It's not entirely clear to me that private schools would cater to individuals, or group by ability in the way that tutors do. There are other market forces at work, such as the preference of many students and their parents for students to be grouped with those of a similar age--- and the dislike of many parents for their students to be seen as "behind". There are also administrative/cost problems with individual attention that weigh in favor of uniformity. For example, if there are a few students who learn "too fast", the optimal business solution for an education provider might be to say, "fuck 'em, 5% of the students isn't where my money is coming from". Or, it might be to generally go by age but have a smallish exception pool; the age-groups-plus-'gifted'-class model that many public schools already use might cover enough of the skills variance, while being much cheaper to administer than a fully individualized model.

At the very least, I don't think it's entirely obvious what the results would be. The bits of evidence we do have don't seem super-encouraging. For-profit universities, for example, appear to have decided that a mass-production model is the best business strategy. And existing private K-12 schools don't seem to have adopted an ability-based model, instead using traditional age-based classes. Is there a reason that, if market incentives would indeed cause such an outcome, they wouldn't have already caused it? It's true that the private-education market is currently effectively restricted to wealthier families, but it's still quite large.

In fact, the current "public" model of centralized control, standardized curriculum, and cookie-cutter learning objectives is based on an antiquated understanding of human development, social systems, and motivation. In fact, by forcing a child to endure hours of boredom and conformity it prepares its inmates for a life of work in a factory.

If market forces were allowed to act on K-12 education we'd see something quite unpredictable but very much unlike what you seem to be imagining... unless, that is, large companies obtained a monopoly on education in the same way that public schools have thusfar.

Without a monopoly, we'd see innovations like Khan Academy all the time (let's face it, what Khan created is trivial and obvious and it's only remarkable b/c most teachers and curricula are so utterly bad).

You are also overlooking the fact that humans have a natural hunger for knowledge, and any notion that there is a lack of demand for top quality k-12 education is an artifact of our current corrupt system.

Here's a simple thought experiment. Look at all the education systems around the world, and ask if the ones with the best results are private or public.

That's not a simple thought experiment, it's a massive data-collecting exercise.

I'm not sure if there are any countries with wholly-private education systems, are there? Still, there are many countries (the UK and Australia spring to mind) where private schools play a larger role than they do in the US. And your fears appear to be unfounded, as the private schools in these countries range from "truly excellent" to "quite reasonably okay". Parents and students choosing a school aren't nearly as misled by glossy brochures as you might think -- the newspapers are filled with detailed comparisons of average marks in statewide tests, success in getting into universities, and so forth.

Now I didn't go to a private school, I went to an academically selective public school in Australia, but there was always the sense that we were in competition with the private schools... their mere presence drives the public schools to try to do better as well. The main criticism that I could make of the private schools where I was (apart from snobbery and often-silly uniforms) is that they had a tendency to spoon-feed education to their students in the interests of maximizing their university entrance marks... the result being that students often floundered somewhat when they actually got to university and were expected to learn in a more self-directed way. But faced with a choice between that and a chaotic American public school where the primary goal appears to be stopping the students from shooting each other, I'll take the spoon feeding and straw hats any day.

Given the fact that the US is a country of over 300 million people, and you have heard only a few stories of shootings, I find this comment extremely hyperbolic.

I went to private and public schools in 3 different states. The public schools I attended were extremely safe, but the private schools provided more structure and discipline (that someone like me was helped by when just a clueless kid).

EDIT: Also note that my best friend went to the well-accredited, local public school, and was valedictorian (eventually graduated from Emory Law). I went to a non-profit, private school where my roommate was on a full-ride, and went on to go full-ride to Carnegie Mellon. I blew off college and became a ski bumb/river-guide/waiter for six years.

My high school was fairly strict on rules and regulations, and my time and movement was managed and regimented to an extent that I've never experienced before or sense. Much of this was due to misguided safety rules. That was before Columbine, and from what I hear things have become far worse now.

Such might be reasonable if shootings were a serious threat, but the aren't, as you point out, so it's basically just wasted.

There appears to be no way to "normalize" the data.

Take an ad for the Macbook Air. It shows a stylish person happily using the Air to do something fun.

Now consider an ad for a private school that shows a child happily benefitting from something he/she learned at the school being advertised.

Maybe the ad shows a graduate getting accepted into a prestigious college or even YC.

Ads are often aspirational and emotional, and do not necessarily contain false information. Sure, paying tuition at a school won't get you into a prestigious school and owning a MB Air won't make you happy. But an ad communicating the virtues of a great product is a good thing if it informs consumers of the product.

Let's face it, no matter how you view ads, if you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution.

If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher.

A bit of back story. I'm the only person in my immediate family to finish high school, and I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things. Yet here I am, a successful software engineer, due in large part to a good public education. I can't see how I would have been better served by a private system.

Or you could send your kid to a public school which is also fucked up, but not have any other options because, hey, there aren't any other schools around, and nobody has any real incentive to fix it up.

I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. In today's public schools, many kids can't read or do basic math, so it's hard to imagine something worse.

Also, the monopoly system is the only reason parents can't easily switch their kid to a different school. If this were an option, parents would be much more critical. Most parents today just settle for whatever is publicly available b/c it's "free" to them and they'd have to move to a different district to put their kid in a different school.

The only concern I'd have would be with religious schools which might teach BS instead of real stuff. But an appropriate level of government intervention in setting the curriculum and standard examinations would hopefully negate this problem.

"Final question for one million points: roughly how old is the Earth, anyway?"

Let me explain how schools work where I come from. The final year of high school is spent largely doing a series of examinations standardized across the state, called the Higher School Certificate. (It's a bit more complicated than that, there's a school-based contribution to the exams which gets normalized with another set of exams, but let's just pretend it's one big set of exams now, which tests everything you learn in your last two years of school.) The marks are all tallied up, and every student in the state recieves a grade between 0 and 100 which ranks exactly how well they did in their exams (if you get 95.4 then you did better than 95.4% of the state, et cetera). These numbers (called Tertiary Entrance Rankings when I went through, though I think they've changed name several times since then) determine what courses and universities you can get into (none of this namby-pamby admissions essay slash extracurricular bullshit stuff like in the US)... or for those who don't go to university it will be a major line item on your CV when you start looking for work, so obviously all students are very keen on making sure they get a high TER. This provides an obvious point for competition between schools -- schools will compete between themselves to get the largest number of high TERs, and parents choosing schools for their children will look at this information when choosing schools.

It's heartless, and it's cut-throat, and it's incredibly stressful for the students, and it works great.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Academy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter_Academy

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_league

Sadly, many kids in special ed programs and many behavior problem kids would not have problems in a different type of learning scenario... but the entrenched K-12 classroom, 30 students one teacher, hour long periods, boring books, exercises, silence, etc., is just a horrible fit for them.

But were you given a good education, or were you smart enough to educate yourself given a modicum of education and a structured environment?

The problem is that half of people are not smart enough. If you teach them to read using word recognition, they will not deduce phonics on their own, so their reading ability is permanently capped at a level suitable for a dull 8 year-old.

The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. And then 20 years later you get a new generation of teachers that are the product of bad teaching. The result is a 50 year cycle of mini dark ages.

... I was raised by my grandmother who is not educated at all. She would have been completely unequipped to make a good decision about such things.

But would she want to make a good decision? Or to avoid a horrifically bad decision? The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools.

I didn't care about education until i was in my 20s. I would not have educated myself as a child or teenager.

"The problem is that half of people are not smart enough"

That sounds like a number you pulled out of your butt. Do you have any real statistics on that?

"The problem with zero-competition government schools is that when they get captured by a fad (word recognition, new math, no student left behind, etc.), it happens everywhere. There is no escape. "

I'm not sure I understand, but I'm pretty sure it's not true. Our schools are becoming more federalized, but that hasn't always been the case. States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems.

"The latter does not require education or sophistication, just the ability to ask about the relative rank of the nearby schools."

