All this talk about how "we" need to redesign education hints at a major problem with our current system: it is a democratic institution and not a market. Therefore, "I" cannot decide on a change in the way "my" child is educated, rather "we" must decide on changes in the way "our" children are educated.

Group decision making is a phenomenally slow and stupid process, filled with all sorts of interest groups with all kinds of different incentives. The slowness and stupidity of this process is why education feels like it is stuck in the past. This is also why school choice advocates are so passionate about their issue. A school choice program would allow each parent to pursue educational choices which he thinks would be best for his child. He could choose some new educational model without first asking permission from the rest of society to do so.

Technology is great. It is making real change on the margin. However, it can only do so much good while children are inmates in a system designed by a public bureaucracy for 40 hours a week.

I think you have a strong predilection for solutions that advocate the complete rearrangement of society - with no path to achieve it and no guarantee that it will provide any benefits until the transformation is complete. While they might provide you with a certain feeling of righteousness they seem to be useless.

Children already spend a large amount of time on optional education activities that do exist in a market. If we improve these it might just provide a path to better education within the public system.

I'd like to see the ways we train people in music, sports and with special needs extended to the core subjects like maths. In those cases a specialist in the learning of that subject will see the child perhaps once a week but oversee and dictate the practice that child undertakes.

I have a strong predilection for systems with incentives to make a good product. This is especially true when the product is as important as education. Maybe you are right and our time would be best spent on developing ways to educate people by working around the public school system rather than trying to change it. For example, you could pay a tutor in the marketplace to provide the service you mentioned in your last paragraph instead of convincing all the voters in your school district that it is a good idea.

I do think the benefit of these optional activities will be limited as long as the 30-40 prime hours spent in school each week are of such low value. And in general I am opposed to such waste.

Politics does require a lot of work to make any useful changes. However, I don't think ending the public monopoly would be impossible. Voters managed to do it in Sweden and the Netherlands.

My purpose was more to point out a relevant fact about our current educational system than to encourage everyone to drop their startups and start lobbying their state Congress.

My point is that many advances can be had without getting rid of public education, those advances are not of only marginal utility and they do not compete with changing public education. You frame everything in terms of libertarianism unnecessarily and dismissing positives because they don't advance your ideology seems unwise.

I think we both have valid points. If the internet were as developed when I was in school as it is today, I would have still been bored in school but I would have learned a lot more after I got home from school. On net, I probably would have been better educated.

We CAN still improve education while the 30-40 hours spent at school each week are a complete write-off.

I still think we would have a better world if that were not the case.

I agree, especially since I support voucher systems.

In truth though, I think technological and other improvements in education will lead to the education freedom we both want, rather than the other way round. Innovations in learning could render the whole public education system outdated, whereas at the moment alternatives don't impress me.

I apologize, I've edited my comments on this thread substantially because I misread your comments the first time around. Also, I have a tendancy to post a "first-draft" comment and then edit it to be better over time, which is annoying to others because every draft is public.

No worries, I get that, I think the thread still makes sense. Always in this sort of thread I'm left wondering whether the initial conflict (when I generalize about your opinions) is a necessary sort of dramatic tension to draw out further discussion. I guess any opinion has unstated qualifiers, but starting with them seems to unsatisfying.

There's also just homeschooling, or dropping out.

One one side, I feel resentful because academic professors and teaching assistants are crucifying Wikipedia as some source bizarre source of information that is the result of 13-year old children wreaking havoc on articles. Contrary to popular belief, the Wikipedia articles go through a review process. Even edits I've made that I felt were accurate had been reverted minutes later by a Wiki editor.

I typically make it a point to tell the whole class that Wikipedia cites many of its claims. Not all of the citations are 100% accurate, but it's a start for doing research. It gives you a high-level overview, and gives you a place to start compared to the messy online library systems. I go to one of the most research-intensive schools where every professor is required to be doing research in addition to their curriculum. And our online library is a bad place if you want to get a high-level view of the problem you're looking at.

On top of that, this article is dead on. I remember ranting about this topic back in 2006:

http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2006/10/09/public-education-is-...

http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/school-sucks/

> Wikipedia articles go through a review process

About three times I have looked through the past revisions on substantial wikipedia articles and each time it was clear that the revisions generally made the article worse. The general pattern is that an expert occasionally writes meaty, high quality sections and then these either get deleted or eventually made incomprehensible. Edits almost always degrade the prose.

I do not understand the wikipedia fanboism. It's fine for basic facts, and great for pop culture, but better informational articles on almost any complex topic are available elsewhere. I do not think wikipedia is working very well and hope that the more closed system some of the original founders started a while back comes out on top.

edit: I just looked up that new, more closed version of wikipedia and from a quick examination it is much better than wikipedia. Compare:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/War_of_1812

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

In Ohio, the way of funding public grade schools (by giving local property taxes to local schools) has been ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court four times.

