Before we begin, I will note that I have indeed written various thoughts about the three college presidents that appeared before Congress and the resulting controversies, including the disputes regarding plagiarism.
Re: copywork, I was struggling with problem sets in the first year of an econ phd after having more or less skated through my prior education and ended up spending quite a bit of time copying written-up solutions that I didn't fully understand, both on paper and with the additional purpose of learning how to use LaTeX. I had answers memorized before I understood them, but it did seem like I eventually came to some understanding. Office hours and study groups were essentially fruitless by comparison.
It's physically painful to read this. As someone who loves the English language definition of "learning" and "education", but was .... less than thrilled with the actual offerings (graduated public HS in 99 in the US), is there any other conclusion than "this massive part of society that we've spent trillions of dollars, hours, force labor and brain cycles on... at best - it doesn't work, and the only positive results are just hardworking diligent (rich?) students who'd be fine anyway, and at worst, it's.... well, a lot worse than that."
100% non-rhetorically, and no offense to you, but what do we do here? I read a LOT of articles about how education sucks, especially past few years. I lived a decade of nearly worthless education. Why does no one care? The only thing that people actually seemed to get upset about education recently was trans issues, which even at maximally-relevant case, can only affect a tiny %. Is the learned helplessness really that bad?
Kamil Kazani on twitter makes the point (about Russia) that revolution never comes from the most oppressive, terrible regimes, because the concept of "better" isn't allowed to exist. It's the ones that attempt to reform things, showing that things could be better (but maybe aren't doing a good/fast enough job) that get overthrown.
Specifically on smartphones in class: I'm a person with 2 eyes and kids. I can confidently assert that any school that allows smartphone use in class is not educating anyone about anything. My kid's school (5th grade) has never allowed phones, and just sent an email home saying that "some students had been caught using smartwatches to text/communicate during school hours" and so they would also be banned.
But, doesn't it kind of work for the people who care about it for their kids? Especially the ones with decent resources?
I mean, we did the research and moved into one of neighborhoods with strong schools. Stronger than many others so there is a path into college, and thus into a professional career. Our kids will be ok.
That's crappy and cynical, but with local control of primary education isn't it also pretty sane? And it means I do not try to start a revolution re education...
I think that's part of the anti-revolutionary sentiment, but when I say "we" I don't mean "me, for my kids" - I've already found a good solution. I'm pretty libertarian, but I think people care sufficiently enough about things like "everyone's education" that they want those things to be well-provided for (public or primary or charter or whatever, so long as people get it) in the wider society. "I've got mine" is true, and a factor, but I don't think it is sufficient to explain why almost no one (even millions of people whose kids are suffering through bad schools!) cares enough to fix. I think we have been taught - in part BY that same educational system, both intentionally... and unintentionally - that improvement to that system is not only physically impossible, but would be actively fought by relatively powerful groups, and that they would call you extremely unkind things in the process of you actually trying to improve the system.
I would also say, look at the mechanics of how one would go about changing the system. Who would start this - who has the desire, the flexibility, and the need to take on the whole system?
Individual parents are in no position to take on the whole system.
Educational Publishers are just navigating the environment they find, responding to state standards and school demand.
Local school districts are fairly boxed in by the state standards, and they are (quite rationally!) focused on trying to deliver the education local parents want, within that system.
I would think a state governor could run on "the best education for [Ohio] kids!" and with sufficient propaganda and a state without some other pressing partisan issues, create/remind a constituency for that. Then once in office, 1) enable full statewide school choice and 2) on one hand, loosen state school standards so that experimentation in schools (do you wanna open a crazy grade school that's 3h of traditional learning, and 4h of recess/funtime/learning/wandering in the woods, go for it!) and 3) on the other hand, strengthen monitoring of state standards around non-negotiatable, non-stupid requirements like "can students read/write/add" or "are teachers doing anything at all" or "are students actually coming to school but you're graduating them anyway".
Sure, it all sounds naive and utopian, but I would respond that if the federal republic of America in 2024 has made it so that "a state's citizens want to improve the education system" is a farfetched utopian dream, then maybe we should change that too.
I think you pretty quickly get into a "watering the tree of liberty" being the only solution that will drive change in that case, and that's overwhelmingly likely to only change things in the negative direction.
Yes, it shouldn't be a farfetched utopian dream, but Molochian coordination problems and entrenched powers and bureaucracies, all feeding off the ~$17k per annum-student we spend on average, not to mention the career-and-personal-life-killing cultural weapons at their disposal, will all ensure that any real change is impossible.
Think of who you would have to get aligned and politically active to do this - the top quintile of parents who actually care are already in private, charter, good public, or homeschool solutions. You're left with trying to mobilize the disengaged middle and bottom quintiles, who are mainly using schools as babysitting services. First, they don't care to begin with, or they'd be doing one of the smart options. Second, their opinion will be easily swayed with TV ads or public campaigns, by the well-funded entrenched interests. How could you ever get enough people off their asses to even vote your way in a referendum? Where is *your* budget for a TV ad campaign? How do you protect yourself from getting cancelled or witch-hunted to extinction before you even get anything off the ground?
Do what Bryan Caplan did. Elite college increases your wages, so you need to go to a good high school and get random credentials, but since nobody cares about schooling prior to that, you just homeschool until then and your kids avoid a lot of bad schooling and probably have better childhoods doing literally anything else
Of course, the real hope here is that the ivies completely torch their reputation to the ground and elite college is no longer necessary by the time your kids are 18 but you can't personally do anything about that
College, for all its problems, doesn't bother me as much as K-12. I personally have found a solution that works for me/my kids but I think it would be nice for tens of millions of other kids/families to have a solution too?