This isn't true. She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her. Think about it. Have you ever watched infomercials with absurd assertions that have graphs and numbers on them? You and I realize they are absurd, but most people don't. Think about it.

What I mean is if you were chained to a desk and forced to study something, would your mind have automatically picked out relationships and meanings, even if they were not explicitly drilled? Most people in the upper third of intelligence do this almost automatically. For them, the curriculum is not the education.

"The problem is that half of people are not smart enough."

The studies of IQ and life outcome suggest that people of below-average intelligence do not spontaneously deduce general principles when given many specific examples. If you teach them to read by word recognition training, they will not figure out the rules of phonics on their own. It will be difficult or impossible for them to read a word that was not trained into them in childhood. (Whereas even really thick people trained in phonics can read words like "platen" or "vellus" that they have never seen before, and they can make themselves understood at writing down words they know but have never seen spelled.)

States once had a lot of leeway in their education systems.

I was thinking of decentralization even at a lower level. If all the schools in a city are captured by a stupid fad, it may take decades for the city to escape. If individual schools are left to run themselves, the ones that pick dumb ideas will lose students/money to schools that pick good ideas.

She'd have no idea what graphs mean, and even if she got it to some degree it would be very easy to mislead her.

She wouldn't be able to understand "the students here get the worst scores in town"? And she would keep not understanding it for 13 years? And you would never figure it out and ask to go somewhere else? There may be some students in that situation, but there are many families with some degree of awareness and ambition, and their ambitions will promptly show up in budget cuts.

You do a fine job of describing what I think is wrong with ads (that most ads consist primarily of false information, often conveyed via subtle signals that the consumer processes non-consciously). I also absolutely agree that making the consuming public aware of the options open to them in the market is beneficial to society. I agree that there's a tension here: if you want to absolutely ban all of the downside of the former, you also lose the upside of the latter. Thank god my disgusting bathwater is gone, but where's my baby?

However, it's completely preposterous to say that the only alternatives are completely unrestrained advertising on the one hand, and a government-sponsored consumer-reports on the other. The latter sounds like an experiment I'd like to see run, actually, but not enough to endorse it in my own economy, so I guess that shows how much faith I have in it. But we already live in a compromise: manufacturers of known social ills like tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, have restrictions placed on how they can advertise. We already have laws on false advertising, especially around food and drugs, and also laws on clarity in packaging (which is a form of advertising). I think that if there were public will to do so, we could iteratively, gradually, over years and years, successively tighten the requirements for truth in advertising.

I think it's plausible and practical that this might get us to a societal state where the standard for advertising is informative, useful, and much much less manipulative.

Or maybe it wouldn't get us there, because getting legislation right is a bitch (especially in the US, apparently). But I see no support for your out-of-hand dismissal of the existence of practical, plausible alternatives to laissez faire.

That's an outrageous claim. Take marketing of pharmaceuticals directly to patients. Unconscionable in my opinion (and many other first world countries agree). There are many limited cases where marketing is quite harmful. Indeed, we have reason to believe education is one of those cases. You simply need to examine the current state of law schools in the United States to see where marketing gets you. People fresh out of undergrad taking out six figure loans and being told the median salary at their law school is also six figures. Which it is. But what they aren't being told about is the bimodal distribution of law salaries and only the top of the class has any chance of paying back their loans. And let's not even get into those ads you see on TV from third rate schools trying to convince you to go back to get your "MBA".

Is it OK to market antidepressants? What about blood pressure or cholesterol medicine? Heartburn medicine? Asprin? Sunscreen? Toothpaste? Dentil floss? Athlete's foot spray?

Prescription meds are controlled such that a doctor must agree that the prescription is a good idea before the patient gets the drug. There have been instances found of conflict-of-interest-inducing quid pro quos between pharmaceutical companies and doctors, but it seems silly to blame the ad a patient saw for this. Most ads I've seen say "ask your doctor about x".

So what is the harm? What classes of remedies (drugs, procedures, OTC items) result in harmful ads?

Your complaint about education ads is interesting b/c you're bemoaning the phenomenon of people with a freshly minted college degree foolishly pursuing more education. If you are seriously worried about a highly educated segment of society being misled by a simple numerical trick like the one you describe, there must be no hope whatsoever for humanity if the only people we can trust to watch commercials are people with a Ph.D in stats.

If someone has not become well acquainted with the sorts of semi-misleading things mentioned in ads by the time he/she is an adult, something is seriously wrong, and the sort of paternalistic society needed to protect this person from him/herself is unacceptably oppressive to everyone else's freedom.

The line is pretty straightforward. No marketing to patients of any drug that requires a prescription whatsoever. The reason why these medicines require prescriptions is because they are more serious than aspirin or sunscreen, so it's an easy and reasonable line to draw. Marketing to doctors is fine (i.e. the market actors who have the base knowledge necessary to make reasonably informed decisions). There are plenty of policy arguments to be found on why direct marketing of pharmaceuticals is not a net win. There's a reason why it only happens in the United States and New Zealand.

> If you are seriously worried about a highly educated segment of society being misled by a simple numerical trick like the one you describe, there must be no hope whatsoever for humanity if the only people we can trust to watch commercials are people with a Ph.D in stats.

The same arguments were made about predatory lending agreements and similarly misleading financial mechanisms. Society has come down in large part against these things, rejecting the idea that the consumer is wholly responsible to educate themselves. Marketing with law schools is a serious problem and the ABA is currently under investigation by several senators on this issue.

> If someone has not become well acquainted with the sorts of semi-misleading things mentioned in ads by the time he/she is an adult, something is seriously wrong, and the sort of paternalistic society needed to protect this person from him/herself is unacceptably oppressive to everyone else's freedom.

Sounds great on paper, but like most arguments of this type it doesn't hold up. In reality you've got people with average college educations going up against PhDs in finance, economics, psychology, etc. Companies can afford to pay these people huge salaries in order to increase sales, while the consumers are just regular people who get home after a hard days work and don't want to spend the balance of their free time on figuring out how the business execs are trying to trip them up. The bottom line is that in this country and others companies don't have the absolute freedom to represent their product how they want. As a practical consideration consumers don't have the time to educate themselves to the proper level and so regulation stops companies from taking advantage of consumers.

The argument that typically comes back is nanny state, etc, etc, etc. But I find it telling that it is only the people with the ability and education to combat predatory practices that make this argument. In reality America is composed of a diverse set of people, some with education, some without, some native speakers, some not. Some regulation to protect everyone who otherwise would trample the average citizen because of greed is the right thing to do.

Your argument against lenders and fine print is interesting. Post housing crash this sort of thing is blamed for herding lots of naive people into mortgages with terms they shouldn't (in retrospect) have agreed to.

However if you look at what regulators were doing during that period, they were actually expanding the core problem. Bush had started a war that was having real effects on the economy. In spite of Greenspan's attempt to clarify the government's position on implicitly underwriting Fannie and Freddie, Bush expended no effort at solving this problem, which had been much anticipated. Fannie and Freddie ended up not releasing any financial information to the public for several years!

This was also the time when many people felt very wise for having bought a house when they did. Prices were up 40% over a few years in many markets, and so it was easy for the American people to support an expensive war b/c so many were rich on paper thanks to the drastic appreciation in housing prices.

The regulations that tilt investment toward housing are supported by both political parties and created the massive bubble that ended up bursting.

Sure you can blame lenders for sloppy research, buyers for inadequate caution, but our government had everyone convinced that housing prices always go up.

You relate a sort of conspiracy theory about intellectuals being paid great sums to hoodwink the average person and suggest that better regulation is the answer. I'd argue that regulation is the biggest problem we have b/c it insulates people from the predictable and obvious consequences that they'd anticipate without this malign guidance.

Like a seatbelt made of tissue paper, it may appear to offer protection, but in reality it leads to risky behavior that no sane person would undertake without a large dose of naive trust in the ruling class.

