I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.
The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.
We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.
I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1].
I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel like I was getting a lot out of school and I would paradoxically do pretty poorly because I was half-assing everything.
It wasn't until I found out about WGU in 2021 where I actually decided to finish my degree, primarily because WGU lets me work at my pace. Since I already knew a lot about computer science, I was able to speed through the classes that would have been very boring to me, and I finished my degree really quickly as a result. I don't feel like my education is appreciably worse than people who did things in a traditional brick and mortar school, but I'm not 100% sure if I'm a test for this.
It made me realize that, at least for people like me, EdTech can be extremely powerful stuff. School can be a lot more engaging when it's personalized, instead of the frustrating "one size fits all" of traditional lecturing.
[1] I say "lucky" because I think it was exactly that: luck. Yeah I learned this stuff on my own for fun but finding an employer who was willing to hire someone without credentials was never guaranteed and I feel extremely fortunate to have accidentally timed my dropout about perfectly.
EDIT: For those confused, WGU means "Western Governors University" in this case.
I dropped out around the same time, and one other key thing I’ve noticed is the tech bootcamps hadn’t completely taken over yet, so there was less of a flood of other entry level people to fight for every single opening. You would even get a call back sometimes applying cold (no internal referral).
I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, considering my jobs before that were call center rep, bus boy and dishwasher at restaurant, camp counselor. Tech changed my entire life.
When I dropped out, I assumed that my job options were limited to minimum wage work, so I applied to McDonald's, Lowes, Target, Walmart (as a cashier), Aldi, and a few other places in one day (driving around the Orlando area). When I got home, sort of on a whim I applied to junior-level Coldfusion+Flash job I saw on Craigslist, thinking that there's no chance but it also didn't cost me anything to apply.
The only job that called me back was the software job, which I thought was bizarre, but it's what kickstarted the career.
In hindsight, I think the reason none of the others called me back was because they saw some college and they were afraid that I would quit the second that I went back to school.
I learned two important lessons that day: 1) The typical Wayne Gretzky "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take", and 2) the less qualified you are for a job, the more willing a company is to overlook a lack of qualifications.
I'd like to elaborate on point 2 because I don't see it mentioned much.
The conventional wisdom for finding a job (qualified or otherwise) is to see what's in demand and learn that skill (e.g. something popular like Java), but then you hit a problem: everyone is applying to that job. There are lots of people who learned Java from school or work, and you're competing with all of them. 2012-dropout-tombert would be applying for the same job as a 4.0-GPA'd-Harvard-Graduate, and as such the company will almost always choose the latter.
When I applied to the Coldfusion job, I accidentally discovered that because it was (even in 2012) a pretty niche bit of tech, no one applied to it. I didn't really know Coldfusion either, but the fact that I applied at all was an artifact of me not having the option to work in a more popular platform, and I was able to learn it quick enough to where it wasn't really a problem.
I think you might be right about why you didn’t get the retail job callbacks. On the other hand I bet today that’s no longer the case, because it’s so hard to find anyone to staff a retail job who is even remotely competent or reliable. Even if you did quit 3 months later, that’s probably above average now.
I think part of it also goes to my second point; since lots of people are qualified for retail jobs, they get a lot of applications, meaning I was competing with a very large pool of people.
I never got confirmation on this, but I am about 95% sure that I was the only person who applied to the Coldfusion job. Compare that to Target, where there was literally a queue of people applying at the terminal in the store.
I’ve been declined for enough jobs to know that you can be declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, so trying to reason about it is an exercise in futility, but I am pretty sure that a lack of applicants is the reason I got the coldfusion job
Thanks for sharing all of this Tom. It's always cool to learn the various backstories behind mainstay HN contributors. Hope the rest of your career is going as well as that first day!
Ha! Never really thought of myself as a "mainstay" contributor, but I'll take it.
I mean, like most careers its had its ups and downs. 2023 was an exceptionally awful year for me (like many, many people in tech), but this year has been pretty alright.
A big difference though between how you're able to leverage online learning as an adult with at least some real-world life experience vs. what a 3rd-grader can do.
I am a strong advocate for zero technology in schools until high school.
One thing that is rarely mentioned is that schools that issue technology to students and use it in the classroom now need to have a hardware, software, and network support person at every school. These jobs use funds that could otherwise be used to pay for more instructional staff, reduce student-teacher ratios, provide more special-needs instructional specialists, etc.
I dropped out and became an engineer at almost the exact same time. I've thought about going back for a degree but I was always so horribly bad at school that it's scared me off. I was bad at it mainly for undiagnosed ADHD reasons that I'm now getting successfully treated, but I'm still worried that if I went back the same things would just happen again. I'd join a class, I'd already kind of know what they're teaching (or think I did), I'd get bored and be unable to pay attention, I'd suddenly find myself MASSIVELY behind.
I really hope this isn't just an ad or something because I'd really love if there was a decent way for me to get a degree without having to go back to a college campus at 35
I dropped out of school for adhd reasons and after getting treatment I went back and finished my last couple semesters (and wrote a novel, that first year on vyvanse was insanely productive). I found it a lot easier to engage with the work and pay attention long enough to take notes in class.
I was skeptical when I first started treatment because I've internalized the whole "You don't have ADHD you're just lazy" thing for literally my entire life, and then imagine my surprise that the medicine designed specifically to make my brain work, actually makes my brain work!
I still get feelings of skepticism that it actually does anything every once in a while. Despite the overwhelming evidence from my wife, my coworkers, and my life in general that it absolutely does.
WGU is a real and legit, and probably one of the top things I would consider if needed to get a bachelors degree while working as a now middle aged adult.
I'm not sure I'd call it legit. As someone who hiring for low-to-mid level IT roles the caliber of WGU students vs. real brick and mortar schools is vast, like vast.
There are edge cases, but if you didn't have the grades and SATs to do real college you're not going to be competitive in this market. I'd take a WGU grad but would put that degree under a VA Tech, RPI, UC Davis, etc. for sure, and way under Stanford or MIT (or Cambridge, or one of the better IIT campuses, etc.).
Honestly this whole thread seems like submarine ads
I don't really know any other WGU graduates in person, so it's hard for me to say the quality of student is "worse" and than anywhere else.
Obviously I am biased, but I don't think I'm appreciably dumber than the average student who went to a brick and mortar school, but admittedly I'm a pretty weird dude who did use WGU as a "rubber stamp" school for me. I finished quickly, though I don't feel like the work was "easier" than when I was learning shit at Florida State, outside of me being a decade more experienced in it.
I'll agree there's definitely selection-bias with WGU for students who underperformed in high school, which can translate to poor work performance. Hell, I underperformed in high school due to at the time undiagnosed Major Depressive Disorder, so I am grateful for something like WGU existing.
It's tough to say. I think if you're in a position like I was, WGU is fine. It is there to demonstrate that you have a Bachelor's worth of CS knowledge; if I were 18 again and had had medication for depression, I would probably apply to some of the nicer public UK schools (e.g. University of York, Manchester, etc.), if I'm being honest, but until someone invents a time machine I'm stuck with the world as it is, not how I want it to be.
In some economies, to be an engineer means a chartered engineer, which demands completion of a formal assessment by the national engineering council.
I'm not throwing shade on you, my degree from 1982 was 1 year too early to make certification in my field and I have worked for 42 years in software and systems without charter status.
I am however cautious of using the word. I call myself a computer scientist even when what I do is systems and network engineering.
I see this type of comment on HN frequently. I have a dim view of national certifications for software engineering or computer science. Are there any highly advanced economies that have "a formal assessment by the national engineering council" for software engineering or computer science? If so, are they useful? Do they actually indicate quality? For me, the field(s) are changing so fast, that it hardly makes sense. If you are working in an area that is not life threatening, I am not a believer in certifications. It all seems like a bunch of gatekeeping.
Today, I was listening to the Lex Fridman podcast with John Carmack. It reminded me that John Carmack does not have a university degree, yet, he is one our generation's globally recognized masters of software optimisation. There are few in the world who can do what he does, and he has no uni degree, nor (I assume!) any "national certifications". Michael Abrash is similar.
On a personal note: (US) Wall Street has similarly ineffective gatekeeping with the Series 7 & 63 exams: My father called it "toilet bowl knowledge" when I studied for it. He said: "Once you are finished the exam, you can flush away that knowledge. You will never use it again." He is right about more than 90% of the "knowledge" required to pass those exams.
> Are there any highly advanced economies that have "a formal assessment by the national engineering council" for software engineering or computer science?
The EUR ING certificate from Engineers Europe can be awarded to those who have attained a degree in engineering, but also for those with "no exemplifying formal qualifications, but will have engaged in professional Career Learning and peer review via the individual route".
Since Engineers Europe is a private organization (albeit one that is widely recognized), I would imagine that individual European countries have their own rules about when someone can call themselves an engineer. I am pretty sure that Germany only requires a degree for instance. Looser still are the rules in Britain: the UK does not require any certification at all for the basic term 'Engineer', although there are more specific titles that are strictly protected (ICTTech being one of them, and yes they really do use that silly abbreviation, obligatory italics included). Theoretically, a country could refuse to recognize certifications from Engineers Europe, but that would not exactly endear them to the European Commission or to other European countries!
Those gatekeepers might not accept a John Carmack or a Palmer Luckey (or Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Vitalik Buterin, etc, etc), but how many of their certificate-holders have done any comparably significant engineering work?
Does it matter for them? Would any employer/investor, seeking to hire/fund carmack etc hold back because they didn't have a cert? The vanishingly few with those levels of talent stand out quite easily and don't need "proof of competency" to be evaluated.
For the _vast majority_ of others, certification allows employers to have externally-validated trust in an engineer who mightn't stand out as obviously.
Early in their careers, even exceptional people face obstacles from gate-keepers. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there have been Germans of similar temperament, credentials and talent as Carmack or Luckey but who struggled much longer to stand out to a sufficient degree that they could get great job opportunities or funding in a that much more credentialist environment.
I like to imagine that such people would have found a way to emigrate and make their impact abroad. Either way, the cost to Germany itself (and Europe generally) has been immense.
> For me, the field(s) are changing so fast, that it hardly makes sense.
This applies to CS degrees too. But while there's immense amounts of churn in the hot language/UI framework of the day, the basics like algorithms and data structures barely change.
On personal note, Series 7, 63, and 62 are not hard tests....one can pass it without much study...I did pass the series 62 in my sleep.
But keep in mind those are legal compliance tests...WTF?
In short words, they give the legal basis for why in finance we have to follow a sales script as it then covers the legal boilerplate mess...
On the other hand in the late 1980s I had a chance to be in the Turtle Trading class in Chicago....obviously that would have been more helpful as I think the success rate was over 50% for students of that pratical turtle trading class.
In the software industry and related domains in other industries (i.e. software at a bank, software for retail systems, etc.) the words engineer, developer and programmer can be used interchangeably. I think "engineer" is more trendy these days than "programmer". Other industries also use the words "architect" or even "sanitation engineer" and they mean different things.
I don't think its a big deal that the same words are used in job titles in different industries. The second anyone reads the job description or follows up with a question will understand the domain someone works in.
I usually go with "I work in software" and non-software people equate all of that to "IT", much like I classify Doctors as "medicine" and there are different disciplines.
It is a little amusing when people get fussy about credentials and certifications for the term "engineer" given that an "engineer" in the railroad industry is simply a person who operates a locomotive engine. It seems a very small stretch to analogize software engineers as operators of computing engines!
I would be skeptical of granting that much power/mental space to gatekeepers you didn't elect. You're fine at your job without the certification right? so maybe it's not needed?
So much this. I studied and got a degree in civil engineering and only call myself studied as an engineer because I never apprenticed or took the professional engineer exam. Despite doing a ton of software now I still feel it would be an insult to my friends who are P.E.'s to call myself an engineer.
In civil engineering especially, you sort of assume senior people have PEs because they have to sign off on certain official documents. But, in general, outside of a few contexts like that, very few people pay any attention to whether someone is a PE or not.
Also tangential, but do you feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth out of the WGU program? I have also been employed as degree-less an engineer for a long time (I have a BA in an unrelated subject), and I’ve occasionally thought about going back to get a BS or a masters in comp sci. Partially for the signaling aspect, and partially to fill in any knowledge gaps that I’m unaware of. WGU’s pacing and pricing sound great. I’ve also heard that it can sometimes be a questionable resume signal. Any thoughts?
I didn't really go to school with the expectation of making more money; I already had a decent job at a FAANG, and finishing my degree hasn't really translated to "more" money. In the "killing the inferiority complex" and "proving to myself that I'm not an idiot" sense, it was definitely worth the money to me.
I'm not at a FAANG anymore, but I really like my current job, and while I'm not 100% sure on this, I'm pretty convinced that the interview for it wouldn't have happened if I didn't have at least some form of a bachelors.
I also had a lot of fun doing the degree, but that's harder to quantify.
But I'm not going to sit here and bullshit you, it's not a perfect degree. I've been trying to break into the finance world for a couple years [1], and finance people really care about which school you went to; most of them seem to simply not have even heard of WGU, and it appears that the rule of finance work is "if I haven't heard of the school, it's not a good school" and then they decline you. Finance jobs want a fancy expensive university; whether or not they're right to do so is orthogonal to that fact.
I was doing a PhD at University of York (distance), but I've since dropped that and am doing their online masters in computer science. York is honestly an extremely decent school, and their online masters is perfectly fine and fairly reasonably priced (about 11,000 British Pounds total I believe, about $14,000). I'm hoping that that can "cleanse" my WGU degree in the eyes of finance.
Outside of finance, as far as I'm aware no one has really given a shit about where I got my degree outside of the "is it accredited?" question, which it is.
[1] I want lots of money, finance jobs on Wall Street can pay pretty well.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I have enough experience to get in the door, so if I’m being honest I’d probably be doing it to prove to myself that I’m not an idiot, too.
Not OP, but I think it was worth it. Within a year of getting my BSCS, I added almost 25% to my salary. It gave me the leverage I needed to push for more. For someone coming into it with no experience I can’t say how well it will play out, but for a degreeless developer, I think it just checks that one box and helps.
> Within a year of getting my BSCS, I added almost 25% to my salary.
Why do you think that was related to the degree?
My salary history, in some abstract units, is 15, 50, 100, 600 (yes, that was good), and 50 (not just earning ten times less, but also working about half the hours, very happy with it).
I can't help but see 25% as really insignificant: I've never experienced such a small change! And I don't even have a degree.
Could I politely suggest writing out the full acronym the first time, and then using WGU subsequently? It'd be a good deal more considerate of non-U.S. readers.
You're absolutely right, apologies for that. It can be easy for me to forget that people don't have every acronym that I know implanted into their head.
Sibling comment already stated this, but I'll just say I was referring to Western Governors University. I have added an edit to the post to clarify.
WGU was a customer when I was at Learning Objects, they always impressed me visionary and outcome oriented. glad to hear a positive anecdote more than 10 years later.
I think many people have very positive experiences and data, at scale, speaking to the kind of success Edtech can have.
I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).
This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.
This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.
These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.
I saw a blog post a few years ago about a Canadian dude getting an exception to go to WGU. You might just email WGU and ask if you can get an exception.
In Canada, Thompson Rivers University offers a bachelor's in computer science as a fully distance option. On the French language side, Université TÉLUQ (part of the Université du Québec network) also offers a BS in CS.
WGU BSCS grad here as well. Regular brick & mortar schools never worked for me, but WGU clicked and let me finally get my degree. Now I’m working on my MSCS with CU Boulder, which although being managed via Coursera has the same feel overall as WGU. In some ways I can see how some think EdTech failed… but I do think there are players in the space that are doing good things
I had a similar experience but I dropped out of high school.
For years the social stigma about being a high-school dropout got to me, and I was determined to enter University as an adult student and get my CS degree.
The problem was that I already had steady work as a software developer. And the entire reason I wanted to go to school in the first place was to level up those skills. It didn't help that, in my late teens / early 20s, I was working for a dot-com startup and we had coop students from the local University, and they weren't being taught anything that I didn't already know or understand.
Eventually I came to the opinion that, at least for me (not necessarily for others), formal education institutions amount to little more than institutional child abuse. For hyper-independent and high IQ students, particularly those with aspergers (I've never been diagnosed, but even my mother says it would put my childhood into perspective), class rooms are not a positive experience.
And I can't honestly look back at my time in public school and identify a single subject that I learned in class, as opposed to independently. According to my parents I was literate before entering kindergarten and I taught myself maths and history as an adult because school taught me to hate both (I don't hate either now, but the way they were taught in school divorced them from our day to day lives, created busy work and the impression that what we were being taught was irrelevant and unnecessary).
I tried online learning for a little bit in order to get my GED but I abandoned that as well because it still felt like boring busy work.
EdTech seems like it might offer the solution to younger children with my personality type. But honestly, I personally learn best by reading books, experimenting (hands on learning) and having goals that I actually care about and can relate to. If school had taught us to prepare a tax return, balance a household budget, that history gives us predictive "power" by examining how humans dealt with certain situations historically, if English class focused on effective communication rather than trying to guess at metaphors and hidden messages in the writings of dead authors who can't be asked to comment on that conjecture... maybe I wouldn't have loathed the experience so much and felt like I was just in a prison for children.
In other words, my personal experiences with EdTech has seen these trying to take a standard public school curriculum and package it in a digital "work at your own pace" format. Whereas my issue with school was at least in large part the curriculum itself. The pace was a factor too ... just not the only one by far.
What was your motivation for getting the degree? It does not seem, from your story, that its absence blocked the growth of your career; were there subjects you wanted to learn for which self-education proved difficult, or does the credential itself have some value?
For the most part, my career was fine. I had a job at Apple as a senior software engineer at the time (though I didn't really enjoy the job itself).
Part of it was just a bit of an inferiority complex over insecurity of not having a degree. People were generally very polite about it, but internally it felt like every bad thing happened to me in my career was because of the lack of a degree; every comment felt like it was loaded with passive aggression, even if that wasn't true.
Kind of the straw the broke the camel's back was actually a bit funny; I had applied for a job as an engineer at Microsoft Research, and I was declined for it. It was far from the first time I had been declined for a job, obviously, but in this case it was the first time that the declination specifically said "declined because you don't have a degree". In the nearly a decade of working as a software person prior to that, I had never explicitly been told that my lack of degree was the reason for a rejection.
That rejection coincided with another milestone: my 30th birthday. I had told myself I'll finish my degree "next year" for nearly a decade, and now I wasn't in my 20's anymore. Obviously there's no real difference between 29.99 and 30 years old, but it just kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. I registered for WGU that day.
There are probably numerous other reasons, I did want to transition to a more theoretical role as well, but those are the main ones.
I, too, dropped out of college, but finding employment as a programmer back in the mid-90s required very little luck. It became difficult to justify the time and expense of further education when my career already seemed to be launching, ready or not.
Funny that you mention MSR - I also applied there, back in 2007, and they are also the only people who have ever turned me down for lack of a degree! (Though I still got an offer out of it, after they passed my information along to devdiv...)
I'm a little jealous that they passed your information along devdiv, I would have liked to work on something like the TypeScript compiler; I just got an unceremonious form letter.
I obviously don't blame them for declining me, they don't owe me a job, but I still find it a bit amusing that in my entire career exactly one entity has declined me for that reason, or at least only one has been brave enough to state that that was the reason why. I'm sure a lot of the places that never got back to me might have declined me for a lack of a degree behind the scenes, but I was never made aware of it.
The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that this is always done in the name of "equity", but the result is that the system perpetuates the inequities that already exist. Because the public schools force kids into grade bands and don't allow children who are ahead to learn at their level, wealthy parents (and only wealthy parents) figure out ways to supplement or move their kids into schools that are appropriate for their level.
Only wealthy parents can afford to do that, while everyone else is stuck with whatever their local school offers or doesn't offer. This perpetuates generational inequalities in ways that the public school system is supposed to solve, all in the name of "leaving no child behind".