The problems at many primary schools isn't like college: "I wasted my time getting an English degree" they are: "nothing is taught at all, classes are often just sit-there-do-nothing", "there is a high risk of student violence," "students are just graduated anyway," "basic life skills, from reading/arithmetic/decent interactions with society, are somehow not absorbed even after 12 years," "it's mandatory, costs billions and wastes everyone's time."
Oh, and for "copy in a different medium" there's an art class exercize that goes like this:
Ok, class, go on see the following exhibition and take notes. Without telling the rest of the class which picture you've chosen, imagine it is part of a movie story board (when, of course, it wasn't). Write a page of what you imagine the corresponding movie script was. These script homework assignments are then photocopied and distributed to the class. Exercize two: re-identify the painting from each of your fellow student' movie scripts, given that the field of choices is down to the couple of dozen painting at that particular exhibition. People may use lateral thinking so that it's not completely obvious.
My intuition on the situation in Sweden (based in having worked for a while in schools there, and comparing it to the situation in Denmark) is roughly: the for-profit schools are very tightly regulated in a way that makes it impossible to do any meaningful innovation on pedagogy etc, so the situation becomes pretty zero sum where the schools to make a profit try to offload costly students and do various non-useful things to get kids to apply (like give away computers). So the left sees this as predatory stuff and, as far as I can tell, no one in the debate says "maybe we should allow innovation." The for-profit schools in Denmark are a lot less regulated than the public schools and also, on average, more innovative and good. Not that I am particularly impressed, but my standards might be unreasonable.
It honestly seems like education, as a field, is populated by people who think grades/statistics are spells. You cast the spell of "transcript shows a B average" and the student gets the B average life, even if they didn't go to class, turn in work or learn anything. This applies to grades, test scores, cancelling programs in the name of equity and probably 2/3rds of this post.
I guess the good thing is most of this insanity is stuff you can opt out of for your own kids. It doesn't fix the world, but it might save some of it.
Half joking proposal to "At a minimum, before we give kids gigantic loans to go get a degree, perhaps we should check for reasonable market expectations on what that degree might enable them to do? And also, if we do not think they should be forced to pay it back but do want them to have the money, give them a grant instead?"
Require schools to take entering student's HS grades, SAT/ACT scores (college must administer for free if student entered without taking one of them) and HS attended/zip code and provide a cost-benefit matrix for 4 years on loans vs expected grades/graduation GPA based on the data + loan repayment using this info.
Right now you have to sign a bunch of docs to get the loans, but they are extremely general and utterly non-specific to the point of lying about the key facts. We have the info!
Make it a choice: School can underwrite the loans and not provide the above analysis, or they can have the government underwrite the loans and provide the above analysis.
Now I'll go back to my libertarian cave and have more daydreams of things that will never happen.
You can greatly cut the cost of a college degree if the student is willing to pursue the Running Start / College in High School approach and get their Associates concurrently with their high school degree. If they have chosen their courses to transfer to the target department at the local state university, they will be coming in as Juniors. My son didn't quite do this - he was one course shy of his Associates. So he went in as a freshman and after his first quarter was a junior and admitted to his target department. He graduated in 7 quarters - and saved a ton of money. Living at home makes it cheaper as well. Not all students are within commuting range, but my daughter did an hour+ one way bus ride from the park and ride her 5 years in college and grad school (she did early admission rather than Running Start) while living at home. Once again, saving a lot of money.
When I was a Teaching Assistant in Mechanical Engineering Design 40+ years ago, we normed the curve at a B-. This was a senior level course. From what I saw with my daughter doing Civil Engineering and my son doing Business at UW Seattle in the last decade, I don't think the grade inflation is unreasonable in those subject areas (at least the physics, chemistry, engineering, math, stats, accounting, econ, & MIS areas).
I was trained as a pen and ink draftsman while in high school in the late 1960's. We did LOTS of copywork.
The Guardian article doesn't do a good job of covering the Swedish education proposals, I think because it is spending too much time talking to Sveriges Lärare, the largest teacher's union. They want to shut down the Free School system, but they _always_ want that. I don't see Lotta Edholm agreeing with this, and as a politician on the right (Liberals are on the Right, in Sweden) it would be very unlikely. We will see what her report, due out later next month says, but from things she has already said in Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter (big Swedish newspapers) we can expect a few things.
1. The State has been setting educational goals for the free schools to meet. Most of them do really well. Some do poorly. A good number of the poorly performing ones are all run by the same few for-profit groups, and there is pretty strong evidence that significant money that the State thought was going to be spent on underperforming students ended up in the bank accounts of the shareholders instead. This is part of the systemic failure that is being talked about -- the state never set the rules up properly to prevent this sort of abuse. Sweden still has a really hard time predicting wickedness, and when it happens, it is always a major surprise to all involved.
2. The Pisa reports aren't showing general decline, but instead volatility. In 2012 Sweden's ranking dropped like a stone, when it experienced the sharpest drop in results of any country in the survey over a ten-year span. OW!
speak Swedish, (already started) and going back to centrally marking test results instead of having all grades be given out by the student's teachers. It seems the teachers are getting pressured to give out better grades than the students deserve, and worse, teachers themselves no longer know what sort of grade a student deserves. https://www.thelocal.se/20230622/sweden-to-look-at-centralised-marking-to-fight-grade-inflation
3. There is great talk about whether cell phones are making our students dumber. It is hard to learn to think up your own solutions in a world where you can always look up the answer. But it is precisely this ability we need to train, so.
