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Comment by corty | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with the article about the problems of profit-driven schools, the whole situation (and the article in parts) points to a imho bigger problem in most education systems: Profit-driven schools cater to the more able, easier to educate and more intelligent pupils. Why can they do that? Because public schools almost everywhere insist on coeducation of the most and least gifted. This is severely holding back and limiting the development of gifted children and imho needs to be dealt with.

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Yes and no. Many aren't less 'gifted' just less able - they don't have the right language background for school, dont have the easy ability to study at home, etc.

'Grammar schools' (or something similar of a different name) are reasonably common in UK and its colonies and attempt what you are asking for - with very well documented positives and negatives.

There is definitely a massive issue of equality where children feel they aren't in the 'good' school this becomes an excuse for not bothering with school and then life. Equal education brings a lot of benefits to society at large.

>This is severely holding back and limiting the development of gifted children and imho needs to be dealt with.

The article describes how for profit schools specifically pick "gifted" (aka easy to teach) children and then cut teaching staff to take the difference as profit. Yes, these students will still get better grades and thus make the for profit school look better than the public school but they absolutely fail to cater to the needs of "gifted" children.

Schools don't pick students. They can't even discriminate on grades.

What you call "most and least gifted" is in my opinion better described as "most and least privileged". And coeducation of students of different levels of privilege just seems like a good thing, nothing that needs to be dealt with.

Of course higher intelligence is a privilege, as is higher sportive ability and other attributes given to you from birth. This includes your own personal attributes as well as the privilege that comes from your family's wealth and status. But actually, the word "privilege" muddles the waters, because those are two very different things.

I agree that schools should not differentiate based on families' status and wealth. Schools should treat poor and rich children the same.

However, schools should never treat stupid and intelligent children the same. Not everyone is cut out to be a rocket surgeon. But your argument means that we should hold back all future rocket surgeons and bring them to a lower level of privilege, i.e. dumb them down. This is neither in the interest of the children (stupid as well as intelligent ones) nor is it in the interest of society. We do need rocket surgeons...

I agree that this can be a difficult balance to strike. But I think it's also important to keep the door open for children who mature a bit later. Stamping someone as "not gifted" by excluding them from a "gifted" group sure seems like it would cause problems, especially for younger children. Of course it's a difficult practical problem to solve; to give every child challenges on their current level.

Also, while there are surely variations in intelligence that are "from birth", I do not know how that compares to all the variations caused by different educational privileges; having parents that have a lot of time to read for/with the child etc. It sort of comes down to "equality vs. equity" I suppose - and that is not a simple question.

  Schools do not treat stupid and intelligent children the same, teachers - with few exceptions - do. Not because they are evil, but because to be able to cater to the different levels of intelligence and the variation in interests that you will naturally find in a random sample of children they require the time and opportunities to do so.

  As long as we treat teachers as the least important workers, without acknowledging the critical work they do [0], have classes that have more pupils than a teacher can follow individually in a meaningful way and consider education "an expense" that needs reduction, rather than "an investment" we will not have a proper education system.

  On the flip side: an uneducated population is easier to sway, so there is not a lot of pressure on the political establishment to change things.

[0] Lack of self awareness - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Er2_n9pXUAMZnyq.jpg:large

Paying teachers more is beside the point. A well-paid teacher isn't suddenly a better teacher just because it earns more money.

The things we should invest in are more teachers, smaller and more separated classes and better teachers' education. Only the last one correlates (somewhat) with teachers' salaries.

How much of a difference do teachers make in the public school system? I don't mean teacher vs no teacher, but good teacher vs average teacher. The topics in the public school system are not set by the teachers themselves - they have to teach what has been decided elsewhere. A good teacher can engage students better, but how much of that is the teacher's ability as opposed to the teacher and students happening to get along? How much of it is good students self-selecting themselves into academically better schools, therefore having better peers?

Asked in a different way: if we paid (all) teachers 3x as we do right now, would we observe significant long-term improvements in students?

Please do not use code blocks just to draw attention to your comment. It is not clever or creative.

  This is odd - I am not using code blocks, I am just typing in the text box to reply. I thought it looked like code as a way of showing my comments. I really don't know why it happens, I will look and see if it's somewhere in the settings.

The issue, in my experience, is that you have to compromise somewhere. That means either leaving the higher performers to be bored, or leaving the lower performers not achieving the minimum. Neither seems like a desirable outcome.

Well, we can always f*ck up both groups. It seems this is the current approach.

No, you don't have to compromise at all.

