Ask HN: How would you change public education?

More power for each learner to shop for different schools. See

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6299910

for the longer version of this answer.

IMHO: Schools should be no different than grocery stores, you should be able to shop knowledge and get what you need from any school, teacher or professor. They should not force you into learning something you will never need and waste a billion people's time. They should not teach you anything beyond basics, but encourage you to research on your own for a project, a purpose, a goal that you define yourself.

Schools should build a friendly, personal and nice environment around people, strengthen the weak, speedup the slow and motivate the smart .

tl,dr:Schools should sell individual knowledge, become a more important part of the government, do startup acceleration, be your mentors and community.

I am starting by working on a pilot project[1] to put control of education standards back in the hands of educators. It's inspired by ideas that are quite familiar to the hacker crowd, but quite new to education: continuous improvement, forking, and open source.

The main problems this project addresses, and how it addresses them:

First problem: Most education standards are written by an external standards body, over which educators have little or no influence. Solution: Make it easy for educators to develop, maintain, and share sets of standards that they create and modify.

Second problem: It is difficult for a successful school to share its overall system with another school. Solution: Make it easy for one school to fork another school's system.

Third problem: Most schools have one set of graduation requirements, regardless of the fact that students have widely varying interests, aptitudes, and experiences. Solution: Allow the creation of different "pathways" through the curriculum that students can follow to earn a diploma.

Fourth problem: Many ed-tech offerings these days are built more with a profit motive in mind than with the desire to foster widespread adoption of what is best for students. Solution: Commit to a fully free and open set of tools for educators and learners.

It's a pilot project just for my school this year, but it is public and the source is available for anyone interested. It is also set up to be scaleable as soon as the pilot phase is over.

[1] http://opencompetencies.org

https://github.com/openlearningtools/opencompetencies/

hint: focus on learners, not educators