The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

A bit tangential but related.

I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1].

I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel like I was getting a lot out of school and I would paradoxically do pretty poorly because I was half-assing everything.

It wasn't until I found out about WGU in 2021 where I actually decided to finish my degree, primarily because WGU lets me work at my pace. Since I already knew a lot about computer science, I was able to speed through the classes that would have been very boring to me, and I finished my degree really quickly as a result. I don't feel like my education is appreciably worse than people who did things in a traditional brick and mortar school, but I'm not 100% sure if I'm a test for this.

It made me realize that, at least for people like me, EdTech can be extremely powerful stuff. School can be a lot more engaging when it's personalized, instead of the frustrating "one size fits all" of traditional lecturing.

[1] I say "lucky" because I think it was exactly that: luck. Yeah I learned this stuff on my own for fun but finding an employer who was willing to hire someone without credentials was never guaranteed and I feel extremely fortunate to have accidentally timed my dropout about perfectly.

EDIT: For those confused, WGU means "Western Governors University" in this case.

The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that this is always done in the name of "equity", but the result is that the system perpetuates the inequities that already exist. Because the public schools force kids into grade bands and don't allow children who are ahead to learn at their level, wealthy parents (and only wealthy parents) figure out ways to supplement or move their kids into schools that are appropriate for their level.

Only wealthy parents can afford to do that, while everyone else is stuck with whatever their local school offers or doesn't offer. This perpetuates generational inequalities in ways that the public school system is supposed to solve, all in the name of "leaving no child behind".

The best school which I ever attended rigorously divided academic and social classes --- academic classes (reading/English/math/science) were attended at one's ability level, while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were attended at one's grade level.

There was a 4 year cap up through the 8th grade (so I was a 4th grader attending 8th grade English, math and science classes), and after that, the cap was lifted and students could begin taking college courses in 8th grade --- some of the teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and if need be, arrangements were made for students to travel to the college, or professors from there to travel to the school.

It was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a 4 year college degree.

Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court declared the system illegal because it conferred an unseemly advantage on the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no equivalent compensation for students who were not.

That's "equity" for you. We can't be unfair and give someone something that makes them better. It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up.

This is because education is more about gatekeeping and politics than trying to maximize human capital development. We all ostensibly want it to be about human capital but our attitudes and behaviour towards education at the political level show otherwise.

The gatekeeping element seems to have developed in tandem with / response to the signalling hypothesis [1]. Simply put, if kids are trying to do the minimum necessary to get by, we raise the bar on the minimum standard until we're satisfied. Teachers (K-12 at least) respond with grade inflation, adding lots of noise to the signal, and we in turn respond with standardized testing in an attempt to clean up the noise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

I've never seen a teacher that was comfortably capable with even 50% of whatever EdTech they're handed. How are they supposed to maximize the use of it?

I remember having to painfully sit through multi-hour presentations in which they'd explain how to use a hamburger menu to find the app settings, and half the participants furiously scribbled down notes so they wouldn't get lost later when they needed to find the settings without guidance, on their home computer.

This was only a decade ago and I doubt it's much better now. People who go into teaching aren't exactly the best & brightest most of the time. And the results speak for themselves.

I think the Lysenkoism of our age is all people are equally intelligent and equally good at all things, thus one size fits all education is an ideological imperative. There are too many unacceptable facts that lead to conclusions that contradict this ideology in the kind of approach you're talking about.

If all children do not perform roughly the same, ideologues will not think that people have naturally different talents and abilities, but instead think there are implied violations of laws protecting against discrimination in education. That being said, I'm sure homeschoolers and people not indoctrinated, even those with lesser abilities, will really appreciate this approach.

This is the very question that crossed my mind when I saw this headline (albeit at a different site): was this a failure of EdTech, or was it a failure of our highly structured and inflexible school system?

This is an issue that started to bother me while in high school, or perhaps even in junior high, and have realized over the years that people learn at different rates, that what should matter is knowledge and mastery and not grades, and that a failure in a class or several shouldn't be permanently incorporated into a "GPA" that also doesn't really capture the true essence of someone's knowledge and mastery.

