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.
It's not entirely clear to me that private schools would 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.
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 already caused it? It's true that the private-education market is currently effectively restricted to wealthier families, but it's still quite large.
You seem to be picturing "ACME Education" creating schools in the model of factories under some scary privatization scheme.
In fact, the current "public" model of centralized control, standardized curriculum, and cookie-cutter learning objectives is based on an antiquated understanding of human development, social systems, and motivation. In fact, by forcing a child to endure hours of boredom and conformity it prepares its inmates for a life of work in a factory.
If market forces were allowed to act on K-12 education we'd see something quite unpredictable but very much unlike what you seem to be imagining... unless, that is, large companies obtained a monopoly on education in the same way that public schools have thusfar.
Without a monopoly, we'd see innovations like Khan Academy all the time (let's face it, what Khan created is trivial and obvious and it's only remarkable b/c most teachers and curricula are so utterly bad).
You are also overlooking the fact that humans have a natural hunger for knowledge, and any notion that there is a lack of demand for top quality k-12 education is an artifact of our current corrupt system.
At the college level, private schools certainly do cater to the individual. I was fast in math, regular speed in everything else. They put me into grad level math and physics classes, while my writing/history/etc classes were still at the normal pace.
I don't see much reason why the incentives would be different below the college level.
Whenever you want to ask "what would a privatized primary education system do", you can often ask instead "what does the privatized secondary education system currently do?"
Public schools are the ones who cater to the large percentage. And have no real revenue loss when they fail to deliver.
Private schools do cater to a small percentage, not everybody in a neighborhood, but a small percentage to whom the school appeals. Just like any other kind of business.
Mercedes doesn't say "screw those snobs. We want the masses." Nope, they cater specifically to a very small set of buyers.
There's no reason to think there won't be brands of schools targeted at different kinds of students.
But we won't know until people can actually make choices without having to pay for education twice. Most people can't afford to pay the taxes required to support public schools and also pay for tuition. They shouldn't have to.
In old communist Yugoslavia, the government produced one car for all. Without any competition it captured 100% of the market. And it was a piece of crap.
Competition ended that stupidity and hopefully one day it will do the same for education.
My parents actually pulled us out of PRIVATE school and put us into PUBLIC school because we were outpacing the curriculum, being bored, and losing interest.
My sister got to 4th grade in the private school and suddenly didn't want to go to school anymore. She wasn't challenged. The private school's solution when my parent's talked to them was to assign my sister MORE BUSYWORK. The public school had an actual gifted & talented program we were able to exploit.
It wasn't all roses though- my mom had yell at several Administrators to get us the programs to challange us (my brother was in AP Calc, the highest math available, his freshman year of HS). It's true though: the biggest indicator of success in school is parental involvement.
Furthermore: I think there's enough variance among private schools, and among public schools, that we still can't even draw generalizations about "public schools" and "private schools" as homogenous sets. It alwyas irks me to see education-policy discussions turn into political debates about the merits of public vs. private sectors.
Let's not forget that, in the US, the US government gives enormous amounts of funding to private universities. So the behavior of universities is not exactly the result of a free market with no government intervention... the government has a huge influence on the way universities work.
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.
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 everyone, everywhere, 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.
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 with what they have. 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.
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.
EDIT: an article that informs my thinking here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch... Great article, whether you've seen Waiting for Superman (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.
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-.
Trying to squeeze more analysis out of this will just result in all sorts of confirmation biases regarding teachers and the education system.
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 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.
I'm sorry, but how the hell do you recieve three BS degrees at the age of sixteen (unless you mean BS degrees, which I'd imagine they'd really have to be...)
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.
I believe:
[1] Each general subject has a core competency that you have to achieve at a minimum.
It's broken into skills and subjects.
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.
Subjects include: english, history, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics (both higher level functional math and theory / proofs). I may be missing some subjects here.
[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.
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.
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.
Why is programming a basic skill? To me, programming is more of a trade than a basic skill. People get by just fine without knowing a thing about programming. When students can't read, write, and do simple mathematics, then they have trouble later in life.
I believe logic and basic computing (this is a folder, that is a keyboard, etc.) are necessary. In fact, these form the foundation for programming later, but how could programming be considered a skill comparable to reading or writing?
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.
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.
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.
I came to Hacker News by links from Paul Graham's essays
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?
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.
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.
