Hacker News Reader

Comment by bugsy | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why Gates is advocating for fewer drop outs. Drop outs are one of the few things that is working for kids.

Schools segregate on age now not ability.

For smart kids, school is frustrating and holds them back. It is better for them to leave school at 15 and transfer to a community college where they can take control of their education.

For not-smart kids, vocational education from 15-17 leading to apprenticeships gives them something of interest and useful to them.

For average kids, the system might work if the other two groups who are frustrated were channelled towards more useful pursuits than sitting bored, and sometimes forced to take amphetamines like Ritalin just to have the appearance of being focused.

View on HN

Where is this sentiment favoring dropping out of our education system coming from? HN and related community has had several discussions about dropping out of college (and now high school). Peter Thiel offered to pay college students to drop out.

Despite our (likely inferior to other countries) educational system, high school and college graduation directly benefits children. By graduating high school, a student will have a minimum level of knowledge (basic literacy, arithmetic) applicable in society. A higher national high school graduation % is better than a lower %.

Advocating students to drop out of high school for community college or trade school is not scalable. Today, ambitious students take AP/Honors/Community College or learn trade crafts after school hours. Blanket favoring kids dropping out of high school is irresponsible as it hurts their future.

I'm currently a high school student taking five AP classes, and I can tell you that most of my AP classes just teach what people need to know on the AP test. I'd much rather take an Honors class than an AP class, but at my school Honors classes aren't offered when APs are. I learned most of what I know now before I even went to high school - I'm a victim of this educational system stratifying by age, and I can tell you that it didn't work for me.

The other thing that I see is that most of the people in my AP classes are diagnosed with ADHD and are put on Ritalin... to keep them paying attention in some lackluster classes. Ken Robinson's first TED talk says it a lot better than I can, but I do favor vocational tech and stratifying by ability, although I can see that that will open a whole new can of worms, such as parents pushing for their children to be top-tier.

Why don't you just study for the AP exams yourself? I self-studied for 4 AP exams (along with other course work) in the last year of high school, and I did pretty well. The AP exams are actually a joke due to the number of unqualified students who take them and the bell-curve system.

I took the AP computer science exam without any prep and got a 5. The issue is that classes aren't offered at the Honors level if there's an AP class that could replace it, and for the classes I'm taking (AP Stats, Psych, Physics, Calc, English, and accelerated Anatomy) it's not worth it to take the accelerated version (Anatomy isn't offered above accelerated, and ironically enough is my favorite class; there's actually more physiology than anatomy, and the memorization isn't that bad).

According to the US BLS, people who do not have a high school degree/GED have been the top-ranked for unemployment when partitioned by education over the past decade. The difference has ranged from 5-10% higher unemployment than the mean unemployment.

I dug those stats out of the BLS site myself.

While I think we can all recognize the problems with the education system, it is absolutely poor advice to recommend dropping out of high school. The statistics are brutally against it.

That statistic is not compelling because one might suspect that the people who do not have a HS degree/GED would be top-ranked for unemployment even if they had acquired those qualifications.

It also ignores the effect of drop outs like me that have founded companies that have created hundreds of good paying jobs. But that's all counted as 1 drop out = 1 job. If I hadn't dropped out and was forced to stay in the useless hell hole that is public high school education, I would have killed myself or others and none of these jobs would exist.

Mine is not an isolated story either, here is a list of drop outs all should take a look at before advocating that talented kids should be forced to suffer the abuse that is state school institutionalization: http://www.angelfire.com/stars4/lists/dropouts.html

Klebold and Harris would be designing video games today and have people working for their firm if they had dropped out of high school instead of staying and suffering abuse from violent bullies and petty ignorant teachers at Columbine High School.

For smart kids, school is frustrating and holds them back. It is better for them to leave school at 15 and transfer to a community college where they can take control of their education.

Washington actually has a program called "Running Start" that implements this idea.

Thanks, interesting, it looks like that started as a dual enrollment program but now they've passed Washington State House Bill 1758 last year which says that if you're in the program and get an AA you also get a State High School Diploma and can skip the regular one. That is smart as it acknowledges that some kids were getting held back by trying to complete high school requirements when it would be better for them to move forward and simply complete a degree.

I think the way you've partitioned the universal set of kids into "smart" and "not smart" to make your case-by-case argument is an insufficiently nuanced breakdown. What about other axes, such as work ethic, or affluence, or...?

Yeah, you are right, but some sort of manageable grouping is needed to make the point since this is a conversation and not an academic journal so I don't feel it would be appropriate or needed to completely break down every possible combination. "Smart" means kids that would be in gifted programs which don't exist anymore. "Not smart" is kids who go on to be plumbers. This is not sufficient itself since there are smart people that go into plumbing, and there are dumb people that get degrees. But it's the general idea that the current system of training everyone in identical classes using a curriculum created by bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen selling textbooks in order to pass a standardized multiple choice test is not an ideal one. I hope that is clear.

...some sort of manageable grouping is needed to make the point since this is a conversation and not an academic journal...

True, you don't need to be quite so formal here, but can you really say that you've "made the point" if it's based on hand-waving and dubious generalities? I ask because you're trying to undermine why the Gates Foundation would look at dropouts as a metric — a point that you can't make with such a transparently flawed model. At best you can say that you've created an illusion of having made a point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com