In the past year, I have been learning a lot about autism and ADHD -- in no small part because I have come to realize I have both -- and I cannot help but come to the conclusion that regardless of why an individual student is different -- whether it be autism, ADHD, life-event-driven depression (eg from a death in the family or a divorce), or high or low or late-blooming intelligence, or even mere boredom that needs to be overcome by the "right spark" -- the school system as currently instituted can handle none of this -- and what's worse, any student who cannot conform to this, even if temporarily, is permanently considered flawed somehow.

This has also been my experience. Curriculum standards really put a stop to any radical changes in the way we structure the learning process.

I guess that IS the point of standards, but we really should be experimenting more on the fringes.

What i also observed was that gamification of learning is violently opposed .The protestant work ethics demand that children suffer jaded while learning, the intrinsic motivation of games be damned. Then the dull overpriced app looses against the tiktok experience and a surprised pikachu face appears. Cant have minecraft with chemistry crafting cause the fun "has no place in school"

> The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are.

This is only truly possible if we trust educators enough to allow them to use a different approach with a child. The system we have has leaned heavily toward “trust nothing”. Parents and teachers all want the best for their students but at the same time we demand that everyone stick to the prescribed curriculum lest something unapproved should enter a classroom. This is how you get “McDonalds” results: Consistent and maybe somewhat average overall.

> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?

"Holding kids back" is not the reason EdTech fails at scale.

The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves, alone, without a dedicated human teacher supervising them or a group of student peers. (You need this skill to succeed in tech, learning new APIs/languages from written materials and online videos.)

The techies who build/fund EdTech wrongly assume that everyone could do this if only they had access to the learning materials, or if the tech vaguely simulated a teacher (an interactive textbook).

But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.

(For kids especially, adult career prospects feel so remote that it scarcely seems worth the trouble, whereas earning respect right now is a very, very concrete problem!)

Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed. I guess that is a "crying shame," but it's a tragedy, not a policy failure.

I understand your frustration, but how does the software manage students that are behind versus students that are way ahead? Like I'd imagine this would be deeper learning for a kid that's ahead, where they can really deep-dive a topic and maybe do some more advanced concepts.

But I can understand it from the teacher's perspective too; They have 30 kids, no extra budget and few resources. They have 20 or so average kids, and a handful of stragglers and a handful of people out in front, and are trying to meet ALL of their needs. Any of those three groups could use up all the time on a specific topic, so you end up stealing some time from one to deal with the others. If there are good monitoring from EdTech software it can help, but lots of teachers are not super techie so things have to be approachable.

It's definitely a space with more nuance and certainly more potential.

Personally I have bad experience with edTech because when a student is young, he is not disciplined enough to do hard things alone or even just annoying things, and studying can be both.

So when they have an app with for example a qcm in front of them, the first times they try to do well, then they learn that if they randomely click buttons, at some point the app validate the answer, even if they didn't read the questions/answers.

So you get a group of young people that after school, just spend 10min randomely clicking on a app without any purpose, and after that they can go play.

I've got students that were from a private school, everyone was doing that, and their level was extremely bad.

Montessori worked on this problem, and did a fairly good job, but somehow it's still under the radar that we could revolutionise our educational system according an already proven model.

I've always thought it would be interesting to have a education system that focused primarily on the best outcome for the brightest students and focused the vast majority of resources on the top 5% or so. I wonder if the total impact made (gdp, research contributions, etc) by a cohort of students this way would be higher vs spending resources to slightly bring up the average on a large number of students that never make much of themselves.

> the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.

OK but we've known this since, when, the 60s? Look at all the academic research on the adoption (or lack thereof) of programmed instruction, programmed learning, etc.

If we didn't already know this before the "EdTech Revolution" then of course the industry would get a pass, but the fact that we already knew what would happen and why is what makes it a scam.

Man, No Child Left Behind left a larger mental scar than I ever imagined. "learning they shouldn't be"? I never would have gotten fast tracked in math, and by extension gotten into a decent engineering school, if that's how my teachers thought. Then university wonders why kids are less prepared.

They're not just banded into a range based on their grade. They're banded into a grade based on their age, even though "being within a year of the same age as somebody" becomes essentially meaningless as soon as you're out of school.

> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

That problem is that parents who want to expose their children to more knowledge and better education have no voice -- of any kind. A small group of parents objecting to something violating their niche belief will absolutely nullify the voices of any number of parents thinking otherwise.

There needs to be greater ability on the part of educational organizations to be able to parse the unencumbered learners from these minority case.

Another instance where technical solution is not the solution for people problem. We can make all bells and whistles but if people won’t use it there is nothing more that can be done unfortunately.