4. The Minister wants Sweden to go back to making more engineers. How to do this remains a challenge.
5. There is a significant fraction of the Muslim population who don't want their children to do well in school at all. They think that secular values are immoral, including the value of education. The previous government, which was in favour of multiculturalism, thought that the thing to do was to let them run their own free schools which would teach the reading, mathematics, and core curriculum, but without the secularism. There have been spectacular and well publicised failures -- we got some religious schools that weren't keen on teaching anything but Islam. Others were recruitment centres for the Islamic State (Daesh). They were shut down, but the fact that they lasted as long as they did pointed to some terrible problem in how they were overseen by the state. That's another systemic failure that the Minister wants to address. And the time is right -- multiculturalism is now a dead issue in Sweden. The largest party on the left, which is the largest party in Sweden, the Social Democrats -- i.e. the ex-government, the former champions of multiculturalism -- are now campaigning on 'Multiculturalism was a mistake! We're going to make the immigrants integrate, and we can do a better job than the goverment who is also attempting to do this because we are better at governing!' (This might even be true). It's nice that they finally noticed that multiculturalism isn't primarily about having more exciting restaurants to eat in, but what took them so long?
At any rate, this has gone on long enough. I just thought you might want a bit of broadening.
On picking public schools: I think though that there should be a place to which a student is entitled, and that place should be within a reasonable distance of their house. I've heard of the NYC "pick your school" system shafting students so badly they get a spot in a school very far away.
Wrt skipping grades...I guess it'd partly depend on exactly how much is being skipped. Within a given school, sure, this seems clearly beneficial. Many happy memories of doing middle- and highschool-grade math in elementary school once the teachers learned how bored I was. And AP classes more or less function as this anyway, along both the academic and social development axes. (This was a huge motivator for my peers to take AP classes: they didn't care about the education so much, just wanted to get away from shitty disruptive children.)
But it does seem like a step change to skip from elementary -> middle, middle -> high, and especially high -> "junior" college. Doesn't happen as often, since that's a bigger jump, but anecdotally every smart kid I know who did one of those got fucked up in some way. So the net effect is pretty small, since they get to college earlier, but then faff about/fail out for long enough that no time is actually saved vs the usual route. And sometimes those lost years are also very painful. Lots of stories of isolation, even with robust non-school social networks. I think the receiving institutions still mostly don't know how to accommodate precocious students, even more than ones at "social par" within institutions.
I feel like the concern there is the skipping separating the child from a cohort of people known? Personally, I 'skipped' 2 grades, but the skipped grades were kindergarten and 1st grade, so there wasn't some disruption in the middle. I don't think being younger affected my social networking much until university, though I had enough unrelated issues (chronic illness) that it's hard to be sure of the counterfactual
Often wish there was some way for Slow Boring subscribers to get a discount on Matt's Bloomberg columns, since sometimes he's got interestingly different material there vs. the blog. What a weird take though. I know he's fairly positive on charter schools, so by the Law of Goodness Conservation Between Geese...what, indeed, makes the standard market mechanisms untenable when it's public v. public instead of public v. private? I don't get it. Could see some form of argument that, because it's so intricately tied to government, there's no way it'd ever become a free enough market to work well...but then you've got the other section directly on existing school choice generally being found positive, which obviously happens under prevailing policies, so ???
His paywalled piece about the uselessness of teacher credentials was indeed very good, can confirm. Part of a recurring series on Credentialism Delenda Est, previously featuring hairdressers and dentists. The rentier rot runs deep. What is our teachers learning?
a great way to get the benefits of early-age geekdom without the detriments of access-to-screenishness is to plop your 8 year old down in front of an arch linux box with no x11
even *after* they learn enough to get a GUI up and running, and set up a browser, and turn on javascript, most of the truly awful parts of the internet simply will not work on this setup without way more effort than your child will be willing to put in
this is what my dad did with me, anyway. i remember setting up some kind of bizarre offbrand tiling WM called 'scrotwm' (i was too young to understand the double entendre and thought it was just a straightforward screenshot + wm), my xorg.conf file was crazy
but i got WoW running in Wine well enough to play with my friends, and my dad said that meant I was allowed to play WoW without restriction
Idk... maybe this strategy isn't actually viable. But we currently have this issue where open and free operating systems have a really hard time dealing with all of the new infinite-scrolling-feed javascript stuff without large amounts of nonfree customization, and ALSO we have a problem where all the new infinite-scrolling-feed javascript stuff happens to be correlated with horrible, horrible psychic damage inflicted on our youth
It feels like there must be a way to make these two problems cancel out in a way that produces somewhat well-adjusted geeks, and it feels like my own childhood is a decent example of that
While I agree in principle (freeing up memory in DOS to get games running sure made me learn a lot which then continued in Linux and BSD as soon as first boradband was available), not sure this still works. Maybe arch is uniquely hard but on most distros I used full GUI is one line of CLI away these days and pretty much has been for the better part of two decades. Proprietary codecs a few clicks after that.
Arch is extremely not like this. Getting from 1) inserting the install media to 2) having a bash CLI set up and you're ready to go, is an all-day project unless you do it so often that you've set up your own custom tools for automating it
Getting X11 installed and working is yet another day's work on top of that before you can even think of installing a GUI
For a 9-year-old I imagine it would be like, a month-long project
I switched neighborhoods between elementary and junior high in the late 1970's and the JH didn't get any of the recommendations from my elementary school so placed me in regular classes across the board.
Except for math, which you had to test into. My dad taught me how to solve quadratic equations when I was 7, and I read Scarne on Gambling a few times, but most of my math time was wasted.
The school had nine levels you could test into; if you were a known smart kid, you would do the levels A, B, and C tests in one sitting; I was not, so I started with the multiple choice addition and subtraction test, which I finished in four minutes leaving 41 minutes to sit quietly. I have always been very fast and will omit ridiculous stories about that.
The next day, a few had left the testing classroom I was in, and I took multiplication and division. This took about five minutes, then I waited 40 minutes then went to my next class.
Next day, we were on decimals. Five minutes, 40 minutes of wait time. The testing classroom had been mostly cleared out.
Day 4: Percentages. You know how this went.
Day 5: There are three of us testing. They start a math class because almost everyone's been rated. I don't remember what this was for sure, but maybe negative numbers? The ongoing math class didn't bother me.
