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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#381

Post by econonut »

phil21 wrote: post #236
lolinder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appropria…

> 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 recei…

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.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#382

Post by emodendroket »

lolinder wrote: post #322
emodendroket wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?).

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#383

Post by Karrot_Kream »

s3r3nity wrote: post #165
lolinder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appropria…

+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).

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#384

Post by hintymad »

phil21 wrote: post #236
lolinder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appropria…

> 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 recei…

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.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#385

Post by hackable_sand »

jppope wrote: post #145
mbesto wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Seems like you're listing highly regulated industries not human interaction.

> anything that requires human interaction fails at scale

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#386

Post by sangnoir »

chongli wrote: post #177
Afton wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enri…

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 th…

> 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)

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#387

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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?

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#388

Post by teractiveodular »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #235
ggm wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.…

> 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.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#389

Post by tombert »

el_benhameen wrote: post #124
tombert wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit tangential but related. 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 l…

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…

It depends on how you define things.

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.

Re: The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

#390

Post by tightbookkeeper »

tivert wrote: post #251
tightbookkeeper wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 5…

>> 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…

> I don't know exactly what you mean by "surveys,"

Typical education studies look at two classrooms/sets of kids, and then compare grades with and without X. It's a mess.

> Yeah, and I think we also need to stop pretending new is better.

Agreed. I think part of the problem is centralized curriculum control. There will always be someone fighting to put in there thing or make a sale.

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