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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

I know this will probably be flagged or voted down, but at least please understand that I truly want to see people in the US get better and more equal. Here it goes: if the US wants to invest in local talent, the US had better invest heavily in education. And I'm not talking about an-iPad-per-kid kind of investment, but investment to hire great teachers, lots of them, to public schools to the point that tutoring schools become a joke, investment to set up a system that can fire bad teachers -- the kinds who ask students in grade 9 physics class "which is heavier, pound or kilogram". Investment to ensure that even the poorest area can have public schools that are at least as good as KIPP. Investment to really keep students in their discomfort zone so they can learn every day. Investment that builds a system that really pushes the limit of every student instead of being complacent with the craps like "Kids can discover most math by themselves" or "left no kids behind" or "challenging math is systemic bias against the poor" or "math is racism" -- maybe they are, but then they are because our governments offer such low-quality education that family with means can get ahead by going to soul-sucking tutoring schools.

Education is the key to local talent, and is the key to equality. Yet, what has the US done to make our education better?

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This comment is the reason why we need to rethink our current culture of censorship and social media outrage.

It explains a non-trivial logical connection, showing how something that could look unpopular from the surface, would pay off in the long run. Except you cannot make comments like this in public anymore. Because all it takes is an angry mob leader shouting "%USERNAME% is %CLICHE%ist" and that's it. Your employer fires you, your friends abandon you, you are socially bankrupt in an instant.

There are many bright people our there with great perspectives to share. Except they have to maintain radio silence, because they are not willing to take that risk. So the only voices to be heard are the most extreme ones that have nothing to lose.

I sincerely hope we can overcome this and get people to discuss problems and work together on solving them before our civilization sinks into medieval barbarism.

I don't see anything in the parent comment that's even remotely controversial. Almost everyone across the political spectrum agrees that we should spend more on education, at least in the abstract. There's plenty of disagreement on the details, but I don't see anything in the comment that stakes out a strong position on any of the major issues. Perhaps I'm missing something.

You’re not missing something. But that’s the point. You read the whole comment and interpreted it in good faith. What the comment you are replying to is saying, is that it is easy to cherry pick statements out of nuanced comments that do not hold up well on their own. So unfortunately many people are afraid of making nuanced points online, and stick to banal platitudes that can’t be easily misinterpreted in bad faith.

I was actually arguing that we should spend differently, not necessarily more, in our education system.

Here's the problem: you cannot guarantee equal outcomes across intersectional groups. Period. Not going to happen. A hundred years of psychometric research backs this up; there are simply differences that cannot be papered over by adjusting metrics and applying equalizing coefficients.

A highly effective education system that really gets the best out of every person involved is also going to be selective, it is going to group people into different classes based on ability, and the resulting output is going to be highly offensive to the militant people who right now are literally doing their best to take over American cities.

So no, we can't fix this problem. We can spend more on it, but ultimately all of that money is just IOUs against a decaying system that demands everyone be equal, even if that lowest common denominator means all but the super-rich end up living in a favela within a few decades.

In short, you're claiming that some races or genders are inherently more capable than others, independent of all 'nurture' factors? If so, you're wrong, but feel free to clarify what "hundred years of psychometric research" you're referring to.

How about you show me an IQ study with a big cohort that shows otherwise? You're the one asserting something that doesn't line up with anyone's experience with zero proof.

No we are claiming that we need $4309582309239 extra spending on the Governor's wife's tennis partners' baker's niece's program to totally-not-put-all-those-dollars-back-into-the-governors-electoral-budget.

That will fix it.

What I mean to say is that 99.9% of those programs are just abusing the system (even if 10% of them started out with honest intentions).

Explaining my downvote: I'm thoroughly annoyed at all of the versions of this comment on HN lately. It adds nothing to the discussion, and derails the conversation we were having to talk about some vague injustice where People These Days don't let you say Stuff Like This.

Can you point to something you've said that's resulted in the problem you've described?

Does it have to be something parent specifically said? If not look around the news?

Sorry, based on your comment history I don't think I'd like to discuss anything with you. Cheers.

So because someone has a counter opinion from yours to refuse debate but stand on a public forum without desire to be challenged? Wow.

