Hacker News Reader

Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

The feds could also do some easy, central infrastructure things that would reduce school and local govt funding needs in the first place. If the schools or localities want to buy their own, great. Three examples:

1. It seems every school uses a mishmash of Moodle, Schoology, and some Sharepoint abortion. If the feds would spend around the cost of 3 or 4 F-35 helmets ($1.6M) they could build and offer a decent school site. You know, homeworks, attendance. It could be the same software everywhere, even if you changed schools. Teachers wouldn't need retraining and kids would have their stuff follow them.

2. Fund a decent central, unbiased curriculum with open source text books. Kansas can suck an egg. Localities really _don't_ need their own curricula. The 3 R's don't need to vary with district.

3. Same as 1 but for local government operations software. Do they really all need their own?

View on HN

On paper that's interesting. I'm skeptical that the national government can do that well, however. The rollout of the ACA websites makes it clear that the government isn't good at producing that sort of product.

Furthermore, the premise of the article is that the government is very inefficient. I'm not sure $1.6M is a fair estimate for the cost of this sort of product. There are millions of teachers in the U.S. not to speak of parents, administrators, and kids.

I'm open to providing incentives to make this sort of progress more feasible. I'm partial to better support of open source software that meets these ends (like tax deductions for time or cash contributions to OSS projects the government uses).

>The rollout of the ACA websites makes it clear that the government isn't good at producing that sort of product.

You mean that the private contractor hired to do the HealthCare.gov website, CGI Federal, did a lousy job?

Most of the things the government "produces" are not produced by the government. They're sent out for bidding by private companies - roads, guns, websites, whatever - and the government is in charge of oversight.

And the fact that they've been proven incapable at oversight and management should figure into the planning.

But what makes you so sure the government wouldn't do better taking it in-house? And even if we throw out that possibility, we're talking about implementing off-the-shelf software here, no producing custom software.

Great point! And since - as described - it's all open source, there doesn't even need to be Federal oversight or management.

If the only thing standing between now and doing it is the will and tech support, that's an easy problem to solve.

> You mean that the private contractor hired to do the HealthCare.gov website, CGI Federal, did a lousy job?

That may be true as well, but any customer that's changing requirements at the last minute and demands idiotic deployments (nationwide, hard deadline, untested, lots of PR, etc.) is ultimately responsible for what happens.

Maybe every single vendor should have sensed that outcome, but it's more realistic to think that someone will take that contract, even if it's doomed.

ACA was very complex and the time from the law actually passing to the site going live was pretty short. Until the law was completely signed there was basically no spec for GCI to work with other than some vague generalities about what it'd have to do. I'd put a fair amount of the blame for how shoddy it was to that compressed timeline as much as contractor waste and inefficiency.

> ACA was very complex and the time from the law actually passing to the site going live was pretty short.

And the federally-run state exchanges were a fallback that was intended to not need to be used, anyway; the whole point was that every state was going to have an exchange and that not setting one up wouldn't affect that, with the idea being that in that scenario even states that didn't support the idea would prefer to have control of the state exchange rather than handing it to the feds. The timeline from determining that there'd actually need to be federally-run exchanges to the site needing to be live was even shorter from the time from the law actually passing to the site going live.

> I'd put a fair amount of the blame for how shoddy it was to that compressed timeline as much as contractor waste and inefficiency.

That's more or less my take, but I consider that part of the government's terrible project management.

> There are millions of teachers in the U.S. not to speak of parents, administrators, and kids.

How's the number relevant? It's not like they'll charge per user, and each school only cares about O(10,000) users at most.

Huh? I worked in school district IT for quite some time and a huge number of services are billed per-student.

> How's the number relevant?

I'm just saying $1.6M is underfunded for something that complex. That's on the right order of magnitude to build out a proof-of-concept to pitch for an actual production rollout.

Keep in mind that you'll be dealing with a lot of relational data with some interesting security requirements, some of them legal. It's not just photos of cats.

I believe the US recently paid about as much for the functionality of a coin flip on an iPad and the software was only used for a few months.

OP is talking about much more complicated software than simulating a coin flip.

> Fund a decent central, unbiased curriculum with open source text books.

The key with this would be to fund the effort but not mandate it. The carrot for using the federal standard books is that they would be without license fees, which means localities would have to justify spending their own money to use something else. But if the feds do such a crap job that localities find it worth it to do that, they should still be able to. Or do that with some books but not all of them etc.

The free software model (something like the GPL) would be very interesting here, because you could have local schools making contributions to the national curriculum that other schools could adopt or not based on merit rather than local budgets. But not have some textbook publisher doing what Apple does to BSD, i.e. making sufficient improvements that theirs is the dominant version and then prohibiting further improvements by anyone else.

But the reason the Fed don't build cheap schools is the same reason the Feds do buy million dollar helmets.

Regulatory capture extends to every level of government so switching the level of government you deal with won't change the problem.

Number 2 is never ever going to happen. Do you remember all of the bugaboo about Common Core? That wasn't even the Feds getting involved in setting curriculum directly.

The right of a parent to indoctrinate their children trumps the right of the child to have an actual education.

I don't know the answer, but it's a gross feedback loop.

>an actual eduction

I'm not one of those people, but here it should be "indoctrinated by the state", because I think that's what our schools do. I think we play fast and loose with the term "school". For being an institution supposedly concerned with imparting knowledge on kids, the current system does a pretty shitty job of it. Most kids don't even know the algebra they "learn" in school, let alone stuff like how to pay rent, taxes, how to drive, how to budget, how to vote, how to work effectively in team situations on common tasks, how to survive in the wilderness (yes, that skill is taught in some countries). Our "schools" are awful. Maybe it's as simple as a big money injection. I dunno. But as is, it's awful.

I think you're being a little hyperbolic. And the question is whether the parents' exercising their "right" to promote their religion of choice and cut out the teaching of evolution and sex ed might not leave the child with some deficiencies in their education. It generally depends on how qualified the alternatives are, but the answer is probably "yes it does".

I'm not saying anything about those awful people. I'm saying that our education system is a giant mess. I am the polar opposite of those parents, but I know a few of them on Facebook and find that I agree with their sentiment about schools more often than not. And that is a problem, when the system is in a condition such that I find myself agreeing with those people about schools.

I wouldn't bet on a money injection fixing anything - I've read a number of reports that show almost no correlation between performance and per-student-dollars.

Yeah, you're right, douche.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com