I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1].

I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel like I was getting a lot out of school and I would paradoxically do pretty poorly because I was half-assing everything.

It wasn't until I found out about WGU in 2021 where I actually decided to finish my degree, primarily because WGU lets me work at my pace. Since I already knew a lot about computer science, I was able to speed through the classes that would have been very boring to me, and I finished my degree really quickly as a result. I don't feel like my education is appreciably worse than people who did things in a traditional brick and mortar school, but I'm not 100% sure if I'm a test for this.

It made me realize that, at least for people like me, EdTech can be extremely powerful stuff. School can be a lot more engaging when it's personalized, instead of the frustrating "one size fits all" of traditional lecturing.

[1] I say "lucky" because I think it was exactly that: luck. Yeah I learned this stuff on my own for fun but finding an employer who was willing to hire someone without credentials was never guaranteed and I feel extremely fortunate to have accidentally timed my dropout about perfectly.

I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, considering my jobs before that were call center rep, bus boy and dishwasher at restaurant, camp counselor. Tech changed my entire life.

When I dropped out, I assumed that my job options were limited to minimum wage work, so I applied to McDonald's, Lowes, Target, Walmart (as a cashier), Aldi, and a few other places in one day (driving around the Orlando area). When I got home, sort of on a whim I applied to junior-level Coldfusion+Flash job I saw on Craigslist, thinking that there's no chance but it also didn't cost me anything to apply.

The only job that called me back was the software job, which I thought was bizarre, but it's what kickstarted the career.

In hindsight, I think the reason none of the others called me back was because they saw some college and they were afraid that I would quit the second that I went back to school.

I learned two important lessons that day: 1) The typical Wayne Gretzky "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take", and 2) the less qualified you are for a job, the more willing a company is to overlook a lack of qualifications.

I'd like to elaborate on point 2 because I don't see it mentioned much.

The conventional wisdom for finding a job (qualified or otherwise) is to see what's in demand and learn that skill (e.g. something popular like Java), but then you hit a problem: everyone is applying to that job. There are lots of people who learned Java from school or work, and you're competing with all of them. 2012-dropout-tombert would be applying for the same job as a 4.0-GPA'd-Harvard-Graduate, and as such the company will almost always choose the latter.

When I applied to the Coldfusion job, I accidentally discovered that because it was (even in 2012) a pretty niche bit of tech, no one applied to it. I didn't really know Coldfusion either, but the fact that I applied at all was an artifact of me not having the option to work in a more popular platform, and I was able to learn it quick enough to where it wasn't really a problem.

I mean, like most careers its had its ups and downs. 2023 was an exceptionally awful year for me (like many, many people in tech), but this year has been pretty alright.

Happy for you that you found your niche!

I never got confirmation on this, but I am about 95% sure that I was the only person who applied to the Coldfusion job. Compare that to Target, where there was literally a queue of people applying at the terminal in the store.

I’ve been declined for enough jobs to know that you can be declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, so trying to reason about it is an exercise in futility, but I am pretty sure that a lack of applicants is the reason I got the coldfusion job

I'm not throwing shade on you, my degree from 1982 was 1 year too early to make certification in my field and I have worked for 42 years in software and systems without charter status.

I am however cautious of using the word. I call myself a computer scientist even when what I do is systems and network engineering.

Today, I was listening to the Lex Fridman podcast with John Carmack. It reminded me that John Carmack does not have a university degree, yet, he is one our generation's globally recognized masters of software optimisation. There are few in the world who can do what he does, and he has no uni degree, nor (I assume!) any "national certifications". Michael Abrash is similar.

On a personal note: (US) Wall Street has similarly ineffective gatekeeping with the Series 7 & 63 exams: My father called it "toilet bowl knowledge" when I studied for it. He said: "Once you are finished the exam, you can flush away that knowledge. You will never use it again." He is right about more than 90% of the "knowledge" required to pass those exams.

The EUR ING certificate from Engineers Europe can be awarded to those who have attained a degree in engineering, but also for those with "no exemplifying formal qualifications, but will have engaged in professional Career Learning and peer review via the individual route".

https://www.engineerseurope.com/what-eur-ing-certificate

Since Engineers Europe is a private organization (albeit one that is widely recognized), I would imagine that individual European countries have their own rules about when someone can call themselves an engineer. I am pretty sure that Germany only requires a degree for instance. Looser still are the rules in Britain: the UK does not require any certification at all for the basic term 'Engineer', although there are more specific titles that are strictly protected (ICTTech being one of them, and yes they really do use that silly abbreviation, obligatory italics included). Theoretically, a country could refuse to recognize certifications from Engineers Europe, but that would not exactly endear them to the European Commission or to other European countries!

Those gatekeepers might not accept a John Carmack or a Palmer Luckey (or Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Vitalik Buterin, etc, etc), but how many of their certificate-holders have done any comparably significant engineering work?

For the _vast majority_ of others, certification allows employers to have externally-validated trust in an engineer who mightn't stand out as obviously.

I like to imagine that such people would have found a way to emigrate and make their impact abroad. Either way, the cost to Germany itself (and Europe generally) has been immense.

But keep in mind those are legal compliance tests...WTF?

In short words, they give the legal basis for why in finance we have to follow a sales script as it then covers the legal boilerplate mess...

On the other hand in the late 1980s I had a chance to be in the Turtle Trading class in Chicago....obviously that would have been more helpful as I think the success rate was over 50% for students of that pratical turtle trading class.

This applies to CS degrees too. But while there's immense amounts of churn in the hot language/UI framework of the day, the basics like algorithms and data structures barely change.

Generally when people have asked what I am, I just say something kind of hand-wavey like "Eccentric" or something.

I don't think its a big deal that the same words are used in job titles in different industries. The second anyone reads the job description or follows up with a question will understand the domain someone works in.

I usually go with "I work in software" and non-software people equate all of that to "IT", much like I classify Doctors as "medicine" and there are different disciplines.

I really hope this isn't just an ad or something because I'd really love if there was a decent way for me to get a degree without having to go back to a college campus at 35

I still get feelings of skepticism that it actually does anything every once in a while. Despite the overwhelming evidence from my wife, my coworkers, and my life in general that it absolutely does.

Feel free to email me if you have any specific questions, I think you and I might be pretty similar in this regard.

Check out /r/WGU and /r/WGU_CompSci

There are edge cases, but if you didn't have the grades and SATs to do real college you're not going to be competitive in this market. I'd take a WGU grad but would put that degree under a VA Tech, RPI, UC Davis, etc. for sure, and way under Stanford or MIT (or Cambridge, or one of the better IIT campuses, etc.).

Honestly this whole thread seems like submarine ads

I don't really know any other WGU graduates in person, so it's hard for me to say the quality of student is "worse" and than anywhere else.

