In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole.
The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations.
Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.
There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long.
As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged.
One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility.
All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.
> The culture in America doesn't respect...educators in the way it used to.
Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.
My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.
I think we tried that in the form of scholarships. Basically, the students with the highest grades get discounts from different colleges. It's not exactly the same, but the effect is similar, and this system has been running for generations.
I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty. Parents who earn less usually don't have time to help kids with their school work, or don't understand the school work, or don't know how to study or teach children. Sure, there's exceptions to this everywhere, but that's the general pattern.
Incidentally, Louisiana has/had a program called TOPs that covers in-state tuition for students that get over a 3.something GPA. Who benefits the most from it? Kids whose families make above the median income in the state.
I don't think giving X dollars to the families with the top ranking students would change society overnight.
> I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.I think one big problem is that low test scores are highly correlated to poverty.
True, but the arrow of causality is not from "poverty" to "low test scores".
Children of poor (and sometimes illiterate) Chinese immigrants did and do quite well!
Your phrasing is crude but there is truth in it. In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture, and it would be far more feasible for the government to pick up the slack and level the playing field (affordable quality education, abolish legacy admissions, etc.). Any amount of public school infrastructure and funding doesn't inherently get people to learn; students play a part in their own success. Of course, changing culture is much easier said than done.
> In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture
African-American communities could be a lot better off if they had been able to take advantage of the same veterans benefits programs that white veterans were able to take advantage of, if they had been able to get home loans on the same terms that white counterparts were able to, if Black professionals had been able find work outside of Black operated businesses, and so on.
But yeah, Black people are real lazy if you just ignore hundreds of years of history. Black people ain't lazy, they just don't have the same opportunities as everyone else because when they walk into an interview with a white manager, there's a real good chance that manager is thinking something like, "In theory, African-American communities could be much better off with some drastic changes in culture".
You're not addressing what I said. I recognize that African-Ammericans are generally very disadvantaged by a multitude of factors that they had no control over. However, a drastic change in culture that embraces education could improve outcomes signficantly, and ample government support could boost this to the point of actual equality being viable in a few generations. I don't remember if it was Kenyan, Nairobi, or other immigrants, but I remember reading about certain African-American immigrants being focused on education and doing fairly well (don't remember how well), like the Chinese immigrants mentioned upthread.
I addressed the fact that you're conflating over a hundred years of systematic disenfranchisement with an some imagined flaw in Black culture. I've taught black kids and I've taught white kids, and there is not a cultural difference between them that explains why one group generally succeeds in life, while the other generally flounders.
> I remember reading about certain African-American immigrants being focused on education and doing fairly well
From the Harvard Business Review: "In the United States, where 13.7% of the population is foreign-born, immigrants represent 20.2% of the self-employed workforce and 25% of startup founders". So, this pattern shows up for immigrant communities in general, it is not evidence that Africans off the boat from Africa have a different culture that makes them more likely to succeed than their American counterparts that have lived in America for generations.
The idea that a historically disenfranchised group is unsuccessful due to certain "cultural values" does not hold water. It's just a way to ignore history, and in turn ignore and excuse existing biases.
How did the Chinese immigrants become so prosperous so quickly if not for their cultural values around hard work and education? It's not as if there was affirmative action for them at the time because they were disenfranchised or something.
Education matters. Black immigrants (from Africa, the Caribbeans, etc.) are doing pretty well. There may be some subconscious biases in hiring, but it's not significant.
I'm not ignoring history. I recognize that African-Americans have been heavily disenfranchised and discriminated against. I'm trying to find a way forward from here. If African-Americans achieve similar educational attainment, I think it's fair to say that we'll be on the path to achieving equality. As they become more successful, fewer people will have undue stereotypes about them. Now the problem becomes initiating the process of betterment. The government should pitch in, but that will do little good without a change in culture. Plants can't grow without light, even if there's plenty of water and nutrients.
> How did the Chinese immigrants become so prosperous so quickly if not for their cultural values around hard work and education?
> Black immigrants (from Africa, the Caribbeans, etc.) are doing pretty well.
You keep attributing immigrant success rates to "cultural values" when they should be attributed to the self-selection process of emigration.
If it is as you say, that a sample of immigrants is representative of their native population and their "cultural values", then you should see comparable poverty rates and earning rates in immigrants' native populations, adjusted for local economies. You do not see that. Immigrants tend to be more enterprising and hardworking, otherwise they would not undergo the immense challenge of immigration in the first place. This whole idea is as absurd as saying that American expats in Berlin or Paris are a representative sample of Americans, and their ability to thrive in another country is reflective of uniquely American "cultural values".
The fact of the matter is that those black immigrants have good educations and are doing well in the US, even if there is perhaps some bias in hiring. I'm talking about outcome here. So shift the culture of African-Americans here to focus on attaining good education, throw in government support and enforce race-blind policies (possibly favor poorer candidates that are acceptable), and I think there will be a similar outcome: within a few generations, equality should generally be reachable. I think that shift in culture is necessary and isn't widespread in African-American communities today.
> Immigrants tend to be more enterprising and hardworking
Yeah. So have the African-American populace at large match that.
> This whole idea is as absurd as saying that American expats in Berlin or Paris are a representative sample of Americans, and their ability to thrive in another country is reflective of uniquely American "cultural values".
I don't know what the financial situation of those expats are and how hard it is to live in Berlin or Paris, but if it is difficult then hard work is necessary, no? Whether that would be American cultural values is trickier to answer because of the diversity here.
You're fine with comparing African Americans to African immigrants, so let's now compare White Americans to African immigrants: most Americans are not highly skilled, while many African immigrants are. In your words, we should "have the American populace at large match that".
Seems like you're trying to get me to say something wrong. Anyways, I see nothing wrong with encouraging skilled work all around. I'm sure there are plenty of things to innovate on. For example, reducing dangerous manual labor or mitigating global warming. Maybe one day we'll be so advanced that few people will need to do work.
> Seems like you're trying to get me to say something wrong.
Listen, if you honestly thought that saying half the stuff you said was right, then I don't know where to start. Imagine landing an interview for a job that will significantly effect where you can afford to live, what you can provide for your kids, and your ability to retire. Now imagine that your hiring manager is making value judgements about you personally, that are based on unfounded opinions he has about how your "culture", and you're passed over for a candidate that comes from a "culture" that he holds in higher regard. This is a real life scenario for millions of Americans, every single day.
I don't even know you're drawing these conclusions from what I'm saying.
Here:
Result I'm looking for: Decent baseline of financial stability among African-Americans
Objective: Get educational attainment and good employment up
Major factors I think are necessary (for relatively quick results, anyways):
- culture shifts towards focusing on education
- government funds public schools in terms of materials, transportation, teachers, etc.
- reduce college tuition somehow
- race-blind hiring/whatever policies
I'm just trying to justify why I think the culture is important. There is evidence that culture is important. Furthermore, I'm saying that there's currently a lack of that education-focused culture and that's why e.g. Baltimore isn't doing too great even with all the funding.
