Meanwhile, the same tech billionaires influencing the public school system will follow a completely different curriculum—usually private, low tech, with limited screen and device time—for their own children.
That low tech limited screen time curriculum requires well trained (aka expensive) staff. Yes, it might have better outcomes, but it can't scale without an absurd investment that, so far, society
has been unwilling to make. If you can raise the general standard of education at the same cost by going digital, that's still positive sum, no?
Are we trying to make education cheaper, or better? To that end does technology make education better, cheaper, or easier? I am probably old fashioned at 36 but I'm with Cliff Stoll on this issue: Let's get technology out of the classroom.
I'll quote the part of the GP that I think you're ignoring:
> it can't scale without an...investment that, so far, society has been unwilling to make
Without making any judgment on what is proper or appropriate education funding, tax policy, or anything political like that, the GP is right. Getting tech out of the classroom 1) is not a 100% positive thing; 2) costs more than society, to date, has been willing to spend.
> Are we trying to make education cheaper, or better?
It's not a binary proposition and pretending it is is dishonest. I want to see the median increase. I want to do it cost-effectively. If the choice is raising the median 5 points by utilizing technology for a marginal change in overall cost, or raising the median 20 points by quintupling education funding, one is possible and one is not.
Classic blinkered-technocrat perspective, why does "scale" matter in education? What is the endgame when education is scaled as much as possible, plugging kids into VR headsets and calling it a day?
Because that's literally how civilization improves. You're able to code for a living because people before you figured out how to make agriculture scale.
All humans have finite amount of time during the day, finite resources and finite lifespans. All of which is allocated pretty tightly. If you want to add value to the lives of people, your best bet is something that doesn't come at a great cost to them. Hence scale.
A secondary benefit is that big things which don't scale are only attempted by few players with lots of resources; making things more scalable means more smaller players can compete on the market.
"Dormfart-website CEOs" are not necessarily what's required to scale education.
But they're consuming money and attention that could be redirected to solving real problems. I know, this is a perpetual complaint with someone in any crowd.
How about we reduce the number of teachers (and have the remaining be paid fairly) by making education scale?
Unless you have an innovation in mind that I haven't seen, I fall back to the copiously documented truism that you can't use technology to solve a people problem.
See also my agriculture example.
I don't concede that children can be educated within the same concepts that are used to harvest cows and cotton.
> I fall back to the copiously documented truism that you can't use technology to solve a people problem.
Thing is, I don't buy that truism. IMO technology is sometimes the best way to solve a people problem, because it sidesteps all the issues of politics and ego.
> I don't concede that children can be educated within the same concepts that are used to harvest cows and cotton.
Why not? Just like modern agriculture makes a farmer more productive per unit of land, we should strive to make teachers be able to teach more children and teach them better.
because it sidesteps all the issues of politics and ego
AKA the reasons why it's a people problem.
we should strive to make teachers be able to teach more children and teach them better
You're comparing apples to oranges. Agriculture does not "strive."
All in all this sounds like pie-in-the-sky thinking. The science I've seen says larger class sizes do not result in better outcomes, do you have anything that contradicts that? Anything demonstrating even a clear benefit from technology in the classroom? Anything about scaling? That is, is what you're proposing anything more than imaginary?
I downloaded the 2016 LAUSD dataset from transparentcalifornia.com and filtered by full time employees with the job title "Teacher". Including the benefits is key, the pension costs are gigantic.
*Edit: Actually it was 2015 data. Also note that less than 1/3 of LAUSD's employees are teachers.
My point is that if you consider their total compensation LAUSD teachers make great money and it's still an abysmally bad school district. In other districts where teachers are worse paid there's always people saying that paying teachers more will fix things, when it clearly doesn't.
What? Education needs to scale because everybody needs education. Highly personalized education requires decreasing the number of students assigned to each teacher, which in turn would require a huge increase in education spending (and also short-medium term labor shortages in the field). Rich people who spend $100k/year on their children's education are doing the best they can for their children, but unfortunately it is not even nearly feasible for everyone to be educated that way.
Also, it's about cost effectiveness, not just cost. The more parts of education that are scaled, the more money can be spent on other programs that can enrich kids' lives, which we currently don't have the money for in some cases (e.g. music programs, special ed, special programs for the gifted, actual educational research).
Maybe because, specifically in the U.S., there are 73.6 million [0] children aged 0-17. 45.7 million (or 50.4 million [1]) of which are school age. If that isn't a problem of scale I have absolutely no clue what is. You can't give every single one of them the kind of attention and resources a super rich kid gets. It's just not feasible.
We as a country made the decision a long time ago that every child deserves an education. I'm sure there's a few libertarians out there who'd disagree. But, I don't think that's a controversial opinion these days. I'd go as far as saying that the opposite opinion, that not every child deserves an education, is borderline taboo. It's not something I would ever suggest in polite company unless I'm intentionally trying to make people think I'm a huge jerk.
Given that we want all children to be educated, that there are limited resources to do so, and the number of school age children is enormous we have no choice but to think of education as a problem of scale. Currently we spend $620 billion a year on public education [2]. That number is sure to increase, but never to the point where every kid has all of the hands on teaching that would be preferred. This means system-wide improvements are likely going to have to come from somewhere else; namely better methods of teaching which can be applied nearly across the board. Is this the optimal situation? No. But, when you consider that the natural state of things is no education at all, perhaps we shouldn't reflexively sneer at attempts to make an imperfect system marginally better for everyone in the long run.
Could you even produce enough quality teachers across America to have that sort of outcome? NYC maybe, Lewiston NC probably not. If software can turn a mediocre education system into a good one then I think it's worth doing. Even if it isn't going to raise a mediocre system into an excellent one.
People are attending and graduating from these schools now. It is far better that their outcome improves now rather than only work to some perfect solution.
I don't think so. We are talking about 3+ million teachers. They would decidedly have a bell curve of teacher skills. Not the upper 10% that teach at great private or public institutions.
Which students deserve to be taught by the bottom 25% of teachers? Also if we wanted to move the mean skill of these teachers higher what would it take? 4 years? 10?
I think software provides a faster benefit. And one that can hopefully have an outsized benefit to students who have the bottom 25% of instructors. Plus faster software iteration hopefully lets us find more optimal solutions faster for groups of students.
