[momokoko]

I think EdTech forgets that student success has much less to do with schooling(home or otherwise). This is why education has bounced from trend to trend over the last 50 years. Because we constantly think we've found a silver bullet, but then after a decade or so, we realize it was once again correlation.

If you really look at the data, student outcomes essentially boil down to parents and the students themselves. We've see this with how standardized testing has gone over so poorly. The truth is that, outside of gaming the test system with essentially test prep style cramming, schools really have not been able to make any real meaningful changes to student outcomes.

Absolutely, schools can move the needle a bit in either direction, but outside of edge cases, I feel as though it may be a challenge to show the kind of outcome data that makes any EdTech product a must have in US education.

[barry-cotter]

Improvements in teaching are very unlikely to change the rank ordering of who learns fastest/most/best. It can absolutely change how much I’d learned and when individual students learn something. Online teaching is far more conducive to mastery learning and ability grouping than offline education. Look at Lambda School for an example. If you have large cohorts starting on a regular basis you can have some people progressing slower than others but ensure they get there eventually in a way that’s not going to happen in a normal classroom environment. The scope for individualised instruction in an environment where you have classes of 15-30 students is limited. If you have 200 students starting every four weeks you can divide them into ten 20 person classes based on where they are in the curriculum and they’ll do much better than if they were doing things they’d already mastered or for which they just don’t have the prerequisites.

On a more purely technological basis integrating spaced repetition into instructional design would be a massive win. Imagine if people actually remembered what they’d been taught in school instead of having a hazy idea the US Civil War was somewhere in the 1800s.

[momokoko]

Lamda school picks winners from the outset. Public education doesn't get that option.

[barry-cotter]

So? With one on one to one on three tuition you can get the average child to the 95th percentile for their age group. That’s the Bloom Two Sigma effect[1]. Tutoring is extremely effective when it comes to teaching but it’s not cost effective. With classes finely graded enough by ability and prior knowledge you can get reasonably close to that with much larger numbers of students, or you can just call it Mastery learning[2]. That’s possible without picking winners. It’s not possible in public schools for institutional and historical reasons but we’re talking about education, not public schools.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

[jacobolus]

If by “student outcomes essentially boil down to parents and the students themselves” what you mean is “largely boil down to structural societal factors out of individuals’ hands, such as poverty, pollution, homelessness, unemployment, neighborhood crime, state-supported violence, lack of access to nutritious food, ...

Then sure.

[momokoko]

I do. But those are all things still end up with parents and the students.

If you have a single mother that works odd hours and can't do basic algebra, it's very unlikely you'll excel as a student. That isn't a judgement of anyone, that is just a fact based on the data we have.

How to prevent that situation is a different discussion, but does illustrate that resources may be better used fixing the root of the problem as opposed to putting all the effort and responsibility on education.