Obviously I am biased, but I don't think I'm appreciably dumber than the average student who went to a brick and mortar school, but admittedly I'm a pretty weird dude who did use WGU as a "rubber stamp" school for me. I finished quickly, though I don't feel like the work was "easier" than when I was learning shit at Florida State, outside of me being a decade more experienced in it.

I'll agree there's definitely selection-bias with WGU for students who underperformed in high school, which can translate to poor work performance. Hell, I underperformed in high school due to at the time undiagnosed Major Depressive Disorder, so I am grateful for something like WGU existing.

It's tough to say. I think if you're in a position like I was, WGU is fine. It is there to demonstrate that you have a Bachelor's worth of CS knowledge; if I were 18 again and had had medication for depression, I would probably apply to some of the nicer public UK schools (e.g. University of York, Manchester, etc.), if I'm being honest, but until someone invents a time machine I'm stuck with the world as it is, not how I want it to be.

Could I politely suggest writing out the full acronym the first time, and then using WGU subsequently? It'd be a good deal more considerate of non-U.S. readers.

WGU = Western Governors University

https://www.wgu.edu/online-it-degrees/computer-science.html

West Georgia University?

Washington, George Understanding-Builder?

But they rarely use the full name, even on their own site.

Sibling comment already stated this, but I'll just say I was referring to Western Governors University. I have added an edit to the post to clarify.

Why do you think that was related to the degree?

My salary history, in some abstract units, is 15, 50, 100, 600 (yes, that was good), and 50 (not just earning ten times less, but also working about half the hours, very happy with it).

I can't help but see 25% as really insignificant: I've never experienced such a small change! And I don't even have a degree.

There are jobs that require a degree, and there are jobs that require a degree from MIT. This will get you in the first door, but not the second.

Also consider GaTech's OMSCS, though there are CS entrance requirements.

I didn't really go to school with the expectation of making more money; I already had a decent job at a FAANG, and finishing my degree hasn't really translated to "more" money. In the "killing the inferiority complex" and "proving to myself that I'm not an idiot" sense, it was definitely worth the money to me.

I'm not at a FAANG anymore, but I really like my current job, and while I'm not 100% sure on this, I'm pretty convinced that the interview for it wouldn't have happened if I didn't have at least some form of a bachelors.

I also had a lot of fun doing the degree, but that's harder to quantify.

But I'm not going to sit here and bullshit you, it's not a perfect degree. I've been trying to break into the finance world for a couple years [1], and finance people really care about which school you went to; most of them seem to simply not have even heard of WGU, and it appears that the rule of finance work is "if I haven't heard of the school, it's not a good school" and then they decline you. Finance jobs want a fancy expensive university; whether or not they're right to do so is orthogonal to that fact.

I was doing a PhD at University of York (distance), but I've since dropped that and am doing their online masters in computer science. York is honestly an extremely decent school, and their online masters is perfectly fine and fairly reasonably priced (about 11,000 British Pounds total I believe, about $14,000). I'm hoping that that can "cleanse" my WGU degree in the eyes of finance.

Outside of finance, as far as I'm aware no one has really given a shit about where I got my degree outside of the "is it accredited?" question, which it is.

[1] I want lots of money, finance jobs on Wall Street can pay pretty well.

For the most part, my career was fine. I had a job at Apple as a senior software engineer at the time (though I didn't really enjoy the job itself).

Part of it was just a bit of an inferiority complex over insecurity of not having a degree. People were generally very polite about it, but internally it felt like every bad thing happened to me in my career was because of the lack of a degree; every comment felt like it was loaded with passive aggression, even if that wasn't true.

Kind of the straw the broke the camel's back was actually a bit funny; I had applied for a job as an engineer at Microsoft Research, and I was declined for it. It was far from the first time I had been declined for a job, obviously, but in this case it was the first time that the declination specifically said "declined because you don't have a degree". In the nearly a decade of working as a software person prior to that, I had never explicitly been told that my lack of degree was the reason for a rejection.

That rejection coincided with another milestone: my 30th birthday. I had told myself I'll finish my degree "next year" for nearly a decade, and now I wasn't in my 20's anymore. Obviously there's no real difference between 29.99 and 30 years old, but it just kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. I registered for WGU that day.

There are probably numerous other reasons, I did want to transition to a more theoretical role as well, but those are the main ones.

I, too, dropped out of college, but finding employment as a programmer back in the mid-90s required very little luck. It became difficult to justify the time and expense of further education when my career already seemed to be launching, ready or not.

Funny that you mention MSR - I also applied there, back in 2007, and they are also the only people who have ever turned me down for lack of a degree! (Though I still got an offer out of it, after they passed my information along to devdiv...)

I obviously don't blame them for declining me, they don't owe me a job, but I still find it a bit amusing that in my entire career exactly one entity has declined me for that reason, or at least only one has been brave enough to state that that was the reason why. I'm sure a lot of the places that never got back to me might have declined me for a lack of a degree behind the scenes, but I was never made aware of it.

My anecdote: I was expelled from a vocational school my senior year, thanks to EdTech I returned and finished the year within a month

https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/cs-degree/

I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).

This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.

This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.

These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.

Here's a 5 minutes vid the center for Game Science published at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdrraeJyhoQ Some numbers here: https://dragonbox.com/about/algebra-challenge

For years the social stigma about being a high-school dropout got to me, and I was determined to enter University as an adult student and get my CS degree.

The problem was that I already had steady work as a software developer. And the entire reason I wanted to go to school in the first place was to level up those skills. It didn't help that, in my late teens / early 20s, I was working for a dot-com startup and we had coop students from the local University, and they weren't being taught anything that I didn't already know or understand.

Eventually I came to the opinion that, at least for me (not necessarily for others), formal education institutions amount to little more than institutional child abuse. For hyper-independent and high IQ students, particularly those with aspergers (I've never been diagnosed, but even my mother says it would put my childhood into perspective), class rooms are not a positive experience.

And I can't honestly look back at my time in public school and identify a single subject that I learned in class, as opposed to independently. According to my parents I was literate before entering kindergarten and I taught myself maths and history as an adult because school taught me to hate both (I don't hate either now, but the way they were taught in school divorced them from our day to day lives, created busy work and the impression that what we were being taught was irrelevant and unnecessary).

I tried online learning for a little bit in order to get my GED but I abandoned that as well because it still felt like boring busy work.

EdTech seems like it might offer the solution to younger children with my personality type. But honestly, I personally learn best by reading books, experimenting (hands on learning) and having goals that I actually care about and can relate to. If school had taught us to prepare a tax return, balance a household budget, that history gives us predictive "power" by examining how humans dealt with certain situations historically, if English class focused on effective communication rather than trying to guess at metaphors and hidden messages in the writings of dead authors who can't be asked to comment on that conjecture... maybe I wouldn't have loathed the experience so much and felt like I was just in a prison for children.