While your formulation is deliberately obtuse, the underlying sentiment can be quite damning for a certain kind of free market fan-boy, the kind who insists that buyers in a market are rational in some individual or even collective sense, that they somehow optimize their own happiness or utility function.

That notion is patently absurd, and is actually flatly and irrefutably countered by the mere existence of marketing. If the decision-making process is rational, then there is no need, nor even ability, to forge emotional connections with brands through marketing. This is a plain fact that you do not seem to get. To wit:

Ads are often aspirational and emotional, and do not necessarily contain false information. Sure, paying tuition at a school won't get you into a prestigious school and owning a MB Air won't make you happy. But an ad communicating the virtues of a great product is a good thing if it informs consumers of the product.

You've cited two examples where ads are certainly misleading, and then seemed to imply that those ads "do not necessarily contain false information," as if they were therefore not deceptive. By attempting to short-circuit the decision-making process, by putting the emotional cart before the rational horse, the ads you describe are fundamentally deceptive. That ads like that exist, that they are paid for by people with skin in the game, and that they work, are all testament to the fundamental irrationality of market players on both an individual and aggregate level. Namely, they can be swayed by a manufactured emotional response before even having gone through the rational decision-making process.

So, the argument for which your reduction ad absurdum is actually a shadow is, "Marketing exists, therefore there is a fundamental problem with the underpinnings of free market theory. It does not match reality in one of the important ways that it purports."

You conclude:

[I]f you think ads are bad then the only solution is for the government to start its own version of 'consumer reports' and to publish a simple list of products ranked according to attributes. Hardly a remotely practical or plausible solution.

I have to say, that's quite a gem. In reverse order, I guess, is the best way to address it. Last, your point about it being impractical or implausible is vacuous and, further, not germane. How would the impracticality of any given solution affect the existence or nature of the underlying problem? Second-to-last, if you really believe that the solution you offered is the "only solution", then that is a failure only of your own imagination. One could at least imagine a tighter regulation of advertising claims, for example. (It's suspicious that the "only solution" you offer is the most oppressive and impractical one. Triumphalism like this is rarely the hallmark of independent thought, but often stems from having swallowed someone's propaganda whole.) Third-to-last and finally, the "if you think ads are bad" remark is hardly the most charitable characterization of the author's original point, and is in fact what is termed an "overgeneralization," a kind of straw man. Some more charitable attempts might be, "If you think that advertising about such important and life-changing things like which school to go to will carry unsustainable hazards,..." See how much closer we are to a solution just by framing the question fairly? Granted, the solutions one might come up with from there are perhaps less simplistic and less susceptible to vilification on ideological grounds, and that might not suit your rhetorical purpose. However, I submit that this approach has a countervailing good quality that ultimately recommends it. It shows good manners, maturity, and a willingness to actually further the discussion.

I think you are mistaken in your understanding of rationality. Emotion is part of rationality, not separate from it. To make a rational decision, a rational person ought to consider his/her emotional response as input to the decision function, not throw it away.

Also, different individuals have different utility functions, and not all are practical, far-looking, mature, or wise.

Your view of humanity seems rather grim if you think that people are so easily misled by advertising. While dishonest claims in ads are a bad thing, those fall under the category of "dishonesty" and not "advertising". An ad touting an inaccurate gas mileage for a car is no more abhorrent than a window sticker or owner's manual stating inaccurate gas mileage figures, and of course laws exist to discourage companies from engaging in either practice.

If anything, advertising omits negative facts about a product or service. But in a competitive marketplace firms have an incentive to publicize negative aspects of competing products (note the Velveeta ad claiming "Cheddar's lumpy, cheddar's oily..."). So the complaint about ommitted negatives is actually a complaint about an insufficiently competitive marketplace.

"Anchoring Bias: Phone Numbers Used as Anchors When Estimating the Prices of Goods"

This is my core point as well, thanks for taking the time to lay out a better case than I did. It's rather shocking once you realize that the human brain is not rational in the way we often think it is. I find this fact to completely destroy most libertarian principles.

How does it do anything of the sort? The most fundamental libertarian principle is simply that one should not use force/aggression/fraud to compel someone to do something against their will[1]. That people should be free from use of oppressive force does not require that they be purely rational.

As for the economic arguments that libertarians often use... understand that consequentalist libertarians like to demonstrate that free market principles usually result in better outcomes for most people, most of the time. I don't know any libertarian or free-market advocate who will contend that there are no pathological edge cases to the free-market / laissez-faire approach. They simply accept that as part of the system and acknowledge the role of private charity to fill gaps.

And to add one more point... while the Austrian School of economics, which is very influential to libertarians, and may sometimes be thought of as almost synonymous with libertarianism, does indeed put a strong emphasis on deductive logic and universal laws, I don't find many (if any) libertarians / austrian economists, who contend that humans are strictly rational, all the time.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

1. There is such a thing as rational utility, and 2. Bureaucrats can figure out what it is.

Huh? So you're saying there is only libertarianism or bureaucratly controlled economies? That's wrong on it's face.

Here's my idea of a good economy, markets for most things with good government regulation of health, safety, etc. And, a few public industries like water, power, and healthcare. This system doesn't fit your model at all.

"By attempting to short-circuit the decision-making process, by putting the emotional cart before the rational horse, the ads you describe are fundamentally deceptive. That ads like that exist, that they are paid for by people with skin in the game, and that they work, are all testament to the fundamental irrationality of market players on both an individual and aggregate level. Namely, they can be swayed by a manufactured emotional response before even having gone through the rational decision-making process."

What makes an emotional response any less worthy than a rational response? Plato's ideas on rationality are just plain wrong- the cart before the horse is a poor metaphor. If you look at any neuroscience research in the area, you soon see that that good decision making is completely impossible without both, together. I highly recommend Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide" as a highly readable book on the subject.

Following emotional cues is not "short-circuiting the decision-making process", and is not in any way "fundamentally deceptive".

EDIT: Not to mention that intangible value is still value. If marketing makes an item higher status, and you value items based on the status they confer on you, then that marketing is creating enormous value. Branding literally makes a product more valuable in a consumer eye, and that is the only measure of value that matters.

That is an extremely black-and-white view of the world. I think ads are generally not useful, and the small use they do provide is vastly overwhelmed by their negative attributes. I fully support truth-in-advertising laws, but I would never go as far as your proposed solution. Poor, emotion-laden advertisements are really due to fundamental flaws in human psychology which will be there no matter what we do.

Are we allowed to include universities?

For example, my wife is a teacher, and one of her biggest challenges is dealing with kids with severe behavior problems. They disrupt the entire class, but these kids still need an education. If you remove those kids from the class the rest of the kids benefit, but our goal as a nation isn't to only educate good kids.

This seems to create a perverse incentive in a private system. Private schools will do everything they can to be selective about there students, because their ultimate goal isn't to educate the nation as a whole, and that seems like the wrong goal to me.

Why does there have to be an ultimate goal that is shared by every single education institution? Top-tier children deserve a top-tier education every bit as much as misbehaving children deserve the best education they can manage. Instead of having a single educational goal, why not start with the following three goals, and move from there?

1. Maximize the maximum outcome. In other words, allow gifted students to move as fast as they want.

2. Improve the mean outcome. If the mean education level of the nation rises, one can expect the mean productivity level to rise as well.

3. Minimize the negative cases. Provide intensive remedial (in the strictest sense of the root word "remedy") solutions to raise the worst case students to the highest possible level.

Actually, I suppose these three goals could be summarized into a single goal:

1. Maximize the individual outcome of each individual student. This would be like the reverse of the "rising tide floats all boats" metaphor. If every student reaches his or her maximum potential, then the nation as a whole reaches its maximum potential.

That should be the singular focus of any education system. Any other metric will fail to optimize certain students' outcomes, which by definition fails to optimize the mean outcome. I would be very happy if nobody ever had to be told to slow down to keep with the class again, as I was multiple times in my public school education.

