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I think all these billionaires are caught up in the idea that the next Einstein is wasting their time in traditional schools, mostly based on the billionaires m

I think all these billionaires are caught up in the idea that the next Einstein is wasting their time in traditional schools, mostly based on the billionaires memory that their time was wasted at school and their belief that they were geniuses whose time was wasted. I was a smart, bookish kid with ADHD who was last in school decades ago. It seems like such hubris to even think I have any answers about how to fix the school system in 2023 let alone my personal experiences would have some bearing on optimal modern educational methods.

Zamicol 3y ago
It doesn't take a genius to figure out why so many schools are failing. Schools are failing for obvious reasons.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  Such as?
  - Zamicol 3y ago
    I went to a public middle school that's the among the lowest funded in the State of Colorado, yet it has frequently ranked in the top 10 in the State of Colorado (frequently in the top 1 or 2 for math and reading) and it's the top rated school in the city. It's also located in Pueblo, a town of historic poverty relative to the rest of Colorado. The problems with the system are obvious: lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. They also had the fewest schooling hours of any school in the district and almost no homework. It was ran by a genius who cared and was willing to say "no" to the dogma of his teaching peers.
    - Ensorceled 3y ago
      > lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Ah, the old standards. These are the same reasons schools were failing 50 years ago. > Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. Actually it does, Colorado pays below average for teachers. If I paid below average for developers, I'd probably have bad developers.
      - Zamicol 3y ago
        As I said, that school is the among the lowest funded in the State of Colorado, yet it has frequently ranked in the top 10 in the State of Colorado. How is that explained?
        Ensorceled 3y ago
        You said it yourself "Genius Principal"! What happens when they retire? Sure, occasionally you will get excellence despite a lack of resources but that's sheer luck. My high school was exceptional due to a confluence of factors leading to a great staff but it has faded in the past 40 years and is now only average in our province.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - eertami 3y ago
      > Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems > bad teachers Perhaps if teaching offered higher salaries, you would get better teachers. Why would a talented teacher work in a US state school if they could instead get a job in the tech industry or work in a foreign private school?
      - Zamicol 3y ago
        That school, Connect, allocates much less money on things that don't matter so they can pay their teachers well. Prioritizing teacher pay is a must, but their teachers are also not outrageously payed. It's a matter of priority. Teacher pay should be a priority.
    - hardware2win 3y ago
      >not focusing on grades Thats good. Grades are like scrum story points Irrelevant imaginary metric.
  - jkepler 3y ago
    Such as the politicization of everything, or the abandoning of teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills in favor of woke political agendas, or perhaps due to the hollowing out of cultural/religious consensus and the corresponding doubt's that there is any unifying factor in the academy. After all, universities were born in the high to late middle ages out of the conviction that knowledge found its unifying point in the Word of God's revelation of Jesus, but today the vast majority of (western) universities have long abandoned the pursuit of truth. Theology, once seen as the queen of the sciences, is generally regarded as less useful and less true than fiction writing.
  - lmm 3y ago
    Putting people into classes based on age not ability. It's worse for everyone, we know this, but it's impossible to get it changed.
  - strken 3y ago