This gives us some breathing room for fixing the long tail instructor issues.
> I don't think so. We are talking about 3+ million teachers. They would decidedly have a bell curve of teacher skills.
Yes, there is a wide spectrum of competency/skill amongst all the practitioners of a profession; that's not a remotely novel insight. That's not an argument for underpaying them.
> Which students deserve to be taught by the bottom 25% of teachers? Also if we wanted to move the mean skill of these teachers higher what would it take? 4 years? 10?
I think software provides a faster benefit.
Which students deserve to get taught by the bottom 25% of shitty, barely-tested software chugging algorithms designed on specious theories? Not your kids, I'd bet.
I have no way of knowing if this i-Ready is the bottom 25% or the top 5% of barely tested software chugging algorithms. It's the only choice I have anyways, so it's hardly worth educating myself on the matter. Luckily my daughter is in the gifted program, so I at least have some assurance that her teacher isn't total crap. And beyond that, being gifted gives her a decent chance of overcoming a potentially shit education.
>Yes, there is a wide spectrum of competency/skill amongst all the practitioners of a profession; that's not a remotely novel insight. That's not an argument for underpaying them.
Well the politics are not there currently to support teacher pay raises in many states. Its shitty but that is how it is. If at some point we get a political culture able to reverse that, great!
>Which students deserve to get taught by the bottom 25% of shitty, barely-tested software chugging algorithms designed on specious theories? Not your kids, I'd bet.
Why do we need to entrust these technology solutions to schools? They are pretty ill equipped to evaluate them except for large districts. The school should just be a data source. The actual software should be parent choice, much like we have school choice in many states. If one piece of software gets a bad reputation the parents can choose to use different software. (Much like paying teachers more, this may not be possible in todays political landscape)
Whenever someone rich gets in the news for being nice, people seem to love digging for some way that their motives are not "entirely altruistic". I understand that sometimes these deals are BS and don't actually benefit anyone but the rich person. But, I don't understand why people get so upset over the rich person benefiting in any way shape or form.
I've seen such outrage as "He only gave away a $1,000,000 so that he could cut $350,000 off of his taxes!" :/ "The deal eventually, indirectly feeds some money back into the project in the long term making it self-sustaining!" :/ "It not anonymous, so he's only helping thousands of people to be famous for helping thousands of people!" :/ "He's rich, so giving away huge amounts of money is easy for him. Helping thousands of people should not be recognized unless it was hard!" :/ Then there's the classic "So, he's helping this part of the problem. But, why doesn't he help the rest of the overwhelmingly huge collection of tangentially-related problems?" :/
Sometimes it seems that the standard we hold people to is "Helping people must be anonymously self-immolating to avoid disparagement." Then we disparage the same people because, as far as we can tell, they are not helping enough.
Signalling games. The good thing about being a super rich person is that you can tell all the onlookers to shove their signalling games deep in their collective ass.
IMO, the conclusions people jump to mostly tell about people doing the jumping.
The main thing we can learn from history, is that we do not in fact learn from history. That's what I have taken from B.H. Liddell Hart's great little book "Why Don't We Learn From History?" and it is exactly what is happening here in education, again.
Today on the HN homepage there was an article about how NJ was the innovation hub of American before the Valley, which generated a nice discussion. Akarnani recounted the story of Fred Terman's failed effort to make NJ more like the Valley. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497136
This historical anecdotes illustrates how even when many essential pieces are present (money, smart people, etc) it is a nearly Sisyphean task to change a system and a culture. The great management thinker W. Edwards Deming once said "a bad system will beat a good person every time" and that is the history of the past 60 years in education reform. I wrote about that in more detail here.
https://medium.com/@m_pettyjohn/on-humans-hard-problems-and-...
This NYTimes article reaches out and touches nearly every broken aspect of education that makes improvement seem intractable. Zuckerberg wasted $100 million in Newark and seemingly came away learning the wrong lessons. Benioff, big hearted and charitable, has his heart in the right place, but long-term will have little impact.
With that in mind it is almost inconsequential what the Silicon Valley billionaires do in education.
There is massive potential in our teachers and students, but to unleash it we need to understand our history, take a systems view and approach, and genuinely understand the discipline of management, which even to the big successes in the Valley seems like an afterthought.
If you're outside (or even inside!) education, reading The Case of Mrs. Oublier, a study of one California teacher during the state's massive 80's reform effort, can be enlightening to the challenges faced.
Well said. And it's important to carefully investigate the limits of the system that is to be improved, as it almost certainly is larger and more complex than anyone thinks. More money is good, better tech is good, better pay for teachers is good, but these are hot spots on a huge network of systems and circumstances. "Holistic approach" is an overworked phrase but it's the thing we need here because education overlaps in so many ways with other aspects of society.
That's not surprising. Let's take a look at this from the teacher side of things:
Next let's substitute computers for manipulatives (something you can model math with such as a place value block) for the educational treatment. In the PDF I linked above about Mrs. Oublier, she reports she is using all of the prescribed educational treatments in her classroom. From manipulatives to small groups. She's even excited about them. Calls it a revolution! Then the researchers visit her classroom and while all of the pieces are there, none of the understanding how to use the treatments is present. This happens systemically, and it's what I have seen happen with technology in schools.
In education we talk about how you teach, pedagogy, and what you teach, content as 'pedagogical content knowledge.' Whether it's blocks, small groups, smart-boards, or software it won't change the pedagogical content knowledge the teacher is bringing to the table. And in the great irony of our education system, our schools are not set up to learn (at least not effectively) so it's very hard to meaningfully move the pedagogical content quotient, especially throughout the system.
But most software that makes its way into schools is not Desmos. It's usually something that merely replicates the content delivery method of teaching. Think Khan Academy. Other software is often just a digital way to practice facts or algorithms (my mind is in the math world for these examples).
I noticed an older comment of yours about expectations your first CS class had including how to navigate a nix system, at least one programming language, and Matlab. Let's pretend this class was instead algebra I where a student is expected to know the fundamentals of arithmetic including properties of operations (so you can use them to manipulate equations), that the equals sign indicates balance, exponentiation, strong proportional reasoning with a solid understanding of multiplication/division, and an understanding of integers.
