Student Achievement In America

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

As predictable as Ted Kennedy's five o'clock date with a gin bottle, it always happens at tax time. Mrs TWC will be home for weeks on end, tippity tapping at her laptop on the dining room table, and then, right when things explode into white hot flame, she has to leave town.

Actually, although I'm certain I must have been smoking opium at the time, TWC had originally planned to tag along with her to Scottsdale this weekend. That worked out. What was I thinking? It's tax time.

Institute for Humane Studies is throwing a big donor shindig in Scottsdale and the Missus caught a plane at zero-dark-thirty this morning. She'll treat the throngs to her shocking and awesome tales of education woes in America sometime later today.

One of the more salient arguments she'll make is that while student achievement in the US may not be as high as other nations, it doesn't matter as much as you think. I hear your eyebrows going up. That's because (paraphrasing) it doesn't do Chinese kids any good to be smart because the system doesn't allow them to do much with the knowledge they've acquired.

In the US, we still have a relatively free market system in place, freer than most western nations. The resulting productivity and creativity gains more than offset any competitive disadvantage of lower test scores.

Fascinating stuff and I hope I got it right (here at home she talks fast and waves her arms around a lot and sometimes her voice is a bit muffled when she's throwing clothes into the dryer and I'm at my desk).

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Mrs TWC is Director of Education at Reason Foundation, a free-market libertarian think tank. I don't know where those guys came up with that picture, but it doesn't look much like the chick I'm married to. She looks more like this.

As Always,

TWC