I feel like it's worth pointing out the ways homeschooling can go badly wrong. Whether or not there's a correlation between homeschooling and abuse, it's obvious that homeschooling can cover up particulary bad instances of abuse (even if it's not the only way to do that). So, I feel like a position of "homeschooling has the potential to go very bad; we should probably have good monitoring to prevent that; are we sure we're doing that? Can we check?" seems sensible.
The article you call a "hit piece" makes some pretty sensible points. The title isn't something like "The horrors of homeschooling," but rather, "Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling."
Here are some quotes that support this reasonable angle:
Some children may not be receiving any instruction at all. Most states don’t require homeschooled kids to be assessed on specific topics the way their classroom-based peers are. This practice enables educational neglect that can have long-lasting consequences for a child’s development.
[...]
Not one state checks with Child Protective Services to determine whether the parents of children being homeschooled have a history of abuse or neglect.
[...]
But federal mandates for reporting and assessment to protect children don’t need to be onerous. For example, homeschool parents could be required to pass an initial background check, as every state requires for all K–12 teachers.
Those all seem like important points to me regardless of whether the article is right about the statistics you and Eric Hoel criticize.
(As an aside, I don't even get why Eric Hoel is convinced that the article wanted to claim that homeschooling is correlated with abuse. To me, these passages, including the 36% figure, are not about claiming that homeschooling leads to more abuse than school schooling. Instead, I interpret them as saying, "There's too much abuse happening in the homeschooling context, so it would be good to have better controls." The article even mentions that homeschooling may be the best choice for some children.)
The variance in homeschooling is clearly huge. The affluent rationalists who coordinate with each other to homeschool their kids are a totally different case than aella's upbringing, which is yet again different from the religious fundamentalist Holocaust-denying household where the father has untreated bipolar disorder and paranoid delusions, and the mother makes medically inadequate home remedies to be the sole treatment for injuries of their half a dozen (or so) children who work on the family scrapyard where life-altering injuries were common. See this memoir -- sure, it's an extreme example, but how many times do we not hear about the experiences of children in situations like that, since the majority of them don't break free and become successful writers?
If there's less abuse happening in homeschooling than in regular schooling, a policy of "let's impose burdens on homeschooling to crack down on abuse in homeschooling" without a similar crackdown on abuse in non-home-schooling does not decrease abuse.
You can see something similar with self-driving cars. It is bad if a self-driving car crashes. It would be good to do things that reduce that. But if you get to a point where self-driving cars are safer than regular driving, and you continue to crack down on self-driving cars but not on regular driving, this is not good for safety overall.
It depends on efficiency of the interventions you'd come up with (some may not be much of a "burden" at all) and on the elasticity with which parents who intend to homeschool are turned away by "burdens". You make a good point but what you say is not generally true -- it totally depends on the specifics of the situation. (Besides, didn't the cited study say that both rates of abuse were roughly equal? I don't think anyone suggested that public schooled kids have [edit: drastically] higher abuse rates than home schooled ones? Was it 37% vs 36%?)
Seriously, -5/-11?
I went through my post line by line and I don't get what people are allergic to.
I'm not taking sides. I flagged that some of the criticisms of homeschooling appear reasonable and important to me. I'm pretty sure I'm right about this, but somehow people want me to say less of this sort of thing, because what? Because public schools are "hell"? How is that different from people who consider the other political party so bad that you cannot say one nuanced thing about them -- isn't that looked down upon on this site?
Also, speaking of "hell," I want to point out that not all types of abuse are equal and that the most extreme cases of childhood suffering probably happen disproportionally in the most isolated of homes.
