9 ms·

While I agree with the article about the problems of profit-driven schools, the whole situation (and the article in parts) points to a imho bigger problem in mo

by corty 6y ago

While I agree with the article about the problems of profit-driven schools, the whole situation (and the article in parts) points to a imho bigger problem in most education systems: Profit-driven schools cater to the more able, easier to educate and more intelligent pupils. Why can they do that? Because public schools almost everywhere insist on coeducation of the most and least gifted. This is severely holding back and limiting the development of gifted children and imho needs to be dealt with.

UrsaMedius 6y ago
What you call "most and least gifted" is in my opinion better described as "most and least privileged". And coeducation of students of different levels of privilege just seems like a good thing, nothing that needs to be dealt with.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- viceroyalbean 6y ago
  The issue, in my experience, is that you have to compromise somewhere. That means either leaving the higher performers to be bored, or leaving the lower performers not achieving the minimum. Neither seems like a desirable outcome.
  - rusabd 6y ago
    Well, we can always f*ck up both groups. It seems this is the current approach.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    No, you don't have to compromise at all. Personal experience: I had a great math teacher in mid school; he gathered the best students from the 5 classes in that year in one class and he set the baseline quite high. For the last 2 years half of our class was taking the prizes at all the inter-school competitions in the city and a few of us from the nationals. Most of that class went to the best high schools in the city and most are today great doctors (medical) or scientists. Imagine that did not happen in mid-school and everybody would be an average Joe - that is a loss for humanity, not just for us. Try to read Ender's Game (the book, the movie is terrible). This is very tough, but if you need great people you can help by creating the conditions to grow them. How many Einsteins wasted their lives achieving nothing and how earlier curing diseases and improving technologies was possible if that waste did not happen? The compromise is to waste the resources that we have in the name of equality; we cannot make everyone smart, we only can make them all stupid, so let's do equality.
    - viceroyalbean 6y ago
      If I'm understanding your story correctly your math teacher did the opposite of what the person I responded to said - he separated out the high performers, creating an environment that allows them to thrive and achieve high results. This is great, but what about the ones who weren't picked into the high performing class? There is nothing saying you can't have good classes for both high and low performers, but with schools that have limited resources it often works out to a poor medium where no one really thrives (hence the caveat of 'in my experience' in my comment).
      - AdrianB1 6y ago
        The ones that weren't picked in the high performing class had the same teacher, but they only studied what was in the standard manual, they did not go above and beyond what they were capable of. At the same time they were not pulling back the ones more capable.
- corty 6y ago
  Of course higher intelligence is a privilege, as is higher sportive ability and other attributes given to you from birth. This includes your own personal attributes as well as the privilege that comes from your family's wealth and status. But actually, the word "privilege" muddles the waters, because those are two very different things. I agree that schools should not differentiate based on families' status and wealth. Schools should treat poor and rich children the same. However, schools should never treat stupid and intelligent children the same. Not everyone is cut out to be a rocket surgeon. But your argument means that we should hold back all future rocket surgeons and bring them to a lower level of privilege, i.e. dumb them down. This is neither in the interest of the children (stupid as well as intelligent ones) nor is it in the interest of society. We do need rocket surgeons...
  - fabbari 6y ago
    Schools do not treat stupid and intelligent children the same, teachers - with few exceptions - do. Not because they are evil, but because to be able to cater to the different levels of intelligence and the variation in interests that you will naturally find in a random sample of children they require the time and opportunities to do so. As long as we treat teachers as the least important workers, without acknowledging the critical work they do [0], have classes that have more pupils than a teacher can follow individually in a meaningful way and consider education "an expense" that needs reduction, rather than "an investment" we will not have a proper education system. On the flip side: an uneducated population is easier to sway, so there is not a lot of pressure on the political establishment to change things. [0] Lack of self awareness - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Er2_n9pXUAMZnyq.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Er2_n9pXUAMZnyq.jpg:large
    - corty 6y ago