So you should at most have an issue with
- culture shift necessary (which embodies "current culture not working")
I don't see where your evidence that culture isn't an important factor here is. Also, I'm not here to talk about historic grievances and bias and all that. I'm trying to discuss a way out, not bemoan the current circumstances or hope the world magically changes overnight.
> I don't even know [how] you're drawing these conclusions from what I'm saying.
That is abundantly clear. Here it is in a nutshell: *if* you accept that "culture is important," *then* you cannot have "race-blind hiring/whatever policies," *because* you have already accepted that one culture values hard work more than another culture.
When you reject that "culture is important," then you can hire individuals based on their merits, instead of the opinions you have about their culture. Making decisions about individuals based on opinions you have about their culture is the definition of racism.
When did I say to consider culture in hiring people? You're just putting words into my mouth. I'm saying culture is an important factor in getting African-Americans to be employed at good jobs, not that companies should consider a candidate's culture. If people start growing crops in hydroponic systems, end consumers won't care as long as the results are good. Wouldn't it be great if more and more African-Americans get quality education and it becomes less and less tenable for companies to have racist (perhaps unintentionally) hiring policies in the face of skilled work?
Cultural problems within the poorer communities in the US cannot be solved completely internally. Because sadly many of the problems come from systemic racism forcing people into a box of sorts. Escaping that requires overcoming a mountain of challenges. My SO taught in some of these schools, and the circumstances in these communities is tragic.
It's a bit like telling prisoners they can all leave if they'd just try harder, meanwhile the outside world has been pouring concrete around the outside for decades.
I don't mean to say that changing a culture/mindset is at all easy. It's just that if the culture were to start changing, I think we would see significant progress in terms of elevating African-Americans to decent socioeconomic standing. The other day there was another HN thread about charter schools, where some people discussed what to do about chronic trouble kids (for lack of a better term). The fact that home life is a major factor in how kids develop means that bad households generally produce bad kids, but good households generally produce good kids.
If there was some magical way to change the culture of many African-American communities instantly, and if the government bolstered schools, healthcare, and whatnot, that would really be something. I don't think all that money will be very effective if the culture isn't changed, though. And affirmative action is too late, too little in the education journey.
I recognize this is like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill right now, but that's the only feasible way out that I see.
I haven't flagged a single one of your replies. I even vouched for this one to reply to it. I don't think I'll do it again. Anyways, when did I say "bad white families" don't need to change? You're putting words into my mouth. It's just that there seems to be a lot more of the whole poverty thing going on with black people. Personally I wouldn't care so much about race and focus on poverty instead, except apparently that's not how a lot of people see it, so I'm focusing on black people.
It doesn't affect my self-esteem or anything but it's a bit sad that you're making wild accusations about Internet strangers. Chill.
Merit scholarships were already out of fashion by the time I was applying for colleges (circa 2010). Especially at more selective schools (those with lower admission rates), merit scholarships have been displaced in favor of diversity scholarships, which I suppose reflects the changing priorities of those schools.
Scholarships also just possibly dried up after the great recession. My wife and I both graduated from same state with similar GPA, though I was 2010, she 2012. We qualified for the exact same scholarship. Mine covered 100% of my tuition, hers 75%.
My son struggled to read when he was young. Over the summer we set a goal and attached a payout to it. Yes, I bribed my son to read. The problem is now I can't get him to stop.
A kid is working a decades long project to figure out how he wants to spend his life and do the work to make that happen.
Imagine facing that and being told you have to do something you aren’t interested in doing without a clear concept of why it even matters… and without really any say in the matter anyway.
I don’t know if I would have the tenacity to tackle a twenty year project partially against my will and I don’t have to worry about developing socially, growing physically, etc.
We've got a six year old, just about to start school in a few months, and we've done the same thing.
We started giving him a quarter of a lego minecraft set every time he read two pages of text - either in English or Finnish - then we had to move to a bunch of bricks every time he read a full chapter.
The surge in his effort, and abilities, was almost frighteningly quick.
(Here in Finland kids can go to daycare from 1 year old, and start in pre-school when they're six. School-proper starts at seven.)
I don't think you can parent without some level of bribing but note that research has been done suggesting that extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation.
One personal anecdote of mine is a school friend who announced that he was never going to read a book again after finishing school (with good grades). For him, reading books was not a thing he loved, just a means to an end.
Sadly, the link you provided shows how much nonsense there is in this space. They provide two sources of "evidence". Both of them are total junk.
For example, they say: As educators, we have heard a lot about the downside of extrinsic motivation. Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation produces only short-term effects, at best. One study out of Princeton University goes so far as to say, “External incentives are weak reinforcers in the short run, and negative reinforcers in the long run.”
The second piece of evidence comes from the founder of this website excelatlife.com A website by a psychologist who treats anxiety and depression, and "Dr. Frank's strong interest in Eastern philosophies and Buddhist psychology has led her to train in various forms of Tai Chi/Qi Gong as well as other mindfulness methods for over 15 years. She is a third degree black belt in American Kenpo and continues her involvement in martial arts at the Martial Arts Center." She knows about as much about childhood education as you do.
Maybe your statement is right, but your evidence is non-evidence.
That was just a Google result that I scanned and found reasonable, so I have no great desire to defend it strongly, but:
The economics paper is trying to reconcile the economics orthodoxy of "incentives matter" with the experimental evidence (that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt.
It's intro is a decent survey of the issue, and has the meta benefit that economists if they could prove this effect didn't happen would be happy to prove that. Instead they are trying to adjust their model to account for it.
> Kohn
(1993) surveys the results from a variety of programmes aimed at getting people to lose weight,
stop smoking, or wear seat belts, either offering or not offering rewards. Consistently, individ-
uals in “reward” treatments showed better compliance at the beginning, but worse compliance
in the long run than those in the “no-reward” or “untreated controls” groups. Taken together,
these many findings indicate a limited impact of rewards on “engagement” (current activity) and
a negative one on “re-engagement” (persistence).
> A related body of work transposes these ideas from the educational setting to the workplace.
In well-known contributions, Etzioni (1971) argues that workers find control of their behaviour
via incentives “alienating” and “dehumanizing”, and Deci and Ryan (1985) devote a chapter of
their book to a criticism of the use of performance-contingent rewards in the work setting.2
> And,
without condemning contingent compensation, Baron and Kreps (1999, p. 99) conclude that:
There is no doubt that the benefits of [piece-rate systems or pay-for-performance incentive
devices] can be considerably compromised when the systems undermine workers’ intrinsic
motivation.
> Kreps (1997) reports his uneasiness when teaching human resources management and
discussing the impact of incentive devices in a way that is somewhat foreign to standard
economic theory. And indeed, recent experimental evidence on the use of performance-
contingent wages or fines confirms that explicit incentives sometimes result in worse compliance
than incomplete labour contracts (Fehr and Falk (1999), Fehr and Schmidt (2000), Gneezy
and Rustichini (2000a)). Relatedly, Gneezy and Rustichini (2000b) find that offering monetary
incentives to subjects for answering questions taken from an IQ test strictly decreases their
performance, unless the “piece rate” is raised to a high enough level. In the policy domain,
Frey and Oberholzer-Gee (1997) surveyed citizens in Swiss cantons where the government was
considering locating a nuclear waste repository; they found that the fraction supporting siting of
the facility in their community fell by half when public compensation was offered.
