8 ms·

In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that

In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole. The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations. Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.

tromp 3y ago
“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” -- attributed to Oscar Wilde
MikeTheRocker 3y ago
Quality comments like this are what keep me coming back to HN. I certainly agree. I’m not sure exactly how, but it’s clear there needs to be some sort of incentive for institutions to actually achieve their purpose, but as soon as a metric is measured, it gets exploited and over optimized.
- c_crank 3y ago
  The only incentive that works is letting such institutions crash and burn and be replaced. Even giant monopolies can end up losing money and going under.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    In the context of Education or you have an entranched monopoly, this means voting for private school vouchers.
    - slt2021 3y ago
      private school vouchers seems like a great idea, but I am afraid it will mirror college situation. most state schools will have bare bones programs, except few select, while private schools will be many levels ahead and become "elite". do we want "ivy league" situation with K-12 education system?
      - c_crank 3y ago
        The bare bones the market would create would depend on if people really want K-12 to be a glorified daycare or a useful tool for imparting knowledge. But having a financial incentive to function or go bust would mean you'd at least get better daycare services.
      - rayiner 3y ago
        The solution is to do what Sweden does, which is to require all schools to accept the vouchers and charge no further tuition.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        I would say yes. Most states schools provide excellent value, and I would even extend that to community colleges which provides even better value for their students.
    - lern_too_spel 3y ago
      No, private schools can reject students. This means voting for charter schools.
      - rayiner 3y ago
        That’s a good thing for all the other students.
smilekzs 3y ago
a.k.a. Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Iirc in systemantics, it was phrased as "the goal of a system is to perpetuate and extend itself, not to achieve whatever it was created for"
  - vacuity 3y ago
    Silly thought: so it's shoehorning evolution into organizations. Regardless of how something is made to replicate itself, it inherently does so because that's what it does. Evolution arises when changes (accidental or not, from some perspective) present opportunities for thriving. It's not a matter of will as it is a matter of fact. I suppose for organizations, regulations and oversight are necessary to prevent evolution towards fulfilling perverse incentives. A bit hard to do when we're dealing with hyacinths, though. Herbicide, anyone?
- astrange 3y ago
  Pournelle was just another Republican and this is just another political slogan, not an "iron law". He was also an engineer, which makes it even worse, because it means he has old engineer brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's fields.
ip26 3y ago
Pitched competition between well-matched opponents is the only sure-fire antidote. It either keeps the players perpetually lean, or picks off the ones that ossify. You are simply left no choice other than to play seriously or lose. Tricky to arrange in education, to be sure, because results are difficult to measure objectively.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
I think a lot of the organizational dysfunction in education and more broadly comes down to a poor understanding of rule utilitarianism. In short, rule utilitarianism is an idea that a standard procedure you can't be better than a complex system that attempts to maximize each individual choice. The classic example that Economist Mike Munger likes to talk about is stop signs. You could replace stop signs with a complex debate and decision tree to try to decide which car at an intersection has greater need and gets priority. However, this complex process may result in longer wait times for all cars, including those that might have the most urgent need to go through the intersection. This manifests in education through a million rules which try to optimize performance for very specific and conflicting purposes. As a result, you get a complex system weighed down by its inefficiency that doesn't meet any of its goals.
tyoma 3y ago
I think the core issue is that we expect institutions like schools to do multiple, often conflicting tasks. In the US, schools are expected to: * Provide instruction to the median student. * Provide support services to those with learning or other disabilities. * Empower gifted students to learn to their potential. * Serve as an amateur sports league. * Distribute food to the hungry via the school lunch program * Serve as a point of preventative medical care (e.g. vision and dental screenings) * Screen children for abuse and neglect * Be a place children can be left while parents are at work Some of these goals will be prioritized over others. The stated goal (education) is not always the goal taxpayers are most supportive of, via revealed preferences on the ballot when it comes to local school funding decisions.
- kaitai 3y ago
