I suppose it's a Cato blog post, but I was hoping for a more interesting discussion than just a random call for private education, with a market-will-solve it assertion. People learning at different paces and on their own is a fairly interesting problem highlighted here, but I think it's wishful thinking to claim that the perfect answer is already known.<p>It's not entirely clear to me that private schools <i>would</i> cater to individuals, or group by ability in the way that tutors do. There are other market forces at work, such as the preference of many students and their parents for students to be grouped with those of a similar age--- and the dislike of many parents for their students to be seen as "behind". There are also administrative/cost problems with individual attention that weigh in favor of uniformity. For example, if there are a few students who learn "too fast", the optimal business solution for an education provider might be to say, "fuck 'em, 5% of the students isn't where my money is coming from". Or, it might be to generally go by age but have a smallish exception pool; the age-groups-plus-'gifted'-class model that many public schools already use might cover enough of the skills variance, while being much cheaper to administer than a fully individualized model.<p>At the very least, I don't think it's entirely obvious what the results would be. The bits of evidence we do have don't seem super-encouraging. For-profit universities, for example, appear to have decided that a mass-production model is the best business strategy. And existing private K-12 schools don't seem to have adopted an ability-based model, instead using traditional age-based classes. Is there a reason that, if market incentives would indeed cause such an outcome, they wouldn't have <i>already</i> caused it? It's true that the private-education market is currently effectively restricted to wealthier families, but it's still quite large.
I'm a parent of two who does NOT plan on putting his kids in public school because I think they won't be served well there (plan on "home schooling"). My 5yo uses Khan Academy and it seems to be great. Finally, I basically hate most aspects of public school.<p>That said, I get sick of everyone piling on public school whenever something like this comes up. Public school is set to the following task: "take <i></i>everyone<i></i>, <i></i>everywhere<i></i>, all across the country, and bring them to the same level of proficiency across the board, with tightly limited funding and regardless of outside factors." Someone comes along and finds a tool that works on a teeny tiny cohort then climbs on their pedestal and declares their system better than public schools.<p>Personally, I think public schools are being set to an (almost?) impossible task. What the reviewer said in that article about "slow them down please" is obviously abhorrent, but the "They have a monopoly! They're monopolists!" chatter is silly, in my opinion. First of all they don't have a monopoly (for those who can afford it: private charter homeschooling etc.). Secondly, they are just trying to do their best to meet their goals <i>with what they have</i>. It's selfish, yes, but having students at more or less the same level of competency makes it easier for them to do the task to which they've been set.<p>When I was in school, the teacher would often say "Sequoia, that's a great question, but it's a bit advanced and I've got 30 other students here. I can't spend a lot of time answering advanced questions when half the class is struggling with basic concepts." That was annoying and I'm not going to send my kids to public school in part because of it, but I didn't rail against the teacher for being a selfish monopolist. S/he was just doing his/her best given the circumstances and requirements: often times public schools are doing the same.<p>EDIT: an article that informs my thinking here: <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-charter-schools/?pagination=false" rel="nofollow">http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch...</a> Great article, whether you've seen <i>Waiting for Superman</i> (hit piece "documentary" about why public schools suck and charter schools are the answer) or not.
Could also mean that some teachers don't want the headache of dealing with a class with even greater disparities in skill and knowledge. It's hard enough dealing with a couple students bored in class cause they already know it. It's even harder to deal with half the class bored cause they already know it.<p>Or it could really mean anything. Removed from context and the teacher's deeper reasoning, these quotes are largely useless. Maybe it was just the really lazy teachers who didn't want to deal with kids asking more advance questions who talked to them. Could be -anything-.<p>Trying to squeeze more analysis out of this will just result in all sorts of confirmation biases regarding teachers and the education system.
<i>That is why the for-profit Asian tutoring industry groups students by performance, not by age. There are “grades,” but they do not depend on when a student was born, only on what she knows and is able to do.</i><p>I just interviewed Andrew Hsu for Startups Open Sourced and he mentioned this was very important in education. He had scored so high on his IQ test at 6 years old he was classified as "genius" and received 3 B.S. degrees at 16, and then dropped out of his Stanford Ph.D. at 19 to do a startup. One thing he says really makes a difference is splitting students based on skill level, not by age. Hoping to release the interview soon.