I was educated in public school and I don't think it was horrible but I do think we can do better.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think the issue involves monopolies as much as a historically based needs.
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.
Workers needed to possess skill sets that are known, and they ultimately needed to become replaceable.
It stands to reason that our education system will change as we move away from the industrial revolution and into the next.
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.
That teachers would ask that students be kept ignorant just to make their job easier does not surprise me a bit.
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.
In my wife's experience as a teacher, it's not the teacher who is incentivized to push students through, or even the one doing the pushing.
If the parent wants the student to advance to the next grade, the system says that they advance, often over the strenuous objections from the teacher who knows the student has no business advancing.
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.
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.
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).
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.
$100K+ and $150K+ /w pension are the salaries it takes to attract and retain excellent teachers and school administrators respectively (adjust for locality). These are the going rates at all the top public schools in the nation. With a fully staffed school, it works out to be about $15K per student per year if you include overhead. The results you get are a 99% graduation rate, average standardized testings scores in the 90th percentile or above, special education, tons of AP classes, and top flight athletics and fine arts programs. Success in college admissions follows from the aforementioned facts, i.e. extraordinarily successful.
So I would propose to reframe the discussion. Because talking about money is silly. We know how much it costs to run a top tier school. The central question in my mind is whether we can develop new methods of education that are cheaper but achieve the same result.
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?
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?
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.
UPDATE: and as other people pointed out that's ignoring all the potential social advantages of being roughly grouped by age
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?
You're simply accepting that "grades" are an ideal concept, and that in order for a kid to learn higher math, they also have to accelerate English, history, etc. If you remove the concept of grades from the picture, you no longer have to call a kid who's really good at math a math specialist...you can just say he's very advanced at math, and on par with his age group at English and history and science.
Remove the preconceived notion that everyone needs to be studying the same thing in order to be in the same "grade", and you don't have this problem. Obviously some kids can self-direct their education to some degree. So, why not let them? If they can advance this way via online instruction, why on earth would you want to stand in their way?
I had a lot of bitterness about my school experience, because I was so often bored and slowed by the pace of my classmates. If I'd had the ability to set my own pace, I would have been much happier and much more successful. We're beginning to have the technology to allow kids to go at their own pace...it's obvious to me (and should be to any other adult who was a "gifted" kid growing up but shackled by the limitations of public school) that the only ethical thing to do is let kids learn as fast as they want to learn. It's the teachers and schools job to figure out how to accommodate that learning, not try to shackle it to a pace that matches the least common denominator.
> all the potential social advantages of being roughly grouped by age
Actually, from what I've seen the one-room-schoolhouse concept is the best. You don't have a single age-group preying on each other in a lord-of-the-flies situation.
True socialization comes from interacting with a reasonable sample of society, in its natural state - such as being surrounded by people of all ages interacting with each other. If we ship kids off the age-segregated prisons every day they become hyper-focused on the views of their peers and vulnerable to pressure.
True, plenty of private schools, but it depends on your definition of monopoly. Microsoft had competition but that didn't stop the lawsuits from the Feds.
Government education may not be a monopoly in appearance but in many cases it sure does behave as one. Look up the examples of local government education bureaucracies doing much to attempt to eliminate those private schools as competition.
Washingto D.C. is an excellent example of this.
In many areas I would define government education as a monopoly simply because they do everything they can to prevent you from not entering your child into their system. And they use government force to do so.
Its not a perfect monopoly, but the market dominance of state education is greater than that of Microsoft, or Standard Oil, or any of the other companies we tend to think of as monopolies.
It is monopolistic in the sense that you have to pay for it whether you use it or not. Private schools may only be attended by those who can afford to pay twice and even then, the establishment caste gets at least a full cut.
If I were to set the policy, I'd subsidize students rather than teachers and administrators, etc. I.e., demonstrate learning and we'll pay you $XX,XXX to cover your costs whether tutors or books or online courses or brick and mortar 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.
In a distributed, self-optimizing system, this is not the case. Outliers can be handled in various ways.
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.
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.
It's a certain mindset that thinks this way. It reminds me of another discussion here where some people and a supporting article (http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs...) 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.
[+] [-] _delirium|14 years ago|reply
It's not entirely clear to me that private schools would 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.
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 already caused it? It's true that the private-education market is currently effectively restricted to wealthier families, but it's still quite large.