      Paying teachers more is beside the point. A well-paid teacher isn't suddenly a better teacher just because it earns more money. The things we should invest in are more teachers, smaller and more separated classes and better teachers' education. Only the last one correlates (somewhat) with teachers' salaries.
    - 6y ago
- gedy 6y ago
  No, you can also be underprivileged and gifted/talented (assuming you mean economic or racial privilege).
  - lukeschlather 6y ago
    If you're underprivileged no test is going to detect your gifts. You're going to be hungry, have poor sleep, possibly abused, all sorts of things that will make you look like you're less capable than you are.
    - username90 6y ago
      Most poor kids get fed and don't get beaten by their parents, so those factors can't be what explains the huge difference.
  - UrsaMedius 6y ago
    This was basically the exact point I was trying to make.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  How is this a good thing? No parent would want their gifted child to be held back because there are other less gifted children in the class who will hold their child back. It is easy to understand their point of view. When you say ‘just seems like a good thing’...it begs the question.. ‘for whom’
yoelo 6y ago
Profit-driven schools don't cater to gifted kids. They cater to kids with rich and highly educated parents. The goal is to do less, to extract more profit.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  Neither. Parents don't pay for schools in Sweden, so profit driven schools are just as free as other schools. Also, they are not elite schools in any sense, they are just slightly better organised and attract students that care enough about their education to select a different school than the default. Sweden is not the US, it's quite different.
  - yoelo 6y ago
    What you're saying, especially the part about "slightly better organised and attract students that care enough about their education" is talking point rhethoric and not anything substantiated in fact. The schools get a fixed amount of money per student from the state. If you have students with high socio-economic status, you can get away with having fewer teachers per student, as well has having teachers that aren't properly educated. One of the more prominent for-profit charter schools is the "International English School" (IES). They aren't only "English" for marketing purposes (because being an "English" school means you can do more marketing about teaching with "higher discipline"), they are also "English" because that allows them to get away with recruiting more teachers from abroad. This is what for-profit charter schools are about. You can't "optimize" what's essentially a service institution. You can only cut to better your margins. Or cheat, which they do. Not only by having fewer authorized teachers, but also by straight up inveting better grades for students, which is something that helps with marketing (see a pattern here?).
    - Grustaf 6y ago
      In the Swedish system, all schools cost the same: 0. So there is no reason to target specifically wealthy students, all students are worth the same to you as school owner. In fact, they can't even accept students based on grades, there are only 4 criteria they are allowed to use when selecting students: location, time in queue, siblings in the school and whether you went to pre-school there. So what you end up with are students with parents that have enough forethought to put your name down early on. > You can't "optimize" what's essentially a service institution. I'm not sure what you mean by this, obviously you could in theory most definitely optimise the education. That is what private schools here in Denmark tend to do.
twelvechairs 6y ago
Yes and no. Many aren't less 'gifted' just less able - they don't have the right language background for school, dont have the easy ability to study at home, etc. 'Grammar schools' (or something similar of a different name) are reasonably common in UK and its colonies and attempt what you are asking for - with very well documented positives and negatives. There is definitely a massive issue of equality where children feel they aren't in the 'good' school this becomes an excuse for not bothering with school and then life. Equal education brings a lot of benefits to society at large.
imtringued 6y ago
>This is severely holding back and limiting the development of gifted children and imho needs to be dealt with. The article describes how for profit schools specifically pick "gifted" (aka easy to teach) children and then cut teaching staff to take the difference as profit. Yes, these students will still get better grades and thus make the for profit school look better than the public school but they absolutely fail to cater to the needs of "gifted" children.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  Schools don't pick students. They can't even discriminate on grades.
captain_price7 6y ago
Assuming it's possible to find out "intelligent" vs not primary/middle schools kids. We all here agree that finding talented developers is hard- meaning 22+ yr old adults. Isn't the job like 10 times harder for say 8 yr old kids?
- username90 6y ago
  > We all here agree that finding talented developers is hard When people say that they mean it is hard to find a talented developer who is looking for a job paying significantly below what he is worth.