The following Monday I'm alone and doing what they call X-1, which I think started to introduce simple variables. Aced that.
Next, on Tuesday, I took a combined test on X-2, X-3, and X-4. X-3 had four questions, and I missed two of them; one was on the volume of a sphere, which I know now forever despite no need and I add some intensifiers if I am provoked into saying it. So I placed into X-3, which was really placing into algebra so I was a week late to start algebra ha ha no, you know that's not how this ends.
All seven of the 8th graders who had tested or qualified into X-3 had been in algebra for almost a week. We should all be in the same place. But, as the principal explained to me much later, there was no reason for me to be in algebra. So they moved all the eighth graders who qualified in X-3 AND WERE ALREADY IN ALGEBRA to a class they called "Advanced X," and threw in the folks who were in X-2, so they didn't have to put me in algebra. I think there were 19 of us in the class.
And somehow, there are now lots of districts that are making it *worse than this.*
(Also, whenever I read about your personal college admission complaints, I first think, "dude, walk it off," and then I realize maybe someone is able to hold a grudge for at least four-thirds of a long time.)
When I finished all the math my middle school had, they had me use some program to learn on my own. I learned nothing because I didn’t understand matrices and had no access to resources to help me. My teacher didn’t know anything past algebra and the internet sucked back then.
This was a banger of a childhood roundup! So many things I feel like responding to, but for now:
(1) I skipped 3 grades in junior high and high school (long story). It *might* have been wonderful for my career, and it *might* have stunted my social development, but I’m not sure, because I don’t know how successful my career would be or how stunted my social development would be if I hadn’t skipped. In any case, if it were more common, which I think it easily could be, then it would’ve been an unmitigated good.
(2) I feel constant guilt over sending my kids to a normal elementary school, knowing that they could probably progress in math (and possibly other subjects) like 5x faster. In my defense, *every* school we looked at, public or private, everywhere in the US, was basically the same way, leaving homeschooling or “aristocratic tutoring” as the main alternatives, and those didn’t seem especially feasible for us. Also, the kids are fairly happy in school, with lots of friends and activities and little to no bullying. And they know they have two professor parents who stand ready to fulfill their scientific curiosity at any time, and they make use of that a hell of a lot less than one would hope.
(3) It’s always weird for me to read these blistering critiques of universities, and mostly *agree* with them, and then try to reconcile that with the fact that my own life from age 15 has been spent almost entirely in universities and (despite sometimes-enraging bureaucracy and politics) it’s mostly been good and it suits me extremely well and my students are eager to learn and they make me proud and my colleagues are brilliant and make real progress on questions that I care about. Maybe I’m just in a charmed bubble.
Something I always note every time someone says "just ban phones in schools!"
I think that's seriously underestimating the ability of kids in school to just do what they want.
Private Jewish schools have been banging that drum for a while and every year there would be a new system to control phones in school and by November it would be dead.
there would invariably be some reasonable exceptions to the rule and the kids would inevitably exploit them, or the kids would get fake phones to turn in, or just not turn in their phones etc.
The place to control phones in school is with the parents who have to tell their kids no when they get to the age where they might start asking for one.
This has to be coordinated by the parents though, it's way harder to tell a kid you won't buy them a phone when all their friends have one. If you have a kid around the age of ~8 now is the time to coordinate with other parents in your grade that no one is buying their kids phones until they are older, they can get a flip phone if the parents are concerned about them having a commute to school they do on their own.
Once they get to upper high school they can get a smartphone but expecting the school to manage to handle the prohibition is wishful thinking, the parents should be the ones who collect their kids phones on the way out the door
also obviously preaching to the choir here but the way we physically structure our communities is tied to how our kids will grow up. In a suburban sprawl type of neighborhood, kids can't get from place to place without a parent driving them. That lack of independence is always going to result in people defaulting to interacting with their friends (and para-friends) via social media. There is one community in the US I know of that has kids that just go to park with friends and make friends there, it's the ultra-orthodox jewish community
They consistently advocate for higher density in their neighborhoods, they rarely have phones, and with the number of kids per couple wayyy higher than the rest of the US, by default, the kids in these communities are always far more autonomous. The result is kids who will take a ball to the park and make up a game with the other random kids they meet there.
Would you be willing to ban note-taking on laptops?
There was no shortage of games/social media/another classes homework (in the best case scenario) on laptops open in class under the pretense of note-taking
some unsuccessful strategies employed to prevent this
teaching from the back of the class
random "hands up" checks
requiring people who took notes on their laptops to hand in notes every set period of time
none of those strategies were successful at preventing a HS kid not really interested in what the teacher has to say from doing whatever the heck they wanted during class on their laptops
Could one simply block internet access? Yes, that still allows a fair few forms of time wasting but it stops almost all the FOMO and removes the social aspect - one or two kids goofing off bother me much less if they don't stop the rest of the class from learning in the process.
I also note that much of the problem with phones is smartphones, and internet. and most of the benefit is from actual phone stuff - I want my kid when she's older to be able to telephone me, and a old-fashioned Nokia brick does that just fine while being virtually indestructible
Re: copywork, I was struggling with problem sets in the first year of an econ phd after having more or less skated through my prior education and ended up spending quite a bit of time copying written-up solutions that I didn't fully understand, both on paper and with the additional purpose of learning how to use LaTeX. I had answers memorized before I understood them, but it did seem like I eventually came to some understanding. Office hours and study groups were essentially fruitless by comparison.
It's physically painful to read this. As someone who loves the English language definition of "learning" and "education", but was .... less than thrilled with the actual offerings (graduated public HS in 99 in the US), is there any other conclusion than "this massive part of society that we've spent trillions of dollars, hours, force labor and brain cycles on... at best - it doesn't work, and the only positive results are just hardworking diligent (rich?) students who'd be fine anyway, and at worst, it's.... well, a lot worse than that."