[+] [-] grandalf|14 years ago|reply
In fact, the current "public" model of centralized control, standardized curriculum, and cookie-cutter learning objectives is based on an antiquated understanding of human development, social systems, and motivation. In fact, by forcing a child to endure hours of boredom and conformity it prepares its inmates for a life of work in a factory.
If market forces were allowed to act on K-12 education we'd see something quite unpredictable but very much unlike what you seem to be imagining... unless, that is, large companies obtained a monopoly on education in the same way that public schools have thusfar.
Without a monopoly, we'd see innovations like Khan Academy all the time (let's face it, what Khan created is trivial and obvious and it's only remarkable b/c most teachers and curricula are so utterly bad).
You are also overlooking the fact that humans have a natural hunger for knowledge, and any notion that there is a lack of demand for top quality k-12 education is an artifact of our current corrupt system.
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|14 years ago|reply
I don't see much reason why the incentives would be different below the college level.
Whenever you want to ask "what would a privatized primary education system do", you can often ask instead "what does the privatized secondary education system currently do?"
[+] [-] stretchwithme|14 years ago|reply
Private schools do cater to a small percentage, not everybody in a neighborhood, but a small percentage to whom the school appeals. Just like any other kind of business.
Mercedes doesn't say "screw those snobs. We want the masses." Nope, they cater specifically to a very small set of buyers.
There's no reason to think there won't be brands of schools targeted at different kinds of students.
But we won't know until people can actually make choices without having to pay for education twice. Most people can't afford to pay the taxes required to support public schools and also pay for tuition. They shouldn't have to.
In old communist Yugoslavia, the government produced one car for all. Without any competition it captured 100% of the market. And it was a piece of crap.
Competition ended that stupidity and hopefully one day it will do the same for education.
[+] [-] Magnin|14 years ago|reply
My sister got to 4th grade in the private school and suddenly didn't want to go to school anymore. She wasn't challenged. The private school's solution when my parent's talked to them was to assign my sister MORE BUSYWORK. The public school had an actual gifted & talented program we were able to exploit.
It wasn't all roses though- my mom had yell at several Administrators to get us the programs to challange us (my brother was in AP Calc, the highest math available, his freshman year of HS). It's true though: the biggest indicator of success in school is parental involvement.
[+] [-] bdunbar|14 years ago|reply
My wife taught at a private school for some years that did that. They had the traditonal grade levels, coursework was modified for the student.
They had to have the grade levels: it was K-8, placing students back in public schools, or a private high school, is really difficult if you don't.
This was a learning disabled private school, so your mileage may vary.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randallsquared|14 years ago|reply
Markets aren't the answer; they're a method for finding the answer, or (more likely) multiple answers.
[+] [-] Astrohacker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steins|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wentz|14 years ago|reply
...which is exactly why to leave it to the market.
[+] [-] sequoia|14 years ago|reply
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 everyone, everywhere, 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.
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 with what they have. 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.
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.
EDIT: an article that informs my thinking here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch... Great article, whether you've seen Waiting for Superman (hit piece "documentary" about why public schools suck and charter schools are the answer) or not.
[+] [-] icegreentea|14 years ago|reply
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-.
Trying to squeeze more analysis out of this will just result in all sorts of confirmation biases regarding teachers and the education system.
[+] [-] jmtame|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hugh3|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdvolz|14 years ago|reply
I believe:
[1] Each general subject has a core competency that you have to achieve at a minimum.
It's broken into skills and subjects.
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.
Subjects include: english, history, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics (both higher level functional math and theory / proofs). I may be missing some subjects here.
[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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] dkokelley|14 years ago|reply
I believe logic and basic computing (this is a folder, that is a keyboard, etc.) are necessary. In fact, these form the foundation for programming later, but how could programming be considered a skill comparable to reading or writing?
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
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.
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.
I came to Hacker News by links from Paul Graham's essays
http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
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."
[+] [-] Alex3917|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chopsueyar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wizard_2|14 years ago|reply
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.
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.
I was educated in public school and I don't think it was horrible but I do think we can do better.
I think the question is; How do we bring this type of learning to public education?
[+] [-] sukuriant|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bendotc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jswinghammer|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdfsnob|14 years ago|reply
As if Hacker News is somehow more qualified on economic issues than Cato, which has 10 Nobel Laureates?