Personal experience: I had a great math teacher in mid school; he gathered the best students from the 5 classes in that year in one class and he set the baseline quite high. For the last 2 years half of our class was taking the prizes at all the inter-school competitions in the city and a few of us from the nationals. Most of that class went to the best high schools in the city and most are today great doctors (medical) or scientists. Imagine that did not happen in mid-school and everybody would be an average Joe - that is a loss for humanity, not just for us.

Try to read Ender's Game (the book, the movie is terrible). This is very tough, but if you need great people you can help by creating the conditions to grow them. How many Einsteins wasted their lives achieving nothing and how earlier curing diseases and improving technologies was possible if that waste did not happen?

The compromise is to waste the resources that we have in the name of equality; we cannot make everyone smart, we only can make them all stupid, so let's do equality.

If I'm understanding your story correctly your math teacher did the opposite of what the person I responded to said - he separated out the high performers, creating an environment that allows them to thrive and achieve high results. This is great, but what about the ones who weren't picked into the high performing class?

There is nothing saying you can't have good classes for both high and low performers, but with schools that have limited resources it often works out to a poor medium where no one really thrives (hence the caveat of 'in my experience' in my comment).

The ones that weren't picked in the high performing class had the same teacher, but they only studied what was in the standard manual, they did not go above and beyond what they were capable of. At the same time they were not pulling back the ones more capable.

How is this a good thing? No parent would want their gifted child to be held back because there are other less gifted children in the class who will hold their child back. It is easy to understand their point of view. When you say ‘just seems like a good thing’...it begs the question.. ‘for whom’

No, you can also be underprivileged and gifted/talented (assuming you mean economic or racial privilege).

If you're underprivileged no test is going to detect your gifts. You're going to be hungry, have poor sleep, possibly abused, all sorts of things that will make you look like you're less capable than you are.

Most poor kids get fed and don't get beaten by their parents, so those factors can't be what explains the huge difference.

This was basically the exact point I was trying to make.

this is not out of the norm in NYC, especially at the low income level.

Take exhibit A - success academies chain. There are about 47 in total , most around NYC. They are an independent school which only the poor can get into. So it is private but paid with tax dollars. Because it is taxpayer-funded, once you apply, they can't discriminate - the only requirement to acceptance is that you are poor.

Yet the best students go there, and the school is so good that if it were a separate education system, it would be the best performing education system in the entire United States.

How do they do it ? Simple - they screen parents. They make the bar really high so only the most motivated parents will jump all the hoops to get their kids in.

And there is the problem - it is not the profit, but rather the fact that we refuse to accept that some kids are in a better situation to be educated than others. Whether due to better home environment, raw talent, good base, not sure. However, refusing to deal with this fact, only hurts kids.

How ? Well, the alternative to Success Academies is no 10,000 poor kids receiving elite education. Let us dump those kids back to the system of mediocrity where they were condemned until 15 or so years ago.

That's what equality really means unfortunately - everyone getting equally mediocre government-sanctioned education

Profit-driven schools don't cater to gifted kids. They cater to kids with rich and highly educated parents. The goal is to do less, to extract more profit.

Neither. Parents don't pay for schools in Sweden, so profit driven schools are just as free as other schools. Also, they are not elite schools in any sense, they are just slightly better organised and attract students that care enough about their education to select a different school than the default.

Sweden is not the US, it's quite different.

What you're saying, especially the part about "slightly better organised and attract students that care enough about their education" is talking point rhethoric and not anything substantiated in fact. The schools get a fixed amount of money per student from the state. If you have students with high socio-economic status, you can get away with having fewer teachers per student, as well has having teachers that aren't properly educated. One of the more prominent for-profit charter schools is the "International English School" (IES). They aren't only "English" for marketing purposes (because being an "English" school means you can do more marketing about teaching with "higher discipline"), they are also "English" because that allows them to get away with recruiting more teachers from abroad. This is what for-profit charter schools are about. You can't "optimize" what's essentially a service institution. You can only cut to better your margins. Or cheat, which they do. Not only by having fewer authorized teachers, but also by straight up inveting better grades for students, which is something that helps with marketing (see a pattern here?).

In the Swedish system, all schools cost the same: 0. So there is no reason to target specifically wealthy students, all students are worth the same to you as school owner.

In fact, they can't even accept students based on grades, there are only 4 criteria they are allowed to use when selecting students: location, time in queue, siblings in the school and whether you went to pre-school there.

So what you end up with are students with parents that have enough forethought to put your name down early on.

> You can't "optimize" what's essentially a service institution.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, obviously you could in theory most definitely optimise the education. That is what private schools here in Denmark tend to do.

