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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

I think to achieve equal opportunity it makes sense to make education equal. But how to make education equal? Instead of setting up quotas maybe we should simply switch teachers. Let the teachers rotate among schools so that every kid gets a random selection of teachers and every teacher gets a random selection of students.

At the same time, should also try to minimize the number of private schools, either through legislation or tax.

I guess it still won't work perfectly because teachers can simply go private by themselves. Meh. Whatever.

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It's a neat idea but it rests on what I believe is a total misunderstanding of what education is.

In supposed 'bad schools' - kids don't show up to class. There's not much in the way of clubs to join, nobody joins them. Kids are bullied for even contemplating doing well. They are bullied on the way to school. Pulled into gangs. Totally absent an role models at all. Parents absent, living in very poor conditions, often one parent missing or in jail. They might knew very few who actually graduated from anything including HS, let alone College. The thought never crossed their mind and they see no point to it. There is literal violence in class. Kids pay little attention when they are there.

The best school in the world can't 'fix' that.

A 'good school' has conscientious parents who make sure their kids get to school, they live in homes erring towards happy, have the material they needs, parents who care about them, parents who inquire at least a bit. Some friends with talent, enough critical mass in activities that good non-academic clubs exist. An overall workable situation wherein teachers can teach.

Some teachers are better than others, some schools better than others, but it's not really that.

I would really support this 'rotation of teachers' concept because I suggest absolutely nothing would change and people would realize what the underlying issues are.

FYI shipping kids from the ghetto, in smaller numbers, to 'decent schools' in the burbs actually seems to work, so long as the 'special kids' can avoid the extra violence they might face for being labelled as nerds by their peers in poor areas.

As for MIT and donors, there is obviously a good discussion to be had about equality, and frankly I think everyone is open to that discussion, but the extremists shutting down discussion need to be stopped.

You described a bunch of failings of the school and then said:

> The best school in the world can't 'fix' that.

I find that puzzling. A good school will not have most of those problems. Doing well when the kids coming in is hard but doable.

Yeah no ... I described failings in the students - or rather, that wouldn't say 'failings' so much as 'contextually, utterly not prepared, willing or able in any way'.

"A good school will not have most of those problems."

Because a 'good school' is full of conscientious and prepared students, raised by conscientious and prepared parents with jobs and stability.

There is nothing a 'decent group of well meaning teachers' can do when 50% don't show up, 90% are literally years behind in reading and the curriculum, 50% are borderline illiterate, nobody pays attention or does any homework, students get violent in class, they are interested only in the most ridiculous artifacts of pop culture, even the students who might try are bullied, and there are zero role models in the lives of students, kids are neglected and abused and the students collectively could care one bit about learning.

There is no possibility for 'education' to happen on those circumstances.

Give them healthcare, parents stable jobs, 2 parents in stable relationship, stable family life, destroy the gangs somehow make them irrelevant, and watch grades magically rise without a single change to the school. We know this because when you take these kinds out of those stark situations and put them in regular suburban schools with teachers roughly the same credentials, they do reasonably well.

Inner city school teachers are not crap, they're basically 1/2 social workers 1/2 teachers, totally undervalued.

  An area won't improve in one year because you switch teachers, and this problem is really socially whole. You don't just switch teachers, you need to inject money into the local economy, invest in public spaces (green areas, children's playgrounds, etc.). And of course, in education as well. 

  But you gotta start regardless. We can't just shrug, though I feel like this problem is so complex it really requires a complete re-structuration of the way America handles its social structure. 

  I don't think the USA is going to solve these problems without a complete 180 degrees change in how you view the world, and that won't happen until the empire has completely collapsed. In that regard, I have quite a grim view of the future of America.

> even the students who might try are bullied, and there are zero role models in the lives of students

Some schools allowed students to beat these odds and decide to give themselves a chance by being in an environment where they could succeed academically. Lowell was such a school here in SF [0]. Sadly, it became a target of a certain crowd and has now switched to a "lottery" system to admit, so the bullies have as much chances of getting in as the victims. [1]

[0] https://youtu.be/DVMmT9k5rYk

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/sf-school-lottery-L...

>I think to achieve equal opportunity it makes sense to make education equal.

It's doable. Make it online and free. The HTTP protocol doesn't care about your social background.

I absolutely can't understand why would any country require its citizens to pay for education in state-funded schools and universities. Educated people are the best and the biggest national asset. Anything that creates a barrier (monetary or not) to education harms the country directly.

Thesis: We are 20 years behind where we should be in online university education, and the only reason we are where we are now is a pandemic.

The universities were at the bleeding edge of new networked IT solutions even into the 1980s. As low-cost portable devices became available that could display high-quality real-time video on demand, it was clear that such a solution would soon be faster, cheaper and better than passively sitting in a lecture hall. And little, if anything, happened on the University side for years and years.

