Why Romania excels in international Olympiads

Tl;dr - Romania, like other Eastern European states, uses "tracking" or separate educational streams, so students from "National Colleges" (the top tier of Romanian high schools) tend to be overrepresented.

> The design of Romania’s educational system makes it perhaps the most stratified educational system in the world

> One of the cruel parts of the Romanian system is that, though sorting is nationally available, students do not have equal opportunities to sort. Students located in smaller towns have fewer high school options to select from unless they’re among the few who opt into a military academy, which means joining the military

> This combined sorting between schools and tracks means that low-ability students get stuck with other low-ability students, and high-ability students are surrounded by other high-ability students. In effect, peer groups throughout high school are extremely homogeneous.

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While this is good for identifying talent for Olympiads, it's questionable whether this is a net benefit for Romania as a whole. Neighboring Poland doesn't have the same level of tracking in it's educational system and has much stronger human capital based on HDI compared to Romania, despite both being roughly comparable to each other in the 1990s.

Human capital isn't developed by having a minority of students becoming the cream of the crop, it comes by helping all students get the option or ability to rise to the academic level at which they can succeed irrespective of geographic location (small town vs city), ethnicity, or economic class.

Ik people tend to point to Russian, Chinese, and Indian Olympiad students as being examples of success, but most of them also attended top universities due to their Olympiad attendance, so I doubt the Olympiad itself had an impact compared to attending a Tsinghua, FyzTech (Citadel still hires from there for the London office at least circa 2023 despite the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia), or IIT Delhi.

And anecdotally at least, I went to HS and college with a decent number of national and international Olympiad winners (one of whom was both a IMO and IPhO team member concurrently), and while they did decent in life (some HFT, mostly academia) it wasn't much different of an outcome compared to our peers who didn't partake in those olympiads.

This shouldn't dissuade people from doing Olympiads if they wish, but targeting Olympiad success for the sake of Olympiad success seems toxic and a waste of resources.

Edit: cannot reply

> Cyberax

I am not opposed to students participating in Olympiads od they chose so with full autonomy and independence, just like I am not opposed to students who want to do well in sports because they like sports.

If you are forcing your kid to be a tier 1 quarterback OR a IMO participant, you aren't making them a well rounded student.

And if you as a society make "being a football player" or "being a topper" the primary goal, you aren't actually identifying new talent, because the only way to rise to the top in a field is if you have an actual aptitude AND interest.

There's a reason why China and India are seeing significant social opposition from younger generations about "test driven" and "rote" culture, the same way plenty of boomer nerds on HN who grew up in the 80s and 90s were probably ostracized for not being into football (idk - I wasn't around for much of the 90s, I'm subsisting of pop culture from that era like Daria)

This is a very interesting topic and the article seems quite thorough. But I have trouble interpreting the crucial "School and track sorting can bolster or bust academic achievement" plots: The y axis is labelled "Graduation score percentile", but it has negative numbers on the scale. How are these values being corrected?

The series for 1-school towns on the left plot is basically flat; am I supposed to believe that, in such towns, students entering the school with a 0.5 on the high school admission test appear at the same exit exam percentile (implying that they have the same average exit exam scores) as those who entered with a 9.5? That can't possibly be true.

ETA: I also thought the conclusion -- that other countries should adopt a similar education model -- was out of step with most of the body text, which seemed to stress the downsides for weaker students. (There's no actual contradiction here, and perhaps the claim about most of society's advances being due to the top-end achievers was intended to justify this angle, but I was nevertheless surprised that there wasn't much discussion of why this upside should overpower the concerns for weaker students.)

> That can't possibly be true

It tracks with spatial inequality.

A 1 school town is highly likely to be a small rural town with limited economic prospects. Like plenty of CEE countries, the overwhelming majority of opportunities have historically been clustered in the capital and a couple regional cities.

The kind of town or village with only a single school is going to have fewer social benefits or services compared to an urban school.

Basically, what it is saying is students in those kinds of towns are s** out of luck statistically speaking compared to their urban peers.

There's a reason Romania's HDI has remained lower than Russia's until recently thanks to EU funding to help develop Romania (which is now on track to become a major economic pole in the CEE)

Edit: can't reply

> A lot turns on this. (I suppose I could read the underlying paper, but I'm lazy.)

I recommend checking it out. It explains the methodology and some potential wonkiness. It's always good to read the docs

The issue with "gifted only schools" is they end up eating the bulk of funds and legitimately don't have a strong predictive capacity on student success that couldn't already be explained the parental background and early childhood care.

In my case, I never placed in gifted academic programs in elementary and middle, but by HS was able to take 14 AP classes (and auto shop - always liked tinkering since elementary school; which was a major reason why I never placed well in gifted programs) and end up at HYS. Most of my peers there similarly didn't attended gifted programs or high schools - amongst the non-legacies the biggest predictor of success was SAT scores and GPA.

While giving and funding academic and gifted tracks within schools should be allowed, "gifted" students should not be segregated from "normal" students. There's no reason a high school can't both offer as many AP classes as possible ALONG with vocational classes.

Edit: can't reply

> Why should gifted schools need more money than normal schools

It's not that they need more funding. The issue is gifted programs tend to overlap with upper income families [0] - the same kinds of families that are overrepresented in School Boards and PTAs [1]

I'm not saying go all "San Francisco 2.0", but recognize that gifted only schools does lead to a moral perception that other students are not as deserving for funding or are "bad students".

[0] - https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2019/09/30/socioeconomic-status-...

[1] - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584188180...

> the highest-ability schools receive a decrement in funding

But are overrepresented in urban areas where human capital is significantly higher than rural areas within Romania [2]. Students in rural and small town schools are less liked to be as healthy or a affluent as students in cities or major urban centers, and this does have a tangible downstream effect on education as a whole.

[2] - https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/abs/2021/06...

> If you look at SF...

Note how I said >

There is a happy middle ground between being an exclusionary system like Romania's or a delusional bussed system like San Francisco.

Giving the example of a city with a population the size of Cincinnati is clearly a facile argument, as it is obviously not representative of the rest of California, let alone the US.

I acknowledge that effect is present, but it's simply not strong enough to dominate natural variation in ability (for which high school entrance exam scores are a proxy) to the point where the results are completely flat -- in fact, students who achieved the highest scores on the entrance exam were slightly lower in exit scores on average than those with low or medium entrance scores!

What this tells me is that some kind of correction is being applied to those y values (we already know this because of negatives numbers on a "percentile" axis) -- but what?

A lot turns on this. (I suppose I could read the underlying paper, but I'm lazy.)