Education inequality is directly linked to income inequality, and our government has failed to solve this problem. Essentially, what we have here is the forced inter-generational transfer of socioeconomic status.

Privatization of schools would not fix this. Free markets fail to find the global optimum in many situations; these situations are called market failures. We need to design systems that benefit societal welfare over individual welfare in the education, healthcare and government sectors.

Injecting technological innovation into the lives of students will not adequately address education inequality (unless you build something that provides students good food, safe homes, and loving families). If you give all students access to, say, MIT OpenCourseWare, it might boost everyone up by the same level, but it will not address the educational gap between the lucky and the unlucky.

We must not allow luck to play a part in education: children deserve to be enabled to reach their full potential, and not be permanent victims of arbitrary systems of distribution.

Edit: If you downvote, write a reply.

There is no way to make people perfectly equal. There are, however, ways to improve educational opportunities for everyone. Technology is one way. Educational markets are another. These methods should be embraced.

Raising the quality of education for everyone is important. Maybe I have a capacity for envy below that of the average human, but I would rather see everyone get a 10x better education than see the gap between the best and the worst narrowed by some amount. If we could choose between a program that increased everybody's income by $10,000 or one that reduced everybody's income by 50%, I would rather choose the first program even though the second would dramatically decrease any measure of income inequality.

Unfortunately, children from wealthy homes don't get better educations only because their schools have more money to spend. If this were the case, the United States would have the best primary schools in the world and perennial hell-holes like DC Public Schools would be educational utopias. Rather, parents in wealthy homes play an active role in their children's education and place importance on the role of education in their children's lives, as their parents likely did.

The government could redistribute income, but it can't redistribute culture. Unless we resort to monstrous social engineering schemes like allocating children to homes by lottery istead of by birth, we are not going to eliminate the inequality caused by home culture. And we haven't begun to talk about the inequalities caused by genetics.

But working on a solution to inequality is focusing on the wrong problem. It is a symptom of zero-sum thinking that doesn't reflect the issues of the real world. The real problem is how to improve the educational opportunity for each person, not equalize opportunities between people. After all, you can equalize the education everyone receives by banning education.

Luck will always play a role in life. We can still try to make every life better.

What is your opinion of the local property-tax education funding system? Education redistribution already occurs in that system; shouldn't we at least redistribute education more equally?

I think a government-run system has incentives that are going to produce a lower quality educational product for everyone. I am for educational markets. Subsidizing the consumption of education by poor people through something like a voucher program would likely mean higher quality education for poor and rich alike compared to the government-run model, for the same price.

I suspect that children of wealthy parents would perform better in school than their less-wealthy peers under any reasonable system. I don't think that is the problem that should concern us the most.

Does it bother you that children are limited by the arbitrary socioeconomic status of their families? Again, luck is determining what any child is able to become.

If I could choose a world where success were not determined by luck, then I would. Unfortunately that is not compatible with the stuff we are made of, right down to our DNA.

Helping the very unlucky is a valuable goal, and a realistic one. "Equality" is not.

I see no reason to believe that schools can systematically rectify socioeconomic inequalities. Educational attainment and status are outcomes of culture and parenting, not schools and teachers. I think these things are largely immutable, unless you want to start talking eugenics.

If culture and parenting were largely immutable, this would mean that not a single early childhood intervention program would have been able to show a statistically significant improvement. This is not the case.

I would like to point out that giving everyone 1,000 dollars would significantly reduce income inequality. But multiplying everyone income by a number does not change it.

PS: Income in equality is measured as a fraction. EX: Top 1% / bottom 20%.

I'm curious. Of the skills you have that earn you money, what percent were learned in public schools ( versus from parents, on your own, through social networks, on the job, etc)? And of the things you learned in school, how much of it was stuff that actually cost money to teach ( via direct instruction or expensive lab equipment) and how much of it was just doing the assigned readings?

I learned almost zero in school that was valuable, and picked up (or had reinforced) much that is detrimental, including laziness, procrastination, and desire/need for external validation. I was lucky enough not to have my ability/desire for learning not crushed, perhaps due to supportive home environment (more books and less tv than most).

Did you learn reading, spelling, and basic math at a public school? The foundations of a good education are far more valuable than most of the minor facts you can gather after that point. I think the public education system is fairly good up to around 3rd grade but after that it get's much more random. With some school systems providing a solid education and others that simply torture the student for little net gain.