With more private schools, smaller, more specialized schools would develop. Someone passionate about teaching special ed would have the chance to make such a profound difference in this setting compared to the public school status quo.

Here's my theory. We should privatize prisons. The competition between companies to build and manage prisons will lead to innovations in rehabilitation techniques, and innovations in efficiency of inmate management. We'll get a system that releases prisoners who don't end up back in prison and it will be cheaper than our current system all because of the magic of competition and the profit motive.

Except we've tried this experiment, and the results are clear. The profit motive has lead to the prison industry lobbying government to get laws that send more people to prison, and to private prisons giving kickbacks to judges to send kinds to prison for first time minor offenses.

The incentive created by privatization is to create more profit, not to create a better school or prison.

Also, if you feel the US college system is so bad, should we try to make our college system more like our primary education system? If not, why not?

Your comparison to prisons is silly since a) non-privatized prisons have similar incentives and similarly lobby for more prisoners (google CA prison guard unions), b) prisoners don't get to choose their prison (unlike schools), and c) private prisons are not rewarded based on rehabilitation.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/

I don't see much reason why the incentives would be different below the college level.

Whenever you want to ask "what would a privatized primary education system do", you can often ask instead "what does the privatized secondary education system currently do?"

My sister got to 4th grade in the private school and suddenly didn't want to go to school anymore. She wasn't challenged. The private school's solution when my parent's talked to them was to assign my sister MORE BUSYWORK. The public school had an actual gifted & talented program we were able to exploit.

It wasn't all roses though- my mom had yell at several Administrators to get us the programs to challange us (my brother was in AP Calc, the highest math available, his freshman year of HS). It's true though: the biggest indicator of success in school is parental involvement.

Private schools do cater to a small percentage, not everybody in a neighborhood, but a small percentage to whom the school appeals. Just like any other kind of business.

Mercedes doesn't say "screw those snobs. We want the masses." Nope, they cater specifically to a very small set of buyers.

There's no reason to think there won't be brands of schools targeted at different kinds of students.

But we won't know until people can actually make choices without having to pay for education twice. Most people can't afford to pay the taxes required to support public schools and also pay for tuition. They shouldn't have to.

In old communist Yugoslavia, the government produced one car for all. Without any competition it captured 100% of the market. And it was a piece of crap.

Competition ended that stupidity and hopefully one day it will do the same for education.

There could well be boutique schools that cater to people with specialized interests who are willing to pay a significant premium (the BMW rather than Civic), but that's also true today.

A major difference from communist Yugoslavia is that private education isn't actually illegal; anyone can buy any education they want. Perhaps more people would buy boutique education if the public school system were abolished along with the taxes that paid for it, since their overall disposable income would be higher. But I suspect most people wouldn't buy a significantly more expensive educational solution if a cheap and decent one were available--- not much more than they do today, even if the price gap were slightly smaller. Instead, my guess is that the vast majority would opt for a cost-effective, fairly standardized large education provider.

(This does depend on how exactly it's implemented. Many of the voucher schemes being proposed would in effect prevent low-end competition, by giving movable fixed-dollar-amount vouchers that aren't refundable, which would make the more expensive schools seem relatively more attractive. For example, if it's a $6k nonrefundable voucher, there's no incentive for a private education provider to improve efficiency to the point where they can provide education for only $4k, because why would you go to the $4k school when it's no cheaper than the $6k school? So that in effect would put a floor on prices and make boutique schools more competitive. That's not really a libertarian solution, though, but sort of a social-engineering-via-managed-market solution.)

Maybe, but we can observe: 1) intense competition for admission to the highest tier colleges 2) intense efforts by many inner city residents to place their kids in charter / special focus schools 3) strong correlations between perceived school quality and housing values

All of which suggests that many parents are actually quite focused on educational quality. That focus is often forestalled from becoming "effective demand" by the high opportunity cost on private education imposed by our public school system.

I don't know how real choice would emerge or how it would play out. I do know that more freedom would enable far more parents to translate their intense interest into much more effective action. It would also deny parents the excuse of poor schools, as they would choose the school, and schools the excuse of poor parenting, as they would be better able to choose the parents. Accountability would shift from procedural compliance to behaviors more likely to be conducive to learning.

Further, it would provide space for innovation. And when some innovation demonstrated better preparation for college, or graduation rates, or post-grad employment, there would be effective market pressure to emulate that innovation, and in an effective rather than formal manner.

It is likely the case that most schools would evolve to forms with great similarities to one another -- and why not, the majority of kids they're teaching are likely pretty similar on the important dimensions. The similarities would emerge after a process of _finding_ that most effective form, and weeding out the institutions that are providing suboptimal service. The freedom to migrate to new forms would constantly discipline those schools to avoid various distractions, or shift accountability. And it would provide greater flexibility to handle edge cases more effectively.

And in a more flexible system, educators would never ask to "slow a kid down" because of the problems the kid's speed poses to _their_ model. They would have to ask how to adjust that model to the kid's speed, lest they lose that kid's revenue to some model that can make the adjustment.

Its quite arbitrary to tie these two things together. Sort of like tying which restaurant you can patronize to the car you drive. Or what sporting event you can attend to the clothes you buy. Except way worse.

I would actually bet it would be the mid-priced schools that would be the most appealing to the masses, because nobody wants to be (or be seen as) the parent sending their kid to "the cheap school" unless they absolutely can't afford better.

My wife taught at a private school for some years that did that. They had the traditonal grade levels, coursework was modified for the student.

They had to have the grade levels: it was K-8, placing students back in public schools, or a private high school, is really difficult if you don't.

This was a learning disabled private school, so your mileage may vary.

Markets aren't the answer; they're a method for finding the answer, or (more likely) multiple answers.

the very end is about a proposed private school

"For his part, Khan says he’s now considering starting his own private school, as a way to see just how much you could wrap learning around Khan Academy. His ideas are intriguing: Among other things, his school wouldn’t divide kids by age; teenagers would mix in with kindergartners. “I have no research to back this up,” he says, “but younger kids act more mature around older kids, and older kids act more mature around younger kids.” If the classrooms were fully flipped, students could spend more of the school day doing creative activities. He’d use board games to teach negotiation, and he’d teach history backward. (“Why are the Israelis and Palestinians pissed at each other? Let’s go back a couple of years. Wait—they were pissed at each other even then! So you go back even further …”) He also thinks he’d teach kids subjects that have more real-world applicability—like “statistics, law, accounting, and finance. Why are you teaching people civics? Teach them law. That’s more relevant, and you learn civics at the same time.” He calculates that it would cost only $10,000 per child, “affordable for professional couples out here.”"

We lived in a fantastic little neighborhood, Perry Circle, in Annapolis where this was routinely observed. It very much nailed the first iteration of Alexander's Pattern Language: 10 buildings, 6 apartments in 3 stories, plus attics and below-ground garages, arranged around a central circle. Those parents who stayed home would congregate on the porches and benches and the kids of all ages would play together very constructively.

I really miss living there. It's what cul-de-sac neighborhoods could have been.

http://goo.gl/e3MNM

...which is exactly why to leave it to the market.

That said, I get sick of everyone piling on public school whenever something like this comes up. Public school is set to the following task: "take everyone, everywhere, all across the country, and bring them to the same level of proficiency across the board, with tightly limited funding and regardless of outside factors." Someone comes along and finds a tool that works on a teeny tiny cohort then climbs on their pedestal and declares their system better than public schools.

Personally, I think public schools are being set to an (almost?) impossible task. What the reviewer said in that article about "slow them down please" is obviously abhorrent, but the "They have a monopoly! They're monopolists!" chatter is silly, in my opinion. First of all they don't have a monopoly (for those who can afford it: private charter homeschooling etc.). Secondly, they are just trying to do their best to meet their goals with what they have. It's selfish, yes, but having students at more or less the same level of competency makes it easier for them to do the task to which they've been set.

