What Do Schools Do? (finalist in ACX review contest) \ stacker news ~Education

This is a long read, but there are parts of it that made me question my own ideas about school and teaching. I especially liked the thesis, the reframing of school as not something for teaching, but for motivating learning.

This essay is a review of school as an institution. It is an attempt to write something that is true and insightful about how school is designed and why the structure of school has proven so durable. In particular, I’m trying to describe why those two commonalities – age-graded classrooms and inefficient learning – are so widespread.

Here’s the thesis, the point of this essay. School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school.” Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale.

Intuitively, it’s reasonable that an education at your level and meets you where you are will result in more learning than just following the prescribed course of study for 6th grade or whatever. All else equal, it’s certainly true that instruction at your level will result in more learning. The thing is, we can’t hold all else equal. Schooling is a massive enterprise, and we can’t give every student instruction at their level without rethinking that enterprise. In general, when schools have tried, they have failed.

Every one of these programs commissions some study showing that students who use their program with fidelity learn more than some control group. Holt digs into the data, and it turns out that the group who used the programs with fidelity was often around 5%. The article is called “The 5 Percent Problem.” These programs do seem to help a subset of students, but don’t do much for the rest.

Today, this manifests in classrooms where low-structure learners thrive on collective routines. Conformity explains why personalized learning often fails. Most students need the social scaffolding of lockstep instruction, even when it’s inefficient. Conformity isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s the best one we have.

These two failures—self-paced technology and ability grouping—get at a deeper truth. Working at your own pace may seem like it makes sense, but it often undermines motivation. Grouping students by ability, whether within or across classrooms, has shown little benefit. Neither approach has delivered the transformation its advocates promised.

Anyway, I think that's enough of a sample. The author goes onto describe the three categories of learners: no structure learners (easily bored, don't need or benefit from instruction), low structure learners (don't need but do benefit from instruction), and high structure learners (need instruction). Then, how any new school designs that are successful are mostly successful because they weeded out high structure learners, and the other learners will do well in any system. And, why we've settled on the age-based school systems we have (at scale we haven't figured out any better method).

I suspect for myself I'm low structure learner. I tend to do better with structure, and find myself more motivated when learning with peers than not, but IF properly motivated (e.g. making something) I can learn on my own just fine.

If you can only read one section of the essay, I recommend this one.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 5h

Pretty interesting article. It was a bit too long for me to give it my full attention, but the thesis seems to be that personalized learning is never going to work at scale, and that our current system is optimized to motivate the maximal number of students to learn.

At first, this seems bizarre, given that if you ask the average person, they hated school and felt unmotivated.

But when I gave it a second thought, I started to dimly understand what the author is saying: People may have felt unmotivated in school, but they still did it, and they learned the things necessary to pass, because that's what everyone else was doing too.

Usually when people say they weren't motivated in school, what they mean is that they weren't motivated enough to succeed to their maximum academic potential. Yet, the truth is they were still motivated enough to try and pass and learn enough to do so.

So it seems that what the author might be arguing is that our system is designed to maximize the number of students who can be motivated enough to learn something. While the current system might not be optimal for any one individual, it's the best way to create some motivation at scale.

I have to think more about this. One of the things I hate most about my job is dealing with lazy unmotivated students. Maybe I should just make peace with their presence, and comfort myself that despite their apparent lack of motivation, they were motivated enough to sit in the class and learn enough to pass.