Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

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I think stratification, or 'tracking; as it's called in the US I believe is one of the biggest failures of the German system.

From my experience in the US, high schools are about 4-5x the size of German schools. That allows for flexible curricular within one school, where you can get into the advanced Calculus class but take it easier with foreign languages, and, most important do sports etc, with everyone.

It really doesn't seem useful to sort people along a linear scale at 10 years of age, especially considering that empirically, the single most important factor for that decision is the parents' ambition.

The US' biggest flaw is quality differences between schools. I can't get my head around the idea that school finances heavily depend on the immediate neighbourhood they're serving. That's both morally bankrupt and severely shortsighted. The larger schools also double or triple the average commute, costing US students an hour per day, strengthening reliance on cars and making social life harder than it needs to be.

I totally agree that stratification at age 10 is pretty terrible, but stratification in universities seems like a very different story.

At college age, people are much more capable of making their own decisions, and their actual capabilities and weaknesses have also become clearer and more stable. And it's not like going to a Fachhochschule is going to set someone up for a hard life as being assigned to a Hauptschule pretty much does.

Fachhochschule gets a bad rep from snobs, but having worked with graduates, they often beat university grads in application fields. It's just a different focus

I agree. The point I was trying to make was that the choices between strata at the post-high school level are all quite good, unlike the choices that are presented at age 10.

Having started out at a University and switched to a Fachhochschule (Bachelor CS for both) I can say that there weren't more practical things at the FH, but everything was simply way easier. Math was simpler (mostly because it was usually applied as opposed to proofs, so I guess math was indeed more practical) and the CS courses were way below what the university offered. So I'd say it's certainly understandable when people look down on FH (because it can easily be the case that it's subpar)

>I totally agree that stratification at age 10 is pretty terrible, but stratification in universities seems like a very different story.

What would it add that the choice of university and major doesn't? The math kids at MIT aren't so different from each other.

I guess you could achieve the same effect with different majors, but in our system for example you can study majors that carry the same name, eg mechanical engineering, with a more theoretical or applied focus depending on which type of university you go to.

It's not rare for college students to spend their first or even second year of college with an undecided major while they find what they're interested in. It happened to me (and I still managed to graduate on time).

In fact, that's what a lot of people like about college and it's why you see college described as a "place to experiment".

> their actual capabilities and weaknesses have also become clearer and more stable

Also not so sure about this. I've met MANY people who went in 99% sure of college major A but after a few classes and an internship they found out they suck at it/hate it.

Could you elaborate why you think stratification is a bad thing? I think at age 10 you can robustly determine whether or not a student has the abilities for serious academic work, and I believe it's best for the students to get an education that's appropriate for their talents/needs. Besides, the system (as I experienced it in southern germany) is quite permeable, so even if the sorting is not perfect, students with the necessary academic ability have many paths to university.

At that age, brain still develops and relative ordering of children still change. The lowest performers are unlikely to become best, but the middle still changes significantly. Otherwise said, it is too soon to determine how good they will be as adults and what they will be good at.

Also, at that age, your ability to learn climbs very high just as function of age.

> The lowest performers are unlikely to become best, but the middle still changes significantly.

As long as the middle gets sorted into the Realschule, there's no problem ;-) But more seriously, according to wikipedia[0] IQ is relatively stable beginning at an age of approx. 11 years, so if we compensate for the measurement error with a permeable system I only see two problems: As you mentioned, at this age the brain devolops so rapidly that being the oldest in the class gives students a measurable advantage, but that is an issue for any school system, and as I said in a neighboring comment, overly ambitions parents are meddling too much, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon and a problem unto itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Age

Be very careful extrapolating from Wikipedia on IQ. The science is subtle and not at all as stable as the encyclopedia makes it sound. One of the reasons people in the field talk about this stuff so gingerly is the proclivity laypeople have for taking half-baked science and turning it into public policy.

I know the difficulties surrounding IQ, I was just quoting it to show that predictions about future ability can be made at that age.

... and my point was, probably no they cannot.

I quoted a source for my claim, imperfect though it may be. Can you support your assertion?

Your source was Wikipedia.

More to the point: you can't in one breath say "I know the difficulties surrounding IQ" and in the next say "any source I cite about IQ must represent settled science". One or the other of those statements must not be true.

Would you kindly elaborate on what you perceive to be the subtleties about IQ? Besides the danger of mistakenly thinking an important factor is the only factor, which is of course a common problem. About predictive qualities in childhood, take a look at [0], maybe this study is more to your liking. But anyway, this discussion is about the predictability of academic success in young children, so please provide a source for your claim that such predictions are infeasible.

[0] Deary, I. J., Whalley, L. J., Lemmon, H., Crawford, J. R., & Starr, J. M. (2000). The stability of individual differences in mental ability from childhood to old age: Follow-up of the 1932 Scottish mental survey. Intelligence, 28, 49 -55

German system does not measure IQ. They split children based on second, third and partly fourth grade grades.

There is a lot more then IQ that goes into grades. All of it happens before 10.

I think I explained myself poorly. Of course the schools don't measure raw IQ, there are many factors like intrinsic motivation (problematic as a measure in young children) conscientousness (which is a relatively stable character trait) and of course parental pressure which distorts any measurement we can try to make. All I was trying to say that it is possible to judge the potential of the children with adequate accuracy.

Your claim the IQ does not change after 11 years old, even if true, is completely irrelevant then. It shows neither that it is good idea to split kids as 11 years old nor that you can say potential so soon.

I know people who were thought to be 'learning challenged' in elementary school who went onto MIT and do great things... so no I disagree you can ascertain that at age 10.

Well, as I said, the system is not perfect, which is why there are several paths for "late bloomers" to make it to university. I myself got sorted into Hauptschule, but after a year my grades improved and I switched to Realschule, got a diploma, went to a Fachgymnasium and enrolled in university. Btw I agree with grandparents argument that the parents' ambition is often the determining factor (as it was in my case) but I would rather try to find a way to assess the students innate abilities more accurately than to simply mix all students together.

Oftentimes it's a funding issue, but not always. Even in large metropolitan cities where each student pretty much receives the same amount of funding, there are still massive differences in the quality of education. Unfortunately the issue goes much deeper than funding and involves issues like the wealth of the surrounding neighborhood, the culture of the students and their parents in that neighborhood, etc. Even if two schools in the same city get about $10k/year for each student, if one school has a median family income of $100k and the other a median family income of $15k, there is going to be an absolutely massive difference in educational outcomes.

In fact it's pretty common for urban schools to spend significantly more than tony suburbs and have far worse outcomes. Student achievement depends a lot on home life and spending more on schools may help some but doesn't fundamentally change that fact.

Something I noticed when I lived in non-assimilated[1] working class neighborhoods is that education just isn't that important. A lot of my neighbors graduated high school and started working for the family ASAP either in some sort of family business or a service job. Families stick together for generations so there's always someone to take care of the house and kids.

For most people I talked to, the idea of sending their son or daughter to college (even a local one) was a risk and rarely considered. If all they want is their kid to graduate high school, they're not going to have the same approach to education as the $100k family with the opposite thought (they HAVE to go to college).

[1] I made up this phrase to mean immigrant families who have been in the US for a few generations but have not assimilated to American middle class culture.

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