Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms (opens in new tab)

Opinion: The thing that has saved the American school system is that everyone around the world has fully copied the deeply flawed Prussian schooling model, and in many cases has doubled down on the flaws. Higher performing schools are often "teaching to the test" even worse than we are, which is how they get measured as "higher performing" in the first place.

If the Prussian model is soooo spectacularly wonderful, then you have nothing to fear from it being exposed to a competitive environment. It'll win. No worries.

On the other hand, if the Prussian model is, shall we say, less than optimal for the 21st century, the fastest way to find out is free market experimentation, and rather than giving ourselves the same cultural shackles that everybody else has, the American exceptionalism that will justify our salaries will be our willingness to experiment, learn, and refine from there where everybody else insists on the Prussian model. Unless, of course, a 19th century schooling model is just so damned perfect that it will admit of no significant improvement. In which case we'll still find that out pretty quickly. The maximum downside is sharply bounded and the upside of cracking open the monopoly on education is hard to bound. (I can't call it "unbounded" with a straight face, that's hard to justify, but it really is hard to know how much better truly 21st schooling could be.) Failing to at least try some innovation isn't even remotely justified with a cost/benefit risk profile like that.

Had some other country beat us to the punch and exposed their schooling system to free market competition before us, we really would be up the creek without a paddle.

I feel like there's an elephant in the room all debates on US education dance around. My experience with school from K-postgrad was that my education was 90% dependent on what I put into it as a student (homework, studying, etc) and everything else (teacher quality, curriculum, etc) was only marginally significant to how much I learned. In other words, I believe there's a much more insidious and intractable problem causing US children to under-perform. The worst part is that I don't believe we even know exactly what it is. But my guess is that it's a combination of issues firmly entrenched in our melting pot of culture.

edit: correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the US is one of the few countries on earth that has had a consistently high standard of living since WWII, right? My guess is that a few generations of unparalleled abundance has helped atrophy a once voracious society.

> figure out what the top-performing countries are doing and then, by capitalizing on our unique strengths, develop a strategy to do it even better.

The top performing countries' strategy is to have mostly Asian or Northern European students, and very few of third/second world extraction.

Reading biographies on Benjamin Franklin[1], amongst others, makes me seriously doubt the importance of formal schooling on the amount of success a person has in life.

I think other factors like innate curiosity and developed capacity for work are more important.

[1] Franklin's entire formal schooling consists of 2 years at the Boston Latin School, from which he did not graduate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Early_life

It also is the case that some countries measure a different population of students for 'high school' than the US.

E.g., in Germany at one time, the secondary schools that were measured was the academic track, this was being compared against the US's schools which was the general secondary school population.

I'm not sure if this still holds true but it's something to be aware of - the measurement bias.

Paying teachers well & requiring them to have in-depth knowledge of the subject is good. No argument there!

One reason why it might not be such a good idea to copy other nations - they tend to have fairly large achievement gaps between natives and immigrants.

The US has an achievement gap of about 20 pts on PISA, compared to roughly 40 for Norway and even higher in Finland and Sweden.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

This isn't a big deal for nations with few immigrants, but it is a problem for the US.

(Of course, for the sake of making a snarky argument, I'm making the same fallacy as the author: if we copy other nations education systems blindly, we'll get the same result.)

From the submitted article: "The top-performing nations boost the quality of their teaching forces by greatly raising entry standards for teacher education programs. They insist that all teachers have in-depth knowledge of the subjects they will teach, apprenticing new teachers to master teachers and raising teacher pay to that of other high-status professions." This is a basically correct description about teacher selection and teacher professional development in several countries with schools that outperform schools in the United States. One way that teachers have the time to meet with more experienced teachers during the school day for mentoring and discussion of lesson plans is by setting higher class sizes. If the staffing ratio of a school (total teachers hired per enrolled pupils) is roughly the same in two countries, but in one country class sizes are larger, the teacher will have time during the school day to do lesson preparation in collaboration with other teachers. That better lesson preparation can result in more engaging lessons that deliver better education to the larger classes.

I've read a longer article by the same author (Marc Tucker) called "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform."

http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Standing-on-t...

I just tested to see if that had been submitted to HN before, and it had not, so now it is linked to from a new thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3321124

Tucker underestimates, in my opinion, the importance of learner choice, but based on international comparisons he correctly identifies several management practices that would make the school system in the United States better for most learners. I have rather more fondness, based on life experience, for learner choice in schools because I live in a state with statewide public school open enrollment,

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/JustParent/SchChoice/index....

which has encouraged Minnesota school districts to offer innovative programs to draw in students.

I'm in a high school classroom two days a week this semester and next semester is my last before becoming a licensed teacher in the US.

A couple of my math professors at the university I attend went to China over the summer to get an idea of what their primary education classrooms are like and compare them to ours. One of the things I've heard regarding the overall demographics is that there they don't have the expectation that all students are going to get educated to the extent that we attempt to here. At a certain point if students don't perform well enough they are transitioned out to a vocational school instead of following an academic track.

This very well could have a profound effect on comparing scores across countries, their top percent of students is being compared to our entire population of students.

If you consider some of the books that are being tossed around in these threads, e.g. Liping Ma's Knowing and Teaching..., one of the small things that sticks out is a language issue that can have an impact on a young child's number development.

Also, according to that book there is an entirely different mindset when it comes to not only teaching as a profession but in their professional development as well. They are afforded more opportunities for planning and collaboration compared to what is often experienced here.

I think we as a society have to consider whether it is feasible to continue down this road where we attempt to educate everyone to the same level.

If you ranked individual US states among countries, you'd find that many of them are near the very top. (As a whole, the US can't compete against tiny countries like Luxembourg because of the law of large numbers.) Wouldn't it make a lot more sense for the badly performing states to look at the well performing states rather than foreign countries? There will be fewer confounding variables and cultural hurdles to applying lessons learned.

In any case, as soon as an author writes something like

>To many in the financial community, these market-inspired reform ideas are very appealing.

I know this is smear job rather than an intellectually honest appraisal. I mean, really. We shouldn't try new models of schooling because they are basically like the financial crisis? Are you kidding me?

Perhaps he's right depending on your definition of "top performing". He doesn't define it but I'm guessing he means "scores well on standardized tests involving math and verbal skills".

When you optimize for creation of wealth for others (products / services) and for yourself (positive life experiences), you end up with a very different solution: http://www.sudval.org/