Yes, but no:

- The schools get a fixed amount of money per student.

- The single largest predictor of school success is education level of the parents.

- most for profit schools are in areas with higher education.

I'm not sure what you are arguing for or against here. I agree with all these points.

But it is still the case that a lot of the students will not be local, and the majority of the local kids will not go to the school, they will go to the local public school.*

The main reason these schools have better students is that you need to make an active choice to go there, and you need to do that a long time in advance. If you don't, you end up in a public school. This of course means that students from more motivated households go to these schools. Not wealthier students or even necessarily smarter students.

* There have been cases recently where it seems that the private school has bribed the public school system to close the local school, but in general the public school will remain and most of the local kids will go there.

Now go and have a look where the schools are located. For-profit schools are more often located in areas where education level is higher. Less money spent on educating kids means more profit ina system where each student gets a fixed amount.

I'm not sure what your point is. Putting a school in a middle class area rather than a ghetto doesn't make it "elite". Especially when any kid can go there, regardless of where they live.

Not in theory. In practice however it is different: https://www.lararforbundet.se/bloggar/lararforbundets-utreda...

I'm still not sure what your point is.

I am not saying that the demographics in free schools are the same as in public schools, or that there is no correlation between where the students in a given free school live.

I'm sure they tend to skew locally, if that is your point, but in any case they skew much less locally than the local public school. So the reason a given free school has better grades than the public school down the street is not its location.

What I am saying is that free schools end up with the easy students. It is not as easy as "anyone can go there" since we have the principle of proximity (närhetsprincipen). People living close to the school will have a higher probability of getting a place. In which areas are the schools of Engelska Skolan? Academedia? Kunskapsskolan? Look in areas above the 80th socioeconomic percentile.

In a system where each school gets a fixed amount of money per student, this puts public schools at a disadvantage, yet the results do not reflect this. We have a school system that leads to more segregation, more costs (like the recent debacle about cities having to compensate free schools for rather inane things) - but we get very little for it.

The equivalence ("likvärdigheten") of the Swedish school system is at an all time low, and it has been getting constantly worse since the early 80s. The free school reform has done nothing but accelerate the problem.

I don't mind free schools at all. I don't even mind that they are making money from it. What I do mind is that none of the promises of the free school reform has been delivered on. I am old enough to remember the promises of less segregation. Better schools driven by passionate teachers (these do exist). Schools where gifted students flourish.

This seems to never have been evaluated. None of these things have happened.

> What I am saying is that free schools end up with the easy students.

Of course they do, but isn't that sort of the point with competition? The good schools get the good students, that would happed regardless of who owned them.

> In which areas are the schools of Engelska Skolan? Academedia? Kunskapsskolan? Look in areas above the 80th socioeconomic percentile

You keep repeating this, I'm not sure why. Do you think I have disputed it? I certainly wouldn't want to start a free school in a ghetto, I'd definitely choose a nice area.

Or are you repeating it because you think it's especially problematic?

> In a system where each school gets a fixed amount of money per student, this puts public schools at a disadvantage, yet the results do not reflect this.

Don't free schools have better results?

> Schools where gifted students flourish

Was this ever promised? Gifted students have never been a priority in Swedish schools.

My problem with the free schools is not that it's unfair, because I don't think it is. You need to look at it from the students' point of view. If we had had ghettos in the 70s and you grew up there, you'd be forced to go to a school with mostly unmotivated children. Nowadays motivated children from problem areas have the option to go to schools in nice areas, together with other motivated students.

No the problem for me is that they are publicly funded but run for profit, that's a crazy system that is very easy to abuse.

The fact that parents don't have to pay just makes it worse, then schools can get away with marketing to students, they don't actually have to provide better education.

Corrected for socioeconomic factors free schools do worse (as per the latest OECD report). One can have many things to say about that way of counting, but if we are to have a system with so many apparent problems, shouldnt we at least get something for it?

And I think that is where the problem lays: we have publicly funded for profit schools. The only way they can make money is by not letting taxpayer money for education go to education. All my other points stem from this.

It is pretty telling about the free school interest group's response to the report of equivalence ("likvärdigheten") of the Swedish school system: they hated all suggestions the report made to make the situation better. Even pretty benign ones like mandatory school selection, removing queued days as grounds for selection and so on. My theory is because they know those things are what makes it possible for them to pocket such a large part of the money they get.

The problem, however, isn't any individual company. It is the law that allows it. Which makes it even more provoking: we have had the numbers for 20 years. Looking at the statistics since 2000 you can see in which direction things were heading. Why didn't anyone go "this is not what we want. Let's re-evaluate".

