So my anecdotal theory is that the (public) education system is optimized to the edges, abandoning the middle entirely, resulting in majority decline.
They do get computers with TONS of dumb-ass apps and zero reference materials.
How much initiative do you think a random office or retail worker would put into solving a problem they were presented with that they couldn't answer immediately and had no impact on their lives?
Memorize 6 equations, 15 terms of art, and be competent at super simple algebraic expressions and you’re done. Physics in US high schools is taught long before calculus and usually before trig, which is dumb, but they compensate by making the calculation requirements something 6th graders routinely do.
AP Calculus is even easier assuming you’ve taken trig and calculus, but I realize many Americans don’t. But freshman physics is… I generally say a waste of time it’s so easy.
What did your daughter find challenging?
Not saying it won't be hard, but I don't want you to think it's some crazy torture. It should be no harder than doing Bio or Chem first, and for many kids it's easier. (Bio and Chem have way more memorization and vocabulary.)
I don't think physics is hardest. On the contrary, physics is probably the best subject to start with, because everyone (even people who don't know about physics) have experienced physics. People intuitively understand that you go faster down a steep hill, than a gently sloped one.
I'm only aware of schools providing these three courses as independent of each other. Which makes sense, since they are independent.
I took Chem as a sophomore, Physics as a freshman, AP Chem as a senior, and AP Physics as a senior. I didn't take a single bio course after 7th grade.
For what it's worth, both Calculus courses were harder IMO than any of the aforementioned.
More like from what women prefer to what men prefer, they probably do it since most teachers are women and prioritize what girls want. Physics is "hard" as in not soft, not "hard" as in not easy.
The reasonable order is the opposite, physics underpins chemistry and chemistry underpins biology.
I am not sure either, but there is, and ignoring it means that school gets optimized for girls and seatbelts optimized for men. You have to bring that up to change it.
Yep. Those edges are pushed by very vocal parents, usually backed by large communities and interest groups.
And the modern-day politics of American public schools (which generally have very low voter engagement) dictate that only the squeaky wheels get the grease.
I want all people to live fulfilling lives and reach their potential, but we are pouring limited resources into a bottomless pit while intentionally de-emphasizing the fundamentals of education that worked well for decades (or longer), and any question of those methods receives an extremely hostile response.
It's no wonder that people are choosing to opt out in some form or another, or that the results are suboptimal.
Then there's a middle tier, the majority of people, where they might end up at a university but it's not top rated. Increasingly it's not worth the money and simultaneously it seems like our country has become more credentialist about prestigious jobs. But a degree probably isn't necessary for most careers that don't have gatekeepers so for these people the education doesn't really have a big payoff and their education might get de-emphasized.
Then there's the bottom tier which is self explanatory.
In the normal track, you don't eventually take calculus in math, learn much about labwork in science, or even learn how to write a research paper until the last year of classes at 18. (Source: class of 2005, USA)
Based on my anecdotal experience, this is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I've been hearing constantly for at least a decade how atrocious American public education is, which I can't reconcile at all with my experience as a 2010 graduate of McLean High School. Either my experience was so far outside the national norm that I have no useful perspective on this issue, or the national discourse has been totally corrupted by vocal minorities and political agendas.
Personally, my teachers were consistently amazing and brilliant (RIP Mr. Bigger), curricula were rigorous, and I learned a ton that prepared me well for my life and career after high school. Every time I hear about some factoid or perspective that American schools supposedly don't teach because they're propaganda farms designed to churn out uncurious low-skill workers, I roll my eyes as I vividly recall how it was explicitly covered in my classes. It's possible my experience may have been more the exception than the rule, given that most of my classes were advanced/AP/post-AP, but I also had some of my favorite teachers in regular and honors classes and never felt like I was receiving insufficient value for my time. Maybe I just got incredibly lucky, but I really have nothing but good things to say, and can't relate at all to the picture of American public education that's been painted in the media and social media. Granted, a lot can change in 15 years, and my perspective is already going to be skewed by having attended a top-ranked school in a wealthy district.
