Comment by triviatise | Hacker News Reader

Comment by triviatise | Hacker News Reader

The #1 factor for improving schools would be public school choice. Competition makes the participants in any system better. The schools need to use a lottery for acceptance of students.

We can drop all the regulation around testing results and simply let people choose which public school they go to. Some schools will be great and have a lot of demand. Some schools will be crap and will have little demand and they should get a reset.

The big challenge will be getting kids to the schools, but this can be done in conjunction with public transit using rideshare type shuttles to create custom routes

The next biggest factor is demand from students themselves. Making education exciting like sports could work. Create academic contests that can be televised, have small prizes at the school level (thousands of dollars), tens of thousands at the regional level, and millions at the state or national level.

Televise the competitions and have a variety like debates, math, science, etc.

If the following are true: 1) children in different areas have similar poverty levels and home lives 2) schools in different areas are funded adequately 3) the quality of teachers and administrators are independent of funding

then, improving competition would help parents pick the right schools for their kids, improving educational outcomes.

However, 1 and 2 are definitely not true, and I think 3 is not true as well (higher salaries attract good teachers.)

If you want to improve education outcomes in the US, you must improve funding for schools in poor areas, increase incomes for parents (possibly with a child allowance), reduce discriminatory law enforcement that disproportionately targets poor and minority parents, and much more.

"Competition makes the participants in any system better."

That's not universally true. There are places where the neighborhood public school is in "competition" with charter schools, however, the charter schools aren't required to play by the same rules (get to select which students attend, don't have to cater to special needs students, etc). The public school receives less funding, and thus is stretched much thinner due to what it has to provide.

In High School, I went to a magnet school where you had to be in the top 5% of your middle school class to be accepted. We took in students from something like 10 school districts. Freshman year was insane because the quality of student was all over the place. There were segments of students who couldn't read.

There are absolutely socioeconomic factors that played into this, and "letting bad schools fail" is only going to hurt the students that are already hurting.

I struggle a lot when it comes to education because "teaching to a test" is the bane of teachers everywhere, but if we don't set a standard, how will we measure success?

>I struggle a lot when it comes to education because "teaching to a test" is the bane of teachers everywhere, but if we don't set a standard, how will we measure success?

Part of the question is who sets the standard and what do they optimize for?

My experience with most of these NCLB tests is that they're optimized for ease of grading more than actually measuring anything worthwhile about comprehension of development.

Test culture promotes lack of growth mindset as students tend to associate their capabilities with their scores from an early age. The earlier we start stratifying students by test scores the more we are likely to develop adults who believe in fixed ability and who don't want to challenge themselves. This is exacerbated when you start separating students into physically different schools based on test scores.

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