I'm happy to have discussions with people I disagree with, but generally once you're down the "poverty is good, actually" [0] rabbit hole I think a discussion would be a waste of both of our time.

I think you should be embarrassed at edgelord takes like "I don’t see the value an impoverished set of humans can provide" [1], and I don't have any interest in talking with far-right extremists. Bye.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591648

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23599938

Read the rest of the comment, which is the point you’re failing to realize. You’re judging without understanding the complete picture. So again read that comment again and read it from a logical standpoint instead of emotional. It literally says the next sentence they have value in some situation and your failure to understand that some poor bread maker can’t have anything valid to say when writing software or building a rocket. That’s my opinion, change it if you want with facts. Not everybody that disagrees with you is a right wing extremist. Some of us are capable of discussing actual facts and values. And you also pointed to a comment made after your comment so how this can be influential in your first comment suggests you have some ability to travel through time.

To further explain my position, I actually don't disagree that help should be given if possible. But right now I don't see why given we have uneducated and poor people still within the US we should help another country. IFF we have this problem resolved, AND we have surplus resources (money, goods, etc), then clearly why not provide as much help as possible? But when we have yet to solve the problem here it's an ask to divert resources. So then the value proposition question comes up. If I must divert resources then this must somehow create more value for me to justify it, so that I can then in turn help those in need in my country that these resources could be going to help instead.

Are you literally not looking around at all these days? Your filter bubble must be very, very small and selective indeed to somehow have missed Cancel Culture.

I've seen people get offended by celebrities with insensitive takes, but I've never seen anyone on HN get cancelled because of a comment. The worst I've seen is "this is wrong and here's why" or "I don't want to talk to you".

Generally I've seen people reach for "cancel culture" when:

1. Fear-mongering the left over perceived injustice.

2. Defending bad takes by tone-policing any disagreement.

Can you point to a comment by john_moscow where they've been 'cancelled'? Or maybe a comment by you?

I'm not sure this comment contributes to the discussion at hand at all. Other than to try to derail the convo into some dialog about "censorship".

I’m going to go off the rails more. You can’t reform the education system in a vacuum without dealing with larger societal problems that affect the US.

The war on drugs - have unfairly targeted minorities breaking up families and when they get out of jail, its harder to get a job because of their criminal record. No matter how good the education system is, if the students home life is unstable, education suffers.

Government funding through court ordered fines and tickets that also cause people to enter the criminal justice system when they can’t afford to pay. They end up in jail and lose their jobs. Again an unstable home life.

Lack of affordable higher education. Also, colleges love to give spots to non US citizens because they pay the full tuition costs.

Education funding is based on local property taxes. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Not in California. The State is responsible for allocating education fund, with a few exception.

33% of education funding comes from the local government.

https://lao.ca.gov/Education/EdBudget/Details/281

https://ed100.org/uploads/images/shares/CA-19-20-budget.png

But the California State government allocates the fund, right? If the state government decides where the fund goes, then can we still conclude that "the richer gets richer and the poor gets poorer" from the fact that local tax funds education?

I am assuming the state sends each school district the same amount of money per student and the local government makes up the difference. So yes it is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

I know in my Metro area the more affluent parts of the city, love breaking off into their own city to keep their money even more localized.

> I am assuming the state sends each school district the same amount of money

It does not, not even per pupil since there is a 20% supplement for each designated “high needs” pupil, and additional funds iif “high needs” pupils exceed a certain threshold.

> But the California State government allocates the fund, right?

It allocates the state funds that make up the vast majority of education funding among the counties. It doesn't specifically direct how counties spend the money.

> The State is responsible for allocating education fund, with a few exception.

That’s between untrue and misleading. The state allocates a very large share of the total education funding among counties, but it does not allocate the funding counties have (whether from the state or from local funds) by line item.

Why are people so quick to always blame teachers? What makes you think throwing even more money at the problem will make things better?

Growing up in a poor area, I went to some of the "worst" schools you can imagine (one even had to get shut down) and I had one of the most inspiring history teachers there, that I still remember to this day. And all the other teachers were great too. It's not the fault of the teachers when students are too busy pencil fighting and throwing basketballs at the teacher's head, rather than studying.