On the flip side, my public elementary school experience was the polar opposite. In kindergarten I was tutoring third graders who needed help learning to read, but by second grade I'd been kicked out more or less for being bored with the level and pace of the course material. (Effectively. Specifically, the principal was going to move me to special ed unless my mom agreed to find a doctor willing to put me on Ritalin for my nonexistent ADHD. The 90s were wild.) So there's that. Luckily there are some great private schools in the area which my mom was able to make sacrifices to afford, but I can't help but wonder how many other kids weren't as lucky and had their whole life trajectories sabotaged from an early age. Granted, that particular principal was fired a few months after my de facto expulsion (for many very good reasons), so maybe this was all genuinely just an anomaly and very far outside the norm for completely different reasons than my high school experience.
McLean's formula for success is to be located in an upper-middle class district with parents who value education and are wealthy enough to provide a stable environment, but not so wealthy they must send their kids to a private school. This formula isn't something that can be easily replicated or scaled out nationwide.
The aspiration is to make excellent education available for all children, regardless of what school district their parents can afford to move into. This is a problem that looks easy on the surface, but it seems to be extremely difficult in practice. Education is a social benefit, and a lot of people seem to have rejected the notion that taxes should even pay for social benefits.
I'm also optimistic that physical goods as a whole will become much more affordable over the next decade or two for various reasons, which would further enable the median public school to approach the level of 00s MHS without relying on local concentration of a disproportionate share of national wealth.
All that being said, my point wasn't "look how well-funded my high school was". Regardless of the reasons, it's a bright spot in a narrative of doom and gloom. Only the horror stories seem to get any attention, and if you listen to anyone with strong political views on the topic you'd think each state's governing party had turned its entire school system into a network of indoctrination camps. It's also clearly the case based on my disturbingly bad elementary school experience, and from what I've heard of some other local schools that should have comparable financing to MHS, that money isn't sufficient to provide a top-tier educational experience.
I think it's important to look at schools and counties that perform well and carefully evaluate which elements can be used as a model to help improve public education as a whole, rather than assuming that absolutely nothing is replicable without gobs of cash. For example, off the top of my head, what if the federal government provided an annual budget for a handful of top-ranking districts across the country to have their best teachers of different subjects at each grade level oversee production and maintenance of open source course materials, video lectures, and possibly LLM chatbots? What if teachers all had some equivalent of GitHub to share and collaborate on that stuff? It wouldn't fix problems like rundown facilities or availability of computers and textbooks, but it would allow the worst Latin teacher in the country to provide something a lot closer to the Mr. Bigger experience, and that's just one idea.
The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.
The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.
You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.
Schoelenopdekaart shows pretty wide variation in how many students go on to vwo etc.
1. Any reform effort needs to ensure that early education isn't overlooked. Elementary schools need capacity, processes, and expertise to appropriately deal with kids of all different knowledge/intelligence levels and backgrounds/skillsets in a personalized way, and they need oversight to ensure that lazy/incompetent/malicious teachers and administrators aren't making poor/abusive decisions that could have lifelong negative impacts on students.
2. AI will be a critical element of future reform. It's too incredibly useful of a learning and scaling tool to sleep on. Of course it's easy to misuse, but that's exactly why responsible use needs to be taught as part of research and fact-checking lessons. If they haven't already, schools need to start running small-scale experiments with incorporation of AI tools into curricula asap.
Imagine how much more you could have learned with a virtual TA in your pocket on call 24/7 for those 13 years, with human teachers in the loop to help guide any self-directed learning you might have chosen to undertake. That bright-eyed kid who never stops asking "why?" will finally have a conversational partner who never tires of answering. All the panic about hallucinations sounds like the same sensationalist takes I grew up hearing from adults about the internet and Wikipedia — a perfectly valid concern, but not sufficient to negate the value of the resource in competent hands.
To your point, I would expect any sanctioned in-school student-facing AI usage to be through a school-provided platform on locked down school-owned hardware, in line with how computer/internet access already works (or how it worked 15 years ago). School-issued mobile devices with AI access could be a nice addition if they were locked down enough to sufficiently minimize distractions, but maybe sticking to laptops and desktops would work better in practice.