Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kharvok | Hacker News Reader

Establish cohorts in schools by academic ability. People want to be grouped with peers and they are more successful when doing so.

We shouldn't have children at vastly different ability levels in the same classroom. Struggling kids are made no better, and the exceptional are dragged down.

View on HN

The reason why this is a really bad idea from an efficiency and an equity POV is that it leads to royally screwed-up incentives for teachers. No self-respecting teacher really wants to teach a class of "struggling, low-achieving" students. So the lowest quality teachers end up teaching those classes, and the struggling students are basically trapped with no prospect for real improvement. It's awful.

It would be very different if teachers could meaningfully specialize towards providing effective instruction for these lower-achieving students. But we barely manage to do this for actual "special" ed, and then only at huge cost.

I agree with your concerns but we already do this somewhat informally with public education in much of the country with college prep, advanced, honors, and AP courses.

I'm just advocating we act with more purpose and honest intention about what we're already doing.

An alternative perspective is that the lower performing teachers will relate more to the lower performing students, and the higher performing teachers will relate more to the higher performing students.

And, from a pure efficiency standpoint, we should absolutely seek to give every possible opportunity to those gifted students. For the lower performing kids, focus on teaching values and ethics, along with realistic and practical goals, to make up for any issues in their upbringing. I think attitude is as important as aptitude for the middle and lower end spectrum kids.

8 classes ranked. 4 teachers

A: 1&8

B: 2&7

C: 3&6

D: 4&5

The ole Catan split

What seems to happen from what I've seen is not quite that. Junior teachers work in low-performing schools and classes, while experienced teachers are are the better ones. But, and this is a big bug, unlike many professions, seniority doesn't reliably correspond to performance and may in fact be negatively correlated! Young teachers are often more enthusiastic and capable of engaging easily-distracted kids while experienced teachers have a clearer understanding of the syllabus and content so it actually seems like a good fit for everyone.

I wonder if this system might ameliorate that negative correlation, if junior teachers are assigned the worst students (not schools). I would think the enthusiasm and engagement dissipate after years of fruitless struggling with bad pupils. If you give the low achieving students exclusively to the young teachers, their wide-eyed passion for the youth of tomorrow or whatever can carry them through the first few years - offering the best to students who won't be able to make much with it (and offering the best to the late bloomers who were miscategorized who will). From there they slowly matriculate up the ranks, teaching students who are more and more capable of and receptive to learning. I bet their enthusiasm weathers the years better overall as they always have the next step of better students to look forward to, and their job becomes easier in a sense as time goes on.

> No self-respecting teacher really wants to teach a class of "struggling, low-achieving" students.

That doesn't ring true to me. Why wouldn't a good teacher take pride in taking kids below the curve up to Average? I would wager that this probably has a better net impact than pushing the elite kids that much further.

Partly it's because their own educational background doesn't let them develop this kind of pride in their work. Modern education schools' doctrine is that kids don't even need to be taught anything because they can simply "learn everything by themselves" with just a few hints about what sort of 'inquiry' they should undertake. This can seem to "work" well enough for high-achieving students who can always rely on someone (either themselves or family) to pick up the slack; it's invariably a dismal failure for everyone else.

>Struggling kids are made no better, and the exceptional are dragged down.

I disagree

I've been terrible student (think of passing subjects, but pretty close to the "edge") until last two years of HS

where I actually started putting effort into math/english and then I looked at the best students after working with them for a while and I was like "why can't you do better, just like them? are you worse or something?"

that was huge motivation, just awarness that you could do better itself

it works in other things in life too - internet, programming, hackernews.

If I were in a group with people similar to me, then I don't know how it'd end, honestly and it pretty scares me to think where I'd be now in life

With IQ tests identifying you as intelligent, you could be in a small class with other terrible students and a teacher who knows how to reach and motivate you. After some weeks you could rejoin the best students and learn at a much higher pace.

Where would you be if you had the best education?

>With IQ tests identifying you as intelligent, you could be in a small class with other terrible students and a teacher who knows how to reach and motivate you.

Actually I've been in such a class in elementary school for students that performed worse. For me, they focused mostly on improving writing and probably something else that I don't remember

I'm unable to say now how much it actually gave me, I still cannot write (handwriting), but that's mostly because I never care about that, I felt like that was useless skill and nowadays I rarely use pen.

>Where would you be if you had the best education?

That's hard to answer, I don't know, especially that "best education" varies by person, but assuming the one that fits my preferences, then probably... I don't know.

The only thing that I still haven't done in my career that I find really interesting is going for a year or two to US and working in CPU Fab or some compilers job, but I'm not sure whether with better edu I'd have it already done, especially that those require a lot of "non-school" effort

That's how my high school (in New Zealand) did things. We were separated into 3 bands, the first band for high achieving students, the second band for average students, and the third band for learning support. From memory, there were ~5 classes in the first band, 10 in the second, and 3 in the third.

It was a great system for both teachers and students. Everyone in a class would be learning at roughly the same rate, and the school was able to allocate resources, such teachers aides, more efficiently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com