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It's like people are reinventing all the same stuff schools do at scale. Can't we be more efficient as a society? Not to mention the privilege that is draped o

It's like people are reinventing all the same stuff schools do at scale. Can't we be more efficient as a society? Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.

brightball 3y ago
Are big efficient schools better than lots of small schools?
- bloaf 3y ago
  https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-most-dangerous-equation https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-most-dangerous... This article makes a case that the statistics of small sample sizes has bamboozled many different well-intentioned groups, including the small school movement. The argument is that the fact that many of the best schools are small is an artifact of statistics (de Moivre's equation) rather than evidence small schools are superior.
giantg2 3y ago
"Can't we be more efficient as a society?" Not the way government tends to work in US.
- jgeada 3y ago
  It is wild that this is the take. This eep distrust of government is at the root of many American problems. It is deliberately created and fed, and it directly leads to some truly awful results: bad education, bad healthcare, virtually no public benefit for all the taxes we pay. But we do get world's largest military, large corporate subsidies, highest per capita healthcare costs. Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the US is controlled at a local level; every town, district, and city etc has its own rules, has to hire its own staff and pay for it all out of local taxes. And because the generally tiny constituency of each district, a very small number of nutcases can change the rules and impose their point of view for the school district. And because of the local funding, there can be huge resource and quality differences between schools for adjacent locations, just due to crossing some arbitrary jurisdiction line. It is madness, but it is a madness that is deeply loved/entrenched here.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    It's not really a wild take - that's the reality. It's not really distrust in this case either. The question was can we educate more efficiently. This case is of a group of kids being taught by parents. The parents give up half a day a week to teach one of their homes. They don't need a staff, a building, etc. You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources. And you're only partially right about local control of education. There are many federal and state regulations that dictate school policies in every facet. These would rule out many of the local "nut cases". Much of the funding is provided by the state and federal government too, depending on the state.
    - alistairSH 3y ago
      You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources. It’s only “efficient” because it doesn’t have to scale. Add non-wealthy kids into the mix. Add children with learning disabilities. All of a sudden, homeschooling fails a massive chunk of the population. Public education has served the US well for most of the post-WWII era. Let’s fix it, not abandon it.
      - giantg2 3y ago
        "Let’s fix it, not abandon it." I'm not saying to abandon it. I'm saying if the question is efficiency, that particular homeschooling model is very efficient, even if other arrangements need to be made for certain segments of the population (I would revise your "non-wealthy" statement to be "poor" as much of the middle class could make that system work). Of course there have been multiple attempts to fix the system already. So far we haven't seemed to find the solution. Back to your "non-wealthy" comment, even the current system tends to fail the poor, since parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success (this is largely tied to two parent households, but income plays a role as well).
        alistairSH 3y ago
        I'm not saying to abandon it But many people, both in this forum and in meat-space are doing just that. Perhaps not directly, but the end result of "school choice" (of which there are several flavors) will be the end of generally good-enough public education for most of the population. Toss in the latest conservative boogeymen (CRT, book bans, etc) and the outlook looks pretty gloomy. parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success I often wonder if our schools are fine, but everything else is broken. Stagnant wages, longer working hours, fewer 2 parent households, other things.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Scale isn't necessarily good. I went to a massive highschool in Texas and suspect I would have had a far better experience in a much smaller school whether it be a homeschooling co-op or a small public school (the latter didn't exist in my hometown, only massive Texan highschools). And my best classes in uni weren't the massive lectures at the University of Texas but rather small summer school classes I took in a cheap Houston community college during summer break where I could actually interact with the teacher and fellow students. Finally, HNers overuse "reinventing" as a pejorative. If you use a similar approach found in another option, and the HNer doesn't prefer your option over the other option, you're always "reinventing" it. As if some trivial thing in common between two options are the only would-be differences between them. It's not very thoughtful commentary. Home-schooling could be 100% identical to public schooling except that it's not the local school system and it would still deliver on its goal of not being the local school system. That's the whole point.
- brightball 3y ago
  "Reinventing the wheel leads to better wheels." - Don't remember where I heard it, but it's a good line.
  - vacuity 3y ago
    Evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
jononomo 3y ago
I guess if having friends, family, and a garage is "privilege", then more power to them -- they'd be idiots not to take advantage of this privilege.
pengaru 3y ago
They're not reinventing anything, they're just doing education with a better instructor:student ratio. We all know the worse the ratio the worse the education tends to be. Tutoring is a long established means of compensating for this, by supplementing sessions with a 1:1 ratio, clearly illustrating the problem.
- chasd00 3y ago
  Also, every parent and student has a direct connection to every other parent and student. Doing education "at scale" is a terrible idea.
eutropia 3y ago
“I’ll intentionally disadvantage my kids in the name of the ideal of egalitarianism” said basically no parent ever.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Eh there no clear cut answer that the alternative doesn’t disadvantage them either
- chasd00 3y ago
  I had someone (childless i might add) try to make me feel guilty for pulling my kids out of a school circling the drain and into a high performing one in the name of diversity. I told them, when the time comes, if they want to sacrifice their child on that altar then it's their decision but don't ask me to sacrifice mine.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Kind of wild and weirdly refreshing to finally see the "everyone is in it for themselves and their own" attitude on fully overt display in this article's comments. Usually it's masked behind talk of "freedom" and "individuality," but here, it's raw and out there in the open! FWIW I probably could afford to send my kid to a better private school or alternate-schooling group, withdrawing from the community and not-so-great public school system, but I don't because then I'm just another contributor to the inequality problem. We Live In A Society.