> I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level... and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be"

A charitable way to read what you are saying is, "kids are not sufficiently challenged in school." But you are railing against an antagonist that is kind of vague. What, specifically, are you talking about?

I'm just very curious as I'm passionate about teaching, how do you evaluate 'their level'?

I my experience, I can give material that is way out of their comfort zone, but it's my job to make it interesting enough and make enough bridges so that everyone can learn the material well, no matter the starting point.

(note: university level, but I also teached numerous times for schools)

I love the idea of individual pacing of kids educational journies - if you do have the syllabus and software to take every kid individually through school, is it impossible for us to fund the school for five years - and after years of every kid walking out with top grades there might just be some social proof

It seems like it is possible - probably enough people on this thread could make that investment

Customized skill based education should be the future.

I worked in EdTech research, it's a shitshow. Indeed the focus is on institutional learning while the power of tech is to empower people outside formal education. The amount of wishful thinking is unbelievable, protocols are often very weak, hard problem aren't addressed and focus is on what is easy to measure. There is so much potential, but it's vastly underexploited.

> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

are you US based?

so of the Nordic countries have implementing thins similar to what you describe as their normal form of education

This is why I hear stories every year at my kids school about home school kids enrolling, then being place in math classes 1-2 years ahead of the max possible for somebody who had been in the school system to start with.

This has been the case for a long time. I was one of those kids who usually "got it" the first time I saw it, and then remembered it. So lectures usually moved much too slowly for me. In an effort to not be bored, I would usually sit quietly and read ahead in my textbook.

Some teachers were cool with this, but most of them would yell at me for not paying attention, and a couple specifically called me out for reading ahead on the basis that I thought I was too good for the class.

I skipped out complete uni classes and followed an analogue online. Maurice Herlihy had its concurrency and multithreading classes online for a while. I passed my c&m course with it, we also used his book

>straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be"

What do you think is behind the threats? Do the teachers fear being replaced or is it coming from a different set of people?

I hear you.

We built a product specifically for student-centric work where educators could assess student progress (think Hattie's Visible Learning and similar lines of thinking) and compare student growth against their own previous work. We encouraged educators to quickly tailor the tasks to individual student needs.

Educators (and pedagogues) loved it. But we couldn't gain traction with the buyer persona: Administrators asking "what's in it for me?" Data on improved outcomes wouldn't be immediate, so it was a no buy.

This was exacerbated by Google and Microsoft giving away their office productivity suites repackaged as classroom tools to ensure future market capture. Because you totally want your 8-year-old becoming a Word or Docs or Excel expert right?

So yeah, we have a reality where students don't have really great EdTech—they have tech that's masquerading as EdTech, picking up all the low-hanging fruit and leaving the hard problems of education unsolved (or unexplored).

The company is in the process of folding, and I'm hoping to re-release the software as true open source sometime in the future once all the legal / corporate shutdown stuff is finished.

Yes the problem isn't so much ed-tech, which by the way we all use everytime we Google or ChatGPT how to do something.

The problem is that ed-tech is being shoehorned into an existing dysfunctional system. It's trying to help the education system do more of what it was already doing, just with computers.

The underlying problem is that the structure of the education system is absolutely stupid and shit. We've just been so used to that for so long that we don't notice it anymore.

If schooling was good, ed-tech would be a big enabler of that, helping students learn at their own pace, guiding their coursework in the right direction, linking it to career paths, all kinds of things.

But currently ed-tech is just enabling and feeding more of the same slop, just digital instead of paper. That's the problem.

The future promise of real education was crushed by the relentless political fiction that actually runs education.

So brutal. Thanks for doing what you can.

Can you expand on threats re kids learning what they shouldn’t be? What are some scenarios for these to occur?

> It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

That is bad. I have to say no teacher I had a problem when I learned things ahead of time. Some less good teachers were not actually encouraging, but they certainly did not think it was a problem.

That said, IMO the school system does not cope well with kids who are not going at the average speed. This is one reason i home educated my kids. We need to change how schools work to take advantage of ed tech (and a lot of other opportunities - you can learn at your own pace from books, like I did)

This sounds like the promise vs. reality of Agile software development too :(

can you give an example of someone being upset and what the thing they'd learned that they "shouldn't?"

as a parent I find it confusing that I'd consider getting upset if my kid was learning 6th grade history as a 3rd grader (or 2nd grade art as a 3rd grader). what actual examples are there?

the only examples of parents being upset about learning I'm aware of lately is, like, critical theory and marxism

Everybody is voting to improve "average" because that's what affects your house price.

