> A good old prisoners dilemma. If you got more resources to spend on education, you don't want to sit in the same class as someone who can only contribute little to the course. Just like worse graduates will ruin the prestige of the school and thus value of your degree. Outcome-base exclusion can be fine, unless it ends up as proxy to select for socio-economic factors and thus make society offer less equal opportunity.

Let's trace that out a little more. Are you implying that private/charter schools have more dollars to spend per student? Because that's certainly not true for Charter schools. It's probably true for some private schools, but also not all. And if that's not what you're saying, then i'm not sure I understand your argument.

> I'd like a source on that. I do understand culture will have a significant influence, especially on what value people place on education. But your statement seems to go a lot further into "school doesn't matter" territory. This directly contradicts with earlier statements and e.g. many chines studying in the US.

I can no longer find the source where I originally read it, but we can reconstruct the data. I'm going to show it for math, but the results are similar for other subjects.

PISA Rankings by country:

https://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-ma...

As you can see, the US looks pretty abysmal, given how rich it is. However, if you look at the math PISA scores for whites and asians, you see this:

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2015/pisa2015highlights...

Now, the US doesn't jump to the very top, but it does jump to just below Norway and right above Austria. Certainly a solidly high quality education. You'll see the same results across other subjects too.

Of course, that doesn't mean our educational system doesn't have room for improvement. It most certainly does. But the idea that we're severely lagging the rest of the developed world is mostly false, when you adjust for this confound.