- ihsw 6y ago
  A good start is taking a harder look at students that go to school to raise hell, and there are many. They have an uncanny ability to destroy the teaching ability of teachers and the learning ability of students. A good start is taking those troublesome students out of the classrooms of public schools/district schools without regard to the inevitable protestations of "concerned citizens."
lou1306 6y ago
School should also teach kids that they live in a complex society, where people have different backgrounds and, yes, different skill sets. I'm afraid that relegating "more gifted" kids (whatever this means) into a world of their own is not only harmful to those who are left out, but to them as well.
- corty 6y ago
  Getting beaten up by the differently-gifted jocks is beneficial?
  - lou1306 6y ago
    Posting snarky replies on HN is beneficial?
    - corty 6y ago
      I was trying to prompt the obviously necessary reflection on what you said. But I'll make it explicit, if irony is considered too snarky: Exposing more gifted children to less gifted ones might be beneficial in small doses, it isn't in general. One group will always be detrimental to the other: Because the more gifted children get bored, learn to minimax everything and to procrastinate because nothing really requires their full application and attention. Maybe you give them harder tasks, but seeing that in the presence of the less gifted children they can also get by with less work if they just play dumb, they will learn to adapt and play dumb. Tons of psychological problems like procrastination and impostor syndrome (that HN likes to complain about) are caused and worsened by these mechanisms. If you do the converse and do your teaching on a level appropriate for the more gifted children, the less gifted ones will be in over their heads. They won't learn most of the curriculum, but they will learn their inferiority and helplessness. They will also learn to hate the more gifted children, and seek an outlet through violent means if possible. I suppose a good part of the HN population has been on the receiving end of that one. If you need examples where coeducation is never done, look no further than the school's choir, orchestra or sports teams. If you aren't in the top group of abilities for those activities you are either not selected, or selected for the second team. With good reason.
red_admiral 6y ago
I think the thesis of Senator Warren's book The Two-Income Trap (2004) is that in the US, where you don't have the problem with profit-driven schools (or at least had it much less back then), you instead have the problem that the middle classes will flee to the suburbs to get their kids into good schools (or, as another poster has put it, "not-bad" schools). The schools may be public, but as long as you need a certain income to live in the district, that serves the same purpose. Book review by Scott Alexander here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-income-trap/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-in...)
japhyr 6y ago
This is not always the case. There's a growing number of states in the US that allow state education funding to follow a student wherever they go. Wherever these laws arise, profit-based schools appear and attempt to draw in as many students as they can. Often times it's the least educated, least privileged people who are pulled into these programs. There is little or no regulation on claims these schools make in their marketing materials, so they promise the world and then dump students into large classes led by gig-economy "teachers".
IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
this is not out of the norm in NYC, especially at the low income level. Take exhibit A - success academies chain. There are about 47 in total , most around NYC. They are an independent school which only the poor can get into. So it is private but paid with tax dollars. Because it is taxpayer-funded, once you apply, they can't discriminate - the only requirement to acceptance is that you are poor. Yet the best students go there, and the school is so good that if it were a separate education system, it would be the best performing education system in the entire United States. How do they do it ? Simple - they screen parents. They make the bar really high so only the most motivated parents will jump all the hoops to get their kids in. And there is the problem - it is not the profit, but rather the fact that we refuse to accept that some kids are in a better situation to be educated than others. Whether due to better home environment, raw talent, good base, not sure. However, refusing to deal with this fact, only hurts kids. How ? Well, the alternative to Success Academies is no 10,000 poor kids receiving elite education. Let us dump those kids back to the system of mediocrity where they were condemned until 15 or so years ago. That's what equality really means unfortunately - everyone getting equally mediocre government-sanctioned education
valuearb 6y ago
Yea, thus ain’t true. When my daughter was diagnosed with autism three weeks plenty of for profit options. We ended up putting her in a charter school because it was far more flexible and attentive to our needs than public school was, where all decisions seemed to revolve around what was best for the school, not our child.