  Yes, agree, and this dovetails with a sibling comment by a long-time teacher. I have a child in the US and have family close in age and demographics in non-US countries. The pressure of school-as-childcare is unique to me in the US because of the amount of paid time off I get, which is substantially less than my peers in Europe. In addition, the financial pressures of childcare and education in the US are quite different than Europe. I certainly earn more money in the US than I would in Europe in the same job, but the logistics of arranging childcare and the pressure of teaching my child both math and English outside of school, despite 7+ hours of school a day, are not insubstantial. As has come up elsewhere in these discussions (on HN and in the article), 15 minutes a day of worksheets has done wonders. While I appreciate what Kid has learned in school, and very much appreciate that Kid's classmates get a nutritional baseline no matter what, it is striking that I must provide this additional instruction and practice. It's this very out-of-school intervention that leads to the inequality of outcomes I so clearly see at the school my child is departing -- one in which the kids with college prof parents score top in the state and kids whose parents are English-language learners or work several (non-adjunct-instructor) jobs score in the 30th percentile. (The kids of all the PhDs, whether well-compensated or not, do fine academically.) Dumbing down the standards doesn't help anyone. I actually like the idea of a data science class, seems like a great motivation/way to teach algebra, but the way it's being operationally proposed in the CMF does not help. And back to my observation about the worksheets above, “This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content." “Instead of reducing the gap, the CMF proposal will worsen disparities as students from affluent families will access private instruction and tutors while under-resourced students will be left behind.” -- Dr. Jelani Nelson, absolutely correct. For interesting discussion of the shoddy research underlying many of the citations in the CMF, see Mike Lawler's Twitter threads (username mikeandallie).
bsder 3y ago
> It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. Schools reflect the values that parents impress upon them. The vast majority of parents want free daycare and a "Magic Paper(tm)" that gets their child into a college higher than what their child is actually qualified for. Nothing else. So, you can complain about education not supporting "learning and growth". And you can complain about the bureaucracy. However, parents have made their wishes very loud and clear over the last several decades about exactly what they want out of the public education system.
- daseiner1 3y ago
  and those parents reflect a rotten culture.
another_story 3y ago
There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long. As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged. One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility. All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.
  - waterhouse 3y ago
    One way to achieve that, for a teacher, would be to get all the good students into your class, and avoid having any bad students, or find reasons to kick them out. Do you have countermeasures for that?
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Sure. Assign the students at random. Some years the teacher will get a better batch than other years, but it would all even out.
passers 3y ago
[dead]
grantsch 3y ago
There is no incentive whatsoever without profit motive to help others repeatedly in an efficient way Large organizations just further exacerbate this
mst_moonshine 3y ago
I grew up in China and came to the same conclusion as yours! I never expect such a similarity. I've always thought that education in the US must be much better. After graduating from college, I realized that the problem I was facing was a systematic one of the whole society, rather than one limited to particular teachers, middle schools, or even the entire education system. Many people say Chinese maths education is better than the US but I can hardly agree. But based on what I have seen, there are problems on both sides. Chinese education is focusing too much on memorizing existing pieces of knowledge, but too less on teaching the young how to create new ones. The knowledge which our ancestors had struggled for thousands of years to find was taught to us in a spendthrift manner. Aside from lacking training on how to find/create new knowledge, Chinese education does not encourage students to learn advanced topics since it could have negative effects on the students' grades. But there is nothing you can do to change it, because too many things are correlated: fair distribution of teaching resources, less demand for highly educated people in the job market, and the overall not-so-innovation-appealing social vibe. I cannot foresee any possibility of a true, self-driven, systematic reform. Education in the US, especially math education, on the other hand, is somehow too frivolous. I have no learning experience in any US middle school, so my opinions can be biased. But it seems that US education is more like elite education. The average/universal maths education level should be a little higher in such a highly modernized society. These different (or even opposite) problems surprisingly show some similarity. Shall I say the problems actually reflect some real problems in the two societies?
- syntheweave 3y ago