The obvious solution is to abolish the possibility to make a profit. I think they should allow private schools, let them charge fees, select students the way they want to but simply not allow any profits. That system works here in Denmark and public schools don’t seem to have suffered from it.

Assuming it's possible to find out "intelligent" vs not primary/middle schools kids.

We all here agree that finding talented developers is hard- meaning 22+ yr old adults. Isn't the job like 10 times harder for say 8 yr old kids?

> We all here agree that finding talented developers is hard

When people say that they mean it is hard to find a talented developer who is looking for a job paying significantly below what he is worth.

This is not always the case. There's a growing number of states in the US that allow state education funding to follow a student wherever they go.

Wherever these laws arise, profit-based schools appear and attempt to draw in as many students as they can. Often times it's the least educated, least privileged people who are pulled into these programs. There is little or no regulation on claims these schools make in their marketing materials, so they promise the world and then dump students into large classes led by gig-economy "teachers".

I think the thesis of Senator Warren's book The Two-Income Trap (2004) is that in the US, where you don't have the problem with profit-driven schools (or at least had it much less back then), you instead have the problem that the middle classes will flee to the suburbs to get their kids into good schools (or, as another poster has put it, "not-bad" schools). The schools may be public, but as long as you need a certain income to live in the district, that serves the same purpose.

Book review by Scott Alexander here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-in...)

Yea, thus ain’t true.

When my daughter was diagnosed with autism three weeks plenty of for profit options. We ended up putting her in a charter school because it was far more flexible and attentive to our needs than public school was, where all decisions seemed to revolve around what was best for the school, not our child.

School should also teach kids that they live in a complex society, where people have different backgrounds and, yes, different skill sets. I'm afraid that relegating "more gifted" kids (whatever this means) into a world of their own is not only harmful to those who are left out, but to them as well.

Getting beaten up by the differently-gifted jocks is beneficial?

Posting snarky replies on HN is beneficial?

I was trying to prompt the obviously necessary reflection on what you said.

But I'll make it explicit, if irony is considered too snarky: Exposing more gifted children to less gifted ones might be beneficial in small doses, it isn't in general. One group will always be detrimental to the other:

Because the more gifted children get bored, learn to minimax everything and to procrastinate because nothing really requires their full application and attention. Maybe you give them harder tasks, but seeing that in the presence of the less gifted children they can also get by with less work if they just play dumb, they will learn to adapt and play dumb. Tons of psychological problems like procrastination and impostor syndrome (that HN likes to complain about) are caused and worsened by these mechanisms.

If you do the converse and do your teaching on a level appropriate for the more gifted children, the less gifted ones will be in over their heads. They won't learn most of the curriculum, but they will learn their inferiority and helplessness. They will also learn to hate the more gifted children, and seek an outlet through violent means if possible. I suppose a good part of the HN population has been on the receiving end of that one.

If you need examples where coeducation is never done, look no further than the school's choir, orchestra or sports teams. If you aren't in the top group of abilities for those activities you are either not selected, or selected for the second team. With good reason.

> But I'll make it explicit, if irony is considered too snarky: Exposing more gifted children to less gifted ones might be beneficial in small doses, it isn't in general. One group will always be detrimental to the other

I do see your point, but it's a matter of tradeoffs. Not exposing different children to each other may benefit the best ones (and maybe even the others, who knows), but may also foster a classist view of society. Similarly, we started coeducating male and female pupils because the previous system was seen as fostering a sexist view of society.

> If you need examples where coeducation is never done, look no further than the school's choir, orchestra or sports teams.

That actually strenghtens the point though, doesn't it? You can also have chess teams, science clubs, and other activities which cater to the best pupils, while keeping the current educational model.

Coeducation and joined competitions still aren't a thing in sports, even chess. It isn't a problem to separate, if there really is a difference imho.

> That actually strenghtens the point though, doesn't it? You can also have chess teams, science clubs, and other activities which cater to the best pupils, while keeping the current educational model.

No, it doesn't. If you really would go through with that, you are making the better pupils waste their time in regular boring classes with the same effects on them I've described, and then make them take more clubs in addition to the boring stuff. And it will be quite a lot of clubs, one for each subject basically. That wastes school resources as well as pupils' time. And it reinforces to the pupils that being smart is a curse that will make you waste extra time in school just to not be bored out of your scull watching the worse pupils scratch their heads over trivialities.

If you want to do it right, you need alternative regular classes or alternative schools for better pupils.

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