by corty 6y ago

UrsaMedius 6y ago

What you call "most and least gifted" is in my opinion better described as "most and least privileged". And coeducation of students of different levels of privilege just seems like a good thing, nothing that needs to be dealt with.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
viceroyalbean 6y ago
The issue, in my experience, is that you have to compromise somewhere. That means either leaving the higher performers to be bored, or leaving the lower performers not achieving the minimum. Neither seems like a desirable outcome.
- rusabd 6y ago
  Well, we can always f*ck up both groups. It seems this is the current approach.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  No, you don't have to compromise at all. Personal experience: I had a great math teacher in mid school; he gathered the best students from the 5 classes in that year in one class and he set the baseline quite high. For the last 2 years half of our class was taking the prizes at all the inter-school competitions in the city and a few of us from the nationals. Most of that class went to the best high schools in the city and most are today great doctors (medical) or scientists. Imagine that did not happen in mid-school and everybody would be an average Joe - that is a loss for humanity, not just for us. Try to read Ender's Game (the book, the movie is terrible). This is very tough, but if you need great people you can help by creating the conditions to grow them. How many Einsteins wasted their lives achieving nothing and how earlier curing diseases and improving technologies was possible if that waste did not happen? The compromise is to waste the resources that we have in the name of equality; we cannot make everyone smart, we only can make them all stupid, so let's do equality.
  - viceroyalbean 6y ago
    If I'm understanding your story correctly your math teacher did the opposite of what the person I responded to said - he separated out the high performers, creating an environment that allows them to thrive and achieve high results. This is great, but what about the ones who weren't picked into the high performing class? There is nothing saying you can't have good classes for both high and low performers, but with schools that have limited resources it often works out to a poor medium where no one really thrives (hence the caveat of 'in my experience' in my comment).
    - AdrianB1 6y ago
      The ones that weren't picked in the high performing class had the same teacher, but they only studied what was in the standard manual, they did not go above and beyond what they were capable of. At the same time they were not pulling back the ones more capable.
corty 6y ago
Of course higher intelligence is a privilege, as is higher sportive ability and other attributes given to you from birth. This includes your own personal attributes as well as the privilege that comes from your family's wealth and status. But actually, the word "privilege" muddles the waters, because those are two very different things. I agree that schools should not differentiate based on families' status and wealth. Schools should treat poor and rich children the same. However, schools should never treat stupid and intelligent children the same. Not everyone is cut out to be a rocket surgeon. But your argument means that we should hold back all future rocket surgeons and bring them to a lower level of privilege, i.e. dumb them down. This is neither in the interest of the children (stupid as well as intelligent ones) nor is it in the interest of society. We do need rocket surgeons...
- fabbari 6y ago
  Schools do not treat stupid and intelligent children the same, teachers - with few exceptions - do. Not because they are evil, but because to be able to cater to the different levels of intelligence and the variation in interests that you will naturally find in a random sample of children they require the time and opportunities to do so. As long as we treat teachers as the least important workers, without acknowledging the critical work they do [0], have classes that have more pupils than a teacher can follow individually in a meaningful way and consider education "an expense" that needs reduction, rather than "an investment" we will not have a proper education system. On the flip side: an uneducated population is easier to sway, so there is not a lot of pressure on the political establishment to change things. [0] Lack of self awareness - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Er2_n9pXUAMZnyq.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Er2_n9pXUAMZnyq.jpg:large
  - corty 6y ago
    Paying teachers more is beside the point. A well-paid teacher isn't suddenly a better teacher just because it earns more money. The things we should invest in are more teachers, smaller and more separated classes and better teachers' education. Only the last one correlates (somewhat) with teachers' salaries.
  - 6y ago
gedy 6y ago
No, you can also be underprivileged and gifted/talented (assuming you mean economic or racial privilege).
- lukeschlather 6y ago
  If you're underprivileged no test is going to detect your gifts. You're going to be hungry, have poor sleep, possibly abused, all sorts of things that will make you look like you're less capable than you are.
  - username90 6y ago
    Most poor kids get fed and don't get beaten by their parents, so those factors can't be what explains the huge difference.
- UrsaMedius 6y ago
  This was basically the exact point I was trying to make.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
How is this a good thing? No parent would want their gifted child to be held back because there are other less gifted children in the class who will hold their child back. It is easy to understand their point of view. When you say ‘just seems like a good thing’...it begs the question.. ‘for whom’