What on earth do you mean with "low quality education"? I certainly didn't see that in the worse schools I went to. I think people misunderstand term "bad schools" and take it literally to mean that the schools are bad. this is completely incorrect. When people say "bad schools" it means the students who went to the school performed bad on standardized tests. It's not a reflection of teachers, or schools or funding. I went to such schools and still did just fine, so did many others.

No, I'm not blaming teachers for all the disciplinary problems in school. I am blaming bad teachers for squandering time of ordinary kids -- kids like me who have a shot if pushed and educated properly.

You're lucky to have great teachers, and I just think we need more of such kind. As for bad schools, let me give you a few examples and you can check out the documentary Waiting For "Superman" to get a more grim picture.

- Did you know that teachers in some Cupertino schools asked parents to grade student homework?

- Did you know that a straight-A student who graduated high school in NYC couldn't pass the math placement exam in The City College of New York? I mean, placement test in a college, how hard could that be, right? The story was featured in NYT, IIRC, a few years ago.

- Did you know that only 48% of public school students who took the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) met or exceeded grade-level standard in 2016. And we're talking about CAASPP, a standard that is really not that high.

- Did you know that SAT is not differentiating to say the least, yet the average score of SAT math in California is merely 536. Pathetic, shall we say?

- Did you know that elite students in the Bay Area routinely completed more than 10 AP classes, yet the average students could barely understand Algebra 1?

And now let me give a few counter examples to show what good teachers can do to students:

1. All 14 students in Jaime Escalante's class passed AP Calculus I back in 1982, even though the school was in a hood. The success was so shocking that people thought the students cheated.

2. KIPP. Merely extending the school time to 6:00pm and offering classes in summer helped students stay in school and make steady progress towards entering college.

3. Schools in other countries. Take the schools in China, for instance. Teachers enforce cultures. Great scientists and philosophers and writers become household names because of them. They form research groups to continuously improve teaching materials. Better ways to teach, better problem sets, better projects, and better exams. It is widely assumed that teachers are better problem solvers than students in China. Can we assume that in the US?

By the way, a student doing well in standard test may not be a good student, but a student who does not do well in standard test is definitely not good academically. I don't really see why people keep blaming standard test for student's miserable scores. Do we really think these students could solve much harder free-form problems when they can't eve deal with much easier standard test? There is a reason that multiple-choice problems are the easiest ones in other country's college entrance exams. It suffices to say that if students in a school couldn't even pass standard tests, then the school has failed the students.

You can't blame teachers if the students don't do well on standardized tests. If you want to know why students don't do well on these tests, just spend a week or two substituting for teachers (or go there as a student) in one of those inner city schools. I guarantee, you'll have an epiphany and you'll see why they don't score well. It doesn't have anything to do with teaching, the problem is cultural.

>>Here it goes: if the US wants to invest in local talent, the US had better invest heavily in education.

As some one who worked in US and returned to India. Let me tell you immigrants will support this as soon as they get their US passports and Green Cards.

It's just which side of the fence you sit on. Once these people have a stake in your country, they magically shift their loyalties to the exact opposite position to what they had before.

In India itself, many of these elites oppose policies like Right to Education Act. knowing well they can fund their kids higher education in foreign countries, and eventually their kids getting settled in US. They don't want poor people to have literacy or any edge in education. Meaning, less competition the better. Why work for Right to Education, when your kids go to expensive private schools, tuitions, coaching classes and then foreign universities, with jobs and citizenships overseas. You want less competition and lesser poor people and underprivileged people studying so that more opportunities are freed up for your kids.

People are deeply selfish at a personal level and unless they have a stake they feel no need to change. I honestly feel things in India will improve with fewer visas. People will work for good domestic education facilities once they realize they are trapped in their own country.

yes I don't understand why people don't just stay in their countries for a while. people need to stop hopping around the world chasing $. leaving dangerous/unsafe places is a different matter. we are in a digital world and the work done in the Bay on h1b can be done from India. people can stay in their countries and build them up and keep the talent there. if US tech companies are desperate for talent they should just build engineering facilities in India and figure out the remote work situation. Honestly the talented Gen Z Indian youths aren't even fussed about moving abroad and have enough opportunity domestically, why should they put up with the hardship of being an immigrant where they are not wanted when they can stay near their parents and still work for Apple on interesting stuff?