> that it references from across decades) that incentives can in some cases hurt.
To be clear, originally you said "extrinsic motivation can negatively impact intrinsic motivation". "Incentives can hurt" is a totally different statement; but I assume you still mean the original.
A short digression. As a scientist I think we should teach critical reading skills when it comes to science. This study has a bunch of things going against it:
1. It is published in an economics venue. This means the reviewers were economists, not psychologists. They had no clue about rewards, children, etc. They are experts in evaluating the model, not in what you want to know about, which is the part about humans.
2. You are relying on something in the paper that isn't the key contribution. You're relying on a short survey in the intro. No reviewer carefully read this and proposed updates. And even if they did, they were not the deciding factor in acceptance. Even if the intro was one-sided and mostly junk, if the model was amazing, the paper would be published. Papers are not evaluated based on their intros.
3. The paper is almost 25 years old, surveying material that is more than 25 years old. Science changes. A lot. The conclusions here could be totally different from the conclusions in a paper today because we have so much more evidence, higher quality studies, and better conceptual frameworks.
4. The authors have a particular goal: they want to show that there's a conflict between internal and external goals. This taints everything. They don't want to present an even-handed review, they literally want to make their case to a reader. I'm not saying this in some "conspiracy" sense. When I write a paper I want to argue my view, and put my view's worldview at the center, because I want to win people over.
All of this means that you should not be reading this paper in this way. It's the wrong paper, from the wrong time, with the wrong thesis, and you're looking in the wrong section.
1. It is published in Contemporary Educational Psychology. You can bet the reviewers here know the material, know the latest studies on child learning, etc.
2. The key contribution of the paper is a survey. This is what they are being evaluated for. You missed a paper? Nope, your survey is bad we don't accept you. You didn't fairly represent what that paper said, we don't accept you. etc. The paper is being evaluated by what you are looking for.
3. The survey is fairly current, 4-5 years is ok. You would expect a survey every that many years, or at least once per decade or so.
4. The authors might have biases, but not in this paper. This paper's goal is to present the state of the art. And reviewers aren't looking at the paper based on how well did their argue their point, they're looking at it based on how well they represented the state of the art.
All of this means that this paper should be read to find what you want to know. It's the right kind of paper, from the right time, with the idea of looking at the field and answering these kinds of questions, and we're looking in the main body of the paper.
Now, let's turn to the paper itself.
What it says is that extrinsic motivation is no longer seen as so alien from intrinsic motivation. That in the past 20 years there's a new framework that talks about internalizing extrinsic motivation.
The story is the same if you look at the paper above on language learning. The two types of motivation are not seen as opposites anymore.
You can keep reading by looking for "survey intrinsic extrinsic motivation teaching" and you'll find many more post 2020 papers. They all say the same thing. The field has changed. The two aren't opposites. Both are useful.
My math teacher in 6th grade had a conversation with my parents that essentially went "he's not going to learn algebra from the Hobbit, but I feel bad telling him not to read"
If we did that, the money would mostly go to the well off already. They’ve already got a system in place, they are already deeply into what their kids are studying. It doesn’t sound like much would improve.
But school districts are already segmented by wealth. So sure money would go to some families in the wealthier school districts. But also families in the poor ones.
I think you might be surprised at the distribution in wealth even within schools. Only an anecdote but I went to a public high school in somewhat of an inner city, and there was a stark contrast in financial well being across my classmates and myself. The kids from upper middle class families were the ones in AP classes and who went on to great universities, while the more median student likely came from a household that were much closer to the poverty line.
If performance had come with a financial bonus, I'd guess 90% of the recipients wouldn't notice any difference in their lives/outcomes. Maybe even a higher percentage than that.
This is how I finally memorized my multiplication tables in elementary school. My father paid me. He made me a set of flash cards and had a schedule of credits for each fact learned but I did not get the payout until I learned them all flawlessly.
>All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to.
Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc.
How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.
Because the top end of US education is still very strong, with some of the best colleges in the world.
Strong capital markets makes the US probably the easiest place to start a company and seek funding.
The US remains a place where smart, talented individuals can succeed and make far more money than peers, attracting a pool of very talented immigrants.
First of all, it's important to define what we mean by "innovation".
Is cryptocurrency "innovation"? Credit-default swaps? Leveraged buyouts? So much of what's been making absurd amounts of money in recent decades—and which gets openly called "innovative" by many people—is not better ways of doing things for people, but simply better ways of separating people from their money.
Second of all, it's important to look at who, exactly, is doing the hard work on the innovations that are pushing us forward, rather than simply making rich people richer. How many of these innovations come from people who got their education 15, 25, 40 years ago?
Third of all, it's important to question the very premise: I'm absolutely in agreement that there is a strong thread of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and that there have been changes in our public school system that have caused some serious problems over the past few decades...but to what extent are these problems universal? To what extent do they actually leave graduates less well prepared to be innovative?
Indeed, to what extent is innovation even a product of education, rather than culture and creativity?
I work for an American company remotely from Europe. I didn't leverage any educational facility from the US yet I'm contributing to the fact that the US is "leading the way" in technology. And the reason is simple: not only do they pay me more than an equivalent European company, often it's hard to find an "equivalent" European company where I can work on something I find interesting.
Now, something did originally created the conditions for why US is leading, but once that has happened it can become a self sustaining network effect, provided enough money is kept flowing
> How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output (its people) is in such dire straights?
That's because it's not the people educated by the U.S. systems that are producing so much. I worked at a FANG company and within my team of 50 engineers, I was one of two people who were born in the U.S. It's not just tech either — my father is a chemical engineer and most of the engineers he works with are from other countries.
The U.S. is currently still one of the top places that the world's best talent wants to move to; whether that continues to hold true remains to be seen.
Yes. The population drop alone is going to make all this happen. Nevermind the massive black hole of citizenry who know next to nothing and are proud of it.
The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.
While I'm not completely against performance-based pay, there are some issues that would make this particular approach unworkable.
One is that in dealing with children, personal compatibility matters a great deal more. Some teacher-student relationships will "just click" and others fail.
Another is the dependence of the students' performance on their home environment.
So, even an excellent teacher will get poor results when working in a disadvantaged district. These things would have to be taken into account when designing a reward system for teachers.
A proper proposal would be a lot more words than my little posting!
It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be significantly better than the existing system, which has zero incentive for the teachers to get results.
Except, of course, wanting to educate -- which is ostensibly the reason they got into the profession in the first place. It probably wasn't for the pay.
Every job has its drudgery, no matter how much someone wants to have that job. I would also expect teachers who love to teach also want to teach those eager to learn. This is about teaching those who are not so interested in learning.