yoelo 6y ago

Profit-driven schools don't cater to gifted kids. They cater to kids with rich and highly educated parents. The goal is to do less, to extract more profit.

Grustaf 6y ago
Neither. Parents don't pay for schools in Sweden, so profit driven schools are just as free as other schools. Also, they are not elite schools in any sense, they are just slightly better organised and attract students that care enough about their education to select a different school than the default. Sweden is not the US, it's quite different.
- yoelo 6y ago
  What you're saying, especially the part about "slightly better organised and attract students that care enough about their education" is talking point rhethoric and not anything substantiated in fact. The schools get a fixed amount of money per student from the state. If you have students with high socio-economic status, you can get away with having fewer teachers per student, as well has having teachers that aren't properly educated. One of the more prominent for-profit charter schools is the "International English School" (IES). They aren't only "English" for marketing purposes (because being an "English" school means you can do more marketing about teaching with "higher discipline"), they are also "English" because that allows them to get away with recruiting more teachers from abroad. This is what for-profit charter schools are about. You can't "optimize" what's essentially a service institution. You can only cut to better your margins. Or cheat, which they do. Not only by having fewer authorized teachers, but also by straight up inveting better grades for students, which is something that helps with marketing (see a pattern here?).
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    In the Swedish system, all schools cost the same: 0. So there is no reason to target specifically wealthy students, all students are worth the same to you as school owner. In fact, they can't even accept students based on grades, there are only 4 criteria they are allowed to use when selecting students: location, time in queue, siblings in the school and whether you went to pre-school there. So what you end up with are students with parents that have enough forethought to put your name down early on. > You can't "optimize" what's essentially a service institution. I'm not sure what you mean by this, obviously you could in theory most definitely optimise the education. That is what private schools here in Denmark tend to do.

twelvechairs 6y ago

Yes and no. Many aren't less 'gifted' just less able - they don't have the right language background for school, dont have the easy ability to study at home, etc. 'Grammar schools' (or something similar of a different name) are reasonably common in UK and its colonies and attempt what you are asking for - with very well documented positives and negatives. There is definitely a massive issue of equality where children feel they aren't in the 'good' school this becomes an excuse for not bothering with school and then life. Equal education brings a lot of benefits to society at large.

imtringued 6y ago

>This is severely holding back and limiting the development of gifted children and imho needs to be dealt with. The article describes how for profit schools specifically pick "gifted" (aka easy to teach) children and then cut teaching staff to take the difference as profit. Yes, these students will still get better grades and thus make the for profit school look better than the public school but they absolutely fail to cater to the needs of "gifted" children.

