Hacker News Reader

Comment by QML | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it'd just be easier for high schools to convert over to a college model: students are free to pick courses corresponding to their preferred times, and to leave and enter campus on will. Of course, there will be incentives to consider -- why would a high schooler attend their classes if they're not paying directly out of pocket? In contrast, a school district would try to maximize the attendance rate as that's how funding works (at least in California).

In hindsight, there's always a tension between high schoolers and those who administrate them; it's never a partnership since teenagers are quick to abuse / misuse a privilege.

View on HN

Drastically reduce administrators. Give the kids something like 25 to 50 cents per class attended.

Honestly, direct pay for attendance would be a great incentive for the poorest demographics. A few dollars can be make-or-break at the margin and even greedy parents that misuse the funds would end up wanting to get the kid showing up and not getting in fights - the bare minimum for a school day to go by undisturbed.

I'd be all for that, as long as there were negative penalties as well. E.g. Disturbing class = no points. Failing homework = no points. Failing test = losing all accumulated points. Failing end of year exams for the subject = lose all money for that subject. I.e. Attendance is only part of the equation, actually fostering learning/growth is what you really want, even if it's semi-artificial. Otherwise you're just making another perverse incentive for kids to keep their butts in the seat and not really engage.

And then further on, only give the money back in the subsequent year, month to month. Make it a long-term commitment with a pay-off.

The problem with that is that low-income families either plain can't afford, or tend to be completely bad at delaying gratification for long-term rewards.

Agreed. Education by itself and the benefits it gives are very long term, too. So this payment has benefit in that it's a quicker return than plain education and would impact a net amount of people. Perhaps there may even be network effects in that those that are able to plan for this medium-term returns can convince and be examples for those that aren't able to.

This interferes with the primary babysitting function that schools occupy in our society.

This seems like a great way to kill the public secondary school system. What percentage of kids do you estimate would stop going to class under this model?

Make attendance mandatory and create some comfortable spaces for in-between classes.

Attendance is mandatory already. This will just make it easier for kids to leave. In fact, they'll be coming and going all the time. Isn't that the whole point?

How would it make it easier? the rules for attendance would be the same. It is already fairly easy to skip school, especially if there is an open lunch or you can forge a parental note. You can also set up classes in a way that doesnt allow for more than 30-60 minutes between classes, allowing relaxation in common areas and the library, for example. Or allow more freedom as kids age.

Just because it is "more like college" doesnt mean it is an exact replica.

We all know that the same teenagers that want to sneak out of their houses at night to go on their escapades (typically 2:1 supervision) would totally follow the rules of mandatory attendance (40:1 supervision )

Then in what sense is QML’s proposal worse than the status quo?

To be fair, I snuck out from time to time and rarely missed school. Those things dont really go together like you imply. Missing school has totally different consequences and besides, I never really found school useless. I even took AP classes.

Some kids skip school. I did... twice in my school career. I imagine some kids would still skip school, but there is no real reason to think it would be higher than it is now.

I went to a high school that had a college-like schedule with the campus covering a few buildings in downtown (small city). Attendance wasn't mandatory, grades were exam/deliverable based.

The freedom was great for high-achievers. Normal students showed up to classes like normal. Almost-dropouts didn't go to class and waste everyone's time (eventually they were transferred to regular high-school).

I learned valuable life-lessons compared to the hand-holding and babysitting done in other high schools, and highly recommend the model.

I'm not surprised by this at all. I just wonder what the percentages of each roughly defined category is. I'll also point out that, in your case, there were fallback alternatives. If all high schools operated this way, what's the fallback?

Thanks for sharing. I'd be interested to read more about the program.

That's how it works in Finland in lukio (upper secondary school between 9th grade and university), we picked the courses ourselves and left/entered campus on will. Looks like the course-based system was introduced in 1982.

And personally I did prefer course instances that were later on the day over those that were earlier.

We still had mandatory lesson attendance, though, unlike most university courses.

> students are free to pick courses corresponding to their preferred times, and to leave and enter campus on will.

I was doing this as a senior in HS in the 90s. Because I had been ahead since elementary school, by the time I was a senior in HS there were only a couple classes left I needed to take. I showed up late, left early and most days went to work.

The best ranking high school in my area (south of the Netherlands) works more or less like this (I don't think all attendance is fully at will). There is a lot of innovation going on in this space, even those who were in high schools just 5 years ago would notice major changes.

A high school I attended had a fairly novel system that's not too far off from this. People in the program I was in would get to school at 8 and leave at 12, with a good deal of variety in what classes they chose to attend. And classes were run on a college schedule with two sets of classes - short MWF classes and longer TTh classes.

The overall affect of this is that good students would end up receiving a more directed education and were in a much more desirable system with immense freedom to pursue their education and growth as they saw fit. But at the same time 'less good' students did extremely poorly. And I think in general there is going to be a strong connection between increasing freedom and increasing the polarization of results. In a way it's really an educational analog of the differences between capitalism and communism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com