The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this morning that subtly made the case for increasing the number of hours American students spend in the classroom during their time in primary and secondary schools. Much of the article's argumentation rests on the fact that students in countries like Japan and Korea spend more time in the classroom and thus — or so the logic goes — outscore their American peers in areas like mathematics and science.

While I don't doubt public schools could devote more time to students, I'm not convinced it's more time in the classroom that accounts for the bulk of this "achievement gap" that separates American students from their international counterparts.

Unlike the United States, most other developed countries have a much more rigid educational hierarchy. In the UK, for example, students who fail to pass at least five GCSE exams, usually around the age of 16, cannot continue on the path toward admission to university. As a result, the lowest achievers don't contribute to the average achievement of UK students in a particular age group. Compare this to the United States' educational system, which does not regularly purge classrooms of weak students.

It's as if we were comparing the relative wealth of the United States and Japan by taking the average income across the whole population in the United States, but only the top 50% of income earners in Japan.

But more than that, my own experience contradicts this premise. While I'm not sure how experts compare educational achievement across countries, I think it's safe to say I was better at math than the average student in any developed country at every point in my high school career. Yet, I attended a public high school that — so far as I know — did not require us to spend considerably more time in the classroom than the average US secondary school.

I'm convinced the real fix for our education problem has more to do with the quality of teachers and cultural norms than the number of hours students are required to spend in the classroom.

Even at the college level, teacher quality makes a big difference in my engagement, perhaps even more than my interest in the subject itself. Just this last semester I signed up for a course on the French Enlightenment to fulfill one of my graduation requirements. It's a subject I have an interest in, though not to the degree I'm fascinated by, say, economic models of drug addiction. But the professor I had for that course was so good, I would by lying if I claimed I found any of my other courses more enthralling.

As to the second part, I'm never surprised that American students don't do better in mathematics given that American culture has accepted this bizarre notion that mathematics is "hard." In some sense, math is complicated. But so is the analysis of literature or history. I've taken a variety of advanced courses in math and economics, but none has challenged me more than the French literature course I took in my first semester of college.

I don't want to argue that primary and secondary education don't need to change. But I'm not convinced more classroom hours will make all that much a difference. It makes no sense to keep students in the classroom for one or two extra hours a week if they don't have engaging teachers and the mindset that, with enough determination, they can integrate real-valued functions.