[rossnordby]

I've wondered about how well something like this would work:

1. Schools open early and accept students as early as they do now, but classes start around noon and extend to 4-6 PM. Students are not required to arrive early; the school opens early to provide a safe place and schedule flexibility for parents and buses.

2. Breakfast and lunch are offered to ensure food security.

3. Every student has 5+ hours of 1:1 or small group tutoring weekly. This is where the bulk of educator funding would likely end up.

4. Open format "study hall" periods with staff available to assist.

5. No homework; personal exercises are handled in study hall.

6. For any lecture format material, provide high quality centrally produced media. On premise educators focus most of their time on interaction and adapting to where the students are.

7. Much less age stratification; progress through class content would be heavily individualized by the 1:1 and small group interaction.

8. Unprison the experience- you can go to the bathroom or eat a snack, or even leave.

This reuses of all existing infrastructure, reorganizes educator hours into what is (as far as I know) a more effective structure, reduces required student time, and seems like this should fit in the current budgets (which are around the $12000/year/pupil averaged over the US).

And, critically, this doesn't force teenagers with delayed circadian rhythms to wake up at 5:45 AM to catch the bus. I'm pretty sure if you changed nothing else and just had high school run from noon to 4PM, you'd have a transformative improvement in outcomes even though the total number of hours would be significantly reduced.

[endisneigh]

You vastly underestimate how much money it would take to do (3) alone, let alone anything else on here. Your assumption around the usage of educator hours is incorrect. I suppose it's worth seeing how you believe educator hours are currently used?

[rossnordby]

I'll admit I haven't put this through an extremely thorough vetting process, and I haven't proposed this in congress or anything yet :P

That said, I roughly assumed a private tutor cost of $50/hour, 5 hours a week, for 36 weeks per year. That alone would come out to $9000, hence the 'small group' suggestion- if each tutor is working with on average 3 students at once, it's a bit more tractable.

I'm not sure what assumption you think I'm making about current educator hours- the proposal is for a radically different usage.

[endisneigh]

> reorganizes educator hours into what is (as far as I know) a more effective structure,

My point is that you would need a lot more educator hours. There's no way to organize the current amount of hours in which you have "small groups" for 5 hours a day, unless small is 30 students per one teacher, in which case we're already doing that.

It's also not worth comparing tutor hourly wages to teachers as teachers have to deal with other things outside of teaching: calling parents, administrative tasks, behavioral issues, etc.

Also, it's worth mentioning that most of the things you've mentioned have been attempted at one point or another. There are a lot of constraints, interestingly money is not necessarily the main one depending on the issue.

[leoc]

> There's no way to organize the current amount of hours in which you have "small groups" for 5 hours a day, unless small is 30 students per one teacher, in which case we're already doing that.

The proposal was 5 hours a week not 5 hours a day, IIUC. Likely you'd still be looking at rather large small groups and/or a substantial increase in teacher-hours per pupil, though.

[rossnordby]

In my proposal, the number of hours a student actually spends directly listening to/interacting with an on-premise educator is much, much lower. The hope is that those would be more efficient hours, to the point of getting better results with >5x less time.

Part of the issue here may be that I found the education system to have net negative impact on my... education. The main value I see in the current system is providing child care, safety, and food security. If there is solid research showing that ~40 hours of the current approach outperforms ~5 hours of a tutoring-style approach in the general population, that would be evidence against my proposal. And that might exist, I just haven't seen it, since this is not exactly a formally vetted idea.

[dannyw]

The point of high school as I see it is to provide a semi-intensive educational experience to keep teenagers somewhere during daytime.

It's not designed to optimise for educational effectiveness.

[tziki]

Finland is currently in the process of trying something similar. The main criticism has been that it puts too much pressure on people too early. It works for some people but there are plenty of those who simply won't assign any homework to themselves or do any of the exercises. It's easy to get into the HN bubble and think almost everyone has above-average smarts and would've benefited from more, not less freedom in their formative years. But the fact is that huge swaths of population only go to school and do their school work because they have to.

The approach has also been criticized for exacerbating the already-poor performance of boys in educational results, and I assume the same approach in the US would exacerbate the educational gap between racial groups.

[cloudier]

What is this program called? I’d love to read more about it.

[dalbasal]

This probably would work as a one off. It would be very hard to do at school with >1000 students.

Also... beware of first principles, back-of-envelope calculations. They can be useful if you are creating something from the ground up, less so for reform.

[rossnordby]

Yup- I'm sensitive to the unforeseen consequences of rug-pulling a massive existing social structure. If I actually had skin in the game and was forced to make policy decisions, I'd probably focus on pushing the start time as late as is practical, and then later smaller scale incremental experimentation.

On the other hand, maybe distance from it has mellowed me too much (even though I still think the current design is responsible for a not-small number of dead kids). 17 year old me was pretty upset about the whole thing.

[Zababa]

> 8. Unprison the experience- you can go to the bathroom or eat a snack, or even leave.

You'll have a hard time finding staff without the promise that you can humiliate younger people /s

[handrous]

On the contrary, I think most teachers would be pretty happy if their least-motivated students left and never came back.

In some classes of 20, having the right 2-3 kids out sick can mean you cover 30% more material on a given day, and everyone has a more pleasant time, too.

[dalbasal]

Have you tried, or asked? Teachers may do a good job or not, like anyone else. For the most part though, they're decent people who want to do good.

[Zababa]

The /s at the end of my message was to say that it's sarcasm. Most teachers (like most people really) have good intentions and end up being good people, or at least not bad people. On the other hand, there's always a few power-hungry people (be it in teaching, or other things) that are just here to have power over people, because that's their thing.

[Jorengarenar]

The '/s' at the end is so called sarcasm mark. That means the previous comment wasn't serious.