When I was in school, the teacher would often say "Sequoia, that's a great question, but it's a bit advanced and I've got 30 other students here. I can't spend a lot of time answering advanced questions when half the class is struggling with basic concepts." That was annoying and I'm not going to send my kids to public school in part because of it, but I didn't rail against the teacher for being a selfish monopolist. S/he was just doing his/her best given the circumstances and requirements: often times public schools are doing the same.

EDIT: an article that informs my thinking here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch... Great article, whether you've seen Waiting for Superman (hit piece "documentary" about why public schools suck and charter schools are the answer) or not.

All in all, it worked out well for me, and I would encourage you to stick with home schooling. If you can, find a private school that allows home study. That way, you can get group field trips and sports activities while staying in control of your child's educational growth.

Interestingly, as home schoolers we're allowed to purchase tickets to local educational events (plays etc.) at the same price as local schools. So if there's a special showing of a play at noon for school kids, we can buy the discounted tickets and go to it. For sports etc., I believe that technically our local schools are obligated to allow our children to join their extracurricular groups, such as sports. As for field trips, that would be nice to be able to go with the private school, but frankly that's the least of my worries. If there's one thing homeschooling (at least how we do it) does better than any other model, it's field trips! :)

A: The ability to work my own schedule. If I wanted to double up on school one day, I could. Then the next day I could skip school and work on a hobby or project. This brings me to

B: The ability to focus my studies on things that interested me. For me, this included Battlebots (I made one) and aviation. Aviation was an early career choice that didn't quite manifest for me (blessing in disguise, I suppose). I was able to do things like take the day off of school to copilot with my uncle who worked as a corporate pilot.

>I was able to do things like take the day off of school to copilot with my uncle

// Confuses me because when you're copiloting with your uncle you're being home-schooled; you're not having the day off from education you're just doing it differently (right!).

Presumably where you are just being educated at home doesn't fit the definition of "home schooled"?

There are still requirements to meet. We had standardized testing every year, and coursework to complete. My point is that I could get the formal stuff out of the way at my own pace, and actually do interesting things like learn about aerodynamics first-hand. At a public school, this would have been more difficult to do.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Schoolslearninganddevelo...

Gives the legal requirements in the UK. We don't have requirements to sit exams or do specific pieces of work (coursework) as long as "full-time education" is provided.

Finally, I basically hate most aspects of public school.

I was ready to agree with this. But then I reflected. What I really hated were my rotten peers (and, to an extent, my rotten self) from around the start of junior high to the end of high school. They weren't horrible, mind you. Just middle-of-the-distribution-curve kids, with the inevitable psychopath or two. I don't think privatization is going to filter that out.

And I rather liked my public community colleges and universities.

For example, I was an exchange student for a year and when I came back I was told I'd get no credits for it because I couldn't produce a report card , so I was held back (i.e. punished for studying in a diff. country for a year).

Same year: moved from another state, forced to take freshman "earth & environmental sciences" because it's a state requirement. I requested being able to take AP Environmental Science instead: "no, it's a requirement." So I'm turning 18, held back to 11th grade because I got an exchange scholarship, forced to take a freshman (remedial) course surrounded by kids straight out of middle school (embarrassing and discouraging as a teenager) when I'm willing to take a comparable AP course.

This stuff happened with me all throughout school. To be fair I was somewhat lazy, but much of this was due to the feeling of powerlessness and inevitability public school is designed to instill.

inb4 someone who had a different, great public school experience. As I said, this is my experience.

I told them that the School Act defined no such requirement and being older than 16 I was no longer required to be in school at all so they could either let me have empty blocks or kick me out for violating the school policy on spare blocks. Being a rather articulate student I would be willing to write a letter to the editor explaining how a student who could sleep through math class and still get an A in the course was being forced out of school despite fulfilling the requirements of the School Act.

They could have another graduate on their rolls or another drop out, it was their choice.

I kind of wish I took the GED as soon as I could have, would have saved many years. I had the unfortunately lucky 'problem' of liking a lot of my teachers and classes though. Basically what I hated were the prerequisites and the required things like art/p.e./poorly taught history which I had already learned in junior high that I had no interest in those things. (I actually liked weight lifting in p.e., but the running and 'games' I didn't like.) (It's especially bad that many of the required subjects in high school are near-replicas of what was required in junior high since most students had forgotten what they learned by then and when a Ceramics course is available to fill an art requirement the teacher has to construct it for those who suck at art, while the good ceramics people still have to take it to get to Ceramics 2.)

So, six years of fulltime classes for an undergraduate degree is my experience.

One of the great pleasures of adulthood is no longer being forced to suffer the presence of such people in my life.

When I compare the same course alternative at UT, it's instead taught by TAs, needlessly much harder (how is a class average of 30% on an exam not an institutional failure?), and I spent my time struggling to teach myself on the side rather than feeling like I grasped the concepts in class.

It's unfortunate that our system glorifies the inferior experience through compensation, taboos, and social status.

Why not? That's exactly what privatization would do. All you need to do is identify the average kids and psychopaths, give them a chance to redeem themselves, and if they don't, unceremoniously kick them out.

Yep, that happened when I TA'd CS 1. I managed to coopt some of the brighter students into helping the others, but, well, it didn't do much for them inasmuch they wanted to learn CS (they just got some social polishing).

Really a pity. :-/

6th through 12th grade is where people learn that life isn't about smart-ness. It's about social-ness.

Are you really comfortable with the idea of potentially stunting one of the most important aspects of your child's abilities --- their ability to interact positively with people? (People other than you. People who don't already like your child.)

I was sent to a "Montissouri" school Kindergarten through 3rd grade, and it was ... Well, let's just say it turned out quite badly. Then I was sent to a private school 4th through 8th grade, with small class sizes. It was one of the most terrible experiences of my life. Personally, I wish my parents had sent me to public school, because I believe I would be a better person today.

heh heh... as someone who's been thru the public school system, I can safely say I don't WANT my kids learning the sort of "social skills" you learn there. You describing it as "interact[ing] positively" has me convinced that your story of not having gone to public school is true. :p

It's funny that people always bring this up: social skills. Have you met many home schooled kids? They are some of the most mature, well balanced, intelligent kids I've met. Secondly, what do you think home schoolers do, live in a bubble? Contrariwise, they interact ("socialize," if you prefer) with kids of all ages, as well as adults, in a normal, "real world" context.

As for "stunting" my child's abilities: I am absolutely certain public school does this, so I'll take my chances, thank you very much. I don't appreciate your insinuation, by the way.

By the way, how, exactly, do you use Kahn Academy? My kids got bored with it.

---------

* My wife had worked as a therapist in San Diego schools for years and when we moved back, we targeted a few neighborhoods to move into. Word on the street was that the private schools were no better than the public schools, at least in elementary.

Or it could really mean anything. Removed from context and the teacher's deeper reasoning, these quotes are largely useless. Maybe it was just the really lazy teachers who didn't want to deal with kids asking more advance questions who talked to them. Could be -anything-.

Trying to squeeze more analysis out of this will just result in all sorts of confirmation biases regarding teachers and the education system.

Clearly, if we're to reap the benefits of an aptitude-driven advancement system, we need to erase the core assumptions of the public school curriculum. (age-based peer groups, pass/fail an entire grade at a time, etc)

When students are permitted to progress in different subjects at different speeds, the desire to see "brakes" put on tools like Kahn's will evaporate.

Great, I agree. Why do you think these assumptions are so hard to change? Who are the people holding the assumptions? Why haven't they changed their minds already?

Frankly, the best way to deal with that mindset is to invent some crap for the people who have it to go through so they leave the rest of us alone. Maybe call it a team-building exercise.

It requires a rethinking of the way schools are designed I believe. Maybe have multiple teachers per class with each one specializing in a level to tutor. Classes would be bigger but you'd still have a similar teacher to student ratio.

