The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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'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.

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."

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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'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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

"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...

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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"