Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

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Yep, tracking students into systems like high/low early on makes it very hard to ever escape that track, as they're a sort of self-perpetuating system. That has downstream effects for one's entire life. It's a crude method of personalizing education within the context of factory education.

Downsides are that kids develop at different times, have different educational needs, have home life issues that can temporarily derail progress, etc and if those happen around the time kids are getting tracked, they may not reach their full potential.

A good education system would offer students a way to rise up whenever they're ready to rise up, let them learn at their pace, focus on mastery, build upon knowledge gained rather than schedule followed, etc. There's a lot of edtech out there that incorporate these concepts but school models struggle to integrate it into the (literally) old school way they operate. It's quite difficult to reorient school around these new concepts at scale, it has to be done school-by-school, leader-by-leader, school board by school board.

Agree its complex, as it may be the 'best of the worst' option for certain contexts. Anything involving balancing equity/access/etc is like that.

From what I've seen there are three major problems with edtech that gives a personalized education:

1) A lot of K-8 education is babysitting. If you let kids do their own thing they'll just watch YouTube and play Roblox instead. Most kids are not _that_ self motivated at this point in life. It's hard for teachers to manage a classroom if everyone is working on different things.

2) Staring at a computer screen is not a great learning experience. A classroom is an interactive, social experience with active feedback. It's hard to socialize when the kid next to you is not working on the same activity or problems you are.

3) Personalizing education diminishes the importance of teachers in the classroom, which teachers unions obviously oppose. Teachers can't teach if every kid is learning something different, and online education strongly promotes winner-take-all dynamics where the best teacher and content can scale up infinitely and dominate.

Out of all these I think 2) and 3) are the hardest problems to solve and whoever solves them is going to meaningfully advance education. But I'm not very convinced by the startups I'm seeing in this space that anyone has solved it yet.

Yeah we’re early on in really nailing the formula. Butts in seats staring at screens doing single player activities isn’t a particularly compelling education environment nor one children are accustomed to biologically. We need more embodied, social, psychologically safe, and intrinsically motivating learning environments, and I don’t think the enabling technologies and designs have yet emerged to fully satisfy these needs.

That said some of these programs have solid learning science foundations and good outcomes. Teachers roles necessarily change to ‘guide on the side’ and motivator, there’s a lot more there to go into but basically it’ll take time.

Another non-obvious problem is that you can get mis-tracked too low even on the highest track. It happened to me. There was an assessment test on entering middle school for how many classes up you got shifted, I went into the highest bucket with 4 other kids. Last year of middle school we had to get bussed into the local high school for math education and back for everything else.

I was not seriously challenged and felt like math classes wasted my time.

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