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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

How do we help those kids that are in 'gen pop', though? Simply pulling the smarter kids out, helping them, and ignoring the rest doesn't seem like a good answer, either.

I feel like HN is not the best place for this sort of discussion, since everyone is coming at the problem from the perspective of the high achiever. The low achievers deserve help, too.

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The bottom 10-20% (larger in 'inner city' schools) of people with behavioral issues will always ruin it for everyone else.

Behavioral issues negatively correlates with intelligence and effort in school (by both the parents and the students). Increased tracking (i.e. separate low achieving and regular achieving) can be used to 'rescue' the majority of students that are average from having their education disrupted from the behavioral issue kids. Effort and behavioral (i.e. evaluate based on behavioral infractions) based hoops for parents and students can be used to separate the low achieving from the disruptive.

Be careful how you define 'behavioral issues.' I think I know what you mean, but you should more carefully define it; I had plenty of behavioral issues. In fact, I was constantly in trouble for talking too much, not paying attention, being loud, etc. I was bored af.

But I wasn't doing drugs or fighting (minus the one or two times), so there's that.

Also need to be careful not to lump the bully and the victim into the same category of "fighting". Both need different interventions.

On the other hand, there will be some fights that defy such classification of the participants. In those circumstances, improperly classifying one participant as the victim and the other as the bully can make the situation worse than it was before.

I don't think anyone is advocating for 'ignoring the rest'. The point is to prevent 'the rest' from setting the pace of development for everyone. You can't optimize educational outcomes for the full spectrum of human beings, from the no-effort types with an IQ of 85, to motivated types with IQs of 115+, in a single classroom with a single curriculum. It just does not make sense.

If anything, separating high, medium, and low achievers and allowing them to move at their own pace seems like a preferable situation for everyone.

Your assumption here is in exact opposition to the article. Unless you can successfully argue that the numbers in the article are wrong, it appears that what seems like a preferable situation is, in fact, not.

The article seems to dance around some carefully crafted statistics. Students are “happier,” or more kids are taking classes which are labeled as advanced. I see very little in the form of college admissions rates, SAT scores, etc.

It’s also possible that tracking does in fact lower the average performance while increasing the high end performance.

One things which would help regardless is for Administrators which permit students to perpetuate bullying and abuse within the student body to be sued out of a job if not charged criminally. The shit we put up with kids doing to kids luckily seems to be changing fairly radically, and that does obviously help you tune down some of the tracking which in the past served as much a behavior as it did a pedagogical purpose.

I will say that my 5th grade daughter basically has stopped being taught new material for the last year (2nd half of 4th and first half of 5th) while the whole the class seems to be stuck in perpetual review mode. She complains that the teacher will rarely offer something new, and she doesn’t understand why everyone else in the class can’t just listen the first time it’s explained, and why the teacher spends the rest of the week basically repeating themselves.

I’m paranoid of teaching her independently and just making her even more bored. Tracking doesn’t start in my district until 6th grade and we are both very much looking forward to it.

> she doesn’t understand why everyone else in the class can’t just listen the first time it’s explained

Hey look, it's me!

Make sure she knows how to study. And doesn't see needing to study as a sure sign of failure, and the act of studying as something adjacent to cheating ("well yeah so-and-so got an A-, but only by studying"). It seems dumb as shit with the distance of [mumble] years but when I finally got around to introspecting re: what exactly went wrong with me starting in 7th or 8th grade—yep, turns out I held those attitudes, even if I might not have phrased it that way at the time.

Mind, I have no idea how to do this effectively. Likely we'll be facing the same problem with our eldest at some point, but we're not there yet so I don't have any battle-tested how-to advice.

You can help the top 90% by keeping the bottom 10% away from them. And similarly, you can probably help that bottom 10% by removing the bottom 1% (the bottom 10% of the bottom 10%) from their environment.

You can probably get good milage out of recursing this up until the point you're dealing with fractional people.

