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Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

Public discussion of education is always hampered by the fact that people not professionals in it have no sense of how complicated it is. Some students are genuises, some are cognitively low. Some students have personality disorders. Some students will soak up everything they see. Others don't care. Some students need to be a medical treatments at various times during the week. Some pray five times a day. Some are so stoned they cannot hold a pencil. Some really only care about what they need to do in this class in order to to play basketball.

When a vendor comes in and says, "We know how to solve your problems," there is reason to be doubtful.

I'm not saying that such efforts have no promise, but there typically needs to be a long growth period during which the tools have to be adapted, sometimes radically. In this complicated a sphere, bottom-up may well work better than top-down.

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> Public discussion of education is always hampered by the fact that people not professionals in it have no sense of how complicated it is.

My friend's a teacher and the stories she tells me give me a glimpse into it. She's been in an intercity school for about 3 years now and so far, yearly:

* 3-4 of her students will be shot dead within a mile of their home or school * 10+ of her students will be in jail or in juvenile detention for a significant amount of time, usually on drug-related charged * 5+ of her students will have a child and miss a significant amount of time * 1-2 of her students will be pulled out of class and beaten by a rival gang

That doesn't even include the kids who work jobs, drug related or otherwise, outside of school to support their families.

Reforming education will be a side effect of working to improve society. Any attempt to reform education without looking at the environment the kids live in will fail.

> 3-4 of her students will be shot dead within a mile of their home or school

I honestly don't understand how can the united states live with that level of violence, seeing by themselves that they are the exception in the first world.

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one.

I'm just as surprised as you are with these anecdotal observations, but I agree- there is a lot to be done to fix the issues, not the symptoms.

> I honestly don't understand how can the united states live with that level of violence

Because the people on this forum and the US in general, I would venture to guess, don't live in poor, gang-riddled communities and hence don't see this level violence daily.

I live in the same city and I've never seen it happen, only hear on the news and through people's discussions, because I don't _live_ in the parts she teaches in.

What's doubly sad is our crime rate has been going down since the 80s and 90s and is fairly low among cities our size (Pittsburgh).

That's not sad, it's a sign of hope that however bad it is now, at least it's getting better and not worse. We can't fix these problems overnight, but the efforts we make do make a difference, and someday these issues will be the subject of history books and not the nightly news.

The only time I ever hear about things like this is on the internet. A large majority of people would never experience these types of issues outside an urban environment. Most likely the 3-4 shot dead will be shot by another student or former student. Most urban areas have these problems and its bad in certain areas.

I'd invite you to visit America for some length of time before you make conclusions based on internet hype.

>I honestly don't understand how can the united states live with that level of violence,

The people causing the violence feel that it is the norm and most people in those communities do not help the police in any way or cannot (due to retaliation). You can only help someone if they want help, it cannot be forced.

The missing context here that no other comments have mentioned is that the violence in question here is almost certainly perpetrated by and against poor blacks. Race relations in the US--particularly those between the black urban poor and whites--are definitely not ideal. I'm sure you've seen media coverage of the Michael Brown shooting and related incidents.

It's a terrible situation that most people aren't motivated to do anything about because it, for the most part, only affects poor black people. The vast majority of Americans never experience any of this violence beyond seeing it in the news.

The missing context isn't race - the context needed was already there, being in the inner city and exposed to gangs. Simply put, the whole United States isn't like this because there aren't more black people across the entire country, but because the entire country isn't made up of inner city areas with high gang activity.

3-4 is probably an exaggeration, however, we live with it because almost all of us don't live it.

By that I mean the murder rates are only high in poor inner city neighborhoods. The crime levels disproportionately fall on poor minorities.

If you can afford to not have to live in those areas, it isn't a problem. And society doesn't care because it's someone else's problem.

Are you an education professional? I'm not, but I wonder why we don't go back to the model of segregating students by ability/need. It seems like the trend today is to "mainstream" everyone into a common classroom, so you have high achievers, low ability, as well as genuinely abnormal (mentally retarded, severe behavorial problems, etc.) all together. I see no way that can be effective for any of them because you will not be able to provide the style of instruction that each of these constituencies need.

They currently do, to a point.

Lower functioning students are provided with much more 'hands on' teaching situations.