I can't speak for MaysonL, but I learned reading and math almost entirely at home. ( I wasn't home schooled though, I learned to read from my mom reading me bed time stories). I learned long division at school, but the mental math that I use every day on the job I taught myself.

I appreciate your comment and your reasoning.

Here is one argument for local taxes paying for local schools: it gives the influence over education to the locals.

It's conceivable that when schools accept federal funding, they are also obliged (somehow) to accept federal instruction.

If I disagree with current instruction, it is more difficult for me to change it when it comes from some larger far-away entity than when it comes from a board paid directly on my dime.

So I see two sides to this problem, but not (yet) a resolution.

In Ohio (where I grew up) it isn't luck which school you go to like it is in, say, San Francisco (where I live now). It's your parents' choice on where to live. They can choose a better school district if it's that important to them. While it isn't perfect it's a heck of a lot better than randomly shuffling kids if you are a parent who places a high priority on schools.

You assume that families are able to relocate to wherever they wish. This is based on the assumption that all families have the adequate financial situation and acumen to plan for such a situation. Perfect foresight is not a realistic assumption to make.

I am not saying it gives everyone an equal education. I just think calling it luck is unfair to those parents who are working hard to get their kids into a better school.

This really hit home with me. I'm suffering from poor teachers who are bored and don't care and a system that only wants my money.

I also was amazed that this came out a week after I started working on something that can solve this problem and do many of the things he mentioned. It makes me feel like my idea is 110% more valid, and that is exciting.

If you don't mind sharing, what are you working on? I'd really love to know. (I understand if you don't want to say though)

alternately, assuming it software, is there anything we can do to help? If not, be sure to share the idea again once it reaches that state.

I think this is the most important point:

You can commoditize curriculum but you cannot do that to teachers.

The biggest cost is also the one that is often the least efficient. Add to that the power of the teaching union and the system stays in stasis.

I'd like to believe technology can make a big difference, but I'd be satisfied if we're merely able to fill some gaps.

Read "Disrupting Class" by Christensen:

http://tinyurl.com/6a9vmf

Christensen is a business school guy, but he understands how technology can disrupt well established markets. In the book above he covers technology and education.

In one of the comments, Fred writes "I'd like to do to standardized testing what napster did to the music biz".

Napster as a phenomenon was possible because the cost of distributing music had fallen close to zero. But testing is different than music, because the value of test material as a reliable measure of proficiency is lost as it is propogated, while the value of an MP3 is preserved, regardless of how many times it is copied.

After all, test material, unlike songs, is subject to cheating. All it takes is a Google search to compromise the reliability of an assessment.

If you want your tests to be reliable measures of proficiency in a given area, then you need a way of creating test material more quickly than ever before.

> If you want your tests to be reliable measures of proficiency in a given area, then you need a way of creating test material more quickly than ever before.

I wonder if it was possible to take a block of text, and automatically generate question&answer pairs from it using some kind of AI software (probably bayesian networks combined with grammar rules).

Question and answer pairs would be too difficult to do automatically, or semi-automatically.

Fill in the blanks would be easier, since all you would need to do is isolate a correct answer, and then retrieve wrong answers. And then make an interface that would make it easy to crop or edit the quiz item in a few seconds.....

I know a great algorithm: Mechanical Turk.

Resting on the assumption that it's the system that's broken and not the kids?

"There are no bad regiments, only bad colonels" -- attributed to both Napoleon and Ulysses S. Grant

Whether it's the kids or the system that's "at fault," a system designed to help kids should adapt to help them even if the requirements for that change.

you're right but what concerns me is being trigger happy with change while lacking in requirements, which is my impression of the original post.

When everything around you appears broken, look for a mirror that isn't.

I think that the reason so many kids don't want to learn is not because of them - it's a result of the system.

I think it's a result of life. Diet, parenting, exercise, natural interests, drugs etc (things outside the education system) play as big a role. Current trend seems to be to blame the public education system for failings in other areas. There are an awful lot of kids who succeed the current education system, and an awful lot of life-paths that don't require higher education.

Could be better: absolutely. Completely broken: absolutely not.

Good point. It's probably the kids that are broken because they never study for their classes, party all the time, e.t.c.

Blaming the educational system without even a mention to family values is the same old ineffective approach we've been taking for years. A good education starts in the family. Good students have a positive attitude toward learning and they understand the importance of an education. Parents have a responsibility to develop these values in their children.

Open-source educational resources, e.g. video lectures, semantically organized testing materials, etc. will definitely be ubiquitous in the future. The real sticking point will be in society and individual's perception of the 'legitimacy' of online self-education versus, for instance, a college degree.

This is a major deterrent to hackers considering whipping up education 2.0. Who would bother with it when they are busy with their real classes?

people who criticize wikipedia are insecure