
25-Year-Old Textbooks and Holes in the Ceiling: Inside America’s Public Schools - SQL2219
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/reader-center/us-public-schools-conditions.html
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awat
I wish I could upvote this more than once. Both my parents were teachers. The
disparities that children face from day one neighborhood to neighborhood are
so large it makes me sigh so hard when I hear people say things like just work
harder.

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mncharity
I'm not sure whether the following thought makes that better, or even worse.

Even the best of pre-college science education is wretched. Chemistry
education research describes chemistry education content as "incoherent".
There's limited evidence that it's possible to do much much better. But it's
hard to create such content, and there's little incentive, so it largely
doesn't exist. Even in expensive private schools in states with the best
public education.

So one perspective is, if by dint of extraordinary societal efforts, the
disparity were eliminated, then science education would achieve... a
uniformity of wretchedness. Useful for student opportunity and mobility, but,
sigh.

Another perspective is, that if changing technology and incentives makes
transformatively better science education possible, it need not follow the
existing pattern of disparity. For illustration, if the best lab experience
becomes a virtual lab experience, then having a well-stocked lab vs a moldy
closet, suddenly matters much less.

Another perspective is, of course, that the pattern could live on (ducktaped
broken obsolete VR?), and thus the barrier grow even larger. :/

But in such a transition, there's at least a hope for piggybacking a change in
disparity.