It has worried me for years why salaries for tech employees in, say, India, don't equalize with US salaries. It seems like there is something artificial preventing it.

But as long as the discrepancy exists, then it seems like there would be a tremendous benefit in allowing people to freely immigrate, even for those already at the destination. Fear of immigrants is based on the idea that they will work for less, but if it's still more than they were making, then the competitive situation for labor has improved, as long as one accepts that it is a global market. I wish there was a way to get political traction for this, as a self-interested goal for American (or other developed country) workers.

> the US had better invest heavily in education

At this point, more money is not going to help. Education in the US is fundamentally broken. Combination of "no child is left behind" and standardized testing (because everything else will be called discrimination) ensures uniformly bad results. If you pour more money in, it's just going to be wasted on bureaucracy and busywork.

So H1-B is actually a great idea. If we can't educate, let's attract well-educated people from elsewhere. They want to live here, so we can choose.

We don't mind buying electronics made in China because they can do it better and cheaper, why not do the same with people. Finland seems to be doing just fine with education at a fraction of US cost, let the market do its thing and flex the comparative advantage.

It already invests heavily in education. USA already spends ones of the highest level of funding per school pupil in the world and for college its by far the highest spender.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf

It's easy to spend a lot of money, it's hard to execute and get results.

Despite the USA spending a ton of money, it doesn't curate quality education.

The entire system needs to be reworked.

The whole teaching towards the test, and prepping kids for college (which I've heard we even do a bad job at), is just awful. We don't typically educate to teach people in a way that can make a connection that to what can be used in the real world, nor do teach real world things, such as basic money handling matters. I was able to take a Math of Money class in high school, but that was my senior year and your had to have had to pass other classes to take that.

I know there are some classes for stuff like electronics and mechanics, but why not offer more career based classes?

I think the requirement for more advanced computer classes has come down, don't need a AP calc/trig credit to take a basic programming class anymore (it's been well over 20 years since I graduated).

This is the same argument that progressive educators have been arguing for decades, and I respectfully disagree. Schools teach students fundamentals. Simplified, but fundamentals nevertheless. You think learning Newton's laws does not teach student how to "make a connection to what to be used in the real world"? You think that years of training in maths didn't prepare the students for the real world? You think it's fruitless to study rigorously and hard on "spherical chicken in vacuum"? You think that all the algorithms, mathematical stats, or data structures have little to do with real-world engineering? Unfortunately, here is the shocker: they are very relevant, and they are the secret of a nation can educate millions of qualified engineers, scientists, and business people who can reason with data and numerical sense.

The only reason that students have to study highly simplified models is that the real-world is too complex. Without years of study of "simplistic physics" in high school, there is just no way that one can learn rigid-body mechanics. Without years of practice on algebra 1/2 in high school, an ordinary kid will have no hope of understanding calculus, and without understanding calculus, the kid loses hope of understanding stats, and without understanding stats, the kid loses hope of understanding machine learning, and without understanding machine learning, the kid won't be able to jump on the gravy train of being a machine learning researcher. And now should the kid cry wolf the world is not fair and the system is rigged? Of course, this is an extreme example and there are thousands of other professions. All I'm saying is that sometimes a subject looks hard and mundane and pointless, but it is actually useful in the long run.

And as specific as Math on Money? It's nice to have, but it's not necessary. I have no problem studying on my own the theory of options and quantitive finance even though I had no idea how money worked. But I have strong background in math, in stats, and in computer science, and some background in economics. And really, such fundamentals carries me a long way.

Why is everyone so convinced that we're getting "low quality education"? I've grown up here and went to "bad schools" and "good schools" and I have not seen any quality problem in education other than what subject matters are being taught and not taught.

I’m guessing a lot of that money is spent on buildings and administration. It’s not for hiring teachers and paying them well.

please lend your support to the ongoing movement to shift investment from the prison-industrial complex into health and education.

Please explain what the “prison-industrial complex” is

The prison industrial complex is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.

Yea so this doesn’t clear it up at all. Are you suggesting we start legalizing things, so that instead of going to jail people are treated for mental health problems if someone robs a house or commits murder? Why can’t people just not commit crimes?

Through its reach and impact, the prison-industrial complex helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through problematic means.

There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the prison-industrial complex, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant.

