to a number of rather pleasant mathematical properties.

[Raw Shark]

Also, I've lived in South Georgia, and while not all of the region's Deliverance country, still, one could almost hear the strains of "Duelling Banjos."

"Dueling Banjos" is a cool song that requires a fair amount of technical proficiency to perform well.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Being a music lover, but not proficent in musical instruments, I'd have to take your word for it, Raw Shark.

But the scene in Deliverance where we first hear the song is just freakin' awesome. As is the song. Don't get me wrong on that.

[LaCroix]

Being a Banjo player, myself, I can only agree with Raw Shark.