Grustaf 6y ago
Schools don't pick students. They can't even discriminate on grades.

captain_price7 6y ago

Assuming it's possible to find out "intelligent" vs not primary/middle schools kids. We all here agree that finding talented developers is hard- meaning 22+ yr old adults. Isn't the job like 10 times harder for say 8 yr old kids?

username90 6y ago
> We all here agree that finding talented developers is hard When people say that they mean it is hard to find a talented developer who is looking for a job paying significantly below what he is worth.
ihsw 6y ago
A good start is taking a harder look at students that go to school to raise hell, and there are many. They have an uncanny ability to destroy the teaching ability of teachers and the learning ability of students. A good start is taking those troublesome students out of the classrooms of public schools/district schools without regard to the inevitable protestations of "concerned citizens."

lou1306 6y ago

School should also teach kids that they live in a complex society, where people have different backgrounds and, yes, different skill sets. I'm afraid that relegating "more gifted" kids (whatever this means) into a world of their own is not only harmful to those who are left out, but to them as well.

corty 6y ago
Getting beaten up by the differently-gifted jocks is beneficial?
- lou1306 6y ago
  Posting snarky replies on HN is beneficial?
  - corty 6y ago
    I was trying to prompt the obviously necessary reflection on what you said. But I'll make it explicit, if irony is considered too snarky: Exposing more gifted children to less gifted ones might be beneficial in small doses, it isn't in general. One group will always be detrimental to the other: Because the more gifted children get bored, learn to minimax everything and to procrastinate because nothing really requires their full application and attention. Maybe you give them harder tasks, but seeing that in the presence of the less gifted children they can also get by with less work if they just play dumb, they will learn to adapt and play dumb. Tons of psychological problems like procrastination and impostor syndrome (that HN likes to complain about) are caused and worsened by these mechanisms. If you do the converse and do your teaching on a level appropriate for the more gifted children, the less gifted ones will be in over their heads. They won't learn most of the curriculum, but they will learn their inferiority and helplessness. They will also learn to hate the more gifted children, and seek an outlet through violent means if possible. I suppose a good part of the HN population has been on the receiving end of that one. If you need examples where coeducation is never done, look no further than the school's choir, orchestra or sports teams. If you aren't in the top group of abilities for those activities you are either not selected, or selected for the second team. With good reason.

red_admiral 6y ago

I think the thesis of Senator Warren's book The Two-Income Trap (2004) is that in the US, where you don't have the problem with profit-driven schools (or at least had it much less back then), you instead have the problem that the middle classes will flee to the suburbs to get their kids into good schools (or, as another poster has put it, "not-bad" schools). The schools may be public, but as long as you need a certain income to live in the district, that serves the same purpose. Book review by Scott Alexander here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-income-trap/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-in...)

japhyr 6y ago

This is not always the case. There's a growing number of states in the US that allow state education funding to follow a student wherever they go. Wherever these laws arise, profit-based schools appear and attempt to draw in as many students as they can. Often times it's the least educated, least privileged people who are pulled into these programs. There is little or no regulation on claims these schools make in their marketing materials, so they promise the world and then dump students into large classes led by gig-economy "teachers".

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago

this is not out of the norm in NYC, especially at the low income level. Take exhibit A - success academies chain. There are about 47 in total , most around NYC. They are an independent school which only the poor can get into. So it is private but paid with tax dollars. Because it is taxpayer-funded, once you apply, they can't discriminate - the only requirement to acceptance is that you are poor. Yet the best students go there, and the school is so good that if it were a separate education system, it would be the best performing education system in the entire United States. How do they do it ? Simple - they screen parents. They make the bar really high so only the most motivated parents will jump all the hoops to get their kids in. And there is the problem - it is not the profit, but rather the fact that we refuse to accept that some kids are in a better situation to be educated than others. Whether due to better home environment, raw talent, good base, not sure. However, refusing to deal with this fact, only hurts kids. How ? Well, the alternative to Success Academies is no 10,000 poor kids receiving elite education. Let us dump those kids back to the system of mediocrity where they were condemned until 15 or so years ago. That's what equality really means unfortunately - everyone getting equally mediocre government-sanctioned education

valuearb 6y ago

Yea, thus ain’t true. When my daughter was diagnosed with autism three weeks plenty of for profit options. We ended up putting her in a charter school because it was far more flexible and attentive to our needs than public school was, where all decisions seemed to revolve around what was best for the school, not our child.