Why do they need more help? The classes are already designed for them. The problem is that the smart kids are forced to be in them too.

He said he did bad because he was bullied. Smart people aren't the only ones that get bullied. If the problem is bullying you aren't fixing it by pulling someone out, the bullies will just target other people.

The bullies aren't living healthy, productive lives either. More than likely, their home life is awful if not horrific.

Sharing the misery to rest of the kids however is hardly a solution.

No, it's not. Doubling down on making their shit lives worse isn't the solution either, though.

I agree with this 100%, but the issues are not intertwined. We need to fix how classes are taught in "low achieving schools," but that's really hard to do when teachers are paid so poorly. Teaching isn't a lucrative career, and thus those that would be great teachers don't generally go into it. It's a really complex and difficult problem that I don't know I have a solution for. I do know that getting rid of magnet schools isn't it, though.

And I agree with this 100%. I think that if we could somehow by fiat pay teachers as much as we paid doctors or lawyers we would attract the same calibre of talent. But we pay teachers as much as janitors or secretaries and somehow expect them to inspire intellectuals.

One thing I'm not saying is that we should just give raises to everyone who's currently in the profession. It would have to be for jobs from here on out. I know of one school that does this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Equity_Project

> on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries.

https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as...

As someone raised by two teachers I can say that my parents both had to work two to four different jobs at times just to struggle to keep up. Whatever that statistic is claiming, it doesn't reflect reality in at least some cases.

Interesting... both my parents were teachers, and we lived comfortably enough (not rich, but never felt deprived)

Same here, but I recall my parents doing side hustles working nights at the drive-in, on summer breaks filling gardens for cash, cutting firewood, doing renovation projects on rental properties we would buy to fix and rent, running a snow plow truck 12-16 hours during storms (teachers get snow days in MD, so snow plow is a near-perfect side hustle), etc.

If you could share something about where and when your parents were working that would be most informative, thanks. Certainly there are outliers in every population but the study is talking about the teaching population, on average.

Utah, in a not-particularly-rich-but-not-middle-of-nowhere rural/suburban district, starting in the 1980s

The Heritage Foundation is an extremely right-wing biased think tank that also produces http://dailysignal.com. As a teacher, you should know that.

So? The arguments, statistical analysis and summary data they base the report on are all either in the report I linked or derived from publicly available data. You don’t need to trust anything they said. You can check each individual claim.

There’s no appeal to authority here. If you don’t believe their analysis feel free to attack it on the merits. But if the devil says 2 + 2 = 4 it’s still true. Either the analysis is correct or it isn’t. If it isn’t attack the analysis. You don’t need to trust the Heritage Foundation. If you can demolish their argument please do.

The Heritage Foundation has been caught lying in their self-funded "studies" so many times that I find it difficult to give them the benefit of doubt.

I’m not saying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m encouraging you not to, saying if you find something they’re wrong about or lying about shout it from the rooftops.

Note this study was national news in the US when released and quite thoroughly discussed so if there are flaws you could either find them yourself or google for them.

Well, that's five minutes of my life that I'm not getting back.

https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/TTR-TchrCompen...

Consider me not surprised that there were serious methodological problems, including a general ignorance of the literature.

Honestly... I don’t care much. My school was low on bullying. Nothing torturous like others experience. Most of the gen pop students were pretty rude and dumb. And most of them have lower middle class business jobs that suck ass but put food on the table. And none of their education mattered except for rubber stamping milestones. “Deserves help” doesn’t make sense to me. Their life choices are going to be the determinants of whether they hit a moderate outcome vs an incredibly shitty outcome. Their education isn’t useful.

If you want to help them, find a way to improve society that’s overburdened with unskilled workers with middle class aspirations. The gen pop group doesn’t disappear when high school ends. It’s still just the majority of people, just perhaps less socially empowered than in high school. We didn’t fail to make them love science, they just don't care about science. It would be far better to recognize that they would be just fine with less education, no college debt, and some encouragement to make a better society for everyone.

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