Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed (2011)

I was in the required but too poor group. I had to borrow others or do the work by hand. I eventually was able to get gifted one from one of those "help families in poverty with school supplies" donation drives. I had those books with tables of logarithms and one other one constantly checked out from the public library just so I could do my homework.

I've told this story before: Back when I was in college, I had a summer internship at a place that was a service center for the K-12 schools in a large county. Microcomputers were the big new thing. We had a facility with one of each kind of computer (Commodore, Apple, Radio Shack, etc.) and all the software we could lay their hands on. Teachers could come in and try things out.

My impression was that the "educational" software was extremely crude and one-dimensional, basically glorified flash cards. Today, the "educational" software is Web based, and more flashy, but still retains that lack of breadth. It's hard and expensive to write interactive software, so a lot of the apps are basically one or two templates, with different sets of data / parameters for different lessons.

Here's a picture. Move your mouse around. When something lights up, click on it, and a little box of text will pop up for you to read. I kid you not. This is real. Today.

Now I have two kids who are in high school. We have acquired (can't say bought in most cases) piles of educational technology, yet little or none of it was "EdTech." The most glaring example was Microsoft Office. The kids used it to create reports, presentations, drawings, etc. It has been supplanted by Google Docs, which they now use heavily, including for collaborative assignments.

We've played with Jupyter/Python. My son is learning solid modeling using some free app. One of them uses DuoLingo daily, as does my spouse.

Some of their educational technology is still in the analog domain: Musical instruments. ;-)

I think the take-away for me is that we are providing our kids with technology that supports their education, but it isn't written for kids. It's the same stuff that grown-ups use. Jupyter/Python is an example -- it's my primary computing tool for my job. Another common feature is that these are creativity tools, not consumption tools.

I worked in a high school for 5 years teaching English as a foreign language. I was not a great teacher because being a teacher is really hard, but I learned a lot in those 5 years. I will let you in on a secret.

Education is not what the teacher does: it's what the student does. Most people think that the job of a teacher is to organise information and explain it to students to make it "easy to understand". This is just plain wrong. In fact, by doing so you cheat your students because you steal their opportunity to organise information and discover how to understand it.

1:1, 1:2, 1:20, or 1:40 doesn't actually matter from a perspective of teaching material. If we make the teacher the font of all information, then we also make the teacher the bottleneck of learning. I was teaching language and if you want native level fluency and proficiency, then you might need to spend up to native level time acquiring the language. In other words, to get to a 10 year old's ability, it might take you up to 10 years of nearly full time practice. Sorry, but I'm not going to teach you 58,400 hours (10 years, 16 hours a day) unless you have Bill Gates level money to spend.

So, you're going to spend something like 3 hours a week in my class, and only something like 30 of those weeks are going to be productive in a year (if I'm lucky). So that's a pidly 90 hours of instruction per year. I'm going to teach you practically nothing in that time.

This is what is wrong with education.

But getting back to 1:1 vs 1:40. In a 1 hour class, if I have 40 students I can spend just over a minute paying attention to each student. In other words, I'm going to present my pidly amount of information and hope like hell that you're going to do something useful with it -- because I do not have enough time to interact with even one person in the class. If you assume that 1 in 40 students have a behaviour problem (just 2.5%!) you will see that I will expect to be interrupted in every single one of my classes. So probably I won't even be able to present my pidly amount of information. Probably I will just babysit and the students who know how to study will do well, while the others do poorly.

As we reduce the ratio, I have more time to interact with the students. But it's really important to realise that if I waste that time trying to teach the material, I will do no good. So in fact, what I want to do is let the students study and then watch them so that I can can correct their behaviour. By doing that, they can become good students and succeed in studying.

How many students I can handle depends a lot on my class management skills and also on the students. Some students require no intervention. They just need a friendly, welcoming, and engaging environment in which to study. Some students need considerable attention. 1:1 might be amazing for some students, but even 1:10 or 1:20 could be amazing for others (depending on the teacher). Some students like to study alone, some like to study in pairs, some like to study in groups. You have to be flexible.

16 year old me had no clue, no help from parents or other adults and teachers that disallowed all calculators that weren't the required ones. I learned about they books of tables from an old man who helped me withmy homework I was doing at the public library, it's likely the only way he knew how. Not to mention, my main source of food during this time was the free school lunches and I was working 3rd shift to help pay rent and utilities, $5 was a lot of money (to us at least, this would have been mid 90s).

Yeah, fair enough. TI has a very effective racket going, and a lot of people and institutions have bought into it wholesale, and the main marks are uninformed and easily pressured students and parents who think it will help lead to success.

Sorry to hear about your tough financial situation in the past. It’s a tragedy that kids go hungry in such a rich country. If an expensive calculator is going to be mandated in school, there should be financial aid available for it.