The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that this is always done in the name of "equity", but the result is that the system perpetuates the inequities that already exist. Because the public schools force kids into grade bands and don't allow children who are ahead to learn at their level, wealthy parents (and only wealthy parents) figure out ways to supplement or move their kids into schools that are appropriate for their level.

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".

Plus it can't be denied that the system incentives holding smart kids back because they boost the metrics: GPA, standardized tests, graduation rates.

+1. Folks pushing for equity haven't read (or too young to have read) "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, and it shows.

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.

This is a silly thing to say. There's no evidence that edtech was forced to band students to grade levels due to equity. It's just as likely it happened due to Bush's Leave No Child Behind, or out of a desire for administrators to follow rules.

"Bergeron" is one of those rare things that's just presciently ahead of it's time it's almost spooky (kind of like "1984").

Where do you think the rules that administrators have to follow come from? And what do you think the purpose of No Child Left Behind was? Its long title is "an act to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind."

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.

> wealthy parents (and only wealthy parents) figure out ways to supplement or move their kids into schools that are appropriate for their level.

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.

Reminiscent of the recent HN submission for "Security is a Useless Controls Problem", re: 5 monkeys & ladder expt.:

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.

You're literally describing equity. The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible.

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 more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible.

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.

It is not "always" done for that purpose; often people don't want children to learn things for other reasons, like wanting to have more control over them, not liking the implications of certain historical events, or having fanciful ideas about preventing their children from engaging in risky behaviors by pretending they don't exist.

> 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. ...

> 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.

> that this is always done in the name of "equity",

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.

People were like this even before equity was much of a concern.

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.

I went to one of those low-income, garbage schools. I grew up in poverty. I was very frustrated by this attitude when I was in school but with a few decades of hindsight I see why this issue is complicated: do you focus on helping your poorest students graduate and not fall into indigence or do you focus on helping your brightest escape the flywheel of poverty and enter the upper-middle class?

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.

It’s very much true that wealthy parents supplement their kids to keep them challenged and leveling up, so to say. What you’re describing re: AP classes is for high school students. While the parent comment may have been referring to high school, I imagine they meant elementary and middle school level. Students with support (read: challenged to learn at their level and not slowed down to the pace of the average student) are able to take more AP courses because they are ready at a younger age. They take AP Calculus in grade 9 or 10. My son, for instance, is taking algebra 1 as a 6th grader because we started doing math lessons at home for fun the last couple years. In terms of AP science classes, it’s typically hard to take all of them if you’re not doing outside lessons due to the nature of prerequisites. And, back to the point of extra lessons (which only wealthy parents can afford) I’ve had a few 8th graders (learning programming with me starting in grade 7) who scored 5s on the AP computer science A exam. Often students can’t get to that AP level without additional support prior to high school.

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.

If you exclude any other reason from the discussion then it's true but tautological. The questions I mentioned still tie into age and aren't just "in the curriculum ever yes or no" type of questions (for instance, at what age should sex education be given?).

It's not a matter of "handicapping", it's a multi-armed bandit problem where you only have N dollars to throw at the problem and you need to decide what distribution of N produces the best outcomes. I went to one of those low-income schools and without intervention I can guarantee you that over 60% wouldn't graduate. Even with a lot of help only 50% of my school graduated when I was in school (admittedly a while ago.) Even then, the number of folks who went to a four-year college was low.

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).

As many countries demonstrated, wealth does not buy good genes. Talented kids stand out, as long as we have a decent public school system, which places a high academic standard and holds teachers accountable. That's how East-European countries and Asian countries produce high-quality students.

I understand that wealthy parents are going to show up in these stats far more often than non-wealthy. I take umbrage at the statement it's only the wealthy. It has turned into effectively only for the wealthy due to the focus on equity over the past 20+ years as we've torn down any sort of public programs for these students.

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.

I really don't think that you and I disagree—I'm talking about the way that things are for my kid who's about to go into elementary school, not the way that things were when we were growing up.

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.

Alright, I'm willing to hear this argument about. What do you think is the "best in class" solution in this space?