Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reinventing the School

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: Reinventing the School

#11

Post by msluyter »

I'd love to pay teachers more -- if I were appointed Dictator of the United States, I would also (at least) double their salaries.

But how would we actually go about achieving that goal in the actual world we live in? Well, we'd have to raise taxes[2], and a solid third of US citizens would veto any raise in taxes for any reason whatsoever, and another 50% or so would veto raising teacher salaries on tribal affiliation grounds (I'm assuming a fair amount of overlap between these groups), meaning, you probably have at least a solid plurality against the idea[1]. Not to mention the difficulty of how a city like Stockton, CA (now bankrupt) could achieve such a goal.

I hate to be so pessimistic, but I tend to believe that anything beyond tinkering with the margins of the school system is unlikely and probably politically impossible.

[1] For example, in Austin, TX, 2/4 of the last round of AISD bond initiatives passed, by very slim margins. And Austin is a rather liberal city.

http://www.traviscountyclerk.org/eclerk/content/images/elect...

[2] Edit: or cut other things, in which case we're back to the same debate that's more or less immobilized our country for the last few years, thus illustrating my point.

Re: Reinventing the School

#13

Post by jerf »

thejteam wrote: post #3
mathattack wrote: post #2

I like the topic, but it's a little too idealistic to tell an underfunded school system to double the pay of teachers just because you can't afford to be timid in reform.

Not only that, but doubling the pay of teachers will only improve your results if you get rid of your current teachers. Which will be difficult to do. Otherwise you are just paying the same people more money and probably getting the same results.

The idea is that if you pay more, you may be able to attract more people who are skilled enough to make more than $52K in the private sector, and thereby hopefully duck around the "those who can, do, those who can't, teach", as, alas, there's more than a kernel of truth to that.

Re: Reinventing the School

#14

Post by koops »

Normally this could slide: "...most of it’s citizens..." But in a piece about the importance of education? (The apostrophe doesn't belong in the possessive version.)

Re: Reinventing the School

#15

Post by codva »

Instead of reinventing the school, I think we need to be thinking outside the school. The institution of school comes with a whole host of problems that are just systemic to the idea of everybody reporting to a central location and being primarily segregated by age. Not that you can't get a decent education in school, because many of us did.

We don't need the best and brightest teachers. We need the most passionate and dedicated teachers. Passion trumps intelligence for teachers just about every time. The best teachers don't teach so much as they light the fire in a kid to learn. It's a subtle but important difference.

If I were designing better schools I'd stick with the basic group format up through about 8th grade, then go to a community college type model where every kid could branch off to follow their interests. The universe of stuff that everybody needs to know is much smaller than most people presume. Everybody needs to write well, read well, and handle math up through about Algebra I. After that, it is all electives. So after about 8th grade, when the 3 Rs should be solid in most kids, let them do what they want. That is how we handled our kids educations (we homeschooled) and it worked out very well. HSing is not an option for most, but the "system" can learn a lot from what works for homeschoolers.

Re: Reinventing the School

#16

Post by jarrett »

blhack wrote: post #8

The school isn't the problem. There are huge social problems that need to be addressed, which are unfortunately politically-incorrect, before we start changing schools. Go visit a school in a very poor area sometime. They need social workers, not teachers. The problem is that a lot of teachers don't want to be social workers, they want to be teachers.

Very true, but it's not just socioeconomically disadvantaged schools that are in trouble. Schools serving middle-class populations often have the problems the author enumerates. For example, the author says that classes do not teach practical skills such as filing taxes or negotiating. He also says that teacher pay is too low, considering its social importance. These (and other) problems the author addresses are not at all confined to poorer schools.

So yes, deeper issues of inequality play a major role in education outcomes. But the education itself is also flawed.

Part of the reason for this is the political culture in our country. We tend to lurch from quick fix to quick fix. A reform is introduced, and three years later the world hasn't turned upside down, so a new reform replaces it. Repeat indefinitely. Or else, a simplistic solution, like expanding standardized testing, is pushed farther and farther every year, in the hopes that if we just take it far enough, it will solve all our problems.

Re: Reinventing the School

#17

Post by MarcScott »

skullum wrote: post #12
vtempest wrote: post #4

Good ideas, but lets just not have classrooms / teachers - just learn online and then come in to use teacher as consultant

I agree. I think stuff like Khan academy https://www.khanacademy.org/ is the future.

Although I use video instruction occasionally in my own lessons, it is not a solution. It is a one-shoe fits all approach. The talent of a teacher is to be able to engage learners of all ability ranges and adapt their lessons according to the progress made by individual students. Software can't do this (yet).

Re: Reinventing the School

#18

Post by hxrts »

If you think about the people you know, the people you admire, how many of them are teachers? I would wager very few. The teaching profession (at least in the US) is not structured to attract quality candidates in the same way other professions do. The public / private divide exacerbates this problem. This requires money and legislation which makes the issue nearly intractable because efforts are most often put toward short-term gain rather than sustainable infrastructure.

Re: Reinventing the School

#19

Post by arethuza »

codva wrote: post #15

Instead of reinventing the school, I think we need to be thinking outside the school. The institution of school comes with a whole host of problems that are just systemic to the idea of everybody reporting to a central location and being primarily segregated by age. Not that you can't get a decent education in school, because many of us did. We don't need the best and brightest teachers. We need the most passionate a…

A quick question - when you say "where every kid could branch off to follow their interests" does this imply that kids in the US education system don't choose a set of subjects to focus on at about 14?

Re: Reinventing the School

#20

Post by ironchef »

jarrett wrote: post #16
blhack wrote: post #8

The school isn't the problem. There are huge social problems that need to be addressed, which are unfortunately politically-incorrect, before we start changing schools. Go visit a school in a very poor area sometime. They need social workers, not teachers. The problem is that a lot of teachers don't want to be social workers, they want to be teachers.

Very true, but it's not just socioeconomically disadvantaged schools that are in trouble. Schools serving middle-class populations often have the problems the author enumerates. For example, the author says that classes do not teach practical skills such as filing taxes or negotiating. He also says that teacher pay is too low, considering its social importance. These (and other) problems the author addresses are not…

Sure...and part of it is that to do things well there's (generally) not a one-size fits all solution. Unfortunately that's what most americans are geared towards. To get a multitude of solutions is typically more costly.

Spot on about the middle classes also feeling it by the way. On the plus side, I know even in a poor school here they have consumer education classes which includes things such as balancing checkbooks, how financing big purchases works, how the stock market works, etc. It's very nice to see.

Post reply on HN