This power is also maintained by earning profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for “tough on crime” politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination in the US.

None of this is fact, yet it’s being portrayed as such.

If mass media images are a problem then why do these groups not join Trump saying MSM is problematic and untrustworthy?

For profit prisons are more efficient, because the government can’t run anything without substantial cost. So privatizing prisons saves costs.

If your main concern is getting people to commit less crimes then we should support a system that promotes rehabilitation over punishment.

Perhaps take a look at Norway's system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Norway

Why aren't all former penal colonies full of criminals? Maybe it's because there are a lot of crimes that are situational. For truly violent offenders who refuse to be rehabilitated? Keep them away from everyone else, including other prisoners. For everyone else though? We should be figuring out what they lack and help them find it.

The reason we DON'T do that is because state prisons are glorified slave rackets. The very existence of for-profit prisons is an obscenity that will be seen as being as barbaric as slavery in the long run.

Which crimes are situational? And I still don’t agree that someone committing a crime is the victim here. To entertain that idea is just silly.

For profit prisons are more cost effective than government run prisons. We are a capitalist society, people seek profit here, including the entirety of the country.

Nah, what's silly is the idea that we need to rationalize uses of force against citizens by private third parties. It's fundamentally stupid and should be illegal because it incentivizes incarceration.

And most people don't "seek profit" here in their day to day lives. That's zero-sum idiocy.

I guess we’ll just agree to disagree on the first part.

And the second part, I’m guessing most people don’t work then?

There are not enough such teachers to teach 1:1. There are not enough people who could be drafted to be such teachers either. It would require a lot of altruism to work as a teacher whereas there are much higher paying positions in the private sector.

We have the technology to amplify a great teacher's lecture to millions. However, the education system relies on the model of interactive lectures given to a class of people of whom many are not acutely interested in the subject. Following that lecture, parents are drafted as involuntary teachers to help their kids with homework. If the student's parents have sufficient background, this works. Else, we end up with the situation where students continue to fall behind as their parents are unable to teach them.

We need to bootstrap our students' learning to the minimally accepted level that sustains self-directed learning. I would define that as mastery of arithmetics as first phase and algebra as second phase. However, we are talking about mastery that does not require a review, which means spending more time on in-depth training without jumping ahead.

Such classes should be separate from mainstream math classes so as to not to bore those of us who already have achieved that mastery.

I am working on this.

Look, the people coming over on H1B are the top picks from other countries in terms of motivation and willingness to work - people that see tech as their golden ticket

What you are saying is how can the US turn their bottom tier performers to match this

Nothing lights a fire under your ass as realizing you are a layoff away from leaving the country and having to start over

Yes, put money into edu but that’s very different from giving teachers more money. Teachers do relatively little. The major influence is parents.

You need to change the cultural mindset. You need to build more colleges. Computer science programs are already maxed out. You need more professors.

I think both are critical. Kids naturally listen to their teachers, probably because they treat their teachers as authorities. Plus, teaching is a profession, a profession that demands deep expertise. A quite amusing example: parents try to teach their 7-year old fractions, and only find themselves yelling and kids crying hard. Yet when a teacher in Russian School of Mathematics teaches the same concepts, kids just understand the concept without any problem, and start to enjoy the learning process.

problem is not in teachers. Problem is parents. Yeah parents.

Good parents with good parenting skills raise good kids. Bad parents/single parents - it is much harder to raise kids and give them good education.

if you want reforms - you need to adopt Scandinavian policies in America (high taxes, universal healthcare, universal childare, universal K-12, universal college system) - that way it will be easier to raise well educated kids

Unfortunately parents don't know how to teach STEM topics, not in the US, especially given years of cultural slash on hard science and engineering. I don't have hard numbers, but I'll venture to guess that very few parents can explain how to use recursion to find the closed formula of a sequence, or the intuition behind vector space, or why 0.9999... is actually 1, or even as simple as modeling a problem as a linear equation system. And all these are really high school basics. I'm using math as an example, but the same idea applies to other subjects too, like not every parent knows how to write, let alone providing precise and accurate feedback to the writing of their kids.

And from a parent point of view, why would I want my kids to waste his or her time in school learning very little, and then to spend my own time tutoring them? All I want is my teachers to do their job, and do it decently.

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