Combine this with a course where the teacher delivers a lesson each day, you do homework, and then have a test each week, never stopping to go back to things that may not have sunk in, let alone pausing to work on any holes in the things mentioned above that are critical to understanding algebra.
I can introduce Desmos to help you model linear equations in a wonderful interface, but it isn't going to do a damn thing to increase outcomes if a) you are lacking in any of the requisite starting knowledge and b) don't go to extraordinary lengths to keep up with the pace of the course.
I like tech, but I don't think it's any sort of panacea for what ails our schools because it doesn't (and maybe can't) address the root causes.
My daughter's school uses i-Ready. It does give differential lessons to each student based on how they've done on the tests. It even occasionally circles back in areas you were maybe just "ok" in. The problem I've seen (based only on her reports so not even remotely scientific) is that if you fail a section, it gives you the exact.same.lesson again. It doesn't try to show you the same material in a different way. It just cycles you back through the same exact thing. Additionally, she reports that "all" of her fellow classmates hate the time they spend doing i-ready. I suspect it's not very engaging, there's no group/social interaction, etc.
Ugh, that kind of teaching, whether from tech or a teacher just kills me as I suspect it kills students' dispositions towards those subjects.
I truly hope that your daughter has many other opportunities to engage in meaningful mathematics throughout her education.
How possible would it be for a group of parents to hire a teacher and have them teach 6-12 kids at someone's house? Sidestepping a lot of the administration BS?
Depends on your state. I'm in Ohio and that's perfectly permissible. Under the Ohio Revised Code and the State Operating Standards for Schools you could do that and have it be considered a) home schooling or b) a private school where you would be exempted from a large portion of the operating standards. In other words, you have significantly more flexibility in how and what you teach.
Read the report. Horrifying. The teacher who is the subject of the paper was convinced to use "new" techniques of teaching math. These techniques are mandated by the education code but are not explained. She ended up with a melange of old and new techniques but applied them all blindly. I finished the paper thoroughly convinced that the old fashion and technique of rote memorization and drills would be superior in almost all cases.
My father was a fine art printmaker by training. In the 1980's he was working in advertising doing (what was then called) desktop publishing. Physical photographs, knives, glue - old school image-making. Making art on the side, he became a very early adopter of digital image making tools and rode the wave as his entire industry was transformed. The tools available to the (what is now called) graphics designer changed completely - but the goals and underlying skills of the job did not. Designers became better designers.
To extend the analogy, I have this feeling that we're putting a great deal of effort into "taking the designer out of the design" rather than making tools to augment the designer's abilities/speed/workflow. Yes - we can probably create a system that can spit out company logos just as "good" as a mediocre designer, but if our best designers are still making do with knives, glue and paint then the entire field is being held back.
There are purpose-build tools for all kinds of professions, but teachers are largely making do with the same processes and tools that they did fifty years ago.
They don't need a LogosmartAI to replace them; they just need Photoshop.
Unlike how other instructional materials are adopted by schools, educational software operates in secrecy - it remains essentially a black box to educators, parents, and students. There is no mechanism for independent reviews/audits of content or code, no insight into the instructional approach, checks for factual accuracy, or evaluations of potential bias.
The money quote (for me): “That sounds like a low bar [that their apps did not harm students’ educational results],” Ms. Woolley-Wilson said. “But with the history of education technology, it is not.”
Mark my words: In 15 years time, the Salesforce.org meddling in Education will be a "Poster Child" study in Hubris outside of one's field of expertise. It will not work. Education is inherently time wasted by way of learning, and as a species, Humans are far too diverse for the grand dreams of utopian schooling. I mean, sure Utopian Schooling is possible but it's incredibly intrusive, Homogenized, and reductive - all of which projects like this try to pretend aren't fundamentally necessary.
Do I have a better plan? I do. Research backed.
Want a hint? Every child should have Music Instruction two times per week for at least one hour per session. That would do more than any stupid spreadsheet or Board Room review. I know, because Research backs it up. Not this..."venture" of sorts.
The fact that we have proven, effective models for schooling in European countries that we explicitly ignore already demonstrates this. Same thing as with healthcare.
But it's not hubris. Silicon Valley Utopianism is just a sales pitch for people to insert themselves as privatizers and middle-men using technology.
Wealthy individuals commit time, money, and effort to important problem. Screw those guys... am I right?
I hate this attitude. Their overall vector is in the right direction; even if it's off slightly, at least they care and are doing something about it. You'll catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar... so perhaps you should try reaching out and volunteering your own resources (time & money) rather than just sounding off -- and not even linking to the research!
> Wealthy individuals commit time, money, and effort to important problem. Screw those guys... am I right?
No, this is not right and the attitude dripping off your post isn't very constructive either.
These individuals have disproportionate leverage as a result of their wealth and available time. The likelihood is that they are going to make a bit of a mess with this leverage (you even say it yourself - "overall vector...off slightly"). So they can have a seriously deleterious effect on really very large numbers of children as a result of the power they wield.
A group of misguided parents in a PTA might might end up getting, say, Intelligent Design onto the science curriculum in their district; an opinionated billionaire could do rather more harm than that to very much larger numbers of students.
As for volunteering, many people do exactly that (and how do you know 6stringmerc doesn't?) by standing for school board elections, chairing the PTA, campaigning locally, giving talks in schools, and so on. The key point is that these are _local_ actions with local fallout. Conducting experiments at scale based on the idiosyncratic preferences of individuals who happen to have got lucky in business is a terrible, terrible thing to do to a city full of children.
I mean look at the proposals! They're classic examples of turning problems into nails when you're holding a hammer. Neflix recommendation algorithms to select lessons! Why? What the hell happened to pedagogy? Frankly, where's the humility? If Reed Hastings had got himself a masters in education and spent a few years teaching, even part time, there'd at least be some practical experience in the problem domain to guide his transformative efforts; otherwise it looks like dilettantism.
> So they can have a seriously deleterious effect on really very large numbers of children as a result of the power they wield.
I have a hard time seeing how anything they decide to do to change schooling is going to make it worse than it is.
Our current education system is largely still in a factory style, where students are all taught the same material, run on the same idiotic schedule, are taught aimed at tests, and generally have any genuine interest in learn crushed out of them by the second grade.