> wealthy parents (and only wealthy parents) figure out ways to supplement or move their kids into schools that are appropriate for their level.
Not true. AP courses and magnet schools are the sole way for working class/poor students to get ahead in life in the public school system. Myself and many friends took advantage of this, and zero had wealthy parents. Many had food scarcity levels of poverty at home but received excellent educations due to these programs existing.
Heck, private schools also participated in this - giving out test and grade based scholarship for exceptional students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. Many friends participated in such programs, even to the point of working "jobs" for the school after classes to pay for their education. This is now seen as abusive to many.
The ironic and incredibly frustrating thing are now these programs are being systematically dismantled over the past 20 years in the name of "equity" with these trends only accelerating.
The one thing it DOES require is parents who care and give a shit about their kids. I suppose if you squint that's a form of wealth, but not what people mean when they talk about such topics.
It’s very much true that wealthy parents supplement their kids to keep them challenged and leveling up, so to say. What you’re describing re: AP classes is for high school students. While the parent comment may have been referring to high school, I imagine they meant elementary and middle school level. Students with support (read: challenged to learn at their level and not slowed down to the pace of the average student) are able to take more AP courses because they are ready at a younger age. They take AP Calculus in grade 9 or 10. My son, for instance, is taking algebra 1 as a 6th grader because we started doing math lessons at home for fun the last couple years. In terms of AP science classes, it’s typically hard to take all of them if you’re not doing outside lessons due to the nature of prerequisites. And, back to the point of extra lessons (which only wealthy parents can afford) I’ve had a few 8th graders (learning programming with me starting in grade 7) who scored 5s on the AP computer science A exam. Often students can’t get to that AP level without additional support prior to high school.
The reason parents look for extra lessons is because most schools can’t challenge students because they group too many students of varying intelligence and interest level into the same class. My public school district does 1 on 1 mentors for students, but only if they score higher than ~144 on an IQ test in grade 2 or 3, which is ridiculous, but these students do get that extra challenge and support with no extra cost. Schools need smaller cohorts to best support kids of all levels, and we’ll continue to fail the majority of kids until we reorganize our schools.
I understand that wealthy parents are going to show up in these stats far more often than non-wealthy. I take umbrage at the statement it's only the wealthy. It has turned into effectively only for the wealthy due to the focus on equity over the past 20+ years as we've torn down any sort of public programs for these students.
My advanced class placement started far earlier than high school. 5th grade is when I recall being put into the advanced track along with others of demonstrated ability. I'd say from my memory maybe 1/3rd of those students could be described as wealthy by any sort of the word. But they'd be more middle class vs. working class in retrospect. They just seemed wealthy in comparison at the time.
The one thing that had near 100% correlation was highly involved parents - even if they were single moms who never had time to be directly involved. All the kids were held accountable at home. I never had outside tutoring, and few of my peers did either. It was all in-school education, where we were removed from normal classes for a few subjects but otherwise part of our grade level for everything else like social studies or gym. Plenty of time spent with said friends at various houses doing homework together though.
I totally agree this needs to happen at a very young age. I was able to test out of the public high school in 10th grade due to being tracked the way I was in grade school and junior high. High school due to no advanced courses being available was an utter waste of time. Those programs that got me there have now been long-removed in the name of equity. This is the one political topic I will speak out on, since it's outright evil what we are doing kids in the name of fairness.
You really couldn't come up with a better plan to cripple a society than what we are doing to public education.
I really don't think that you and I disagree—I'm talking about the way that things are for my kid who's about to go into elementary school, not the way that things were when we were growing up.
We're well off enough to provide what he needs, but we're also painfully aware that the public school system is not going to and that most people don't have the means to do what we can do for him. I agree that that's a new trend and not something that has always been true of public education in the US.
As many countries demonstrated, wealth does not buy good genes. Talented kids stand out, as long as we have a decent public school system, which places a high academic standard and holds teachers accountable. That's how East-European countries and Asian countries produce high-quality students.
+1. Folks pushing for equity haven't read (or too young to have read) "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, and it shows.
Instead of handicapping those who are ahead, we should intervene with those who are falling behind. Instead of enforcing equal outcomes, instead prioritize offering equal opportunity for every student to get the highest quality of education.
It's not a matter of "handicapping", it's a multi-armed bandit problem where you only have N dollars to throw at the problem and you need to decide what distribution of N produces the best outcomes. I went to one of those low-income schools and without intervention I can guarantee you that over 60% wouldn't graduate. Even with a lot of help only 50% of my school graduated when I was in school (admittedly a while ago.) Even then, the number of folks who went to a four-year college was low.
The question is: do you help more folks graduate or do you help the 5% of stars succeed? I don't think it's as easy a choice as you make it out to be once you stop identifying with the gifted students (this is my primary annoyance with HN comments about most topics these days: it's just the commenter opining about themselves, disinterested in taking a systemic view on the issue).
You're literally describing equity. The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible.
I don't think it's an issue of a person's politics, Republicans tried the exact same thing with No Child Left Behind. Is the more important thing the individual rising to their highest potential, or is the more important thing the system where economic factors
have created a cycle where only children of middle-class or better families are given the environment to rise and those kids run with the flywheel and become the middle-class parents.
I was literally never not going to be successful, I think I'm reasonably intelligent but that by far wasn't the biggest factor. My parents made damn sure I was on the gifted track, always got A's, and was set up
to get into an in-demand major at a prestigious university. Was I actually that special or was I just the chosen one, in that I was chosen?
You can only be like "that's not true of everyone <anecdote>" but the exceptions fall away in the aggregate where your success is frighteningly well predicted by your zip code.
> The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible.
The top-level-commenter's point is that this is not necessarily the case anymore—the whole promise of educational technology was that we could finally scale individual intervention to every child, but efforts to do so have met with stiff resistance. I also work in EdTech and I've seen exactly what the OP is talking about.
We're at the point where we could extend the flywheel to more children than ever by integrating it into the public school systems instead of having it be something that upper-middle class parents have to provide as a supplement, but the culture has so thoroughly embraced the idea that "getting ahead" is unfair that we're not allowed to systematize it even when doing so would benefit poor students the most.
I went to one of those low-income, garbage schools. I grew up in poverty. I was very frustrated by this attitude when I was in school but with a few decades of hindsight I see why this issue is complicated: do you focus on helping your poorest students graduate and not fall into indigence or do you focus on helping your brightest escape the flywheel of poverty and enter the upper-middle class?
I'm curious what exactly this "unfair"ness is. (I'm being genuine, my partner works in EdTech but I don't and I have very little idea what happens behind the scenes.) My impression in my low-income school was that the parents barely had any idea what was going on and if anything pressured their kids to leave school asap so they could get jobs and bring money home.
> that this is always done in the name of "equity",
I never understood the rationale behind these progressives. Don't they have kids? Don't they know even twins may perform differently in school? I have two kids. They are only 1 year apart. They can access any educational materials as they want. Even if their school teachers were not good (they are very good, by the way), the kids would have access to excellent private teachers and tutoring. Yet, one handles maths with ease and has jumped three grades without even trying, but on the other hand does not like reading or writing. The other can barely keep up and I spend enormous amount of time just to make sure he can understand the fundamentals, but on the other hand he loved reading and is creative in writing.
People were like this even before equity was much of a concern.
I think it's sort of natural for teachers to view kids that are both too behind or too ahead as "problems". In both cases, there is an indication they've failed, and no one likes that.
It is not "always" done for that purpose; often people don't want children to learn things for other reasons, like wanting to have more control over them, not liking the implications of certain historical events, or having fanciful ideas about preventing their children from engaging in risky behaviors by pretending they don't exist.
> The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured. ...
> Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth.
This is the behavior that I'm referring to. I'm not talking about political fights about what goes into the curriculum in the first place, I'm talking specifically about efforts to keep children from getting ahead along whatever the curriculum is already defined to include.
If you exclude any other reason from the discussion then it's true but tautological. The questions I mentioned still tie into age and aren't just "in the curriculum ever yes or no" type of questions (for instance, at what age should sex education be given?).
This is a silly thing to say. There's no evidence that edtech was forced to band students to grade levels due to equity. It's just as likely it happened due to Bush's Leave No Child Behind, or out of a desire for administrators to follow rules.
The crutch isn't the EdTech itself. The numerous examples regarding WGU's success for some self-driven training here suffices to suggest the tech isn't the issue.
It's the metrics required as part of legislation such as NCLB that effectively bind administrations to ensure adherence to a common curriculum, regardless of capacity or competence.
This effectively imposes Goodhart's law, since the only way to meet these measures on scale is to teach to the test, and only the test.
This ensures that no actual deep learning occurs for those falling back, while hamstringing those who master the subject matter early since there is no mechanism for rewarding early mastery.
Where do you think the rules that administrators have to follow come from? And what do you think the purpose of No Child Left Behind was? Its long title is "an act to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind."
I think you may have interpreted my use of the word "equity" to mean something along the lines of "woke", but I meant it in the strictest sense: The red tape that OP is talking about was put in place in the name of ensuring equal opportunities for all children, but has actually accomplished the opposite.
The best school which I ever attended rigorously divided academic and social classes --- academic classes (reading/English/math/science) were attended at one's ability level, while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were attended at one's grade level.
There was a 4 year cap up through the 8th grade (so I was a 4th grader attending 8th grade English, math and science classes), and after that, the cap was lifted and students could begin taking college courses in 8th grade --- some of the teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and if need be, arrangements were made for students to travel to the college, or professors from there to travel to the school.
It was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a 4 year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court declared the system illegal because it conferred an unseemly advantage on the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no equivalent compensation for students who were not.
>conferred an unseemly advantage on the students who were able to take advantage of it,
Meanwhile private school...
Its all crabs in a bucket. Instead of suggesting that more schools do this to boost education, let's tear town the successful ones and pretend we're a meritocracy.
Not that I've been able to find --- it would have been the school local to Columbus AFB in the late 1960s to mid 70s.
The State Supreme Court stuff is my hazy recollection of letters my parents received from other folks who were still living there when the school system was changed.
That's quite a different thing though --- this was not a matter of funding (save that there wasn't money set aside to send students who didn't get a college degree with their high school to college after graduation) but of how the school was structured and how students were taught.
That 1960s court ruling would be worth reading, to see how it was rationalized, and for discovery of related legal cases. LexisNexis or an LLM might be able to find it.
The court case should have been late 70s, early 80s --- as it was explained to me, it was ruled as unfair that some children got a college education, while others who graduated from the same school had to pay for college
There were debates about whether military children attending base schools were receiving benefits not available to children in the local civilian school systems. This issue could have come up in various ways, such as in cases where military dependents might have access to college-level classes or subsidized education while local students did not.
That's "equity" for you. We can't be unfair and give someone something that makes them better. It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up.
To be fair, it is less about "keeping top kids down" and more about "let's use our very scarce resources helping the bottom kids". Put that way it seems less malicious, and more like probably the right thing to do over all, while still being extremely frustrating if you are, or are the parent of, a 'top kid'. I know that in Seattle, I've been very frustrated with all the talk and promise of our school to provide enrichment to kids like mine who are able to learn quickly and are ready for more advanced learning opportunities, only to discover that it is haphazard, often in name only, and there isn't time or interest in providing more.
But it's not because of some drive for 'equity'. I've talked with teachers (as friends, not in a school setting). They're doing what they can with the resources they have.
> "let's use our very scarce resources helping the bottom kids"
So why does the richest country on the planet have "very scarce resources" only when it comes to educating its kids ? Of course, that very same public school has a stadium that is easily several times larger than facilities provided for Olympic level athletes in a poor country like India. That same school has a music program with a huge ballroom, recording studio, fancy musical instruments...bass sax, harps, bassoons and contrabassoons, double bass, violas...like literally, even a top of the line Bollywood studio doesn't have half of this. USA has chosen to prioritize just about everything other than basic classroom stem education. Then when you ask the math teacher why the kids don't know their logarithms and trig tables, he is like...well we have calculators and chromebooks.
I have spent multiple years trying to engage with school board officials in public schools here in the mid-west. The most reasonable, unemotional, takeaway after all this engagement is that Americans are simply not interested in classroom education. They don't have teacher, don't have the time to teach, don't care for books or chalkboards...its simply not their thing. That's fine. I do hope all of this hyper-investment in music and sports produces some world class track and field athlete who can run a mile under three minutes while playing the bassoon.
> That same school has a music program with a huge ballroom, recording studio, fancy musical instruments...bass sax, harps, bassoons and contrabassoons, double bass, violas...
Seattle has cancelled a bunch of their music programs as well.
A couple years ago they also cancelled, a very successful, STEM program in schools that primarily served economically disadvantaged students, because the school district couldn't afford to pay their portion of the program's cost.
There was a court ruling in Washington state a decade or so ago that said the state government has to fund schools and that school districts and cities are forbidden from raising more than a pittance of additional funding for teachers and academic activities.
This was good for the first few years, all schools in the state finally became fully funded, not just the schools in rich areas, but recently the state has been underfunding schools and now every major school district in the state is having financial problems.
Which poor public schools have any of those amenities? Most of the schools I’ve seen are in old buildings, with no air conditioning. The fancy ones may have a space for the band and a theater, while the poorer ones barely even have a playground. I’ve never seen a school with a recording studio, let alone a ballroom.
and more like probably the right thing to do over all
It’s only the right thing if you assume equity as a starting position though. We already know, rather robustly, that the weakest and most disruptive students can consume far more than their share of limited resources and produce correspondingly limited outcomes.
Another theory goes that we should provide more resources to the best and brightest students so that they go on to become great leaders and experts in their fields and then improve society for everyone. This may be called the “rising tide lifts all boats” theory. It was the predominant one in the US for much of the 20th century and earlier, and it arguably led to the US’s position as a global leader in science, technology, and industry.
> Another theory goes that we should provide more resources to the best and brightest students so that they go on to become great leaders and experts in their fields and then improve society for everyone.
I'd call it "trickle down" theory. Or "horse-and-sparrow theory" (feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat)
I'd call it "trickle down" theory. Or "horse-and-sparrow theory" (feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat)
What you’re missing here is that we’ve been sold on this idea of “one size fits all” education as the only just model. This means forcing the weakest, most disruptive students up to a standard (especially in math and science) they can’t realistically meet. Instead of allowing these kids to find their true calling in some skilled trades such as plumbing, electrical, welding, or construction, we force them to go to university where they’re guaranteed to fail (or drop out trying). And in the process we saddle them with a mountain of student loans!
This has been the strategy used by families around the world for thousands of years.
Have some kids, pick the one that seems like they'll be the most successful, put all of the family's limited resources into that one kid. If that kid goes on to become successful, they are expected to help lift up the rest of the family.
Another view is that I've paid back in taxes alone, many multiples of what my education cost the city.
> feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat
Yeah well the current strategy being employed is starve all the horses and leave the bodies in the field to rot.
The harsh truth is bell curves exist. Some people are just better are things than others.
Imagine a scenario with three classrooms:
One classroom is full of kids who can be taught 3 years of a subject in one year
A second classroom has kids who can be taught 1 year of a skills in a subject in 1 year.
The third classroom is kids who are remedial and if great effort is put in, they'll be taught one year of skills in two years.
The no-shit-sherlock strategy is to assign a teacher to each classroom.
What we are doing instead is one of two strategies:
1. Mix all the students together, and watch as the kids who would be advanced drop out of school due to boredom, and the kids who need remedial help drop out because they aren't learning anything.
2. Fund classroom 2 as normal, take resources that would've been spent on classroom 1, and give it to classroom 3, causing incremental improvements, and again failing the kids who would be in classroom 1.
Both strategies are downright stupid and inefficient.
Not only that, these strategies also cause funding problems. Now the parents of kids who would have been in classroom 1 pull their kids out of school, causing a reduction in funding for everyone. Next, parents who would have kids in classroom 1 don't even move to the city, causing a reduction in the overall economy for the city, so now there is even less money for social and academic programs to help disadvantaged students.
To be clear, I'm not naming the subject here because students should be independently evaluated on each subject. Someone may need remedial math help but be great at writing.
Barrels of ink have been used to debunk various flavors of Social Darwinism by better thinkers and writers than I.
I wouldn't commit a kid who struggles with math in 3rd grade to a life in the trades. I suppose HN has an over-represention of former gifted student commenters- but being intelligent doesn't make one better than others, or better suited for greater expectations, more deserving of resources, or more likely to succeed. Intelligence is just one aspect out of the many you can measure a human by - resilience, resourcefulness, grit, propensity to self-destruction, proneness to addictions, self-delusion, confidence, being an insufferable dick, laziness, are among the things I've seen people exhibit to their own detriment (or success) - regardless of what their baseline intelligence was. Society does better when it nurtures all the positives, and not just putting all eggs in the "very intelligent" basket.
The smartest students I knew are doing very mundane jobs that can be (and are) done by far less smarter folk - the one in academia is trying to leave. I'm less smart, but I pay more on taxes than most of them - one exception is the executive at a dating app. She's probably a genius as she never had to study at all: but that's not exactly a role that moves society forward, is it?
being intelligent doesn't make one better than others
The only issue here is with the attitude that a career in the trades is somehow inferior to getting a degree. It is not. I have many friends and family who work in the trades. They are intelligent, hard-working, resourceful people who take tremendous pride in the quality of their work. They both produce and repair useful things (houses, cars, factories, and countless other pieces of equipment). They are the backbone of our society.
They also happen to earn a lot more money than many other people I know who have degrees and work those "mundane jobs" you mentioned. Why? Because there's a huge shortage of labour in the trades and people who enter that career have far more bargaining power than they did back in the early-mid 20th century. It's also reflected in the way we simply don't build the way we used to. China built an incredible high speed rail network all over their country in just a few decades at minimal cost. The US can't even manage to build one high speed link between San Francisco and LA without spending more than the GDP of most countries on the project while facing countless delays.
It's one of our greatest shames that we in the West have developed such an elitist culture that we look down on the people who build things.
> The only issue here is with the attitude that a career in the trades is somehow inferior to getting a degree
I made no such claim - the word I used (commit) was chosen with care, and is neutral.
> They also happen to earn a lot more money than many other people I know who have degrees and work those "mundane jobs" you mentioned.
While trades are a decent choice; let's not overly romanticize them. The ones making decent money are those who are self-employed (basically effectively consultants) and those in unions with a monopoly (like the longshoremen). The working stiffs aren't doing that great, especially if the work is hard on the body, then it means their career is going to be much shorter than the average desk jockey, and they will have considerable health costs later.
The trades cover a wide range of fields, from car mechanics to people using CNC machines to roofers.
Is the roofer going to suffer a lot later in life? Yes. Is the CNC operator going to have problems down the line? Probably not.
> The ones making decent money are those who are self-employed (basically effectively consultants) and those in unions with a monopoly (like the longshoremen).
Most office workers outside of tech are not doing so great either in regards to pay. Customer service roles are even worse.
> I wouldn't commit a kid who struggles with math in 3rd grade to a life in the trades.
Students should be re-evaluated every year. I've been at the bottom of classes and the top of classes in the same subject!
Also as others have pointed out, please stop crapping on the trades. I've met plumbers who are damn good at math calculations (needed for complex hydroponic heating systems!). Not to mention plenty of people in the trades learn to run their own businesses, with all the different skills that requires.
> but being intelligent doesn't make one better than others, or better suited for greater expectations, more deserving of resources, or more likely to succeed.
I didn't say any of that.
I said that right now schools are allocating 0 resources to students who are gifted, which is just as messed up as allocating 0 resources to students who need extra help. And as a reminder a child can be in both groups at the same time.
> I wouldn't commit a kid who struggles with math in 3rd grade to a life in the trades.
