Because the teachers and education department are useless. My nephews had to get an iPad for their programming class, an expensive device (and all the problems with that) that is less capable and far less practical to learn programming on.

Imagine how much better school could be if kids had raspberry pis and and use free tools like gnuplot in their maths and physics classes.

Then it should be provided to the kids by the school. My girlfriend works at a poor school where a lot of the students don't even speak english and they provide laptops to all the kids whose parents cannot afford one.

A friend of my son has a laptop provided by the city, presumably because his family is too poor. And because it's a laptop, he takes it with him when he comes over to play Minecraft. My son is a bit jealous, because despite his access to two excellent desktop PCs and numerous tablets, he doesn't have his own laptop. (I'll probably have to get him one when he goes to secondary school.)

edit: not to mention internet, router, wifi dongle or ethernet cord, etc.

Any assignment that makes use of a proprietary software that the school has purchased.

That is to say that there are plenty of times when a student _must_ use X software that only runs on platform Y, and the school very rarely takes into account what platforms the student may have available to them.

I ran IT support for a Prepatory <-> Year 12 school. The number of times I had to gently remind the early grade teachers that not every child has access to an iPad at home and that an Android tablet cannot run iPad software was quite frequent.

Example: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-11-6-chromebook-intel-cele...

And for older kids, there’s Linux support, etc.

Of course, in the context of low income, ideally the district would provide standardized choices or offer crossover as a supported alternative.

I’m not familiar with this program, but it seems like Google has made efforts in this direction: https://edu.google.com/products/chromebooks/

A lot of schools do generally offer standardised hardware & software. For example, at the last school I was admin at, we had a Lenovo range, and a series of programs to help poor families afford them. (Tablets at primary school, one kind of laptop at middle school and a more powerful laptop at senior school).

However, I still, in three years, could not force around a dozen teachers to understand the limitations of their platform. Official policy was actually that a teacher may not use a piece of software without getting it approved by IT - so that we could check it was compatible, and automate rollout across all the devices.

The problem, most simply put, is that teachers would get excited about a piece of software, build their entire curriculum around it, and not involve IT at any point in the process whilst simultaneously having no idea how software works.

This sore point wasn't isolated at all either, at conference when the entire town's IT teams got together (we exchanged talking points, software and regularly donated our older hardware to less-well-off schools), it was the most common anecdote, followed up by most school administrations being entirely unwilling to have IT's back when we would be unable to deploy a particular teacher's favourite software that wouldn't run on the accepted platform.

If the assignment involves a computer, the materials were probably not developed or tested on a Pi or anything similar, so, yeah, they probably often can't reasonably be completed on a Pi or lower as assigned, even if there is no technical reason that they couldn't have been developed with that in mind.

They are also bathed in advertising, which drowns then in guilt at not being able to afford a multi-thousand dollar Windows or Macintosh rig, when a $40 Arm64 rig hooked up to a discarded flat screen TV and keyboard/mouse would be a superior learning option for their child.

There likely are some parents who can’t afford those, but those parents are vanishingly small. Often times parents think that they “provide” the child and the school does the rest. Good parents, poor or otherwise know that it’s mostly on the parents to guide the kids.

As someone who occasionally has to work with the working poor, I can tell you this is completely false.

Here's one example: I work in healthcare. We can't send text messages to people about their medical conditions, etc... because a startling number of working poor families not only have only a flip phone, but that phone is shared among several families.

Let me state that again: A single flip phone will be used by eight to ten people in three or four different families.

To think that anyone with a job just has a computer/table/smartphone lying around for their kid to do his homework on is just living in a fantasy land.

Truly, your comment does reflect the attitude of much of the teaching establishment: if children can't learn to read from their parents, they're hopeless [1]; if children can't learn math from their parents, they're hopeless. It's a total abdication of the vocation of teaching, and it's not universal. In Finland it's accepted that teachers teach children how to read, and accepted that every kid needs a good lunch in order to be able to concentrate. That's 'obvious' in their cultural context, but in the US cultural context poverty and struggle are just signs that God doesn't love you (the prosperity 'gospel' in action).

[1] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-a...

So I'm gonna make the assumption that "teacher" still somewhat means the same thing in the US, and that they must be teaching the kids something.

What in goodness sake are they teaching the children if not how to read? Isn't that the very first thing you should be teaching them after kindergarten?

If there is ONE thing a kid could learn in school. Wouldn't you pick how to read over literally anything else?

The second thing would imho be math. But on that point people may say geography and history are also important and I can't really disagree cause I happen to be good at math and shamefully bad at the other two.

Why can't they bear the load?

- Because they are underfunded and understaffed

- Because society doesn't think it's the school's responsibility to teach

If society decided that reading and writing should be taught in school, then it would be taught in school and the system would be designed such that teachers would easily handle it.

Your "parents have a load to carry" in this case is throwing people under the bus like single mothers who are working two or more jobs just to put food on the table.

Your attitude is that their children should be left behind because those children belong to the unlucky sperm club.

And those children grow up to be disadvantaged and poor and the cycle continues indefinitely. I find it vile and revolting that HN can talk about the wonders of Elon Musk disrupting the automobile industry, can debate whether scooters will disrupt the ride sahring industry, which in turn disrupted the taxi industry, and so on...

And then when it comes to poverty, the attitude is, "C'mon, carry your load or fall behind."

This community talks a good line about disruption, but if the only kind of disruption that interests us is the disruption that happens to make people into billionaires, it's time to stop pretending that we're "hackers" and start calling ourselves capitalists.

The education system needs to be disrupted from the bottom up, but it needs people who actually care about educating children more than negotiating term sheets.

I think of it that parents need to teach their kids how to behave, not math. Kids who come to class and don't listen, talk when the teacher is talking and disturb the other kids is going to be a problem. Children who act out violently or with screaming when confronted create big problems. Children who are not adjusted to being respectful towards other children and grownups will ruin any school.

That job is in my mind the job of the parent, the teacher should not have to use math class to try and get a child to be respectful. This is what it in my mind means when you tell someone that parents need to "carry their load".

If the teacher needs to do all these additional jobs, then I think we need to change the whole institution of school.

Those engaged parents will also be the first to complain if the teachers spend too much time with the children who don’t get that at home. So without engaged parents and a supportive home environment, children are at a significant disadvantage.

I mean, society could also decide that houses shouldn't have roofs, but then they wouldn't be houses would they.

The word for "school where you don't learn to read" in the rest of the educated world is "daycare".

I'm scanning that article and I'm being aghast.

There's a bar graph that mentions 4th and 8th grade, what ages do these grades roughly correspond to? Not that it really matters because the percentages are roughly equal, meaning they didn't improve their reading skill in 4 years. Guess that answers my first question.

Guys you need to fix this. Education is the future, there's literally no better place to dump money and resources on.