Classes teach generic material and completely fail to demonstrate useful applications. Useful things like critical thought, philosophy, personal finance, cooking, computing systems/programming - not taught. Students learn to focus on rote memorization and local application of principles - see the articles the problems of getting students to solve conceptual physics problems vs. mathematical ones - and then proceed to forget most of the material as soon as there's no test on the horizon.
And we've known how to do better for a long time. Montessori's analysis of children and how they learn, her experimentation with the classroom and materials - this sort of thing is a hundred years old at this point, but we don't apply it widely. Instead we largely have the same old ineffective crap that we pass for "teaching". There's a reason Khan Academy became a thing.
We already know that schools do a bad job of preparing students for the current economic landscape. There's no reason to look at this and say "but some of these things might not work! Think of the children!" The children will be fine (or at a minimum, no worse off). We've already seen this where school districts have blown millions of dollars on new tech, to no useful effect. Zuckerberg threw a hundred million at some school district on the east coast, to zero benefit. But stuff like that isn't going to make things any worse. And on the flip side, they won't get better without action like this and without experimentation.
Better education is, imo, the best way to put this country on a strong footing for the coming decades. The government isn't going to do it. The private market isn't going to do it at scale. The average PTA isn't going to do it, and really, what the hell do most parents know about education, other than what they experienced? Committees and groups are the kind of thing that get bogged down in details, have no clear direction, and take forever to decide anything. At least a random billionaire can have the money and direction to get things done, even if not all of their ideas pan out.
One last thing - I feel these days schools are much less important than in the past, in so far as learning. The internet provides tremendous access to information; sites like Khan and other education material has improved over traditional textbooks by leaps and bounds; Stack Overflow and similar provide places to ask questions and find answers/explanations to specific problems or concepts; and so on. Fifty years ago, if a billionaire decided to bulldoze some schools and leave a bunch of children with no place to learn, that would have been a dire problem. Today, it's much less of an issue.
I agree with your broad point about the fairly poor state of education and its central role in the country's future. I don't agree with some other things: one of which being "at least a random billionaire can have the money and direction to get things done, even if not all their ideas pan out." I argued that above so I won't rehash it, but to summarize, I hold the precautionary principle in high regard, and you - I think - prefer iteration and experimentation; we can agree to disagree.
Otherwise I found your comment a bit contradictory. You don't like recent investments in classroom technology and say that technology isn't a solution, but you seem to think that technology is an at least partially adequate replacement for the classroom itself. Mark Zuckerberg wasted $100m in New Jersey (was it a waste? How do we know?) but seem happy for that pattern to continue.
To pick on a specific theme you touched on a few times: learning isn't even mostly about information. Ask anyone who bought a textbook in college then slept through lectures and never spoke to their professor. Kahn Academy doesn't represent a visionary, Montessori-compatible approach to learning math; instead it's a scaled up, gamified, alternative to an already stale math education pattern of rote memorization, depersonalized instruction, and practice problems. That's a part of math education - you have to learn how to apply techniques after all - but hardly represents the paradigm shift in math teaching that gets talked about here frequently. Don't get me wrong: Khan is a very good thing, especially for students struggling with bad teachers, but it's not the next step. And that's just talking about math education.
I don't agree at all that schools are less important. Schools are the only place where kids have mandatory exposure to specialists who's only job is to teach them things. To my point above, information is not education. 'Education' is the thing that happens when decent teachers with adequate materials and reasonable tools spend focused time with children. So you need time - which means smaller class sizes; you need tools, which really is a solved problem requiring only situational application of cash; you need materials, same; and you need decent teachers, which is a matter of training and status and autonomy and job satisfaction and vocation, and that is a really thorny mess. It's a generational political problem, not a thing a billionaire can meaningfully affect with a recommendation algorithm for syllabus modules.
So I guess my conclusion is - a really just absolutely epically well-funded lobbying foundation with a world-class policy board would do far more good than a series of expensive experiments playing with the margins of the existing borked system.
Thanks for your response and it's quite on point regarding the contentious nature (and emotions!) that come with it.
I've actually got a hard time pinning down all the work I've done in Education. A Degree in Curriculum Design. Substitute teacher for a couple years. Reviewer for Textbooks for Compliance with NCLB. Writing Tutor. Music Instructor. Public and Private Primary through Secondary Education product. Private and Public University product. Internationally travelled, bi-lingual and can pick up a couple other languages. I can often guess a person's Ethnic lineage based on their face, complexion, and last name. All of these pursuits come from a love of learning and turning around and sharing.
Localized Education is key. What works in San Diego, CA may not work well in Nashua, NH.
If there's one reason for a person like me to be pissy about the state of affairs in the United States, it's that I'm more qualified than Betsy DeVos to be the Secretary of Education. If that doesn't scare the crap out of smart people with the ability to change things, then we're straight up doomed.
Reading the research, it was based on an observational study of 42 adults across three segments of musical training: None, Little (1-3 years), and Moderate (4-14) and found that "A greater amount of music training early in life was associated with the most efficient auditory function decades after training stopped."
Why is it that billionaires from many industries subvert democratic process constantly, yet when they do it openly and for education, it's criticized? If anything, the biggest problem with education is that nobody has had any power at all to make a substantial difference at scale. For once, I applaud billionaires for subverting the democratic process.
This is literally the first time I've read an article with a line similar to:
“They have the power to change policy, but no corresponding check on that power,” said Megan Tompkins-Stange,
“We should be asking a lot more questions about who is behind the curtain,” Ms. Davis said.
I've worked in K-12 schools all my life and the answer is so incredibly clear, yet there is so much incentive riding in never saying it: Students and learning are secondary in the business of education.
True, meaningful educational impact happens when you can deliver authentic instruction -- instruction that creates a really tight feedback loop between the learner, the instructor, and the subject. We have tried with technology to mimick that at scale. Khan Academy and online quizzes is not a new idea; B.F. Skinner had a device doing this since at least the 60s. It works to stuff CEOs' pockets with money, feed the ever-larger administrative behemoth that schools are becoming, etc. Results, not so much.
There is no greater evidence than the fact that schools are probably the only sector which has literally gotten less efficient over the past decades; we literally spend more money per pupil for worse outcomes. The incentives in public education are absolutely abysmal, and we've seemingly done everything in the book to strip the voice of students and families in this sector.