Also, you can't say teachers are poorly paid by neglecting they only work 8 months of the year, have a gold plated medical plan, and can retire with a lifetime very generous pension.
Can you offer any evidence or reasoning as to why I should believe this? It would seem to assert that somehow student success/failure currently sits entirely in the hands of teachers: they know what is needed and could do it if only they were marginally more motivated. I'm not a teacher myself but have been involved in the system my entire life and this doesn't ring true at all. Even if it were possible it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling. Which seems to run counter to the goals of public education.
Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work. In my own company, Zortech, the staff was paid a base rate plus a cut of the gross sales for the month.
> it would almost certainly result in teachers focusing all of their efforts on the best students and none of it on those who are struggling
Actually the reverse would happen. The best students would automatically attain grade level performance, and likely exceed it. They'll already get the bonus for those students without any effort. The gold is in getting the underachievers to achieve.
In companies where bonuses are based on, say, revenue booked per quarter, salesmen play all kinds of games to jack that number up as far as it can go, regardless of the collateral damage. Piss off the engineers by promising the impossible? Who cares, I closed that McScully deal. Sold a customer a product that won't actually solve their problem? Cha-ching, bonus time!
Now, when you figure out how to tie sales bonuses to positive outcomes... that's a different story. Then the incentives match the actual goals.
But that's really hard to do. Outcomes can take years to measure, if they are measurable at all.
Hence why you end up with all kinds of really screwed-up corporate behavior. It's not because people or corporations are evil -- they just take the shortest path to the win, even if that's not really the road you wanted them on.
Schools are equivalent to large companies, and large companies can screw the proverbial six ways from Sunday for years before it hurts their bottom line, for any number of reasons.
Many Americans seem to have this mental disease whereby they think every problem can be solved with more money.
Large companies still have plenty of incentive pay.
Currently, teachers have zero incentive to get results. I bet you'll see results that follow incentives. Of course it won't be perfect - but I bet it'll be much better than the current disaster.
People like money. Especially the people who say they aren't motivated by money :-)
I work for a large company notorious for shooting itself in the foot because someone’s personal incentives to ship a shiny new thing and get promoted causes long-term repetitional harm as older things get abandoned. We pay for performance too, and quite well at that :)
While that might (or might not) mitigate one perverse incentive, there are lots more. It's important for policy proposals to take unintended consequences into account. What others can you foresee and how would you mitigate them?
I suspect the problem is how you can reasonably write a general spec for that which doesn't systematically doom some teachers, especially during the bootstrap phase (arguably quite a few years).
In an ideal world, our perfectly spherical students would enter the classroom "at grade level" and ready to proceed to the next level.
But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75? Or are we in a "we started back, and are going to beat them by going slower" mentality, and even getting 0.75 grade per year would be a win?
Conversely, if you're at a magnet school, you may be taking in students already a few grades above the norm on day one of class. There are kids who can absolute bury the needle on a standardized test-- "12th grade equivalent" at 5th or 6th grade. You could simply babysit them all year and still clear the bar.
I also expect there's a huge amount of dealing with Karen parents too-- I suspect an firm hand in holding back underachieving students could result in parental backlash. Too many parents would rather see the kid tossed out the moment he turns 18, even if they haven't gotten them career or independent-life ready.
> But what happens if you inherit a class of students that's barely above "remedial"-- starting one or two grades back on day 1-- what's the right metric for success? Getting all the way up to "at grade level" is probably unrealistic, but should we expect them to make up 1.25 grades per year, or 1.75?
Well, obviously, they've been making less than 1.0 grades per year so far; you'd expect them to keep going at that rate, not to suddenly double their rate.
but it doesn’t really work in the private sector. MBOs are common for US companies and to this day i’ve got teams across other departments that haven’t met MBO at 100% for years but the higher management seems it okay. the minimum work is still done but the full goals are never realized and these departments are just stuck in a rut. but, who cares? the minimum work is done, the progress numbers still go up, just we don’t have the ideal end result, just an acceptable one.
teachers already run the line of barely enough compensation to make it worthwhile except for those who are inclined towards teaching.
teachers are expected to do too much and there are too many goals imo for the position. whether we want it to be the case or not there is a huge social and mental health aspect to their jobs, and the standards look to be wildly inconsistent even within the same city as to what a successful education means.
like would you want to put a ton of effort in on a project knowing that the very next quarter you’re going to have to basically change the entire stack you’re working with and have a completely different set of regulations and project goals? and on top of it all, you need to get your team to even take the project seriously? and to make it even more fun a bunch of your teams’ families and friends are telling the world that the language you picked is awful and evil and are trying to regulate it out of use?
how much would you want for conditions like that every single project?
Performance reviews aren't always based on "objective goals" and it'd be bad if they were, because almost anyone outside of sales could game them.
Typically it's a kind of stack ranking based on how you performed relative to peers, where relative means in the vague opinion of your management tree.
Public teacher unions are adamantly against subjective reviews, which is why I suggested an objective mechanism.
> in the vague opinion of your management tree
I know it's popular to believe that management has no idea who the real performers are. But every office I've worked in, everyone knew who the good performers were and who the deadwood was. Including the managers.
It's also true that every person I've talked to who had been laid off was sure he was unfairly targeted. Even the ones who'd come to work strung out on coke.
Let's apply this to bankers, too. They must give a checking account to anybody who shows up, and their pay can be based on how much money is in those checking accounts at the end of the fiscal year.
a teacher's job is to teach their students. a "banker" (at the sort of bank where you might open a checking account) isn't expected to grow your checking account for you. you're supposed to do that, and the bank is supposed to hold it safely. I don't understand the comparison you are trying to make.
> because almost anyone outside of sales could game them
Perhaps you haven't worked in sales? My experience of sales meetings was that most of the meeting was taken up with discussions of how to optimise commission. The sales manager was totally in on the game; after all, he got a skim of his salesmen's commissions.
In no other environment have I seen people so obsessed with juking the stats.
Even sales manipulates them -- giving away way too much to lock in a longer deal this quarter because it makes this quarter's numbers look better had been a problem at places I've worked.
Pervasiveness seems to be more a function of whatever the latest workplace fad is rather than based on underlying assessments of how well it works. I've heard upper management outright say things like they're mandating return-to-office simply because everybody else is doing it.
Since the phrase 'piece work' first appears in writing around the year 1549, it is likely that at about this time, the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home, rather than within the master's workshop.
Did you not have any history classes in your early schooling?
I bet piece work was paid for the piece, i.e. results, not time in the seat.
I never wrote that all work was done in the office, sheesh. Besides, any organized labor project is going to need the labor on site. Piece work can only be done if no coordination or teamwork is needed.
> the master craftsmen of the guild system began to assign their apprentices work on pieces which could be performed at home
Sounds like speculation to me. Where are those apprentices going to get the tools? Is he just going to carry the anvil home with him? How about the forge? Even hand tools have historically been pretty costly items, up until just a few years ago.
> Did you not have any history classes in your early schooling?