100% non-rhetorically, and no offense to you, but what do we do here? I read a LOT of articles about how education sucks, especially past few years. I lived a decade of nearly worthless education. Why does no one care? The only thing that people actually seemed to get upset about education recently was trans issues, which even at maximally-relevant case, can only affect a tiny %. Is the learned helplessness really that bad?
Kamil Kazani on twitter makes the point (about Russia) that revolution never comes from the most oppressive, terrible regimes, because the concept of "better" isn't allowed to exist. It's the ones that attempt to reform things, showing that things could be better (but maybe aren't doing a good/fast enough job) that get overthrown.
Specifically on smartphones in class: I'm a person with 2 eyes and kids. I can confidently assert that any school that allows smartphone use in class is not educating anyone about anything. My kid's school (5th grade) has never allowed phones, and just sent an email home saying that "some students had been caught using smartwatches to text/communicate during school hours" and so they would also be banned.
But, doesn't it kind of work for the people who care about it for their kids? Especially the ones with decent resources?
I mean, we did the research and moved into one of neighborhoods with strong schools. Stronger than many others so there is a path into college, and thus into a professional career. Our kids will be ok.
That's crappy and cynical, but with local control of primary education isn't it also pretty sane? And it means I do not try to start a revolution re education...
I think that's part of the anti-revolutionary sentiment, but when I say "we" I don't mean "me, for my kids" - I've already found a good solution. I'm pretty libertarian, but I think people care sufficiently enough about things like "everyone's education" that they want those things to be well-provided for (public or primary or charter or whatever, so long as people get it) in the wider society. "I've got mine" is true, and a factor, but I don't think it is sufficient to explain why almost no one (even millions of people whose kids are suffering through bad schools!) cares enough to fix. I think we have been taught - in part BY that same educational system, both intentionally... and unintentionally - that improvement to that system is not only physically impossible, but would be actively fought by relatively powerful groups, and that they would call you extremely unkind things in the process of you actually trying to improve the system.
I would also say, look at the mechanics of how one would go about changing the system. Who would start this - who has the desire, the flexibility, and the need to take on the whole system?
Individual parents are in no position to take on the whole system.
Educational Publishers are just navigating the environment they find, responding to state standards and school demand.
Local school districts are fairly boxed in by the state standards, and they are (quite rationally!) focused on trying to deliver the education local parents want, within that system.
I would think a state governor could run on "the best education for [Ohio] kids!" and with sufficient propaganda and a state without some other pressing partisan issues, create/remind a constituency for that. Then once in office, 1) enable full statewide school choice and 2) on one hand, loosen state school standards so that experimentation in schools (do you wanna open a crazy grade school that's 3h of traditional learning, and 4h of recess/funtime/learning/wandering in the woods, go for it!) and 3) on the other hand, strengthen monitoring of state standards around non-negotiatable, non-stupid requirements like "can students read/write/add" or "are teachers doing anything at all" or "are students actually coming to school but you're graduating them anyway".
Sure, it all sounds naive and utopian, but I would respond that if the federal republic of America in 2024 has made it so that "a state's citizens want to improve the education system" is a farfetched utopian dream, then maybe we should change that too.
I think you pretty quickly get into a "watering the tree of liberty" being the only solution that will drive change in that case, and that's overwhelmingly likely to only change things in the negative direction.
Yes, it shouldn't be a farfetched utopian dream, but Molochian coordination problems and entrenched powers and bureaucracies, all feeding off the ~$17k per annum-student we spend on average, not to mention the career-and-personal-life-killing cultural weapons at their disposal, will all ensure that any real change is impossible.
Think of who you would have to get aligned and politically active to do this - the top quintile of parents who actually care are already in private, charter, good public, or homeschool solutions. You're left with trying to mobilize the disengaged middle and bottom quintiles, who are mainly using schools as babysitting services. First, they don't care to begin with, or they'd be doing one of the smart options. Second, their opinion will be easily swayed with TV ads or public campaigns, by the well-funded entrenched interests. How could you ever get enough people off their asses to even vote your way in a referendum? Where is *your* budget for a TV ad campaign? How do you protect yourself from getting cancelled or witch-hunted to extinction before you even get anything off the ground?
Run for governor?
Do what Bryan Caplan did. Elite college increases your wages, so you need to go to a good high school and get random credentials, but since nobody cares about schooling prior to that, you just homeschool until then and your kids avoid a lot of bad schooling and probably have better childhoods doing literally anything else
Of course, the real hope here is that the ivies completely torch their reputation to the ground and elite college is no longer necessary by the time your kids are 18 but you can't personally do anything about that
College, for all its problems, doesn't bother me as much as K-12. I personally have found a solution that works for me/my kids but I think it would be nice for tens of millions of other kids/families to have a solution too?
The problems at many primary schools isn't like college: "I wasted my time getting an English degree" they are: "nothing is taught at all, classes are often just sit-there-do-nothing", "there is a high risk of student violence," "students are just graduated anyway," "basic life skills, from reading/arithmetic/decent interactions with society, are somehow not absorbed even after 12 years," "it's mandatory, costs billions and wastes everyone's time."
In art classes (e.g. drawing, panting) you usually do a fair amount of copywork...
Copy this thing
A);fairly literally, but of course it will come out sight different
B)in a different medium, e.g, a pencil sketch of an oil panting
C)a small detail of it
D)do something loosely inspired by the dead/techniques in it.
Alice Mumford's lecture on Pierre Bonnard was pretty cool ... she brought along a copy of Bonnard panting that she had just made...
Oh, and for "copy in a different medium" there's an art class exercize that goes like this:
Ok, class, go on see the following exhibition and take notes. Without telling the rest of the class which picture you've chosen, imagine it is part of a movie story board (when, of course, it wasn't). Write a page of what you imagine the corresponding movie script was. These script homework assignments are then photocopied and distributed to the class. Exercize two: re-identify the painting from each of your fellow student' movie scripts, given that the field of choices is down to the couple of dozen painting at that particular exhibition. People may use lateral thinking so that it's not completely obvious.