    - bigstrat2003 3y ago
      One's job as a parent isn't to use their children to solve systemic issues in society, it's to do the best they can for their children.
      - AdamN 3y ago
        There's a bit of a curve there. You may invest in a school for many community reasons if the school is near the same quality as the other option. If the quality is way below then the logic of family protection basically demands a move.
rcpt 3y ago
How do you propose we measure that efficiency? Attendance requirements? Standardized testing?
jtriangle 3y ago
Scale for scale's sake isn't necessarily ideal, or efficient. My freshman year of highschool, I was at a very large school, around 3400 in attendance. The school had been expanded several times, and was more or less at capacity. Some facilities were scaled out well, others weren't. There were fights on a weekly basis, tons of security trying to prevent that, but, they could only do so much. Lunch lines were very long, sometimes I'd be lucky to get 10 minutes to eat, mostly brought my own lunch because of that. The school was locked down a few times that year because of weapon scares. It was hell. Then my sophomore year, they cut the school in half, sending most of the students, save for the seniors, to a new school across town. That landed the school I attended at around 1400 kids, my junior year, all of the extra seniors had graduated, so, it shrank further to around 1300. From sophomore year on, there was not a single fight, everyone knew eachother and got along, they cut the security team down to just two people and they both were well liked. Test scores were way up, class sizes went from 40+ to consistently under 30, and things overall were fairly good as far as highschool goes. The new school across town was a similar situation from what I gathered from friends who went there. Now you might write that off as it was simply too crowded, but, they closed about a third of the school, which was held in portable classrooms when the split happened. Some of those were re-purposed for offices and whatnot, most got hauled away. So the actual density of people didn't really change much. We got some extra space to have PE classes in, but that was about it, space wise. You might also write that off as demographic changes, which was also not true. In fact, the roughest part of town all went to the school I attended, while the nicer, more affluent side of town, mostly got sent to the new school. The way I see it, the school was simply too large, and managing that many students day to day, and all of their needs and affairs, did not scale well, and bred inefficiency, inefficiency that existed long before I got there and everyone got to keep their job and maintain that as the status-quo. Sure the buildings/campus could physically contain them well enough, yes they were all reasonably well fed and watered, but they'd become unmanageable in such a way that was not likely to be fixed. In terms of reinvention in public education, smaller schools are a decent model, as are smaller class sizes. The real deciding factor in how well a student does however, is parent buy-in, which homeschool models have in spades, and in addition the class sizes are about as small as you can reasonably go as well. Understand of course that, parents opting to homeschool are paying taxes to public schools, while receiving no benefit, and that in addition to paying for the costs associated with homeschooling. Not all families can afford to effectively pay for schooling twice, hell, most can barely afford to exist while paying once. You could very likely fix your concerns about privilege by simply redirecting money back to homeschool parents that would normally be spent on public school. There are very well defined $/student numbers out there, so, the amounts would be fairly trivial to come up with. You could also really work around the whole right/left politically polarized bullshit factory by perhaps giving a little more to the lower income families and a little less to high income families. I think that'd sufficiently frame the nominally 'right wing' framed homeschool ideals as neutral, or at least dissonant enough that you might get most of everyone on-board provided you could get the right palms greased in state government. Understand of course that, the public education system is an enormous apparatus, and they're managing unfathomable numbers of students. They're also not setup in fairly clean competency hierarchies either. At the local level, seniority tends to be king, at the broader level, the ability to navigate the political system is the selection factor. Neither of those have anything to do with "who's talented at educating kids", and while you do have means to measure performance, those same means are also decided upon by the very same people being effectively measured, so there's an incentive to make them easier over time, as that looks politically better. So if anything, the incentives we've created are exactly backwards, and the system cannot change until those incentives are fixed. I don't really know how you'd prevent standardized testing from being watered down or trifled with. I don't really know how you'd create sufficient educator turnover with the unions in place to weed out bad teachers. More or less, the system is broken, we need bloodsports to fix it, but they've thought of that, and have prevented it from happening. I'm not holding by breath of course. People are more than likely going to write it off as "privilege" regardless of the changes proposed, with a whole list of valid enough sounding reasons that they haven't really thought through, most of which won't really have any baring on reality, and nothing will change aside from actual children being mortally wounded by poor education. That'll continue as-is, furthering the class divide, increasing unrest, increasing predatory behavior toward people who, could have been saved by better policy, but were thought more useful as sacrifices on the altar of "the other team's" apparatus. As for me? I'll be eating beans and rice and driving a 15 year old honda while putting my future children through a homeschool program regardless of what happens.
inglor_cz 3y ago
If everyone was force-fed the same dinner and compelled to wear the same clothes, there would be a lot of societal efficiency to unlock. It would also be a nightmare. People are diverse and have diverse needs. That includes kids. AFAIK the most efficient method of education is still one-to-one tutoring, the very opposite of "schools at scale". Unfortunately it is also very expensive.
- AdamN 3y ago
  It's not necessarily that expensive - at least I'd say it's within 50%. At Oxford where I did 1:1, I believe the total time with the tutors was around 5 hours per week and each tutor was probably investing 2 hours (max) per student. That would mean a tutor could handle let's say 15 students on a full load. This is about the same ratio as a teacher at a well-resourced school.
HuwFulcher 3y ago
> Can't we be more efficient as a society? Efficient in what way? Children in public schools are now doing worse than previous generations. Efficiency does not beget quality education. > Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup. If we, as a society values families more and enables single income households this wouldn’t be privilege, it could be the norm.

