Comment by dcx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcx | Hacker News Reader

Full disclosure: I worked on a small project with Ello / Catalin a few years ago.

At the time of writing, the sentiment in this post is that this is a terrible idea, and that kids need human tutors. The latter is 100% true. But also, you might want to know some facts about the state of children's literacy in the US (Ello is a math and reading tutor):

1. We're in crisis. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders are reading below basic levels [1].

2. There's a massive teacher shortage. 2025 US state data shows ~400k teacher positions either unfilled or underqualified [2] – over 10% of the workforce.

3. Bloom's 2-sigma shows that 1-1 tutoring delivers outcomes at the 90th percentile of classroom teaching. Early research is finding that AI can deliver some of this benefit [3].

4. This can't always be solved by parents: 54% of US adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level, and 20% are below 5th-grade level [4].

At Ello, I heard stories of children figuring out they were behind at school, and when given the app, they holed themselves up in their room and used it to get themselves caught up. And then they could read! Can you imagine falling behind at this critical juncture, and being stuck illiterate while your friends grow past you? We're currently setting kids up for lives of shame and deprivation.

My take: this really is a life-changing technology. And we need this problem solved. Democracy doesn't function without an educated populace.

[1] https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2025/nati...

[2] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/overview-teacher...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2...

[4] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

> We're in crisis. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders are reading below basic levels

How much of this crisis is due to the social engineering being attempted in school districts across America? Case in point: San Francisco schools decided a couple of years ago that they would no longer teach Algebra in 8th grade. Why? Because too many kids of a certain demographic were failing it. So let's just not teach it! No class, so nobody fails it, right?

It took a proposition on a ballot (i.e., an election) [1] to force the SFUSD to put Algebra back in 8th grade!

I have kids in SFUSD. It often feels like the SFUSD does not care about the average and above average kids; all they focus on is the bottom layer. And even there, they do a terrible job. There was a student who got straight F's in each and every class, and still managed to be a senior in High School! [2]

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-child-left-beh...

The explanation I've heard is that the national curriculum switched away from phonics and to a teaching method called "balanced literacy", and this went terribly [1]. IIRC it involved teaching kids to recognize words by their overall visual shape. I believe this is what mature readers do, but the problem is that for this to work, one first needs to have bootstrapped a robust vocabulary. And that happens via being able to sound out words, i.e. phonics.

(I'm not sure whether Cato is generally reliable, but FYI there are lots of other writeups online on the same topic. It was the first non-paywalled and reasonably complete one I found)

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/phonics-failure-public-schools

I've heard a lot of people argue that phonics are vastly superior to "whole word" techniques, and maybe that's true -- I'm definitely not an expert, though it is how I was taught English in Australia ~30 years ago.

However, I find it quite hard to believe that it is the most important cause of the modern literacy rate issues in the US. Why? Because "whole word" teaching was the conventional wisdom since at least the 1950s[1,2]! Most articles on the topic reference the book Why Johnny Can't Read (1955) which was written to argue in favour of phonics as a response to (perceived?) child illiteracy at the time and claims (page 1):

> Since the 1920s, most American schoolchildren have been taught to memorize the "appearance" of words, one after another, like Chinese characters, without reference to the sounds of the individual letters that make up each word.

The reintroduction of phonics in the US first started as "balanced literacy" (phonics and "whole word", ideally tailored to students) in the 1990s and "science-based reading" (basically just phonics) properly started in the 2000s[1,2], which means that the argument that phonics would improve reading scores is on quite shaky ground (most children in the US today get taught phonics and most people >40 were probably taught with "whole word" teaching).

[1]: https://wearealigned.org/brief-history-literacy-instruction-... [2]: https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...

Fascinating. Do you have any suspicions as to what the cause might be instead?

Go back to the 18th and 19th centuries and you land back in phonics-land. The fad of whole-word and three-queuing lasted a generation and has produced terrible results. Those techniques even induce dyslexia in some cases.

I am aware of that (the articles I linked even mention it), my point was that modern fears around literacy are based on data suggesting that child literacy rates have recently declined.

If lack of phonics was solely to blame then almost all US adults alive today (not just "a generation" -- anyone born between the 1920s and 2000s, at least) would have literacy problems, but the concern is that today's children have literacy problems in contrast to previous generations -- the exact opposite of what you would expect. To be fair, people in the 1950s were also claiming that children were illiterate compared to previous generations, but I'm not sure whether those claims are really credible. Do your parents' and grandparents' generations strike you as being shockingly illiterate?

> San Francisco schools decided a couple of years ago that they would no longer teach Algebra in 8th grade.

This has nothing to do with this at all. We're talking about 4th grader literacy nationwide and you're talking about algebra in a single area in a different grade!?

The second point where there aren't enough teachers nationwide (10% missing workforce) is probably because teachers are terribly paid, disrespected, and subject to bad working conditions.

Maybe that's why people aren't clamoring to be teachers and the quality of work is low?

This is not how I want the world to be.

"Wow, our state institutions are struggling in ways X, Y, and Z. Rather than addressing these problems we will shuffle them to an unaccountable third party that will provide a necessarily worse substitute using the hot technology of the day."

https://dlants.me/bloom.html

Blooms 2 sigma, like many studies that are thrown about, is not as much of a slam dunk as people claim that it is. Have you read the paper or any efforts to replicate?

