5 ms·

Why School Reform Is Impossible

19 points by b-man 17y ago

TomOfTTB 17y ago
I'd offer this as a rebuttal to his conclusion... http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11653 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11653 When individual reformers can't change things you need systematic reform. That's exactly where education is right now.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  I don't know why the ideas of market-provided educational services are considered so radical and receive so little consideration by smart people. I find the arguments for school choice and loosening the grip of the education monopoly very compelling. And the example of programs like the DC Opportunity Scholarship Fund are very powerful (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7FS5B-CynM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7FS5B-CynM). But these ideas have very little uptake. There seems to be no political will to do anything but what we have been doing all along, except try harder.
  - dpatru 17y ago
    School choice is rejected because the people who have the most to lose from it, public school employees, are very organized and those who stand to gain, parents, are not organized.
tokenadult 17y ago
Surely there are business opportunities for hackers in attempts to improve education by "Darwinian design."
- araneae 17y ago
  The problem is that we don't have a good metric for what a good education is. Anytime you try to come up with one and enforce it, like No Child Left Behind, someone doesn't like it. In that Alan Greenspan book that was posted, he remarked that his father was infuriated that some of his homework involved painstakingly coloring in maps for hours, because he considered it useless. I don't know about history, but in art classes we would painstakingly spend hours making little patches of different textures. And do things like draw without looking at the page. One person's waste of time is another person's education. We might be able to come up with the best education to get someone into med school, but it's much harder to come up with an education that is most likely to make someone "successful."
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Perhaps (and I think this agrees with TomOfTTB's point in his comment) the problem is assuming that if all people receive the same education, then they have all received a good education. This seems to be the assumption built into current state laws about compulsory schooling. If people have power to shop, they don't all eat the same foods or wear the same wardrobes. Neither should we expect learners with the power to shop to all choose the same educations. As you correctly say, "One person's waste of time is another person's education." (By the way, that mention of drawing exercises is an especially apt example.)
    - yardie 17y ago
      Primary and secondary school should provide enough education to get you started and after that get out the way. We make choices in eating because we are knowledgeable enough to decide what makes a good choice. But the curriculum of schools is just insane. Fatter years, they add more classes, leaner years they cut back to the basics. The kids are caught in the middle of these 12 year experiments. And the results can't be seen for atleast 20 years. Some schools want to prepare students for college and others just want to get off the D-list of NCLB. If anything schools should do what they were outlined to do 200 years ago. Provide a baseline of education. If you want additional classes provide them after school or on the weekends. If you've passed the baseline then there is no need to stick around for 2-3 years. Get out, go to college or get an apprenticeship.
      - dpatru 17y ago
        I think schools are more about providing jobs to school employees and babysitting (keeping kids safely out of the way) than they are about education.
jseliger 17y ago
The structure of School is so deeply rooted that one reacts to deviations from it as one would to a grammatically deviant utterance: Both feel wrong on a level deeper than one's ability to formulate reasons. The problem with comments like this is that they depend on what you mean by "structure." Although I want to agree with it, I do so only because I think of "structure" as the basic idea behind the school day: you go to class for six to eight hours, divided into chunks of about an hour each and by subject, and then you go home. As near as I can tell, that's been the basic form of school since the formalization of public education. But one could easily be talking about structure as something else, like the way teachers are hired and paid. One problem with the idea of reforming a school's "grammar" is that a) schools are so vast and b) the stakeholders in schools, most notably teachers and their unions, have a greater stake in schools than any other. That's one reason I linked to all the articles here: http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get in a post on how "Susan Engel doesn’t get the problems with schools, but she’ll tell us to “Teach Your Teachers Well” anyway." The problems with public education are largely structural, but probably have more to do with the way teachers are rewarded and incentivized than any other factor. At least that's what the educational research of the last decade or so seems to show. Although you might over time be able to change that, I'm not sure you'll be able to change everything. For example, lots of people complain (justifiably) about grade inflation and other aspects that are problematic about grades. But what are you supposed to do instead? There's not anything major or obvious, as discussed here: http://jseliger.com/2010/02/17/the-validity-of-grades http://jseliger.com/2010/02/17/the-validity-of-grades .
- euroclydon 17y ago
  There is one single aspect of the public school system, which if removed, would make schools more productive, their material less watered down, and all children more happy and well educated. That single aspect is: compulsion. If the kids who do not want to be there, were not forced to, the mission of teachers would move away from what it is now: discipline, and back to what it was before compulsion, education.