Which has a lot of implications:
1. That someone who is bad at math has to go into the trades, ignoring that many trades require quite a bit of math and that plenty of college degree programs hardly require any math at all
2. That kids are being told in 3rd grade that they have to go into the trades based on math scores, as if that is some sort of "punishment". I know you said that you used the word "commit" to be neutral, but it is less than neutral when used in comparison to the unspoken alternative of non-trade jobs which are silently implied (in the very least through the American cultural lens) to be "better".
Also you didn't reply to the actual meat of my comment:
1. Schools have cut funding to gifted programs, denying resources to students who need them
2. The same students can be gifted in one area and behind in another, meaning resourcing isn't some binary "lift these students up and put these students down" decision.
Also I'd add that gifted programs typically require very little additional funding, if any. In a large district a gifted program just takes a bunch of students out of other classrooms and puts them into a classroom together. There is no additional cost for teachers, it is just a shuffling of what classroom students are in.
This means aside from the incremental cost of bussing students to a school with a gifted program classroom, there isn't even a resourcing issue for gifted programs!
The choice isn't "gifted programs or remedial education programs". That entire narrative is not based in reality and it only exists to cause arguments between different advocacy groups.
None of which I expressed in my brief comment, but you're projecting from what others have said or done. You are arguing against a stereotypical position I do not hold, and I have no desire keep explaining how I don't hold the position you insist on ascribing me to.
That approach eventually failed, because the great leaders and experts went on to improve the society for themselves, at the expense of everyone else. Focusing on those who would be successful anyway made sense when the middle class was still expanding. Then the expansion stopped, social mobility decreased, and the zero-sum aspects of the society became dominant.
One unfortunate consequence is that underchallenged "top kids" can quickly turn into "bottom kids" themselves. (Especially, but not only, if they are bullied by their peers for appearing too engaged with their studies). This is a devastating loss.
In our public school, there are multiple math classes already with people randomly assigned to one of them, and both advanced and regular classes are taught by the same teachers. So there is very little extra cost to have more advanced math classes - shuffle kids around and allow teachers to teach one of the classes faster. And yet we only one advanced half-class, despite dozens of students wanting to go there.
Why? Our school management is explicitly against that. I've talked to them directly, and they admitted that they are very much against any "out of the grade" behavior, the teachers are not allowed to give more advanced material. It was all in the name of equity of course.
> I don’t think there’s a clear answer, but what we have isn’t it.
The answer is entirely clear but it's uncomfortable.
Society is moved forward by the top percentile, not by even the "average". You can only help those who wish to help themselves, and expending massive resources on kids who are not there to learn (or cannot) has had predictable results.
Some evil folks in history have used this exact strategy of crippling the "top kids" of a group for their genocidal plans. It's highly effective.
The best thing you can do is make sure those "top kids" are identified early and tracked into the proper classes regardless of socioeconomic background. Yes, this means segregating students based on ability earlier than later. Doing this ends up helping those "bottom kids" once they reach adulthood since society is better overall for everyone.
As one of those frustrated top kids, it taught me a well-earned contempt for my neurotypical peers. Frustration at spending the resources on them when it didn't seem to move the needle.
> I know that in Seattle, I've been very frustrated with all the talk and promise of our school to provide enrichment to kids like mine who are able to learn quickly and are ready for more advanced learning opportunities, only to discover that it is haphazard, often in name only, and there isn't time or interest in providing more.
Seattle used to have one of the nation's best gifted programs. Back in the 90s it was ran in a racist fashion, gifted schools only existed in wealthy neighborhoods and poor and minority families had to fight like hell to get kids into the gifted program.
The easy solution was to offer gifted classes in schools throughout the city, and to offer free gifted program testing to all students in the district.
Washington state actually recently passed the later into law, all students can get tested for free during the school day, removing one large barrier to entry. The law was passed just in time for the Seattle School District to dismantle the city's gifted program.
On top of this, the city got rid of their bussing program, moving back to a neighborhood schools model. While this saved the district money on bussing, it is also a return to a racist system that was dismantled for good reason generations ago. Is it actual segregation? No, but you don't have to squint very hard to see how it looks awfully similar...
> But it's not because of some drive for 'equity'. I've talked with teachers (as friends, not in a school setting).
The school board's removal of the gifted resources was driven by "equity".
That "equity" drive has also seen the test scores of disadvantaged minority students continue to decline. Not only that, now the kids who have a real opportunity to escape generational poverty, are no longer being given those resources.
I say this as a kid who grew up in Seattle in the 90s to a family that was working class poor, and as someone who benefited immensely from Seattle's once great gifted program.
"let's use our very scarce resources helping the bottom kids... They're doing what they can with the resources they have."
I'm not convinced that resources are actually that scarce (the US has the second-highest amount spent per pupil among OECD countries). I think your teacher friends are doing the best with what they are being given by school boards, which is different. In many cities, the school board is considered a key stepping stone into bigger and better offices (city council, boards of supervisors, mayor, etc), which means it often attracts folks who are trying to leverage their positions to take stances on issues that have nothing to do with education. I think attacking gifted programs / tracking is one example of this, which are cast as perpetuating inequality, despite evidence that they help students across the board.
The top kids don't need more resources. They need to be segregated from the bottom kids, which can be done with the same number of teachers by tracking.
I mean there are alternative models. Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore famously opposed the "helping the bottom kids at expense of the top ones". Is it really the right thing?
Equity really isn't the ideology doing this, except in a few cases, it's something else. I'd speculate the dominant effect is that people tend to dislike and resist what they have a hard time imagining: there's a strong bias towards easily-administrated uniformity, and ppl tend to enforce what they know and what they were brought up in themselves
I work in education and you're probably right that it's not THE thing, but it does enter the conversation. Teachers are supposed to provide what's called differential instruction but the quality and fidelity really depends on the teacher.
yeah, it's there, but I tend to think that "equity" is what people end up reaching for as a rationalization of the emotional need for uniformity / conformity / familiarity
It sort of "fits" but it just doesn't explain very much on its own
As an aside, I'm not really sure whether equity in the schools is simply being used as a buzzword folks think they need to include in their statements about various topics, or whether people really adhere to what it means and entails. Probably a little from column A and a little from column B.
Cost is a reason, but also there's social concerns. In the standardized system, all classmates share the same material, at the same speed. This shared experience disappears when every student is going at their own place, looking at a computer. This leads to the students being a bit more alienated from each other, and comparisons that go way past just a grade.
When a classmate at the same age is covering material that someone else did three years ago, you will get the tension from both sides, in the same way that it's not all that great socially to be on a traditional school and take classes 3 years ahead.
This issue disappears with all adult students, but around puberty, we are short tools whenever we don't have large enough cadres that we can just put all the kids fast at a given class all together.
American high schools (grades 9+) already give each student customized schedule, so there is no single set of "classmates" anymore - a Computer Science class might have 9-th graders and 11-th graders sitting side-by-side. This does not reflect their knowledge levels, it only means that one student decided to take CS first, and other student decided to leave CS for later and take some other class (like Physics) first.
This is why parents are unhappy: it's OK to skip most math classes entirely and only do state-mandated minimum... but skipping _basic_ math classes and jumping straight to advanced ones is not allowed.
Not really. Equity is a philosophy (of many; none perfect) that describes how to spend money.
Do you spend money (mostly) on bringing kids up to average, and any kid average or above average basically stays where they are, as far as the school's efforts are concerned?
Do you spend equally per child, aiming to uplift each of them by the same amount?
> It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating. .... Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade
This sentiment that "they shouldn't be" learning advanced things is not an equity argument—it's probably the kids' OWN parents complaining! I certainly agree that the equity-based shutdowns in highly-progressive cities are a problem, but that's really a very limited case; this thread is really about an entirely different phenomenon.
That's not necessarily the reason. OP probably was letting faster kids jump ahead but that doesn't really do anything helpful for a class that's going through a topic together step by step.
Better would have been to let the faster person learn something else tangentially related to the course so that they stay engaged but they don't disengage because they're simply ahead of the rest of the class on the next topic - which is just frustrating for everybody.
Alternatives exist for self-directed study and the tutorial system but that's presumably not what they're building for.
Or just...not have students at wildly different levels in the same class.
At high school and more so in universities, there are distinct classes at different levels, and prerequisites for those classes, and students at different levels. Bring that system to all grades, rather than just having "age N = grade X" as one giant class with pressure for uniformity.
> let the faster person learn something else tangentially related
If content someday emphasizes science as a richly interwoven tapestry, and heavily leverages implicit curriculum, this might become straightforward. The chemistry problem, that's also implicitly teaching cellular biology and supply chain dynamics, enables tangents on those too. The K-2 intro mittens, with tangents on thermal budgets, and spacesuit dexterity limitations, and winter camping clothing 101, and knitting how to, and so much more.
If OP regrets our handling of current curriculum, there's seemingly an enormous additional level of despair available, in education's profoundly impoverished opaque window into the beauty of the world.
I find that an uncharitable take of equity. You can also make someone like that grow stronger so that they have more to contribute to society. “Strongest shoulders carrying the heaviest burden” and all that (it’s a Dutch saying about the Dutch tax system).
But one should understand what that term means before doing so.
This seems quite the opposite - promoting mandatory equality (equality of outputs in fact) rather than equity (which would explicitly account for giving students different paces to learn at, and grade accordingly)
Nonsense. Equity is not to blame. Finland has arguably the most equitable education system in the world and it's ahead of the US.
There are plenty of problems with the US education system -- among them this typically SV $$$-eyed idea that "tech solves everything" -- but investments to raise up the educational standards of low-income or underserved communities is not one of them.
> Nonsense. Equity is not to blame. Finland has arguably the most equitable education system in the world and it's ahead of the US.
Finland has one of the most equitable societies in the world.
This means the amount of effort it takes to "raise up" a poor kid in Finland to have the same resources as a well to do kid is much less than it is in America.
> but investments to raise up the educational standards of low-income or underserved communities is not one of them.
School districts cannot solve structural issues within American society, but we expect them too.
If kids are starving, or being beaten, or otherwise abused, the teachers get judged if those students do poorly on standardized tests.
The problem is kids who don't get enough to eat, the problem is that there are kids who stay awake at night scared for their lives.
But as a society we've chosen to ignore all of that and worry about test scores instead.
This is because education is more about gatekeeping and politics than trying to maximize human capital development. We all ostensibly want it to be about human capital but our attitudes and behaviour towards education at the political level show otherwise.
The gatekeeping element seems to have developed in tandem with / response to the signalling hypothesis [1]. Simply put, if kids are trying to do the minimum necessary to get by, we raise the bar on the minimum standard until we're satisfied. Teachers (K-12 at least) respond with grade inflation, adding lots of noise to the signal, and we in turn respond with standardized testing in an attempt to clean up the noise.
I've never seen a teacher that was comfortably capable with even 50% of whatever EdTech they're handed. How are they supposed to maximize the use of it?
I remember having to painfully sit through multi-hour presentations in which they'd explain how to use a hamburger menu to find the app settings, and half the participants furiously scribbled down notes so they wouldn't get lost later when they needed to find the settings without guidance, on their home computer.
This was only a decade ago and I doubt it's much better now. People who go into teaching aren't exactly the best & brightest most of the time. And the results speak for themselves.
No doubt that there have been poor teaching experiences, but I would counter that my experience with EdTech teachers has been amazing and empowering. Really don't think we can tar all the teachers with the "EdTech sucks" brush.
not a teacher nor related to but i heard around 400 hours of pedagogy podcasts, be it the science of it, small-talk about teaching & sometimes edtech software that seriously, most of the time just sounded as apps coming from the next guy trying to be the next silicon money maker by offering what Google Docs offers but in a fancy app or in the most complex cases, what Matrix/Discord offers for free or what Emacs org-mode could accomplish without diving far from the basics it provides.
there was good apps & often these were backed/based by novel & evidence based ways of teaching
you can start with these podcasts for inspiration, not exactly in this order; "Emerging Research in Educational Psychology" "The Evidence Based Education Podcast" "Psychology in the Classroom" "The Edtech Podcast" "The Cult of Pedagogy"
i never liked school and actually what made avoid it as much as possible (to the point i proposed to my parents to work as a minor apprentice in the construction field because my plans were to quit school) was a 8° grade math teacher saying after my question about why that formula came to be, something like "you need a university degree at least to understand this"; so a neat direction i would like to see education taking is slowing down the amount of stuff we throw at students throat... maybe emotional intelligence/awareness, cooperative behavior (like knowing how to give someone a good feedback) & tech literacy! would be so cool if more people had the basic knowledge of getting some Arduino/ESP32 libraries at Github and hooking up into a board for small things, like a paddle Atari controller or just a cute LED thing as adornment/gift for a loved one (which i think to do that, lots of concepts can be taught); as well critical thinking so we don't have people lured to modern bullshit, like "buying this new fancy iPhone meanwhile i don't even understand what a shutter or aperture control serves, nor i use apps fancier than iMessage and Instagram" etc.
This is the very question that crossed my mind when I saw this headline (albeit at a different site): was this a failure of EdTech, or was it a failure of our highly structured and inflexible school system?
This is an issue that started to bother me while in high school, or perhaps even in junior high, and have realized over the years that people learn at different rates, that what should matter is knowledge and mastery and not grades, and that a failure in a class or several shouldn't be permanently incorporated into a "GPA" that also doesn't really capture the true essence of someone's knowledge and mastery.
In the past year, I have been learning a lot about autism and ADHD -- in no small part because I have come to realize I have both -- and I cannot help but come to the conclusion that regardless of why an individual student is different -- whether it be autism, ADHD, life-event-driven depression (eg from a death in the family or a divorce), or high or low or late-blooming intelligence, or even mere boredom that needs to be overcome by the "right spark" -- the school system as currently instituted can handle none of this -- and what's worse, any student who cannot conform to this, even if temporarily, is permanently considered flawed somehow.
I think the Lysenkoism of our age is all people are equally intelligent and equally good at all things, thus one size fits all education is an ideological imperative. There are too many unacceptable facts that lead to conclusions that contradict this ideology in the kind of approach you're talking about.
If all children do not perform roughly the same, ideologues will not think that people have naturally different talents and abilities, but instead think there are implied violations of laws protecting against discrimination in education. That being said, I'm sure homeschoolers and people not indoctrinated, even those with lesser abilities, will really appreciate this approach.
What i also observed was that gamification of learning is violently opposed .The protestant work ethics demand that children suffer jaded while learning, the intrinsic motivation of games be damned. Then the dull overpriced app looses against the tiktok experience and a surprised pikachu face appears. Cant have minecraft with chemistry crafting cause the fun "has no place in school"
I understand your frustration, but how does the software manage students that are behind versus students that are way ahead?
Like I'd imagine this would be deeper learning for a kid that's ahead, where they can really deep-dive a topic and maybe do some more advanced concepts.
But I can understand it from the teacher's perspective too; They have 30 kids, no extra budget and few resources. They have 20 or so average kids, and a handful of stragglers and a handful of people out in front, and are trying to meet ALL of their needs. Any of those three groups could use up all the time on a specific topic, so you end up stealing some time from one to deal with the others. If there are good monitoring from EdTech software it can help, but lots of teachers are not super techie so things have to be approachable.
It's definitely a space with more nuance and certainly more potential.
> The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are.
This is only truly possible if we trust educators enough to allow them to use a different approach with a child. The system we have has leaned heavily toward “trust nothing”. Parents and teachers all want the best for their students but at the same time we demand that everyone stick to the prescribed curriculum lest something unapproved should enter a classroom. This is how you get “McDonalds” results: Consistent and maybe somewhat average overall.
"Holding kids back" is not the reason EdTech fails at scale.
The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves, alone, without a dedicated human teacher supervising them or a group of student peers. (You need this skill to succeed in tech, learning new APIs/languages from written materials and online videos.)
The techies who build/fund EdTech wrongly assume that everyone could do this if only they had access to the learning materials, or if the tech vaguely simulated a teacher (an interactive textbook).
But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.
(For kids especially, adult career prospects feel so remote that it scarcely seems worth the trouble, whereas earning respect right now is a very, very concrete problem!)
Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed. I guess that is a "crying shame," but it's a tragedy, not a policy failure.
> everyone could do this if only they had access to the learning materials, or if the tech vaguely simulated a teacher
Everyone could do it if they were taught to teach themselves, it's funny we've almost come full circle back to the original intention of public education and universities.
I believe (almost) everyone can teach themselves something provided they have the material to learn from (videos, books, teachers, etc.).
This is because if people can't truly be taught to teach themselves there's no larger point in schooling unless you have only exceptional teachers throughout. Mediocre and bad teachers, which are far more common, make it so students end up having to teach parts of the material to themselves (which unfortunately leads to a tonne of rote memorisation) - this to me is where the true benefit of public education and standardised testing is, not the information retained.
The point of school was never fill our heads with facts we will never use in the workforce - most blue collar work is learnt on the job (or can be taught in short time), and white collar work is (generally*) done by those who learnt to teach themselves (as proved by them earning something like a college degree in spite of the bad and mediocre teachers).
* I say generally because there are white collar jobs that don't require it. And there are rote-memorisers who have such good memory they can make it into these positions, generally though upon hitting the workforce they stagnate, leave, or learn to learn (ever had an incompetent middle manager who only knew how to follow procedure?)
You're absolutely right, even in this thread there's a ton of "I was able to teach myself, so clearly everyone would be geniuses if only the system didn't hold them back" posts. It's the same thing that led to a lot of the problems with the OLPC project (check out the book "The Charisma Machine" if you're interested in that subject).
> The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves
Not by magic, though. Those who take an interest in tech are forced to learn how to educate themselves in order to fulfill their interest in tech. The same story applies to many other interests. Of course, it is possible one will never develop any interests...
> But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.
But is socialization the only thing most children can take an interest in, or does sticking children in these rigid school environments take away from them discovering other interests? In other words, is this just a symptom of them being in the wrong environment, rather than the nature if it?
Furthermore, if socialization really is the only interest, why can't it still be used to force learning how to educate oneself? If fitting in and admiration are a compelling reason to learn in general, why would it not be equally compelling towards learning how to learn?
> Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed.
Of course, that questions if most kids should succeed. What for? Being from the most educated region in the most educated nation, it's not clear what we actually get for it. The popular tropes don't hold up. Other parts of the world are much more progressive, economically vibrant, healthier, etc. It is hardly the worst place in the world, but a relative backwater compared to other much less educated places.
You don't have to go back many generations to find populations not exposed to much, if any, formal education and they don't seem to have ended up any worse off than the average person today. I expect there is a strong case to be made that people with a vision can leverage educational resources as a force multiplier to propel themselves well beyond what those earlier generations could have ever dreamed of been capable of, but for the average Joe just trying to fit in...? Perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees.
> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?
> Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?
Not GP but I can share a personal experience from high school: I was extremely advanced in English class. Like would literally finish a 45min exam in 10min and get an A.
This caused problems for the teacher. For one I was constantly bored and disruptive of others around me because I was bored and needed friends to chat with. But this made their grades suffer (it’s okay I did their exams too, lol).
Another big problem for her was that teaching me was a pain in the ass. I was clearly fluent in English but couldn’t be arsed to follow today’s lesson. My essays were a pain to grade because she could never tell if I was using a weird word I picked up from Tolkien or the internet, or just used the wrong word. She had to use a dictionary. During class sometimes I’d pull her on tangents discussing the nuanced meaning of a word she was teaching and none of the rest of the class could follow. Etc.
Basically I was a pain in the ass because the class was too easy and teenage boys aren’t known for their good classroom behavior.
The best advice that teacher gave me before the matura exam (like SATs) was this: Ok Swiz I know you think you’re a wiseass, but the matura commission won’t pull out a dictionary, they’ll just mark your answer wrong. Tone it down.
And if you think “Wow that teacher failed to control a problem student”, I think she did the right thing. It’s very easy to crush someone’s spirit if you don’t let them explore and pursue a thing they’re clearly talented in.
I was the same in math and science. I remember being told “You are not supposed to know that, and who told you?” angrily. My moment of disillusionment with authority.