As the father of a near 3 year old the educational questions weigh heavily on my mind. While this is a great thought experiment ("How could we make it better?") it's scary when given a concrete example that is near and dear to your heart.<p>I believe:<p>[1] Each general subject has a core competency that you have to achieve at a minimum.<p>It's broken into skills and subjects.<p>Skills includes: programming, reading, writing, functional mathematics (+-*/ and solving word problems), learning (figuring out how the pupil best learns for themselves, or if you want "meta-learning"). I may be missing some skills here.<p>Subjects include: english, history, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics (both higher level functional math and theory / proofs). I may be missing some subjects here.<p>[2] on top of #1 you have focused subjects of interest which you should support the pupil learning to whatever depth they are interested in learning. Most people I know upon finding something they are truly interested in become a borderline expert. Are they world class? Maybe or maybe not, but they are certainly journeymen. These range everywhere from finance to car repair to engineering to language learning to musical instruments to basically anything people take an interest in.<p>If your student can reach functional usage in all parts of #1 earlier that gives them more time to learn different things from #2. Note that the skills and background knowledge learned in #1 are reusable to various subjects in #2.<p>Circling back to the article: It's a stupid idea to even attempt to prevent a student from mastering anything in #1 above faster. It might help if the peer group instead of being defined by age could be defined by what your interests in #2 are. Then you get cross pollination of students by more advanced students in those same interesting subjects.
Segregating pupils by age in school has always been a bad idea, and it has always been known to be a bad idea by careful observers of children and their learning.<p><a href="http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html" rel="nofollow">http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html</a><p>Segregating pupils by age in school began in the English-speaking world (in Massachusetts) as an imitation of the Prussian schools of that time. It was strictly for administrative convenience. It is not at all a cultural or historical universal to group school learners into lock-step groups by age.<p>After edit: One comment about the author of the submitted article. He is actually a programmer by occupation. When his employee shares of Microsoft stock vested, he turned his good fortune to improving education in the United States. I have known him online for years as a thoughtful contributor to discussions of education policy.<p>I came to Hacker News by links from Paul Graham's essays<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html</a><p>and came to those because pg frequently writes about education policy and has some of his own thoughts about how schools could be better. So I've always expected threads about education policy to be within the Hacker News topic scope of "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
This isn't surprising. There was actually an experimental elementary school in my town that was eventually shut down because the students were too advanced in math, so once they got to middle school it started causing political issues. Rather than having the other three elementary schools adopt the same system, they literally demolished the school and replaced it with a parking lot. There is actually a pretty good book about the whole incident called Public Schools Should Learn To Ski.
I've read though most of our comments here and I have a question. Are people concerned with the education of their neighbors kids?<p>I'll be able to afford private schooling for my children. The average demographic here probably can. I relish at the idea of seeing how a Khan Academy Classroom could teach my child (maybe in some sort of "Free school" environment?) and I realize that public education probably wont be able to cover that.<p>What I worry about more is that my children's friends wont be able to go to a private school, and while I realize Khan Academy is free online. Most kids will probably be sent to public schools.<p>I was educated in public school and I don't think it was horrible but I do think we can do better.<p>I think the question is;
How do we bring this type of learning to public education?
Really interesting, shocking quote from the original article, but the Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News, IMO. The original Wired piece is great, though.
My brother is currently working with the Adams County school system which is switching to an entirely new system of public education. <a href="http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/22189278/detail.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/22189278/detail.html</a><p>They will no longer have traditional grades like Grade 7, Grade 8, etc, instead they will only have levels, and all students of a certain level will share the same classroom. When you level up in Math 10, you move to Math 11, even if you're still only in English 6. Your age no longer has any bearing on the level you belong in, only your ability.<p>The educational track will now be entirely in the hands of the students and they have until the age of 20 I believe to "graduate" from high school under the new system with a certain number of levels achieved.
I spent some time with a 6 year old, who was my girlfriend's nephew. I noticed that he spoke well and was very sharp, but wasn't able to read. I suggested that we should read some things and he should learn to read, but no - his mother said that he was going to learn to read in 1st grade, with the other kids. Starting him earlier than that, she said, would stunt his social performance because he would be so far ahead of his peers.
This is a fine example of supplying a quote from an imaginary adversary to show how much better your own position is.<p>The proponent is just using the popularity of the khan schools to frame the bashing of public schools.