I also think that, unfortunately, America kids have an anti-geek attitude that could make tutoring difficult. The statement that "this kid is better than you, and now you have to listen to him/her" might not be taken well by some of the poorer performers.

Why should anyone impart knowledge without monetarily profiting?

Let them all water their crops with Brawndo.

(I also had a younger brother who'd beat on people who might otherwise have picked on me. Nobody told me at the time, though. Whole situation was kinda weird.)

I just interviewed Andrew Hsu for Startups Open Sourced and he mentioned this was very important in education. He had scored so high on his IQ test at 6 years old he was classified as "genius" and received 3 B.S. degrees at 16, and then dropped out of his Stanford Ph.D. at 19 to do a startup. One thing he says really makes a difference is splitting students based on skill level, not by age. Hoping to release the interview soon.

I suppose if you took (essentially) the same courses at four different universities simultaneously, you could get four for the "price" of one. And I mean only the intellectual price, not the actual price, which would be huge and pointless.

I believe:

[1] Each general subject has a core competency that you have to achieve at a minimum.

It's broken into skills and subjects.

Skills includes: programming, reading, writing, functional mathematics (+-*/ and solving word problems), learning (figuring out how the pupil best learns for themselves, or if you want "meta-learning"). I may be missing some skills here.

Subjects include: english, history, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics (both higher level functional math and theory / proofs). I may be missing some subjects here.

[2] on top of #1 you have focused subjects of interest which you should support the pupil learning to whatever depth they are interested in learning. Most people I know upon finding something they are truly interested in become a borderline expert. Are they world class? Maybe or maybe not, but they are certainly journeymen. These range everywhere from finance to car repair to engineering to language learning to musical instruments to basically anything people take an interest in.

If your student can reach functional usage in all parts of #1 earlier that gives them more time to learn different things from #2. Note that the skills and background knowledge learned in #1 are reusable to various subjects in #2.

Circling back to the article: It's a stupid idea to even attempt to prevent a student from mastering anything in #1 above faster. It might help if the peer group instead of being defined by age could be defined by what your interests in #2 are. Then you get cross pollination of students by more advanced students in those same interesting subjects.

I believe logic and basic computing (this is a folder, that is a keyboard, etc.) are necessary. In fact, these form the foundation for programming later, but how could programming be considered a skill comparable to reading or writing?

For the same reason being able to write English[1] well is: If you can use English effectively, you can better influence the people you have to deal with. If you can write code effectively, you can often find ways to better influence the computers you have to deal with.

[1] (Replace 'English' with any natural language of your choice, if you want.)

Also, if you can tune engines effectively, you can better influence the cars you drive, and most people use one every day. Shouldn't auto shop be up there with programming?

I don't say that to knock auto shop. I want to reinforce the idea that 'programming' is not as important a skill as reading, writing, and math. Programming is a trade skill that builds on the concepts of reading, writing, and math. It's an advanced skill, not a basic one.

It's more important because, frankly, being able to use a computer really well means you can do things the companies in charge don't want you doing. Disabling DRM, making backups of the software you own, blocking virus-laden ads, and so on, all the things I won't put up with being unable to do but the average person just kind of suffers with, like a cow in a thunderstorm unable to find shelter.

I wish this were so, but if you look at most education systems, they seem to be designed with a goal of ubiquitous mediocrity. There's a lot of focus on bringing everybody up to minimal standards of not totally sucking, but anybody who isn't in the bottom 1/3 of the class is usually neglected.

At least, that's the way I remember it, and the way politicians usually talk about it. Remember "No Child Left Behind," where the goals were all based on improving education for the worst-performing students?

(It wasn't all bad. I got so bored that I learned a lot of computer stuff, which turned out to be a spectacularly good use of my time.)

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

Segregating pupils by age in school began in the English-speaking world (in Massachusetts) as an imitation of the Prussian schools of that time. It was strictly for administrative convenience. It is not at all a cultural or historical universal to group school learners into lock-step groups by age.

After edit: One comment about the author of the submitted article. He is actually a programmer by occupation. When his employee shares of Microsoft stock vested, he turned his good fortune to improving education in the United States. I have known him online for years as a thoughtful contributor to discussions of education policy.

I came to Hacker News by links from Paul Graham's essays

http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

and came to those because pg frequently writes about education policy and has some of his own thoughts about how schools could be better. So I've always expected threads about education policy to be within the Hacker News topic scope of "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I'll be able to afford private schooling for my children. The average demographic here probably can. I relish at the idea of seeing how a Khan Academy Classroom could teach my child (maybe in some sort of "Free school" environment?) and I realize that public education probably wont be able to cover that.

What I worry about more is that my children's friends wont be able to go to a private school, and while I realize Khan Academy is free online. Most kids will probably be sent to public schools.

I was educated in public school and I don't think it was horrible but I do think we can do better.

I think the question is; How do we bring this type of learning to public education?

Allowed by whom?

Cato only exists because advocating private ownership of profit turns out to be profitable

And this is somehow not simplistic?

There's a difference between simple and simplistic. Simplistic is pretending the only incentive force at work in a national scale institution is the profit incentive.

Simple is acknowledging that a small institution with the mission statement to advocate for profit incentive as the singular organizing principle of our economy probably believes in its mission statement and operates for the purpose of the private profit of its owners.

I've seen a few _interesting_ notes from CATO, but nothing I would call subtle or anything but free market fundamentalism. They tend to pick up every single news story and view it through a free market, shrink govt, give an individual the profit lens. Which is why they can only write a short, generic paragraph of comment on an interesting story about Khan Academy. OP should have been a link to Wired.

As if Hacker News is somehow more qualified on economic issues than Cato, which has 10 Nobel Laureates?

F. A. Hayek

Milton Friedman

James M. Buchanan

Robert Mundell

Edward C. Prescott

Douglass C. North

Vernon L. Smith

Gary S. Becker

Ronald Coase

Thomas C. Schelling

http://www.cato.org/people/nobel-index.html

I was not impeaching the intellectual output of the Nobel laureates associated with the Cato institute, but I do have to note here that none of them wrote this blog post, nor is there any indication that any of them reviewed it. I could further debate your name-dropping, but I've wasted enough key-strokes on this as is.

These are all primarily political and non-technical issues that affect our industry just as the Khan Academy affects our ability to learn in the politicized education industry.

Sorry, but you dismiss Cato because of its "free-market spin" and then call its main thesis "questionable", when 10 Nobel Laureates, who probably know far more than us on economic issues, are associated with Cato. I'd also note that Paul Krugman, Delong, and Sachs -- all very prominent Democratic supporters -- are very pro free market as indicated on the links you'll find on their Wikipedia pages.

They will no longer have traditional grades like Grade 7, Grade 8, etc, instead they will only have levels, and all students of a certain level will share the same classroom. When you level up in Math 10, you move to Math 11, even if you're still only in English 6. Your age no longer has any bearing on the level you belong in, only your ability.

The educational track will now be entirely in the hands of the students and they have until the age of 20 I believe to "graduate" from high school under the new system with a certain number of levels achieved.

The proponent is just using the popularity of the khan schools to frame the bashing of public schools.

Our education systems were formed as part of the drive that became known as the industrial revolution. Standardisation was a key focus, because people needed to be able to become part of the industrial processes that surrounded their day-to-day lives working in factories and offices.

Workers needed to possess skill sets that are known, and they ultimately needed to become replaceable.

It stands to reason that our education system will change as we move away from the industrial revolution and into the next.

The question should be: what do (and will) society need from an education system in the coming 50 years?

That teachers would ask that students be kept ignorant just to make their job easier does not surprise me a bit.

To be clear, not all teachers are asking this. Some teachers really care about the students. I had quite a few good teachers in school, and only a few bad ones. But my perception is that that balance has been changing. Lower pay, more work, and general bad conditions have been driving the good teachers to go elsewhere while the bad ones stay to collect a paycheck.

If the parent wants the student to advance to the next grade, the system says that they advance, often over the strenuous objections from the teacher who knows the student has no business advancing.

