Hacker News Reader

Comment by rossnordby | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit I haven't put this through an extremely thorough vetting process, and I haven't proposed this in congress or anything yet :P

That said, I roughly assumed a private tutor cost of $50/hour, 5 hours a week, for 36 weeks per year. That alone would come out to $9000, hence the 'small group' suggestion- if each tutor is working with on average 3 students at once, it's a bit more tractable.

I'm not sure what assumption you think I'm making about current educator hours- the proposal is for a radically different usage.

View on HN

> reorganizes educator hours into what is (as far as I know) a more effective structure,

My point is that you would need a lot more educator hours. There's no way to organize the current amount of hours in which you have "small groups" for 5 hours a day, unless small is 30 students per one teacher, in which case we're already doing that.

It's also not worth comparing tutor hourly wages to teachers as teachers have to deal with other things outside of teaching: calling parents, administrative tasks, behavioral issues, etc.

Also, it's worth mentioning that most of the things you've mentioned have been attempted at one point or another. There are a lot of constraints, interestingly money is not necessarily the main one depending on the issue.

In my proposal, the number of hours a student actually spends directly listening to/interacting with an on-premise educator is much, much lower. The hope is that those would be more efficient hours, to the point of getting better results with >5x less time.

Part of the issue here may be that I found the education system to have net negative impact on my... education. The main value I see in the current system is providing child care, safety, and food security. If there is solid research showing that ~40 hours of the current approach outperforms ~5 hours of a tutoring-style approach in the general population, that would be evidence against my proposal. And that might exist, I just haven't seen it, since this is not exactly a formally vetted idea.

The point of high school as I see it is to provide a semi-intensive educational experience to keep teenagers somewhere during daytime.

It's not designed to optimise for educational effectiveness.

> There's no way to organize the current amount of hours in which you have "small groups" for 5 hours a day, unless small is 30 students per one teacher, in which case we're already doing that.

The proposal was 5 hours a week not 5 hours a day, IIUC. Likely you'd still be looking at rather large small groups and/or a substantial increase in teacher-hours per pupil, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com