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Comment by csentropy | Hacker News Reader

Simple solution to a complex problem. Just abolish public schools, let anyone and everyone compete to be able to become educators, open schools etc for profit, let the parents choose, select and vote with their money, let a million models be tested and a thousand flowers bloom. The best will rise to the top, (and probably be expensive), but every segment of the population will be catered to by price, taste and other preferences. More importantly, many more kids will have a decent shot at a good if not a great life versus becoming drones captive to the world's worst performing school system, (by per capita dollars spent).

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> Just abolish public schools

This suggestion is highly inconsistent with the data from the article.

Every nation out-performing the United States has a strong and well-funded public school system. Although some have a hybrid model, the hybrid models favor public schools over private schools. And hybrid models hardly constitute "abolishing".

There is also a strong correlation between states (in the US) with high per-pupil spending and states which out-perform the US average [1].

> but every segment of the population will be catered to by price, taste and other preferences.

"Same quality, lower price"? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[1] I am comparing Fig. 1 of the article with the table titled "Current Spending per Pupil" on this page: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...

Can we define strong? What does well funded mean? How do achievements of students in public schools vs private schools in all the out performing nations compare? How do they compare between nations? And to the US? Were the students normalized before we compare per capita spending vs achievement by state? How? What factors were not considered? Without answering these and many other questions, most of this data is useless and pretty much exemplifies the pitfalls of aggregate statistics.

We absolutely do /not/ need to answer all those questions before we can conclude that countries out-performing the United States have significant public school systems.

The other correlation I pointed out does deserve scrutiny, but data-driven decision making is not impossible and this data isn't nearly as bad as you claim. The correlation between high per pupil spending and educational outcomes is not a ground truth and does not hold universally. However, it does hold with surprising consistency throughout time and space).

As an aside: you initially claimed that abolishing public schools will solve our performance problems. You provided zero empirical evidence. It's not even possible to compare the evidence for and against your claim, because you literally provided no evidence.

You're holding other people's opinions to a ridiculously high standard of rigor while selling your own as self-evident.

If the state of affairs is really this bad, if it is impossible to obtain good data and make reasonable predictions based on that data, then your initial post could be nothing except blind faith.

As far as I know, the hate towards public education in US is unique to western countries.

The problem with this line of thinking is that low educational attainment is strongly correlated (and causally related) to low family income levels. Low family income levels mean that parents can't afford to send their kids to the "best" schools, even with voucher systems, since (1) schools can raise the price of admission higher than the voucher, (2) the "best" schools tend to be located closer to the affluent, not the poor (and commuting long distances is disproportionately expensive to the poor), and (3) in many states, non-public schools can expel students for not performing well academically. (3) especially is the reason a lot of non-public schools (particularly BASIS) appear to look high-performing (while not actually being high performing). Unless these concerns (and more) are addressed, abolishing public schools will screw over the children who need the best schools the most.

"...The problem with this line of thinking is that low educational attainment is strongly correlated (and causally related) to low family income levels..."

To be fair...

The point of the article is that, in a lot of places across the US, low educational attainment is correlated with ALL family income levels. And the problem is how do you handle a situation like that?

Put another way... even if the poor could get their kids into the top schools via vouchers or what have you... chances are, they would still not get as good an education as their international counterparts. Now there are some states, mostly in the North East and Midwest that buck that trend. But for everyone else... the test results aren't all that stellar regardless of income (or rather, familial level of educational attainment).

The thing is ...

The best have already risen to the top. We already have a top 10 who seem to do relatively well. So why, on earth, are we not simply copying them ???

The Minnesotas, the New Jerseys, the Massachesettses, even the Wisconsins... why don't we just take one of these models and install it everywhere? Are kids in California, Washington and Nebraska really all that different from the kids in the old Union states ???

I'd like to see a comparison of # of days of sunshine per year vs. test scores. Or perhaps average monthly temperature vs. test scores.

I'm thinking not having anything better to do in the winter might have an effect on scores.

Not sure why the downvotes there.

I teach in South-West Western Australia so our winters are cold and wet and the summers are quite dry and hot and it's quite interesting to see the effect the weather and climate has on students (it certainly has an effect on emotional and behavioural characteristics). It'd be interesting to see how comparative students do in different climates.

Some quick looking about only found an article on worker productivity, which isn't really the same thing: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6975.html

So like charter schools? I went to one for high school; it was a great experience for me, and gave me a lot more of what I needed than a normal public school would. But this solution already exists, and has since the 90s: if you'd like to see more school choice, lobby for alternatives like charter schools and homeschooling that already have some traction.

> Simple solution to a complex problem.

Anytime you think you have a simple solution to a complex problem, you probably don't understand the problem.

Assuming a correlation between quality and price, what would be the advantage of choosing a cheaper school in such a system? A parent would simply choose to send their child to the most expensive school they could afford, leading to some not particularly desirable phenomenon (think, total lack of social mobility).

In theory, there should be ample room to innovate in low-cost high-quality instruction. Think of Khan Academy or Udacity: you get world-class instructors delivering clear lectures at scale. There are tons of just plain inefficiencies in the public school system, where it wouldn't be hard to improve both price and quality if it were a fair, competitive market.

In practice, the main problem is that it's very difficult to judge the quality of an education until decades after you pay for it, and so there's a large signalling effect. In the absence of hard quality signals, people (both consumers and those who would judge the consumers, like colleges or jobs) rely on price as a proxy, assuming that the effect you mention holds.

For me, the most interesting market in the economy today is credentialing. That's what people actually pay for in higher ed, and that's the one keystone you need to topple for a revolution in education to happen. Unfortunately, it seems to take decades for a credential to gain legitimacy, because most of its value lies in the unconscious beliefs of the public.

> there should be ample room to innovate in low-cost high-quality instruction.

Lots of other countries and US states seem to be doing very well without MOOCs, which indicates there are probably more fundamental changes the US can make.

That aside...

MOOCs seem like a panacea. Individual experiences with MOOCs help reinforce this perception for many reasons:

* Most people take MOOCs in areas where they have previous experience or are intrinsically motivated.

* MOOCs tend to cover technical material, which is far easier to teach than sophisticated reading or writing.

* MOOCs tend to cover introductory or intermediate university material, and assume a certain level of intellectual maturity that many teenagers do not yet possess.

* Many high school courses are far more difficult (for high schoolers) than university-level courses (for high school graduates). In particular, most CS 101 courses probably rank somewhere between high school Algebra I and Algebra II courses in terms of time and intelligence required to master the concepts (for relevant age groups).

Effective instruction at the secondary level requires knowing your students and reacting to their individual strengths and weaknesses.

Most often, and especially at the secondary school level, it's impossible to teach effectively without actually spending lots of time in front of your students. "Delivering the content" is not enough -- you have to determine (in real time) whether students understand and help fill in gaps.

So although MOOCs can probably play some role in improving secondary education, they will never replace the classroom teacher.

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