In other words, my personal experiences with EdTech has seen these trying to take a standard public school curriculum and package it in a digital "work at your own pace" format. Whereas my issue with school was at least in large part the curriculum itself. The pace was a factor too ... just not the only one by far.

I edited the post to clarify.

I am a strong advocate for zero technology in schools until high school.

One thing that is rarely mentioned is that schools that issue technology to students and use it in the classroom now need to have a hardware, software, and network support person at every school. These jobs use funds that could otherwise be used to pay for more instructional staff, reduce student-teacher ratios, provide more special-needs instructional specialists, etc.

That said, I'm a fan of forcing kids to check any phones at the door.

By the way, check out the School product line from Constructor Tech (disclosure: I work for this company on a different product): https://constructor.tech/solutions/schools?tag%5B0%5D=16. They are backed by hard science, and their founder made a scientific career while researching this topic. Evidence shows they are working, especially for kids lagging behind classmates.

Only wealthy parents can afford to do that, while everyone else is stuck with whatever their local school offers or doesn't offer. This perpetuates generational inequalities in ways that the public school system is supposed to solve, all in the name of "leaving no child behind".

Not true. AP courses and magnet schools are the sole way for working class/poor students to get ahead in life in the public school system. Myself and many friends took advantage of this, and zero had wealthy parents. Many had food scarcity levels of poverty at home but received excellent educations due to these programs existing.

Heck, private schools also participated in this - giving out test and grade based scholarship for exceptional students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. Many friends participated in such programs, even to the point of working "jobs" for the school after classes to pay for their education. This is now seen as abusive to many.

The ironic and incredibly frustrating thing are now these programs are being systematically dismantled over the past 20 years in the name of "equity" with these trends only accelerating.

The one thing it DOES require is parents who care and give a shit about their kids. I suppose if you squint that's a form of wealth, but not what people mean when they talk about such topics.

The reason parents look for extra lessons is because most schools can’t challenge students because they group too many students of varying intelligence and interest level into the same class. My public school district does 1 on 1 mentors for students, but only if they score higher than ~144 on an IQ test in grade 2 or 3, which is ridiculous, but these students do get that extra challenge and support with no extra cost. Schools need smaller cohorts to best support kids of all levels, and we’ll continue to fail the majority of kids until we reorganize our schools.

My advanced class placement started far earlier than high school. 5th grade is when I recall being put into the advanced track along with others of demonstrated ability. I'd say from my memory maybe 1/3rd of those students could be described as wealthy by any sort of the word. But they'd be more middle class vs. working class in retrospect. They just seemed wealthy in comparison at the time.

The one thing that had near 100% correlation was highly involved parents - even if they were single moms who never had time to be directly involved. All the kids were held accountable at home. I never had outside tutoring, and few of my peers did either. It was all in-school education, where we were removed from normal classes for a few subjects but otherwise part of our grade level for everything else like social studies or gym. Plenty of time spent with said friends at various houses doing homework together though.

I totally agree this needs to happen at a very young age. I was able to test out of the public high school in 10th grade due to being tracked the way I was in grade school and junior high. High school due to no advanced courses being available was an utter waste of time. Those programs that got me there have now been long-removed in the name of equity. This is the one political topic I will speak out on, since it's outright evil what we are doing kids in the name of fairness.

You really couldn't come up with a better plan to cripple a society than what we are doing to public education.

We're well off enough to provide what he needs, but we're also painfully aware that the public school system is not going to and that most people don't have the means to do what we can do for him. I agree that that's a new trend and not something that has always been true of public education in the US.

Instead of handicapping those who are ahead, we should intervene with those who are falling behind. Instead of enforcing equal outcomes, instead prioritize offering equal opportunity for every student to get the highest quality of education.

I don't think it's an issue of a person's politics, Republicans tried the exact same thing with No Child Left Behind. Is the more important thing the individual rising to their highest potential, or is the more important thing the system where economic factors have created a cycle where only children of middle-class or better families are given the environment to rise and those kids run with the flywheel and become the middle-class parents.

I was literally never not going to be successful, I think I'm reasonably intelligent but that by far wasn't the biggest factor. My parents made damn sure I was on the gifted track, always got A's, and was set up to get into an in-demand major at a prestigious university. Was I actually that special or was I just the chosen one, in that I was chosen?

You can only be like "that's not true of everyone <anecdote>" but the exceptions fall away in the aggregate where your success is frighteningly well predicted by your zip code.

The top-level-commenter's point is that this is not necessarily the case anymore—the whole promise of educational technology was that we could finally scale individual intervention to every child, but efforts to do so have met with stiff resistance. I also work in EdTech and I've seen exactly what the OP is talking about.

We're at the point where we could extend the flywheel to more children than ever by integrating it into the public school systems instead of having it be something that upper-middle class parents have to provide as a supplement, but the culture has so thoroughly embraced the idea that "getting ahead" is unfair that we're not allowed to systematize it even when doing so would benefit poor students the most.

I'm curious what exactly this "unfair"ness is. (I'm being genuine, my partner works in EdTech but I don't and I have very little idea what happens behind the scenes.) My impression in my low-income school was that the parents barely had any idea what was going on and if anything pressured their kids to leave school asap so they could get jobs and bring money home.

The question is: do you help more folks graduate or do you help the 5% of stars succeed? I don't think it's as easy a choice as you make it out to be once you stop identifying with the gifted students (this is my primary annoyance with HN comments about most topics these days: it's just the commenter opining about themselves, disinterested in taking a systemic view on the issue).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42110149

The crutch isn't the EdTech itself. The numerous examples regarding WGU's success for some self-driven training here suffices to suggest the tech isn't the issue.

It's the metrics required as part of legislation such as NCLB that effectively bind administrations to ensure adherence to a common curriculum, regardless of capacity or competence.

This effectively imposes Goodhart's law, since the only way to meet these measures on scale is to teach to the test, and only the test.

This ensures that no actual deep learning occurs for those falling back, while hamstringing those who master the subject matter early since there is no mechanism for rewarding early mastery.

I think you may have interpreted my use of the word "equity" to mean something along the lines of "woke", but I meant it in the strictest sense: The red tape that OP is talking about was put in place in the name of ensuring equal opportunities for all children, but has actually accomplished the opposite.

> Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth.

This is the behavior that I'm referring to. I'm not talking about political fights about what goes into the curriculum in the first place, I'm talking specifically about efforts to keep children from getting ahead along whatever the curriculum is already defined to include.