The best way to move an "average" is to improve the big mass slightly below average.

The worst off and best off are too small to affect the average--so nobody cares about them. QED.

[dead]

I think it's weird that you're not telling us what "things they shouldn't be" are. There are plenty of things I think kids shouldn't be learning.

> An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable.

This is a reactionary take.

Math, science, and basic language skills do not lead to political upheaval, and are incredibly valuable skills to the capital class. Leadership would be more apt to propagandize social studies and suppress dissent.

China easily comes to mind as a counter argument.

I'd apply Hanlon's razor: education languishes due to poor funding, lack of competition, and low salaries that attract mediocre teachers. We don't even properly fund development for blue collar jobs! Also the problem compounds since one generations students become the next generations teachers.

> It's what a lot people here have already said. Education is what is failing, EdTech didn't magically solve this.

To expand this more globally - anything that requires human interaction fails at scale. Healthcare, trade skills, education, housing, etc. is all "failing" to some degree no matter how much technology we throw at it. The costs continually go up and the value isn't paired to it.

>An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism,

Very wrong. Education only camouflages stupidity, it does not remove it. And then part of education is indoctrination to trust authority (eg. trust the science).

That said, basic education reading/writing/simple math/science is indeed valuable.

> There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.

I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.

Focusing solely on the “babysitting” aspect of your post:

Since babysitting is essentially required in our current social framework, why do we need physical schools with in person teachers. It seems to me that we could have babysitting facilities spread to lots of small commercial spaces with in person babysitters for kids who are doing school on computers with synchronous teachers online.

I realize that the model I’ve laid out here is simplistic, but it would solve so many problems that it seems worthwhile to flesh it out and mitigate the issues.

Well put, all around! If it makes you feel better, state-funded education has, as a rule, pretty much always been babysitting. As we fight together for a brighter future, I think it’s important to know that we’re building something new and glorious, not restoring some natural status quo.

Tho I’m no history buff. Maybe some civilization had really great public schools? Designating only a small portion of your population as True Pure Citizens does tend to help with stuff like that

I don’t think this is the case for several core reasons:

- higher income people spend more money. The middle and upper class is by far the largest market and source of tax revenue.

- poverty generally turns areas into low trust higher theft spots that need expensive security.

- high income places generally have good public schools because a majority do know how important education is

- this requires a pretty vast conspiracy of people saying “keep people dumb so we can profit”, which I haven’t heard of at all

I think the much simpler explanation is that there is no accountability for inept pockets in the education system. Schools can’t really be punished for sucking and parents can’t move their kids in most states without just switching to private. There is no feedback loop for broken schools.

"There are too many profitable incentives... Power generally resides with those who benefit... The system is setup to fail because that's what's profitable in the long run for those seeking such profits. And because they can lobby, and use their wealth to influence politics, it won't change. Something else needs to happen first."

Who exactly are you talking about?

Seems like there might be some survivorship bias here, right? You teach students who made it to a top university because they thrived in the classical setup which is the most common one. Presumably your preferred teaching style aligning well with the classical approach also helped get you to that position.

Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Coursera became available. I did reasonably well at uni but was not motivated with others deciding what I had to learn and when. Lectures tended to be slow paced and often boring, so I zoned out instead of being pulled in (I passed my exams by working through the problem sets in the textbooks, I skipped most lectures).

When I got the ability to play/pause/skip/1.5-2x videos, and when I could choose what subject to learn like a kid in a candy shop, I did start consuming lectures much more aggressively. Still, I think well designed problem sets and assignments actually do the bulk of the work when it comes to learning/teaching, and I regularly skip the lectures and dive right to those.

Not saying that your method doesn't work, or that it shouldn't work for you, but its suitability depends on the topic, the student, and the setting.

My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday and another throw a chair. Another just sat there and didn't do a thing for 7 hours. The Little House/Christmas Story model hasn't been able to work for a long time.

I have no doubt it is the best option. For certain people. But why impose a single way to learn, when there is no such a thing as a "single size fit them all" learning experience? All the more when there are alternative options.

> The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is unclear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible.