I don't think the issue involves monopolies as much as a historically based needs.<p>Our education systems were formed as part of the drive that became known as the industrial revolution. Standardisation was a key focus, because people needed to be able to become part of the industrial processes that surrounded their day-to-day lives working in factories and offices.<p>Workers needed to possess skill sets that are known, and they ultimately needed to become replaceable.<p>It stands to reason that our education system will change as we move away from the industrial revolution and into the next.<p>The question should be: what do (and will) society need from an education system in the coming 50 years?
It doesn't surprise me at all. The incentives are all wrong. Teachers are incentivized to push students to the next grade with as little fuss as possible. They aren't ever asked to help kids improve themselves... Only to make sure they learned the minimum required knowledge.<p>That teachers would ask that students be kept ignorant just to make their job easier does not surprise me a bit.<p>To be clear, not all teachers are asking this. Some teachers really care about the students. I had quite a few good teachers in school, and only a few bad ones. But my perception is that that balance has been changing. Lower pay, more work, and general bad conditions have been driving the good teachers to go elsewhere while the bad ones stay to collect a paycheck.
The education system is broken and has been for decades. The supporters of the system re-characterize criticism of the system into "attacks" on teachers (ie. union membership) and demand more money.<p>The establishment "won" their side of the argument in many states -- states that richly compensated employees (the payscale in most NY school districts ends at $110k, plus 65% pension for life) and administrators (typical school superintendents make $175k in NY) and built lots of new schools. Yet those investments yielded marginal "value" at best.<p>Until recently, the critics were mostly focused on religion (ie. Catholic schooling dominated education in many areas until fairly recently), monetary issues (taxes) and ideological stuff (unions suck).<p>That seems to be changing now. Movements like the Khan Academy are bringing scientific methods focused on outcomes to education. There was a recent "Freakonomics" podcast talking about how the New York City school system is experimenting with multi-modal learning, which seems to be successful in its early stages.
It's a very bad way of putting it - but I think there's a valid discussion needed around whether schools should enforce 'rounded' education - I think the question is essentially what should we do students who are at 10th grade maths and 5th grade social science?<p>Should we allow earlier education specialization? (ie move them up grades but accept they'll be lacking in some areas) Or keep them in 5th grade until they are sufficiently good in all areas - maybe allowing them skip classes they're already excelling in so they have more free time for self-study?<p>I imagine allowing 5th graders to attend 10th grade maths only say (or more general any student being in a mix of any level in any subject) becomes impractical to schedule.<p>UPDATE: and as other people pointed out that's ignoring all the potential social advantages of being roughly grouped by age
How did this article hit the front page? What is insightful or interesting about it?<p>"This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly."<p>This is blatantly not true, in the US we do not operate education as a monopoly. There are plenty of private schools.
Seeing that it's a Cato Institute article, I anticipate a lot of noise here. I'd like to note, though, that in a standardized, rule-from-the-top system, outliers create immense problems, whether the outliers are really smart kids or kids who need additional attention.<p>In a distributed, self-optimizing system, this is not the case. Outliers can be handled in various ways.<p>This observation isn't political. You can observe the same thing in stuff all over the place, like network traffic. If you had universal rules for everything, the internet would tank. Instead we have a (somewhat) distributed and adaptive system using common protocols. Best of both worlds.<p>Perhaps the argument begins at how to create such adaptive distributed systems. If so, that's cool, but that should be the starting place, not a discussion of free markets or social concern, at least in my opinion. (I was very discouraged to hear Bill Gates blow right through this concept when talking about helping education systems. He's trying to quantify and create the universally-optimized teacher. Good luck with that pipe-dream, Bill.)
Too short an article. That particular quote was called out and discussed here when the Khan Academy article was discussed previously.<p>It's a certain mindset that thinks this way. It reminds me of another discussion here where some people and a supporting article (<a href="http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs-with-an-obscure-functional-programming-language/" rel="nofollow">http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs...</a>) argued that it is unfair that some students have previous experience programming when they enter a CS program, therefore classes should be done in obscure (and thus pretty useless) languages that no one has heard of, in order to equally handicap everyone.
