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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

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346 points obscurette | 2 comments | 12 Nov 24 14:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.501s | 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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michaelrpeskin ◴[12 Nov 24 16:01 UTC] No.42116631[source]▶
That's "equity" for you. We can't be unfair and give someone something that makes them better. It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up.
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sixo ◴[12 Nov 24 16:25 UTC] No.42116923[source]▶
Equity really isn't the ideology doing this, except in a few cases, it's something else. I'd speculate the dominant effect is that people tend to dislike and resist what they have a hard time imagining: there's a strong bias towards easily-administrated uniformity, and ppl tend to enforce what they know and what they were brought up in themselves
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dpkirchner ◴[12 Nov 24 16:32 UTC] No.42116987[source]▶
Agreed, and that strong bias is likely driven by cost, not the equity boogeyman that causes many a jerked knee.
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1. hibikir ◴[12 Nov 24 16:56 UTC] No.42117238[source]▶
Cost is a reason, but also there's social concerns. In the standardized system, all classmates share the same material, at the same speed. This shared experience disappears when every student is going at their own place, looking at a computer. This leads to the students being a bit more alienated from each other, and comparisons that go way past just a grade.

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.

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2. theamk ◴[12 Nov 24 17:48 UTC] No.42117800[source]▶
American high schools (grades 9+) already give each student customized schedule, so there is no single set of "classmates" anymore - a Computer Science class might have 9-th graders and 11-th graders sitting side-by-side. This does not reflect their knowledge levels, it only means that one student decided to take CS first, and other student decided to leave CS for later and take some other class (like Physics) first.

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.