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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

(www.afterbabel.com)
346 points obscurette | 1 comments | 12 Nov 24 14:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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donatj ◴[12 Nov 24 15:41 UTC] No.42116365[source]▶
I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.

The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.

We had this. 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. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.

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1. chongli ◴[12 Nov 24 16:08 UTC] No.42116704[source]▶
This is because education is more about gatekeeping and politics than trying to maximize human capital development. We all ostensibly want it to be about human capital but our attitudes and behaviour towards education at the political level show otherwise.

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