I had something similar happen to me. But it sounds like my teacher handled it differently. I used to watch a lot of documentaries. There was a public access TV channel that would air educational content, I'd occasionally watch it for "fun".
After watching a documentary about Conic Section I asked my math teacher "When are we going to learn about Ellipses and Hyperbolas?" This was in year 7 (so age 12/13), We were learning about perimeter and area at the time I found it dead easy.
He patiently explained to me that we needed to build up to those topics and it wasn't something we could just skip ahead to. looking back on it I think he handled me pretty well. He didn't discourage me and he justified things in a way that 12 year old me could understand that there was a reason we covered the topics in the order that we did.
Conic sections would end up being taught in 11th Grade when I was 17.
In primary school there was a teacher who straight up hated me because I did the exercises too fast and this would cause extra work for him to keep me busy.
My guess is that the kids were learning ahead of the rest of the class and it made the teacher's life harder to keep track of where each kid is, or had to field questions outside of her expertise since often elementary school teachers only know enough to teach elementary school
A major part of this problem is teachers who treat "student knows something I don't (or aren't prepared to teach right now)" as a status challenge to be rapidly obliterated, rather than as an opportunity to encourage a student.
Many, many adults are extremely emotionally unprepared to accept the possibility that they may be wrong and a child may be right; they start from the assumption that this is an impossibility, and reason backwards from there.
Or, in the case where they do in fact know that the child is right, they nonetheless decide to prioritize asserting authority over demonstrating how a mature adult should handle being wrong. And thus do students learn bad examples of what to do when they're wrong.
On top of that the teacher has to juggle two tracks, the normal one and a special needs one. There has been a push for awhile to put mentally disabled kids in with their age peers and the teacher has to handle it, maybe with a low pay assistant.
Denmark did this about 10 years ago, the results pretty much speak for themselves:
Everyone is frustrated with it, teachers, parents, students, as well as their special-needs counterparts.
Grades have been steadily decreasing across the board, while enrolment in private education has skyrocketed (private schools do not have to accept difficult students). The private education is particularly surprising as Denmark has a very strong tradition of public education, where private education was viewed as something for the "elites" of society (e.g. royalty), now it's becoming more and more common.
Yeah - this is on OP if that is the case. No teacher wants that and it's annoying for the ahead kids and the behind kids. Better to give them something tangential to keep them engaged but still gate on moving ahead with the mainline curriculum.
To be fair - maybe that's what the product mentioned should have been doing? You can focus on general problem-solving ability by giving talented kids hard problems with the amount of knowledge adequate for their level rather giving them more an more material and making the whole learning process less manageable.
"general problem solving ability" isn't a real thing. Proficiency in solving, for example, math problems, does not confer the ability to draw conclusions based on evidence in history class. If you require a kid who's already mastered fractions to simply do harder and harder fractions rather than allowing them to continue onward, they will become bored and distracted, and ultimately burned out or resentful of the education system
I think it would be better to have a system where teachers aren't required to synchronize knowledge between 30 kids and some source material; where each kid can excel at their own pace and the teacher helps them manage their goals rather than being the primary source of information
Personally I have bad experience with edTech because when a student is young, he is not disciplined enough to do hard things alone or even just annoying things, and studying can be both.
So when they have an app with for example a qcm in front of them, the first times they try to do well, then they learn that if they randomely click buttons, at some point the app validate the answer, even if they didn't read the questions/answers.
So you get a group of young people that after school, just spend 10min randomely clicking on a app without any purpose, and after that they can go play.
I've got students that were from a private school, everyone was doing that, and their level was extremely bad.
Montessori worked on this problem, and did a fairly good job, but somehow it's still under the radar that we could revolutionise our educational system according an already proven model.
Montessori is more of a brand. People definitely perceive it to be the way you are describing, but really, if there were something old and certain, it would be widely used. On the flip side, there are lots of pedagogical practices that are proven, and this article is trying to show you how they are probably being disrupted by cell phones.
?? i went to a montessori school and i learned how to read and write poetry, cursive, tie my shoes, use scissors, all 4 mathematical operations, how to read novels, hell, i used to read our encyclopedia for fun, did a project on the bernoulli principal, and more, all before 2nd grade. no one i have ever met had an identical experience
I've always thought it would be interesting to have a education system that focused primarily on the best outcome for the brightest students and focused the vast majority of resources on the top 5% or so. I wonder if the total impact made (gdp, research contributions, etc) by a cohort of students this way would be higher vs spending resources to slightly bring up the average on a large number of students that never make much of themselves.
> the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.
OK but we've known this since, when, the 60s? Look at all the academic research on the adoption (or lack thereof) of programmed instruction, programmed learning, etc.
If we didn't already know this before the "EdTech Revolution" then of course the industry would get a pass, but the fact that we already knew what would happen and why is what makes it a scam.
Man, No Child Left Behind left a larger mental scar than I ever imagined. "learning they shouldn't be"? I never would have gotten fast tracked in math, and by extension gotten into a decent engineering school, if that's how my teachers thought. Then university wonders why kids are less prepared.
They're not just banded into a range based on their grade. They're banded into a grade based on their age, even though "being within a year of the same age as somebody" becomes essentially meaningless as soon as you're out of school.
Yes but that’s because you (mostly) stop physically growing once you are out of school. Banded within a year is meaningless for adults, a 25 yr old isn’t that different than a 30 year old but a 5 year old and a 10 year old are distinctly different. They are at different points in their development physically, emotionally and mentally. They socialize differently and have different needs. I’m not saying they can’t interact but there is some value in keeping children together by developmental stage and developmental stage is fairly age specific.
As the kid who stood 4-6 inches taller than the next tallest kid in my class until I stopped getting taller when I was 5'8" and 11 years old, I'm acutely aware that kids physically grow at entirely different rates even during school. (I'm a woman, so this is still above average height, but I'm nowhere close to as awkwardly tall as I was in a room full of 11yos.) Look at any classroom and you'll see a wide variety of physical development.
I'm just saying age is an arbitrary indicator for every category I can think of, and most situations would benefit from using a more relevant metric. In situations where size matters the most, let the huge 10yo play with the 11 or 12yos and the tiny one be with the 8 or 9yos. When I was 11, for safety reasons my karate instructor had me start training with the adult women who were closer to my size. In situations where intellectual ability is the relevant factor, you might have even a broader reach. If my parents hadn't refused, my kindergarten principal wanted to have me in 3rd grade by the end of my first year and doing two a year after that. Sitting through 13 full years of classroom instruction instead of 5 or 6 was miserable. Somebody you share interests with might happily overlook the fact that you're a couple years younger and still want to be friends. It's at least more likely than that someone will overlook the fact that you have absolutely nothing in common because, hey, you were born within a couple months of each other!
> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
That problem is that parents who want to expose their children to more knowledge and better education have no voice -- of any kind. A small group of parents objecting to something violating their niche belief will absolutely nullify the voices of any number of parents thinking otherwise.
There needs to be greater ability on the part of educational organizations to be able to parse the unencumbered learners from these minority case.
Another instance where technical solution is not the solution for people problem. We can make all bells and whistles but if people won’t use it there is nothing more that can be done unfortunately.
I'm just very curious as I'm passionate about teaching, how do you evaluate 'their level'?
I my experience, I can give material that is way out of their comfort zone, but it's my job to make it interesting enough and make enough bridges so that everyone can learn the material well, no matter the starting point.
(note: university level, but I also teached numerous times for schools)
> I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level... and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be"
A charitable way to read what you are saying is, "kids are not sufficiently challenged in school." But you are railing against an antagonist that is kind of vague. What, specifically, are you talking about?
I love the idea of individual pacing of kids educational journies - if you do have the syllabus and software to take every kid individually through school, is it impossible for us to fund the school for five years - and after years of every kid walking out with top grades there might just be some social proof
It seems like it is possible - probably enough people on this thread could make that investment
The problem is that it should be the present. Oh, I've been an engineer for a while and I know the system can't turn on a dime, it would take some time.
However, we should be seeing visible progress towards this goal, and frankly, if anything, the system continues to be moving in the other direction, lowering bars to try to get everyone into the exact same level long after it should be clear that lowering the bar still isn't even achieving that goal, even as it destroys everything around it in the process.
The system isn't even trying to customize skill-based education, beyond a bit of clearly-ineffectual lip service.
Large bureaucracy wants people to be as fungible as possible, so that systems can be designed that interact with fungible units instead of complex, multifaceted individuals.
To be clear, most engineers at FAANG would describe their own companies as a "large bureaucracy", yet, the engineers at these places are highly skilled, "complex, multifaceted individuals". Their hiring strategy has demonstrated this time and time again on HN discussions. It is insanely hard to get hired into these places. There must be at least 10 qualified candidates for each role. And, weirdly, I would say that almost all of the most highly skilled software engineers that I have known in my career are also the most dynamic. By definition, that makes them fungible because they can learn new skills so quickly.
Computerization barely helps with "customized skill-based education" outside of parts of certain topics (some areas of math, notably, are very well-suited to it). Detailed feedback from humans is vital in many topics and for learning many skills, and, as they say, that doesn't scale. We can do it, but it means spending a lot more on teachers, so we aren't going to. We may eventually get a half-assed version involving LLMs or whatever nonsense, but that will be brought in mainly as a way to get by with fewer teachers (they're cost-diseasing into something we can't afford any more, it seems) not to increase educational quality.
My expected outcome for all of this is that the gap between rich and poor students will grow, as only rich students will continue to have decent student:teacher ratios (their ratios already tend to be a ton better than public school kids). Paid tutoring will become common somewhat farther down-market than it currently is, as more people choose to pay extra just to cover what their tax money used to, but no longer does.
I worked in EdTech research, it's a shitshow. Indeed the focus is on institutional learning while the power of tech is to empower people outside formal education. The amount of wishful thinking is unbelievable, protocols are often very weak, hard problem aren't addressed and focus is on what is easy to measure. There is so much potential, but it's vastly underexploited.
> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
are you US based?
so of the Nordic countries have implementing thins similar to what you describe as their normal form of education
This is why I hear stories every year at my kids school about home school kids enrolling, then being place in math classes 1-2 years ahead of the max possible for somebody who had been in the school system to start with.
This has been the case for a long time. I was one of those kids who usually "got it" the first time I saw it, and then remembered it. So lectures usually moved much too slowly for me. In an effort to not be bored, I would usually sit quietly and read ahead in my textbook.
Some teachers were cool with this, but most of them would yell at me for not paying attention, and a couple specifically called me out for reading ahead on the basis that I thought I was too good for the class.
I skipped out complete uni classes and followed an analogue online. Maurice Herlihy had its concurrency and multithreading classes online for a while. I passed my c&m course with it, we also used his book
We built a product specifically for student-centric work where educators could assess student progress (think Hattie's Visible Learning and similar lines of thinking) and compare student growth against their own previous work. We encouraged educators to quickly tailor the tasks to individual student needs.
Educators (and pedagogues) loved it. But we couldn't gain traction with the buyer persona: Administrators asking "what's in it for me?" Data on improved outcomes wouldn't be immediate, so it was a no buy.
This was exacerbated by Google and Microsoft giving away their office productivity suites repackaged as classroom tools to ensure future market capture. Because you totally want your 8-year-old becoming a Word or Docs or Excel expert right?
So yeah, we have a reality where students don't have really great EdTech—they have tech that's masquerading as EdTech, picking up all the low-hanging fruit and leaving the hard problems of education unsolved (or unexplored).
The company is in the process of folding, and I'm hoping to re-release the software as true open source sometime in the future once all the legal / corporate shutdown stuff is finished.
Yes the problem isn't so much ed-tech, which by the way we all use everytime we Google or ChatGPT how to do something.
The problem is that ed-tech is being shoehorned into an existing dysfunctional system. It's trying to help the education system do more of what it was already doing, just with computers.
The underlying problem is that the structure of the education system is absolutely stupid and shit. We've just been so used to that for so long that we don't notice it anymore.
If schooling was good, ed-tech would be a big enabler of that, helping students learn at their own pace, guiding their coursework in the right direction, linking it to career paths, all kinds of things.
But currently ed-tech is just enabling and feeding more of the same slop, just digital instead of paper. That's the problem.
> It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
That is bad. I have to say no teacher I had a problem when I learned things ahead of time. Some less good teachers were not actually encouraging, but they certainly did not think it was a problem.
That said, IMO the school system does not cope well with kids who are not going at the average speed. This is one reason i home educated my kids. We need to change how schools work to take advantage of ed tech (and a lot of other opportunities - you can learn at your own pace from books, like I did)
can you give an example of someone being upset and what the thing they'd learned that they "shouldn't?"
as a parent I find it confusing that I'd consider getting upset if my kid was learning 6th grade history as a 3rd grader (or 2nd grade art as a 3rd grader). what actual examples are there?
the only examples of parents being upset about learning I'm aware of lately is, like, critical theory and marxism
IMO, EdTech has failed because it's BS. I'd sooner buy GameStop stock than the next EdTech-in-schools startup. (EdX, Khan etc. are playing in a different market, and doing ok.)
But sex ed and the like is definitely something that gets parents upset, as is the general concept of "they're teaching my child things they're not telling me about", whether that's critical theory, sex ed, evolution, or anything with the word gender in it.
I doubt they were talking about any kind of "adult" content. The situation they're referring to is more like "your second grader should be focused on multiplication, not long division."
Never underestimate how upset people can get when a kid does longhand addition the old way (write numbers under each other, carry the ones) rather than some more "holistic" way.
I'm not sure why the commenter is being downvoted. I too can make a drama, literally capitalizing one of the worst words ever invented, "actually," about a vague antagonist, and rile people up, letting their imaginations fill in whatever boogieman they feel wronged them in school. What specifically is the situation? I don't want to speculate.
not sure why porn is assumed how the hell is that educational content? maybe there's religious things on there, any number of things parents would want a say on
As someone who's worked in EdTech for around two decades, I know why people think this. It's what a lot people here have already said. Education is what is failing, EdTech didn't magically solve this. Just like money, you can't just throw tech at education and expect it to solve anything.
There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.
I'll repeat what others have said here. Giving teachers the means with which to properly work with their students, and investing in students at a more individual level, is what's needed. Sadly, my refrain with regards to public education is that is has become little more than glorified babysitting. Those that succeed do so in spite of the system, and not because of it. Meanwhile, students that suffer from one or more disadvantagements (poverty, disability, social issues, mental or physical health issues, and so much more) tend to just...suffer more. And then they fall into cycles where preventable issues repeat or enhance into the next generation. They'll still spend all of their little income excessively, so profit is still to be had, or they'll end-up in prison, which, again, thanks to privatization, is also immensely profitable, so no problem there, right?
The system is setup to fail because that's what's profitable in the long run for those seeking such profits. And because they can lobby, and use their wealth to influence politics, it won't change. Something else needs to happen first.
> An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable.
This is a reactionary take.
Math, science, and basic language skills do not lead to political upheaval, and are incredibly valuable skills to the capital class. Leadership would be more apt to propagandize social studies and suppress dissent.
China easily comes to mind as a counter argument.
I'd apply Hanlon's razor: education languishes due to poor funding, lack of competition, and low salaries that attract mediocre teachers. We don't even properly fund development for blue collar jobs! Also the problem compounds since one generations students become the next generations teachers.
Economists have a pretty poor track record of predictions themselves... so I wouldn't be too smug about this. The economy (the real one, not the one in textbooks) is very complex, and most "obvious" things that you think about the various proposed policies are probably wrong.
If the US electorate had better economics education, the 2024 candidates might have been forced to present sane and reasonable economic platforms, because doing so would have actual political value. Dare I say at least one of those candidates wouldn't even have made it to the primaries. Which I leave as an exercise for the reader.
They aren't economic idiots, they just know most American voters mistrust any economic concept more complex than "taxes bad. China bad. jobs good."
This is reductive. Even PhD economists are crap at predicting effects of certain policies (see the Federal Reserve - it has thousands of them!). The economy is very complex to model (and has reflexivity), and generally you will find credentialed experts on both sides of anything short of a trivial debate.
Tariffs have pros/cons, as does any other policy proposed by the two candidates. And the most tricky thing when computing the effects of these policies is: "what is the quantity we're trying to optimize for?" - where the "welfare of the people" is not really a measurable thing.
That's fair, and someone told be there's a distinction between politics and policy, but when politicians pander to the crowd, it's really hard to get an idea of what their actual policy will be.
> It's what a lot people here have already said. Education is what is failing, EdTech didn't magically solve this.
To expand this more globally - anything that requires human interaction fails at scale. Healthcare, trade skills, education, housing, etc. is all "failing" to some degree no matter how much technology we throw at it. The costs continually go up and the value isn't paired to it.
To put a name on this, it's the Baumol effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. Essentially, as productivity increases in most industries (from automation), it drives up labor costs in the industries that can't be automated (healthcare, education, performing arts, etc), which drives up the price of those services (healthcare), or drives down the quality to find a market clearing price (increasing student to teacher ratios).
> anything that requires human interaction fails at scale
What do you mean by "fails"? It doesn't have the zero-marginal-cost dynamic favored by the investor class of the tech industry?
Don't confuse "you can't scale human interactions" with "human interaction fails at scale". The former is talking about the venture-capital-accelerated winner-takes-all business strategy, the latter is a misunderstanding of civil societies and living a rewarding life because you can only envision such things through the lens of owning a zero-marginal-cost process.
These industries, more or less, need to be highly regulated because we've faced the alternative and it's worse. The quality of education went up SIGNFICANTLY when the state took more control over it.
Part of that is questionable, because the state gets to set the means by which the quality of education is measured. However, a more objective measure is the extent of education; certainly, the introduction of national education has always produced a much greater literacy rate.
The thing is extent and execution are intrinsically linked. Meaning, unregulated markets mean the extent will be limited because people will just choose not to get educated. Which makes sense, if they themselves are uneducated they don't have perfect reasoning skills or future outlook.
A market relies on the participants having visibility and ability. They need to see the alternatives, understand them deeply, and have access to them. Turns out you can't do that in a bunch of markets, education being one of them. So, it can never be a true free market.
Is not the absolute cost that goes up per se. It’s the cost relative to cost of things that scale. Education, nursing care, even doctoring all have significant human to human interaction at a personal level for there to be success. When the cost of other things like commodities drop 100x, those human interactions services don’t and therefore become relatively more expensive even despite massive productivity gains those fields
I understand education and healthcare, but how do trade skills and housing require human interaction? For housing especially, a lot of foreign/remote investors can own houses and just collect rent checks from tenants in a pretty hand-off manner. Housing is supply-limited, sure, and heavily regulated, sure, but I don't think it requires human interaction, and certainly not to the scale of education or healthcare.
>An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism,
Very wrong. Education only camouflages stupidity, it does not remove it. And then part of education is indoctrination to trust authority (eg. trust the science).
That said, basic education reading/writing/simple math/science is indeed valuable.
Yes, it is innate, with a high degree of heritability. No one questions physical traits are innate, but some how when it comes to IQ it become highly contested...
You are using the word "heritable" as evidence for the "innateness" of a trait. "Innate" can mean multiple things, but the implication here is that it implies genetic determinism. Heritability statistics do not establish genetic determinism and, for intelligence, there's now substantial evidence in the other direction.
Heritability: Black kid born to black parents. The blackness is heritable
Innate: Albino kid born to black parents ( mutation, etc..) So here Albinism is innate to kid but not inherited.
That's a black and white definition ( for the sake of conversation). There can be intermediate states. For example even if the kid's skin is black there can be variation in skin tone, so slight mutation, but still largely inherited.
Trying to quantify genetics and intelligence is fraught because of history and ethics. We cannot put one twin in a box of food and water and the other in schools of varying quality. We also cannot clone Einstein and put them in various schools then test them.
Everyone has to live and grow within unjust societies. Some groups will suffer from racism, others may benefit. So it's going to be hard to prove much of anything without a lot of twins and decades of natural experiments.