How can it not be an ideal to aim for that all children have contact with some qualified person outside their household who can check if they're not being badly abused? Admittedly, it's not understood to be a public school teacher's primary role to notice when something with a child is seriously wrong, but it's a role that they often end up filling (and I wouldn't be surprised if they even get trained in this in many areas). You don't necessarily need public schools for this sort of checking in that serves as a safeguard against some of the most severe kinds of prolonged abuse, but if you just replace public schooling with homeschooling, that role falls away. So, what you could do to get some of the monitoring back: have homeschooling with (e.g.) yearly check-ins with the affected children from a social worker. I don't know the details, but my guess is that some states have this and others don't. (Like the "hit piece" claims, regulation differs from state to state and some are poorly regulated.) I'm not saying I know for sure whether yearly check-ins would be cost-effective compared to other things the state puts money in, but it totally might be, and I doubt that the people who are trying to discourage this discussion (with downvotes and fully-general counterarguments that clearly prove way too much) know enough about this either, to be certain that there are no easy/worthwhile ways to make the situation safer. Like, even if yearly check-ins for everyone turn out to be too expensive, you could at least check if people who sign their kid up for homeschooling already have a history of neglect and abuse, so that you can add regular monitoring if that turns out to be the case. (Note that such background checks are a low-effort action where the article claims no state is doing it so far.)
I strong-disagreed since I don't think any of your listed criticisms are reasonable. The implied premise is that homeschooling is deviant in a way that justifies a lot of government scrutiny, when really parents have a natural right to educate their children the way they want (with government intervention being reasonable in extreme cases that pass a high bar of scrutiny).
In particular, I think that outside of an existing norm where most students go to public school, the things you listed would be obviously unjust. Do you think that parents who fail a criminal background check shouldn't be allowed to educate their own children (given that they still have custody of their children), or that a CPS investigation should make some kind of intermediate judgment of "not abusive but not worthy to educate the children without state intervention"?
If we were under a different education regime like universal school vouchers, or just totally unfunded private education, do you think it would be reasonable to have parents' freedom to educate their children restricted for reasons like the ones you gave, or to introduce mandatory public schooling just for this kind of monitoring?
1Thanks for elaborating, that's helpful.
If we were under a different education regime
Something like what you describe would maybe even be my ideal too (I'm hedging because I don't have super informed views on this). But I don't understand how my position of "let's make sure we don't miss out on low-cost, low-downside ways of safeguarding children (who btw are people too and didn't consent to be born, especially not in cases where their parents lack empathy or treat children as not people) from severe abuse" is committed to having to answer this hypotethical. I feel like all my position needs to argue for is that some children have parents/caretakers where it would worse if they had 100% control and no accountability than if the children also spend some time outside the household in public school. This can hold true even if we grant that mandatory public school is itself abusive to children who don't want to be there.
This can hold true even if we grant that mandatory public school is itself abusive to children
My point doesn't have anything to do with the relevant merits of public vs homeschool. My point is that your listed interventions aren't reasonable because they involve too much government intrusion into a parent's freedom to educate his children how he wants, for reasons based on dubious and marginal "safeguarding" grounds. My example of a different education regime was to consider a different status quo that makes the intrusiveness more clear.
I feel like all my position needs to argue for is that some children have parents/caretakers where it would be worse if they had 100% control and no accountability than if the children also spend some time outside the household in public school [emphasis mine]
This might be the crux: I'm saying that this position isn't based on any reasonable principle of government intrusion on people's lives. The government shouldn't intrude on basic parenting rights with a ton of surveillance just to see whether it can make what it thinks is a marginal improvement.
More concretely, do you think parents should have to pass a criminal background check (assuming this is what you meant by "background check") in order to homeschool, even if they retain custody of their children otherwise?
Re-reading your previous reply, I noticed this:
So, what you could do to get some of the monitoring back: have homeschooling with (e.g.) yearly check-ins with the affected children from a social worker. I don't know the details, but my guess is that some states have this and others don't.
No states use this policy and it doesn't make sense that parents should have to submit to yearly inspections of their parenting practices. It only makes sense from the point of view where homeschooling is highly deviant and basically impermissible without special dispensation, and where the government has the authority to decide in very specific terms what composes children's educations.
More concretely, do you think parents should have to pass a criminal background check (assuming this is what you meant by "background check") in order to homeschool, even if they retain custody of their children otherwise?