I never understood the rationale behind these progressives. Don't they have kids? Don't they know even twins may perform differently in school? I have two kids. They are only 1 year apart. They can access any educational materials as they want. Even if their school teachers were not good (they are very good, by the way), the kids would have access to excellent private teachers and tutoring. Yet, one handles maths with ease and has jumped three grades without even trying, but on the other hand does not like reading or writing. The other can barely keep up and I spend enormous amount of time just to make sure he can understand the fundamentals, but on the other hand he loved reading and is creative in writing.

Equity my ass.

I think it's sort of natural for teachers to view kids that are both too behind or too ahead as "problems". In both cases, there is an indication they've failed, and no one likes that.

The gatekeeping element seems to have developed in tandem with / response to the signalling hypothesis [1]. Simply put, if kids are trying to do the minimum necessary to get by, we raise the bar on the minimum standard until we're satisfied. Teachers (K-12 at least) respond with grade inflation, adding lots of noise to the signal, and we in turn respond with standardized testing in an attempt to clean up the noise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

There was a 4 year cap up through the 8th grade (so I was a 4th grader attend 8th grade English, math and science classes), and after that, the cap was lifted and students could begin taking college courses in 8th grade --- some of the teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and if need be, arrangemetns were made for students to travel to the college, or professors from there to travel to the school.

It was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a 4 year college degree.

Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court declared the system illegal because it conferred an unseemly advantage on the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no equivalent compensation for students who were not.

The State Supreme Court stuff is my hazy recollection of letters my parents received from other folks who were still living there when the school system was changed.

  There were debates about whether military children attending base schools were receiving benefits not available to children in the local civilian school systems. This issue could have come up in various ways, such as in cases where military dependents might have access to college-level classes or subsidized education while local students did not.

Meanwhile private school...

Its all crabs in a bucket. Instead of suggesting that more schools do this to boost education, let's tear town the successful ones and pretend we're a meritocracy.

But it's not because of some drive for 'equity'. I've talked with teachers (as friends, not in a school setting). They're doing what they can with the resources they have.

So why does the richest country on the planet have "very scarce resources" only when it comes to educating its kids ? Of course, that very same public school has a stadium that is easily several times larger than facilities provided for Olympic level athletes in a poor country like India. That same school has a music program with a huge ballroom, recording studio, fancy musical instruments...bass sax, harps, bassoons and contrabassoons, double bass, violas...like literally, even a top of the line Bollywood studio doesn't have half of this. USA has chosen to prioritize just about everything other than basic classroom stem education. Then when you ask the math teacher why the kids don't know their logarithms and trig tables, he is like...well we have calculators and chromebooks. I have spent multiple years trying to engage with school board officials in public schools here in the mid-west. The most reasonable, unemotional, takeaway after all this engagement is that Americans are simply not interested in classroom education. They don't have teacher, don't have the time to teach, don't care for books or chalkboards...its simply not their thing. That's fine. I do hope all of this hyper-investment in music and sports produces some world class track and field athlete who can run a mile under three minutes while playing the bassoon.

Seattle has cancelled a bunch of their music programs as well.

A couple years ago they also cancelled, a very successful, STEM program in schools that primarily served economically disadvantaged students, because the school district couldn't afford to pay their portion of the program's cost.

There was a court ruling in Washington state a decade or so ago that said the state government has to fund schools and that school districts and cities are forbidden from raising more than a pittance of additional funding for teachers and academic activities.

This was good for the first few years, all schools in the state finally became fully funded, not just the schools in rich areas, but recently the state has been underfunding schools and now every major school district in the state is having financial problems.

It’s only the right thing if you assume equity as a starting position though. We already know, rather robustly, that the weakest and most disruptive students can consume far more than their share of limited resources and produce correspondingly limited outcomes.

Another theory goes that we should provide more resources to the best and brightest students so that they go on to become great leaders and experts in their fields and then improve society for everyone. This may be called the “rising tide lifts all boats” theory. It was the predominant one in the US for much of the 20th century and earlier, and it arguably led to the US’s position as a global leader in science, technology, and industry.

I'd call it "trickle down" theory. Or "horse-and-sparrow theory" (feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat)

What you’re missing here is that we’ve been sold on this idea of “one size fits all” education as the only just model. This means forcing the weakest, most disruptive students up to a standard (especially in math and science) they can’t realistically meet. Instead of allowing these kids to find their true calling in some skilled trades such as plumbing, electrical, welding, or construction, we force them to go to university where they’re guaranteed to fail (or drop out trying). And in the process we saddle them with a mountain of student loans!

Have some kids, pick the one that seems like they'll be the most successful, put all of the family's limited resources into that one kid. If that kid goes on to become successful, they are expected to help lift up the rest of the family.

Another view is that I've paid back in taxes alone, many multiples of what my education cost the city.

> feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat

Yeah well the current strategy being employed is starve all the horses and leave the bodies in the field to rot.

The harsh truth is bell curves exist. Some people are just better are things than others.

Imagine a scenario with three classrooms:

One classroom is full of kids who can be taught 3 years of a subject in one year

A second classroom has kids who can be taught 1 year of a skills in a subject in 1 year.

The third classroom is kids who are remedial and if great effort is put in, they'll be taught one year of skills in two years.

The no-shit-sherlock strategy is to assign a teacher to each classroom.

What we are doing instead is one of two strategies:

1. Mix all the students together, and watch as the kids who would be advanced drop out of school due to boredom, and the kids who need remedial help drop out because they aren't learning anything.

2. Fund classroom 2 as normal, take resources that would've been spent on classroom 1, and give it to classroom 3, causing incremental improvements, and again failing the kids who would be in classroom 1.

Both strategies are downright stupid and inefficient.

Not only that, these strategies also cause funding problems. Now the parents of kids who would have been in classroom 1 pull their kids out of school, causing a reduction in funding for everyone. Next, parents who would have kids in classroom 1 don't even move to the city, causing a reduction in the overall economy for the city, so now there is even less money for social and academic programs to help disadvantaged students.

To be clear, I'm not naming the subject here because students should be independently evaluated on each subject. Someone may need remedial math help but be great at writing.

I wouldn't commit a kid who struggles with math in 3rd grade to a life in the trades. I suppose HN has an over-represention of former gifted student commenters- but being intelligent doesn't make one better than others, or better suited for greater expectations, more deserving of resources, or more likely to succeed. Intelligence is just one aspect out of the many you can measure a human by - resilience, resourcefulness, grit, propensity to self-destruction, proneness to addictions, self-delusion, confidence, being an insufferable dick, laziness, are among the things I've seen people exhibit to their own detriment (or success) - regardless of what their baseline intelligence was. Society does better when it nurtures all the positives, and not just putting all eggs in the "very intelligent" basket.