Reminds me very much of Lockhart's Lament[1] - an excellent essay on the state of mathematics education, and which has featured on HN several times[2]. So yeah, if this topic interests you and you haven't yet read the lament, go and read it!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf</a><p>[2]a <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130499" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130499</a><p>[2]b <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666563" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666563</a><p>[2]c <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256176" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256176</a>
The article identifies a strong problem, but:<p>> "This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly."<p>Without any arguments to support it, the libertarian approach is served as the only solution.
It made me sick to my stomach to read this. Why are people so frightened by intelligence and more importantly, intelligent children? It's sad to see that we've become so competitive and complacent with our shit education system, that we're willing to <i>limit intelligent students on purpose</i>. True educators will find the value in the Khan Academy and similar services. Heartbreaking to learn that people are actually trying to limit the success of a company that promotes free knowledge.
But this is already occurring for students enrolled in extracurricular math programs like Kumon that accelerate their math skills. Khan Academy isn't doing anything that Kumon isn't already doing other than adding a few more science subjects.
the "problem" isn't student tracks or free markets. it's teacher tracks. teacher unions (or monopolies) retard innovation-- and accommodate failures-- as evidenced by the quote.
In 90% of the geography (50% of the population?) of the united states, there is effectively only enough population to support a limited set of teachers & facility. It is nice that we can have magnet schools in urban areas. What about deeply surban or rural areas?<p>Perhaps the whole idea of competition between schools is incorrect -- should we instead focus on creating a competitive learning platform (under neutral brick & mortar facility) where competition is between classrooms?
I think the innocence behind that statement comes from the difficulty a teacher will face if s/he must teach students with diverse learning needs (child A is learning timestables while child B has moved on to trigonometry).<p>That said, I think a teacher should suck it up for the sake of students in this sort of situation. At worst, we find ways to reorganize teachers and students based on students' self-progress.
I think this more a function of all subjects in one classroom and one teacher model of grade 1-7. If this was a grade 8 13 year old, he would be just taking Math 11 classes and English 8 classes in his schedule. If they put their primary school schedule in bands (all classes teach math from 1-2, teach english from 2-3, etc) advanced kids can move to another classroom during that band.
If you ran a school with complete authority, how would you handle these cases?<p>(I don't mean that rhetorically; I'm curious to see some hacker brainstorming.)
It skips the whole effing core of the debate...<p>Its not, "How do we get better test performing students?"<p>Its, "How do we produce people who are at the top of their self-learning game?"<p>The general idea is that someone progresses from elementary school of directed learning to self-directed learning when finishing a University degree..<p>Some of us reach that stage when in fact we are in High School..
Without attribution of who made the original statement and the context, this is completely meaningless. The Wired article is good, but the Cato article is not HN worthy at all. Purely political propaganda.
As a software developer who works with teachers on a regular basis (and one of my parents is one), the issue of becoming "too advanced" is a legitimate problem. Its the same reason why Einstein supposedly got Fs throughout school - he was bored with the curriculum, he was too smart for class.<p>Teachers have to work within the framework and structure of the current education system. Let me assure you that in education the tallest blades of grass are the first to get cut. I don't really blame them, its just self-preservation.<p>If you look at the current structure of grouping kids by age, then the teacher's issues are perfectly reasonable. How are they going to keep the 15% of really smart kids from being bored, goofing off, and raising a ruckus while the teacher tries to run around and help the average or behind kids with the exercises. A child could legitimately be 3-4 months ahead in school work if they're brilliant learners. So what do we do, let me out in March if he has mastered all the material for the school year? Let him start on next year's material?<p>If we start grouping by ability to learn and knowledge level, that has problems too. I was great at math but only a good reader and poor at spelling/grammar. Do I get put in an advanced class and lag the other students in areas where I wasn't as strong? Does elementary school look like high school with different classes throughout the day, and how does that impact students in non-knowledge areas?<p>The rates at which children learn is not steady across all subjects. The rates at which children learn aren't even steady throughout childhood - they could start slow and speed up at a certain age. Self-paced education would be ideal for every student if we were all self-starters and bright, KA will be great for home-schoolers and tutors. Even kids who need remedial help over the summer, give them an iPad and the Khan Academy app and let them catch up over the summer. But letting a bright, ultra-focused kid master an entire grade level over the summer and then the kid will be a hellraiser in school for the next 9.