Comment by deltarholamda

>We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results.

It would depend on what you're asking for. It depends on the school district/state, but anything that gets close to the curriculum isn't easy or simple to change.

For example, one of my kids who went to public school had to use this program (I forget the name) for algebra that the school paid for. You used a weird toolbar to input your equations that appeared to be some monstrous Javascript nightmare. It more or less worked, but it wasn't great. To my mind it would have been simpler to teach them LaTeX or something, but whatever.

As a parent, you can't go in and say "why don't you just let them write the answers on paper like everybody else did until 9 minutes ago?" The teachers loved this program, because it did all the teacher work for them. The school administration already paid for it, plus paying for the computers for the kids to use, plus the IT overhead to keep the computers running.

That's a fundamental structural problem that no parent can surmount. "What do you mean use a screwdriver? We paid for all these hammers!"

The incentives that drive public education are often orthogonal to actually teaching the public. It's not a mystery, any trough where money collects will get snouts rooting for some of it. The parents don't have much say in how all this money must be spent because they don't have any say about the money at all, other than moving to a different district or writing off what they pay in property taxes and paying again to do something else.