    My parents were both teachers, though not in the US, and they point to: + A decline in respect for teachers and the institution of teaching + Lower qualifications required to become a teacher relative to the general population[0] + More classroom hours and larger class sizes + The previous factors plus lower pay have been driving a systemic brain drain for decades, which forms a positive feedback loop to drive respect down even further + Greater opportunities elsewhere, along with the removal of studentships and incentives, make teaching less useful as a socioeconomic stepping stone + Inability for students who don't want to be in school to leave and get a job + Parents who are uninvolved in discipline or who actively counter it + Inability to remove disruptive students from classrooms, which is getting worse over time, as alternative pathways to school are no longer viable and disabled schools are shutting down[1] + An increasingly hostile environment where clearly false allegations are "taken seriously" to the point of not supporting accused teachers even after they're exonerated[2] + Far fewer men in the classroom than women, which has (unfair) effects on the perception of teaching as a "caring profession"[3] and on collective bargaining, as well as practical matters like boys lacking role models, and a worsened ability to verbally (or even physically) stop really disruptive students[4] [0] The actual requirements have gone up, but a bachelor's is relatively less prestigious than a diploma used to be. 50 years ago about 30% of people stayed in school, while it's up around 80% now. The US stats are very different, of course, and this might not apply there. [1] Not that disabled students are all disruptive, but one historical way to remove or manage disruptive students was to slap an autism/ADHD diagnosis on them, qualifying them for a classroom helper or to go to a special school. [2] This may just have been a single incident that happened to a family friend, but it was bad. [3] E.g. an underpaid one. [4] My parents talk more in terms of senior teachers helping with classroom control in a wing, but grudgingly admit that it occasionally helps if some of those senior teachers are large and look strong.
- krisoft 3y ago
  > It doesn't take a genius to figure out why so many schools are failing. I guess only a non-genius would ask: are schools failing? How do you know, and under which metric do you consider them failing?
BirAdam 3y ago
Eh, many of the tech billionaires/millionaires never completed their college educations.
_jal 3y ago
I completely agree. The first things these people with far more money than capability for introspection miss is that education is not about that next Einstein. It is about integrating the median student. If you want to find diapered brilliance, you should probably be building a network of talent spotters, or something like Fast Grants. Not attempting to build robot tutors.
- xp84 3y ago
  > the median student Oh boy. I feel like people who are active in the education policy world will come for you with pitchforks for suggesting that. Arguably the median student is exactly what public school kinda does fine with today. Such kids basically learn what they need to and probably get into an ok college and have a decent chance in life. However, the parents of the kids with learning disabilities or neurodivergent brains are screaming that it doesn’t work for their kids, who are absolutely floundering and cannot learn in the “median kid” environment. Meanwhile the parents of the gifted kids, the ones who truly are having their time wasted “learning” with those far beneath their own abilities, are also complaining bitterly that their kids aren’t being challenged enough, and they resent any attempts to temper the speed of the curriculum to allow the bottom half of the class to finish grasping the material. Neither of these groups is well-served - and it seems like any changes made to help one of them frequently hurts the other. (I don’t have any answers for any of these groups, which is why I’m not involved in telling anyone how to do education!)
  - _jal 3y ago
    > Arguably the median student is exactly what public school kinda does fine with today That's pretty much what I meant. It was a descriptive claim, not a normative one. > I feel like people who are active in the education policy world will come for you with pitchforks for suggesting that. None of them are directly active in ed policy, but academics are overrepresented in my circle of friends. I know. There are even some not terrible for them to reject my claims. I'm just someone outside looking in, I don't have their priors. (Or their expertise.)
  - erik_seaberg 3y ago
smelendez 3y ago
There's a great book by a Berkeley professor about the One Laptop Per Child project called The Charisma Machine (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/) that focuses deeply on this point. It is interesting, though, because this is how a lot of adults with flexibility work: In a coffee shop or coworking space, sometimes using headphones, on their own laptops, around other people but not collaborating or interacting that much with them. But then, most of us wouldn't work in a coffee shop full of restless kids or teens.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  Sure, as an adult, with goals and maturity and fully developed brains ... this works. As a pre-teen? > But then, most of us wouldn't work in a coffee shop full of restless kids or teens. Also, COVID remote learning kind of showed most kids can't work without external systems.