The eugenics movements and Nazi experiments have also made the whole subject taboo.
Finally IQ is quite arbitrary and the tests evolve over time too.
>The eugenics movements and Nazi experiments have also made the whole subject taboo.
I know this.
>Finally IQ is quite arbitrary and the tests evolve over time too.
The IQ test may be flawed, but is the concept flawed?
Can you see any downside in not acknowledging differing intelligence among individuals?
(we know the downside of acknowledging it - right from the Natzis, to individuals who may not try hard enough to achieve something)
And oh well - there are both twin studying and studies on kid adopted by their non-biological parent. Given the taboo, it may not be easy to find them.
> There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.
I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
> actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
I'm reminded of the quote
> “No one involved in an extralegal activity thinks of themselves as nefarious. I'm a businessman, okay?" - Quark, DS9 S6E25
I don't believe anyone nefariously sits there and says "lets make sure people aren't educated" but I genuinely believe there are people who say "I did this thing and people keep voting me in to keep doing that thing or keep paying me to do that thing, so I'm going to continue doing it that way"
You are 100% correct, people mostly follow incentives. The problem is that, for many politicians, "this thing" in "I did this thing and people keep voting me in, so I'm going to continue doing this thing" refers to the starving and/or defunding of education.
I can almost admire how you manage to think that but that is just ignoring reality. Politicians have created entire media giants that are designed to either lie to you and trigger an emotional response within you. Maybe not out of pure maliciousness but they benefit from doing it.
In the US, it's easy to imagine, or just see, politicians actively opposing expansion of the currently-poor education system. Some actively seek to further defund it (see school vouchers).
As for actively misinforming poor people, that is the day job (campaigning) for countless politicians, who usually spend less than half their time drafting or voting on legislation.
That's because you aren't viewing it in the proper context and think that the result of the action is isolated. I can't honestly imagine that you couldn't come up with a single incentive for misinforming people on topics in such a way that would result in your own benefit.
Just curious, how would you describe the motivations of a stereotypical sleazy car salesman offering predatory loan rates: A hard working person doing what they need to do to survive, or a con artist trying to find more victims? Only one of those choices represents reality, and you should really be wary of anyone who would suggest the other choice.
> I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
Populism is exactly this - misinforming poorly educated people with bad scary words, "others", "easy" fixes.
> Inflation is bad! Crime is bad! We'll just deport 20 million "others" and everything will be allright!
Or:
> Let's send all the money we're spending on the EU on the NHS, 350 million pounds per week more for the National Health Service!
In some countries, like the US, there are active efforts to sabotage education, or at least cripple it - by reducing funding to a point where educators have to spend their own money for supplies, get burned out, have poverty-level wages, etc. Those can't be accidental.
Focusing solely on the “babysitting” aspect of your post:
Since babysitting is essentially required in our current social framework, why do we need physical schools with in person teachers. It seems to me that we could have babysitting facilities spread to lots of small commercial spaces with in person babysitters for kids who are doing school on computers with synchronous teachers online.
I realize that the model I’ve laid out here is simplistic, but it would solve so many problems that it seems worthwhile to flesh it out and mitigate the issues.
I don’t think this is the case for several core reasons:
- higher income people spend more money. The middle and upper class is by far the largest market and source of tax revenue.
- poverty generally turns areas into low trust higher theft spots that need expensive security.
- high income places generally have good public schools because a majority do know how important education is
- this requires a pretty vast conspiracy of people saying “keep people dumb so we can profit”, which I haven’t heard of at all
I think the much simpler explanation is that there is no accountability for inept pockets in the education system. Schools can’t really be punished for sucking and parents can’t move their kids in most states without just switching to private. There is no feedback loop for broken schools.
"There are too many profitable incentives... Power generally resides with those who benefit... The system is setup to fail because that's what's profitable in the long run for those seeking such profits. And because they can lobby, and use their wealth to influence politics, it won't change. Something else needs to happen first."
Well put, all around! If it makes you feel better, state-funded education has, as a rule, pretty much always been babysitting. As we fight together for a brighter future, I think it’s important to know that we’re building something new and glorious, not restoring some natural status quo.
Tho I’m no history buff. Maybe some civilization had really great public schools? Designating only a small portion of your population as True Pure Citizens does tend to help with stuff like that
The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is not clear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible. Of course all the nuances and little details make all the difference: board picture, structure, teacher personality, pacing, choice of topic, interaction, motivation, excitement, etc.. It is not guaranteed to work, but as a format it is workable, and I found nothing so far that is better either as a student (long time ago) or as a prof at a top university (for some time now).
A distant second is the format we used during COVID: writing with a tablet using xournal, and streaming it via zoom (loosely like Khan academy). This is of course only my personal experience/opinion, but also informed by vast amounts of student feedback.
EDIT: I agree with the different perspectives from the responses, and should have qualified that I meant it for subjects one typically learns at a university, like calculus or linear algebra. One-on-one tutoring, self-learning can work even better or complement the above and skills, e.g. playing a musical instrument should be approached totally differently.
Seems like there might be some survivorship bias here, right? You teach students who made it to a top university because they thrived in the classical setup which is the most common one. Presumably your preferred teaching style aligning well with the classical approach also helped get you to that position.
Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Coursera became available. I did reasonably well at uni but was not motivated with others deciding what I had to learn and when. Lectures tended to be slow paced and often boring, so I zoned out instead of being pulled in (I passed my exams by working through the problem sets in the textbooks, I skipped most lectures).
When I got the ability to play/pause/skip/1.5-2x videos, and when I could choose what subject to learn like a kid in a candy shop, I did start consuming lectures much more aggressively. Still, I think well designed problem sets and assignments actually do the bulk of the work when it comes to learning/teaching, and I regularly skip the lectures and dive right to those.
Not saying that your method doesn't work, or that it shouldn't work for you, but its suitability depends on the topic, the student, and the setting.
I learned math from khan academy, and physics from my textbooks. When I exams were coming up, I would skip every single lecture to read my textbooks and do practice problems.
Did that all the way through physics undergrad, and I never would have graduated via the standard lecture + questions method.
Maybe my professors were mediocre, but I think I’m just not built for classrooms!
My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday and another throw a chair. Another just sat there and didn't do a thing for 7 hours. The Little House/Christmas Story model hasn't been able to work for a long time.
> My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday
Did she actually allow this kid to disrupt the entire class for 10 minutes? Isn't there a responsibility to all the other students that they should have a reasonable learning environment?
I remember being sent to the office for a lot less than that.
- Some schools don't have the resources to send a kid who screams for 10 minutes to the office. Schools in bad areas may have a line of battery incidents waiting for admin's attention by noon. There are schools where second graders threatening the teacher with sexual assault is just a Tuesday and basically gets ignored.
- Schools in nicer areas are sometimes in the middle of some dumbshit half-implemented (the other parts made admin uncomfortable) "discipline plan" that the superintendent got sold on at some damn district-paid drinking vacation away from the family... er, I mean, education conference, which may lead to insane crap like letting a kid scream in the classroom for ten minutes (sending them to the office might get the teacher in trouble for not following the plan). Half-implemented plainly-doomed-to-fail admin-driven plans for discipline, or for education approaches to any or all subject areas, are often a factor in stupid crap schools do.
She called for admin backup, which reacted pretty quickly, but they basically just calm him down and return him to class. And of course the screaming happened after a series of de-escalation attempts by her, which often works, but not always. He is non-neurotypical, mostly ahead of the class academically (though there are gaps), but very behind emotionally. He is the 'worst behaved' in her grade level, but every class has at least one that is liable to 'go off' as it were. It is in no way fair to the rest of the class, but while the state we live in likes to act blue, when it comes to paying for social services it's pretty red. And this is in a state with school choice, so don't think that necessarily helps either...
My impression is that both a teacher's power to do much anything about such behavior, and the rights of the non-problematic students to a viable classroom environment, are either gone, or "going, going", in most parts of America.
There was a story in the NY Times a few months back about a basically one room schoolhouse in Alta Utah. Of course that's a small and mostly homogeneous community and, as I recall, it was unclear from the article how well students were learning other than presumably becoming good skiers.
I have no doubt it is the best option. For certain people. But why impose a single way to learn, when there is no such a thing as a "single size fit them all" learning experience? All the more when there are alternative options.
There is. There is a ton of alternative schools, homeschooling is legal in most of places in the world etc. The problem is that people expect teachers adopt to every single pupil. It's not possible.
> The problem is that people expect teachers adopt to every single pupil.
Nah. The people expect EdTech to allow children to find their own suitable learning style with only babysitter oversight. But no teacher wants to "demote" themselves to being a babysitter, nor do the administrators want to become seen as running a daycare, so you end up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116365.
Maybe the solution is to segment students to the teaching style?
We can't expect teachers to provide a good environment for students who are good at self paced learning, and students who need structure in the same classroom. But we might be able to have classrooms that lean one way or another...
> The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is unclear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible.
I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least.
At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me.
The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer.
Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion.
The best two are self teaching and one to one teaching.
Both are, of course, "boring classical setups" but both can be improved by technology. My daughter had one to one teaching over video in subjects that we would have struggled to find a tutor for locally (classical civilisation, for example). Self teaching is hugely improved by access to more materials - this does not need fancy tech, but just websites and videos can help a lot.
Worth noting that this is fine for academic subjects (although highly dependent for success on student interest), but doesn't work at all for skill based subjects.
You would enjoy Cliff Stoll's writings on this topic. He hates technology in the classroom, and still firmly believes teachers with chalkboards and flashcards are superior to any technology in the classroom. I disagree with him only in so much as technology allows for media that can help simplify some things, but agree with him that nothing beats a good teacher.
I find chalk on a blackboard one of the worst ways to learn. This isn't 1890 anymore. Much better are more modern prepared lectures with much more complex and interesting slides than what a teacher can draw with chalk in the time of a class, and with a lot more detail and scale with the magic of a modern projector. this also lets the notes and videos be reviewable before and after the fact. Very helpful. Hell even overhead projectors were a lot better than most chalk on board classes I went to pre electricity.
Beyond that, I find I learn infinitely better by doing than by being lectured to. By being challenged by a set of problems that grow over time.
Beyond that tutoring blows lectures out of the water. I was failing calc e in normal semester, I dropped. My moms bit the bullet and bought me 3 weeks of tutoring over the summer (much shorter semester). I then aced summer calc 3 which is generally much harder. It was amazing how well me being able to guide the lesson to where I was having trouble versus the lecturer keeping on track worked for me. I've learned this lesson as a mentor as well, teaching is for the student, not the teacher.
tl;dr what works for you sucks for me, don't tell me how I learn.
What if a teacher starts telling what the best way to write software for a large codebase that 1000s of engineer contribute to is, based on their experience of writing ten lines of code to some toy problem that teacher once faced.
Think about it. That’s what you just did here. The better thing to do is state your experience as your experience and leave opining on optimal teaching pedagogy to those best equipped to study and understand it, which sure is as well isn’t you
That part was clear. It was when you started opining on “what’s better” that I felt you stepped way way out of your area of expertise. You really have no grounds to say what’s better
I have 100% grounds to say what's been better for me over the 30 or so years of school I've taken, I'm sorry if you're reading more into what I'm saying than what I'm saying.
Just like I'll say that spaced repetition seems like a good theory that I'm having trouble (with adhd) putting into practice esp while taking classes and holding down a job. Or that I liked the approach the class took during lectures by talking with a small peer group, but could see that it didn't work for many shy people and seemed to take a lot of lecture time. Overall they were interesting and I'd try them again.
These are my own observations I am not professing to be an expert in education.
I mean, I’d argue the chalkboard method often can’t visualize things as well as modern educational stuff like 3blue1brown, which is the kind of thing I often supplement for my relatively dry university material. For tons of things, well-produced videos are more effective, especially when compared to a class with maybe a hundred fifty people in it where questions are discouraged during lecture.
This is largely just anti tech puritanism. I cant comment on the psych and neurological arguments, but the following line of reasoning
> A pre-Covid survey exploring how US students aged 8-18 utilize digital technologies both inside and outside of school provides the answer (values below are per week) ...If we extrapolate and consider a typical U.S. academic school year of 36 weeks, these numbers suggest that students spend 198 hours annually using digital devices for learning purposes, and 2,028 hours annually using those same exact tools to jump around between scatter-shot media content.
is incredibly silly, given that it is counting time on device outside of class (things that students are allowed to do) against effectiveness of in class usage.
It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning. Students who play games or watch movies are not alcoholics using beer for buoyancy studies.
Not only this, it groups listening to music on a computer as an independent recreation activity, and not something that students will do concurrently with homework or other tasks outside of class, double dipping on recreation hours. As if listening to music isn't a boon for learning, which it easily can be.
IMO the correct analogy would be a physical object where you could switch back and forth between Harry Potter and books used for learning. If that were the case I'd agree with you. But here we are talking about two separate distinct physical objects, the Harry Potter book and, for example, a biology book.
When a person is reading the latter they can't easily switch to HP, but I can do that while learning anything in my computer. It's as easy as doing ctrl + T + red + enter and I get to the infinite entertainment that is Reddit thanks to the browser autocomplete, for example.
Switching to nonsense with physical books is as easy as having two books in your bag/desk, or reading a physical newspaper with a comics section. Treating the ability to switch context quickly as essentially bad for learning is reductive, especially when the ability to add more context (searching unknown words, useful videos, articles etc) can obviously be incredibly useful.
Stopping the ability to do ctrl+T+reddit.com also prevents the huge amount of info the rest of the informative internet can provide.
The article also includes smart watches as computers, and personally as a Apple Watch user, the amount that this device can distract is incredibly low, and obvious to viewers like a teacher.
No, it's saying that if you use the same device to entertain yourself and to do homework, and you use it for entertainment 10x as often as you use it for homework, you'll get distracted then you're doing homework.
> It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning.
Books are separate objects, they are not a platform. It's saying that if you put a child's homework as a two page insert into a great comic book, the rest of the comic book will distract from the annoying, difficult insert.
The opposing theory is that the proximity of homework to comics will somehow make the homework fun. Homework is going to be hard and annoying no matter what you do, if it's not hard you're not learning anything from it.
The Harry Potter and comic book argument also works for paper newspapers, the same object contains good, informative articles, opinion pieces etc, but also the comics page.
I am arguing that thinking that the same object cannot be used in two contexts is incredibly reductive and essentialist. They are stacking the books (by double counting time listening to music etc) to prove the idea that they are insistent on, that computers (which the article generalizes from desktops to chromebooks to iPads to smart watches) are essentially bad for learning, when this is not necessarily the case.
Students will continue to learn using computers, just as I will, because they are ridiculously effective for doing so.
The argument Jared makes in the body of his article ("The argument I’m making is that digital technologies so often aren’t used for learning that...") is less bold and sweeping than the one in the title ("The EdTech Revolution Has Failed").
It's true that edtech hasn't (yet) created an educational utopia, as some people may have imagined or hoped. But there are educational technology tools that my son (8yo) uses several times per week, that undoubtedly help him to learn important stuff:
1. Math Academy (truly amazing for 4th grade math all the way to first year of undergrad: https://www.bit.ly/ma-way)
2. Skritter (for learning to write Chinese characters)
3. Anki (flashcard program).
4. Octostudio (for learning to code, by the same folks as MIT Scratch)
#1 and #2 are both much more efficient (learning per unit of time) than any other method I've seen. They (along with #3) use spaced repetition and retrieval practice as part of their secret sauce.
But they are also highly domain-specific. Math Academy relies on thousands of hand-crafted math problems, all designed within a (hand-crafted) graph of topics that students must master. Skritter has tools that give people (adults or children) an easy on-ramp to learning the broad strokes of each character, and more advanced modes that train more precision.
I'm an adult user of Math Academy. I have a bachelor's in Math and I'm working through the Mathematical Foundations series to brush up on material from all the lectures/assignments I skipped and fill in the cracks of my knowledge. I absolutely love it.
I used it for 2 months during spring last year (averaging over an hour per day). I have chosen not to prioritize math study for now, but I also absolutely love it.
As others commented, the article doesn't really talk about edtech, but about introducing smartphones/tables/computers in curriculum in a way that makes it harder to limit their use both at school and at home. From my kids' experience, I agree with the article.
But I also want to touch on products. Had a startup in the space[0], and we only achieved commercial success once we started gaining customers outside of EdTech.
EdTech is hard, in that it combines enterprise-like sales with scrappy startup-like budgets. On top of that, you're selling to people who are far removed from the user experience (heads of districts vs students and teachers). End result is stuff like Blackboard, who everyone hates, but it's everywhere.
I've seen a ton of interesting, promising startups that tried to engage students and help with learning (in various ways), only to never hear about them again.
I've also seen (& heard from) a lot of teachers with great ideas, who basically need to do grassroots campaigns and teach each other tips & tricks, because they're not really supported by their organizations.
What is missing in edtech is a concept of progress and partial correctness and guess work. The primary input in edtech is multiple choice. This is selected so a person does not need to evaluate the answer making it cheaper. But leads to kids guessing. Starting a blank line to write a response is what really kicks the brain in. There is no easy way out.
We could replicate the same blank page and grayscale human response to questions. But then we have not made a cheap factory that reduces costs. Its the typical fast, good, cheap conundrum. Everyone keeps picking cheap and getting mad when it does not work.
Or, almost as bad, kids learning to approximate the answer. I aced too many multiple-choice physics exams in my GCSEs because the multiple choice was A) 1,000,000 B) 1,000 C) 100 D) 10. Without knowing the formula I was able to eyeball which numbers looked obviously wrong and just select the closest.
You probably want to get units correct too. Say Newtons vs Kelvins vs Amperes... Still able to estimate right size is in general skill that should be taught.
I don’t even think they taught that much, I’m pretty sure I learnt about Newtons in mechanics (A-level maths course), Kelvin from reading Wikipedia and Amps I think I knew because my dad worked in motor repairs. My knowledge is old now, pre-2008 before the Gove reforms.
At least from what I remember in A-level physics, a lot of the multi-choice answers usually had 2 sets of answers, both of which were ambiguous and could be the correct answer. A few questions even had answers where they were all the same answer, just with the digits either transposed or the decimal point being different. Stuff like
Honestly I think you’re giving British exam boards more credit than they deserve. You options were so ridiculous that you only needed to pay attention for 2 minutes out of a 1 hour lesson to realise what the answer was.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say I left the exam hall still none the wiser of what the actual formulae were!
IIR, that problem-solving method is called "Fermi estimation" - after the Nobel-prize-winning physicist who was particularly skilled at doing it. Perhaps you're smarter than you give yourself credit for?
I think people, and society in general, need to be a lot more careful about buying into hype, and prematurely adopting hyped tech.
Would you buy (or fly in) a "revolutionary" new jet, that (by the way) hasn't been tested, but it's makers are really hopeful it will be safe and perform better than other jets?
IMHO, changes in education need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study. First you've got "balanced reading" that de-emphasized phonics and reduced literacy (but I'm sure resulted in massive textbook sales and prestige for a few education academics), and now you've got EdTech screens that have hurt students' learning (but probably made some VCs rich). Implementation's got to slow down until we actually are sure the shit actually works better.
i think part of the reason computers swept into classrooms so quickly is that we had a generation of old folks seeing their jobs get computerized and they (correctly) felt that computer-literacy would be essential for a huge swath of the workforce.
however, this group also had a very hard time learning how to use computers later in their career and felt "wow, this is really hard. we need to be very proactive about teaching this to kids".
it was well intentioned, but i think they really REALLY
overestimated the need for 'teaching computer literacy' because:
a) we've gotten a lot better with UX so computers are easy to use
b) the older generations difficulty was more related to unlearning old ways and transitioning rather than difficulty inherent to computers
You should Google "marc prensky digital natives". You'll see this hype is over two decades old now.
> Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers, the people sitting in their classes grew up on the “twitch speed” of video games and MTV.