Not much history is taught in public schools - not my fault. But I have a cite for you:
"Chapter 2 examines the material and religious foundations of
capitalism that were laid down during the so-called Dark Ages."
Huh? No, it's not. The first step may be learning what "capitalism" means. It's a specific economic system that developed in early modernity. It's not some "natural state of man" any more than feudalism was before it.
The opinions of Rodney Stark are neither unkown, uncontested, nor definitive.
At best they are niche and contraversial (admittedly it's the phrase "revolutionary and controversial" that most commonly appears on his book reviews).
I spoke of modern capitalism which is a well understood term, as acknowledged by bandrami.
If you wish to speculate on undocumented pre history then it's reasonable to assume that work from home predates first documentation and goes back as far in time as large works with small parts existed.
I've read Stark, and he goes way out in front of the actual documents we have. The high middle ages contained elements of a market economy that eventually developed into mercantilism and thence capitalism, which is very different from your claim that capitalism is a lot older than 1549. (You also seem to be conflating mercantilism and capitalism, incidentally, but either way the result is the same.)
One way to achieve that, for a teacher, would be to get all the good students into your class, and avoid having any bad students, or find reasons to kick them out. Do you have countermeasures for that?
Why would it be ineffective? Suppose you're a teacher at a school where the kids are all below grade level. Sounds like a much larger opportunity to get those bonuses than a school where all kids are above average.
> or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers
Teachers are only human, and humans respond to positive incentives. The current system has no incentives.
You claimed that the fix to getting lucky with a batch of good students (or unlucky with bad) is random assignment. Now it seems that you're claiming that getting a bad batch is a good deal as it will be easier to get them to improve...
I think you have baked into your plan an incorrect assumption: You are massively overestimating the effect a teacher's input has on student output. Of all the things that lead to student education performance, the quality/performance of the teacher is very low on the list. Teachers are not factory workers, where if they are more skilled, or faster, or better trained, they'll produce more widgets faster.
Most teachers can predict each of their student's year-end educational performance by the end of the first parent-teacher meeting week. Students whose parents who are not involved or where there is no culture valuing education at home are pretty much screwed, no matter how much effort is spent on them, and students whose parents are dialed in and taking an active role in their educations are going to succeed regardless of whether the teacher is even there.
Basing a teacher's bonus on student performance will have one effect: Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.
There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes". Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".
> You are massively overestimating the effect a teacher's input has on student output
Who needs teachers, then, if they are so ineffectual? Might as well replace them with a canned video course.
BTW, every school knows who the good teachers are and who the useless ones are. They get paid exactly the same. Do you think that's a good system?
> There are teachers who are better than other teachers, but it's not generally measurable in "student outcomes".
Of course they are.
> Just like there are better programmers than other programmers, but it's not measurable in "company revenue".
Company revenue is the sum of all the contributions of its workers. A student outcome is not the sum of the other student's outcomes, and is measurable independently.
> Teachers will be incentivized to move to schools or districts with better students.
Sure. And there are only so many of those positions available.
My parents and step-parents are all retired teachers so I've seen the system from both the student and teacher's sides (and now also as a parent). School is not like a factory where raw material (students) come in, teachers apply work onto the raw material, and then finished product (educated students) come out. You can measure the students, but you are not measuring teaching quality. Student success is probably close to 95% parents/culture/homelife/nutrition and 5% some result of teacher input. If you have a reliable way to isolate and measure that 5% independently, by all means, suggest it to your local school board. They would absolutely love it.
> Who needs teachers, then, if they are so ineffectual? Might as well replace them with a canned video course.
Replacing teachers by canned video courses does not a priori sound like a bad idea.
The central reason why this is not done is that school also serves as daycare, so you need some employees to supervise the children, i.e. removing the teachers will hardly decrease the employee count. All together, if we consider the additinal cost of creating the video courses, this measure would hardly decrease the cost of schooling. So politicians think "never change a running system" and "avoid the trouble with the teacher's unions" and leave everything as it is.
I think it’s the reverse. The baseline remedial student growth is say .8 grades per year. Therefore to get 1.0 grades of progress you would need 125% baseline effectiveness. To get the same with a 1.2 growth rate student it would only take 83%. Students also can’t be judged in isolation, remedial students adversely affect other students so that needs to be taken into account somehow.
I’m not saying it couldn’t be done but you would need a pretty sophisticated model to try to figure out who is or isn’t effective. Then once you turned on the model you would need to constantly tweek it to handle metrics based tampering.
If you did that some years would be great and some total losses. The reason being that at each grade level there are 4-10 kids that are completely unmanageable. If you allowed random to happen some percentage of the time you would overload a class with mayhem
I find it weird the intensity with which people believe that teachers rather than students are the bottleneck here. If you want to add an incentive it makes much more sense to incent the students to do well.
No. Children are not the bottleneck. Parents are. All the statistics we have say that children in homes where the adults value education and urge their children to learn do better, regardless of other circumstances. Unruly children are typically the result of parental neglect. There are many many examples among poor families of well-behaved children achieving a trajectory that raises them out of poverty within a generation. But it all has to do with the attitude toward education and behavior in the home.
The classic example is poor Asian immigrants that produce successful professionals within one or two generations. Strict behavioral expectations in the home, coupled with an attitude of parental sacrifice for their child's educational opportunities causes significantly better results decade over decade. But this is an attitude that often doesn't translate to many American households.
Vouchers might be one way to help, but it still requires parental involvement in creating the incentive for the child.
How would vouchers help? It's not like changing schools increases parental involvement. If that's your model the use of public money that makes sense is paying parents to be more involved.
An incentive for the teachers is better than no incentive.
I recall a case at a company I worked for. They snagged a major contract with IBM, but it had a tight deadline. They hired a team of 6 or 7 greybeards to do the work. The fun thing was they each got a $10,000 bonus if delivered on time.
They delivered it on time, got the $10 grand each (a lot of money in those days), IBM was happy, all good. So I asked them, did the $10 grand bonus motivate them to get it done on time?
They were offended, saying they were professionals and would have worked just as hard without it.
I laughed, and didn't buy it. Do you?
Here's another case. There was an earthquake in LA, and one of the cloverleaf freeway interchanges fell down. They contracted out the job with a tight deadline, and a bonus of ONE MILLION BUCKS per day it was finished ahead of schedule. It was finished several weeks ahead. Ka-ching!
While I agree with the idea that people respond to incentives, you are making it out to be a lot simpler to design these schemes than is actually the case.
The examples you give are straightforward. You already have a bunch of people who know how to do a job, so you pay them to do it quickly. Basically you are giving them money to go and tell their families they are going to be working late for a while and they have to postpone their holidays. These are both examples of a simple task with a definable, specific goal. Everyone can tell when the junction is built.
With this teaching math thing, there is no finish line. The people who decide if the kids pass are... teachers. Grading your own work is not going to lead to healthy outcomes. You want to adjust for how easy the task is because you don't want easy classes to get paid and difficult classes to be excluded from getting the bonus. But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.