As schools, our feedback loop between our own quality is practically nonexistent. No wonder we don't do right by these kids. Lots of money to be made selling software, though.
Recently I read comments about "the art of learning" by child chess prodigy and expert in martial arts Josh Waitzkin about coaching and how to conquest excellence. My take on that is that if your family or society inspire on you the value of hard work and incremental improvement, you will obtain a strong motivation to get better in whatever you do and that will give you an enormous opportunity to succeed.
Speaking from my own experience, in my high school our math teacher had a voice problem and on top of that he used to speak very quickly, hence it was really difficult to understand what he was saying, but that was not a problem for me, I learned all the math in a book and became the right hand of that teacher, my duty was to try to teach to other people in class. Another nice anecdote was how I discovered the multiplication table, I was a dumb body in my childhood, I repeated several years until I was nine or ten years. I didn't know what was 2 x 2, then someone told me that the multiplication table was written in our pencil and that to answer that you have to memorize that table, that was my start on math. It seems that all the ways to a solution are written somewhere.
Anyway I wouldn't change any bit my wild education, I have really loving memories from my chilhood and school. I would never change that for a formal education, let nature teach you, something in the spirit of Mark Twain novels.
If I'd been allowed to work at my own pace; there's been some understanding for my environmental needs (I can do classroom/group, just fine, but I need peace and quiet when I'm working by myself); and I'd been provided some actual social oversight and guidance, instead of the "Lord of the Flies" dominance of the student peer group (staff were largely divorced from all but pedagogy, and my parents -- plopped down in front of the TV every night -- were no help at all). Well, I think I would have done a lot better.
That is to say, you can throw all the money and toys and methods you want at it. What you need, is people actually paying attention.
And paid to pay attention. So that they are not overwhelmed with workload nor how they are going to pay their own bills and take care of their own families.
In other words, invest in the people providing the education. Choose them wisely, and empower them. The rest is just various forms of b.s.
While I appreciate the effort of the billionaires, I largely think that this type of "redesign" is more of a bandage than a cure. I think that there are some much greater fundamental systemic problems the go far beyond not "thinking bigger".
My beliefs are somewhat extreme in this topic, but I will share anyway. In broad strokes:
1. One of the biggest problems is that education has come to be ruled by the administrators. They are not servant leaders, rather they are aristocrats. Their pawns are students, faculty, parents, and taxpayers. These stakeholders need more influence in the decision-making process.
2. Mandatory schooling (both explicit and implicit) could easily stop at 8th grade with the goal of basic numeracy and literacy as well as fundamental learning skills. These skills will provide enough education for the graduates to function in society as well as move forward in the education system if/when they choose to do so. Currently, most of high school (and middle school, frankly) is just very expensive and inefficient baby sitting.
3. That said, secondary, tertiary, and trade-based education should be widely available, of high quality, and low price -- probably subsidized heavily by the state -- throughout a person's life. Many people do not realize the value of education and learning until they are older, and our current system does a relatively poor job accommodating these people.
4. Overall curriculum design needs to focus on autonomous learning (touched on in the article). Note that this means that the learner takes responsibility for their learning, not someone else (e.g., teachers). Also note that this does not obviate teachers, rather it just makes them one of many sources of knowledge/learning. Anecdotally, I have seen this type of system pull off what many would consider to be miracles.
5. Learning in general should be much more contextualized and (when practicable) experiential. Many/most students do not see how the current curriculum content applies to them. The current content seems to be related to, and largely is a product of, the type of education upper middle class people want. Folks from other walks of life actually have a lot of curiosity and a high capacity to learn, but taking part in the current curriculum would turn them into an alien within their community (e.g., non-native English speaker being beaten/abused for speaking English well). Few people are willing to do this.
6. Assessment should lean much more heavily on portfolios than on standardized tests. Don't get me wrong, standardized tests have their place, but currently they are overused and are often times misused.
This is an issue I very passionate about. Please let me know via a response here if you would like to discuss this more.
70 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadDo as I say, not as I do.
> it can't scale without an...investment that, so far, society has been unwilling to make
Without making any judgment on what is proper or appropriate education funding, tax policy, or anything political like that, the GP is right. Getting tech out of the classroom 1) is not a 100% positive thing; 2) costs more than society, to date, has been willing to spend.
> Are we trying to make education cheaper, or better?
It's not a binary proposition and pretending it is is dishonest. I want to see the median increase. I want to do it cost-effectively. If the choice is raising the median 5 points by utilizing technology for a marginal change in overall cost, or raising the median 20 points by quintupling education funding, one is possible and one is not.
All humans have finite amount of time during the day, finite resources and finite lifespans. All of which is allocated pretty tightly. If you want to add value to the lives of people, your best bet is something that doesn't come at a great cost to them. Hence scale.
A secondary benefit is that big things which don't scale are only attempted by few players with lots of resources; making things more scalable means more smaller players can compete on the market.
2. How about we reduce the number of teachers (and have the remaining be paid fairly) by making education scale? See also my agriculture example.
But they're consuming money and attention that could be redirected to solving real problems. I know, this is a perpetual complaint with someone in any crowd.
How about we reduce the number of teachers (and have the remaining be paid fairly) by making education scale?
Unless you have an innovation in mind that I haven't seen, I fall back to the copiously documented truism that you can't use technology to solve a people problem.
See also my agriculture example.
I don't concede that children can be educated within the same concepts that are used to harvest cows and cotton.
Thing is, I don't buy that truism. IMO technology is sometimes the best way to solve a people problem, because it sidesteps all the issues of politics and ego.
> I don't concede that children can be educated within the same concepts that are used to harvest cows and cotton.
Why not? Just like modern agriculture makes a farmer more productive per unit of land, we should strive to make teachers be able to teach more children and teach them better.
AKA the reasons why it's a people problem.
we should strive to make teachers be able to teach more children and teach them better
You're comparing apples to oranges. Agriculture does not "strive."
All in all this sounds like pie-in-the-sky thinking. The science I've seen says larger class sizes do not result in better outcomes, do you have anything that contradicts that? Anything demonstrating even a clear benefit from technology in the classroom? Anything about scaling? That is, is what you're proposing anything more than imaginary?
I mean, call me an out-of-touch plutocrat.