> They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging.
> They've been networked most or all of their lives.
> They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test” instruction.
There's a lot more cheerful predictions:
> My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.
> After all, it's an idiom with which most of them are totally familiar.
I think the core fact that learning is fundamentally about curiosity and motivation, not "engagement", was (and continues to be) glossed over, or intentionally ignored by a lot of tech-pushers.
> need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study.
If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
>> need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study.
> If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I don't know exactly what you mean by "surveys," but I thinking the decision should be a default no, and whatever "innovation" is being pushed should get rolled out slowly enough that public debate can nip bad ideas in the bud. I'm specifically thinking of an article I read awhile back where a parent (who knew she was a bad reader) was flabbergasted that her kid was actually being explicitly taught the same bad reading strategies she used as part of a "balanced" reading curriculum.
I under if you had no more than 10% of schools using something like "balanced reading" for 20 years, before it could be rolled out. I'm hoping their underperformance and criticism from parents and dissenting educators could get the idea scrapped before it became the mainstream, saving the students in the other 90% of schools from being harmed by it.
> I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
Yeah, and I think we also need to stop pretending new is better. The idea that kids being subjected to "innovation" may be getting harmed more than they're being helped, needs to be made prominent in these debates.
Ed tech, like most tech, is primarily focused on making money for the ed tech companies and their shareholders. Not at all surprised that it doesn't actually lift education standards.
As the parent of two kids in elementary and middle school, the one thing we learned from Covid is that children need live teachers. Yes, there are exceptional children who can self-teach with good materials (I have one such child) but most don't. And for those who do, you don't need fancy tech. I supplement my (advanced) child's education and primarily use books and pencils, and live coaching, as I've found those work better than any "adaptive" EdTech I've encountered. Finding it too easy? Just skip pages to the next chapter? Too hard? Find some extra review problems on the topic.
> as I've found those work better than any "adaptive" EdTech I've encountered
Have you tried Math Academy? From seeing my son using it, I'm guessing it's more effective than live coaching from a median middle school math teacher.
I saw that on HN recently, and it does look good, but haven't tried it yet. I might give it a try. One factor is I'm my son's math coach so I don't mind sitting down with him and books (he's 2 grades ahead).
This isn't to say EdTech can't be useful, and my previous comment was perhaps a bit harsh. Khan Academy is great for drilling into specific subjects; my older child (now finished college) used it at home in HS as a supplement and it helped (scored in top 2% nationwide on SAT).
I just don't think EdTech __replaces__ teachers (which is what many edtech-utopians preach), and I'm not even sure it's a good classroom tool, but rather is a useful _supplement_ that allows _some_ students who are interested and good at certain subjects to forge ahead on their own, or maybe as homework. It's just a tool among others, not a "revolution in education" that's going to "raise scores for everyone".
I'm not even sure it's a good classroom tool, but rather is a useful _supplement_
We may soon get to a point where, for certain subjects, edtech is the classroom tool, and the teacher/coach is the supplement.
I don't mind sitting down with him and books (he's 2 grades ahead).
My son is also 2 grades ahead in math. He skipped Kindergarten and now, in 3rd grade, he does math with the 4th grade class (which is currently working through the Singapore Math 4A book).
At home, he's just over half way through Math Academy's 5th grade curriculum (which is roughly equivalent to 5th grade common core standards). He still comes to me with questions. Sometimes, I can give a great, personalized explanation just because I know him well, we have shared context etc.
But usually he's just been too aggressive at skipping past the explanations or worked examples in the MA lesson, and I just tell him to scroll up and read. He does that and says 'oooh, now I get it...' and then he can continue on his own.
What I'm trying to say is: I also don't mind sitting down with my son with math books. But it's more effective for MA to be the core experience, and for me to be an on-call coach (i.e. for me to the supplement).
> in 3rd grade, he does math with the 4th grade class (which is currently working through the Singapore Math 4A book).
Coincidentally, my son is also in 3rd grade and also on Singapore 4A book at home :) He can't do math with the 4th grade class (not really an option at our school) but does 5th grade level with the apps they use in class (DreamBox, not sure which others).
> But usually he's just been too aggressive at skipping past the explanations or worked examples in the MA lesson, and I just tell him to scroll up and read.
Again, similar situation here; so I prefer to go over the concepts with him to make sure he's grasped them. His biggest problem is reading the problems too quickly. When he slows down and takes the time to think through he figures them all out -- and that's probably my most important contribution as his "coach" -- and also where you need a live person I think. It's like with sports -- many players are skilled enough that they don't need a coach to teach them skills, but they need a coach to learn how to use those skills.
> But it's more effective for MA to be the core experience, and for me to be an on-call coach (i.e. for me to the supplement).
Fair point. I should give it a try as an alternative (always useful to have different curriculums approaching problems from different angles, especially as the concepts get harder).
The teachers, the tools, the curriculum are not the problem. The No Child Left Behind Act is the problem. When everyone passes regardless if they learned anything or not, literacy skills are going to go down. You used to stay in a grade until you passed that grades curriculum, now everyone gets a pass. There are no consequences, resulting in no incentive to learn. Repeating 8th grade while all your friends move to high school is a pretty good incentive to get your act together.
More incrementally different than foundationally different. ESSA was trying to address complaints about NCLB, to allow more autonomy and flexibility. Neither are directly responsible for "everyone passes." They both were trying to stop everyone passes by adding a standard of accountability.
IMO education is still built around Victorian structures and needs to be reworked from examinations downwards. Examinations are an exercise in being good at examinations, not proficiency in the subject. Once you strip that away the you wind back all the structures that feed it. You can see this working at schools designed for the neuro diverse. Those students simply can't sit and listen to a teacher all day, so each student learns in their own way and are better of for it.
Arguing about the effectiveness of edtech is like complaining there wasn't a viola on the Titanic's band.
I agree 100%.
With ChatGPT at everyone's disposal with entire humanity knowledge in generative form, we need to completely rethink the concept of teaching and learning.
There are so many opportunities to deliver personalized Ivy League level education in your native language of choice, for essentially pennies/free to everyone around the world on demand
What, specifically, is an example of an exam not measuring proficiency? If an exam is well designed, the student will need to figure out what is being asked and use their mastery to provide an answer.
> What, specifically, is an example of an exam not measuring proficiency
Not op, but a few examples:
1. Test structures that reward good time management. The paper SAT is a good example of this. The early items in a section are (were?) easy, the middle items were medium difficulty, and the toughest items were towards the end. A good test take would manage their time so that they spent the most amount of time on questions that could improve their scores — later questions for high achievers, but the middle questions for folks who were missing a lot of questions in that range.
2. Test structures that reward endurance. Again, SAT is a good example. How often have examinees sat down in a multi-hour high-stakes testing situation before taking the SAT. “Not often enough to feel comfortable” is usually the answer. I have taken some foreign language proficiency tests that were also multi-hour long endeavors. I practiced answer old exam questions in a testing environment, so the tests were easy for me. Some of my peers did not, and fatigue seemed to be a part of their challenge.
3. I took some “issue spotter” tests in college. I had never heard of or seen an issue spotter test before. I bombed my first one. My professor kindly walked me through things he knew I knew the answers to that would what given me credit. I aced all future issue-spotter exams. Side note: familiarity with test/question format seems to matter for better students, but it largely doesn’t for unmotivated students. Many studies on familiarity with test/question format show no correlation, but my personal experience (as a test giver) is that this is due to lumping the unmotivated and ambivalent examinees with the folks who notice, care, and take action.
There are many more answers to your question, but the above are few decent examples.
I think test prep allowing people to increase SAT scores is actually a useful feature not a bug.
If you’re the kind of person who’s going to put extra effort to add a few points to your results, you are also the kind of person more likely to do well in collage classes.
I agree in general with what your idea, but this sort of assumes a few things that aren’t always true:
1. Examinee is aware of test prep and its potential benefits. Definitely not always true in low socioeconomic status (SES) families, especially ones with no family members who have been to college.
2. Examinee can afford said test prep courses and/or materials. Library and online are “free” options, but we are back to assuming that the examinee has easy access to a library and/or the internet and knows how to find said materials.
There are many, many students who would do well in college if they had some insight on how to do college. The US has a lot of wasted potential due to our public school focus on bringing up the low achievers to the exclusion of developing those with high achiever potential.
Some private schools and most public schools in “good” neighborhoods have programs and cultures that cater to those with high potential, but these schools only address a relatively small portion of the student population with high potential, imho.
It's not really being the "kind of person who’s going to put extra effort" and more the "kind of person who is privileged enough to have parents that care about their education, know that outside resources exist, and have the time and money to utilize those resources".
I think the SAT is a ludicrous setup given that most people never see anything like it in their lives again but the practice of studying for passing an exam of some kind is an absolutely invaluable skill
> I think the SAT is a ludicrous setup given that most people never see anything like it in their lives again
Yeah, I guess.
I think the issue is that the folks best suited to get the most out of college don’t really need to prep much to absolutely crush the SAT.
Most people are just woefully underprepared.
> but the practice of studying for passing an exam of some kind is an absolutely invaluable skill
Yep. Learning how to study, learn, and prep for a test are good skills to have.
That said, for folks who have done well in a semi-rigorous school environment and read the right things (high-brow periodicals), very little test prep is actually needed to get them close to their theoretical max score.
There are a few catches, though:
- Some people in the US have an incredibly irrational fear of math.
- The math curriculum is super-slow and limited for those who like math, often turning them away from it (or at least the high school math classes).
- Most folks have no idea what university-level literacy looks like. Doing things like reading “high-brow” periodicals gives high school students most of the vocab and text structures covered in the SAT.
A good example in the UK is teaching students the FOIL technique for algebraic expansion. Students typically can expand (ax+b)(cx+d) because they've learnt a recipe but cannot expand say (ax2+bx+c)(dx+e).
Many schools here focus on such tricks (nix the tricks was a great book focusing on such things) as schools here are judged on pass/fail rates.
In general, exams are an excellent way to assess students en masse at their ability to remember similar problems but not inherent problem solving techniques. The latter I've found is possible to teach 1to1 but far harder with a class of varying abilities.
That, to me, is not a problem with the exam though. It's a problem of teaching to a special case and not the general case. If you want to find fault, it's in the incentive system. But I don't see how the exam itself is the problem.
Well I won't reiterate all of 'bad education' by Bryan Caplan but to my mind exams are imperfect because:
1. Schools are not equal. It's not fair to compare students when they usually have no choice over their teachers.
2. Exams cover an arbitrary syllabus controlled by undemocratic exam boards.
3. Topics are chosen by exam boards that can be examined not by importance.
4. Students who perform poorly under stress of exam conditions are punished for it.
5. Exams serve no real purpose. Children are not chickens being graded for sale. They're at best a weak signal of aptitude.
I would much prefer exams to serve as a prerequisite of sitting a future course rather than an assessment at the end. That way teachers can actually teach rather than continuously repeat the same content.
the inability the generalize the foil procedure to an expression with more than 2 variables speaks more to the non mathematically oriented population just sucking at generalizing things. i have found this to be a very “you have it or you don’t” type of thing, not really something that can be taught
“Well designed? is doing heavy lifting here. You can get very good at specific test formats in terms of time management, common tricks, etc.
Actual tests include things like: Multiple choice questions were providing answers aids answering the question. Short responses / fill in the blank generally mean people can just regurgitate answers they don’t understand. Essay responses sound great, except you can’t answer many questions and essays writing is a separate skill which heavily influences final scores.
More broadly tests are time limited so can’t test skills that take long periods of time to demonstrate a major issue for say programming.
> More broadly tests are time limited so can’t test skills that take long periods of time to demonstrate a major issue for say programming.
Every programming class I've taken, in high school or college, was project based where the main source of grade were actual programs I wrote which actually did something.
The one exception perhaps being the AP test for AP CS.
English exams for ESL students are a great example.
Getting good grades in those exams requires that you know the criteria for evaluating each part of the exam and how to tailor your answer to that criteria. For example, if the exam asks you to write a short movie review you are expected to follow the formula for reviews and show that you can use certain specific grammar constructs.
If you know English well but you don't practice the exam before you will get a mediocre grade, simply because you didn't follow the tacit guidelines that you are expected to know.
Exams are a poor measure of proficiency. Proficiency is gained by doing and stretching a skill over time. You can measure that in small increments than a periodic exam. At the end of a period, a student would have a body of work to demonstrate proficiency rather than relying on a single day.
When I taught at university there was a disparity between exam grades and the physical body of work they had submitted over the years. You'd see the grade and be shocked the did so badly. The grade reflected proficiency in examinations, not in the subject.
Yeah definitely agree. Tech at my kids school just means all the tests and homework are done on a computer instead of on paper, but it is still the same format as it has always been.
Would be cool to see more open ended long running projects instead of the standard 'lecture > homework > test' pipeline. Kids are also given a crazy amount of leeway and teachers/parents will drag a negligent kid to their diploma. Even if a kid tried to fail they would be met with a bunch of counselors and special classes begging him to put forth a minimal effort. It might help if we moved the guardrails back a bit and let kids know that failure is a very real possibility.
In my opinion without exams, kids will never solidify what they learn. It’s usually pretty easy to think you have a solid grasp of some thing until you’re actually asked to solve a brand new problem.
Then I would ask anyone to keep building on knowledge rather than training for an arbitrary benchmark. Filling your short-term memory with knowledge to be then dumped straight after will get you a good exam mark but doesn't mean you have anything close to a solid grasp. Most schools (in the UK in particular) optimise for grade outcome because that's how they are judged, that's not the same thing as being good at a task.
It kind of is. I’m a firm believer in that knowledge comes from doing. Even the trades use exams. If you want to become a welder, you have to weld five particular welds, then get graded. There’s no better way to gauge someone’s proficiency at something while also letting that person find out what their weaknesses are.
This is interesting, and I think plausible, but I find it... surprisinging that the evidence base is so poor. Like, I know entire states have banned smart-phones now, can we see those effects yet? If it's anywhere near as powerful as the author suggests, surely we should?
The second question I have is about the outcome variable on these (but I realise I should probably just go read the damn research) - is it possible that letting people use phone teaches digital skills, at the cost of traditional spelling, for instance?
They banned cellphones/smartphones in Ontario schools in 2019... but it was a "ban" with no plan for enforcement and no roll-out so everyone ignored the ban.
Perhaps the onus of the evidence base should be upon EdTech. I used to ask the OLPC fans where the studies were. Or what curricula had been tested to work, or what great education software was being ported, what measurable outcomes were expected, what programs were established to educate the ITeachers...
EdTech is a baseless orthodoxy tied together with hardware sales, unproven software and anecdotes.
Could it be that part of the failure is that EdTech companies are focused on replacing the pedagogical aspect of schools, but the main utility of schools for parents is not pedagogy - it is a daycare centre for kids while parents go on about their careers?
That said, i think it more true of governments than of parents. It increases the size of the workforce, therefore higher business profits and household income, therefore higher GDP.
Its pretty evidence in various attempts to increase time in school. talk about the "summer slump" in the US, or the government encouraging extended school days (drop off for "breakfast club", pick up after "after school" activities) in the UK.
No. A legion of edtech companies have been born and died who solve the underlying pedagogical issues but die.
Some of the reasons they die are:
- students don’t control the budget for their spending, so their voice/progress has almost no impact on budgets
- parents in the US spend a tiny fraction of their deposable income on education (and also have almost no say in budgets)
- teachers have almost no say in budgets. In public schools, it’s none. In others, it’s performative if at all most of the time.
- administrators get promoted by doing a very specific set of small things, none of which include improving outcomes through addressing pedagogical innovation
This all adds up to: you can create an edtech startup that radically improves student outcomes and still run out of cash
"it is a daycare centre for kids while parents go on about their careers?"
This is the kind of thing that could only be said by somebody who is not a parent. There might be a minority of parents for whom this is true, but I know zero other parents who don't care whether their kids are learning.
> I know zero other parents who don't care whether their kids are learning.
Nobody said that.
While I don't think you deserve to be downvoted, the reason you are is that you are complaining about generalization ("the kind of thing that could only be said by somebody who is not a parent") while immediately generalizing, implicitly, that commenters on Hacker News are not parents. I am a parent, I care about my son learning, and the experiences I've seen for very young children (less than 5) are very close to daycare, even at the very best schools.
It isn't saying much that very young children learn best with one-on-one time with a very engaged adult, which isn't something you can do in daycare. Some people believe that learning occurs because of a specific ethnic heritage, using a pile of money, or a piece of technology. If these are your beliefs, then it can be hard to make any progress whatsoever.
To your comment about even the best <=5 schools being glorified daycares, you might consider Montessori, if your kids are still in that 3-6 age band. There are many faux-Montessoris which are daycare with wooden toys, and use the name to collect that premium, but the real ones are very different, and do a good job of teaching independence in learning. You can look for the accredited ones on AMS’ site (you still have to evaluate the teacher, but it should weed out the worst offenders).
While I don't doubt that a benefit of schools is you don't have to pay for day care while you pursue a career, that is far from the "main utility" of schools.
The main utility of schools, despite the hyperbole on the internet, is to educate and cultivate a productive, adjusted society. Yes there is overlap with what parents do, yes there is overlap with daycare. But those are ancillary benefits, not the ultimate goal.
Here in Canada teachers are paid well but we still don't want to pay for good resources. Anything where money is going into overhead that's separate from teaching students is viewed with a stink-eye. They killed textbooks and replaced them with nothing.
Think about how many teachers are out there scrounging up and making up their lesson materials, tests, etc. because state/provincial bodies don't provide that content top-down, even as an optional resource for them to draw upon. Then teachers are told "also you need to accommodate all these special cases where students have distinct educational needs" but the basic easy stuff that could've been pre-made is consuming all the time they should've been able to spend "personalizing".
> - playing games such as _Dragon Box_ (which teaches the principles of math and esp. algebra)
One of my kids got pretty damn good at Dragon Box in like... first grade, I think it was?
As far as I can tell this has had (years later) no effect on actually being able to understand algebra any better. The connection's not there. I can see why, too—doing it myself, it was sometimes hard for me to figure out how the various patterns of actions in the game connected to the mechanics of solving algebra problems, and that's with my already understanding that part pretty well. Even when it gets a little more explicit about which symbols are connected to what, later on, what actual mathematical operation or set of scribbles on paper does "drag this little box onto that other little box so it disappears" translate to?
My conclusion is it was good at making me feel like my kid was learning something, but not a great use of time for actually learning that. I think she got a ton more out of the couple times I sat down with her for five minutes to show her how something worked on paper, than hours and hours of Dragon Math.
This goes for other games that are supposed to teach place value and such, but make it really abstract and "fun". Maybe it's just my kids, but even when you point out that what they were doing perfectly well in the game is the same thing they're supposed to do on this worksheet for school, the presentation and mechanics are so different from "drag these colored blobs around" that the value the game provided was practically none. It didn't confer understanding, it taught a very specific kind of pattern recognition just for the game that the kids have trouble generalizing, same as Dragon Math.
Since I am a developer I have always created fun games for my kids to play and learn. Almost every single time they just go with the game mechanics instead of the actual learning concept. The only game which worked was a roblox game[1] I created for fun. And that too, its just a basic obby. Nothing fancy. But I told my kid, he can play Roblox for 30 minutes if he can finish this obby for 5 numbers. So, in a way, had to force him. But within a week, he was able to memorize the multiplication tables :)
Venture capital technology is mostly about replacing expensive processes with human input by cheap substitutes that are 75% as good but hoping scale will compensate. Sometimes 10x at 75% is really is better than 1x at 100%. Sometimes it’s not, because 75% isn’t good enough, and it might as well be 10x at zero.
Education is closer to the latter. VCs think they can remove the humans and the scale and cheapness (the latter in theory, at least) will compensate, but people are social animals, and students lose trust in the state when it wastes their time, so education by machine turns out not to work well at all, despite the fervent belief held in a few hundred Bay Area tech companies that it should.