Finally there's the problem of feedback. Incentives work when the person who is incentivized knows how things are going and knows how to change the outcome. It is not clear at all that teachers know that if they just show Billy Bob the times tables as a rhyme then he will pass his test. It is not clear at all that teachers even know whether Billy Bob understands the times tables, or is just repeating what is being said.
This is the problem with all incentive engineering schemes. I'm an engineer too and I wish it were simple. But the history of it is rife with all sorts of catastrophes.
> Grading your own work is not going to lead to healthy outcomes.
Sigh. Why do people keep bringing this up? Of course you'd need an assessment test that is not under the control of the teacher. Nobody sets up an incentive program where the person being incentivized evaluates himself.
I think you need to steelman my arguments, per HN guidelines. I didn't say that each teacher would literally mark their own work, the fair interpretation would be that another teacher or committee of teachers would do this.
Here's what I wrote:
> But then who defines the baseline? Teachers again. Maybe not the exact same teachers but they are all part of the same system.
So how do you intend to grade the teacher's work, except by other teachers, who are in the same position?
This is just like having board members appointing CEOs out of the same pool.
In fact, it's a pretty hard problem to deal with in general, and it appears many places in society, so it's fair to ask how this would be dealt with.
If we're going to build an incentive system, we don't want it to be gamed.
Right but you give the incentive to the construction company, not to the food truck that feeds the workers. The teachers aren't the problem (to the extent there even is a problem, which is an embarrassingly unexamined question), the students are. So give them an incentive to stop being a problem.
I think some of them are. In fact, we both know some of them are. We also both know that there are hard limits to what a person with an IQ of 100 can learn.
> The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.
You're talking as if this isn't how the system works today. Your proposal is literally how US education has worked since the 80s. The disaster you see in the public education system in the US is in part caused by merit-based systems including merit-based pay for teachers.
The key problem is that we cannot measure how educated someone is. We can only measure their results on a test. Garbage in, garbage out.
This means that everyone teaches to a test. That's a horrible experience for teachers and students. And it literally leads to the solution the article warns us about: water down all the tests and eliminate as much knowledge from the curriculum as you can so that everyone excels and everyone gets their merit-based pay.
So not only does merit-based pay for teachers not work, not only does it not raise scores in any meaningful way, not only does it erode the curriculum, it's literally a big part of the current problem in the US.
Oh, and let's not forget kids with any kind of disability. Under this system they become a massive liability. Instead of teachers trying to help such students, they're quickly routed to the closest holding area so that they don't affect scores. This has been going on for almost 20 years now because of No Child Left Behind.
This is why teachers are opposed to the idea of doubling down on merit-based pay. It's not because the best teachers don't want to make more money. It's because it only rewards the teachers of kids that are already performing well, while punishing teachers in schools that aren't performing well, without any means for the teachers to meaningfully intervene.
Why does teaching to a test not work? If the curriculum was standard and the test was well made it should work fine. All my college grades were 50-100% test based and it seemed to work fine. Maybe you break down the content into testable units or something instead of one big test but still what’s wrong with tests?
There are a bunch of reasons why teaching to the test doesn't work.
1. Because tests are a crappy way of assessing knowledge.
There are students who are amazing test takers, but don't really understand the material. There are students who are terrible test takers, like they have test anxiety, but have an incredible understanding of the material if you talk to them and they work through a problem in front of you.
2. Because it's a terrible teaching methodology.
No one wants to learn about something because it's on the test. That's horrible motivation. They want to learn about something because it explains something cool they could never understand, because it provides a new perspective, because they get to do an exciting thing, because it's a fun competition with others, etc.
When you have to teach to a test, people teach to a test. There's pressure from administration to do it because the merit-based pay isn't just for you personally, it's also for the school as a whole. When test scores don't go up your school gets punished too. So now you drill the specific problems on the test over and over again. Do test scores go up? Sure, by that 0.1 standard deviations we talked about. Does joy go up? Does understanding go up? No.
3. Because tests can only test so much.
Practically, only so many topics can be on the test. There are big topics that are important to know in every class. There's tension here: if you design a test that's in a sense fair for a machine, you pick a random page, a random paragraph and ask a specific question about that paragraph, well, ok, you have a test that tests everything. Sort of, at least at the level of memorization. But, immediately people would say this is a terrible test for a human: why does it matter that my child remember the minutia in page 32, paragraph 3, when there are 7 big topics in this course, the topics that are important to build on for next year, and my child mastered them all? And that's fair criticism.
So now, tests become about the big things. Which makes sense, that's what you need for the future. But that interacts with 1 and 2. So now you drill the big topics over and over again. It becomes a game about memorizations.
4. Because we start teaching test taking skills instead of material
Many people are not good test takers. And that's fine! The goal of tests is not to test if you're a good test taker. It's to test if you know the material. We specifically design tests to avoid testing how good you are at taking tests.
Well, when the stakes are so high at Mr/Ms's Smith's retirement fund is on the line, and St. Margaret's operating funds for next year are on the line, people teach test taking. This is miserable for students. You basically teach it by taking a lot of tests over and over. And then of course teaching test taking strategies.
5. Because it makes losers and winners.
If a teacher and school knows that Jimmy isn't going to make it to grade level, will they work with Jimmy so he can do his best. Maybe catch up a little this year? Maybe find an alternative teaching style. Maybe there's a 10% chance that it will work out for Jimmy and he'll go on to university and do amazing things. No. Teaching to the test and merit based pay means that teachers will dump Jimmy. Even if they don't want to do that, the administration makes them. Jimmy is a liability, sure, but it's worse. All the time spent on Jimmy becomes a liability too. Better to just discard him to the scrap heap, he's unlikely to pass the test anyway. We'll double down on our efforts to help Bob instead. He's middling, he has a 70% chance to pass the test. If we double down maybe we increase that to 90%. That's much better for us. This is terrible for students and it feels really bad as a teacher too.
There's much more that is wrong, this is just a short summary.
It doesn't teach people to become educated, curious, smart, interesting, kind, well-rounded. To ask interesting questions. To want to learn. It forces teachers to turn people into widgets and to discard them like widgets.
Incentives are whack across the board in education.
At every level, hiring and purchasing are done on the basis of political loyalty, rather than competence or fitness-for-purpose. An entire cathedral has been built upon patronage, and that cathedral will fight quite literally to the death rather than reform itself.
We're just now approaching the end-stage of what that looks like in-practice.
I’m generally supportive of finding ways to better use the talent of teachers and if paying incentives is part of that, great.
But this claim is pretty absurd. Imagine that payoffs (in a poorly designed system) are based on a random number generator. That won’t have any lasting, society-wide effect (I suspect you agree), but would result in some payouts.
Incentive design is the difficult nut here, but if cracked, there’s a lot of value to the next generations.
School choice only works because you can choose to not be in a school with high need kids. The public schools can’t choose their student so it’s a huge disadvantage
That's a feature not a bug and public school districts should do the same.