My intuition on the situation in Sweden (based in having worked for a while in schools there, and comparing it to the situation in Denmark) is roughly: the for-profit schools are very tightly regulated in a way that makes it impossible to do any meaningful innovation on pedagogy etc, so the situation becomes pretty zero sum where the schools to make a profit try to offload costly students and do various non-useful things to get kids to apply (like give away computers). So the left sees this as predatory stuff and, as far as I can tell, no one in the debate says "maybe we should allow innovation." The for-profit schools in Denmark are a lot less regulated than the public schools and also, on average, more innovative and good. Not that I am particularly impressed, but my standards might be unreasonable.
It honestly seems like education, as a field, is populated by people who think grades/statistics are spells. You cast the spell of "transcript shows a B average" and the student gets the B average life, even if they didn't go to class, turn in work or learn anything. This applies to grades, test scores, cancelling programs in the name of equity and probably 2/3rds of this post.
I guess the good thing is most of this insanity is stuff you can opt out of for your own kids. It doesn't fix the world, but it might save some of it.
Half joking proposal to "At a minimum, before we give kids gigantic loans to go get a degree, perhaps we should check for reasonable market expectations on what that degree might enable them to do? And also, if we do not think they should be forced to pay it back but do want them to have the money, give them a grant instead?"
Require schools to take entering student's HS grades, SAT/ACT scores (college must administer for free if student entered without taking one of them) and HS attended/zip code and provide a cost-benefit matrix for 4 years on loans vs expected grades/graduation GPA based on the data + loan repayment using this info.
Right now you have to sign a bunch of docs to get the loans, but they are extremely general and utterly non-specific to the point of lying about the key facts. We have the info!
Make it a choice: School can underwrite the loans and not provide the above analysis, or they can have the government underwrite the loans and provide the above analysis.
Now I'll go back to my libertarian cave and have more daydreams of things that will never happen.
You can greatly cut the cost of a college degree if the student is willing to pursue the Running Start / College in High School approach and get their Associates concurrently with their high school degree. If they have chosen their courses to transfer to the target department at the local state university, they will be coming in as Juniors. My son didn't quite do this - he was one course shy of his Associates. So he went in as a freshman and after his first quarter was a junior and admitted to his target department. He graduated in 7 quarters - and saved a ton of money. Living at home makes it cheaper as well. Not all students are within commuting range, but my daughter did an hour+ one way bus ride from the park and ride her 5 years in college and grad school (she did early admission rather than Running Start) while living at home. Once again, saving a lot of money.
When I was a Teaching Assistant in Mechanical Engineering Design 40+ years ago, we normed the curve at a B-. This was a senior level course. From what I saw with my daughter doing Civil Engineering and my son doing Business at UW Seattle in the last decade, I don't think the grade inflation is unreasonable in those subject areas (at least the physics, chemistry, engineering, math, stats, accounting, econ, & MIS areas).
I was trained as a pen and ink draftsman while in high school in the late 1960's. We did LOTS of copywork.
A typo, I presume?
"Competition should improve meth and reading outcomes here."
And "It is the extreme outlier or outliers"
"Talib talks about this a lot" - should say '
Taleb?
The Guardian article doesn't do a good job of covering the Swedish education proposals, I think because it is spending too much time talking to Sveriges Lärare, the largest teacher's union. They want to shut down the Free School system, but they _always_ want that. I don't see Lotta Edholm agreeing with this, and as a politician on the right (Liberals are on the Right, in Sweden) it would be very unlikely. We will see what her report, due out later next month says, but from things she has already said in Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter (big Swedish newspapers) we can expect a few things.
1. The State has been setting educational goals for the free schools to meet. Most of them do really well. Some do poorly. A good number of the poorly performing ones are all run by the same few for-profit groups, and there is pretty strong evidence that significant money that the State thought was going to be spent on underperforming students ended up in the bank accounts of the shareholders instead. This is part of the systemic failure that is being talked about -- the state never set the rules up properly to prevent this sort of abuse. Sweden still has a really hard time predicting wickedness, and when it happens, it is always a major surprise to all involved.
2. The Pisa reports aren't showing general decline, but instead volatility. In 2012 Sweden's ranking dropped like a stone, when it experienced the sharpest drop in results of any country in the survey over a ten-year span. OW!
https://www.thelocal.se/20131203/sweden-slides-in-global-education-rank-pisa-students-schools
Much arguing about what should be done went on. Then in 2018 the trend reversed. https://www.thelocal.se/20191203/what-do-the-pisa-rankings-tell-us-about-swedish-schools
Everybody cheered and thought the problem was fixed. Now we have another decline https://www.thelocal.se/20231205/swedish-students-maths-and-reading-scores-plunge-in-pisa-world-rankings Guess the celebration was a bit premature. The new minister has some ideas about how to fix things, and they are starting with extra Swedish lessons for pre-school children who do not
speak Swedish, (already started) and going back to centrally marking test results instead of having all grades be given out by the student's teachers. It seems the teachers are getting pressured to give out better grades than the students deserve, and worse, teachers themselves no longer know what sort of grade a student deserves. https://www.thelocal.se/20230622/sweden-to-look-at-centralised-marking-to-fight-grade-inflation
3. There is great talk about whether cell phones are making our students dumber. It is hard to learn to think up your own solutions in a world where you can always look up the answer. But it is precisely this ability we need to train, so.