I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least.

At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me.

The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer.

Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU

IMO that is about the third best method.

The best two are self teaching and one to one teaching.

Both are, of course, "boring classical setups" but both can be improved by technology. My daughter had one to one teaching over video in subjects that we would have struggled to find a tutor for locally (classical civilisation, for example). Self teaching is hugely improved by access to more materials - this does not need fancy tech, but just websites and videos can help a lot.

Worth noting that this is fine for academic subjects (although highly dependent for success on student interest), but doesn't work at all for skill based subjects.

You would enjoy Cliff Stoll's writings on this topic. He hates technology in the classroom, and still firmly believes teachers with chalkboards and flashcards are superior to any technology in the classroom. I disagree with him only in so much as technology allows for media that can help simplify some things, but agree with him that nothing beats a good teacher.

There are a lot of things, particularly in math and science, that really benefit from modern media when it comes to illustrating things.

I find chalk on a blackboard one of the worst ways to learn. This isn't 1890 anymore. Much better are more modern prepared lectures with much more complex and interesting slides than what a teacher can draw with chalk in the time of a class, and with a lot more detail and scale with the magic of a modern projector. this also lets the notes and videos be reviewable before and after the fact. Very helpful. Hell even overhead projectors were a lot better than most chalk on board classes I went to pre electricity.

Beyond that, I find I learn infinitely better by doing than by being lectured to. By being challenged by a set of problems that grow over time.

Beyond that tutoring blows lectures out of the water. I was failing calc e in normal semester, I dropped. My moms bit the bullet and bought me 3 weeks of tutoring over the summer (much shorter semester). I then aced summer calc 3 which is generally much harder. It was amazing how well me being able to guide the lesson to where I was having trouble versus the lecturer keeping on track worked for me. I've learned this lesson as a mentor as well, teaching is for the student, not the teacher.

tl;dr what works for you sucks for me, don't tell me how I learn.

I mean, I’d argue the chalkboard method often can’t visualize things as well as modern educational stuff like 3blue1brown, which is the kind of thing I often supplement for my relatively dry university material. For tons of things, well-produced videos are more effective, especially when compared to a class with maybe a hundred fifty people in it where questions are discouraged during lecture.

IMO the correct analogy would be a physical object where you could switch back and forth between Harry Potter and books used for learning. If that were the case I'd agree with you. But here we are talking about two separate distinct physical objects, the Harry Potter book and, for example, a biology book.

When a person is reading the latter they can't easily switch to HP, but I can do that while learning anything in my computer. It's as easy as doing ctrl + T + red + enter and I get to the infinite entertainment that is Reddit thanks to the browser autocomplete, for example.

No, it's saying that if you use the same device to entertain yourself and to do homework, and you use it for entertainment 10x as often as you use it for homework, you'll get distracted then you're doing homework.

> It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning.

Books are separate objects, they are not a platform. It's saying that if you put a child's homework as a two page insert into a great comic book, the rest of the comic book will distract from the annoying, difficult insert.

The opposing theory is that the proximity of homework to comics will somehow make the homework fun. Homework is going to be hard and annoying no matter what you do, if it's not hard you're not learning anything from it.

I'm an adult user of Math Academy. I have a bachelor's in Math and I'm working through the Mathematical Foundations series to brush up on material from all the lectures/assignments I skipped and fill in the cracks of my knowledge. I absolutely love it.

> 1. Math Academy (truly amazing for 4th grade math all the way to first year of undergrad: https://www.bit.ly/ma-way)

This stuff is so exciting. He dips in and out of HN periodically when the subject comes up.

> But leads to kids guessing.

Or, almost as bad, kids learning to approximate the answer. I aced too many multiple-choice physics exams in my GCSEs because the multiple choice was A) 1,000,000 B) 1,000 C) 100 D) 10. Without knowing the formula I was able to eyeball which numbers looked obviously wrong and just select the closest.

i think part of the reason computers swept into classrooms so quickly is that we had a generation of old folks seeing their jobs get computerized and they (correctly) felt that computer-literacy would be essential for a huge swath of the workforce.

however, this group also had a very hard time learning how to use computers later in their career and felt "wow, this is really hard. we need to be very proactive about teaching this to kids".

it was well intentioned, but i think they really REALLY overestimated the need for 'teaching computer literacy' because: a) we've gotten a lot better with UX so computers are easy to use b) the older generations difficulty was more related to unlearning old ways and transitioning rather than difficulty inherent to computers

> need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study.