19 points by b-man 17y ago

I'd offer this as a rebuttal to his conclusion... http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11653 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11653 When individual reformers can't change things you need systematic reform. That's exactly where education is right now.

jacoblyles 17y ago
I don't know why the ideas of market-provided educational services are considered so radical and receive so little consideration by smart people. I find the arguments for school choice and loosening the grip of the education monopoly very compelling. And the example of programs like the DC Opportunity Scholarship Fund are very powerful (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7FS5B-CynM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7FS5B-CynM). But these ideas have very little uptake. There seems to be no political will to do anything but what we have been doing all along, except try harder.
- dpatru 17y ago
  School choice is rejected because the people who have the most to lose from it, public school employees, are very organized and those who stand to gain, parents, are not organized.

tokenadult 17y ago

Surely there are business opportunities for hackers in attempts to improve education by "Darwinian design."

araneae 17y ago
The problem is that we don't have a good metric for what a good education is. Anytime you try to come up with one and enforce it, like No Child Left Behind, someone doesn't like it. In that Alan Greenspan book that was posted, he remarked that his father was infuriated that some of his homework involved painstakingly coloring in maps for hours, because he considered it useless. I don't know about history, but in art classes we would painstakingly spend hours making little patches of different textures. And do things like draw without looking at the page. One person's waste of time is another person's education. We might be able to come up with the best education to get someone into med school, but it's much harder to come up with an education that is most likely to make someone "successful."
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Perhaps (and I think this agrees with TomOfTTB's point in his comment) the problem is assuming that if all people receive the same education, then they have all received a good education. This seems to be the assumption built into current state laws about compulsory schooling. If people have power to shop, they don't all eat the same foods or wear the same wardrobes. Neither should we expect learners with the power to shop to all choose the same educations. As you correctly say, "One person's waste of time is another person's education." (By the way, that mention of drawing exercises is an especially apt example.)
  - yardie 17y ago
    Primary and secondary school should provide enough education to get you started and after that get out the way. We make choices in eating because we are knowledgeable enough to decide what makes a good choice. But the curriculum of schools is just insane. Fatter years, they add more classes, leaner years they cut back to the basics. The kids are caught in the middle of these 12 year experiments. And the results can't be seen for atleast 20 years. Some schools want to prepare students for college and others just want to get off the D-list of NCLB. If anything schools should do what they were outlined to do 200 years ago. Provide a baseline of education. If you want additional classes provide them after school or on the weekends. If you've passed the baseline then there is no need to stick around for 2-3 years. Get out, go to college or get an apprenticeship.
    - dpatru 17y ago
      I think schools are more about providing jobs to school employees and babysitting (keeping kids safely out of the way) than they are about education.

jseliger 17y ago

The structure of School is so deeply rooted that one reacts to deviations from it as one would to a grammatically deviant utterance: Both feel wrong on a level deeper than one's ability to formulate reasons. The problem with comments like this is that they depend on what you mean by "structure." Although I want to agree with it, I do so only because I think of "structure" as the basic idea behind the school day: you go to class for six to eight hours, divided into chunks of about an hour each and by subject, and then you go home. As near as I can tell, that's been the basic form of school since the formalization of public education. But one could easily be talking about structure as something else, like the way teachers are hired and paid. One problem with the idea of reforming a school's "grammar" is that a) schools are so vast and b) the stakeholders in schools, most notably teachers and their unions, have a greater stake in schools than any other. That's one reason I linked to all the articles here: http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get in a post on how "Susan Engel doesn’t get the problems with schools, but she’ll tell us to “Teach Your Teachers Well” anyway." The problems with public education are largely structural, but probably have more to do with the way teachers are rewarded and incentivized than any other factor. At least that's what the educational research of the last decade or so seems to show. Although you might over time be able to change that, I'm not sure you'll be able to change everything. For example, lots of people complain (justifiably) about grade inflation and other aspects that are problematic about grades. But what are you supposed to do instead? There's not anything major or obvious, as discussed here: http://jseliger.com/2010/02/17/the-validity-of-grades http://jseliger.com/2010/02/17/the-validity-of-grades .

euroclydon 17y ago
There is one single aspect of the public school system, which if removed, would make schools more productive, their material less watered down, and all children more happy and well educated. That single aspect is: compulsion. If the kids who do not want to be there, were not forced to, the mission of teachers would move away from what it is now: discipline, and back to what it was before compulsion, education.