From Freddie: The Basics: School Reform
Education discourse is caught in many contradictions and tensions, including
- Our education system is presumed to serve the essential function of sorting high school graduates into colleges and college graduates into jobs commensurate with their ability, but modern norms prevent us from acknowledging that for this system to work, there must be students who are at the bottom of the distribution – that is, bad at school
- Education is purported to be a great equalizer even while it fulfills the aforementioned mission of sorting good students from bad, a central internal tension that results in endless controversies like those concerning the SAT
- Education research has profound and unique challenges in terms of basic research design and empirical principles, which I detail here
- Issues of schooling highlight the odd reality that many people have limitless compassion for children and will support all manner of programs to help them but lose all of that sympathy once someone turns 18, putting intense pressure on the system to promote social justice while they’re young
- Basic resource questions, like “Should the best teachers teach the best-performing students or the worst?,” go unanswered even in elite spaces that regularly debate education, largely because those questions are complex, uncomfortable, and politically unpalatable1
- In recent decades our school system has been purported to be the key mechanism through which society moves people out of poverty and promotes equality, tasks which schooling was never designed to accomplish.
I really liked this comment from Combaticus Wombaticus III:
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People avoid the question of “what do we want our schools to do?” because there will never ever be an agreement. Even in much more homogenous countries than the United States, there will not be an agreement on this.Report
A lack of an agreement is fine!
I’d like us to disagree about it.
That would be preferable to not talking about what is possible, what (sadly) is not possible, nor whether or not increasing funding would work this time.Report
It’s a bit weird that so few people who give lectures on public education ever bother with its history.Report
What would bothering with its history make explicit that is obfuscated now?Report
For any given policy recommendation:
Is there currently a working model we can study?
Has this been tried before? What was the outcome and why is it not being done currently?Report
I’m pretty sure FdB wrote a book on this topic.Report
There are lots of models we can study from other developed democracies but they all have the problem of pissing off the entire political spectrum in the United States for one reason or another. Liberals aren’t going to like the massive amount of tracking in Europe or the STEM and route learning heavy systems in the Asian developed democracies. Conservatives aren’t going to like that the other system will not allow for heavy indoctrination in the way they want.Report
One issue with school reform in the United States at least is that nobody likes dealing with the changing demographics. There is a big Asian-American demographic with their own ideas about what a good education that go against what most Democrats or Republicans want the schools to be.Report
I think that what most people are really thinking about with education is less the education itself than the positive externalities associated with public, compulsory education. And when compared to a society where only a select few are literate and have more than the most rudimentary numeracy, the benefits are huge and indisputable.
The struggle now I think is what to do in a situation of diminishing returns, and where all of the low hanging fruit is picked. Should we be sparing no expense and effort on the lowest achievers? Should we be doubling and tripling down on the best of the best? Or do we accept that beyond a certain minimal level the whole thing is just daycare, and its up to those that want more to figure it out for themselves?
Not sure there’s an easy answer.Report
Freddie also references MY’s multi part series on the death of education reform. He never reaches a firm conclusion but I think Freddie is basically right, that the results just weren’t there. Charters proved a shell game, and no one was ever able to really diminish the teachers unions where they are powerful, to the extent that was part of the game plan.
In light of that failure we’ve had a progressive movement that seems to want to redefine success as whatever the outcomes happen to be and a conservative movement increasingly defecting from the project of public education altogether. Absent a real sea change my suspicion is that they will both win, probably to the detriment of us all.Report
One reason why Americans latched onto education reform for a long time was because it was a lot easier to raise tax money for education than it was for public health measures or other welfare state measures in American politics. This turned education into a sort of holy grail and panacea for American liberals. It isn’t though.Report
The scarcity premium thing was weird.
When I got into tech right around the mid-90s, there were articles coming out that talked about Solitaire training people how to use the mouse.
I got hired to my first job in tech because I knew how to type. (The fact that I had a Bachelor’s degree when only about a quarter of the country had one got me in the interview chair in the first place.)
Now? They won’t even look at kids with humanities degrees fresh outta college. All of the interns here have degrees in CompSci or Programming or something like that.
At least they know how to type, I guess.Report
The pendulum will swing back; I’m seeing an opening for those of us who’ve read widely in prompt engineering.
One project I’m working on my engineer told the LLM, ‘you are a marketing professional’ and a bunch of other stuff like, don’t lie, don’t add text after the name of the product, and so on… to help sell cookies.
Oh what an opportunity missed is all I could think. Imagine using the voice of a ‘marketing professional’ how droll.
You are Fafhrd describing to the Gray Mouser the finest cookie you’ve ever had; embellish with comparisons to local fauna, and after naming the cookie officially, give it a nickname that would tickle us with whimsey. Post to instagram.Report
I suspect that Americans might be too diverse in basically everything to come up with a working and uniform education system. You have conservatives that don’t want a system that will challenge traditional patriotism or religious feeling and traditional social beliefs. You have people who want a STEM heavy and pressure cooker system that don’t care about the humanities at all and want them regulated to the sidelines. You have different types of liberals and leftists who want a humanities heavy education that will teach kids to remedy the injustices of the American past. I don’t think there is anyway to square these various circles of wants and desires.Report
I think too many people suffer from too much romanticism over what school is and always has been.
That said I think it’s pretty clear that the public system has become too ossified. If it’s going to survive it’s going to need to get more flexible in terms of what it can offer and how it operates.
Right now I think we’re going in slow motion towards a worst case scenario. The best and brightest with the most involved families opt out to better options. A lot of cultural conservatives opt out to stupider and/or crazier options. Eventually the public schools become hollowed out husks where they babysit poor kids and maybe depending on the district throw in some progressive fairy tales.Report
I agree about the people suffering from too much romanticism.Report