Hacker News Reader

Comment by underseacables | Hacker News Reader

This is sad. It reads more as though teachers and school employees are doing whatever they can to keep/justify their jobs, but not to improve learning. It is almost as if a teachers first job is self-preservation. If students can’t pass the test, then the test must be made easier, that way more students can pass and the teacher doesn’t look bad.

View on HN

I would say most teachers pass students so hell doesn't rain down upon them in the form of administrators, parents, and the school district/city itself.

I think this is the defining distinction - if the child is disciplined or fails, who do the parents blame? If they blame the teacher or the system, you’re going to get bad outcomes on average as you’re removing the tools the teachers need.

That's an incentive alignment problem. It is the responsibility of management (state and district admin) to ensure that what is best for the teacher's career is also what is best for student education.

Who's responsibility is it to ensure that what is best for the management (state and district admin) is also what is best for student education?

I'm not too familiar with the details of management here, but is it even possible for public schools (and other government operations) to have proper incentives given voters don't care about results? I suppose "school-choice", which happens to be vehemently opposed by Democrats, would be the only way.

Parents who have money and care enough already pick the schools by simply buying a house in a slightly different place. Cupertino used to be the hot place for tiger parents in the bay area to go but I'm not sure if it still is. The issue is that then the rest of the schools get even worse which eventually results in bad social issues in 20 years. The kids from those schools grow up and everyone has to deal with them.

I don't think Cupertino's character has changed much. If anything, housing prices continued to skyrocket…

"School-choice" is great for optimizing local maximums at the expense of just about everyone else. Public education should focus on the lowest common denominators to maximize education per tax dollar. It's not the smart people with lack of opportunity that drag down society, it's the massive amount of undereducated adults that become dangerously suceptable to manipulation.

That may be true—the system may be better served by raising the floor on education. But voters are individuals, and the most passionate are likely the type of people who prioritize maximizing their own (smart) kids’ opportunities over raising the floor for everyone.

If you want to maximize education per tax dollar then you need to separate out the smart kids into their own schools. Benefits of education are not evenly distributed. It is heavily weighted towards the right tail.

Pretending that the outcome for everyone should be college and a degree is part of the problem - admitting that outcomes may be different allows you to create different paths adjusted for abilities (think trade school instead of high school, etc). Forcing everyone into the same mold results in a broken mold.

Not clear what your argument against school choice is.

Not sure what you mean by “optimizing local maximums at the expense of everything else”. It almost sounds like an argument but there’s no substance.

You claim that public education should focus on the lowest common denominator so we can avoid an underclass susceptible to manipulation. That’s both a weak justification to purposely damage public education and condescension shown by elites when poor people don’t vote the way “they should”.

School choice is still universal public education. It is just the government providers of education have to compete with private providers.

School vouchers aren't really about aligning incentives. They're a backdoor to having the public fund the religious schools comprising a large majority of private schools.

But which comes first, the teachers career, or the students education? I would contend that in the available evidence it is the former.

Teacher's choice of curriculum and how, and when, subjects are taught are ever more regimented and regulated.

What evidence do you have that management cares about student education?

Let's rephrase this.

If you had a choice between:

a. doing your job as well as you can, then losing it (and being unemployable forever, quite likely);

b. doing it somewhat worse, but keeping it (and hopefully having a chance to help more students).

What would you do?

Please blame whoever forced this conundrum on teachers. Nonsensical bureaucratic decisions like this are the reason for which I left the profession.

The teachers who choose A mostly have already left for private schools where they have a bit for flexibility at the cost of lower pay.

> Most teachers seem to take it as a given that of course half the class is going to wander in half an hour late during first period— it’s so early, you know!— and during fourth period

I don't know. What does this have to do with keeping teacher's jobs and not improving learning? Late start is, as far as "clinical outcomes" can be measured in education, like, the cheapest win there is.

Moving to late start may help with the chronically late - but it doesn’t solve the intentionally tardy and the scofflaws.

> It is almost as if a teachers first job is self-preservation.

That is simply the top priority of most employees.

It’s probably a bit more complicated than that… if failure rates went way up because of COVID, it would probably be an honest representation of how little students learned, but it would also screw over a lot of kids and affect their futures. It’s not really their fault that society didn’t adapt well.

I’m not saying they’re right to just pass everyone, but it might not be purely selfish on the part of administrators.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com