Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

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Reading this comment from this teacher's blog article

"And if the choices have run out for my toddler when he’s ready for school, I will do it myself. Maybe I’ll do it for others, as well. Who knows."

questions about a potential education system hack popped into my head. Maybe many others have already had this idea...

What about uniting the home-schooling and frustrated-teachers movements?

I'm sure there are onerous restrictions on setting up a "school" in the U.S. But what about an intensive tutoring system catering to home schooled children? If you had a tutor (who happens to be a formerly disgruntled public school teacher) in a home, how many other children could be in that home, receiving personal tutoring, before no longer being considered a "home school" environment? What if the formerly disgruntled public school teacher drove to various homes during the day or the week? Can "home school" instruction happen in a place other than the child's residence and still be considered home schooling?

Obviously, this could be supplemented with online curricula.

If anything like this is legally feasible, seems like an online service allowing parents to personally select educators sharing their vision for how they want their children to be educated could be hugely disruptive to the current K12 educational establishment.

Does anything like this already exist?

This kind of tutoring is already very common among homeschoolers, though without involving frustrated teachers. Homeschooling law varies by state and local district, but I've never heard of requirements for teaching to physically take place at the home.

> Does anything like this already exist?

Google "homeschool co-ops"

I was part of one when I was a kid. Science was taught by a teacher who used to teach in public schools and we were very fortunate to have him because my mother didn't want potentially dangerous chemicals or dissection animals in the house. I was home-schooled from 1st to 8th grade, then went to public high school and college.

How did you find the transition? That's an interesting pathway to have followed.

Charter schools. There are a wide range of approaches, but the charter school I attended provided an alternative for both teachers and parents looking for flexibility in their child's education.

Some charter schools are amazing, and some are awful ... just like public schools. Research has failed to find any evidence that charter schools perform better as a group -- which is surprising, since they can (by and large) select their students and have flexibility in hiring. Moreover, they undercut public schools in the same district.

Seems like a net-negative to me.

Thank you so much for pointing this out. For people who are so focused on "data-driven education" they always seem to ignore this. The fact of the matter is that collectively they perform no better than public schools, while undermining those very schools they are trying to 'fix.'

Perhaps part of the issue is that people are focusing on a 'silver bullet' for education. Standardized tests, charter schools, and even things like kahn academy have been offered, but it's all based on a false premise. There is no silver bullet. We know the strategies we need to take to improve education, but we always fail at tactics because of the assumption that there is one tactic that can be applied everywhere and it's just going to work.

That said, there might be one tactic that could work everywhere: teacher autonomy. Let the people in the classroom decide the tactics they need to use in order to teach the children they are charged with educating.

Why can't there be more than one school serving a particular area? Does the mere existence of charter/private/parochial in a community undermine that community's public school? Why would that be so?

Education is far from the only service industry for which there is no silver bullet. Other such industries function by fostering expertise at management levels in addition to the "work" level, but always leaving the final decision in the hands of the consumer. On the other hand, USA public education takes no consumer input at all, and it's crap. The reason we continue to attempt doomed one-size-fits-all strategies (and really, always using a single poor tactic is poor strategy, despite what we think we may know) is because we intentionally ignore the primary input that helps other industries regulate quality.

I actually don't think teachers as a whole are that bad (of course there are individual exceptions), but the management/administration of USA public education is abysmal. If most current administrators were actually responsible for firing underperformers while recruiting talented new teachers, they would fail miserably at those tasks.

I'm all in favor of teacher autonomy when we have sufficient public vouchers and other similar mechanisms in place to guarantee parental choice as well.

One way a charter school can undermine the normal public school is by draining away motivated students, since they do get to choose who is admitted, thereby skewing stats.

> Why can't there be more than one school serving a particular area? Does the mere existence of charter/private/parochial in a community undermine that community's public school? Why would that be so?

Tragedy of the anti-commons, basically.

A few reasons:

* Charter schools would pull out the best students (or at least the ones with the most motivated parents). Research generally suggests weak students get lots of benefit from being in class with strong students.

* Public schools benefit greatly from economies of scale. If 10% of students (and thus money) is taken away, the public school still needs to pay for existing fixed infrastructure

* Charter schools frequently take the cheapest students — special ed students, for example, are still left to public schools.

Taken together, this makes charter schools a net negative.

Weak students may benefit, but strong students don't. Some of them are strong enough to work through a class of couple dozens of peers not interested in learning and disrupting the class out of boredom, but some of them just give up.

I'd like to see some data about this "net negative" claim. I think forcing bright kids that want to learn and advance to suffer through substandard school and disruptive environment that suppresses their will to learn and prevents them from achieving better results because the school needs their parents' money and they will be "good influence" on those bullies and delinquents - is plain wrong. A person - even a kid - should not be means to an end. It's just immoral - and judging from the results public school achieve statistically, being more expensive and less successful that private ones - also impractical.

If charter schools consistently out-performed public schools, you might be right. But they don't! It really seems to be a myth that charter schools provide a better education — if anything, it is worse, since they have a number of advantages.

Any data to back up that claim? I see the observable behavior that people pay money for private schools suggests private schools are usually providing better value - otherwise why pay the money? Charter schools are voluntary too, so there must be something that attracts consumers there.

However, I agree that people can be stupid and pay money for products that aren't nearly as good as they are advertised. So given some data I'd be inclined to update my opinion on private and charter schools quality. Where could I see the data that your opinion is based on?

Here's a good summary: http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Organizing...

Their overview: "Some charters do better; the majority do the same or worse. CREDO also moved beyond individual student performance to examine the overall performance of charter schools across multiple subject areas. They found that while some charter schools do better than the traditional public schools that fed them, the majority do the same or worse. Almost one-fifth of charters (17 percent) performed significantly better (at the 95 percent confidence level) than the traditional public school. However, an even larger group of charters (37 percent) performed significantly worse in terms of reading and math. The remainder (46 percent) did not do significantly better or worse."

Education is very hard to judge, particularly for a new institution. I'm not at all surprised people pay for private schools or apply to charter schools — exclusivity might seem to provide additional value.

Also, charter schools != private schools. I don't know the data there, but if you have lots more money than a public school, different things are possible.

Students certainly benefit from interaction with slightly stronger students, regardless of absolute academic strength. The most able student in any class is unlikely to actually learn much, but let's stipulate that we don't care about her needs. I still don't agree that any student benefits from sharing a class with others who are far more advanced. It's not like they're somehow going to catch up (rare exceptions exist, but clearly the system isn't about rare exceptions). Not everyone should be groomed to go $10k in debt for 1.5 years of college, or worse, $50k in debt for a degree that will never pay for itself. We need alternatives to this path for those who are never going to write a convincing essay or calculate a derivative (here we shouldn't just criticize the education establishment; the business community should be creating better opportunities as well).

Public schools benefit much less from economies of scale than their administrators, architects, and accountants (who do so benefit) would have us believe. This is why one of the most effective public-only reforms is to break up large schools into smaller ones. The principals don't have any army of vice-principals behind whom to hide, and there is some accountability for what happens in class. Very few charter, private, or parochial schools ever become the behemoths that public schools are, and few of the parents and students who choose them would want them to.

I agree that students with special challenges should have commensurately larger vouchers they can take with them to whatever school their parents judge to be the best for them. It's hard to imagine that alternative schools would do worse for those with IEPs than most public schools do.

We do a hybrid model where we augment the public fare with a parent organized "auxiliary academic association" (once a week classes).

Also, any parent that wants to be involved with their kids education should check out Odyssey of the Mind (getting kids on teams to do creative problem solving. Fun!) -- http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/

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