Thanks for taking time to write this. HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) ! Folks here are wildly overestimating (or ignoring!) how many adults are qualified to be good teachers and how many of them further have enough incentives (money, time, resources) to do it well. Its a _very_ small number.

In my part of the world, "become a teacher" is often a job advised to people who are not able to find other jobs or are looking for a safe way back after career break. None of them are looking forward to engaging 5 year old with life's curiosities. To add the famous quip from WorryDream/Bret Victor : most of the teachers teaching calculus etc. have never ever used it in real life.

Working parents with STEM backgrounds likely know that schools are glorified day-cares and probability of your child having access to a life changing tutor is very low.

I tried building an edtech venture frustrated precisely with these problems. Failed, but would def do it again with AI in the mix. I'm for one rooting for this to succeed!

Pay your teachers better.

How? Taxing you higher?

It's a matter of distribution, not scarcity.

ok. You've rephrased something. But do you have a specific solution? Because the OP seem to do.

They have a business venture, not a silver bullet.

Paying teachers higher is a harder sell than isolating children from humans so they can talk to an LLM?

What fucking society are we trying to cultivate?

Apparently one where taxing you higher for better teachers does not elicit a "sure, yes".

That is the ideal solution. I'll tell you an incident that seems from a black humour novel. A state government in one of the highest populous state in India decided to make biometric attendance for government school teachers, to ensure they are in school. Large number of so called "teachers" started protesting against state, egged on by opportunistic opposition. Because many of them were drawing salaries from government and _not even showing up in school_. That's the ground reality of government funded education.

I'm open to the idea that market forces or reality _might_ tilt the favour in more investment in AI in education and tutoring. Think about developing economies or under developed economies of the world. The state / government has to think how should they allocate budget: on agriculture subsidies or pay teachers better or spend it on energy security in increasingly hostile multipolar world or invest it in infrastructure. There are no good answers.

> That's the ground reality of government funded education.

In India perhaps.

In Commonwealth countries such as the UK, AU, CA, NZ, etc. teachers being paid but not attending doesn't go unnoticed and would be part of an award (sick leave, paid vacation time, etc).

What I'm hearing from your anecdote is that in India the government is unable to track it's own employees.

> HN is showing (expected) dismissing attitude towards this idea. That tells me it might work :) !

I recently learned the name of this logical fallacy: Galileo gambit. It’s one of my pet peeves. Yes, we all know Dropbox was infamously dismissed by the top comment on HN. No, just because someone criticizes your project on here doesn’t mean it’ll be a big success.

Instead of fixing the education system and giving it the resources it deserves (eg paying teachers more like the other reply said) we’re going to “fix it” by ossifying a two tiered system where wealthy kids get individualized attention from well trained adults while poor kids are taught by AI.

The Galileo gambit is the idea that because experts reject an idea, it must be true. HN is the furthest thing from experts when it comes to early childhood education.

Or Clarke's first law

-- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

I hear you, and I know every project being dissed here is not going to be Dropbox. Perhaps some projects deserve the reality check they get. Though I still believe that HN crowd telling that just pay teachers more or kids need to be taught by good human teachers are underestimating the scale of the problem.

Some real experience of school in my part of the world (India). My child goes to a somewhat costly private school. Still, each class has 35-40 kids. The teacher is over-worked : checking home work, prepares kids for upcoming random extra curricular activity, has to teach AI because someone suddenly thought it is important to teach it in grade 3. I know multiple teachers in that school who landed the job after doing just a 6 months course after a career break. Forget research on teaching, hardly any one of them read anything beyond curriculum. None of the teachers have enough time to give personalised attention to _any_ kid. Its a sorry state of affairs.

Personalised tutoring produced geniuses in last century but was affordable only for a wealthy few. It is my belief that AI might help democratise the idea. I know it is somewhat hard to think that a mere machine might have more patience and time to explain a concept 100 times to a student, instead of a human.

This still doesn't take away from the fact that teachers deserve to be paid more. I was a passionate for becoming a teacher, but knew I can't make enough money from it. I'm seeing a possibility in emerging markets that India / China might find it cheaper to deploy AI en masse for better educational outcomes because it will be much cheaper for the state than paying high wages (and subsequently pensions) to human teachers, however unfair it might look.

I love my parents but I don't think either of them have read a book in 50+ years now.

My mother kept a type of year book that each year I would say what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think in 5th grade I said physicist.

You know how they nurtured this curiosity? They did nothing. I don't think either of them even know what a physicist is beyond something to do with science.

I think in 6th grade I wanted a microscope that I eventually got but had no guidance on what to do , what to look at. I don't think I even knew there was this concept of "biology".

A huge number of kids have this same experience as I did right now.

What is even worse is life is ultimately a path dependent process with a huge part of the outcome based on the deterministic chaos of initial starting conditions.

No shit I would rather have my father be a particle physicist and my mother a librarian with a passion for reading non-fiction to kids.

My parents did the best they could but they are not intellectuals in the slightest and neither is the average person now. Claude would have been a god send to me in 5th grade.

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