The occasional academician might try something, but it was spotty at best. A few years ago, there were professors who were still banning laptops from lecture rooms. Faculty Senates stuck their collective heads in the sand. They couldn’t figure out a business case where they could make money in a video future, so they ignored it. Meanwhile, students got a slower, worse, more expensive education than they could and should have.

We should be in the third or fourth generation of online university courses by now. Professionally produced and vetted lectures, hyperlinks to past and supplemental materials synced to video, diverse actors presenting material that engage various population of students more effectively. Objective measures of student learning improvements to support process quality improvements. From service courses through grad seminars. The best courses offered to not one university, but all universities (potentially). Simulators of lab equipments so students get training on the newest equipment, and aren’t learning outdated inefficient lab practices. Online networking with mentors in the real world. Effective controls on cheating on exams. These all should be mature, fully deployed technologies by now. And they aren’t.

That is the mortal sin of Higher Education in the 21st Century. They just didn’t care. I consider a lot of the political turmoil on campuses as just a smokescreen by academic leadership to distract the digital native students from asking the inconvenient questions of why is education so…clunky.

Rant mode off.

Ironically people these days get most of their extra-curricula learning from random (i.e. non-academic/non-teachers) people on Youtube.

I do too, and I don't think it's "worse" in quality than what they teach in university.

Even that won’t do it. Kids show up to kindergarten with wildly different abilities to even “take turns” and participate conversationally. Kids who had less adult conversational interaction as toddlers won’t get the same out of school even with the teachers being in rotation.

There’s disagreement as to whether the gap is 30 million words, but it seems quite likely to be well into the millions. https://www.edutopia.org/article/new-research-ignites-debate...

It’s hard.

All of these replies seem to co-mingle the concepts of equal opportunity and equal outcome. The foundation of a free society is personal responsibility. Personal outcomes in such a system are pretty much guaranteed not to be the same (equal), since different people will use their freedom in different ways. Sucks for kids of irresponsible parents, who truly don't have self-autonomy. But then again, our society is full of compassionate safety nets for such kids.

You raise a very fair question of “when does someone have the responsibility for turning their opportunity into their outcome and how quickly does that responsibility ramp from 0% theirs to 100% theirs?

Could it ever begin before conception? Could it ever begin before birth? At 6 months of age? At 1, 2, or 3 years of age? Is it 100% “on them” at 12, 16, 18, or 21?

> But then again, our society is full of compassionate safety nets for such kids.

That really depends on what you are referring to by "our society." If you're talking about the US, many would dispute that characterization.

I'd not call it a characterization but a fact. I was initially thinking of Western(ized) society, although a moment's reflection suggests to me that it's nearly all current human society. For starters, (nearly?) every nation offers free public education. Westernized nations offer food assistance or some form of welfare for low- or no-income families. There are countless other programs at just at this "systemic," nation-state level; then consider that the world abounds with private and religious charities, which although they mostly hail from wealthier nations, dispense educational and life support to children (and adults) around the world. A myriad of privately-sponsored orphanages in India. Whatever the Gates foundation is doing this week in Africa. Privately sponsored open-to-the-community schools and day cares in Harlem. The list is endless.

> I'd not call it a characterization but a fact.

It's a subjective, unquantified statement. It cannot possibly be called a fact.

In any case the proof is in the pudding: children in the US who are born poor are highly likely to die poor, and we are significantly worse in that respect than other Western countries.

Exactly. Outside of the state taking away children from their parents at birth and raising them there will never truly be equal opportunity. Even then there are genetic differences which give some more opportunity than others: I got blessed by flat ass feet and bad joints from my parents. I will never be able to be an athlete and will always be somewhat limited in the physical endeavours I can persue. Being tall and attractive is directly correlated with better life outcomes, but if you are ugly or short you are just out of luck.

The real question which needs to be answered is where do institutions need to draw the line for equal opportunity? Do institutional services need to be a zero sum game? Can we offer the same services to everyone — education, healthcare, UBI — where providing services to certain individuals is not at the expense of other individuals?

> Outside of the state taking away children from their parents at birth and raising them...

Don't give them any ideas!

Yeah you are right, it's really difficult to do that. In the dreamland everyone gets to discover what they are good at and explore possibilities, but in the real world we all struggle to feed the family :/

> how to make education equal? Instead of setting up quotas maybe we should simply switch teachers. Let the teachers rotate among schools so that every kid gets a random selection of teachers and every teacher gets a random selection of students.

The lottery came back and you are moving from a school in Florida to Alaska.

>simply switch teachers

I think you’re on to something. 10 years ago, what you describe would have been entirely infeasible what with forcing teachers to move places they don’t want to go. Now, with KhanAcademy, you can have top-notch teaching on virtually any subject anywhere.

That’s not to say e-learning is a suitable replacement but as a supplement, it should certainly be able to bridge much of the gap.

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