[japhyr]

I was excited to read this article, because I want to see more attempts to improve education. But then I saw that this is a for-profit education company.

I know there is a place for private educational endeavors in our society. But if you really want to fix education for everyone, you've got to focus on public education. Yes, it's a big ugly political seemingly unchangeable mess. But it's the only system that reaches everyone.

Every generation has a revolution waiting to happen. Improving public education might be the next significant social revolution in the US, but it won't be led by for-profit education companies.

[jerf]

How much failure would it take from the not-for-profit public education system before you'd consider the possibility that it is the very incentive system created by their non-profit status that has a huge hand in the failure?

We've created a system in which the reward for being an excellent teacher is... what, exactly? More paperwork? More friction from the ever-larger administration for not doing the same as everybody else? More frustration with not being allowed to be the good teacher because they have to teach ever harder to the test?

Until you fix the incentive system you're not going to get better teaching, and yeah, that's probably going to involve someone making some money, because it's beyond me how to fix the incentive system in the presence of an open-ended promise to keep the money hose opened and pointed at them no matter how much they fail. I suppose we could always try giving the same people even more money if they just promise to try really, really hard to do something else a couple of times until they give up.

And I am also pretty sure that true 21st century education isn't going to just a tweaked 20th century education. It's going to be something totally different, and the non-profit system simply won't get us there. Why would they? They don't get defunded for using decades-old totally outdated education systems. (In contrast to the decades-old non-outdated parts, which do exist, but are not 100% of the curriculum by any means.) We know that, because that's already the current situation. They've got no reason to move.

[japhyr]

How much failure would it take from the not-for-profit public education system before you'd consider the possibility that it is the very incentive system created by their non-profit status that has a huge hand in the failure?

That is part of the failure, and I am deeply affected by it right now. I am a pretty good teacher, and I watch terrible teachers get paid more than me because they've been at it longer. I can't pay off my family's student loans, and I can't afford anything more than a small condo.

But I still don't think privatizing education is the answer. There is always the possibility of taking education back from the politicians, and setting up a system that does incentivize good teaching. It's not as simple as paying teachers more if their students pass tests.

One fix that would go a long way is restructuring our approach to tuition in service sectors. If you take away my student loans, I would be a happy, hard working teacher the rest of my life. I will get some portion of my loans forgiven for teaching in a high-need area, but that won't go a long way. The same goes for other service sectors, where a reasonable job will leave you paying off student loans until you are past retirement age.

There are bureaucratic fixes. You can give more professional freedoms to highly-effective teachers. Measuring effective teaching is difficult, but not impossible.

As soon as you give up on public education and only see privatization as the answer, you give up on addressing the education gap between different socioeconomic groups.

[jerf]

"It's not as simple as paying teachers more if their students pass tests."

That's not the interesting thing that privatization allows. What it allows is the doing of something fundamentally different.

I don't see privatization as "the current school system, just private". Yes, that is what it is now, mostly, unless you poke around what are currently very fringe bits. What I see is a world in which (in a nutshell) self-serve homeschooling becomes easier and easier and more effective until it eats the current system from the inside. Give it about 20 years. Public schooling will survive, but as part of a large ecosystem, instead of the whole.

"As soon as you give up on public education and only see privatization as the answer, you give up on addressing the education gap between different socioeconomic groups."

No we don't. Vouchers may not be 100% "free market", but it's not going to keep me up at night.

[endlessvoid94]

In the short term, there's just no way being a teacher in public education has any financial incentive.

Until you can pay a teacher the same salary as a silicon valley engineer, the best people will not be teachers.

[jerf]

We've tried the "keep giving the system more money in the hope we get better teachers". We've been trying that for my entire life. If you want to pay teachers like SV engineers, you're only going to be able to do that in the general framework of a for-profit company.

If you imagine a really competent teacher sitting next to an engineer with the Khan Academy and intensely working with them and the statistics to produce a high-quality course, that's definitely the sort of thing that will command an SV engineer salary. There will be fewer such positions, but the immense societal gain of having these high-quality curricula propagated far and wide for cheap will far outweigh the fact there are fewer teaching jobs.

[endlessvoid94]

> If you want to pay teachers like SV engineers, you're only going to be able to do that in the general framework of a for-profit company.

That was exactly my point, and our goal at Bloc :-)

[hanibash]

That sounds like an amazing future, jerf

[JumpCrisscross]

Given that neither system is working but both have evidence of having worked historically or in other countries, it would seem premature to assume sans evidence that education must be in the public sector.

Note that non-profit private institutions are not public schools and are highly effective research institutions.

When things aren't working it's a good idea to rethink the base assumptions we are making on faith alone.