Because districts are required to provide education to all students, they should establish special schools that are essentially prisons for children with behavioral issues or daycares for the mentally handicapped to segment the student population when necessary.
I don’t think the parents of the kids sent off to prison and daycare would be all to happy with that outcome. Usually schools that do that do it in a way that doesn’t draw too much attention. It doesn’t take many pissed off parents to tilt the scales in a local election.
It also makes a lot of parents happy. A lot of it comes down to political inertia and the dominance of reactionism.
If you have a system with a dedicated school for violent and behaviorally challenged kids, there would be a much larger number of angry parents reacting to the idea of integrating those students with their children.
Of course there are limits on what can be achieved. But we won't know until we try. It's hard to be worse than the current system of no incentive whatsoever.
Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis? They're doing pretty well, like they always have, but people are remarkably willing to simply accept claims (often by parties with financial interests in making them) that they aren't.
These suggestions of "pay for results" have a complicated history. I suggest anyone interested actually search the literature on it.
Ever since I saw the critique of the 2012 NYC value added measure results, which shows VAM scores uncorrelated between different classrooms of the same teacher [4], I have been very skeptical that any kind of incentive pay will work. (Also, this NYT article is pretty damning considering the source. [3])
The question is not whether VAM can work, it is a question of does a particular implementation work. The paper [1] is a classic (search for it).
In this particular case: the exact method is not clear but it sounds like there is no adjustment for prior achievement, so all teachers of advanced classes will automatically get the bonus? What if instead what is being measured is the change from year to year? Same result: in this case history is an excellent predictor of the future.
[1]: Rothstein, Jesse. “Teacher Quality in Educational Production: Tracking, Decay, and Student Achievement.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 1, February 2010, pp. 175–214.
We have already seen that such incentives produce the wrong effect. At the whole-school level, what we see from incentives like this is that the system gets gamed such that the standard is lowered so that pay milestones are achieved, as opposed to the actual results of educating the children.
Tests get dumbed down. Teaching to tests instead of to understanding occurs.
Pay teachers more, but put them in a system where the students matter, not the money.
And when you suggest that maybe the distance between those making the decision and those on the ground shouldnt be too large, and maybe those on the ground are allowed to take decisions on their own, youd be branded a commie :/
I think the core issue is that we expect institutions like schools to do multiple, often conflicting tasks. In the US, schools are expected to:
* Provide instruction to the median student.
* Provide support services to those with learning or other disabilities.
* Empower gifted students to learn to their potential.
* Serve as an amateur sports league.
* Distribute food to the hungry via the school lunch program
* Serve as a point of preventative medical care (e.g. vision and dental screenings)
* Screen children for abuse and neglect
* Be a place children can be left while parents are at work
Some of these goals will be prioritized over others. The stated goal (education) is not always the goal taxpayers are most supportive of, via revealed preferences on the ballot when it comes to local school funding decisions.
Yes, agree, and this dovetails with a sibling comment by a long-time teacher. I have a child in the US and have family close in age and demographics in non-US countries. The pressure of school-as-childcare is unique to me in the US because of the amount of paid time off I get, which is substantially less than my peers in Europe. In addition, the financial pressures of childcare and education in the US are quite different than Europe. I certainly earn more money in the US than I would in Europe in the same job, but the logistics of arranging childcare and the pressure of teaching my child both math and English outside of school, despite 7+ hours of school a day, are not insubstantial. As has come up elsewhere in these discussions (on HN and in the article), 15 minutes a day of worksheets has done wonders. While I appreciate what Kid has learned in school, and very much appreciate that Kid's classmates get a nutritional baseline no matter what, it is striking that I must provide this additional instruction and practice. It's this very out-of-school intervention that leads to the inequality of outcomes I so clearly see at the school my child is departing -- one in which the kids with college prof parents score top in the state and kids whose parents are English-language learners or work several (non-adjunct-instructor) jobs score in the 30th percentile. (The kids of all the PhDs, whether well-compensated or not, do fine academically.)
Dumbing down the standards doesn't help anyone. I actually like the idea of a data science class, seems like a great motivation/way to teach algebra, but the way it's being operationally proposed in the CMF does not help. And back to my observation about the worksheets above, “This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content." “Instead of reducing the gap, the CMF proposal will worsen disparities as students from affluent families will access private instruction and tutors while under-resourced students will be left behind.” -- Dr. Jelani Nelson, absolutely correct.
For interesting discussion of the shoddy research underlying many of the citations in the CMF, see Mike Lawler's Twitter threads (username mikeandallie).
I tend to agree and I think public schools, at least in the US, have the same basic challenge as most government services. The consumer/parent/voter has direct control over the inputs to the system (funding, policy, etc) as well as expectations on the output (the goals you mentioned), but doesn't actually behave as if they're at least partially responsible for those outputs. I actually think taxpayers are generally supportive of education as a goal, but they think that's achieved by shouting at the school district instead of voting as if education was their priority.
Government bureaucracy absolutely produces less than optimal incentives and priorities, but the responsibility voters have in creating those incentives seems underappreciated, especially when it comes to public schools.
I grew up in China and came to the same conclusion as yours! I never expect such a similarity. I've always thought that education in the US must be much better.
After graduating from college, I realized that the problem I was facing was a systematic one of the whole society, rather than one limited to particular teachers, middle schools, or even the entire education system.
Many people say Chinese maths education is better than the US but I can hardly agree. But based on what I have seen, there are problems on both sides. Chinese education is focusing too much on memorizing existing pieces of knowledge, but too less on teaching the young how to create new ones. The knowledge which our ancestors had struggled for thousands of years to find was taught to us in a spendthrift manner. Aside from lacking training on how to find/create new knowledge, Chinese education does not encourage students to learn advanced topics since it could have negative effects on the students' grades. But there is nothing you can do to change it, because too many things are correlated: fair distribution of teaching resources, less demand for highly educated people in the job market, and the overall not-so-innovation-appealing social vibe. I cannot foresee any possibility of a true, self-driven, systematic reform.
Education in the US, especially math education, on the other hand, is somehow too frivolous. I have no learning experience in any US middle school, so my opinions can be biased. But it seems that US education is more like elite education. The average/universal maths education level should be a little higher in such a highly modernized society.
These different (or even opposite) problems surprisingly show some similarity. Shall I say the problems actually reflect some real problems in the two societies?
I had the experience of going to US schools among competitive immigrants from Taiwan and HK(in the late 90's, i.e. they left while it was still under the British), and a little bit of mainland China as well.
Reflecting on it, it produced an odd dichotomy in classroom expectations where nobody was really on the same page: I'm fourth-generation American to a mixed European background - my mom insisted on me attempting advanced math, but in a distinctly Eastern European sense, with emphasis on learning theory, which wasn't anything like what I was confronted with at school, which was primarily computational drills that I didn't know how to prepare for and which my parents tried to pretend I could just power through, as my older brother did(he had more of a direct interest, and later confessed that he probably got through it all just with short-term memory, because he was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and started medicating, and thought I should too). My classmates, meanwhile, had clearly normalized strict study habits but could not usefully communicate what they were to me, or maybe did not want to give up their secrets. And the teachers were just pleased that the class behaved so well and could withstand being assigned piles of homework, but they didn't have particularly advanced backgrounds themselves and often couldn't hold their own when challenged by the best students in the city.