LAUSD's own numbers for 2016-17 indicate a maximum of $88K, and that's with a doctorate and maximum seniority.
http://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib08/CA01000043/Centricity/Dom...
*Edit: Actually it was 2015 data. Also note that less than 1/3 of LAUSD's employees are teachers.
Also, it's about cost effectiveness, not just cost. The more parts of education that are scaled, the more money can be spent on other programs that can enrich kids' lives, which we currently don't have the money for in some cases (e.g. music programs, special ed, special programs for the gifted, actual educational research).
Maybe because, specifically in the U.S., there are 73.6 million [0] children aged 0-17. 45.7 million (or 50.4 million [1]) of which are school age. If that isn't a problem of scale I have absolutely no clue what is. You can't give every single one of them the kind of attention and resources a super rich kid gets. It's just not feasible.
We as a country made the decision a long time ago that every child deserves an education. I'm sure there's a few libertarians out there who'd disagree. But, I don't think that's a controversial opinion these days. I'd go as far as saying that the opposite opinion, that not every child deserves an education, is borderline taboo. It's not something I would ever suggest in polite company unless I'm intentionally trying to make people think I'm a huge jerk.
Given that we want all children to be educated, that there are limited resources to do so, and the number of school age children is enormous we have no choice but to think of education as a problem of scale. Currently we spend $620 billion a year on public education [2]. That number is sure to increase, but never to the point where every kid has all of the hands on teaching that would be preferred. This means system-wide improvements are likely going to have to come from somewhere else; namely better methods of teaching which can be applied nearly across the board. Is this the optimal situation? No. But, when you consider that the natural state of things is no education at all, perhaps we shouldn't reflexively sneer at attempts to make an imperfect system marginally better for everyone in the long run.
0: https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp
1: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372
2: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
Possibly, if we could actually pay all public school teachers decent salaries.
Which students deserve to be taught by the bottom 25% of teachers? Also if we wanted to move the mean skill of these teachers higher what would it take? 4 years? 10?
I think software provides a faster benefit. And one that can hopefully have an outsized benefit to students who have the bottom 25% of instructors. Plus faster software iteration hopefully lets us find more optimal solutions faster for groups of students.
This gives us some breathing room for fixing the long tail instructor issues.
Yes, there is a wide spectrum of competency/skill amongst all the practitioners of a profession; that's not a remotely novel insight. That's not an argument for underpaying them.
> Which students deserve to be taught by the bottom 25% of teachers? Also if we wanted to move the mean skill of these teachers higher what would it take? 4 years? 10? I think software provides a faster benefit.
Which students deserve to get taught by the bottom 25% of shitty, barely-tested software chugging algorithms designed on specious theories? Not your kids, I'd bet.
I have no way of knowing if this i-Ready is the bottom 25% or the top 5% of barely tested software chugging algorithms. It's the only choice I have anyways, so it's hardly worth educating myself on the matter. Luckily my daughter is in the gifted program, so I at least have some assurance that her teacher isn't total crap. And beyond that, being gifted gives her a decent chance of overcoming a potentially shit education.
Well the politics are not there currently to support teacher pay raises in many states. Its shitty but that is how it is. If at some point we get a political culture able to reverse that, great!
>Which students deserve to get taught by the bottom 25% of shitty, barely-tested software chugging algorithms designed on specious theories? Not your kids, I'd bet.
>My daughter is already a guinea pig for this stuff. Her public school uses i-Ready. http://www.curriculumassociates.com/products/iready/diagnost....
Why do we need to entrust these technology solutions to schools? They are pretty ill equipped to evaluate them except for large districts. The school should just be a data source. The actual software should be parent choice, much like we have school choice in many states. If one piece of software gets a bad reputation the parents can choose to use different software. (Much like paying teachers more, this may not be possible in todays political landscape)
https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/6aadft/math_teache...
I've seen such outrage as "He only gave away a $1,000,000 so that he could cut $350,000 off of his taxes!" :/ "The deal eventually, indirectly feeds some money back into the project in the long term making it self-sustaining!" :/ "It not anonymous, so he's only helping thousands of people to be famous for helping thousands of people!" :/ "He's rich, so giving away huge amounts of money is easy for him. Helping thousands of people should not be recognized unless it was hard!" :/ Then there's the classic "So, he's helping this part of the problem. But, why doesn't he help the rest of the overwhelmingly huge collection of tangentially-related problems?" :/
Sometimes it seems that the standard we hold people to is "Helping people must be anonymously self-immolating to avoid disparagement." Then we disparage the same people because, as far as we can tell, they are not helping enough.
IMO, the conclusions people jump to mostly tell about people doing the jumping.
Also, https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth....
I'm speaking from observations made sometimes on Hacker News and frequently on Reddit.
Today on the HN homepage there was an article about how NJ was the innovation hub of American before the Valley, which generated a nice discussion. Akarnani recounted the story of Fred Terman's failed effort to make NJ more like the Valley. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497136
This historical anecdotes illustrates how even when many essential pieces are present (money, smart people, etc) it is a nearly Sisyphean task to change a system and a culture. The great management thinker W. Edwards Deming once said "a bad system will beat a good person every time" and that is the history of the past 60 years in education reform. I wrote about that in more detail here. https://medium.com/@m_pettyjohn/on-humans-hard-problems-and-...
This NYTimes article reaches out and touches nearly every broken aspect of education that makes improvement seem intractable. Zuckerberg wasted $100 million in Newark and seemingly came away learning the wrong lessons. Benioff, big hearted and charitable, has his heart in the right place, but long-term will have little impact.
With that in mind it is almost inconsequential what the Silicon Valley billionaires do in education.
There is massive potential in our teachers and students, but to unleash it we need to understand our history, take a systems view and approach, and genuinely understand the discipline of management, which even to the big successes in the Valley seems like an afterthought.
If you're outside (or even inside!) education, reading The Case of Mrs. Oublier, a study of one California teacher during the state's massive 80's reform effort, can be enlightening to the challenges faced.
https://393methods1.wikispaces.com/file/view/Cohen,+D.+K.+(1...