The smartest students I knew are doing very mundane jobs that can be (and are) done by far less smarter folk - the one in academia is trying to leave. I'm less smart, but I pay more on taxes than most of them - one exception is the executive at a dating app. She's probably a genius as she never had to study at all: but that's not exactly a role that moves society forward, is it?

Edit: oh, and Elon Musk was a B student.

Students should be re-evaluated every year. I've been at the bottom of classes and the top of classes in the same subject!

Also as others have pointed out, please stop crapping on the trades. I've met plumbers who are damn good at math calculations (needed for complex hydroponic heating systems!). Not to mention plenty of people in the trades learn to run their own businesses, with all the different skills that requires.

> but being intelligent doesn't make one better than others, or better suited for greater expectations, more deserving of resources, or more likely to succeed.

I didn't say any of that.

I said that right now schools are allocating 0 resources to students who are gifted, which is just as messed up as allocating 0 resources to students who need extra help. And as a reminder a child can be in both groups at the same time.

I never "crapped" on the trades like you imagined I did, they are a perfectly fine career choice.

> I wouldn't commit a kid who struggles with math in 3rd grade to a life in the trades.

Which has a lot of implications:

1. That someone who is bad at math has to go into the trades, ignoring that many trades require quite a bit of math and that plenty of college degree programs hardly require any math at all 2. That kids are being told in 3rd grade that they have to go into the trades based on math scores, as if that is some sort of "punishment". I know you said that you used the word "commit" to be neutral, but it is less than neutral when used in comparison to the unspoken alternative of non-trade jobs which are silently implied (in the very least through the American cultural lens) to be "better".

Also you didn't reply to the actual meat of my comment:

1. Schools have cut funding to gifted programs, denying resources to students who need them 2. The same students can be gifted in one area and behind in another, meaning resourcing isn't some binary "lift these students up and put these students down" decision.

Also I'd add that gifted programs typically require very little additional funding, if any. In a large district a gifted program just takes a bunch of students out of other classrooms and puts them into a classroom together. There is no additional cost for teachers, it is just a shuffling of what classroom students are in.

This means aside from the incremental cost of bussing students to a school with a gifted program classroom, there isn't even a resourcing issue for gifted programs!

The choice isn't "gifted programs or remedial education programs". That entire narrative is not based in reality and it only exists to cause arguments between different advocacy groups.

None of which I expressed in my brief comment, but you're projecting from what others have said or done. You are arguing against a stereotypical position I do not hold, and I have no desire keep explaining how I don't hold the position you insist on ascribing me to.

The only issue here is with the attitude that a career in the trades is somehow inferior to getting a degree. It is not. I have many friends and family who work in the trades. They are intelligent, hard-working, resourceful people who take tremendous pride in the quality of their work. They both produce and repair useful things (houses, cars, factories, and countless other pieces of equipment). They are the backbone of our society.

They also happen to earn a lot more money than many other people I know who have degrees and work those "mundane jobs" you mentioned. Why? Because there's a huge shortage of labour in the trades and people who enter that career have far more bargaining power than they did back in the early-mid 20th century. It's also reflected in the way we simply don't build the way we used to. China built an incredible high speed rail network all over their country in just a few decades at minimal cost. The US can't even manage to build one high speed link between San Francisco and LA without spending more than the GDP of most countries on the project while facing countless delays.

It's one of our greatest shames that we in the West have developed such an elitist culture that we look down on the people who build things.

I made no such claim - the word I used (commit) was chosen with care, and is neutral.

> They also happen to earn a lot more money than many other people I know who have degrees and work those "mundane jobs" you mentioned.

While trades are a decent choice; let's not overly romanticize them. The ones making decent money are those who are self-employed (basically effectively consultants) and those in unions with a monopoly (like the longshoremen). The working stiffs aren't doing that great, especially if the work is hard on the body, then it means their career is going to be much shorter than the average desk jockey, and they will have considerable health costs later.

Is the roofer going to suffer a lot later in life? Yes. Is the CNC operator going to have problems down the line? Probably not.

> The ones making decent money are those who are self-employed (basically effectively consultants) and those in unions with a monopoly (like the longshoremen).

Most office workers outside of tech are not doing so great either in regards to pay. Customer service roles are even worse.

Is it worth it to spend monumental effort trying to get not very bright children to meet some minimum requirement

OR

is it more worth it to just encourage and lift up brighter students.

I don’t think there’s a clear answer, but what we have isn’t it.

The answer is entirely clear but it's uncomfortable.

Society is moved forward by the top percentile, not by even the "average". You can only help those who wish to help themselves, and expending massive resources on kids who are not there to learn (or cannot) has had predictable results.

Some evil folks in history have used this exact strategy of crippling the "top kids" of a group for their genocidal plans. It's highly effective.

The best thing you can do is make sure those "top kids" are identified early and tracked into the proper classes regardless of socioeconomic background. Yes, this means segregating students based on ability earlier than later. Doing this ends up helping those "bottom kids" once they reach adulthood since society is better overall for everyone.

I'm not convinced that resources are actually that scarce (the US has the second-highest amount spent per pupil among OECD countries). I think your teacher friends are doing the best with what they are being given by school boards, which is different. In many cities, the school board is considered a key stepping stone into bigger and better offices (city council, boards of supervisors, mayor, etc), which means it often attracts folks who are trying to leverage their positions to take stances on issues that have nothing to do with education. I think attacking gifted programs / tracking is one example of this, which are cast as perpetuating inequality, despite evidence that they help students across the board.

In our public school, there are multiple math classes already with people randomly assigned to one of them, and both advanced and regular classes are taught by the same teachers. So there is very little extra cost to have more advanced math classes - shuffle kids around and allow teachers to teach one of the classes faster. And yet we only one advanced half-class, despite dozens of students wanting to go there.

Why? Our school management is explicitly against that. I've talked to them directly, and they admitted that they are very much against any "out of the grade" behavior, the teachers are not allowed to give more advanced material. It was all in the name of equity of course.

Seattle used to have one of the nation's best gifted programs. Back in the 90s it was ran in a racist fashion, gifted schools only existed in wealthy neighborhoods and poor and minority families had to fight like hell to get kids into the gifted program.

The easy solution was to offer gifted classes in schools throughout the city, and to offer free gifted program testing to all students in the district.

Washington state actually recently passed the later into law, all students can get tested for free during the school day, removing one large barrier to entry. The law was passed just in time for the Seattle School District to dismantle the city's gifted program.

On top of this, the city got rid of their bussing program, moving back to a neighborhood schools model. While this saved the district money on bussing, it is also a return to a racist system that was dismantled for good reason generations ago. Is it actual segregation? No, but you don't have to squint very hard to see how it looks awfully similar...

> But it's not because of some drive for 'equity'. I've talked with teachers (as friends, not in a school setting).

The school board's removal of the gifted resources was driven by "equity".

