Holy shit... Ann Coulter is one bitter, old spinster...

[DFW]

185. That depends on what you consider "good."

Each State has its own education ministry, and decides a rigid curriculum. All teachers in a state are given guidelines on how they are to teach the subjects. Creativity is discouraged. In their math classes, if the students found another way to solve a problem than the one prescribed by the teacher (and thus the state) then they got marked wrong, even if they got the right answer.

Teachers are what is called "beamtet," in other words they can never be fired from their jobs, no matter how bad they may be. One semester here, three quarters of my daughters math class was getting paid outside tutoring because the teacher was impossible for all but future Nobel Prize nominees to follow. The whole class's parents had a meeting with her, and she haughtily explained it was their "age group" that made teaching them difficult. Contrast that with her semester in Dallas. At her school (a Dallas public school), they had the same problem with a new math teacher. They couldn't understand anything and all failed the first test. He was fired within two weeks. In Germany, he would have been there for the rest of his life. They got a new math teacher, and she learned more math in the one semester in Dallas than she had learned in the past two years in Germany.

That having been said, there is not the huge contrast here like there in the States. In the USA, you will have public schools that are so poorly funded, or so poorly administrated, that they practically look like third world schools. That is almost unheard of in Germany (or most anywhere in western Europe). In parts of Texas, some public schools are in miserable shape. Contrast that with Highland Park High School in Dallas, which is better funded than most New England prep schools. It's free--but you have to live within the school district. I met a teacher who worked there, and he said they had plenty of parents faking their residence documents just to get their kids in there.

So it's a question that really can't be answered with a yes or no. They DO have some good schools here. They have some good ones in the USA, too. It's more complicated than "is one better than the other." There's a lot of luck of the draw involved. My daughter had the luck to spend her semester at Highland Park High. Most of the kids there were from rich families, and didn't give a crap about their schoolwork. My daughter, on the other hand, after her rigid Gymnasium (high school) in Germany blossomed academically like a rosebud in the Spring. She took journalism and astronomy, courses German high schools don't offer, and she did very well in both. When she returned to finish her high school in Germany, she felt like she had been given a furlough from prison, and was being returned to serve out her sentence. When her younger sister decided she also wanted to go to the USA for her time "abroad," she requested to stay on, and finish her high school there (she landed in Hawaii, so there WAS an added bonus or two). We warned her that German universities did not recognize US high school diplomas (they have 13 years here). She said, then to hell with them, I'll apply to college in the USA. She never set foot in a German classroom again. Her sister's experience in the high school here was not lost on her.