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> For the same price as 'out of state' tuition at UC Berkeley, you could hire a $100/hour tutor for 1:1 sessions, 8 hours a week. Out-of-state fees raise tuiti

> For the same price as 'out of state' tuition at UC Berkeley, you could hire a $100/hour tutor for 1:1 sessions, 8 hours a week. Out-of-state fees raise tuition from $17K to $51K, but $17K is still a lot of money (and overall costs add up to about $51K a year even for in-state students.) Besides expensive $100/hour tutors - Berkeley could (as many schools do) hire cheap undergrads from the previous cohort. It also seems to me that the basic idea of mastery could be implemented with self-paced learning and individualized assessment, which could potentially be batched based on milestones.

rahimnathwani 2y ago
which could potentially be batched based on milestones This is a form of 'ability grouping'. Many people in California don't like ability grouping, for ideological reasons, even though it works.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  You cannot effectively teach children UNLESS you do ability grouping. The gap just becomes too large. You can't teach one child calculus while another in the same math class can't multiply.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- musicale 2y ago
  In this case "ability" would basically be "the set (or sequence) of course objectives that you have completed so far." Such an assessment is not an evaluation of future potential, nor is it a moral judgment. The purpose is simply to determine what the next thing to learn should be.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    If you're in a group and some of your peers leave the group because they've mastered the material, you might feel like you're being 'held back'. And observers might feel that certain demographic or identity groups are being 'held back' at a higher rate than others. Sure, perhaps you leave it up to the student to decide which group they should be in. But what if they move to the next group when they're not ready? Does the tutor cater to them or to the rest of the group? What if some demographic group is less confident on average, and doesn't move ahead even when ready? The setup you've described might work, but people will find all sorts of reasons to be mad about it, to claim discrimination and/or to use whatever outcomes there are to claim that somebody is being treated unfairly. The academic literature on 'mismatch' doesn't all lean in one direction. You should read Sonja Starr's article on the coming magnet school wars. She definitely has an opinion, but she made a decent attempt to present fairly both sides of each issue she covers.

rahimnathwani 2y ago

which could potentially be batched based on milestones This is a form of 'ability grouping'. Many people in California don't like ability grouping, for ideological reasons, even though it works.

UltraSane 2y ago
You cannot effectively teach children UNLESS you do ability grouping. The gap just becomes too large. You can't teach one child calculus while another in the same math class can't multiply.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
musicale 2y ago
In this case "ability" would basically be "the set (or sequence) of course objectives that you have completed so far." Such an assessment is not an evaluation of future potential, nor is it a moral judgment. The purpose is simply to determine what the next thing to learn should be.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  If you're in a group and some of your peers leave the group because they've mastered the material, you might feel like you're being 'held back'. And observers might feel that certain demographic or identity groups are being 'held back' at a higher rate than others. Sure, perhaps you leave it up to the student to decide which group they should be in. But what if they move to the next group when they're not ready? Does the tutor cater to them or to the rest of the group? What if some demographic group is less confident on average, and doesn't move ahead even when ready? The setup you've described might work, but people will find all sorts of reasons to be mad about it, to claim discrimination and/or to use whatever outcomes there are to claim that somebody is being treated unfairly. The academic literature on 'mismatch' doesn't all lean in one direction. You should read Sonja Starr's article on the coming magnet school wars. She definitely has an opinion, but she made a decent attempt to present fairly both sides of each issue she covers.