That "equity" drive has also seen the test scores of disadvantaged minority students continue to decline. Not only that, now the kids who have a real opportunity to escape generational poverty, are no longer being given those resources.

I say this as a kid who grew up in Seattle in the 90s to a family that was working class poor, and as someone who benefited immensely from Seattle's once great gifted program.

It sort of "fits" but it just doesn't explain very much on its own

When a classmate at the same age is covering material that someone else did three years ago, you will get the tension from both sides, in the same way that it's not all that great socially to be on a traditional school and take classes 3 years ahead.

This issue disappears with all adult students, but around puberty, we are short tools whenever we don't have large enough cadres that we can just put all the kids fast at a given class all together.

This is why parents are unhappy: it's OK to skip most math classes entirely and only do state-mandated minimum... but skipping _basic_ math classes and jumping straight to advanced ones is not allowed.

Do you spend money (mostly) on bringing kids up to average, and any kid average or above average basically stays where they are, as far as the school's efforts are concerned?

Do you spend equally per child, aiming to uplift each of them by the same amount?

...

Many options. Equity is the first one.

The examples I've seen, in New York, Seattle, and LA, all cited equity as the reason.

Edit: I'm responding here to the comment "It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up."

> It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating. .... Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade

This sentiment that "they shouldn't be" learning advanced things is not an equity argument—it's probably the kids' OWN parents complaining! I certainly agree that the equity-based shutdowns in highly-progressive cities are a problem, but that's really a very limited case; this thread is really about an entirely different phenomenon.

Yes, some of these were shut down. It wasn't because of "equity". It was because of something called "budget cuts."

"NYC to eliminate gifted and talented school program that opponents say segregated students"

"this new, equitable model"

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/08/us/new-york-gifted-and-talent...

And indeed, the CNN article is the only actual reporting claiming that NYC was eliminating this program.

You would think that something of this magnitude would have been reported in the hometown paper if it were true...But the NYT reports that NYC actually expanded the program by over 1100 seats...(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/nyregion/nyc-gifted-talen...)

"instead implement an accelerated instructional model in Fall of 2022 that will serve all approximately 65,000 kindergartners"

"Officials plan to train all 4,000 kindergarten teachers in this accelerated learning instruction"

Better would have been to let the faster person learn something else tangentially related to the course so that they stay engaged but they don't disengage because they're simply ahead of the rest of the class on the next topic - which is just frustrating for everybody.

Alternatives exist for self-directed study and the tutorial system but that's presumably not what they're building for.

At high school and more so in universities, there are distinct classes at different levels, and prerequisites for those classes, and students at different levels. Bring that system to all grades, rather than just having "age N = grade X" as one giant class with pressure for uniformity.

If content someday emphasizes science as a richly interwoven tapestry, and heavily leverages implicit curriculum, this might become straightforward. The chemistry problem, that's also implicitly teaching cellular biology and supply chain dynamics, enables tangents on those too. The K-2 intro mittens, with tangents on thermal budgets, and spacesuit dexterity limitations, and winter camping clothing 101, and knitting how to, and so much more.

If OP regrets our handling of current curriculum, there's seemingly an enormous additional level of despair available, in education's profoundly impoverished opaque window into the beauty of the world.

There are plenty of problems with the US education system -- among them this typically SV $$$-eyed idea that "tech solves everything" -- but investments to raise up the educational standards of low-income or underserved communities is not one of them.

Finland has one of the most equitable societies in the world.

This means the amount of effort it takes to "raise up" a poor kid in Finland to have the same resources as a well to do kid is much less than it is in America.

> but investments to raise up the educational standards of low-income or underserved communities is not one of them.

School districts cannot solve structural issues within American society, but we expect them too.

If kids are starving, or being beaten, or otherwise abused, the teachers get judged if those students do poorly on standardized tests.

The problem is kids who don't get enough to eat, the problem is that there are kids who stay awake at night scared for their lives.

But as a society we've chosen to ignore all of that and worry about test scores instead.

But one should understand what that term means before doing so.

This seems quite the opposite - promoting mandatory equality (equality of outputs in fact) rather than equity (which would explicitly account for giving students different paces to learn at, and grade accordingly)

I guess that IS the point of standards, but we really should be experimenting more on the fringes.

I remember having to painfully sit through multi-hour presentations in which they'd explain how to use a hamburger menu to find the app settings, and half the participants furiously scribbled down notes so they wouldn't get lost later when they needed to find the settings without guidance, on their home computer.

This was only a decade ago and I doubt it's much better now. People who go into teaching aren't exactly the best & brightest most of the time. And the results speak for themselves.

not a teacher nor related to but i heard around 400 hours of pedagogy podcasts, be it the science of it, small-talk about teaching & sometimes edtech software that seriously, most of the time just sounded as apps coming from the next guy trying to be the next silicon money maker by offering what Google Docs offers but in a fancy app or in the most complex cases, what Matrix/Discord offers for free or what Emacs org-mode could accomplish without diving far from the basics it provides. there was good apps & often these were backed/based by novel & evidence based ways of teaching

What are the good apps? In what direction do you think educational software should go?

i never liked school and actually what made avoid it as much as possible (to the point i proposed to my parents to work as a minor apprentice in the construction field because my plans were to quit school) was a 8° grade math teacher saying after my question about why that formula came to be, something like "you need a university degree at least to understand this"; so a neat direction i would like to see education taking is slowing down the amount of stuff we throw at students throat... maybe emotional intelligence/awareness, cooperative behavior (like knowing how to give someone a good feedback) & tech literacy! would be so cool if more people had the basic knowledge of getting some Arduino/ESP32 libraries at Github and hooking up into a board for small things, like a paddle Atari controller or just a cute LED thing as adornment/gift for a loved one (which i think to do that, lots of concepts can be taught); as well critical thinking so we don't have people lured to modern bullshit, like "buying this new fancy iPhone meanwhile i don't even understand what a shutter or aperture control serves, nor i use apps fancier than iMessage and Instagram" etc.

This is only truly possible if we trust educators enough to allow them to use a different approach with a child. The system we have has leaned heavily toward “trust nothing”. Parents and teachers all want the best for their students but at the same time we demand that everyone stick to the prescribed curriculum lest something unapproved should enter a classroom. This is how you get “McDonalds” results: Consistent and maybe somewhat average overall.

Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?

Not GP but I can share a personal experience from high school: I was extremely advanced in English class. Like would literally finish a 45min exam in 10min and get an A.

This caused problems for the teacher. For one I was constantly bored and disruptive of others around me because I was bored and needed friends to chat with. But this made their grades suffer (it’s okay I did their exams too, lol).