It's like people are reinventing all the same stuff schools do at scale. Can't we be more efficient as a society? Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.

brightball 3y ago

Are big efficient schools better than lots of small schools?

bloaf 3y ago
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-most-dangerous-equation https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-most-dangerous... This article makes a case that the statistics of small sample sizes has bamboozled many different well-intentioned groups, including the small school movement. The argument is that the fact that many of the best schools are small is an artifact of statistics (de Moivre's equation) rather than evidence small schools are superior.

giantg2 3y ago

"Can't we be more efficient as a society?" Not the way government tends to work in US.

jgeada 3y ago
It is wild that this is the take. This eep distrust of government is at the root of many American problems. It is deliberately created and fed, and it directly leads to some truly awful results: bad education, bad healthcare, virtually no public benefit for all the taxes we pay. But we do get world's largest military, large corporate subsidies, highest per capita healthcare costs. Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the US is controlled at a local level; every town, district, and city etc has its own rules, has to hire its own staff and pay for it all out of local taxes. And because the generally tiny constituency of each district, a very small number of nutcases can change the rules and impose their point of view for the school district. And because of the local funding, there can be huge resource and quality differences between schools for adjacent locations, just due to crossing some arbitrary jurisdiction line. It is madness, but it is a madness that is deeply loved/entrenched here.
- giantg2 3y ago
  It's not really a wild take - that's the reality. It's not really distrust in this case either. The question was can we educate more efficiently. This case is of a group of kids being taught by parents. The parents give up half a day a week to teach one of their homes. They don't need a staff, a building, etc. You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources. And you're only partially right about local control of education. There are many federal and state regulations that dictate school policies in every facet. These would rule out many of the local "nut cases". Much of the funding is provided by the state and federal government too, depending on the state.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources. It’s only “efficient” because it doesn’t have to scale. Add non-wealthy kids into the mix. Add children with learning disabilities. All of a sudden, homeschooling fails a massive chunk of the population. Public education has served the US well for most of the post-WWII era. Let’s fix it, not abandon it.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      "Let’s fix it, not abandon it." I'm not saying to abandon it. I'm saying if the question is efficiency, that particular homeschooling model is very efficient, even if other arrangements need to be made for certain segments of the population (I would revise your "non-wealthy" statement to be "poor" as much of the middle class could make that system work). Of course there have been multiple attempts to fix the system already. So far we haven't seemed to find the solution. Back to your "non-wealthy" comment, even the current system tends to fail the poor, since parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success (this is largely tied to two parent households, but income plays a role as well).
      - alistairSH 3y ago
        I'm not saying to abandon it But many people, both in this forum and in meat-space are doing just that. Perhaps not directly, but the end result of "school choice" (of which there are several flavors) will be the end of generally good-enough public education for most of the population. Toss in the latest conservative boogeymen (CRT, book bans, etc) and the outlook looks pretty gloomy. parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success I often wonder if our schools are fine, but everything else is broken. Stagnant wages, longer working hours, fewer 2 parent households, other things.