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34174796
Next let's substitute computers for manipulatives (something you can model math with such as a place value block) for the educational treatment. In the PDF I linked above about Mrs. Oublier, she reports she is using all of the prescribed educational treatments in her classroom. From manipulatives to small groups. She's even excited about them. Calls it a revolution! Then the researchers visit her classroom and while all of the pieces are there, none of the understanding how to use the treatments is present. This happens systemically, and it's what I have seen happen with technology in schools.
In education we talk about how you teach, pedagogy, and what you teach, content as 'pedagogical content knowledge.' Whether it's blocks, small groups, smart-boards, or software it won't change the pedagogical content knowledge the teacher is bringing to the table. And in the great irony of our education system, our schools are not set up to learn (at least not effectively) so it's very hard to meaningfully move the pedagogical content quotient, especially throughout the system.
There is some nice software out there. Desmos comes to mind. https://teacher.desmos.com
But most software that makes its way into schools is not Desmos. It's usually something that merely replicates the content delivery method of teaching. Think Khan Academy. Other software is often just a digital way to practice facts or algorithms (my mind is in the math world for these examples).
I noticed an older comment of yours about expectations your first CS class had including how to navigate a nix system, at least one programming language, and Matlab. Let's pretend this class was instead algebra I where a student is expected to know the fundamentals of arithmetic including properties of operations (so you can use them to manipulate equations), that the equals sign indicates balance, exponentiation, strong proportional reasoning with a solid understanding of multiplication/division, and an understanding of integers. Combine this with a course where the teacher delivers a lesson each day, you do homework, and then have a test each week, never stopping to go back to things that may not have sunk in, let alone pausing to work on any holes in the things mentioned above that are critical to understanding algebra. I can introduce Desmos to help you model linear equations in a wonderful interface, but it isn't going to do a damn thing to increase outcomes if a) you are lacking in any of the requisite starting knowledge and b) don't go to extraordinary lengths to keep up with the pace of the course.
I like tech, but I don't think it's any sort of panacea for what ails our schools because it doesn't (and maybe can't) address the root causes.
To extend the analogy, I have this feeling that we're putting a great deal of effort into "taking the designer out of the design" rather than making tools to augment the designer's abilities/speed/workflow. Yes - we can probably create a system that can spit out company logos just as "good" as a mediocre designer, but if our best designers are still making do with knives, glue and paint then the entire field is being held back.
There are purpose-build tools for all kinds of professions, but teachers are largely making do with the same processes and tools that they did fifty years ago.
They don't need a LogosmartAI to replace them; they just need Photoshop.
The money quote (for me): “That sounds like a low bar [that their apps did not harm students’ educational results],” Ms. Woolley-Wilson said. “But with the history of education technology, it is not.”
Do I have a better plan? I do. Research backed.
Want a hint? Every child should have Music Instruction two times per week for at least one hour per session. That would do more than any stupid spreadsheet or Board Room review. I know, because Research backs it up. Not this..."venture" of sorts.
But it's not hubris. Silicon Valley Utopianism is just a sales pitch for people to insert themselves as privatizers and middle-men using technology.
I hate this attitude. Their overall vector is in the right direction; even if it's off slightly, at least they care and are doing something about it. You'll catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar... so perhaps you should try reaching out and volunteering your own resources (time & money) rather than just sounding off -- and not even linking to the research!
The arrogance of the wealthy and their defenders is astounding and will lead to the burning of civilization if we don't knock them into line.
No, this is not right and the attitude dripping off your post isn't very constructive either.
These individuals have disproportionate leverage as a result of their wealth and available time. The likelihood is that they are going to make a bit of a mess with this leverage (you even say it yourself - "overall vector...off slightly"). So they can have a seriously deleterious effect on really very large numbers of children as a result of the power they wield.
A group of misguided parents in a PTA might might end up getting, say, Intelligent Design onto the science curriculum in their district; an opinionated billionaire could do rather more harm than that to very much larger numbers of students.
As for volunteering, many people do exactly that (and how do you know 6stringmerc doesn't?) by standing for school board elections, chairing the PTA, campaigning locally, giving talks in schools, and so on. The key point is that these are _local_ actions with local fallout. Conducting experiments at scale based on the idiosyncratic preferences of individuals who happen to have got lucky in business is a terrible, terrible thing to do to a city full of children.
I mean look at the proposals! They're classic examples of turning problems into nails when you're holding a hammer. Neflix recommendation algorithms to select lessons! Why? What the hell happened to pedagogy? Frankly, where's the humility? If Reed Hastings had got himself a masters in education and spent a few years teaching, even part time, there'd at least be some practical experience in the problem domain to guide his transformative efforts; otherwise it looks like dilettantism.
I have a hard time seeing how anything they decide to do to change schooling is going to make it worse than it is.
Our current education system is largely still in a factory style, where students are all taught the same material, run on the same idiotic schedule, are taught aimed at tests, and generally have any genuine interest in learn crushed out of them by the second grade.
Classes teach generic material and completely fail to demonstrate useful applications. Useful things like critical thought, philosophy, personal finance, cooking, computing systems/programming - not taught. Students learn to focus on rote memorization and local application of principles - see the articles the problems of getting students to solve conceptual physics problems vs. mathematical ones - and then proceed to forget most of the material as soon as there's no test on the horizon.
And we've known how to do better for a long time. Montessori's analysis of children and how they learn, her experimentation with the classroom and materials - this sort of thing is a hundred years old at this point, but we don't apply it widely. Instead we largely have the same old ineffective crap that we pass for "teaching". There's a reason Khan Academy became a thing.
We already know that schools do a bad job of preparing students for the current economic landscape. There's no reason to look at this and say "but some of these things might not work! Think of the children!" The children will be fine (or at a minimum, no worse off). We've already seen this where school districts have blown millions of dollars on new tech, to no useful effect. Zuckerberg threw a hundred million at some school district on the east coast, to zero benefit. But stuff like that isn't going to make things any worse. And on the flip side, they won't get better without action like this and without experimentation.
Better education is, imo, the best way to put this country on a strong footing for the coming decades. The government isn't going to do it. The private market isn't going to do it at scale. The average PTA isn't going to do it, and really, what the hell do most parents know about education, other than what they experienced? Committees and groups are the kind of thing that get bogged down in details, have no clear direction, and take forever to decide anything. At least a random billionaire can have the money and direction to get things done, even if not all of their ideas pan out.