And then I went off to college and the student body was now mostly white. I realized that this was a completely different vibe and I didn't understand that, either.
I think the places in which the US system manages to work are because sometimes the collision of varied cultures against the institutions produces useful sparks. The institution itself tracks political winds, which vary at the state and local level. Struggling schools have the usual issues of domestic insecurity spilling into the classroom, and being in the public school system, occasionally I would cross paths with those students instead of the "gifted and talented" track that I was on. But "good schools" tend to be "home owners association" schools, whipped into doing whatever the parents ask for, which usually amounts to fairy tale fantasies. When my mom started pressuring the faculty for me to stay in the advanced math track despite my not fitting there, it was, I now see, in this latter mode. Eventually, not getting the desired result, she insisted that I argue my own case, which of course I was terrible at, and left me confused, ashamed and other feelings which took years to work through. I just wanted to withdraw from everything at that point, but I was being hurried along. That is the one quality I would say tends to always be the case throughout, at least in the large schools I went to - nobody has time for anything, because everyone has a deadline to meet. It's mostly an illusion and busywork, but it nevertheless sucks out societal energy.
The elite students, some of whom I ran into in college, tend to have a path carefully paved for them through subtle signalling and tracking - opportunities and experiences that are just not the norm for anyone less wealthy. They aren't getting well-rounded educations either, rather, they are normalized to self-identify as strivers, which when combined with some early connections, is enough for most of the cohort to advance. I had a housemate who was an heir to an major beer company executive. He was an alcoholic and his dad was, too, and he bemoaned the idea that his summer job was being the boss to people ten decades older than him. His goal in getting a CS degree was to prove that he could do something for himself, essentially.
In the end, looking at it, the way the US system is set up is to not know you are in a rat race until it's too late and you're tracked at the bottom for reasons beyond your control.
> It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth.
Schools reflect the values that parents impress upon them.
The vast majority of parents want free daycare and a "Magic Paper(tm)" that gets their child into a college higher than what their child is actually qualified for. Nothing else.
So, you can complain about education not supporting "learning and growth". And you can complain about the bureaucracy. However, parents have made their wishes very loud and clear over the last several decades about exactly what they want out of the public education system.
This is precisely why the solution is to keep size small and allow consumers (in the education market, these are parents) to have a choice between many small providers who are forced to compete with each other. Governments should (with notable exceptions) constantly be pressuring large organizations to break apart into smaller ones.
There are some cases where this isn't feasible, particularly in natural monopolies and in the government itself. Here, I point to Pahlka's excellent "Culture Eats Policy", https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ for which no summary can do her piece justice.
Multiple problems with this. The most obvious one is cost: schools don't have large classes because they want to but because of budgets. The second one is that "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case and might very well be: experience in other countries shows you that parents tend to optimize for grades , test scores and "connections"; so you get grade inflation, "teaching to the test", bribery and networks and over all worse quality (just think of prejudices you have heard about some private schools).
Irrelevant to the question at hand. There are small schools with small classes, small schools with large classes, large schools with small classes, large schools with large classes.
> "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case
No, it's intended to be a technical/neutral term to describe the person(s) making the economic (as in the science of economics) choice of which school to choose.
> parents tend to optimize for...
And other parents optimize for other priorities, see e.g. Montessori schools, St. Anne's in NYC where there are no grades. Having options allows parents to make that choice. When parents are forced to send their children to the large monopolistic public option because there are no other affordable options, they don't have a choice.
Silly thought: so it's shoehorning evolution into organizations. Regardless of how something is made to replicate itself, it inherently does so because that's what it does. Evolution arises when changes (accidental or not, from some perspective) present opportunities for thriving. It's not a matter of will as it is a matter of fact. I suppose for organizations, regulations and oversight are necessary to prevent evolution towards fulfilling perverse incentives. A bit hard to do when we're dealing with hyacinths, though. Herbicide, anyone?
Pournelle was just another Republican and this is just another political slogan, not an "iron law".
He was also an engineer, which makes it even worse, because it means he has old engineer brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's fields.
I think a lot of the organizational dysfunction in education and more broadly comes down to a poor understanding of rule utilitarianism.
In short, rule utilitarianism is an idea that a standard procedure you can't be better than a complex system that attempts to maximize each individual choice.
The classic example that Economist Mike Munger likes to talk about is stop signs. You could replace stop signs with a complex debate and decision tree to try to decide which car at an intersection has greater need and gets priority. However, this complex process may result in longer wait times for all cars, including those that might have the most urgent need to go through the intersection.
This manifests in education through a million rules which try to optimize performance for very specific and conflicting purposes. As a result, you get a complex system weighed down by its inefficiency that doesn't meet any of its goals.
Quality comments like this are what keep me coming back to HN.
I certainly agree. I’m not sure exactly how, but it’s clear there needs to be some sort of incentive for institutions to actually achieve their purpose, but as soon as a metric is measured, it gets exploited and over optimized.
The only incentive that works is letting such institutions crash and burn and be replaced. Even giant monopolies can end up losing money and going under.
The bare bones the market would create would depend on if people really want K-12 to be a glorified daycare or a useful tool for imparting knowledge. But having a financial incentive to function or go bust would mean you'd at least get better daycare services.
I would say yes. Most states schools provide excellent value, and I would even extend that to community colleges which provides even better value for their students.
to some sort of educator of last resort.
This might be a private school that specialized in this, or a public school that can not refuse them and is therefore full of bad students.
And how will they get to this educator of last resort? The per child transportation and tuition costs for this educator of last resort will far exceed the amount of the voucher.
I dont see how transportation would be any different. If they can take a school bus or public trasport to school A, they could take it to school B (last resort).
I don't see why the cost of an educator should be that much different at school A than B either. It might be even cheaper.
California spends 23k per K-12 student now. You should be able to pay someone 100k to guard 5 jail cells with self study students.
> I dont see how transportation would be any different. If they can take a school bus or public trasport to school A, they could take it to school B (last resort).
Because the school of last resort will have to be further away in order to consist only of misbehaving kids. You don't have to take my word for it. You can see for yourself that there are far fewer schools for troubled kids.
> I don't see why the cost of an educator should be that much different at school A than B either.
Because these educators will be dealing solely with misbehaving kids. You don't have to take my word for it. There are private schools that take these kids, and they charge more.
These institutions cannot be reformed in a reasonable amount of time. The alternative has to come from elsewhere. People need a viable alternative so they can 'exit' similar to how Uber changed the taxi industry.
Pitched competition between well-matched opponents is the only sure-fire antidote. It either keeps the players perpetually lean, or picks off the ones that ossify. You are simply left no choice other than to play seriously or lose.
Tricky to arrange in education, to be sure, because results are difficult to measure objectively.
The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations.
Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.