Hacker News Reader

Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

De-centralize and de-nationalize schooling. It's clear the feds have no idea how to make the education system work. Let the states have ~50 different curricula, or individual schools to have ~hundreds or ~thousands of different curricula. Even if they're bad on average, some of them will probably figure out how to make an actually good US school by sheer luck. Once we have that, the others have a model to copy.

View on HN

> Once we have that, the others have a model to copy.

That is a bold expectation. Some schools will have an incentive to just have as much pupils pass the exam by lowering the bar, other will be incentivized to just teach the bare minimum, others won't have enough money if the model of excellence is expensive (and it probably will be).

And the model that applies to, say, a child who grew up with college-educated parents won't necessarily apply to the child from a blue collar family.

That is just to say that this is a hard problem. My intuition is that the only way to achieve the best education (excluding the case of hypergifted people) seems to be by throwing money at it through personalized education and tutoring and solving the child's other life problems, i.e. the wealthy kid model, but obviously that's not realistic when it comes to mass education. But maybe mass education (at the level we seem to expect from it) isn't realistic.

Or maybe we should reduce the number of subjects taught in school to math, language and physical education.

The problem with trying to make a good school is that strong students pretty much teach themselves and their performance far exceeds any effects from good teaching methods. If any school starts to show decent results then word gets around and it becomes a magnet school. Magnet schools attract wealthy and high-performing students, which totally swamp the effects of the teaching method you're trying to study.

Good teachers unfettered by standardized course plans, when dealing with brilliant students, keep pace with and support those students. If this attracts even more brilliant students, all the better! Then the brilliant students will also support and motivate each other leading to even better outcomes. This is an ideal situation unless you're one of those Harrison Bergeron people who wants to cap high achievers so they don't leave the dummies in the dust.

We really should be prioritizing the brightest students, because their brilliance has the best payoff for all of society. Better to have 100 students who are genuine math wizards and are prepared to continue building on what they know than to have 10000 students who sort of learn basic calculus then forget all of it, with those previous 100 lost in the noise and never given the resources to reach their potential.

On the contrary, standardized course plans are actually the most effective way to provide truly reliable instruction at all levels in a mass lecture/group education format. One key reason why those 100 math wizards don't all become PhD's is that math instruction at both school and university level leads to the proliferation of random gaps in learning where some content just wasn't reinforced effectively. Since math instruction generally builds on previously-learned math, once you accumulate enough of these gaps you hit a wall, and will need remedial instruction (often sought via autonomous self-teaching, of course) to make any progress. The dynamic is structurally the same between the "dummies" and the "math whizs", all that changes is the level at which the problem arises.

Focusing on a standardized course plan that the student is able to learn, memorize and ultimately repeat effortlessly makes it easy to ensure that absolutely everything was reinforced properly.

Congrats: what you’re asking for is exactly how things work now! The feds do not set currricula, each state does independently. Common Core is an opt-in, state-led initiative, which was based on the idea of examining the latest research and practices in education across the country, and adjusting curricula to match.

I haven’t been in public school in 15 years but there was 2 public school districts, a public-private magnet school associated with the State University and a Private Catholic school with radically different curriculum in my hometown. Even between the two high schools in the same district there was different courses and funding because of the property taxes funding specific schools and one school was on the nice side of town.

As far as I understand, most public schools are decentralized, at least the State level, if not further. Are you claiming that is not the case currently?

Except that as soon as someone says 'hey X works, here's the data to prove it's all the rent seekers who have gotten happy with the alternatives will fight against its adoption. When I was younger I used to buy into the 'laboratories of democracy' concept, now I think it's more like 'meth labs of bureaucracy.'

Schools and teachers have ways to make sure improvements don't happen. These include - same pay regardless of performance, not hiring or firing based on performance, and teachers don't want to learn or do anything differently, especially if it's even slightly harder than what they already do. They're not really professionals that improve or have any career growth besides management and accumulating number of years experience. Schools don't care either, nor do governments bother to incentivize them to care.

Except in, say, China, where none of that applies and education works great.

> Schools and teachers have ways to make sure improvements don't happen. These include - same pay regardless of performance, not hiring or firing based on performance, and teachers don't want to learn or do anything differently, especially if it's even slightly harder than what they already do

You can just say unions, no need to beat around the bush. Anyway, I don't really agree. Of course some teachers are stuck in the mud, but other teachers are eager to try new things and improve outcomes. If unfettered by standardization they would be eagerly experimenting with new approaches to teaching their subjects. And if school funding weren't reliant on teachers "teaching the test", then schools would find ways to reward these teachers because it makes the administration look good to have passionate and proactive teachers.

> Except in, say, China, where none of that applies and education works great.

Yup the school system plagued by epidemic cheating where cheating is even accepted to some level (you are an idiot if you don't cheat).

There are problems of course, but they end up with higher levels of education despite that. If a country was serious about education, they could just make it work. I guess having to balance too many competing interests weakens it. We don't want extreme lifetime poverty for school dropouts either, which might be part of what's needed to motivate success.

> Even if they're bad on average, some of them will probably figure out how to make an actually good US school by sheer luck. Once we have that, the others have a model to copy.

How could anyone know that, if each school has its own curriculum and exams? If you got 4 gold stars out of 5 on your reading comprehension and I got three palm leaves out of 4 at literature interpretation, which one of us is getting a better education?

The ones who get into better colleges.

The there is a de facto national curriculum, defined by the good college entrance criteria.

> De-centralize and de-nationalize schooling. It's clear the feds have no idea how to make the education system work. Let the states have ~50 different curricula, or individual schools to have ~hundreds or ~thousands of different curricula. Even if they're bad on average, some of them will probably figure out how to make an actually good US school by sheer luck. Once we have that, the others have a model to copy.

Sadly, we already know what works, individualized/custom attention that exposes the kid to a lot of fields. A worse way to put it, more money == better education. And this is largely true even if specifically wrong.

But once you try to scale that up, everything falls apart.

I am not defending "Common Core", but why didn't this happen before Common Core existed?

Also: Many highly advanced nations have a national-level curriculum. What is different and why does it work?

>Let the states have ~50 different curricula,

There are several states in which that would be absolutely disastrous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com