One last thing - I feel these days schools are much less important than in the past, in so far as learning. The internet provides tremendous access to information; sites like Khan and other education material has improved over traditional textbooks by leaps and bounds; Stack Overflow and similar provide places to ask questions and find answers/explanations to specific problems or concepts; and so on. Fifty years ago, if a billionaire decided to bulldoze some schools and leave a bunch of children with no place to learn, that would have been a dire problem. Today, it's much less of an issue.
Otherwise I found your comment a bit contradictory. You don't like recent investments in classroom technology and say that technology isn't a solution, but you seem to think that technology is an at least partially adequate replacement for the classroom itself. Mark Zuckerberg wasted $100m in New Jersey (was it a waste? How do we know?) but seem happy for that pattern to continue.
To pick on a specific theme you touched on a few times: learning isn't even mostly about information. Ask anyone who bought a textbook in college then slept through lectures and never spoke to their professor. Kahn Academy doesn't represent a visionary, Montessori-compatible approach to learning math; instead it's a scaled up, gamified, alternative to an already stale math education pattern of rote memorization, depersonalized instruction, and practice problems. That's a part of math education - you have to learn how to apply techniques after all - but hardly represents the paradigm shift in math teaching that gets talked about here frequently. Don't get me wrong: Khan is a very good thing, especially for students struggling with bad teachers, but it's not the next step. And that's just talking about math education.
I don't agree at all that schools are less important. Schools are the only place where kids have mandatory exposure to specialists who's only job is to teach them things. To my point above, information is not education. 'Education' is the thing that happens when decent teachers with adequate materials and reasonable tools spend focused time with children. So you need time - which means smaller class sizes; you need tools, which really is a solved problem requiring only situational application of cash; you need materials, same; and you need decent teachers, which is a matter of training and status and autonomy and job satisfaction and vocation, and that is a really thorny mess. It's a generational political problem, not a thing a billionaire can meaningfully affect with a recommendation algorithm for syllabus modules.
So I guess my conclusion is - a really just absolutely epically well-funded lobbying foundation with a world-class policy board would do far more good than a series of expensive experiments playing with the margins of the existing borked system.
I've actually got a hard time pinning down all the work I've done in Education. A Degree in Curriculum Design. Substitute teacher for a couple years. Reviewer for Textbooks for Compliance with NCLB. Writing Tutor. Music Instructor. Public and Private Primary through Secondary Education product. Private and Public University product. Internationally travelled, bi-lingual and can pick up a couple other languages. I can often guess a person's Ethnic lineage based on their face, complexion, and last name. All of these pursuits come from a love of learning and turning around and sharing.
Localized Education is key. What works in San Diego, CA may not work well in Nashua, NH.
If there's one reason for a person like me to be pissy about the state of affairs in the United States, it's that I'm more qualified than Betsy DeVos to be the Secretary of Education. If that doesn't scare the crap out of smart people with the ability to change things, then we're straight up doomed.
Invest in Private Prisons.
I wouldn't draw any conclusions from this.
This is literally the first time I've read an article with a line similar to:
“They have the power to change policy, but no corresponding check on that power,” said Megan Tompkins-Stange,
“We should be asking a lot more questions about who is behind the curtain,” Ms. Davis said.
True, meaningful educational impact happens when you can deliver authentic instruction -- instruction that creates a really tight feedback loop between the learner, the instructor, and the subject. We have tried with technology to mimick that at scale. Khan Academy and online quizzes is not a new idea; B.F. Skinner had a device doing this since at least the 60s. It works to stuff CEOs' pockets with money, feed the ever-larger administrative behemoth that schools are becoming, etc. Results, not so much.
There is no greater evidence than the fact that schools are probably the only sector which has literally gotten less efficient over the past decades; we literally spend more money per pupil for worse outcomes. The incentives in public education are absolutely abysmal, and we've seemingly done everything in the book to strip the voice of students and families in this sector.
As schools, our feedback loop between our own quality is practically nonexistent. No wonder we don't do right by these kids. Lots of money to be made selling software, though.
That is to say, you can throw all the money and toys and methods you want at it. What you need, is people actually paying attention.
And paid to pay attention. So that they are not overwhelmed with workload nor how they are going to pay their own bills and take care of their own families.
In other words, invest in the people providing the education. Choose them wisely, and empower them. The rest is just various forms of b.s.
My beliefs are somewhat extreme in this topic, but I will share anyway. In broad strokes:
1. One of the biggest problems is that education has come to be ruled by the administrators. They are not servant leaders, rather they are aristocrats. Their pawns are students, faculty, parents, and taxpayers. These stakeholders need more influence in the decision-making process.
2. Mandatory schooling (both explicit and implicit) could easily stop at 8th grade with the goal of basic numeracy and literacy as well as fundamental learning skills. These skills will provide enough education for the graduates to function in society as well as move forward in the education system if/when they choose to do so. Currently, most of high school (and middle school, frankly) is just very expensive and inefficient baby sitting.
3. That said, secondary, tertiary, and trade-based education should be widely available, of high quality, and low price -- probably subsidized heavily by the state -- throughout a person's life. Many people do not realize the value of education and learning until they are older, and our current system does a relatively poor job accommodating these people.
4. Overall curriculum design needs to focus on autonomous learning (touched on in the article). Note that this means that the learner takes responsibility for their learning, not someone else (e.g., teachers). Also note that this does not obviate teachers, rather it just makes them one of many sources of knowledge/learning. Anecdotally, I have seen this type of system pull off what many would consider to be miracles.
5. Learning in general should be much more contextualized and (when practicable) experiential. Many/most students do not see how the current curriculum content applies to them. The current content seems to be related to, and largely is a product of, the type of education upper middle class people want. Folks from other walks of life actually have a lot of curiosity and a high capacity to learn, but taking part in the current curriculum would turn them into an alien within their community (e.g., non-native English speaker being beaten/abused for speaking English well). Few people are willing to do this.
6. Assessment should lean much more heavily on portfolios than on standardized tests. Don't get me wrong, standardized tests have their place, but currently they are overused and are often times misused.
This is an issue I very passionate about. Please let me know via a response here if you would like to discuss this more.
This is the opposite of corporate social responsibility, yall. Do your freakin job, Benioff!