<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>jerf</author><text>Step one in solving problems is &lt;i&gt;identify the problem&lt;/i&gt;. Especially in the political sphere people &lt;i&gt;love&lt;/i&gt; to skip over this step for a variety of reasons I hardly have to spell out.&lt;p&gt;If in fact our schooling policies are basically OK and the problem lies almost solely in the homes, then solutions involving throwing more money at school won&apos;t work. This is a worthy investigation.&lt;p&gt;My personal biases lead me to believe that if anything there&apos;s problems in both places, so my main point isn&apos;t that this person is necessarily right or wrong, my main point is Step One: Identify The Problem. It&apos;s often harder than you might think and often requires biases to be discarded.</text><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>There&apos;s something a little creepy about saying there&apos;s nothing wrong with the American education system by only looking at those in the US of European descent and excluding all others.&lt;p&gt;Basically it doesn&apos;t matter how well or badly the rest of the population does, it doesn&apos;t change the OP&apos;s hypothesis.&lt;p&gt;The point about immigrants scoring lower is well-taken but this is largely a language barrier. How exactly does this apply to, say, the African American segment of the population, many of whom have been in the US for hundreds of years and most of whom know no other language than English?&lt;p&gt;Socioeconomic factors, the education level of your parents and so on obviously come into play here but I read this post and read it like this: &quot;if we exclude all the problems in the US education system, the US education system is fine!&quot;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps that&apos;s not entirely fair but one must be very careful before discounting selection bias when drawing conclusions such as these.&lt;p&gt;Now I&apos;m not claiming the US education system is bad. Frankly I have no personal experience with it (coming from the &quot;negative gap&quot; of Australia).&lt;p&gt;I will say one thing: the US has something we don&apos;t in Australia and that&apos;s a tenured teacher system that makes it (near-)impossible to fire teachers [1]. It&apos;s still not easy in Australia but it is easier. That strikes me as a problem.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://reason.com/assets/db/12639308918768.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://reason.com/assets/db/12639308918768.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>After correcting for demographics, US schools fare better than EU/Asian schools</title><url>http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>endtime</author><text>&amp;#62;How exactly does this apply to, say, the African American segment of the population, many of whom have been in the US for hundreds of years and most of whom know no other language than English?&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s an extreme anti-education element to black culture in the US.  Caring about and one&apos;s education and working hard in school is derided as &quot;acting white&quot;.  It doesn&apos;t apply to everyone, of course (I knew black Americans at Georgetown and Stanford), but it&apos;s significant enough to bring down aggregate measures quite a lot.  I&apos;ve also seen studies showing that black parents spend less time helping their children with schoolwork than white and Asian parents.&lt;p&gt;The US school system isn&apos;t perfect (the inability to fire bad teachers, largely because of unions, is, in my opinion, among the biggest problems in the country), but it&apos;s not totally or even primarily at fault for the education problems among black people.&lt;p&gt;Also:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62;There&apos;s something a little creepy about saying there&apos;s nothing wrong with the American education system by only looking at those in the US of European descent and excluding all others.&lt;p&gt;You&apos;re misrepresenting this, not sure if it&apos;s deliberate, but this is done for the sake of comparing the US to Europe, which is pretty reasonable and not crypto-racist as you imply.</text><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>There&apos;s something a little creepy about saying there&apos;s nothing wrong with the American education system by only looking at those in the US of European descent and excluding all others.&lt;p&gt;Basically it doesn&apos;t matter how well or badly the rest of the population does, it doesn&apos;t change the OP&apos;s hypothesis.&lt;p&gt;The point about immigrants scoring lower is well-taken but this is largely a language barrier. How exactly does this apply to, say, the African American segment of the population, many of whom have been in the US for hundreds of years and most of whom know no other language than English?&lt;p&gt;Socioeconomic factors, the education level of your parents and so on obviously come into play here but I read this post and read it like this: &quot;if we exclude all the problems in the US education system, the US education system is fine!&quot;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps that&apos;s not entirely fair but one must be very careful before discounting selection bias when drawing conclusions such as these.&lt;p&gt;Now I&apos;m not claiming the US education system is bad. Frankly I have no personal experience with it (coming from the &quot;negative gap&quot; of Australia).&lt;p&gt;I will say one thing: the US has something we don&apos;t in Australia and that&apos;s a tenured teacher system that makes it (near-)impossible to fire teachers [1]. It&apos;s still not easy in Australia but it is easier. That strikes me as a problem.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;http://reason.com/assets/db/12639308918768.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://reason.com/assets/db/12639308918768.pdf&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>After correcting for demographics, US schools fare better than EU/Asian schools</title><url>http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html</url></story>