If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).

I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.

> as I've found those work better than any "adaptive" EdTech I've encountered

Have you tried Math Academy? From seeing my son using it, I'm guessing it's more effective than live coaching from a median middle school math teacher.

FWIW, No Child Left Behind is no longer law, it was replaced in 2015.

What, specifically, is an example of an exam not measuring proficiency? If an exam is well designed, the student will need to figure out what is being asked and use their mastery to provide an answer.

I agree 100%. With ChatGPT at everyone's disposal with entire humanity knowledge in generative form, we need to completely rethink the concept of teaching and learning.

There are so many opportunities to deliver personalized Ivy League level education in your native language of choice, for essentially pennies/free to everyone around the world on demand

> Examinations are an exercise in being good at examinations, not proficiency in the subject.

Isn't this just complaining about Goodhart's Law? I believe any exam will become a target no matter how well it is designed

In my opinion without exams, kids will never solidify what they learn. It’s usually pretty easy to think you have a solid grasp of some thing until you’re actually asked to solve a brand new problem.

Yeah definitely agree. Tech at my kids school just means all the tests and homework are done on a computer instead of on paper, but it is still the same format as it has always been.

Would be cool to see more open ended long running projects instead of the standard 'lecture > homework > test' pipeline. Kids are also given a crazy amount of leeway and teachers/parents will drag a negligent kid to their diploma. Even if a kid tried to fail they would be met with a bunch of counselors and special classes begging him to put forth a minimal effort. It might help if we moved the guardrails back a bit and let kids know that failure is a very real possibility.

Perhaps the onus of the evidence base should be upon EdTech. I used to ask the OLPC fans where the studies were. Or what curricula had been tested to work, or what great education software was being ported, what measurable outcomes were expected, what programs were established to educate the ITeachers...

EdTech is a baseless orthodoxy tied together with hardware sales, unproven software and anecdotes.

I don't think there are any smartphone bans for US states that have been in force for more than a school year, no?

The elephant in the room.

That said, i think it more true of governments than of parents. It increases the size of the workforce, therefore higher business profits and household income, therefore higher GDP.

Its pretty evidence in various attempts to increase time in school. talk about the "summer slump" in the US, or the government encouraging extended school days (drop off for "breakfast club", pick up after "after school" activities) in the UK.

While I don't doubt that a benefit of schools is you don't have to pay for day care while you pursue a career, that is far from the "main utility" of schools.

The main utility of schools, despite the hyperbole on the internet, is to educate and cultivate a productive, adjusted society. Yes there is overlap with what parents do, yes there is overlap with daycare. But those are ancillary benefits, not the ultimate goal.

No. A legion of edtech companies have been born and died who solve the underlying pedagogical issues but die.

Some of the reasons they die are:

- students don’t control the budget for their spending, so their voice/progress has almost no impact on budgets

- parents in the US spend a tiny fraction of their deposable income on education (and also have almost no say in budgets)

- teachers have almost no say in budgets. In public schools, it’s none. In others, it’s performative if at all most of the time.

- administrators get promoted by doing a very specific set of small things, none of which include improving outcomes through addressing pedagogical innovation

This all adds up to: you can create an edtech startup that radically improves student outcomes and still run out of cash

"it is a daycare centre for kids while parents go on about their careers?"

This is the kind of thing that could only be said by somebody who is not a parent. There might be a minority of parents for whom this is true, but I know zero other parents who don't care whether their kids are learning.

Here in Canada teachers are paid well but we still don't want to pay for good resources. Anything where money is going into overhead that's separate from teaching students is viewed with a stink-eye. They killed textbooks and replaced them with nothing.

Think about how many teachers are out there scrounging up and making up their lesson materials, tests, etc. because state/provincial bodies don't provide that content top-down, even as an optional resource for them to draw upon. Then teachers are told "also you need to accommodate all these special cases where students have distinct educational needs" but the basic easy stuff that could've been pre-made is consuming all the time they should've been able to spend "personalizing".

Tech is considered scalable, human resources and interactions are not.

> - playing games such as _Dragon Box_ (which teaches the principles of math and esp. algebra)

One of my kids got pretty damn good at Dragon Box in like... first grade, I think it was?