F. A. Hayek
Milton Friedman
James M. Buchanan
Robert Mundell
Edward C. Prescott
Douglass C. North
Vernon L. Smith
Gary S. Becker
Ronald Coase
Thomas C. Schelling
http://www.cato.org/people/nobel-index.html
[+] [-] seanalltogether|14 years ago|reply
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.
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.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carpdiem|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stretchwithme|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zafka|14 years ago|reply
The proponent is just using the popularity of the khan schools to frame the bashing of public schools.
[+] [-] lwhi|14 years ago|reply
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.
Workers needed to possess skill sets that are known, and they ultimately needed to become replaceable.
It stands to reason that our education system will change as we move away from the industrial revolution and into the next.
The question should be: what do (and will) society need from an education system in the coming 50 years?
[+] [-] wccrawford|14 years ago|reply
That teachers would ask that students be kept ignorant just to make their job easier does not surprise me a bit.
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.
[+] [-] Legion|14 years ago|reply
If the parent wants the student to advance to the next grade, the system says that they advance, often over the strenuous objections from the teacher who knows the student has no business advancing.
[+] [-] jbooth|14 years ago|reply
I know that anecdote < data but surely anecdote > ramblings, right?
[+] [-] Duff|14 years ago|reply
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.
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).
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.
[+] [-] timsally|14 years ago|reply
So I would propose to reframe the discussion. Because talking about money is silly. We know how much it costs to run a top tier school. The central question in my mind is whether we can develop new methods of education that are cheaper but achieve the same result.
[+] [-] dodo53|14 years ago|reply
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?
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.
UPDATE: and as other people pointed out that's ignoring all the potential social advantages of being roughly grouped by age
[+] [-] SwellJoe|14 years ago|reply
You're simply accepting that "grades" are an ideal concept, and that in order for a kid to learn higher math, they also have to accelerate English, history, etc. If you remove the concept of grades from the picture, you no longer have to call a kid who's really good at math a math specialist...you can just say he's very advanced at math, and on par with his age group at English and history and science.
Remove the preconceived notion that everyone needs to be studying the same thing in order to be in the same "grade", and you don't have this problem. Obviously some kids can self-direct their education to some degree. So, why not let them? If they can advance this way via online instruction, why on earth would you want to stand in their way?
I had a lot of bitterness about my school experience, because I was so often bored and slowed by the pace of my classmates. If I'd had the ability to set my own pace, I would have been much happier and much more successful. We're beginning to have the technology to allow kids to go at their own pace...it's obvious to me (and should be to any other adult who was a "gifted" kid growing up but shackled by the limitations of public school) that the only ethical thing to do is let kids learn as fast as they want to learn. It's the teachers and schools job to figure out how to accommodate that learning, not try to shackle it to a pace that matches the least common denominator.
[+] [-] barry-cotter|14 years ago|reply
Which are?
[+] [-] wnight|14 years ago|reply
Actually, from what I've seen the one-room-schoolhouse concept is the best. You don't have a single age-group preying on each other in a lord-of-the-flies situation.
True socialization comes from interacting with a reasonable sample of society, in its natural state - such as being surrounded by people of all ages interacting with each other. If we ship kids off the age-segregated prisons every day they become hyper-focused on the views of their peers and vulnerable to pressure.
[+] [-] ohyes|14 years ago|reply
"This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly."
This is blatantly not true, in the US we do not operate education as a monopoly. There are plenty of private schools.
[+] [-] talmand|14 years ago|reply
Government education may not be a monopoly in appearance but in many cases it sure does behave as one. Look up the examples of local government education bureaucracies doing much to attempt to eliminate those private schools as competition.
Washingto D.C. is an excellent example of this.
In many areas I would define government education as a monopoly simply because they do everything they can to prevent you from not entering your child into their system. And they use government force to do so.
[+] [-] Symmetry|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steamer25|14 years ago|reply
If I were to set the policy, I'd subsidize students rather than teachers and administrators, etc. I.e., demonstrate learning and we'll pay you $XX,XXX to cover your costs whether tutors or books or online courses or brick and mortar schools.
[+] [-] grandalf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawndrost|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|14 years ago|reply
In a distributed, self-optimizing system, this is not the case. Outliers can be handled in various ways.
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.
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.)
[+] [-] bugsy|14 years ago|reply
It's a certain mindset that thinks this way. It reminds me of another discussion here where some people and a supporting article (http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs...) 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.