Comment by cutemonster 2 days ago
But you aren't supposed to choose either or. Instead, you split the students in different groups, different speeds.
So it works ok for everyone. You when you're in a good shape, and also works ok for you when you're in a bad life situation.
I hope everything went mostly okay in the end for you
> should be a natural way to work on your own pace at your own level
Analogous to the old one-room-school model where one teacher taught all grade levels and students generally worked from textbooks. There were issues with it stemming from specialization (e.g., teaching 1st grade is different than teaching 12th). They were also largely in rural areas and generally had poor facilities.
The main barrier in the US to track separation is manpower. Public School teachers are underpaid and treated like shit, and schools don't get enough funding which further reduces the number of teachers.
Teachers just don't have the time in the US to do multiple tracks in the classroom.
You can have a multi-track high-school system, like in much of Europe. Some are geared towards the academically inclined who expect to go to university, others hold that option open but focus on also learning a trade or specialty (this can be stuff like welding, CNC, or hospitality industry / restaurants etc.), while others focus more heavily on the trade side, with apprenticeship at companies intertwined with the education throughout high school, and switching to a university after that is not possible by default, but not ruled out if you put in some extra time).
Or you can also have stronger or weaker schools where the admission test scores required are different, so stronger students go to different schools. Not sure if that's a thing in the US.
> Also if there is an explicit split there will be groups of people who "game" it (spend disproportional amount of time to "train" their kids vs actual natural talent - not sure if this is good or bad).
The idea of tracking out kids who excel due to high personal motivation when they have less natural aptitude is flat out dystopian. I'm drawing mental images of Gattaca. Training isn't "gaming". It's a natural part of how you improve performance, and it's a desirable ethical attribute.
What if its parents "motivation" to a large extent (and by gaming I meant primarily parents pushing extremely hard)? How would you draw the line?
To be clear - I personally don't have an answer to this.
>But you aren't supposed to choose either or. Instead, you split the students in different groups, different speeds.
This answer is from the US perspective. I've lived in several states now, and I know many of teachers because my partner is adjacent to education in her work and family. This is what I've learned from all this so far:
This is an incredibly easy and logical thing to both suggest, conceptualize, and even accept. In fact, I can see why alot of people don't think its a bad idea. The problem comes down the following in no specific order:
- Education is highly politicized. Not only that, its one of the most politicized topics of our time. This continues to have negative affects on everything to proper funding of programs[0]
- This means some N number of parents will inevitably take issue with these buckets for one reason or another. That can become a real drain of resources dealing with this.
- There's going to be reasonable questions of objectivity that go into this, including historical circumstances. This type of policy is unfortunately easy enough to co-op certain kids into certain groups based on factors like race, class, sex etc. rather than educational achievement alone, of which we also do not have a good enough way to measure objectively currently because of the aforementioned politicized nature of education.
- How to correct for the social bucketing of tiered education? High achieving kids will be lauded as lower achieving ones fall to the background. How do you mitigate that so you don't end up in a situation where one group is reaping all the benefits and thereby getting all the social recognition? Simply because I couldn't do college level trig when I was in 8th grade doesn't mean I deserved limited opportunities[2], but this tiered system ends up being ripe for this kind of exploitation. In districts that already have these types of programs you can already see parents clamoring to get their kids into advanced classes because it correlates to better outcomes.
[0]: I know that the US spends in aggregate per student, approximately 15,000 USD per year, but that money isn't simply handed to school districts. If you factor specialized grants, bonds, commitments etc. the actual classroom spending is not working with this budget directly, its much smaller than this. This is because at least some your local districts funding is likely coming from grants, which are more often than not only paid out for a specific purpose and must be used in pursuant of that purpose. Sometimes that purpose is wide and allows schools to be flexible, but more often it is exceedingly rigid as its tied to some outcome, such as passing rates, test scores etc. There's lots of this type of money sloshing around the school system, which creates perverse incentives.
[1]: Funding without strict restrictions on how its used
[2]: Look, I barely graduated high school, largely due to alot of personal stuff in my life back then. I was a model college student though, but due to a different set of life circumstances never quite managed to graduate, but I have excelled in this industry because I'm very good at what I do and don't shy away from hard problems. Yet despite this, some doors were closed to me longer than others because I didn't have the right on paper pedigree. This only gets worse when you start bucketing kids like this, because people inevitably see these things as some sort of signal about someones ability to perform regardless of relevancy.
Yeah, all that stuff in the end boils down to: rich parents will find a way to have it their way. Whether private schools or tutors or whatever.
Every ideological system has certain hangups, depending on what they can afford. In the Soviet communist system, obviously a big thing was to promote kids of worker and peasant background etc., but they kept the standards high and math etc was rigorous and actual educational progress taken seriously. But there was Cold War pressure to have a strong science/math base.
Currently, the US is coasting, relying on talent from outside the country for the cream of the top, so they can afford nonsense beliefs, given also that most middle-class jobs are not all that related to knowledge, and are more status-jockeying email jobs.
It will likely turn around once there are real stakes.
>Currently, the US is coasting, relying on talent from outside the country for the cream of the top, so they can afford nonsense beliefs, given also that most middle-class jobs are not all that related to knowledge, and are more status-jockeying email jobs.
Ironically, we also rely on talent from outside the country to undercut wages and worker protections on the low end, which also allows us to afford even more nonsense beliefs.
I think we've worked ourselves into a sort of topsy-turvy paradigm where academic and cultural deviance from a certain range is punished severely, but a non-existent ceiling on wealth/floor on poverty are just assumed to be natural and correct. And it really should be the opposite, not least of which because extreme wealth and poverty seem to exacerbate the contraction of the acceptable academic/cultural range, and the punishments for being outside of that range.
This is probably the right solution. It seems in reality nobody does this since it is expensive (more teachers, real attention to students, etc). Also if there is an explicit split there will be groups of people who "game" it (spend disproportional amount of time to "train" their kids vs actual natural talent - not sure if this is good or bad).
So, it feels to me ideally within the same classroom there should be a natural way to work on your own pace at your own level. Is it possible? Have no idea - seems not, again primarily because it requires a completely different skillset and attention from teachers.