  I had the experience of going to US schools among competitive immigrants from Taiwan and HK(in the late 90's, i.e. they left while it was still under the British), and a little bit of mainland China as well. Reflecting on it, it produced an odd dichotomy in classroom expectations where nobody was really on the same page: I'm fourth-generation American to a mixed European background - my mom insisted on me attempting advanced math, but in a distinctly Eastern European sense, with emphasis on learning theory, which wasn't anything like what I was confronted with at school, which was primarily computational drills that I didn't know how to prepare for and which my parents tried to pretend I could just power through, as my older brother did(he had more of a direct interest, and later confessed that he probably got through it all just with short-term memory, because he was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and started medicating, and thought I should too). My classmates, meanwhile, had clearly normalized strict study habits but could not usefully communicate what they were to me, or maybe did not want to give up their secrets. And the teachers were just pleased that the class behaved so well and could withstand being assigned piles of homework, but they didn't have particularly advanced backgrounds themselves and often couldn't hold their own when challenged by the best students in the city. And then I went off to college and the student body was now mostly white. I realized that this was a completely different vibe and I didn't understand that, either. I think the places in which the US system manages to work are because sometimes the collision of varied cultures against the institutions produces useful sparks. The institution itself tracks political winds, which vary at the state and local level. Struggling schools have the usual issues of domestic insecurity spilling into the classroom, and being in the public school system, occasionally I would cross paths with those students instead of the "gifted and talented" track that I was on. But "good schools" tend to be "home owners association" schools, whipped into doing whatever the parents ask for, which usually amounts to fairy tale fantasies. When my mom started pressuring the faculty for me to stay in the advanced math track despite my not fitting there, it was, I now see, in this latter mode. Eventually, not getting the desired result, she insisted that I argue my own case, which of course I was terrible at, and left me confused, ashamed and other feelings which took years to work through. I just wanted to withdraw from everything at that point, but I was being hurried along. That is the one quality I would say tends to always be the case throughout, at least in the large schools I went to - nobody has time for anything, because everyone has a deadline to meet. It's mostly an illusion and busywork, but it nevertheless sucks out societal energy. The elite students, some of whom I ran into in college, tend to have a path carefully paved for them through subtle signalling and tracking - opportunities and experiences that are just not the norm for anyone less wealthy. They aren't getting well-rounded educations either, rather, they are normalized to self-identify as strivers, which when combined with some early connections, is enough for most of the cohort to advance. I had a housemate who was an heir to an major beer company executive. He was an alcoholic and his dad was, too, and he bemoaned the idea that his summer job was being the boss to people ten decades older than him. His goal in getting a CS degree was to prove that he could do something for himself, essentially. In the end, looking at it, the way the US system is set up is to not know you are in a rat race until it's too late and you're tracked at the bottom for reasons beyond your control.
electriclove 3y ago
These institutions cannot be reformed in a reasonable amount of time. The alternative has to come from elsewhere. People need a viable alternative so they can 'exit' similar to how Uber changed the taxi industry.
huevosabio 3y ago
Indeed. And this is really the alignment problem of our time.
solatic 3y ago
> once an organization surpasses a certain size This is precisely why the solution is to keep size small and allow consumers (in the education market, these are parents) to have a choice between many small providers who are forced to compete with each other. Governments should (with notable exceptions) constantly be pressuring large organizations to break apart into smaller ones. There are some cases where this isn't feasible, particularly in natural monopolies and in the government itself. Here, I point to Pahlka's excellent "Culture Eats Policy", https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ for which no summary can do her piece justice.
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  Multiple problems with this. The most obvious one is cost: schools don't have large classes because they want to but because of budgets. The second one is that "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case and might very well be: experience in other countries shows you that parents tend to optimize for grades , test scores and "connections"; so you get grade inflation, "teaching to the test", bribery and networks and over all worse quality (just think of prejudices you have heard about some private schools).
  - solatic 3y ago
    > large classes Irrelevant to the question at hand. There are small schools with small classes, small schools with large classes, large schools with small classes, large schools with large classes. > "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case No, it's intended to be a technical/neutral term to describe the person(s) making the economic (as in the science of economics) choice of which school to choose. > parents tend to optimize for... And other parents optimize for other priorities, see e.g. Montessori schools, St. Anne's in NYC where there are no grades. Having options allows parents to make that choice. When parents are forced to send their children to the large monopolistic public option because there are no other affordable options, they don't have a choice.
oatmeal1 3y ago
> Unless we find a way to counteract this Charter schools. Competition. Of course education sucks when there's no competition.

