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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

The reason why this is a really bad idea from an efficiency and an equity POV is that it leads to royally screwed-up incentives for teachers. No self-respecting teacher really wants to teach a class of "struggling, low-achieving" students. So the lowest quality teachers end up teaching those classes, and the struggling students are basically trapped with no prospect for real improvement. It's awful.

It would be very different if teachers could meaningfully specialize towards providing effective instruction for these lower-achieving students. But we barely manage to do this for actual "special" ed, and then only at huge cost.

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An alternative perspective is that the lower performing teachers will relate more to the lower performing students, and the higher performing teachers will relate more to the higher performing students.

And, from a pure efficiency standpoint, we should absolutely seek to give every possible opportunity to those gifted students. For the lower performing kids, focus on teaching values and ethics, along with realistic and practical goals, to make up for any issues in their upbringing. I think attitude is as important as aptitude for the middle and lower end spectrum kids.

> No self-respecting teacher really wants to teach a class of "struggling, low-achieving" students.

That doesn't ring true to me. Why wouldn't a good teacher take pride in taking kids below the curve up to Average? I would wager that this probably has a better net impact than pushing the elite kids that much further.

Partly it's because their own educational background doesn't let them develop this kind of pride in their work. Modern education schools' doctrine is that kids don't even need to be taught anything because they can simply "learn everything by themselves" with just a few hints about what sort of 'inquiry' they should undertake. This can seem to "work" well enough for high-achieving students who can always rely on someone (either themselves or family) to pick up the slack; it's invariably a dismal failure for everyone else.

What seems to happen from what I've seen is not quite that. Junior teachers work in low-performing schools and classes, while experienced teachers are are the better ones. But, and this is a big bug, unlike many professions, seniority doesn't reliably correspond to performance and may in fact be negatively correlated! Young teachers are often more enthusiastic and capable of engaging easily-distracted kids while experienced teachers have a clearer understanding of the syllabus and content so it actually seems like a good fit for everyone.

I wonder if this system might ameliorate that negative correlation, if junior teachers are assigned the worst students (not schools). I would think the enthusiasm and engagement dissipate after years of fruitless struggling with bad pupils. If you give the low achieving students exclusively to the young teachers, their wide-eyed passion for the youth of tomorrow or whatever can carry them through the first few years - offering the best to students who won't be able to make much with it (and offering the best to the late bloomers who were miscategorized who will). From there they slowly matriculate up the ranks, teaching students who are more and more capable of and receptive to learning. I bet their enthusiasm weathers the years better overall as they always have the next step of better students to look forward to, and their job becomes easier in a sense as time goes on.

I agree with your concerns but we already do this somewhat informally with public education in much of the country with college prep, advanced, honors, and AP courses.

I'm just advocating we act with more purpose and honest intention about what we're already doing.

8 classes ranked. 4 teachers

A: 1&8

B: 2&7

C: 3&6

D: 4&5

The ole Catan split

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