Zamicol 3y ago

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why so many schools are failing. Schools are failing for obvious reasons.

Ensorceled 3y ago
Such as?
- Zamicol 3y ago
  I went to a public middle school that's the among the lowest funded in the State of Colorado, yet it has frequently ranked in the top 10 in the State of Colorado (frequently in the top 1 or 2 for math and reading) and it's the top rated school in the city. It's also located in Pueblo, a town of historic poverty relative to the rest of Colorado. The problems with the system are obvious: lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. They also had the fewest schooling hours of any school in the district and almost no homework. It was ran by a genius who cared and was willing to say "no" to the dogma of his teaching peers.
  - Ensorceled 3y ago
    > lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Ah, the old standards. These are the same reasons schools were failing 50 years ago. > Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. Actually it does, Colorado pays below average for teachers. If I paid below average for developers, I'd probably have bad developers.
    - Zamicol 3y ago
      As I said, that school is the among the lowest funded in the State of Colorado, yet it has frequently ranked in the top 10 in the State of Colorado. How is that explained?
      - Ensorceled 3y ago
        You said it yourself "Genius Principal"! What happens when they retire? Sure, occasionally you will get excellence despite a lack of resources but that's sheer luck. My high school was exceptional due to a confluence of factors leading to a great staff but it has faded in the past 40 years and is now only average in our province.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - eertami 3y ago
    > Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems > bad teachers Perhaps if teaching offered higher salaries, you would get better teachers. Why would a talented teacher work in a US state school if they could instead get a job in the tech industry or work in a foreign private school?
    - Zamicol 3y ago
      That school, Connect, allocates much less money on things that don't matter so they can pay their teachers well. Prioritizing teacher pay is a must, but their teachers are also not outrageously payed. It's a matter of priority. Teacher pay should be a priority.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    >not focusing on grades Thats good. Grades are like scrum story points Irrelevant imaginary metric.
- jkepler 3y ago
  Such as the politicization of everything, or the abandoning of teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills in favor of woke political agendas, or perhaps due to the hollowing out of cultural/religious consensus and the corresponding doubt's that there is any unifying factor in the academy. After all, universities were born in the high to late middle ages out of the conviction that knowledge found its unifying point in the Word of God's revelation of Jesus, but today the vast majority of (western) universities have long abandoned the pursuit of truth. Theology, once seen as the queen of the sciences, is generally regarded as less useful and less true than fiction writing.
- lmm 3y ago
  Putting people into classes based on age not ability. It's worse for everyone, we know this, but it's impossible to get it changed.
- strken 3y ago
  My parents were both teachers, though not in the US, and they point to: + A decline in respect for teachers and the institution of teaching + Lower qualifications required to become a teacher relative to the general population[0] + More classroom hours and larger class sizes + The previous factors plus lower pay have been driving a systemic brain drain for decades, which forms a positive feedback loop to drive respect down even further + Greater opportunities elsewhere, along with the removal of studentships and incentives, make teaching less useful as a socioeconomic stepping stone + Inability for students who don't want to be in school to leave and get a job + Parents who are uninvolved in discipline or who actively counter it + Inability to remove disruptive students from classrooms, which is getting worse over time, as alternative pathways to school are no longer viable and disabled schools are shutting down[1] + An increasingly hostile environment where clearly false allegations are "taken seriously" to the point of not supporting accused teachers even after they're exonerated[2] + Far fewer men in the classroom than women, which has (unfair) effects on the perception of teaching as a "caring profession"[3] and on collective bargaining, as well as practical matters like boys lacking role models, and a worsened ability to verbally (or even physically) stop really disruptive students[4] [0] The actual requirements have gone up, but a bachelor's is relatively less prestigious than a diploma used to be. 50 years ago about 30% of people stayed in school, while it's up around 80% now. The US stats are very different, of course, and this might not apply there. [1] Not that disabled students are all disruptive, but one historical way to remove or manage disruptive students was to slap an autism/ADHD diagnosis on them, qualifying them for a classroom helper or to go to a special school. [2] This may just have been a single incident that happened to a family friend, but it was bad. [3] E.g. an underpaid one. [4] My parents talk more in terms of senior teachers helping with classroom control in a wing, but grudgingly admit that it occasionally helps if some of those senior teachers are large and look strong.
krisoft 3y ago
> It doesn't take a genius to figure out why so many schools are failing. I guess only a non-genius would ask: are schools failing? How do you know, and under which metric do you consider them failing?

BirAdam 3y ago

Eh, many of the tech billionaires/millionaires never completed their college educations.

_jal 3y ago

I completely agree. The first things these people with far more money than capability for introspection miss is that education is not about that next Einstein. It is about integrating the median student. If you want to find diapered brilliance, you should probably be building a network of talent spotters, or something like Fast Grants. Not attempting to build robot tutors.

xp84 3y ago
> the median student Oh boy. I feel like people who are active in the education policy world will come for you with pitchforks for suggesting that. Arguably the median student is exactly what public school kinda does fine with today. Such kids basically learn what they need to and probably get into an ok college and have a decent chance in life. However, the parents of the kids with learning disabilities or neurodivergent brains are screaming that it doesn’t work for their kids, who are absolutely floundering and cannot learn in the “median kid” environment. Meanwhile the parents of the gifted kids, the ones who truly are having their time wasted “learning” with those far beneath their own abilities, are also complaining bitterly that their kids aren’t being challenged enough, and they resent any attempts to temper the speed of the curriculum to allow the bottom half of the class to finish grasping the material. Neither of these groups is well-served - and it seems like any changes made to help one of them frequently hurts the other. (I don’t have any answers for any of these groups, which is why I’m not involved in telling anyone how to do education!)
- _jal 3y ago
  > Arguably the median student is exactly what public school kinda does fine with today That's pretty much what I meant. It was a descriptive claim, not a normative one. > I feel like people who are active in the education policy world will come for you with pitchforks for suggesting that. None of them are directly active in ed policy, but academics are overrepresented in my circle of friends. I know. There are even some not terrible for them to reject my claims. I'm just someone outside looking in, I don't have their priors. (Or their expertise.)
- erik_seaberg 3y ago

smelendez 3y ago

There's a great book by a Berkeley professor about the One Laptop Per Child project called The Charisma Machine (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537445/the-charisma-machine/) that focuses deeply on this point. It is interesting, though, because this is how a lot of adults with flexibility work: In a coffee shop or coworking space, sometimes using headphones, on their own laptops, around other people but not collaborating or interacting that much with them. But then, most of us wouldn't work in a coffee shop full of restless kids or teens.

Ensorceled 3y ago
Sure, as an adult, with goals and maturity and fully developed brains ... this works. As a pre-teen? > But then, most of us wouldn't work in a coffee shop full of restless kids or teens. Also, COVID remote learning kind of showed most kids can't work without external systems.