tromp 3y ago

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” -- attributed to Oscar Wilde

MikeTheRocker 3y ago

Quality comments like this are what keep me coming back to HN. I certainly agree. I’m not sure exactly how, but it’s clear there needs to be some sort of incentive for institutions to actually achieve their purpose, but as soon as a metric is measured, it gets exploited and over optimized.

c_crank 3y ago
The only incentive that works is letting such institutions crash and burn and be replaced. Even giant monopolies can end up losing money and going under.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  In the context of Education or you have an entranched monopoly, this means voting for private school vouchers.
  - slt2021 3y ago
    private school vouchers seems like a great idea, but I am afraid it will mirror college situation. most state schools will have bare bones programs, except few select, while private schools will be many levels ahead and become "elite". do we want "ivy league" situation with K-12 education system?
    - c_crank 3y ago
      The bare bones the market would create would depend on if people really want K-12 to be a glorified daycare or a useful tool for imparting knowledge. But having a financial incentive to function or go bust would mean you'd at least get better daycare services.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      The solution is to do what Sweden does, which is to require all schools to accept the vouchers and charge no further tuition.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      I would say yes. Most states schools provide excellent value, and I would even extend that to community colleges which provides even better value for their students.
  - lern_too_spel 3y ago
    No, private schools can reject students. This means voting for charter schools.
    - rayiner 3y ago
      That’s a good thing for all the other students.

smilekzs 3y ago

a.k.a. Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

readthenotes1 3y ago
Iirc in systemantics, it was phrased as "the goal of a system is to perpetuate and extend itself, not to achieve whatever it was created for"
- vacuity 3y ago
  Silly thought: so it's shoehorning evolution into organizations. Regardless of how something is made to replicate itself, it inherently does so because that's what it does. Evolution arises when changes (accidental or not, from some perspective) present opportunities for thriving. It's not a matter of will as it is a matter of fact. I suppose for organizations, regulations and oversight are necessary to prevent evolution towards fulfilling perverse incentives. A bit hard to do when we're dealing with hyacinths, though. Herbicide, anyone?
astrange 3y ago
Pournelle was just another Republican and this is just another political slogan, not an "iron law". He was also an engineer, which makes it even worse, because it means he has old engineer brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's fields.

ip26 3y ago

Pitched competition between well-matched opponents is the only sure-fire antidote. It either keeps the players perpetually lean, or picks off the ones that ossify. You are simply left no choice other than to play seriously or lose. Tricky to arrange in education, to be sure, because results are difficult to measure objectively.

s1artibartfast 3y ago

I think a lot of the organizational dysfunction in education and more broadly comes down to a poor understanding of rule utilitarianism. In short, rule utilitarianism is an idea that a standard procedure you can't be better than a complex system that attempts to maximize each individual choice. The classic example that Economist Mike Munger likes to talk about is stop signs. You could replace stop signs with a complex debate and decision tree to try to decide which car at an intersection has greater need and gets priority. However, this complex process may result in longer wait times for all cars, including those that might have the most urgent need to go through the intersection. This manifests in education through a million rules which try to optimize performance for very specific and conflicting purposes. As a result, you get a complex system weighed down by its inefficiency that doesn't meet any of its goals.

tyoma 3y ago

I think the core issue is that we expect institutions like schools to do multiple, often conflicting tasks. In the US, schools are expected to: * Provide instruction to the median student. * Provide support services to those with learning or other disabilities. * Empower gifted students to learn to their potential. * Serve as an amateur sports league. * Distribute food to the hungry via the school lunch program * Serve as a point of preventative medical care (e.g. vision and dental screenings) * Screen children for abuse and neglect * Be a place children can be left while parents are at work Some of these goals will be prioritized over others. The stated goal (education) is not always the goal taxpayers are most supportive of, via revealed preferences on the ballot when it comes to local school funding decisions.