hombre_fatal 3y ago

Scale isn't necessarily good. I went to a massive highschool in Texas and suspect I would have had a far better experience in a much smaller school whether it be a homeschooling co-op or a small public school (the latter didn't exist in my hometown, only massive Texan highschools). And my best classes in uni weren't the massive lectures at the University of Texas but rather small summer school classes I took in a cheap Houston community college during summer break where I could actually interact with the teacher and fellow students. Finally, HNers overuse "reinventing" as a pejorative. If you use a similar approach found in another option, and the HNer doesn't prefer your option over the other option, you're always "reinventing" it. As if some trivial thing in common between two options are the only would-be differences between them. It's not very thoughtful commentary. Home-schooling could be 100% identical to public schooling except that it's not the local school system and it would still deliver on its goal of not being the local school system. That's the whole point.

brightball 3y ago
"Reinventing the wheel leads to better wheels." - Don't remember where I heard it, but it's a good line.
- vacuity 3y ago
  Evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

jononomo 3y ago

I guess if having friends, family, and a garage is "privilege", then more power to them -- they'd be idiots not to take advantage of this privilege.

pengaru 3y ago

They're not reinventing anything, they're just doing education with a better instructor:student ratio. We all know the worse the ratio the worse the education tends to be. Tutoring is a long established means of compensating for this, by supplementing sessions with a 1:1 ratio, clearly illustrating the problem.

chasd00 3y ago
Also, every parent and student has a direct connection to every other parent and student. Doing education "at scale" is a terrible idea.

eutropia 3y ago

“I’ll intentionally disadvantage my kids in the name of the ideal of egalitarianism” said basically no parent ever.

huytersd 3y ago
Eh there no clear cut answer that the alternative doesn’t disadvantage them either
chasd00 3y ago
I had someone (childless i might add) try to make me feel guilty for pulling my kids out of a school circling the drain and into a high performing one in the name of diversity. I told them, when the time comes, if they want to sacrifice their child on that altar then it's their decision but don't ask me to sacrifice mine.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Kind of wild and weirdly refreshing to finally see the "everyone is in it for themselves and their own" attitude on fully overt display in this article's comments. Usually it's masked behind talk of "freedom" and "individuality," but here, it's raw and out there in the open! FWIW I probably could afford to send my kid to a better private school or alternate-schooling group, withdrawing from the community and not-so-great public school system, but I don't because then I'm just another contributor to the inequality problem. We Live In A Society.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    One's job as a parent isn't to use their children to solve systemic issues in society, it's to do the best they can for their children.
    - AdamN 3y ago
      There's a bit of a curve there. You may invest in a school for many community reasons if the school is near the same quality as the other option. If the quality is way below then the logic of family protection basically demands a move.

rcpt 3y ago

How do you propose we measure that efficiency? Attendance requirements? Standardized testing?