I don't really understand why you're asking me about this more intrusive and less-obviously-cost-effective intervention, when one of the examples I spelled out above was a lower-effort, less intrusive, less controversial version of this sort of proposal.
I wrote above:
Like, even if yearly check-ins for everyone turn out to be too expensive, you could at least check if people who sign their kid up for homeschooling already have a history of neglect and abuse, so that you can add regular monitoring if that turns out to be the case. (Note that such background checks are a low-effort action where the article claims no state is doing it so far.)
(In case this wasn't clear, by "regular monitoring" I mean stuff like "have a social worker talk to the kids.")
To make this more vivid, if someone is, e.g., a step dad with a history of child sexual abuse, or there's been a previous substantiated complaint about child neglect or physical abuse in some household, then yeah, it's probably a bad idea if parents with such track records can pull children out of public schools and thereby avoid all outside accountability for the next decade or so, possibly putting their children in a situation where no one would notice if they deteriorated/showed worsening signs of severe abuse. Sure, you're right that the question of custody plays into that. You probably agree that there are some cases where custody should be taken away. With children in school, there's quite a bit of "opportunity for noticing surface" for people potentially noticing and checking in if something seems really off. With children in completely unregulated homeschooling environments, there could be all the way down to zero noticing surface (like, maybe the evil grandma locked the children into a dark basement for the last two years and no one outside the household would know). All I'm saying is: The households that opt for potential high isolation, they should get compensatory check ins.
I even flagged that it may be too much effort to hire enough social workers to visit all the relevant households, so I proposed the option that maybe no one needs to check in yearly if Kelsey Piper and her friends are jointly homeschooling their kids, and instead, monitoring resources could get concentrated on cases where there's a higher prior of severe abuse and neglect.
Again, I don't see how that isn't reasonable.
Habryka claims I display a missing mood of not understanding how costly marginal regulation can be. In turn, I for sure feel like the people I've been arguing with display something weird. I wouldn't call it a missing mood, but more like a missing ambition to make things as good as they can be, think in nuances, and not demonize (and write off without closer inspection) all possible regulation just because it's common for regulation to go too far?
In my comments thus far, I've been almost exclusively focused on preventing severe abuse and too much isolation.
Something else I'm unsure about, but not necessarily a hill I want to die on given that government resources aren't unlimited, is the question of whether kids should have a right to "something at least similarly good as voluntary public school education." I'm not sure if this can be done cost-effectively, but if the state had a lot money that they're not otherwise using in better ways, then I think it would be pretty good to have standardized tests for homeschooled kids every now and then, maybe every two to three years. One of them could be an IQ test, the other an abilities test. If the kid has an IQ that suggests that they could learn things well but they seem super behind other children of their age, and you ask them if they want to learn and they say yes with enthusiasm, then that's suggestive of the parents doing an inadequate job, in which case you could put them on homeschooling probation and/or force them to allow their child to go to public school?
Something else I'm unsure about, but not necessarily a hill I want to die on given that government resources aren't unlimited, is the question of whether kids should have a right to "something at least similarly good as voluntary public school education."
This seems like it would punish variance a lot, and de-facto therefore be a huge tax on homeschooling. Some public schools are extremely bad, if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools, the costs of homeschooling increase a lot, constituting effectively a tax on homeschooling.
Maybe you mean "a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education", but my guess is the worst public school education is so bad that these would already be covered by almost any reasonable approach to human rights (like, my guess is it already involves continuous ongoing threats of violence, being lied to, frequent physical violence, etc.).
Er… I think you maybe got the adjectives mixed up in a bit? As written, your second paragraph doesn’t make any sense.
Did you perhaps mean… “good” / “as bad as the best”…? But that is also weird… yeah, I don’t understand what you had in mind there. Clarify, please?
Huh, it grammatically reads fine to me. I am assuming the first paragraph reads fine, so I'll clarify just the second.
