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Comment by someothherguyy | Hacker News Reader

Why have grade levels at all? Instead, have a directed graph of skills that you need to advance through. Then, in order to advance, you can focus the labor effort toward correcting skill deficits in a dynamic way. This is not possible with how educational institutions are traditionally organized, but it doesn't seem intractable to restructure to support this methodology.

It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress.

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> Why have grades at all? Instead, have a directed graph of skills that you need to advance through

FTA: "Elements of so-called equitable grading, which is supposed to be more resistant to bias than traditional grading, have taken off in American schools. Roughly 40 percent of middle-school teachers work in schools where there are no late penalties for coursework, no zeroes for missing coursework, and unlimited redos of tests."

> It would remove the stigma of "being held back", as there are no levels in a strict sense, just cumulative progress

These students do worse. Absent a challenge, you get the pedagogical equivalent of button mashing. Evaluation is a necessary component of progress. It seems that if the evaluation is stripped of consequence, it ceases to evaluate.

This is exactly how it is at my husband's high school: no penalties, no consequences, unlimited turning in of work until the end of the quarter. Didn't finish it all and ended up with a D or lower? Doesn't matter, because you can't be held back anyway.

Let's not even get into how kneecapped teachers are in classroom management. A student reported him for pointing at them and touching them when he was never fewer than 3 feet away pointing away from them. The students know they have the power now, and they're definitely not going to be told what to do.

There are other ways to introduce motivating factors that aren't tied to grade level retention. Sometimes this is done in secondary and tertiary education in the US, like preventing participation in extracurricular activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholastic_probation

You could also reward students for outstanding accomplishments.

Right, the nodes of such a skills graph would require standardized evaluation.

To be clear, I am talking about replacing grade levels (K, 1, 2, ..., 12), not graded assessments. I updated my comment to clarify this.

I'd love to see this tried. If you want to level up in writing, take those classes. If you reach minimum levels in enough subjects, you get a diploma. And you could make it as granular as you wanted.

You might need more carrots and sticks since the penalty for being held back is lessened.

We already run colleges this way, granular down to an academic quarter.

It really comes down to costs and efficiency. Having large enough class size and thus grade level makes things more efficient. As teachers do scale to certain number of pupils. Current schools can teach same material for say 15-40 students at one time. But in more tutoring like system you might be able to do 5. Which means you need 3-8 times more teachers.

I don't think it does. I think it comes down to legal frameworks that inhibit major changes to education systems.

There are methods that you could use to increase mentorship and attention by distributing expertise to less-credentialed individuals. This is done in many other credentialed institutions, like hospitals, colleges, or universities.

Beyond that, you could utilize technology in blended learning. This lessens a load on a teacher.

From what I understand, much of this cannot happen easily because there is a gigantic top-down system distributing rules to institutions. On top of that you have labor agreements that blend into those rules and so on.

It seems accomplishing major reform, outside of curricula alone, would be a massive undertaking.

I have a suspicion that you'd wind up with a lot of places that would care even less and with people making it to 18 without ever having advanced at all without some sort of stick ("being held back"), probably impacting the most vulnerable even more.

That might be a possibility, but from what I've read, retention (the stick) does more harm than good. One of those harms is that students get held back by struggling with one skill, like math, when they are progressing on other skills at a normal pace.

A system like this would address that issue, and could prevent education resources from being applied redundantly.

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