The Failed "Hostage Theory" of Nikole Hannah-Jones | Hacker News Reader

The Failed "Hostage Theory" of Nikole Hannah-Jones

educationprogress.org

16 pointsbarry-cotter9 comments

There is also https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ on: "There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. "

It's not just that one failed thing, education jumps from one failed fad to another. Former neighbor of mine was a teaching inspector for schools and he'd occasionally talk about whatever the latest stupid fad was that he had to deal with. One example was open-plan classrooms, a complete disaster that failed in the 1970s. Who could have predicted that throwing ten teachers and ten lots of kids of different ages into the same space with no dividing walls would be a bad idea? Then about ten years ago a new school was built in an under-supplied suburb. Hey, let's make it open plan, that sounds like a great idea! So they spent tens of millions of dollars rendering into reinforced concrete and mirror-glass something that had already been shown not to work, but that was the current fad at the time so that's what got built. I don't know what they did with the school, it was nearly new and had swallowed a huge amount of money so they couldn't just demolish it, but it was unusable for teaching.

And that was just one single fad out of an endless succession of someone's-brain-fart fads that came along. He eventually took retirement after he spent more time dealing with education bureaucracy and mandatory virtue-signalling exercises than working with kids, which was his real passion. They lost a damn good teacher, and probably not the only one.

if you are interested in the topics of this article i encourage you to read https://www.potreroview.net/starr-king-one-campus-two-school... about a Mandarin immersion program in San Francisco. the issues are very complex.

The issues are very complex, but elementary schooling isn't.

Of course, people with motivations not entirely driven by teaching children reading, writing, and arithmetic can make things very confusing.

Good point, morality should be entirely absent.

Maybe we can include it as an elective in highschool?

I can’t find anything on this “Center For Education Promise,” and it reads like a hit job once all of the friendly disclaimers are finished.

I’d be very interested to know what exactly this “think tank” is. Their Manifund page suggests they’re little more than three people who mostly write substack blogs.

You could evaluate the arguments on their merit.

But if you must know what they do other than analysis and writing, here's a recent example: https://www.educationprogress.org/p/were-suing-the-makers-of...

Disclaimer: I think Jack, Thomas and the others are doing useful work. I have contributed two articles to their Substack. I don't think the number of people involved in an organization should determine how seriously we take that organization.

> Almost everything about Najya’s school experience is a result not of structural inequities in society, but of a system that has every possible incentive to produce precisely the result Hannah-Jones bragged about and her daughter suffered through

Huh. This sounds like an article that's about to take a fair and balanced view of the evidence.

I don't think having an opinion and summarizing it are indicators of bias.

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