Hacking Education
avc.com
avc.com
Group decision making is a phenomenally slow and stupid process, filled with all sorts of interest groups with all kinds of different incentives. The slowness and stupidity of this process is why education feels like it is stuck in the past. This is also why school choice advocates are so passionate about their issue. A school choice program would allow each parent to pursue educational choices which he thinks would be best for his child. He could choose some new educational model without first asking permission from the rest of society to do so.
Technology is great. It is making real change on the margin. However, it can only do so much good while children are inmates in a system designed by a public bureaucracy for 40 hours a week.
Children already spend a large amount of time on optional education activities that do exist in a market. If we improve these it might just provide a path to better education within the public system.
I'd like to see the ways we train people in music, sports and with special needs extended to the core subjects like maths. In those cases a specialist in the learning of that subject will see the child perhaps once a week but oversee and dictate the practice that child undertakes.
I do think the benefit of these optional activities will be limited as long as the 30-40 prime hours spent in school each week are of such low value. And in general I am opposed to such waste.
Politics does require a lot of work to make any useful changes. However, I don't think ending the public monopoly would be impossible. Voters managed to do it in Sweden and the Netherlands.
My purpose was more to point out a relevant fact about our current educational system than to encourage everyone to drop their startups and start lobbying their state Congress.
We CAN still improve education while the 30-40 hours spent at school each week are a complete write-off.
I still think we would have a better world if that were not the case.
In truth though, I think technological and other improvements in education will lead to the education freedom we both want, rather than the other way round. Innovations in learning could render the whole public education system outdated, whereas at the moment alternatives don't impress me.
I typically make it a point to tell the whole class that Wikipedia cites many of its claims. Not all of the citations are 100% accurate, but it's a start for doing research. It gives you a high-level overview, and gives you a place to start compared to the messy online library systems. I go to one of the most research-intensive schools where every professor is required to be doing research in addition to their curriculum. And our online library is a bad place if you want to get a high-level view of the problem you're looking at.
On top of that, this article is dead on. I remember ranting about this topic back in 2006:
http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/public-education-is-...
About three times I have looked through the past revisions on substantial wikipedia articles and each time it was clear that the revisions generally made the article worse. The general pattern is that an expert occasionally writes meaty, high quality sections and then these either get deleted or eventually made incomprehensible. Edits almost always degrade the prose.
I do not understand the wikipedia fanboism. It's fine for basic facts, and great for pop culture, but better informational articles on almost any complex topic are available elsewhere. I do not think wikipedia is working very well and hope that the more closed system some of the original founders started a while back comes out on top.
edit: I just looked up that new, more closed version of wikipedia and from a quick examination it is much better than wikipedia. Compare:
Education inequality is directly linked to income inequality, and our government has failed to solve this problem. Essentially, what we have here is the forced inter-generational transfer of socioeconomic status.
Privatization of schools would not fix this. Free markets fail to find the global optimum in many situations; these situations are called market failures. We need to design systems that benefit societal welfare over individual welfare in the education, healthcare and government sectors.
Injecting technological innovation into the lives of students will not adequately address education inequality (unless you build something that provides students good food, safe homes, and loving families). If you give all students access to, say, MIT OpenCourseWare, it might boost everyone up by the same level, but it will not address the educational gap between the lucky and the unlucky.
We must not allow luck to play a part in education: children deserve to be enabled to reach their full potential, and not be permanent victims of arbitrary systems of distribution.
Edit: If you downvote, write a reply.
Raising the quality of education for everyone is important. Maybe I have a capacity for envy below that of the average human, but I would rather see everyone get a 10x better education than see the gap between the best and the worst narrowed by some amount. If we could choose between a program that increased everybody's income by $10,000 or one that reduced everybody's income by 50%, I would rather choose the first program even though the second would dramatically decrease any measure of income inequality.
Unfortunately, children from wealthy homes don't get better educations only because their schools have more money to spend. If this were the case, the United States would have the best primary schools in the world and perennial hell-holes like DC Public Schools would be educational utopias. Rather, parents in wealthy homes play an active role in their children's education and place importance on the role of education in their children's lives, as their parents likely did.
The government could redistribute income, but it can't redistribute culture. Unless we resort to monstrous social engineering schemes like allocating children to homes by lottery istead of by birth, we are not going to eliminate the inequality caused by home culture. And we haven't begun to talk about the inequalities caused by genetics.
But working on a solution to inequality is focusing on the wrong problem. It is a symptom of zero-sum thinking that doesn't reflect the issues of the real world. The real problem is how to improve the educational opportunity for each person, not equalize opportunities between people. After all, you can equalize the education everyone receives by banning education.
Luck will always play a role in life. We can still try to make every life better.
I suspect that children of wealthy parents would perform better in school than their less-wealthy peers under any reasonable system. I don't think that is the problem that should concern us the most.
Helping the very unlucky is a valuable goal, and a realistic one. "Equality" is not.
PS: Income in equality is measured as a fraction. EX: Top 1% / bottom 20%.
Here is one argument for local taxes paying for local schools: it gives the influence over education to the locals.
It's conceivable that when schools accept federal funding, they are also obliged (somehow) to accept federal instruction.
If I disagree with current instruction, it is more difficult for me to change it when it comes from some larger far-away entity than when it comes from a board paid directly on my dime.
So I see two sides to this problem, but not (yet) a resolution.
I also was amazed that this came out a week after I started working on something that can solve this problem and do many of the things he mentioned. It makes me feel like my idea is 110% more valid, and that is exciting.
You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers.
The biggest cost is also the one that is often the least efficient. Add to that the power of the teaching union and the system stays in stasis.
I'd like to believe technology can make a big difference, but I'd be satisfied if we're merely able to fill some gaps.
Christensen is a business school guy, but he understands how technology can disrupt well established markets. In the book above he covers technology and education.
Napster as a phenomenon was possible because the cost of distributing music had fallen close to zero. But testing is different than music, because the value of test material as a reliable measure of proficiency is lost as it is propogated, while the value of an MP3 is preserved, regardless of how many times it is copied.
After all, test material, unlike songs, is subject to cheating. All it takes is a Google search to compromise the reliability of an assessment.
If you want your tests to be reliable measures of proficiency in a given area, then you need a way of creating test material more quickly than ever before.
I wonder if it was possible to take a block of text, and automatically generate question&answer pairs from it using some kind of AI software (probably bayesian networks combined with grammar rules).
Fill in the blanks would be easier, since all you would need to do is isolate a correct answer, and then retrieve wrong answers. And then make an interface that would make it easy to crop or edit the quiz item in a few seconds.....
Could be better: absolutely. Completely broken: absolutely not.
Whether it's the kids or the system that's "at fault," a system designed to help kids should adapt to help them even if the requirements for that change.