As far as I can tell this has had (years later) no effect on actually being able to understand algebra any better. The connection's not there. I can see why, too—doing it myself, it was sometimes hard for me to figure out how the various patterns of actions in the game connected to the mechanics of solving algebra problems, and that's with my already understanding that part pretty well. Even when it gets a little more explicit about which symbols are connected to what, later on, what actual mathematical operation or set of scribbles on paper does "drag this little box onto that other little box so it disappears" translate to?

My conclusion is it was good at making me feel like my kid was learning something, but not a great use of time for actually learning that. I think she got a ton more out of the couple times I sat down with her for five minutes to show her how something worked on paper, than hours and hours of Dragon Math.

This goes for other games that are supposed to teach place value and such, but make it really abstract and "fun". Maybe it's just my kids, but even when you point out that what they were doing perfectly well in the game is the same thing they're supposed to do on this worksheet for school, the presentation and mechanics are so different from "drag these colored blobs around" that the value the game provided was practically none. It didn't confer understanding, it taught a very specific kind of pattern recognition just for the game that the kids have trouble generalizing, same as Dragon Math.

Yes, there was also a thing known as the Great Media Debate in the 90's iirc. MOOCs have a less than 10% completion rate. Media by itself is not the answer. What makes a big difference is teaching techniques and things like superhuman spaced repetition and system adaptation. See how Math Academy does it: https://www.mathacademy.com/pedagogy

The article is pretty supportive of the conclusion. Reductively, EdTech is putting screens in front of kids at school. Doing that leads to distraction and procrastination than using those screens for learning.

I sympathize with this goal, but I'm not seeing what to do instead of screens for kids. I've been looking, hard. Suburbia makes this really hard. try getting three kids to sports with two working parents, and thats only half the time you're trying to fill. Try to get any kind of regular playtime with other families who are busier than you. We kid ourselves we're keeping them off of algorithms, but craft materials only take them so far, and the rest will be filled with TV and video games when we are stuck working.

Would you be willing to share any (anonymized) anecdote(s) that helped you see this reality?

I'll share that I saw how much EdTech was infested by folks trying to leverage "gamification", and I read Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy". That, and other events like Sebastian Thrun admitting "We have a lousy product" (on MOOCs) was enough to disabuse me of any notion that our generation's EdTech hype would prove any different than its predecessors (education over TV, or via Radio).

If you're trying to learn programming, it can be pretty handy to have a computer so you can try things and see what happens.

In TFA, "EdTech" refers to things like grade-school subjects: e.g. learning to do fractions. In this respect, replacing human teachers with software/apps is what's being debated. The consequence of this replacement is a sharp drop in face-to-face engagement, and the substitution thereof with 1:1 screen time.

You provided some examples of auto-didacts teaching themselves useful life skills via YT. I think these are good resources for such folks -- I know I've benefited from them myself -- but it's hardly in the same ballpark.

What if it is possible to spend a lot less time learning that with newer classroom methods (ed tech doesn't have to mean whiteboards and apps, teaching methods are technology too).

We can make a good house without metal fasteners using hand tools and nothing but muscles. But that doesn't mean that a house built using brushless power tools in 1/4 the time isn't also a good house.

More directly: I conceptually understand a lot of algorithms that I read about. For me though, the ones that I learned by coding them and running them are the ones I understand much better. Hand written notes on a lecture do not guarantee complete or correct understanding, and there is no mechanism for checking.

I didn't even own a computer for my first year of computer science (couldn't afford it), and had a 1½-2 hour commute to school. I did everything with paper and pencil, because when I had to actually turn in something, it involved staying in a giant, crowded computer lab and getting home well after dark after having left well before dawn. I still have notebooks filled with C.

That being said, my mother learned how to program when they were still using punchcard decks. My ordeal wasn't special. Don't know if I learned any better than others, but I think the need to not have bugs on the first iteration was more important for me than for other people. I did not just tweak things until it worked.

^^ This!

My 4th grader has some sound sensitivity issues, so he uses that as an excuse to go out in the hall and read a book or listen to an auto book on his school-supplied chromebook when the classroom gets too loud for him

Well, guess what he's been doing? Watching unfiltered youtube! He's clever and sneaky, so it's been an arms race at home to block youtube enough for him but still allow it to work on my Roku for me. Why does the school allow 4th graders to have unfettered access to youtube?

