US K-12 students do poorly compared to other countries.
Once you account for race, American K-12 students outperform other countries. All that extra money we spend on schooling does translate into modest educational gains.
Accounting for race is generally just a lazy way to account for economic status.
I want to learn what's well-understood about education. I expect to launch myself into some endeavors in teaching the first few levels of epistemic and instrumental rationality - ie., critical thinking and problem solving. I'm a little suspicious, though, of the scattered educational texts that I've so far read. In particular, education seems like a field where it's easy to have motivated thoughts, and hard to gather good data.
With my background (Math and CS) I'm a little at sea in educational literature. Does anyone know of good, reductionist-grade or evidential-grade, introductory texts in education?