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Comment by ericpts | Hacker News Reader

What would be a good reason for distributing students based on luck (which is what I gathered from the article), versus having everyone take a standardized test and then assigning pupils to schools based on their performance in their test?

The test approach seems the fairest to me, as a grade A student should have a higher priority of getting into a top school than a lower grade student.

Contrast this with having a high achieving student not getting into the school of his choice due to sheer bad luck, and I do not see much benefit from the lottery system.

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Two reasons come to mind — one is you don’t want your middle schoolers devoting significant resources to mastering an arbitrary test, and you certainly don’t want middle schools themselves to start teaching to it.

Second, that it may be contrary to their social engineering goals to place high schoolers into schools based on test taking ability in the first place. They don’t want popular schools to be loaded with the students who achieved the highest test scores. Probably this is exactly not what they want.

> mastering an arbitrary test

If the test is based on the standard middle/high school curriculum (if there is one), then it can be a fairly good predictor.

Otherwise, even if it is an arbitrary test, it takes study skills and discipline to be able to master it. I imagine that both of those traits correlate with performance at school.

> If the test is based on the standard middle/high school curriculum (if there is one), then it can be a fairly good predictor.

I doubt that, humans are capable of overfitting standardized tests extremely easily. Just doing a single practice run will usually give you significant advantage. You would have to "regularize" by changing the test structure/types of questions/whatever every year, which is not really feasible.

> Otherwise, even if it is an arbitrary test, it takes study skills and discipline to be able to master it. I imagine that both of those traits correlate with performance at school.

Sure they do - except now you have got students training for a significant part of their middle school life for an arbitrary test instead of some "real" education.

Creating a new test each year is very doable. Especially if it consists of many parts (for different classes/subjects - maths, literature, biology, etc).

Students are already tested to death.

Not every secondary school is the same. There are a couple of levels:

* VWO ("preparatory scientific education") is the hardest level and prepares students for university.

* HAVO ("higher general education") is the level below that, and prepared students for higher professional education (HBO), or they can choose to do the last two years of VWO in order to qualify for university (though they can also go to university after higher professional education)

* VMBO ("preparatory medium professional education"), used to be called "lower professional education". Teaches students practical skills (trade school?), after which they can get a low-level job, or move on to medium professional education (MBO), or they can do the last two years of HAVO to qualify for HBO or VWO.

In the last year of primary school, students do a "Cito Test", and based on that and the opinion of the teacher and school, they get a recommendation for which level is most appropriate for them. Often it's a mix, like HAVO/VWO, so the student would best go to a school that offers both HAVO and VWO.

I have no idea what happens when a student picks a school that's way outside their recommendation. I expect they'll be refused, but I have no idea at which moment in the process.

First time I have seen trade skills referred to as professional - in the education / job designation sense not in the sense in dong a good job.

I don't know what else to call it, really. In Dutch it's called "beroepsonderwijs". Beroep = profession. In my opinion, you're a professional if you get paid to do something. And hopefully many graduates of VMBO, MBO and HBO are competent at what they do.

The Dutch system also makes clear that it's a scale. HBO graduates are definitely professionals. They include engineers, nurses, managers, teachers, therapists, architects, etc. MBO graduates can become anything from mechanic to lab worker, computer programmer, various construction jobs, and tons of other things.

VMBO is really for lower level jobs. It's not recommended that you stop after VMBO, but it's possible. But many students continue to MBO, and some move on to HBO after that. A cousin of mine took that route, as did my wife. She started with MAVO, which is now the highest track if VMBO, then she did MBO, and HBO, and now she's better paid than I am while working on her MBA.

> a grade A student should have a higher priority of getting into a top school than a lower grade student.

Why? Attending a school isn't the Stanley Cup trophy.

Why bother pouring resources into students have already achieved educational targets? Comparative advantage implies that lower performing students have more room to gain from better schools.

This is before even getting into what even defines "better", which is too quickly overlooked.

For medical school there exactly this kind of test you describe: the 'decentralized test'. If you score well enough you are allowed admission in med school. If you do not pass you can take part in the lottery where your admission rate is based upon your high school grades.

