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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

Why would you waste your best teachers on your worst students?

Because they are the ones who will see the biggest benefit from a good teacher. And concomitantly your country will benefit from a higher level of preficiency in maths of the population.

Going from 25th percentile to 75th at math does little good. Going from 90th percentile to 99th is more valuable. Better to have a population that has a lower median math skill, but many math geniuses than a population that has a slightly higher median, but few right tail geniuses.

In a democracy, I strongly disagree. The masses have a tremendous impact on the society that your geniuses have to live in.

If you're a genius, you're a genius - an average teacher would be able to point you in the direction of the more specialised coaching that would benefit you.

For the kind of people who don't seem to be able to weigh up basic risk levels and end up dying unvaccinated at six times the rate of those that do, I'd suggest that going up enough percentiles to save their lives would be, yeah, kinda useful.

> Because they are the ones who will see the biggest benefit from a good teacher.

This is a big assertion, and one not well supported by data[1][2].

Money is not the bottleneck at any public school in the West. A student's performance is very well correlated to external factors like parental income and education level, and is NOT well correlated with the amount of money the state spends on education. Utah spends a third of New York per student, and still outperforms in test scores.

I agree that the best teachers should go to the students who would benefit from those teachers the most. The students that would benefit most from good teachers are the good students, who exist in an environment that enables them to learn and excel.

[1] https://medium.com/@tgof137/increased-school-funding-doesnt-...

[2] https://www.alec.org/article/increasing-education-spending-e...

Who said anything about funding? You are attacking a strawman.

Money isn't the bottleneck, but teacher quality is.

The original assertion was

> lowest scoring areas get the most funding and the highest paid teachers.

I think using highest paid teachers as a proxy for best teachers makes sense in this context, because that's how the public policy works. A state looking to hire better teachers would raise teacher salaries in order to attract better teachers.

There is a certain brand of person who is obsessed with redistributing resources from the most productive to the least productive. They don't see how allocating the best teachers in the world to students who are disabled or borderline disabled is not beneficial to society.

Yes this. As someone who was “gifted” in school but with a father who teaches mild/moderate learning disabilities, the skill sets of the two ends of the spectrum of teachers are dramatically different. “Gifted” student teachers can take as a given that their students are there to learn and generally speaking want to be there. For my father getting students to begin to think that is a big part of the job. To replace him with a “gifted” student teacher who has no experience with that type of clientele would be absurd.

I suppose you could be the best at teaching disabled people...that might be a different person to the best at teaching maths to the highest achievers.

So that you improve the students. So that you give more support to teachers working in harder conditions.

The right and left tail of the distribution are not equal and offsetting here. The cost to society from one idiot is more than offset by the benefit of one genius. Therefore equality is not a desirable outcome. Optimizing the abilities of the right tail is.

I dont really think so. First of all, math geniuses are fighting among themselves for a few positions that allow them to actually use hard math. We produce more of them then we can reasonably use.

Second, teacher able to move kids up from "idiots" is actually saving us a lot of money.

Since worst students have most to improve, I'd think it's efficient not wasteful.

This is a fallacy, similar to thinking that a portfolio should be invested into the worst performing stocks because "they have the most room to improve".

Education and stock market are not analogous. The key question is whether current level is correlated with expected improvement. For education it is, for stock market it isn't.

>Education and stock market are not analogous

Why not? A company is just an aggregate of people working towards a shared mission. Not unlike a society.

What is the unifying goal of the community you live in?

We don't have one in mine, the US. We have anarchists and right-wing stochastic terrorists and suburban dwellers engaged in the rat race and college professors seeking tenure and veterans working to find good healthcare and teachers paying way too much out of pocket for their classroom supplies and business owners often cheating to milk PPP loans or other shady revenue streams and public work officials making side deals and.....

If the bottom line is GDP, let me introduce you to GNP, and both of which miss cottage industry generally.

We don't have a shared mission, because society does not have a tangible owner.

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