The problem with edtech is they make the key mistake of taking the curriculum intended for pen / paper / chalkboard and they just put it on a tablet and expect it to work.
Seymour Papert wrote "Mindstorms" about this very topic in the 80s when PCs were being put in classrooms. Back then, teachers took the multiplication tables they had been doing with pen and paper and just made kids do them on the computer. Teachers make the same mistake with iPads and iPhones. Papert's book talks about the right way to do it -- reformulate the entire concept of learning to include these new tools. Unfortunately, everything gets measured against the old standards, and when the new tools don't work as well to teach the old standards as the tools with which the old standards were designed to be taught, obviously the results are going to look bad.
Yes, there was also a thing known as the Great Media Debate in the 90's iirc. MOOCs have a less than 10% completion rate. Media by itself is not the answer. What makes a big difference is teaching techniques and things like superhuman spaced repetition and system adaptation. See how Math Academy does it: https://www.mathacademy.com/pedagogy
The article is pretty supportive of the conclusion. Reductively, EdTech is putting screens in front of kids at school. Doing that leads to distraction and procrastination than using those screens for learning.
I sympathize with this goal, but I'm not seeing what to do instead of screens for kids. I've been looking, hard. Suburbia makes this really hard. try getting three kids to sports with two working parents, and thats only half the time you're trying to fill. Try to get any kind of regular playtime with other families who are busier than you. We kid ourselves we're keeping them off of algorithms, but craft materials only take them so far, and the rest will be filled with TV and video games when we are stuck working.
When my daughter was 11 she tiled our bathroom. Now she's 16 and talking about what tools she wants to add to the workshop. Kids are tiny adults, you just need to enable them.
KISS. Teacher, Whiteboard, and a textbook. (Preferable one the student can keep at home and one in the classroom) EdTech resources are amazing for self-study, but should be divorced from the school system. There will be non-profit (Khan Academy) and for-profit options available for students and parents.
Though I am in favor of any suggestion that makes a teacher’s life easier.
However, I do have the controversial opinion that there should be no calculators allowed at all in K-12. So, I have some anti-tech bias.
As someone who tried all kinds of EdTech, I'd venture to say that the key to education quality is not in tech but in pedagogy and student engagement. The pedagogy depends on the quality of teachers, or specifically the quality of lecturing and the quality of assignments. Good assignments are really hard to come by. They need to be tailored. They need to have progressive difficulties. They need to be designed to help students understand fundamentals. They need to inspire students. And very importantly, they need to be graded and reviewed by the teachers. All such will require dedication and ingenuity of teachers.
As for the student engagement, I believe it depends on the passion and curiosity of a student, but I also recognize that most students simply don't want to work hard, and therefore they need certain healthy pressure, or at least a specific goal. Maybe EdTech can make quality teachers and homework accessible to millions, but it's just hard to keep students engaged. On the other hand, there are enough amazing free education materials in libraries and on the internet. The barrier to access them is really one's motivation.
In my experience as a parent of a senior in high school, the classes where the least amount of learning happens are those that depend on and are designed around "EdTech". The best ones still use paper and books.
My son's AP calculus 1 and 2 classes were all paper and books and run by dedicated teachers. I have never seen my son learn so much and put in so much effort. Other classes relying on "EdTech" are just babysitting with free grades. The teachers give up because they can't obtain a basic level of control of the student's use of the devices.
In my son's 12 years of education so far there has never been a class where the teacher had control of the technology - the Chromebooks. There was no switch the teacher had to turn the Chromebooks off or lock them. No ability to filter out games. The school district IT could never stay on top of the filters. Games are a constant presence.
Having these entertainment devices in the classroom just distracts from real learning and only serves to feed kid's behavioral data into Google's profiling algorithms.
As someone who has taught in formal and informal settings, the promise of EdTech was amazing, but the delivery has not really been that good.
To me, a lot of the companies in the space seem to be more concerned with how to maximize dollars sent to them and not as much about how things are improving or better with technology. Tech should be a tool to help the learning, it doesn't have to be each and every part, and I feel like the ultimate goal of at least some of the companies was to create an all-in-one solution for every problem.
Would you be willing to share any (anonymized) anecdote(s) that helped you see this reality?
I'll share that I saw how much EdTech was infested by folks trying to leverage "gamification", and I read Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy". That, and other events like Sebastian Thrun admitting "We have a lousy product" (on MOOCs) was enough to disabuse me of any notion that our generation's EdTech hype would prove any different than its predecessors (education over TV, or via Radio).
I worked leading the digital product of an education company with a whole methodology, books, teacher coaching program, etc.
The education guru of that company talked a lot about Estonia, Finland, and Singapore as models of the best education in the world (pre college). These countries get consistently good PISA scores. And guess what? Close to zero tech in education in these countries.
Some papers were released that showed fine motor control (eg pen and paper writing) has deep implications in cognitive development.
And then slowly we've started to see all the consequences of phones, tablets, social media etc on gen z and alpha. I don't think it's controversial to say kids should not be using these devices and there's plenty of research to prove it. Obviously schools in many countries are now banning them.
Pretty fluffy article for someone who is a PhD, MEd, (AND Best Selling Author!).
I read the first half and skimmed the second half because the author couldn't make a point somewhere in the giant wall of text. Even if there was a point in there, the subject is too broad which is another question I have...
Anyway, in a broad (meaningless) rebuttal, I wouldn't say EdTech has failed- everyone I know has learned how to do something real they didn't know how to do before from youtube. Easy examples: basic plumbing, basic electrical, playing guitar, playing drums, systems design, how to improve in their sports, software stuff... even my dad learned how to properly put up a gutter on their house recently.
What I'm observing it seems like people are learning more its probably just schools getting in the way.
In TFA, "EdTech" refers to things like grade-school subjects: e.g. learning to do fractions. In this respect, replacing human teachers with software/apps is what's being debated. The consequence of this replacement is a sharp drop in face-to-face engagement, and the substitution thereof with 1:1 screen time.
You provided some examples of auto-didacts teaching themselves useful life skills via YT. I think these are good resources for such folks -- I know I've benefited from them myself -- but it's hardly in the same ballpark.
I took about 60 credits - ~8 hours per week each school semester - of Computer Science courses back in the mid 00's at a top state school. Besides the 101 Course, heavy on Java syntax; and Software Architecture where one learns the dark art of Swing, we used pencil, paper, and white boards (even a few chalk boards!) for the rest.
I use concepts like Dijkstra's algorithm and the Turing machine regularly in my job. They are very real to me - more real than any programming language - because I sat for hours taking paper notes off a whiteboard while some OG Computer guru discussed the topic.
If I didn't need tech to learn Computer Science, kids definitely don't need it to learn Algebra.
What if it is possible to spend a lot less time learning that with newer classroom methods (ed tech doesn't have to mean whiteboards and apps, teaching methods are technology too).
We can make a good house without metal fasteners using hand tools and nothing but muscles. But that doesn't mean that a house built using brushless power tools in 1/4 the time isn't also a good house.
More directly: I conceptually understand a lot of algorithms that I read about. For me though, the ones that I learned by coding them and running them are the ones I understand much better. Hand written notes on a lecture do not guarantee complete or correct understanding, and there is no mechanism for checking.
I didn't even own a computer for my first year of computer science (couldn't afford it), and had a 1½-2 hour commute to school. I did everything with paper and pencil, because when I had to actually turn in something, it involved staying in a giant, crowded computer lab and getting home well after dark after having left well before dawn. I still have notebooks filled with C.
That being said, my mother learned how to program when they were still using punchcard decks. My ordeal wasn't special. Don't know if I learned any better than others, but I think the need to not have bugs on the first iteration was more important for me than for other people. I did not just tweak things until it worked.
I discovered some amazing EdTech recently: the game Prodigy. It’s brilliant. Kids play it, and it’s an utterly uninspired example of modern gamification with a big dose of paid (by parents, of course) DLC. The selling point is that it’s (a) free for schools and (b) mixed in with the gamification is a little bit of measurement that is supposedly aligned to common core standards. The game does not even pretend to teach the material it measures.
And now we’ve gone past the usual endpoint where the metric becomes the goal. It seems that the ability to waste everyone’s time measuring the metrics has become the new goal.
I think education is best done with 'minimal power' in the students' hands.
An example:
A student is taught how to calculate an integral with MathCAD on a school PC. They now know how to use MathCAD on Windows to calculate an integral. If the OS or software changes, they may lose that knowledge, and they may not understand the concept. They've effectively 'lost' knowledge due to time moving on.
Differently:
A student is taught how to calculate an integral with pencil and paper. Due to pencil and paper doing nothing without the student driving it, they must understand the steps to the process, and in doing so, will likely get to understanding why those are the steps. At the very least they may be curious about the steps, why they work, and why all are required. If you give them a PC, they'll likely be able to figure out how to use it, as they understand the concept. If you take away the PC, they'll still be able to use pencil and paper.
The distraction/multitasking angle is interesting too, but I really think education works best when you take all unnecessary power away from the student. They are forced to learn the concepts rather than get lost in all the peripheral details (PC, software, notifications, etc.) and understanding of fundamental concepts will rarely become useless. While understanding of computing platforms or software versions will very quickly become useless.
I think part of the problem is that they decided to use the computers for every class instead of using computers in classes about computers.
Tell kids to do open ended history/english research on a computer, they get sidetracked and waste time.
Tell the kids to do a computer thing on the computer (like use math as to solve this question), they have a much more focused task at hand and will use the computer as the teacher intended.
This strikes me as a really strange way to define EdTech:
> In this article, I’m defining EdTech as any student-employed, internet-connected digital device; this includes computers, laptops, tablets, cell phones, and smart watches. I am not discussing or evaluating the use of digital devices by teachers.
Aren't there a huge swath of self-defined "EdTech" startups aimed at tools for teachers, and-or use in the class, perhaps exclusively by the teacher?
There are, which is why the author included the quoted clarification of what "EdTech" means in the context of this article.
Is there another term the article could use that would fit better or be more clear?
I find this article to be frustratingly gappy and the discourse here about it to be awful, a soup of personal anecdotes that would make the bikeshed painting discourse proud. Given at least 10 years of different types of EdTech in classrooms, is there really no peer-reviewed study about the effects of technology in the classroom conditioned on type of technology, time spent, etc? It's no doubt that the comments are personal anecdotes because the article itself is a soup of meta-analyses that dance around a picture that isn't really clear to me.
I don't disagree with the thrust of the article and it makes intuitive sense to me but it feels so substance free as to be unactionable. Yes multi-tasking is bad for individuals, yes kids spend a lot of time on media. Are there other interventions that are better? Are lower class sizes a bulwark against this? How does income and culture (anglosphere, asia, etc) affect this?
I wouldn't say it has failed completely, but yes, it has not delivered on the promise. Edtech and teaching is close to my heart and I have spent a lot of time analyzing this. My insights are mostly from what I have observed in India.
Edtech has failed in India because there is very little tech and even little education in the apps. Mostly edtech in India equates to exam preparation apps.
Other approaches like the duolingo gamification approaches have also failed to actually educate users though some of them have found success as startups.
This has lead to a disillusionment among parents about the edtech promise. Also, unfortunately the big successes of edtech(Byjus, Whitehat etc) turned out to be bad apples.
But lets take the positives. The main positive is that parents and kids are willing to try and there is a huge market. They just need the right product.
My takeaways are as follows:
1. Too many products try to reinvent the wheel with their own curriculum etc. This creates an extra burden for students who have to study these in addition to their course work. Given the paucity of time, guess what they drop?
2. Too much gamification and engagement farming. The emphasis on gamification instead of learning.
3. Most edtech is about putting videos online and adding quizzes. No emphasis on making the content actually interactive and engaging. In this day and age why shouldn't text books be interactive.
This is what I am focusing on and helping my wife do a startup in this space(I am unfortunately busy with running a SaaS startup, so I just help out of passion :))
So far, we have made the whole of CBSE(India's national curriculum) curriculum for math as an interactive textbook. But it's a long journey. There is no hurry. The revolution has just started :)
You know, for EdTech, STEM is one thing but the humanities already had a fully successful way of engaging kids in their concepts for decades, genre fiction.
While perhaps they aren't as deep or worthy of academic analysis, their stronger engagement is undeniable, they still do messages worth listening to, and lays down the path for stronger appreciation for more subtle world later. Which makes sense, you don't start out in Tolkien in Fantasy, you'd probably put off 95% of potential readers into boredom. We go with Sanderson, or Patrick Rothfuss then we go on to more complex classics.
The fact that kids are forced to start with Shakespeare is insanity and the exact opposite, and then teachers disdain people who predictably get put of by that culture. Why don't they change it is a question beyond me.
I stopped monitoring that side of tech, but early MOOCs (first gen coursera, edx, stanford) were as good or even better in some regards than my own college programming studies[0]. I could engage deeper in the material and there was some healthy emulation between people on the dedicated IRC rooms. On site college doesn't give you full focus, you might be distracted by people, teachers won't necessarily be more present for you (so not worse than rewatching a video)
bonus point: there were some famous names in our groups, it was fun to see the spread between absolute noobs and cpp iso standard contributor
[0] for programming, questions + test suites are very effective to try various ideas and see what fails. for other subjects, like philosophy it might differ
Yeah, it was fun and a little mind boggling when I was just starting out that the person who maintained the python library everyone was using was teaching the class on how to use it. (waving at web.py)
As a former teacher and current parent, I hate ed tech for a variety of reasons:
-ed tech exists, by definition, on the greatest distraction machine heretofore known to humankind
-ed tech lets the tech do the grading, removing the ed from the loop. It abstracts away the teacher's mental model of my student's mind.
-ed tech is overwhelmingly short-response or multiple choice; this measures only the most basic forms of learning.
-there is rarely a physical artifact, making lessons and learning far more ephemeral. Often, I cant review previously-submitted work to see where my children have gone astray.
-ed tech has completely removed the physical aspects of education. Writing notes is better than typing notes is better than merely listening to a lecture, on a retention basis. Rather than actually submerge an object in a graduated cylinder of water to calculate its volume via displacement, its now a shitty online "experiment"
I could go on and on, and perhaps later I will in subsequent comments.
Tech and Education solutions or proposals always seem to be sort of island solutions.
But none of them address the structural problems / challenges with education. Teachers are burnt out, many teachers are terrible with tech, do not get enough support, the structure of education systems doesn't allow for flexibility. Parents aren't involved in many cases, kids are hungry, social worker type issues. Education IT is often underfunded, their IT workers get low pay so they leave. The list is endless.
But tech is dropped in like a bomb on a building that is supposed to help with renovation ...
no it hasnt, edtech's purpose is, and always has been, selling to administrators. I have never met a single educator of any sort who ever believed that this technology would be valuable to students in any way.
I still appreciate how self-learning is now easier and more convenient than ever. It's always been possible by reading books, but the addition of resources like Kahn, 3Bl1Br, MitX etc are lovely.
Given the adversarial of systematic education, and their focus on discriminating into social status castes, the self-learning will have a dual advantage: Growth, enjoyment of learning, and a large advantage in the competitive aspect. Someone who's smart may score well on an evaluation; so will someone who's seen the material, and worked through the problems before.
I’m the CEO of an ed tech startup that delivers on some of these promises in critical areas for post secondary. It allows scoring and adaptive learning to be self paced and based on skill mastery.
It's because medtech is only useful if individualized, and individualized does not scale. You will end up with 'range' of kids, but even that is dumb because each children apprehend different subjects differently. You can put each kid in a range for each subject (history, language, math), but even that isn't enough. In the end, it just cost 'too much' (I.E more than we want to spend).
Step one should be having an edtech ecosystem that doesn't allow students to use the web. There are just too many distractions online. I think noone has really invested the kind of capital required to do a good job with this. Most of the software my kids have to use for school is pretty bad.
Until you consider that almost all children in N.A. that are learning rely on Kahn academy & YouTubers to make up for the fact that their school’s can’t figure out how to replicate a great learning experience that is available for free.
Was one of the goals with EdTech to sort of gamify learning to get kids more engaged or something? I could imagine a scenario where some kids learn more by a paper / pencil / book modality and would do worse learning from an iPad— while other kids who are totally disengaged might learn something at all from an iPad so that’s better than nothing?
> This is why, when getting paid as part of a research study to focus on a 20-minute computerized lesson, nearly 40% of students were unable to stop themselves from multitasking.
I read this as I was waiting for unit tests to compile and run. Such a paradox.
Computers and access to the Web are incompatible not with education, but with the paradigm of conventional school education, where teachers instruct classes of pupils to a national (or otherwise standardized) curriculum. In the school context, an electronic device competes with the teacher for the pupils' attention. Educational resources such as Khan Academy explicitly attempt to follow conventional curricula, but one that only follows one country's educational expectations (here, that of the USA), and even that only loosely; many of the most informative online resources aren't intended to fit into any standard curriculum at all.
Essentially, statistics will tell you how to gradually improve a system that you already have (conventional class-based school education), but won't tell you about the value of an entirely new system. It's a sort of 'local minima' problem like that.
The article admits as much, but fails to acknowledge the other solution to this conflict: instead of a 'phone-free school', why not change the school to support an electronic educational paradigm? Just as the Montessori method or the culture-rich concept of Kindergarten education are usually very valuable to those children who are lucky enough to experience them, there is already a wealth of evidence for interactive and electronic learning methods - not just a 'potential' as the article claims. The key difference between learning paradigms such as Montessori and Kindergarten and electronic education is that the former requires expensive (and safe) access to materials, and the latter is now almost free! The article claims: "However, if there are two or more options for engaging with learning material, then it is best to select the tool that will yield the best results." I ask, what justification is there to not select a tool that isn't perhaps the best, but it the best that society can afford? One-on-one tutoring with experts and fully-equiped laboratories would be wonderful, even better than electronic education, but that was never the offer. Historically progressive educational authorities are literally rejecting an educational opportunity that requires nothing except open minds.
P.S. An irrelevant but interesting nit-pick: the article mentions that you have to hold each word in memory as you read a sentence of English text, but this is untrue. Readers create a mental, semantic and emotional image while they read; dyslexic readers might struggle with the concept of a 'word' itself yet are still able to understand the meaning of a sentence.
Since the primary thing my son has used his school-issued device for is playing games and watching youtube during class, this doesn't surprise me. Whether that's a failure of EdTech is, I suppose, up to interpretation.
Most student devices are older Android or iPad tablets. Sometimes they get older generation Chromebooks. They are not getting M4 laptops. Then EdTech delivers MS teams level bloatware and expects it to run? This stuff is generally absolute garbage that even at the most optimistic barely works as advertised.
Lots of this stuff gets built with very little thought on how it's supposed to integrate into a classroom setting. None of it even attempts to integrate with the student grading or scheduling system(s).
We expect public school teachers to be:
* Very well educated.
* Emotionally mature and able to understand/handle emotionally immature students.
* Very good at their jobs.
* Able to understand the dizzying array of laws and regulations around education.
* Handle the politics of education(around what can be taught or not, what books can be used, etc.)
* Having students who were promoted from the previous grade, even if they can't do previous grade level things(like say HS students that still can't read). * Teach to a test.
* Teach to an individual up to their ability.
* Teach 30+ students at once at the lower grades.
* In Middle School/High School teaching over 200 unique students in a day.
* Dealing with unreasonable demands by some parents.
* Some students having special needs, diets.
* Having little to no classroom level funding.
* Understand and be educated in the latest tech.
* In some states teach students that are hungry.
* In some states carry guns to protect from school shooters.
All while also being paid poorly, if not terribly.
Sure, I can totally see that working out well.
If we paid teachers like we paid any other professional job(lawyers, doctors, etc), I guarantee we will get much higher calibre teachers. Teacher pay in the US hasn't even kept up with inflation over the past decade. Not to mention salaries of all the support staff around teachers to help them thrive in the classroom.