I didn't get into med school on my first try and switched to applied math, never looked back. I'm kind of glad I didn't get in in hindsight.

Metrics and chance are bad substitutes for tutelage. If a world values scholarship (which seems self-evident), then scholars should not be presented with obstacles. I'm not sure what the measure of a person's scholarship is, and indeed this such measures are often turned to different purposes. It probably becomes a Grim Trigger Game for some.

The popularity of the top high schools in Amsterdam is based only for a minor part on the results of their students. Other aspects that make certain high schools popular than others are their location (the city center is much preferred), side classes that are offered such as dancing or certain languages, activities that are organized outside school, etc.

That's right, schools aren't really popular for this reason as there's very little grade-selection for university entrances. It's (with some exceptions) open to virtually anyone with the proper passing high school qualifications regardless of the specific grades.

Location isn't a big role as far as I know, except for proximity to population which might be more dense in some areas. But the ethnic background / socioeconomic class of the student body and staff is a major factor, as well as a preference for teaching method (montessori, dalton, ipad schools, bilingual education etc).

There has been a shift in conversation over the last years and at least in US they are claiming that the highest variance in student performance can be attributed to socioeconomic status and developmental environment. So it would seem like selecting based on school performance could make things worse. One could make the case that this would really hurt very smart/ high-performing individuals from low socio-economic status families but most people (and rational policy) care about helping/ making an impact at the population level.

That’s what people say, because it’s hard to say anything else without hitting narratives that will be interpreted as racist or insensitive for other reasons.

Household culture is a big predictor of outcome. Parental age is another. Asian/Indian kids buck the bigger trend, because those family cultures value education as the way to advance.

Usually these policy discussions get dumbed down into inner-city vs suburbia comparison. But I think we’re starting to see bigger cohorts of white kids from suburban professional backgrounds who are not doing better than their parents.

The shift has come, probably not coincidentally, at the same there has been ever more evidence (genetics in particular) that people are indeed inherently different. I think most people are just afraid of considering this possibility since if you apply it in any way whatsoever it leads to either suboptimal solutions or dystopic ones. For instance if you know somebody is unlikely to be able to achieve, do you allow them into e.g. top tier schools, or not? Brave New World or Gattica? Both answers suck.

Consider that with this system everyone is a stakeholder in having every school be good enough.

One could equally say that high-achieving students are likely to be able to learn independantly and are less in need of the best educational resources.

I'm currently one week away from finishing secondary school here in the UK. My school is pretty mediocre, and better luck in the school ballot would've gotten me into a much better school. But I'm glad I 'lost' the ballot - I like my school in spite of its flaws, and am certain that I would not have achieved any higher in a 'better' school than I have anyway.

Standardized tests are only good at measuring hard skills (eg. reading comprehension, math). “Soft” skills like empathy, conflict management or leadership abilities are very hard to measure in standardized tests. So if you pick students based on a test, you risk rejecting students that you want.

Put the kids that get the best marks in the best schools, and put poorly tested kids in the worst schools?

What you are suggesting is actually unfair. You want preffered treatment for grade A students.

Reality is unfair for distributing cognitive ability and grit the way it does. Preventing our institutions from responding to this reality is far more "unfair" than otherwise.

Nature and nurture probably dealt you a pretty good hand, even to endowing you with grit. Had it been otherwise, though, you might now feel somewhat differently about how our institutions should respond to the fact that people get dealt unequal hands.

I know this person to be a scholar by their concept of a "Reality," but they still have reading to do if they don't recognize that there may be at least three.

> Reality is unfair for distributing cognitive ability and grit the way it does

...with a strong correlation towards one's familial socioeconomic rank?

Rich parents will find a way one way or another. This would punish smart-but-poor kids only.

Should we have universities take students by lottery, god forbid they will enforce correlation with socioeconomic rank? Should we make companies hire by lotterry? We have to start treating people by their abilities at one point or another.

So you are suggesting punishing grade A students instead?

Rich parents will find a way to get their smart kids proper schooling one way or another. It’s poor-but-smart kids that gets the short end of the stick. I’d rather treat kids by their ability. Than let parents wealth be the deciding factor.

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