kaitai 3y ago
Yes, agree, and this dovetails with a sibling comment by a long-time teacher. I have a child in the US and have family close in age and demographics in non-US countries. The pressure of school-as-childcare is unique to me in the US because of the amount of paid time off I get, which is substantially less than my peers in Europe. In addition, the financial pressures of childcare and education in the US are quite different than Europe. I certainly earn more money in the US than I would in Europe in the same job, but the logistics of arranging childcare and the pressure of teaching my child both math and English outside of school, despite 7+ hours of school a day, are not insubstantial. As has come up elsewhere in these discussions (on HN and in the article), 15 minutes a day of worksheets has done wonders. While I appreciate what Kid has learned in school, and very much appreciate that Kid's classmates get a nutritional baseline no matter what, it is striking that I must provide this additional instruction and practice. It's this very out-of-school intervention that leads to the inequality of outcomes I so clearly see at the school my child is departing -- one in which the kids with college prof parents score top in the state and kids whose parents are English-language learners or work several (non-adjunct-instructor) jobs score in the 30th percentile. (The kids of all the PhDs, whether well-compensated or not, do fine academically.) Dumbing down the standards doesn't help anyone. I actually like the idea of a data science class, seems like a great motivation/way to teach algebra, but the way it's being operationally proposed in the CMF does not help. And back to my observation about the worksheets above, “This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content." “Instead of reducing the gap, the CMF proposal will worsen disparities as students from affluent families will access private instruction and tutors while under-resourced students will be left behind.” -- Dr. Jelani Nelson, absolutely correct. For interesting discussion of the shoddy research underlying many of the citations in the CMF, see Mike Lawler's Twitter threads (username mikeandallie).

bsder 3y ago

> It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. Schools reflect the values that parents impress upon them. The vast majority of parents want free daycare and a "Magic Paper(tm)" that gets their child into a college higher than what their child is actually qualified for. Nothing else. So, you can complain about education not supporting "learning and growth". And you can complain about the bureaucracy. However, parents have made their wishes very loud and clear over the last several decades about exactly what they want out of the public education system.

daseiner1 3y ago
and those parents reflect a rotten culture.

another_story 3y ago

There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long. As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged. One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility. All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.

WalterBright 3y ago
The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.
- waterhouse 3y ago
  One way to achieve that, for a teacher, would be to get all the good students into your class, and avoid having any bad students, or find reasons to kick them out. Do you have countermeasures for that?
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Sure. Assign the students at random. Some years the teacher will get a better batch than other years, but it would all even out.

passers 3y ago

[dead]

grantsch 3y ago

There is no incentive whatsoever without profit motive to help others repeatedly in an efficient way Large organizations just further exacerbate this

mst_moonshine 3y ago

I grew up in China and came to the same conclusion as yours! I never expect such a similarity. I've always thought that education in the US must be much better. After graduating from college, I realized that the problem I was facing was a systematic one of the whole society, rather than one limited to particular teachers, middle schools, or even the entire education system. Many people say Chinese maths education is better than the US but I can hardly agree. But based on what I have seen, there are problems on both sides. Chinese education is focusing too much on memorizing existing pieces of knowledge, but too less on teaching the young how to create new ones. The knowledge which our ancestors had struggled for thousands of years to find was taught to us in a spendthrift manner. Aside from lacking training on how to find/create new knowledge, Chinese education does not encourage students to learn advanced topics since it could have negative effects on the students' grades. But there is nothing you can do to change it, because too many things are correlated: fair distribution of teaching resources, less demand for highly educated people in the job market, and the overall not-so-innovation-appealing social vibe. I cannot foresee any possibility of a true, self-driven, systematic reform. Education in the US, especially math education, on the other hand, is somehow too frivolous. I have no learning experience in any US middle school, so my opinions can be biased. But it seems that US education is more like elite education. The average/universal maths education level should be a little higher in such a highly modernized society. These different (or even opposite) problems surprisingly show some similarity. Shall I say the problems actually reflect some real problems in the two societies?