I know that anecdote < data but surely anecdote > ramblings, right?

Not at all. I would have to assume he is describing the current state of education as he sees it and not his direct experience with education from whenever he was previously in school. It is perfectly fine for him to say that, in his opinion, there are fewer good teachers today than there were yesterday.

Good teachers care enough about the students to sacrifice their own livelihood for the good of the student. At least, to a degree. Sometimes that means buying school supplies from their own pocketbook, and other times that means extra time spent on students who have different needs than the rest of the class, above or below.

And I'm not calling all the rest of the teachers 'bad'. The ones that do their job to their best of their ability, but don't sacrifice, are not bad. They're largely being ignore here.

It's only the teachers that do the bare minimum and only think as far as making teaching easier for themselves... Those are the bad ones. And the incentives currently favor them.

And based on data I've seen for the past few years on the performance of our education system I would have to say he's more likely correct than you.

He's saying that because of the incentives, most teachers will drift into becoming lazy SOBs who don't fundamentally care about education and will only work to the extent that they're whipped into doing it.

I'm saying that there's something else going on, in most cases. Professional pride, believing in education.

The establishment "won" their side of the argument in many states -- states that richly compensated employees (the payscale in most NY school districts ends at $110k, plus 65% pension for life) and administrators (typical school superintendents make $175k in NY) and built lots of new schools. Yet those investments yielded marginal "value" at best.

Until recently, the critics were mostly focused on religion (ie. Catholic schooling dominated education in many areas until fairly recently), monetary issues (taxes) and ideological stuff (unions suck).

That seems to be changing now. Movements like the Khan Academy are bringing scientific methods focused on outcomes to education. There was a recent "Freakonomics" podcast talking about how the New York City school system is experimenting with multi-modal learning, which seems to be successful in its early stages.

So I would propose to reframe the discussion. Because talking about money is silly. We know how much it costs to run a top tier school. The central question in my mind is whether we can develop new methods of education that are cheaper but achieve the same result.

Those results that you refer to apply to a suburban school in high-income area with few challenges. Those students have an edge because they have parents (note the plural) who can fill in the blanks left at school or have the resources to hire someone to do that. That's why the stoner white kids from the suburbs graduate from high school and the middle of the pack urban students get swept out the door.

I live in a small city with low costs (standard of living index is 1.1) where the per-pupil costs are in excess of $23,000/child, the average teacher salary is $85k, median income in the city is $50k, the graduation rate is 42%, and in many elementary schools less than 15% of the 4th graders are in the upper half of state testing results for math.

That NYC multi-modal experiment offers the promise of bridging the gap between urban students without access to supplemental instruction and the suburban kids who have lots of resources available. Kids spend time in large/small classroom settings, Khan-academy type computer applications and "virtual" tutoring. Results are measured and kids get rotated through various modes of learning based on their results.

What does that mean? It means that we can improve education and reduce the inequity in our society without throwing $100k+ teachers into the breach like infantrymen. Being born in a city shouldn't condemn you to a marginal education and future prospects.

It's not a matter of being "against" teachers or whatever -- it's applying their talents strategically in a way that benefits the students. Would you solve an IT or difficult programming problem by throwing more IT guys at it? Or would you break the problem down and figure out the best way to address it?

Should we allow earlier education specialization? (ie move them up grades but accept they'll be lacking in some areas) Or keep them in 5th grade until they are sufficiently good in all areas - maybe allowing them skip classes they're already excelling in so they have more free time for self-study?

I imagine allowing 5th graders to attend 10th grade maths only say (or more general any student being in a mix of any level in any subject) becomes impractical to schedule.

UPDATE: and as other people pointed out that's ignoring all the potential social advantages of being roughly grouped by age

You're simply accepting that "grades" are an ideal concept, and that in order for a kid to learn higher math, they also have to accelerate English, history, etc. If you remove the concept of grades from the picture, you no longer have to call a kid who's really good at math a math specialist...you can just say he's very advanced at math, and on par with his age group at English and history and science.

Remove the preconceived notion that everyone needs to be studying the same thing in order to be in the same "grade", and you don't have this problem. Obviously some kids can self-direct their education to some degree. So, why not let them? If they can advance this way via online instruction, why on earth would you want to stand in their way?

I had a lot of bitterness about my school experience, because I was so often bored and slowed by the pace of my classmates. If I'd had the ability to set my own pace, I would have been much happier and much more successful. We're beginning to have the technology to allow kids to go at their own pace...it's obvious to me (and should be to any other adult who was a "gifted" kid growing up but shackled by the limitations of public school) that the only ethical thing to do is let kids learn as fast as they want to learn. It's the teachers and schools job to figure out how to accommodate that learning, not try to shackle it to a pace that matches the least common denominator.

Which are?

Actually, from what I've seen the one-room-schoolhouse concept is the best. You don't have a single age-group preying on each other in a lord-of-the-flies situation.

True socialization comes from interacting with a reasonable sample of society, in its natural state - such as being surrounded by people of all ages interacting with each other. If we ship kids off the age-segregated prisons every day they become hyper-focused on the views of their peers and vulnerable to pressure.

"This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly."

This is blatantly not true, in the US we do not operate education as a monopoly. There are plenty of private schools.

Government education may not be a monopoly in appearance but in many cases it sure does behave as one. Look up the examples of local government education bureaucracies doing much to attempt to eliminate those private schools as competition.

Washingto D.C. is an excellent example of this.

In many areas I would define government education as a monopoly simply because they do everything they can to prevent you from not entering your child into their system. And they use government force to do so.

Each school is controlled by the state and local government, which is in turn controlled by elected officials. There are federal and government regulations, but aside from that, it is run by the people.

If you don't like what your town or district is doing, get on the school board and change it, or vote for someone who agrees with you. And if you really don't like what the state is doing, offer your own option through private education.

If I were to set the policy, I'd subsidize students rather than teachers and administrators, etc. I.e., demonstrate learning and we'll pay you $XX,XXX to cover your costs whether tutors or books or online courses or brick and mortar schools.

In a distributed, self-optimizing system, this is not the case. Outliers can be handled in various ways.

This observation isn't political. You can observe the same thing in stuff all over the place, like network traffic. If you had universal rules for everything, the internet would tank. Instead we have a (somewhat) distributed and adaptive system using common protocols. Best of both worlds.

Perhaps the argument begins at how to create such adaptive distributed systems. If so, that's cool, but that should be the starting place, not a discussion of free markets or social concern, at least in my opinion. (I was very discouraged to hear Bill Gates blow right through this concept when talking about helping education systems. He's trying to quantify and create the universally-optimized teacher. Good luck with that pipe-dream, Bill.)

It's a certain mindset that thinks this way. It reminds me of another discussion here where some people and a supporting article (http://geekfeminism.org/2010/08/10/restore-meritocracy-in-cs...) argued that it is unfair that some students have previous experience programming when they enter a CS program, therefore classes should be done in obscure (and thus pretty useless) languages that no one has heard of, in order to equally handicap everyone.

[1] http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

[2]a http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130499

[2]b http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666563

[2]c http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=256176

> "This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly."

Without any arguments to support it, the libertarian approach is served as the only solution.

Perhaps the whole idea of competition between schools is incorrect -- should we instead focus on creating a competitive learning platform (under neutral brick & mortar facility) where competition is between classrooms?

Well, in a small-to-medium-sized town that can only support one school, you can nonetheless segregate students by ability. A town of eight thousand should have about one hundred students in each year, so you segregate 'em into five classes (alpha through epsilon?) and teach 'em separately, at a pace suitable for each.

The US is actually pretty densely populated, so the number of folks living outside commuting distance of eight thousand other people is pretty low.

The real problem with this is that nobody wants their precious snowflake to be classified as an epsilon, or even a delta or gamma. Bad luck, drones!