It's incredibly frustrating as a parent when you've taken care to make your network and devices work a certain way for your kids, then the schools send them home with devices that have unlimited access to Youtube and trash-tier Web games and whatever else, and no ability for parents to manage any of that (of course). WTF. Thanks, now I have some damn object I have to keep away from them, but also have to get back in their backpacks each morning. Wonderful.

Fascinating. I teach and believe the devices should be more open. I've personally witnessed student agitation, anger, anxiety etc when barred from changing their wallpaper, from adding a bookmark to Chrome, from changing basic accessibility settings. I have a hard time seeing how we can lock these devices down any further.

Though I do believe schools need an edu version of YouTube. YouTube kids is too childish for older students. But regular YouTube has too much inappropriate stuff on it. That's a tough one.

I get culture shock on HN these days. People on HN advocating for locking down school computers? What in the dystopia is happening?

I'm personally glad that they're circumventing these "protections." At least, they'll learn something along the way.

I think part of the problem is that they decided to use the computers for every class instead of using computers in classes about computers.

Tell kids to do open ended history/english research on a computer, they get sidetracked and waste time.

Tell the kids to do a computer thing on the computer (like use math as to solve this question), they have a much more focused task at hand and will use the computer as the teacher intended.

There are, which is why the author included the quoted clarification of what "EdTech" means in the context of this article. Is there another term the article could use that would fit better or be more clear?

Hi! Can you show some of that interactive text book?

Yeah, it was fun and a little mind boggling when I was just starting out that the person who maintained the python library everyone was using was teaching the class on how to use it. (waving at web.py)

This sounds sensible.

Until you consider that almost all children in N.A. that are learning rely on Kahn academy & YouTubers to make up for the fact that their school’s can’t figure out how to replicate a great learning experience that is available for free.

My daughter has learned more arithmetic in 200 minutes with flash cards and a sticker board than in a year with her school’s tablets

I think the goal is to give kids screens so they’ll quit bugging their teacher

Unfortunately the internet has been corrupted by JavaScript. A website is rarely loading a single site anymore. Try noscript and you'll quickly see that, even a trivial website loads dozens of dependencies. Dependencies that shift over time.

Reality is whitelisting can't work as you'll simply break websites. This has been my experience at several schools now. Websites may or may not load. And even if they do, they rarely work properly.

Irony is, students are clever enough to realise you can use translate websites to load anything with translation from English to English. No blocking at all!

Apple devices, both iOS and macOS, have great and fairly easy to use remotely-managed parental controls (Microsoft may too, IDK) that can do things like apply all sorts of limits to allowed websites or apps during certain periods of the day, but god-damned school-provided-and-managed devices blow holes through any plan to use that for those purpose. Even if the school sends home devices in your ecosystem, you won't be able to configure the parental controls on them, and their settings are always way too loose.

Which leaves you with your network as the place you have to manage all of that, which is a much bigger pain in the ass.

Or just buy a router that has that. There are tons that do it. Even my shitty CenturyLink DSL router has it.

Not only are we paying teachers worse than we used to, we are actually spending more on education! The scandal is the addition of more useless Administrator positions. https://x.com/TCCRI/status/1760792700771533084

sorry about the formatting. It won't let me edit it now either.

yes, I see a lot of value in this approach, especially for ADHD learners (who represent about 10% of the student population). Imagine if the only thing a kid could access on their school computer was the thing they were supposed to be doing? How much would that help focus? On MacBooks, you can use https://gertrude.app/ to enforce this allow-list only approach, which has proven very beneficial for homeschool students.

Really jarring reading that. I think I was in middle school when the AOL and the "internet" to me became a thing (lol) and sure there was a lot of time wasting stuff (chatrooms, games, etc.) but there was a huge huge field of just exploration and learning. I cut my tech teeth on that; minimal parent supervision, no gamifying or artificial motivators, just my curiosity.

I feel for kids nowadays. It was the wild west back then, everything was basically unrestricted and nobody had any clue of the consequences, but we didn't have companies actively trying to addict us to stuff.

No idea what the answer is.

The interesting follow-up here... there is no reason these effects should be restricted to children. Like, if children can't learn with devices in a classroom, it suggests executives can't learn in an office (and might give a hint as to why we haven't seen expected productivity benefits driven by it).

But again, if the effect was this strong, I'd really expect to see broader evidence (even just at a national level based of digital uptake).