Another big problem for her was that teaching me was a pain in the ass. I was clearly fluent in English but couldn’t be arsed to follow today’s lesson. My essays were a pain to grade because she could never tell if I was using a weird word I picked up from Tolkien or the internet, or just used the wrong word. She had to use a dictionary. During class sometimes I’d pull her on tangents discussing the nuanced meaning of a word she was teaching and none of the rest of the class could follow. Etc.

Basically I was a pain in the ass because the class was too easy and teenage boys aren’t known for their good classroom behavior.

The best advice that teacher gave me before the matura exam (like SATs) was this: Ok Swiz I know you think you’re a wiseass, but the matura commission won’t pull out a dictionary, they’ll just mark your answer wrong. Tone it down.

And if you think “Wow that teacher failed to control a problem student”, I think she did the right thing. It’s very easy to crush someone’s spirit if you don’t let them explore and pursue a thing they’re clearly talented in.

After watching a documentary about Conic Section I asked my math teacher "When are we going to learn about Ellipses and Hyperbolas?" This was in year 7 (so age 12/13), We were learning about perimeter and area at the time I found it dead easy.

He patiently explained to me that we needed to build up to those topics and it wasn't something we could just skip ahead to. looking back on it I think he handled me pretty well. He didn't discourage me and he justified things in a way that 12 year old me could understand that there was a reason we covered the topics in the order that we did.

Conic sections would end up being taught in 11th Grade when I was 17.

Many, many adults are extremely emotionally unprepared to accept the possibility that they may be wrong and a child may be right; they start from the assumption that this is an impossibility, and reason backwards from there.

Or, in the case where they do in fact know that the child is right, they nonetheless decide to prioritize asserting authority over demonstrating how a mature adult should handle being wrong. And thus do students learn bad examples of what to do when they're wrong.

Grades have been steadily decreasing across the board, while enrolment in private education has skyrocketed (private schools do not have to accept difficult students). The private education is particularly surprising as Denmark has a very strong tradition of public education, where private education was viewed as something for the "elites" of society (e.g. royalty), now it's becoming more and more common.

The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves, alone, without a dedicated human teacher supervising them or a group of student peers. (You need this skill to succeed in tech, learning new APIs/languages from written materials and online videos.)

The techies who build/fund EdTech wrongly assume that everyone could do this if only they had access to the learning materials, or if the tech vaguely simulated a teacher (an interactive textbook).

But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.

(For kids especially, adult career prospects feel so remote that it scarcely seems worth the trouble, whereas earning respect right now is a very, very concrete problem!)

Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed. I guess that is a "crying shame," but it's a tragedy, not a policy failure.

Everyone could do it if they were taught to teach themselves, it's funny we've almost come full circle back to the original intention of public education and universities.

I believe (almost) everyone can teach themselves something provided they have the material to learn from (videos, books, teachers, etc.).

This is because if people can't truly be taught to teach themselves there's no larger point in schooling unless you have only exceptional teachers throughout. Mediocre and bad teachers, which are far more common, make it so students end up having to teach parts of the material to themselves (which unfortunately leads to a tonne of rote memorisation) - this to me is where the true benefit of public education and standardised testing is, not the information retained.

The point of school was never fill our heads with facts we will never use in the workforce - most blue collar work is learnt on the job (or can be taught in short time), and white collar work is (generally*) done by those who learnt to teach themselves (as proved by them earning something like a college degree in spite of the bad and mediocre teachers).

* I say generally because there are white collar jobs that don't require it. And there are rote-memorisers who have such good memory they can make it into these positions, generally though upon hitting the workforce they stagnate, leave, or learn to learn (ever had an incompetent middle manager who only knew how to follow procedure?)

Not by magic, though. Those who take an interest in tech are forced to learn how to educate themselves in order to fulfill their interest in tech. The same story applies to many other interests. Of course, it is possible one will never develop any interests...

> But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.

But is socialization the only thing most children can take an interest in, or does sticking children in these rigid school environments take away from them discovering other interests? In other words, is this just a symptom of them being in the wrong environment, rather than the nature if it?

Furthermore, if socialization really is the only interest, why can't it still be used to force learning how to educate oneself? If fitting in and admiration are a compelling reason to learn in general, why would it not be equally compelling towards learning how to learn?

> Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed.

Of course, that questions if most kids should succeed. What for? Being from the most educated region in the most educated nation, it's not clear what we actually get for it. The popular tropes don't hold up. Other parts of the world are much more progressive, economically vibrant, healthier, etc. It is hardly the worst place in the world, but a relative backwater compared to other much less educated places.

You don't have to go back many generations to find populations not exposed to much, if any, formal education and they don't seem to have ended up any worse off than the average person today. I expect there is a strong case to be made that people with a vision can leverage educational resources as a force multiplier to propel themselves well beyond what those earlier generations could have ever dreamed of been capable of, but for the average Joe just trying to fit in...? Perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees.

are you US based?

so of the Nordic countries have implementing thins similar to what you describe as their normal form of education

OK but we've known this since, when, the 60s? Look at all the academic research on the adoption (or lack thereof) of programmed instruction, programmed learning, etc.

If we didn't already know this before the "EdTech Revolution" then of course the industry would get a pass, but the fact that we already knew what would happen and why is what makes it a scam.

A charitable way to read what you are saying is, "kids are not sufficiently challenged in school." But you are railing against an antagonist that is kind of vague. What, specifically, are you talking about?

Some teachers were cool with this, but most of them would yell at me for not paying attention, and a couple specifically called me out for reading ahead on the basis that I thought I was too good for the class.

What do you think is behind the threats? Do the teachers fear being replaced or is it coming from a different set of people?

However, we should be seeing visible progress towards this goal, and frankly, if anything, the system continues to be moving in the other direction, lowering bars to try to get everyone into the exact same level long after it should be clear that lowering the bar still isn't even achieving that goal, even as it destroys everything around it in the process.

The system isn't even trying to customize skill-based education, beyond a bit of clearly-ineffectual lip service.

To be clear, most engineers at FAANG would describe their own companies as a "large bureaucracy", yet, the engineers at these places are highly skilled, "complex, multifaceted individuals". Their hiring strategy has demonstrated this time and time again on HN discussions. It is insanely hard to get hired into these places. There must be at least 10 qualified candidates for each role. And, weirdly, I would say that almost all of the most highly skilled software engineers that I have known in my career are also the most dynamic. By definition, that makes them fungible because they can learn new skills so quickly.

My expected outcome for all of this is that the gap between rich and poor students will grow, as only rich students will continue to have decent student:teacher ratios (their ratios already tend to be a ton better than public school kids). Paid tutoring will become common somewhat farther down-market than it currently is, as more people choose to pay extra just to cover what their tax money used to, but no longer does.

That is bad. I have to say no teacher I had a problem when I learned things ahead of time. Some less good teachers were not actually encouraging, but they certainly did not think it was a problem.