Not only are we paying teachers worse than we used to, we are actually spending more on education! The scandal is the addition of more useless Administrator positions. https://x.com/TCCRI/status/1760792700771533084
From what I've seen, they are trying to steer the ship of education towards the dominant political ideology in the area. Or they may be tasked with fixing a perceived problem in the existing bureaucracy.
It seems the real issue here is that school devices should be locked down better? It's honestly shocking they aren't already. Why on Earth would kids be allowed to access TikTok over their school network?
My 4th grader has some sound sensitivity issues, so he uses that as an excuse to go out in the hall and read a book or listen to an auto book on his school-supplied chromebook when the classroom gets too loud for him
Well, guess what he's been doing? Watching unfiltered youtube! He's clever and sneaky, so it's been an arms race at home to block youtube enough for him but still allow it to work on my Roku for me. Why does the school allow 4th graders to have unfettered access to youtube?
we use Screen Time on iPad and iPhone with some limited time for YouTube, while google.com has different time limits for school...the end game went like this:
a) you can search anything at google, go to Videos and watch youtube with no limits, the url is still google.com
b) he did come up with an idea to screen record everything and then re-watch everything using Photos app. After that was blocked, apparently you can access same photos thru Camera.app :)
Right now, I have youtube filtered by MAC on my Roku. I would like to add granularity so that they can watch some youtube, but they make that too hard. So we all just share the living room TV right now so that I can just keep an eye on things.
I'm still getting outsmarted though. I have locked-down parental controls on Minecraft so that my two kids can play together but not invite or be invited to stranger's worlds. But somehow, I see other people in there. Microsoft parental controls leave a lot to be desired. I don't know how non-tech-oriented parents do it.
It's incredibly frustrating as a parent when you've taken care to make your network and devices work a certain way for your kids, then the schools send them home with devices that have unlimited access to Youtube and trash-tier Web games and whatever else, and no ability for parents to manage any of that (of course). WTF. Thanks, now I have some damn object I have to keep away from them, but also have to get back in their backpacks each morning. Wonderful.
Fascinating. I teach and believe the devices should be more open. I've personally witnessed student agitation, anger, anxiety etc when barred from changing their wallpaper, from adding a bookmark to Chrome, from changing basic accessibility settings. I have a hard time seeing how we can lock these devices down any further.
Though I do believe schools need an edu version of YouTube. YouTube kids is too childish for older students. But regular YouTube has too much inappropriate stuff on it. That's a tough one.
Isn't an edu version of YouTube basically Nebula or those other platforms I see big YouTubers talk about?
I honestly think people should stop trying to make sanitized versions of YouTube though. It doesn't really work (YouTube Kids is still a disaster and often inappropriate IMO), but all the extra rules and regulations severely inconvenience the creators and viewers who are happy with it as an entertainment platform.
Our district uses Light Speed Content Filter. It uses a web proxy with tls decryption to read the page content and block certain videos flagged by the AI. Works way better than our previous system. That being said, now the issue is a matter of distractions. They can watch "appropriate" videos, but they just watch at inappropriate times...like during class or at lunch. As a parent, I take an allow-list only approach to YouTube. they can only watch individual videos/channels I select. everything else is blocked.
I’m pretty certain the previous commenter was specifically talking about restricting unfettered network access to YT/Tiktok, and not locking the wallpaper or bookmarks.
Imagine blending the traditional educational structures into EdTech and using network engineering to clamp down what can be accessed in a classroom device to only the educational software modules needed. For example, you could put timers on how long each module is open. Give teachers the ability to override them and tap into each student individually if needed.
The issue is that the surrounding infrastructures would need to be much more competent than they currently are in education. I worked at an educational institution in the IT department, and the level of knowledge the IT staff had was abysmal. It was surprising that anything worked at all.
Additionally, not everything needs to be gamified. Somehow this notion that everything a child interacts with on a computer has to mimic a video game is a really narrow way of thinking. Instead, we could start with basic computer usage skills such as file management, and system configuration, and using core tools such as word processes and image manipulation software.
Instead of dumping kids into the world of Google which is a for-profit mechanism that is inherently designed to get people to click on stuff as much as possible, we actually as software developers need to re-think EdTech and have it be learning first.
yes, I see a lot of value in this approach, especially for ADHD learners (who represent about 10% of the student population). Imagine if the only thing a kid could access on their school computer was the thing they were supposed to be doing? How much would that help focus? On MacBooks, you can use https://gertrude.app/ to enforce this allow-list only approach, which has proven very beneficial for homeschool students.
Allow me to correct a bit the window: commercial EdTech push is clearly failed. The idea of remote learning might be perfectly valid though.
An example:
- TED Talk alike video lessons (ok, without political biases), meaning teachers who craft lectio magistralis on video, mount them, improve them over time and share them, their colleagues and students will makes the best emerge;
- students see and take notes of the video lesson in the evening (the best moment for young brain), in the morning they arrange their note for an afternoon speech, a random selection of students will actually give the speech on what they learned to their teachers and their peers;
- FLOSS desktop as basic system needs, no mobile crap or webcrapplications in the soup, people have to learn technically sound systems not commercially interested modern-archaic crapware.
In general, people tend to learn most subjects through their own actions and continuous practice... and not through abstract imagination of some non sequitur that lecturers may not even fully comprehend. Only 1:17 people have the self discipline to do self-directed study... online that stat is likely more dismal... =)
Yet, we found Steve Brunton's book and many labs tended to engage people better than handouts:
Tech has infinite possibility in educating people, and may eventually remove the need for school altogether. What has to be faced is:
1) that our theories about education are bad, and that we've been cargo culting traditional education and haven't made any significant changes in the process for hundreds of years,
2) our theories about how to handle the future of education with the new tools that we now have were doomed to failure because of that, and
3) with no theoretical foundation, charlatans tried to push a theory that sheer proximity to technology would have an emergent magical effect on education (while another set of charlatans push a theory that technology has a magical dampening effect on education.)
It's the same situation we're in with governance, or law. The English accidentally and clumsily developed a Parliament that worked, and the people who wiped the King's ass developed into a cabinet. It was productive. We then formalized it by examining what had been done and simply writing it down and sometimes streamlining it. We also do that explicitly in the common law, where we assume that every judicial decision ever made was correct, and concentrate on when they contradict each other to make changes. It's productive, but it's not theory; they're descriptions of history.
Covid was a test for Edtech, and it failed horribly. We need to ground education in reality: we're trying to force unwilling children to remember things. We need to focus on their wills, and their memories, and to come up with theory. We can experiment on adults, although the difference between adult education and children's education is that adults are self-motivated, so this would concentrate on memory methods. When focused on children, how can we give a child the discipline to feel like they want to participate in and contribute to the world? Does that have to do more with social services, the safety net, and giving children real responsibility earlier than with educational theory?
Recent interesting read for me was a failure and partial success trying to use spaced repetition in the classroom. His partial answer was that it was better when everyone shared the same screen and answered together, you move slower than you wish you could, and you don't demand that they remember forever. Also, from my reading, the expected schedule of schooling completely disrupted what he was trying to do. Schools have to be redone, not tweaked. People knew this in the 19th and early 20th century, even if they didn't manage to come up with a formula that worked.
Electronic learning materials tend to be consumer oriented. Instead of reading a book you’re going to click through an interactive story book, etc.
But custom software and is very expensive, and doesn’t scale. Thousands of work hours to make 1 consumable hour. It’s like maintaining an MMO and adding new quests every week, but without the talented devs or interesting source material.
The real leverage offered by technology is creative tools that enable experiences which are impractical, like simulations, etc.
But it’s probably a tougher sell to administrations:
- no telemetry (surveillance)
- not an on rails experience you can drop a low performing kid in front of
I find it telling that “EdTech” is naturally assumed to be “classroom tools”. Talk about a lack of vision. The fine people at OMSCS are pioneering a fantastic new future for higher education, and it goes way beyond flash card systems and pop quiz tools.
Education is in trouble in America, but that doesn’t mean a) the concept of technology has failed, or b) it’s in trouble everywhere. The edtech revolution can’t fail, it already happened for many hundreds of millions worldwide with the advent of Wikipedia, YouTube, and Kahn Academy.
I teach tech to elementary and intermediate grades. The Chromebooks are locked down ewaste. I'm not saying if one of you guys buy a Chromebook you can't have it function as a general purpose computer. But the Chromebooks students use aren't computers.
The more that I think of it. They are terminals that permit students to access random edtech platforms. Very little computing going on. Which is absurd when a potential computer is sitting right there in front of you in computer class.
Router-manufacturer should be mandated to implement a functionality that allows applying a whitelist filter for certain times of a day. It would have helped me a lot as a parent to make sure that my children can only access Desmos, online Office sites etc. while they are supposed to do their homework.
Unfortunately the internet has been corrupted by JavaScript. A website is rarely loading a single site anymore. Try noscript and you'll quickly see that, even a trivial website loads dozens of dependencies. Dependencies that shift over time.
Reality is whitelisting can't work as you'll simply break websites. This has been my experience at several schools now. Websites may or may not load. And even if they do, they rarely work properly.
Irony is, students are clever enough to realise you can use translate websites to load anything with translation from English to English. No blocking at all!
Sure but here in the UK schools will use what is cheapest, free or part of a wider package of software already used. RM web filtering or smoothwall make me want to bash my skull against a wall at times. Finally School IT staff are not judged on their ability to manage a web filter well. Safeguarding is (rightly) the primary concern and so if an existing solution can be said to block the more egregious parts of the internet, it's irrelevant if it blocks the useful parts too.
Apple devices, both iOS and macOS, have great and fairly easy to use remotely-managed parental controls (Microsoft may too, IDK) that can do things like apply all sorts of limits to allowed websites or apps during certain periods of the day, but god-damned school-provided-and-managed devices blow holes through any plan to use that for those purpose. Even if the school sends home devices in your ecosystem, you won't be able to configure the parental controls on them, and their settings are always way too loose.
Which leaves you with your network as the place you have to manage all of that, which is a much bigger pain in the ass.
I think the EdTech revolution hasn’t truly happened yet, but it feels inevitable. In fact, the PISA Test might soon incorporate LLM prompting. I’m not kidding. Things are accelerating in every direction, and I’d rather brainstorm here on HN than focus solely on the article, which I think is a valuable resource regardless of whether you agree with it.
Just my two cents, not claiming this is groundbreaking, but hoping to provoke insights from smarter and more experienced folks here:
- Education should be a blend of virtual and physical, working with both individuals and groups.
- Kids should be able to set their own pace but also have structured routes to accelerate when possible.
- Curriculum could be streamlined into core components: today, you can learn subjects like chemistry, physics, CS, math, and biology through various Python packages. So, why not start by learning a programming language?
> Seeing as the great majority of students spend over 80% of their digital device time using these tools to multitask, the automatic response for a great majority of students using these tools has become multitasking.. Unfortunately, when we attempt to employ digital devices for learning purposes, this primary function quickly bleeds into student behavior.
> This is why, when using a computer for homework, students typically last fewer than 6 minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends, and engaging with other digital distractions. This is why, when using a laptop during class, students typically spend 38 minutes of every hour off-task. This is why, when getting paid as part of a research study to focus on a 20-minute computerized lesson, nearly 40% of students were unable to stop themselves from multitasking. It’s not that the students of today have abnormally weak constitutions; it’s that they have spent thousands of hours training themselves to use digital devices in a manner guaranteed to impair learning and performance. It’s also that many of the apps being run on those devices were carefully engineered to pull young people away from whatever they were doing.
> And perhaps this is the key point: I’m not saying that digital technologies can’t be used for learning; in fact, if these tools were only ever employed for learning purposes, then they may have proven some of the most important academic inventions ever. The argument I’m making is that digital technologies so often aren’t used for learning that giving students a laptop, tablet, or other multi-function device places a large (and unnecessary) obstacle between the student and the desired outcome. In order to effectively learn while using an unlocked, internet-connected multi-function digital device, students must expend a great deal of cognitive effort battling impulses that they’ve spent years honing - a battle they lose more often than not. (of course schools do often try to implement blockers and restrictions, but this opens up an eternal cat-and-mouse struggle, and the mice are very good at finding ways to evade the cat.)
Really jarring reading that. I think I was in middle school when the AOL and the "internet" to me became a thing (lol) and sure there was a lot of time wasting stuff (chatrooms, games, etc.) but there was a huge huge field of just exploration and learning. I cut my tech teeth on that; minimal parent supervision, no gamifying or artificial motivators, just my curiosity.
I feel for kids nowadays. It was the wild west back then, everything was basically unrestricted and nobody had any clue of the consequences, but we didn't have companies actively trying to addict us to stuff.
The interesting follow-up here... there is no reason these effects should be restricted to children. Like, if children can't learn with devices in a classroom, it suggests executives can't learn in an office (and might give a hint as to why we haven't seen expected productivity benefits driven by it).
But again, if the effect was this strong, I'd really expect to see broader evidence (even just at a national level based of digital uptake).
These authors have big Google Docs of evidence, https://jonathanhaidt.com/reviews/. But if you read it, you will see the effect is (AFAICT) limited to certain populations. There is a significant fraction of students that do have trouble with executive function and staying on task and will fail to do their homework because of social media access. Then there are the other students that have no trouble staying off social media when they have to do homework.
Part of this is because the pre-frontal cortex (associated with logic, will power, discipline, focus, etc) doesn't finish developing until about age 25.
Until then, folks can be reliant on the adults in their environments older than that age, if they haven't built up some abilities.
> (and might give a hint as to why we haven't seen expected productivity benefits driven by it)
I'd be shocked if that's not a significant part of why. Most folks will get more work done when their only alternatives are trashcan basketball or doodling, versus... the Web.
I suspect another cause is that a great deal of application of computer technology in organizations aims to improve a certain kind of legibility of processes, which is something management loves a great deal, but the cost of attaining this legibility is high enough (including in hidden or hard-to-track ways) that any benefits are neutralized or all-accounted-for costs actually go up.
[EDIT] A third cause is probably that median ability to use computers remains very low among office workers. There continue to exist offices where knowing how to copy-paste(!) for more than just bare text, or extremely-basic spreadsheet use beyond "put numbers in it" makes you a wizard. I'm not kidding.
i'd love to have a distraction-proof workstation that would force me into my IDE or whatever design doc i'm working on and block out everything else.
but it's not possible because the job requires all these gateway-drugs-to-distraction to be on the forefront of your workspace:
* keep slack open in case you're needed in that support thread
* keep a browser open so you can google the api docs for something (that's how i ended up here right now)
* keep spotify playing in the background so you can drown out the noise of the open office/work-from-home-noise
The effect is absolutely that strong, even on adults. My anecdata in IT overwhelmingly supports that claim. Be it educational institutions, large enterprises, SMBs, or just Mom and Dad with their cell phones, the proliferation of distraction boxes has reduced critical and rational thinking abilities that are foundational elements of learning. After all, why try to reason out what you could just look up online? And if you can get the answer somewhere quicker, well, now you can also skim Twitter or Instagram with the time you saved.
During my brief stint working IT for private schools, with their SMARTBoards in every classroom, Meraki APs blanketing their 300 year old campus structures, and Chromebooks in the hands of every student, the feedback I got was that students hated having technology always with them (to the point of breaking their Chromebooks on purpose), while teachers would deliberately not report broken technology (like their SMARTBoards) so they could force kids off of electronics and into a textbook or journal. Despite the often adversarial relationship of students and teachers, both cohorts acted unconsciously towards the same outcome of less technology.
This early experience has also informed my perspective on the role of technology in the workplace as a force amplifier rather than mandatory toolset. It’s why I’m often fiercely resistant to any “new” technology coming in that doesn’t solve a problem we’ve already identified, as blindly expanding the IT estate just adds to the noise of the enterprise and detracts from the signals important to business.
Even the younger folks (20-30) I find community with outside of tech spaces bemoan the over reliance on technology in general. They aren’t luddites by any stretch of the truth, and they love BlueSky and Instagram and TikTok and all the usual social spaces where their friends are, but they’ve engaged in more active resistance to technology as a necessary component in everything they buy. This same cohort is often an ally at work, because they seek to push products or solutions that remove technology interactions from the daily grind through automation, rather than dragging in the latest toys like we (millennials) did.
There have been consistent reporting for two decades that screens are leading to measurable reductions in attention span. Three decades of reports linking the internet and digital culture with mental health issues. What evidence is missing?
People with an Internet- connected screen appear to have a short attention span because they have instant access to a multitude of things that they're interested in, competing for their attention with whatever you want them to be focusing on.
That what you want them to be focusing on is no longer the path of least boredom like it was in the previous era; the path of least boredom goes through their mobile device.
People's ability and willingness to concentrate on something that interested in has not changed one iota. That sort of biological change takes hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Observations of the behavior of people interacting with tech can easily support the wrong argument that people's attention spans have increased. Just look at how somebody can play the same game for 11 hours straight, right?
> People with an Internet- connected screen appear to have a short attention span because they have instant access to a multitude of things that they're interested in, competing for their attention with whatever you want them to be focusing on.
This is incorrect. There have been repeated studies that show a distinct decline in individuals ability to consume and process long-form text. Folks brains are literally remodeling towards ADHD-like behaviors.
I'd be particularly keen on evidence affecting primary outcomes - eg, are people genuinly more productive or healthier. Attention span is an interesting metric, but if it doesn't directly affect how much work you can do or the quality of it in a meaningful way, I am less fussed.
COVID was to EdTech as The Fukushima Nuclear event was to Japanese Robotics -- the one big event where all hands were needed on deck and the decades of investment came up...lacking.
In the case of Fukushima - getting entry and information on the inside of the reactor core eventually required U.S. developed robots, built for much more challenging and pragmatic environments.
With EdTech, for decades we knew that it was a backup option to solid in-classroom, instructor led, education. AFAIK, measured outcomes on non-traditional learning have nearly always lagged the classroom. But more and more institutions were turning to it because, quite frankly, its cheaper -- with student flexibility as the trailing, but strongly upsold, benefit.
The 100%, digital, EdTech event that was COVID has forced a reckoning. We finally have, at massive scale, real data (and not small or unusual situations) that comprehensively shows the tech either isn't ready, or never will be.
I personally don't understand why this seems to be such a surprise. Ever since I went through school, there was an attempt to shove technogadgets into classrooms that offered very minimal educational value over a teacher using their judgment, training, and experience to work with a student to learn a topic.
There's a part in this article that I think is the key problem:
> What he found was equal parts surprising and predictable: nearly everything has a positive impact on student learning.
I remember a specific "training" I received years ago as an adult. The instructor put each student through a comprehensive skills assessment. Then the students spent 8 weeks in a room with the resources we should have used for learning -- books, video, software, and so on -- but without any instruction of any kind. At the end of the 8 weeks we were all assessed again and voila! nearly all students had shown progress. Great success! and the instructor was free to continue doing next to nothing and doomscrolling Facebook most of the day in his best job ever. Providing no education whatsoever, but just access to resources, had a demonstrated positive outcome.
A lot of EdTech falls into this same sort of bullshit pile. It doesn't really do anything in particular, but will sometimes show the promise of improvement. Fingers are pointed to improperly trained educators, or lack of time with the technogadget, or some other reason other than the tech when searching for what's holding the tech back. What the deployers of EdTech are really measuring is not educational outcomes, but improvements to the bottom-line. If they were really focused on education, then EdTech would only be used where it should a learning effect at least as great as classroom instruction. But we know it generally doesn't, and yet here it is in our classrooms.
Source: Developed adult learning curriculum in advanced technical areas and delivered material to over 2,000 students who were required to have had at least an undergraduate degree and significant other job-specific training as prerequisites. Was also a "cursed" gifted kid in K-12.
don't forget that 2021 is when we let all the students get infected with a virus that causes neurocognitive issues, and then infected them again. it's not the whole story, but damned if it isn't a big part of it.
The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.
We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.
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