I don't know how effective separating student more would be- one could argue that at a certain point it might harm the students because of the lack of socialization. A selection bias of social awkwardness, if you will.

I am a teacher.

Ability/need isn't a scalar quantity and real students don't distribute themselves in a way that can be described by a couple of parameters.

I don't know what the answers are either but I think we need to be very explicit about any assumptions underpinning proposed models. I also agree with the 'bottom up' part of the gf comment.

Now, what discrete 'styles of instruction' are there do you think?

When I was in elementary school, we had different classes that were segregated by ability. We had different subjects with different teachers and different students, and students were moved to different classes as their abilities changed. So if I were good at reading I could be in the more advanced reading class, but if I were bad at math I would be in the lower math class. If I improved at math I would be moved to a more challenging math class.

Is this no longer the case? This was 3rd-6th grade, I don't remember much before those grades.

Most districts I've seen do this to some degree, so I think the premise of the question -- that schools don't -- is fundamentally flawed.

Of course, there are more axes of student variation than schools can segregate on without having a single educator dedicated full time to each individual student, and there are other factors working against such segregation -- it imposes additional curriculum costs costs, and administrative costs which are politically unpopular, and it creates decision points which parents frequently disagree with, which leads to conflict and additional costs on top of those basically necessary to manage the segregation.

I am a teacher. Every child has individual needs that cannot necessarily be simply classified.

Schools (and teachers) do account for this as much as they are able to, but having 30 children in the same classroom is more cost-effective than having real provision for individuals.

Hence the push for differentiated instruction within classrooms, which I'm sure you're intimately aware of being a teacher. My understanding from my wife, who is also a teacher, is that it can be a pain for a lot of teachers but seems to offer some promise if an instructor can successfully integrate it into the learning process. There's obviously a lot of debate around this subject since teachers are asked to do so much already, but figured it's worth mentioning.

What axis do you pick? Kids can be brilliant in one subject but terrible in another. They can have behavioral problems but vary between low and high achievers.

The reality of it is that we group kids by age and geolocation and put them under the same teacher. It works out mostly ok, improving that will be a hard problem.

Even defining an improvement is not trivial as well. While you ask if students can be grouped by ability, some schools prefer to split these students up, with the thinking that there is more to be gained by having children helping each other out in the same room.

So, not a teacher, but I have a lot of close friends who are teachers; this post is mostly informed by what they've told me about their experiences. First, I would say that segregation by ability is common in high school, but uncommon in elementary school. It can go either way in middle school.

So, in my mind, your question is mainly asking if increased amounts of differentiated instruction could benefit elementary school students. I've definitely heard way more about the difficulty of dealing with poorly behaved students than the difficulty of dealing with well-behaved, but low achieving students. That suggests segregating not along ability lines but rather along behavior/self-control lines.

If you run with that idea, and keep class sizes the same for well-behaved children and poorly behaved children, the "good" kids would probably benefit, but the "bad" classrooms would be completely out of control; in effect you would be completely writing those kids off at a very early age. Depending on the capability of the teachers and the difficulty of the student population, I personally think that might actually be a socially optimal use of resources. However, that is a very controversial opinion, and there are a whole lot of people who would not agree with me on that (and most of my teacher friends are among them).

If you go to very large classes for "good" kids, and very small classes for "bad" kids (say ~50 kids vs ~10), you have a different set of problems. A class of 50 8 year olds can get pretty hard to control, even if they're well-behaved 8 year olds. Plus, most schools don't have the facilities to accommodate classes that size. You can bet parents aren't going to be that pleased to have their kids in huge classes. And even if more individual attention is what the "bad" kids need, you still have the problem that you've labeled the bad kids as bad; they'll figure it out and it will probably have adverse affects on those kids' development. That may offset any benefit you're getting from the smaller class size in the "bad" population.

So I don't think it's actually the slam dunk it might seem from a casual analysis.

Apart from everything you said being true, my father is a high school headmaster and he says classes of 35 perform the best. Lower students are pulled ahead and they understand that they have to become independant if they don't want to be rejected. Of course, as you mention, the lowest 5% will have bigger problems than in smaller groups.

Another thing I've seen that people don't realize is that grant money is usually earmarked for cool things. If someone donates money to a school they'd want it to go to a new state-of-the-art technology program instead of replacing old books, buying copier paper, or other more useful, boring things.

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