That said, IMO the school system does not cope well with kids who are not going at the average speed. This is one reason i home educated my kids. We need to change how schools work to take advantage of ed tech (and a lot of other opportunities - you can learn at your own pace from books, like I did)

We built a product specifically for student-centric work where educators could assess student progress (think Hattie's Visible Learning and similar lines of thinking) and compare student growth against their own previous work. We encouraged educators to quickly tailor the tasks to individual student needs.

Educators (and pedagogues) loved it. But we couldn't gain traction with the buyer persona: Administrators asking "what's in it for me?" Data on improved outcomes wouldn't be immediate, so it was a no buy.

This was exacerbated by Google and Microsoft giving away their office productivity suites repackaged as classroom tools to ensure future market capture. Because you totally want your 8-year-old becoming a Word or Docs or Excel expert right?

So yeah, we have a reality where students don't have really great EdTech—they have tech that's masquerading as EdTech, picking up all the low-hanging fruit and leaving the hard problems of education unsolved (or unexplored).

The company is in the process of folding, and I'm hoping to re-release the software as true open source sometime in the future once all the legal / corporate shutdown stuff is finished.

as a parent I find it confusing that I'd consider getting upset if my kid was learning 6th grade history as a 3rd grader (or 2nd grade art as a 3rd grader). what actual examples are there?

the only examples of parents being upset about learning I'm aware of lately is, like, critical theory and marxism

But sex ed and the like is definitely something that gets parents upset, as is the general concept of "they're teaching my child things they're not telling me about", whether that's critical theory, sex ed, evolution, or anything with the word gender in it.

Others have given their own experiences in this thread -- some teachers are encouraging, others get frustrated.

I'm just saying age is an arbitrary indicator for every category I can think of, and most situations would benefit from using a more relevant metric. In situations where size matters the most, let the huge 10yo play with the 11 or 12yos and the tiny one be with the 8 or 9yos. When I was 11, for safety reasons my karate instructor had me start training with the adult women who were closer to my size. In situations where intellectual ability is the relevant factor, you might have even a broader reach. If my parents hadn't refused, my kindergarten principal wanted to have me in 3rd grade by the end of my first year and doing two a year after that. Sitting through 13 full years of classroom instruction instead of 5 or 6 was miserable. Somebody you share interests with might happily overlook the fact that you're a couple years younger and still want to be friends. It's at least more likely than that someone will overlook the fact that you have absolutely nothing in common because, hey, you were born within a couple months of each other!

It seems like it is possible - probably enough people on this thread could make that investment

If all children do not perform roughly the same, ideologues will not think that people have naturally different talents and abilities, but instead think there are implied violations of laws protecting against discrimination in education. That being said, I'm sure homeschoolers and people not indoctrinated, even those with lesser abilities, will really appreciate this approach.

I my experience, I can give material that is way out of their comfort zone, but it's my job to make it interesting enough and make enough bridges so that everyone can learn the material well, no matter the starting point.

(note: university level, but I also teached numerous times for schools)

So when they have an app with for example a qcm in front of them, the first times they try to do well, then they learn that if they randomely click buttons, at some point the app validate the answer, even if they didn't read the questions/answers.

So you get a group of young people that after school, just spend 10min randomely clicking on a app without any purpose, and after that they can go play.

I've got students that were from a private school, everyone was doing that, and their level was extremely bad.

I cannot help but think that we shouldn't be forcing kids to learn if they don't want to learn -- and rather than try to force every kid to be "grade level", we should go back to 1-room schoolhouses (for elementary levels, at least) and teach each student at their own pace.

All of which because they uniquely used tablets and qcm for all their work. This was a general issue with their capacity of concentration, memorization, and overall learning.

They were able to understand a simple concept, for example symmetries of objects, after a lot of work, but forget about it the following day. I helped them through some years. They are doing better now.. But they didn't catch up what they should be able to do as functioning adults.

If you don't teach to a child to study, he will never do it, studying is not fun per se, if it's not motivated, the random probability that one does it alone is extremely small, and even then. You fail him for not providing him a good education.

Now I hear you, you are talking about preschool and, clearly I think that prematurely forcing them to study has no purpose, they should start studying when they are ready to it, but we do not have a way to know when it is.

I'm on the camp of making study as fun as possible, not by creating random games around the work, but instead by providing lot of context and unexpected examples that motivate the creation of the theory. In this way, I think education can start pretty soon.

I like to have my student study because they are intrigued instead of having them study because they 'need to'. Which is counterproductive no matter the age.

That problem is that parents who want to expose their children to more knowledge and better education have no voice -- of any kind. A small group of parents objecting to something violating their niche belief will absolutely nullify the voices of any number of parents thinking otherwise.

There needs to be greater ability on the part of educational organizations to be able to parse the unencumbered learners from these minority case.

So brutal. Thanks for doing what you can.

The best way to move an "average" is to improve the big mass slightly below average.

The worst off and best off are too small to affect the average--so nobody cares about them. QED.

The problem is that ed-tech is being shoehorned into an existing dysfunctional system. It's trying to help the education system do more of what it was already doing, just with computers.

The underlying problem is that the structure of the education system is absolutely stupid and shit. We've just been so used to that for so long that we don't notice it anymore.

If schooling was good, ed-tech would be a big enabler of that, helping students learn at their own pace, guiding their coursework in the right direction, linking it to career paths, all kinds of things.

But currently ed-tech is just enabling and feeding more of the same slop, just digital instead of paper. That's the problem.

But I can understand it from the teacher's perspective too; They have 30 kids, no extra budget and few resources. They have 20 or so average kids, and a handful of stragglers and a handful of people out in front, and are trying to meet ALL of their needs. Any of those three groups could use up all the time on a specific topic, so you end up stealing some time from one to deal with the others. If there are good monitoring from EdTech software it can help, but lots of teachers are not super techie so things have to be approachable.

It's definitely a space with more nuance and certainly more potential.

This is an issue that started to bother me while in high school, or perhaps even in junior high, and have realized over the years that people learn at different rates, that what should matter is knowledge and mastery and not grades, and that a failure in a class or several shouldn't be permanently incorporated into a "GPA" that also doesn't really capture the true essence of someone's knowledge and mastery.

In the past year, I have been learning a lot about autism and ADHD -- in no small part because I have come to realize I have both -- and I cannot help but come to the conclusion that regardless of why an individual student is different -- whether it be autism, ADHD, life-event-driven depression (eg from a death in the family or a divorce), or high or low or late-blooming intelligence, or even mere boredom that needs to be overcome by the "right spark" -- the school system as currently instituted can handle none of this -- and what's worse, any student who cannot conform to this, even if temporarily, is permanently considered flawed somehow.