jtriangle 3y ago

Scale for scale's sake isn't necessarily ideal, or efficient. My freshman year of highschool, I was at a very large school, around 3400 in attendance. The school had been expanded several times, and was more or less at capacity. Some facilities were scaled out well, others weren't. There were fights on a weekly basis, tons of security trying to prevent that, but, they could only do so much. Lunch lines were very long, sometimes I'd be lucky to get 10 minutes to eat, mostly brought my own lunch because of that. The school was locked down a few times that year because of weapon scares. It was hell. Then my sophomore year, they cut the school in half, sending most of the students, save for the seniors, to a new school across town. That landed the school I attended at around 1400 kids, my junior year, all of the extra seniors had graduated, so, it shrank further to around 1300. From sophomore year on, there was not a single fight, everyone knew eachother and got along, they cut the security team down to just two people and they both were well liked. Test scores were way up, class sizes went from 40+ to consistently under 30, and things overall were fairly good as far as highschool goes. The new school across town was a similar situation from what I gathered from friends who went there. Now you might write that off as it was simply too crowded, but, they closed about a third of the school, which was held in portable classrooms when the split happened. Some of those were re-purposed for offices and whatnot, most got hauled away. So the actual density of people didn't really change much. We got some extra space to have PE classes in, but that was about it, space wise. You might also write that off as demographic changes, which was also not true. In fact, the roughest part of town all went to the school I attended, while the nicer, more affluent side of town, mostly got sent to the new school. The way I see it, the school was simply too large, and managing that many students day to day, and all of their needs and affairs, did not scale well, and bred inefficiency, inefficiency that existed long before I got there and everyone got to keep their job and maintain that as the status-quo. Sure the buildings/campus could physically contain them well enough, yes they were all reasonably well fed and watered, but they'd become unmanageable in such a way that was not likely to be fixed. In terms of reinvention in public education, smaller schools are a decent model, as are smaller class sizes. The real deciding factor in how well a student does however, is parent buy-in, which homeschool models have in spades, and in addition the class sizes are about as small as you can reasonably go as well. Understand of course that, parents opting to homeschool are paying taxes to public schools, while receiving no benefit, and that in addition to paying for the costs associated with homeschooling. Not all families can afford to effectively pay for schooling twice, hell, most can barely afford to exist while paying once. You could very likely fix your concerns about privilege by simply redirecting money back to homeschool parents that would normally be spent on public school. There are very well defined $/student numbers out there, so, the amounts would be fairly trivial to come up with. You could also really work around the whole right/left politically polarized bullshit factory by perhaps giving a little more to the lower income families and a little less to high income families. I think that'd sufficiently frame the nominally 'right wing' framed homeschool ideals as neutral, or at least dissonant enough that you might get most of everyone on-board provided you could get the right palms greased in state government. Understand of course that, the public education system is an enormous apparatus, and they're managing unfathomable numbers of students. They're also not setup in fairly clean competency hierarchies either. At the local level, seniority tends to be king, at the broader level, the ability to navigate the political system is the selection factor. Neither of those have anything to do with "who's talented at educating kids", and while you do have means to measure performance, those same means are also decided upon by the very same people being effectively measured, so there's an incentive to make them easier over time, as that looks politically better. So if anything, the incentives we've created are exactly backwards, and the system cannot change until those incentives are fixed. I don't really know how you'd prevent standardized testing from being watered down or trifled with. I don't really know how you'd create sufficient educator turnover with the unions in place to weed out bad teachers. More or less, the system is broken, we need bloodsports to fix it, but they've thought of that, and have prevented it from happening. I'm not holding by breath of course. People are more than likely going to write it off as "privilege" regardless of the changes proposed, with a whole list of valid enough sounding reasons that they haven't really thought through, most of which won't really have any baring on reality, and nothing will change aside from actual children being mortally wounded by poor education. That'll continue as-is, furthering the class divide, increasing unrest, increasing predatory behavior toward people who, could have been saved by better policy, but were thought more useful as sacrifices on the altar of "the other team's" apparatus. As for me? I'll be eating beans and rice and driving a 15 year old honda while putting my future children through a homeschool program regardless of what happens.

inglor_cz 3y ago

If everyone was force-fed the same dinner and compelled to wear the same clothes, there would be a lot of societal efficiency to unlock. It would also be a nightmare. People are diverse and have diverse needs. That includes kids. AFAIK the most efficient method of education is still one-to-one tutoring, the very opposite of "schools at scale". Unfortunately it is also very expensive.

AdamN 3y ago
It's not necessarily that expensive - at least I'd say it's within 50%. At Oxford where I did 1:1, I believe the total time with the tutors was around 5 hours per week and each tutor was probably investing 2 hours (max) per student. That would mean a tutor could handle let's say 15 students on a full load. This is about the same ratio as a teacher at a well-resourced school.

HuwFulcher 3y ago

> Can't we be more efficient as a society? Efficient in what way? Children in public schools are now doing worse than previous generations. Efficiency does not beget quality education. > Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup. If we, as a society values families more and enables single income households this wouldn’t be privilege, it could be the norm.