That said, I think a teacher should suck it up for the sake of students in this sort of situation. At worst, we find ways to reorganize teachers and students based on students' self-progress.

(I don't mean that rhetorically; I'm curious to see some hacker brainstorming.)

I'd start with Khan Academy math, since they've got pretty good tools for supervising students learning at different rates, and the math track is pretty thorough for someone in K-12.

Since the students are self-selected, I wouldn't expect significant discipline problems, and since each mixed-grade classroom focuses on a specific subject there exists the possibility for easier collaboration.

I think this model would stand a greater chance of success in middle- or high schools where students have a class schedule. I don't think it would be practical in very small schools; however, I would expect that very small schools already have their own ways of handling students learning at different rates for budgeting reasons.

You can be taking freshman-level courses your senior year.

Or, if you are up to the challenging, junior level courses your freshmen year.

Not if the upper-level courses have prerequisites, which is typically the case in STEM programs. In my EE program the courses were scheduled so that it was impossible to graduate in less than four years. Most courses beyond freshman year had only one or two sections, taught during a specific semester.

Liberal arts may be different.

I did that. It was somewhat of a shocker to my RA to have one of his freshmen to be in his Calculus III class.

You also had to meet with an adviser towards the end of each semester before you were released to schedule classes for the next. Apparently engineers tried to circumvent the rules too many times, probably because we're always focused on optimizing solutions.

Its not, "How do we get better test performing students?"

Its, "How do we produce people who are at the top of their self-learning game?"

The general idea is that someone progresses from elementary school of directed learning to self-directed learning when finishing a University degree..

Some of us reach that stage when in fact we are in High School..

And if political leanings have corrupted this article, it is in phrasing the solution to the problem in terms of "market competition" and "monopolies"--i.e. the terms of capitalism--rather than in terms of freedom.

In the name of providing an informed citizenry, the educationists have demanded the power to shape American life(how many years of your formative life did you spend in school?), and in too many cases have misshaped it--for their own purposes, good and bad--into a clumsy mess. And still demand that we provide the clay. For evidence, read what the NEA and the AFT say about home-schooling and charter schools.

And to paraphrase Nietzsche, take care in decrying against "political propaganda", lest you become a propagandist yourself.

It opens with an unattributed quote. One that is somewhat surprising given what I've seen from the teachers and educators I know who have seen Khan Academy. While some complain about things like the rigor of the exercises, I've never heard the complaint about needing to slow down the education of students. Ben's statement, which Cato parrots needs to be attributed to someone. Cato should known better than to base a story on it.

Furthermore, the Cato story say, "This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly." Is it really? Where is the argument that substantiates such a claim?

Then they say, "In a competitive marketplace, educators have incentives to serve each individual child to the best of their ability, because each child can easily be enrolled elsewhere if they fail to do so." Again, can they substantiate that claim? Supermarkets exist in a competitive marketplace, but things like geography make it far from a frictionless market. Again, I'd love to see the data that supports this claim.

Lastly, "But why should a monopolist bother doing that? It’s easier just to feed children through the system on a uniform conveyor belt based on when they were born." Again, this is a claim with no finding in fact. And ignores a LOT of things like the fact that schools typically have single classes by grade, but subclasses broken out by skill. In my experience a child who is three grade levels ahead in math often should't be placed for social interaction with children three years older.

So again, my point is that this Cato article is full of speculation and absolutely no data. Now your appeals to Cato's authority (Nobel prizes and such) is fine. They should put their skills that won them the Noble prize to work and actually write credible stories. This was a junk story simply meant to attack public schools. Plain and simple. It's political propaganda. No data. No logical arguments. Not worthy of HN.

But that's just my opinion.

From the teacher's perspective of trying to help a student not have a year of miserable experience, this is a legitimate concern. That's the core of the problem.

This quote is not about a teacher trying to hold a kid back. So it really doesn't matter who it came from.

It's about a teacher who, even though he/she is passionate and fearless enough to put significant effort into working with a system as new and scary as the Khan Academy, is still constrained by the momentum of an entire educational system that directly contradicts many of the self-paced goals of Khan Academy.

That's an important challenge to acknowledge. And unless they're in some crazy special circumstance, even the most fearless teachers in the world can't yet escape it.

Or when there's not consensus in the field.

You state that CATO is "purely political propaganda" without substantiating that claim with any specifics whatsoever.

Why do you keep saying that? The first sentence of my last post makes it clear that this isn't about Cato. I don't care who wrote it.

I'm from Seattle and this school district, up until this year, has been open enrollment which means students could attend any school in the school district they wanted. And the school district would even pay for busing, but traveling halfway across the city, spending 2 hours a day on the bus typically meant people went to neighborhood schools.

And that's my point with supermarkets too. Go to Watts and check out the selection and quality of food in supermarkets. Then go to La Jolla. Sure its a free market, but people don't really have much in the way of choice in poor areas. Unless they want to hop on a bus for an hour each way.

A PhD in econ may mean you've figured out the optimal way to rapidly approach equilibria, but it won't tell you that you can't ride the L through the westside to get to the good supermarkets if you're known to be from the eastside.

Regarding Seattle, you're citing one data point. The majority of American public schools don't operate with open enrollment. If you're in a public school, you're assigned to one school in a designated area, and can't choose a different school.

"Go to Watts and check out the selection and quality of food in supermarkets."

This is just completely false and dishonest. There are a handful of Walmarts and Targets around Watts and the majority of other low-income neighborhoods -- all within a 5-minute drive.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=watts,+california,+walmart&...

Please cite specifically what you're referring to as "political propaganda".

Political propaganda is trying to make political claims with no data or evidence. It's not the specific claim that's relevant so much as the fact that its just a post that says it and nothing else.

It would be like someone posting to HN something that said:

Emacs sucks. Really. It's for dumb programmers who program in languages that no one uses it. If the world didn't have Emacs we'd be better off.

The specific claim here doesn't matter. But I'd be trying to push a specific agenda by using no or deceptive arguments. This Cato post doesn't give any new information. It leads to no new insight. It doesn't present a new perspective. It simply asserts its position.

// Not really.

"Appeal to authority" simply means that it's fallacious reasoning to assume a position because of who stated the position.

To restate it, if a usually trustworthy person says some thing that doesn't _necessarily_ make that thing true. Bringing that back to the case in hand, if Cato make a statement on Economics that statement doesn't acquire it's truth from the status/authority of Cato.

Teachers have to work within the framework and structure of the current education system. Let me assure you that in education the tallest blades of grass are the first to get cut. I don't really blame them, its just self-preservation.

If you look at the current structure of grouping kids by age, then the teacher's issues are perfectly reasonable. How are they going to keep the 15% of really smart kids from being bored, goofing off, and raising a ruckus while the teacher tries to run around and help the average or behind kids with the exercises. A child could legitimately be 3-4 months ahead in school work if they're brilliant learners. So what do we do, let me out in March if he has mastered all the material for the school year? Let him start on next year's material?

If we start grouping by ability to learn and knowledge level, that has problems too. I was great at math but only a good reader and poor at spelling/grammar. Do I get put in an advanced class and lag the other students in areas where I wasn't as strong? Does elementary school look like high school with different classes throughout the day, and how does that impact students in non-knowledge areas?

The rates at which children learn is not steady across all subjects. The rates at which children learn aren't even steady throughout childhood - they could start slow and speed up at a certain age. Self-paced education would be ideal for every student if we were all self-starters and bright, KA will be great for home-schoolers and tutors. Even kids who need remedial help over the summer, give them an iPad and the Khan Academy app and let them catch up over the summer. But letting a bright, ultra-focused kid master an entire grade level over the summer and then the kid will be a hellraiser in school for the next 9.

If kids fall behind or are poorly motivated then they get extra attention. But if they shoot ahead or are strongly motivated they get ignored? Chastised?

I'm interested in presenting the best opportunities for education to my children and instead of being concerned with making the current educational frameworks run more smoothly (they're not mutually exclusive interests though).