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Request for Education Startups

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Request for Education Startups

#71

Post by hdctambien »

Kevin_S wrote: post #19
ankyth27 wrote: post #17

A professional football player starts playing at the age of 4-5, a professional dancer starts practicing right from childhood, but I see most people only get interested in code when they need a job and they start fearing. Our education system should introduce problem solving and coding right from primary classes, teachers should be trained exclusively for these, and the big G, F and others should collaborate with gov…

Disagree. Coding is one of hundreds of skills that can lead to a good career, and coding is absolutely not for everyone. Football/dance are extra-curriculars, I am all for coding being an option early on (high school?) but not anytime before then. If a kid shows an interest in coding, they'll find a way. And parents nowadays are more aware of it as a viable option Even if this seems worth it anyway, a teacher "traine…

> a teacher "trained" in coding is not a programmer

And if the "trained teacher" is a programmer, what is stopping them from taking a $100,000 programming job over their $40,000 teaching job (That caps out at $70,000 after 20 years)?

Re: Request for Education Startups

#72

Post by jpereira »

graniter wrote: post #63
jpereira wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda crazy that assessment has been coupled with instruction for so long, it pretty obviously creates a warped incentive model that stands on some real shaky ground. I think the model also doesn't scale well for assessment, which prompts the creation of few, ineffective, but highly scalable assessments upon which the functioning of the entire system rest, which in turn prompts practices like teaching to the tes…

Agreed. I think about the analogy of interchangeable parts and if that might apply to education. Maybe teachers should just teach and assessors should assess. Interchangeable parts made it so equipment could be more efficiently be manufactured. But that didn't preclude there being a lot of different types of equipment. In fact, there's probably more types of equipment because of interchangeable parts. So for educatio…

I don't see the advantage of tying assessments to singular institutions especially ones structured like College Board. What this promotes a bottleneck of what can be communicated to others meaningfully. Currently the SAT can be broadly communicated (because CB and others have invested very large amounts of resources into it) and so students optimize for it. Instead they could be putting their efforts to towards learning that is more personally and socially valuable.

I don't think this is just because the SATs are bad tests but fundamentally emerges from the institutional single source of truth model, where the incentive is for the institution to make their test as general/broad as possible and the most broadly accepted , as to capture the most students and hence fees.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#73

Post by hdctambien »

jfaucett wrote: post #23

I've been slowly working on an idea in this area for a while and and would love to be able to work on it full-time, part of its a software problem and that's the only part I've been working on thus far. I'm not doing this for monetary reasons at all, and don't really see how VC would ever be the right solution and lawmakers probably wouldn't allow it to happen either. But anyway I'll put the gist of the idea up here.…

You have to imagine a school full of children like a room full of hackers that will work harder to break your system than they will to follow it.

On this forum people say "all you need is a library card" to learn Computer Science, but you also need to read those library books.

How does your system deal with students that just refuse to do anything?

Re: Request for Education Startups

#74

Post by jpereira »

germinalphrase wrote: post #62
jpereira wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this needs to be directly tied to public education. My concern is more that educational startups tend to assume an institutional model (i.e an institutions defines what is being learned, how it's being learned etc etc). They don't need to change public education but rather create services that embody a different educational paradigm. For example a matchmaking service for shared learning goals or interes…

I am sympathetic, but an obvious hurdle is that our employment system is largely biased toward that traditional pipeline. High school GPA/ACT Scores > Various Tiers of High Education > Standardized Credentials for Employment. I'm not sure how you would resolve the two (without, of course, cracking the nut on a neutral, true-ability assessment system).

I think the latter is possible, but even without there are options.

There's a long-tail of credential consumers beyond traditional employers that holds a ton of value. Community level organizations, digital social networks, even open-source communities.

There's also a decent set of skills that can't currently be measured or conveyed by traditional standardized credentials.

Both of these represent an opportunity for a new academic/assessment paradigm to step in and create real value today.

That being said there's definitely going to be huge hurdles in getting to traditional employers, their logic is not necessarily based on best placement or best skill set, but often times on bureaucracy/ass-covering/good-enough mindset. Not to say that isn't valuable at very large scale organizations.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#75

Post by barry-cotter »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #65

I used to work as a developer for an online charter school many years back so this space is very familiar. I even thought about starting my own company and breaking into this space because the software I worked on wasn't very good (it was miles above what was already out there, for sure, but I thought there were many places that could be improved). The problem I ran into, which completely discouraged me at the time,…

> One big issue you face is that you're going to be teaching children and helping to shape their minds so you must use valid scientific research to back up your ideas less we create a generation of adults who cannot think about the world.

Don't let the barely adequate be the enemy of the actively harmful. Most education research is of low quality and education does not incorporate known effective techniques like mastery learning or spaced repetition.

Education degrees and education research deserve all the respect they get.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#76

Post by jamestimmins »

jacquesm wrote: post #68
ams6110 wrote: post #64

> For instance, we believe there’s potential for a company to build a service that meaningfully connects schools and parents, and to charge parents for the service. I disagree. I already pay taxes, book fees, technology fees, extracurricular fees to my school district. I would not pay another cent for anything I didn't have to pay. A big problem in K-12 education today is actually over-involvement of parents. Helicop…

The bigger problem is that it would make it much harder for poor parents to keep up with the richer ones because they could not afford the service .

This problem has a solution (albeit an imperfect one), which is charging wealthier schools more in order to charge more poor schools less. Obviously that model has drawbacks, but it may work better with a tech product than other areas, where marginal cost is relatively small.

Re: Request for Education Startups

#77

Post by hdctambien »

barry-cotter wrote: post #75
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #65

I used to work as a developer for an online charter school many years back so this space is very familiar. I even thought about starting my own company and breaking into this space because the software I worked on wasn't very good (it was miles above what was already out there, for sure, but I thought there were many places that could be improved). The problem I ran into, which completely discouraged me at the time,…

> One big issue you face is that you're going to be teaching children and helping to shape their minds so you must use valid scientific research to back up your ideas less we create a generation of adults who cannot think about the world. Don't let the barely adequate be the enemy of the actively harmful. Most education research is of low quality and education does not incorporate known effective techniques like mast…

Honestly, fixing the education of educators would be the best long term solution.

Alternatively, creating a complete, ready-to-go curriculum package for every course (as defined in every state) that could be handed to anyone might be a startup-able solution to that problem.

Although, that might also just be a patch that leads to a local maximum of not-very-good teachers teaching from better-than-before curriculum. Where making better teachers would lead to better teaching (eventually).

Re: Request for Education Startups

#78

Post by BadassFractal »

jamestimmins wrote: post #76
jacquesm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is that it would make it much harder for poor parents to keep up with the richer ones because they could not afford the service .

This problem has a solution (albeit an imperfect one), which is charging wealthier schools more in order to charge more poor schools less. Obviously that model has drawbacks, but it may work better with a tech product than other areas, where marginal cost is relatively small.

We already have that, it's called Title I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Educa...
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