syntheweave 3y ago
I had the experience of going to US schools among competitive immigrants from Taiwan and HK(in the late 90's, i.e. they left while it was still under the British), and a little bit of mainland China as well. Reflecting on it, it produced an odd dichotomy in classroom expectations where nobody was really on the same page: I'm fourth-generation American to a mixed European background - my mom insisted on me attempting advanced math, but in a distinctly Eastern European sense, with emphasis on learning theory, which wasn't anything like what I was confronted with at school, which was primarily computational drills that I didn't know how to prepare for and which my parents tried to pretend I could just power through, as my older brother did(he had more of a direct interest, and later confessed that he probably got through it all just with short-term memory, because he was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and started medicating, and thought I should too). My classmates, meanwhile, had clearly normalized strict study habits but could not usefully communicate what they were to me, or maybe did not want to give up their secrets. And the teachers were just pleased that the class behaved so well and could withstand being assigned piles of homework, but they didn't have particularly advanced backgrounds themselves and often couldn't hold their own when challenged by the best students in the city. And then I went off to college and the student body was now mostly white. I realized that this was a completely different vibe and I didn't understand that, either. I think the places in which the US system manages to work are because sometimes the collision of varied cultures against the institutions produces useful sparks. The institution itself tracks political winds, which vary at the state and local level. Struggling schools have the usual issues of domestic insecurity spilling into the classroom, and being in the public school system, occasionally I would cross paths with those students instead of the "gifted and talented" track that I was on. But "good schools" tend to be "home owners association" schools, whipped into doing whatever the parents ask for, which usually amounts to fairy tale fantasies. When my mom started pressuring the faculty for me to stay in the advanced math track despite my not fitting there, it was, I now see, in this latter mode. Eventually, not getting the desired result, she insisted that I argue my own case, which of course I was terrible at, and left me confused, ashamed and other feelings which took years to work through. I just wanted to withdraw from everything at that point, but I was being hurried along. That is the one quality I would say tends to always be the case throughout, at least in the large schools I went to - nobody has time for anything, because everyone has a deadline to meet. It's mostly an illusion and busywork, but it nevertheless sucks out societal energy. The elite students, some of whom I ran into in college, tend to have a path carefully paved for them through subtle signalling and tracking - opportunities and experiences that are just not the norm for anyone less wealthy. They aren't getting well-rounded educations either, rather, they are normalized to self-identify as strivers, which when combined with some early connections, is enough for most of the cohort to advance. I had a housemate who was an heir to an major beer company executive. He was an alcoholic and his dad was, too, and he bemoaned the idea that his summer job was being the boss to people ten decades older than him. His goal in getting a CS degree was to prove that he could do something for himself, essentially. In the end, looking at it, the way the US system is set up is to not know you are in a rat race until it's too late and you're tracked at the bottom for reasons beyond your control.

electriclove 3y ago

These institutions cannot be reformed in a reasonable amount of time. The alternative has to come from elsewhere. People need a viable alternative so they can 'exit' similar to how Uber changed the taxi industry.

huevosabio 3y ago

Indeed. And this is really the alignment problem of our time.

solatic 3y ago

> once an organization surpasses a certain size This is precisely why the solution is to keep size small and allow consumers (in the education market, these are parents) to have a choice between many small providers who are forced to compete with each other. Governments should (with notable exceptions) constantly be pressuring large organizations to break apart into smaller ones. There are some cases where this isn't feasible, particularly in natural monopolies and in the government itself. Here, I point to Pahlka's excellent "Culture Eats Policy", https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ for which no summary can do her piece justice.

diffeomorphism 3y ago
Multiple problems with this. The most obvious one is cost: schools don't have large classes because they want to but because of budgets. The second one is that "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case and might very well be: experience in other countries shows you that parents tend to optimize for grades , test scores and "connections"; so you get grade inflation, "teaching to the test", bribery and networks and over all worse quality (just think of prejudices you have heard about some private schools).
- solatic 3y ago
  > large classes Irrelevant to the question at hand. There are small schools with small classes, small schools with large classes, large schools with small classes, large schools with large classes. > "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case No, it's intended to be a technical/neutral term to describe the person(s) making the economic (as in the science of economics) choice of which school to choose. > parents tend to optimize for... And other parents optimize for other priorities, see e.g. Montessori schools, St. Anne's in NYC where there are no grades. Having options allows parents to make that choice. When parents are forced to send their children to the large monopolistic public option because there are no other affordable options, they don't have a choice.

oatmeal1 3y ago

> Unless we find a way to counteract this Charter schools. Competition. Of course education sucks when there's no competition.