4. The Minister wants Sweden to go back to making more engineers. How to do this remains a challenge.
5. There is a significant fraction of the Muslim population who don't want their children to do well in school at all. They think that secular values are immoral, including the value of education. The previous government, which was in favour of multiculturalism, thought that the thing to do was to let them run their own free schools which would teach the reading, mathematics, and core curriculum, but without the secularism. There have been spectacular and well publicised failures -- we got some religious schools that weren't keen on teaching anything but Islam. Others were recruitment centres for the Islamic State (Daesh). They were shut down, but the fact that they lasted as long as they did pointed to some terrible problem in how they were overseen by the state. That's another systemic failure that the Minister wants to address. And the time is right -- multiculturalism is now a dead issue in Sweden. The largest party on the left, which is the largest party in Sweden, the Social Democrats -- i.e. the ex-government, the former champions of multiculturalism -- are now campaigning on 'Multiculturalism was a mistake! We're going to make the immigrants integrate, and we can do a better job than the goverment who is also attempting to do this because we are better at governing!' (This might even be true). It's nice that they finally noticed that multiculturalism isn't primarily about having more exciting restaurants to eat in, but what took them so long?
At any rate, this has gone on long enough. I just thought you might want a bit of broadening.
On picking public schools: I think though that there should be a place to which a student is entitled, and that place should be within a reasonable distance of their house. I've heard of the NYC "pick your school" system shafting students so badly they get a spot in a school very far away.
Wrt skipping grades...I guess it'd partly depend on exactly how much is being skipped. Within a given school, sure, this seems clearly beneficial. Many happy memories of doing middle- and highschool-grade math in elementary school once the teachers learned how bored I was. And AP classes more or less function as this anyway, along both the academic and social development axes. (This was a huge motivator for my peers to take AP classes: they didn't care about the education so much, just wanted to get away from shitty disruptive children.)
But it does seem like a step change to skip from elementary -> middle, middle -> high, and especially high -> "junior" college. Doesn't happen as often, since that's a bigger jump, but anecdotally every smart kid I know who did one of those got fucked up in some way. So the net effect is pretty small, since they get to college earlier, but then faff about/fail out for long enough that no time is actually saved vs the usual route. And sometimes those lost years are also very painful. Lots of stories of isolation, even with robust non-school social networks. I think the receiving institutions still mostly don't know how to accommodate precocious students, even more than ones at "social par" within institutions.
I feel like the concern there is the skipping separating the child from a cohort of people known? Personally, I 'skipped' 2 grades, but the skipped grades were kindergarten and 1st grade, so there wasn't some disruption in the middle. I don't think being younger affected my social networking much until university, though I had enough unrelated issues (chronic illness) that it's hard to be sure of the counterfactual
Often wish there was some way for Slow Boring subscribers to get a discount on Matt's Bloomberg columns, since sometimes he's got interestingly different material there vs. the blog. What a weird take though. I know he's fairly positive on charter schools, so by the Law of Goodness Conservation Between Geese...what, indeed, makes the standard market mechanisms untenable when it's public v. public instead of public v. private? I don't get it. Could see some form of argument that, because it's so intricately tied to government, there's no way it'd ever become a free enough market to work well...but then you've got the other section directly on existing school choice generally being found positive, which obviously happens under prevailing policies, so ???
His paywalled piece about the uselessness of teacher credentials was indeed very good, can confirm. Part of a recurring series on Credentialism Delenda Est, previously featuring hairdressers and dentists. The rentier rot runs deep. What is our teachers learning?
Re: screen time
a great way to get the benefits of early-age geekdom without the detriments of access-to-screenishness is to plop your 8 year old down in front of an arch linux box with no x11
even *after* they learn enough to get a GUI up and running, and set up a browser, and turn on javascript, most of the truly awful parts of the internet simply will not work on this setup without way more effort than your child will be willing to put in
this is what my dad did with me, anyway. i remember setting up some kind of bizarre offbrand tiling WM called 'scrotwm' (i was too young to understand the double entendre and thought it was just a straightforward screenshot + wm), my xorg.conf file was crazy
but i got WoW running in Wine well enough to play with my friends, and my dad said that meant I was allowed to play WoW without restriction
Idk... maybe this strategy isn't actually viable. But we currently have this issue where open and free operating systems have a really hard time dealing with all of the new infinite-scrolling-feed javascript stuff without large amounts of nonfree customization, and ALSO we have a problem where all the new infinite-scrolling-feed javascript stuff happens to be correlated with horrible, horrible psychic damage inflicted on our youth
It feels like there must be a way to make these two problems cancel out in a way that produces somewhat well-adjusted geeks, and it feels like my own childhood is a decent example of that
While I agree in principle (freeing up memory in DOS to get games running sure made me learn a lot which then continued in Linux and BSD as soon as first boradband was available), not sure this still works. Maybe arch is uniquely hard but on most distros I used full GUI is one line of CLI away these days and pretty much has been for the better part of two decades. Proprietary codecs a few clicks after that.
Arch is extremely not like this. Getting from 1) inserting the install media to 2) having a bash CLI set up and you're ready to go, is an all-day project unless you do it so often that you've set up your own custom tools for automating it
Getting X11 installed and working is yet another day's work on top of that before you can even think of installing a GUI
For a 9-year-old I imagine it would be like, a month-long project
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide
Fun (?) story:
I switched neighborhoods between elementary and junior high in the late 1970's and the JH didn't get any of the recommendations from my elementary school so placed me in regular classes across the board.
Except for math, which you had to test into. My dad taught me how to solve quadratic equations when I was 7, and I read Scarne on Gambling a few times, but most of my math time was wasted.
The school had nine levels you could test into; if you were a known smart kid, you would do the levels A, B, and C tests in one sitting; I was not, so I started with the multiple choice addition and subtraction test, which I finished in four minutes leaving 41 minutes to sit quietly. I have always been very fast and will omit ridiculous stories about that.
The next day, a few had left the testing classroom I was in, and I took multiplication and division. This took about five minutes, then I waited 40 minutes then went to my next class.
Next day, we were on decimals. Five minutes, 40 minutes of wait time. The testing classroom had been mostly cleared out.
