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Comment by imroot | Hacker News Reader

It's not that teachers don't like Creative Students -- my wife is a K-12 Special Ed teacher working on her Ph.D -- but that the educational system doesn't know what to do with students who do not fit into their state-provided lesson plan. In Kentucky, the state dept of Education provides:

  - The lesson plans
  - The Powerpoint slides 
  - The quizes
  - The lecture outline

The lazy teachers use the state provided materials and don't change it.

The good teachers modify the plans to suit their students learning behavior and work accordingly.

The great teachers identify a different instructional design model and make it work for all of the students in their class.

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There are two more groups of teachers you missed:

The bad teachers modify the plans in a manner they think suits their students, but works worse than the provided materials.

The terrible teachers completely make up their own system, which simply fails.

The kids are tested every year at a state level that ensures that the student who lives in BFE, Kentucky (where I live) receives the same level of education as a student in a medium sized town and both students learn the same things that a student who lives in a 'major' area like Lexington or Louisville will learn.

If a teacher isn't making the grades at a statewide level, they will get rid of her or cut funding to the school. Sadly, this means that many lazy teachers are just teaching to the test, and nothing else.

If the system works as you describe, then it's fantastic - state provided standards ensure a minimum level of education, while still allowing some students to receive a superior level of education.

Perhaps the rest of the country can learn something from Kentucky.

Did you read what he said? The bad teachers just "teach the test", the good teachers are far better off without state provided standards and equal outcome mandates rendering the entire exercise pointless.

The bad teachers just "teach the test"...

No, he said the lazy teachers "teach the test", i.e. strive to make sure their students meet minimum standards. A system which makes sure even lazy workers perform adequately is a good system.

...the good teachers are far better off without state provided standards...

No, he said the good teachers are just as well off - they modify the standard lesson plans and are only penalized if their students do poorly.

I'm not sure if you are being deliberately obtuse. The lazy workers are not performing adequately under the system, they are gaming it by focusing only on monitored metrics.

This has real consequences for good teachers, who have to justify what they are trying to teach to a principal who only cares that school funding will be cut unless standardized test scores improve.

As long as the monitored metrics are appropriate measures of what the school is trying to teach, there is nothing wrong with optimizing them. If the metrics are insufficient, then the problem is the metrics, not the attempt to maximize them.

Since neither you nor imroot actually criticized the metrics, I see no reason to believe they do a bad job of measuring performance.

> my wife is a K-12 Special Ed teacher

The only things they're creating are funny noises ...

Actually, in the district where my wife works, both gifted kids as well as children who have emotional and behavioral disorders are placed in the "Special Education" department. She does half a day doing "Pull-Out" special ed, where she'll pull the EBD children into a corner of their existing classroom to work on things, then another half day doing the same type of pull-out work with gifted kids.

"both gifted kids as well as children who have emotional and behavioral disorders"

The two groups are not mutually exclusive.

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