[goolulusaurs]

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.

[another_story]

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.

[wrp]

> 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.

[SteveGerencser]

There is a better, older, phrase that would be great to promote over that tired saying:

“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” — Aristotle

[birdyrooster]

You are a contrarian in the best sense, thanks for sharing this!

[SteveGerencser]

As a true 'jack of all trades' I feel that it's my duty to share these quotes, or the full version of widely used quotes.

[another_story]

Great quote, thanks for sharing.

[ecshafer]

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.

[cjohnson318]

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.

[peterfirefly]

> 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!

[cpursley]

Careful, you’re not allowed to utter the “C” word here in relation to educational outcomes.

(The word is “Culture”)

[vacuity]

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.

[incone123]

I find this site more open to constructive debate than elsewhere.

Thanks for specifying which c word you meant, as the only one in the post you replied to was Chinese.

[xvedejas]

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.

[AmpsterMan]

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%.

[twothamendment]

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.

Money talks.

[cgriswald]

Learning is a kid’s job.

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.

Pay the damn kids, I say.

[stevekemp]

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.)

[ZeroGravitas]

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.

https://www.weareteachers.com/understanding-intrinsic-vs-ext...

[light_hue_1]

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.”

That study? https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/papers/RES2003.pdf It's an economic model of how idealized humans might work! It literally says nothing about real humans or children.

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.

[hguant]

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"

There are worse problems to have!

[seanmcdirmid]

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.

[ecshafer]

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.

[sb52191]

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.

[SoftTalker]

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.

[gretch]

This Ted talk (includes a lot of data) shows that motivation via money hurts creative problem solving.

https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y

[mkl]

Sounds like an excuse for parents to make their kids' lives hell. Such a policy would do a lot of damage.

[nebula8804]

>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.

[jfdbcv]

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.

[danaris]

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?

[ithkuil]

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

[Xcelerate]

> 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.

[datavirtue]

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.

[WalterBright]

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.

[wrp]

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.

[WalterBright]

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.

[reverius42]

> 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.

[WalterBright]

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.

[ordersofmag]

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.

[WalterBright]

It works everywhere in the private sector.

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.

[donw]

It... really doesn't.

Sales is a great example.

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.

[WalterBright]

Companies fix it or they go out of business. I've seen them tweaking it.

[hakfoo]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

[csydas]

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?

[astrange]

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.

[WalterBright]

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.

[denton-scratch]

> 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.

[bandrami]

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.

[bandrami]

It doesn't really work in the private sector though; it leads to destructive and short-sighted juking of the relevant metrics.

[WalterBright]

Companies wouldn't use it pervasively if it didn't work.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Having a base salary plus incentive pay for meeting objective goals is commonplace. Companies wouldn't do that if it didn't work.

Management methods are full of cargo cult "science".

[waterhouse]

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?

[WalterBright]

Sure. Assign the students at random. Some years the teacher will get a better batch than other years, but it would all even out.

[davidgay]

Don't forget to bus the kids randomly across town (county? state?), or else your suggestion is ineffective.

That has always been a very popular and well received idea (or maybe your should think a bit before blaming teachers).

[WalterBright]

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.

[throw9away6]

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

[bandrami]

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.

[slowmovintarget]

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.

[bandrami]

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.

[WalterBright]

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!

Money talks, BS walks.

[lordnacho]

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.

[WalterBright]

> 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.

Come on. Give me a reasonable riposte.

[bandrami]

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.

[WalterBright]

Giving the teachers an incentive to find a way to incentivize the students is a perfectly reasonable approach.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

My parents gave me a few bucks for As and Bs. My school also gave me some scholarship money based on my scores.

[light_hue_1]

> 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.

We also know that merit-based pay has a tiny impact on student scores in the short term at the scale that one teacher can control over a student-year, under 0.1 standard deviations. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/000283122090558...

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.

[throw9away6]

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?

[light_hue_1]

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.

[donw]

I don't think that would make a difference.

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.

[astrange]

We aren't approaching any kind of end stage anywhere in anything.

As a guy said once, there are neither beginnings or endings to the wheel of time.

[WalterBright]

Hence the vehement opposition to the idea, sadly.

[donw]

Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference.

The only thing that works is school choice. If parents can choose the schools, the schools have to deliver results.

[WalterBright]

> Cash incentives aren't going to make a difference.

If they don't make a difference, then there won't be any payouts to make. It's a can't-lose proposal.

[davidgay]

> The only thing that works is school choice.

Citation needed.

[throw9away6]

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

[bandrami]

DC has been doing full school choice for 20 years now. So your bold innovative goal is to "be like DCPS in the early 2000s".

That's gonna go over great in Fairfax County.

[SoftTalker]

I think that could work but you would need to give teachers more control over the discipline and syllabus in their classrooms.

If you can't maintain order and can't adapt your teaching to meet the needs of your students, there's limits to what can be achieved.

[WalterBright]

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.

[tremon]

It's hard to be worse than the current system

This is hardly ever true, for any kind of system.

[bandrami]

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.

[WalterBright]

> Where did you get the idea that US public schools are in some kind of crisis?

Declining achievement levels, the perfectly horrible results in inner city schools, and the disparities between different racial groups.

[fn-mote]

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.

[2]: Methodological issues in value-added modeling. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11092-019-09303-w

[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/education/teacher-quality... (paywall)

[4]: https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-re... (Found it!!)

[slowmovintarget]

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.

[TheCoelacanth]

That seems like more of an incentive to get a job at an already high-performing school than it is to do a better job of teaching.

[coconuthacker42]

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 :/

[tyoma]

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.

[kaitai]

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).

[rainsford]

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.

[mst_moonshine]

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?

[syntheweave]

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.

[bsder]

> 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.

[daseiner1]

and those parents reflect a rotten culture.

[solatic]

> once an organization surpasses a certain size

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.

[diffeomorphism]

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).

[solatic]

> large classes

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.

[smilekzs]

a.k.a. Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

[readthenotes1]

Iirc in systemantics, it was phrased as "the goal of a system is to perpetuate and extend itself, not to achieve whatever it was created for"

[vacuity]

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?

[astrange]

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.

[s1artibartfast]

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.

[MikeTheRocker]

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.

[c_crank]

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.

[s1artibartfast]

In the context of Education or you have an entranched monopoly, this means voting for private school vouchers.

[slt2021]

private school vouchers seems like a great idea, but I am afraid it will mirror college situation.

most state schools will have bare bones programs, except few select, while private schools will be many levels ahead and become "elite".

do we want "ivy league" situation with K-12 education system?

[rayiner]

The solution is to do what Sweden does, which is to require all schools to accept the vouchers and charge no further tuition.

[c_crank]

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.

[s1artibartfast]

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.

[lern_too_spel]

No, private schools can reject students. This means voting for charter schools.

[s1artibartfast]

Rejecting students is a feature not a bug. If you have a student that attacks other students or teachers institutions should be able to expel them.

[lern_too_spel]

Then where does the rejected student go with their voucher?

Segregating misbehaving students is a feature. Rejecting them is a bug.

[rayiner]

That’s a good thing for all the other students.

[electriclove]

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.

[ip26]

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.

[grantsch]

There is no incentive whatsoever without profit motive to help others repeatedly in an efficient way

Large organizations just further exacerbate this

[huevosabio]

Indeed. And this is really the alignment problem of our time.

[tromp]

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

-- attributed to Oscar Wilde

[oatmeal1]

> Unless we find a way to counteract this

Charter schools. Competition. Of course education sucks when there's no competition.