Day 4: Percentages. You know how this went.
Day 5: There are three of us testing. They start a math class because almost everyone's been rated. I don't remember what this was for sure, but maybe negative numbers? The ongoing math class didn't bother me.
The following Monday I'm alone and doing what they call X-1, which I think started to introduce simple variables. Aced that.
Next, on Tuesday, I took a combined test on X-2, X-3, and X-4. X-3 had four questions, and I missed two of them; one was on the volume of a sphere, which I know now forever despite no need and I add some intensifiers if I am provoked into saying it. So I placed into X-3, which was really placing into algebra so I was a week late to start algebra ha ha no, you know that's not how this ends.
All seven of the 8th graders who had tested or qualified into X-3 had been in algebra for almost a week. We should all be in the same place. But, as the principal explained to me much later, there was no reason for me to be in algebra. So they moved all the eighth graders who qualified in X-3 AND WERE ALREADY IN ALGEBRA to a class they called "Advanced X," and threw in the folks who were in X-2, so they didn't have to put me in algebra. I think there were 19 of us in the class.
And somehow, there are now lots of districts that are making it *worse than this.*
(Also, whenever I read about your personal college admission complaints, I first think, "dude, walk it off," and then I realize maybe someone is able to hold a grudge for at least four-thirds of a long time.)
When I finished all the math my middle school had, they had me use some program to learn on my own. I learned nothing because I didn’t understand matrices and had no access to resources to help me. My teacher didn’t know anything past algebra and the internet sucked back then.
This was a banger of a childhood roundup! So many things I feel like responding to, but for now:
(1) I skipped 3 grades in junior high and high school (long story). It *might* have been wonderful for my career, and it *might* have stunted my social development, but I’m not sure, because I don’t know how successful my career would be or how stunted my social development would be if I hadn’t skipped. In any case, if it were more common, which I think it easily could be, then it would’ve been an unmitigated good.
(2) I feel constant guilt over sending my kids to a normal elementary school, knowing that they could probably progress in math (and possibly other subjects) like 5x faster. In my defense, *every* school we looked at, public or private, everywhere in the US, was basically the same way, leaving homeschooling or “aristocratic tutoring” as the main alternatives, and those didn’t seem especially feasible for us. Also, the kids are fairly happy in school, with lots of friends and activities and little to no bullying. And they know they have two professor parents who stand ready to fulfill their scientific curiosity at any time, and they make use of that a hell of a lot less than one would hope.
(3) It’s always weird for me to read these blistering critiques of universities, and mostly *agree* with them, and then try to reconcile that with the fact that my own life from age 15 has been spent almost entirely in universities and (despite sometimes-enraging bureaucracy and politics) it’s mostly been good and it suits me extremely well and my students are eager to learn and they make me proud and my colleagues are brilliant and make real progress on questions that I care about. Maybe I’m just in a charmed bubble.
they keep unironically implementing the no child running ahead act
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxxDEgoLeaSfudvE4UaFryMFDy6WcZMBbn?si=ZMVE_o4ZHBpdHFVL
Something I always note every time someone says "just ban phones in schools!"
I think that's seriously underestimating the ability of kids in school to just do what they want.
Private Jewish schools have been banging that drum for a while and every year there would be a new system to control phones in school and by November it would be dead.
there would invariably be some reasonable exceptions to the rule and the kids would inevitably exploit them, or the kids would get fake phones to turn in, or just not turn in their phones etc.
The place to control phones in school is with the parents who have to tell their kids no when they get to the age where they might start asking for one.
This has to be coordinated by the parents though, it's way harder to tell a kid you won't buy them a phone when all their friends have one. If you have a kid around the age of ~8 now is the time to coordinate with other parents in your grade that no one is buying their kids phones until they are older, they can get a flip phone if the parents are concerned about them having a commute to school they do on their own.
Once they get to upper high school they can get a smartphone but expecting the school to manage to handle the prohibition is wishful thinking, the parents should be the ones who collect their kids phones on the way out the door
also obviously preaching to the choir here but the way we physically structure our communities is tied to how our kids will grow up. In a suburban sprawl type of neighborhood, kids can't get from place to place without a parent driving them. That lack of independence is always going to result in people defaulting to interacting with their friends (and para-friends) via social media. There is one community in the US I know of that has kids that just go to park with friends and make friends there, it's the ultra-orthodox jewish community
They consistently advocate for higher density in their neighborhoods, they rarely have phones, and with the number of kids per couple wayyy higher than the rest of the US, by default, the kids in these communities are always far more autonomous. The result is kids who will take a ball to the park and make up a game with the other random kids they meet there.
Two communities: Mormons in small-town Utah also fit this bill to a tee.
Do Mormons generally live in dense neighborhoods? Ultra orthodox jews can't drive 1 day a week which is a big driver of the need for density
I would have guessed that Mormons live in more sprawls neighborhoods
another point to consider:
Would you be willing to ban note-taking on laptops?
There was no shortage of games/social media/another classes homework (in the best case scenario) on laptops open in class under the pretense of note-taking
some unsuccessful strategies employed to prevent this
teaching from the back of the class
random "hands up" checks
requiring people who took notes on their laptops to hand in notes every set period of time
none of those strategies were successful at preventing a HS kid not really interested in what the teacher has to say from doing whatever the heck they wanted during class on their laptops
Could one simply block internet access? Yes, that still allows a fair few forms of time wasting but it stops almost all the FOMO and removes the social aspect - one or two kids goofing off bother me much less if they don't stop the rest of the class from learning in the process.
I also note that much of the problem with phones is smartphones, and internet. and most of the benefit is from actual phone stuff - I want my kid when she's older to be able to telephone me, and a old-fashioned Nokia brick does that just fine while being virtually indestructible
Depends on if they have their phones
If they do then just mobile Hotspot