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Comment by ashark | Hacker News Reader

In the case of public k-12 schools, I've observed that there's an incredible amount of flailing when it comes to the curriculum, and every time they thrash about and change course a ton of money is spent on consultants (training, implementation) and new materials. I suspect there are also admin and support positions that exist mostly due to the strain caused by all of this (curriculum experts and such). This is constant, but they can also count on each new US President to create some initiative that makes them spend a bunch of money every 4-8 years.

My guess is this was not the case in the 60s and 70s, or not to the same degree. I know, I know, "new math" and all that, but that may have been just the beginning of this trend of constant curriculum strategy churn, which seems to be getting worse with each passing year.

I wonder what educational material and consulting company revenues look like over the last 5-6 decades?

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You hit on a problem I hear from my high school teacher girlfriend. It typically looks like:

1. One or several motivated schools attempt a new style of teaching / grading / curriculum. 2. It succeeds amazingly. 3. Other schools rush to grab some of that success.

The issue is that the causality between #1 and #2 is: "A motivated admin & teaching staff all working in the same direction can improve outcomes". While #3 is assuming: "a magic curriculum will do it for us".

Then after adopting the new-hotness fails, repeat with another new idea.

I wonder if there's anything professionals developing software could learn from this by analogy.

Motivated team chooses technology X. Succeeds. Other team chooses X but forgets to have motivated people?

I think you've just described Agile.

Yes. The "silver bullet" is having people that care and those people are all pulling in the same direction.

I've even seen (though my wife, who's a teacher) admin that doesn't understand how replicability works, and takes on some new discipline strategy or teaching approach for their school(s), spending a bunch of money on it and wasting a ton of teachers' time, but jettisoning large parts of it they're not comfortable with... thus obviously to any observer with a lick of sense destroying any hope it had of succeeding. It's painful to watch.

I think most of the motivation for this (in general, not the specific failure mode in the previous paragraph) is blame-shifting. If you're switching stuff around you're trying something. It's a sign that you're working so hard to improve things. If it's some consulting-corporation-blessed system you don't need to justify it personally—they say it's good and sell it for you! If (when...) it fails, maybe the system was at fault, maybe the company, but at least there are potential targets for blame that aren't you.

And the only people who've lost are everyone who's not in school admin or education consulting/supply, so you know, just teachers, students, taxpayers, parents. No biggie.

Even worse is the similar pattern of

1. A school produces great results. 2. A consultant comes and mines that school for "best practices". 3. Other schools pay the consultant a small fortune to replicate those practices.

Where the successful school may not even have updated anything in the last decade; they just have a particularly good combination of dedicated staff, helpful administration, and well-supported students. Particularly bad is trying to replicate something from a suburban school full of privately-paid tutors and parents reviewing the nightly homework in a setting where lunch and school supplies are a major hurdle for many families.

The cost curriculum flailing can't be understated. Eg. of school textbook is ridiculous. Not just college level, all the k-12 texts have to be updated to match the very detailed curriculum requirements - and only textbook vendors track it, and then they put out new books. But it's now not only the books, because the curriculum changes, teachers need to develop new teaching plans and because it changes so often - they often need to buy workbooks or other materials to help keep up. Then there is the add-on electronic access (which is almost always some terrible 90's tech access gateway to quasi-pdfs, or some html+proprietary multimedia gateway). Meanwhile, kids are lugging around backpacks full of textbooks which are 2x the thickness they used to be (because the efficiency of production wasn't used to reduce costs - it was used to increase pagecount...).

I don't think this is a major part of the equation. Most states have at least a six year textbook purchase cycle. Often they try to stretch it out even further than that.

Let's do a Fermi calculation: 6 subjects x 1 / 6 of a text book per year x 1.1 for lost or destroyed textbooks * $200 per book = $220 in textbooks per year per student.

For scale, Mississippi has the lowest average spending per pupil in the nation -- $8,130 as of two years ago.

Granted there's workbooks and software too, but if you look at the budget of a school district, the lion's share is going to district personnel not books or computers or electricity or anything else external.

Disclosure: I work for an e-textbook company.

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