In my first paragraph I said that making sure that most reasonable interpretations of "a right to an education at least as good as voluntary public school education" would put undue cost on homeschooling. In my second paragraph I then suggested one reading that does not plausibly incur that cost, which is a right to an education at least better than the worst voluntary public school education. However, it appears to me that students already have a right to an education at least better than the worst voluntary public school education, as I am sure the worst public school education violates many straightforward human rights and would be prosecutable under current law (just nobody is bothering to do that), suggesting that adding an additional right with such a low threshold wouldn't really make any difference.
Hope that helps!
Ugh, this is totally my fault, but I did mean “first paragraph”. (Second paragraph of the comment, of which the first paragraph is the quote… yeah, I know; I wouldn’t have figured it out either…)
What I am saying is: yeah, your second paragraph makes sense. But… aren’t you just describing exactly the same thing that you, in your first paragraph, said would be bad?
Like… you say that “if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools”, this would be bad, would put an undue cost on homeschooling, etc. But then you say that “a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education” would be fine, but meaningless in practice.
But…
… aren’t those the same thing??
if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools
a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education
What’s the difference? You can’t just be leaning on the “greater than” vs. “greater than or equal to” distinction here… right? (Because that’s obviously a trivial difference!) Other than that, are these two scenarios not literally, exactly the same? What am I not seeing here?
Ah, oops, now I get it. Yes, I what I wrote sure didn't make any sense. In my first paragraph I meant to write something like "if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as bad or average public schools, the costs of homeschooling increase a lot, constituting effectively a tax on homeschooling" and then in my second paragraph I meant to strengthen it into "the very worst public school". I did sure write the same clarifiers in each paragraph, being very confusing.
I strong-upvoted and strong-disagree voted, since I also agree the current voting distribution didn't make much sense.
I do think you are doing something in your comment that feels pretty off. For example you link to aphyer's comment as a "fully general counterargument that clearly prove[s] way too much", but I don't buy it, I think it's a pretty reasonable argument. The prior should be towards liberty, and if the higher-liberty option is also safer, then I don't see any reason to mess with it for now.
Like, it seems fine to improve things, but I do think state involvement in education has been really very terrifying and I sense a continuous missing mood throughout your comments of not understanding how costly marginal regulation can be.
To be clear, I think your comment is fine and doesn't deserve downvoting, and disagree-voting feels like the appropriate dimension.
1The prior should be towards liberty
Right, I was the first strong-disagree and I disagreed because of the implied premise that homeschooling was deviant in a way that warranted a high degree of scrutiny, rather than being the natural right/default that should be restricted only in extreme cases. I figure that's why others disagreed as well.
Elaborated in this thread: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MJFeDGCRLwgBxkmfs/childhood-and-education-9-school-is-hell?commentId=W8FoHDkB3xAkfcwyw
Yeah, I don't see why either. LessWrong allegedly has a utilitarian culture, and simply from the utilitarian "minimize abuse" perspective, you're spot on. Even if home-schooling has similar or mildly lower rates of abuse, the weight of that abuse is higher.
Instead, the actual thesis of many against homeschooling, when they’re not making up things like the claims earlier in this section, is flat out that parents are not qualified to teach their children.
That’s just true, though. Most parents aren’t even slightly qualified to teach their children. Is this not obvious…?
EDIT:
It is beyond absurd to think that an average teacher, with a class of 24 kids, couldn’t be outperformed by a competent parent focusing purely on their own child.
But most parents aren’t competent, at all, in any way whatsoever, especially at teaching anyone anything (but also at most other things).
The idea that if you don’t specifically have an ‘education degree’ that you can’t teach things is to defy all of human experience and existence. Completely crazy. And yet.
Oh, no, no, that’s not the idea at all!
The idea, rather, is that you probably can’t teach things, regardless of whether you have an “education degree”.
And that idea is completely consistent with all of human experience and existence.
Most people are stupid, incompetent, and very bad at teaching (and at most other things).
I want to follow up on this a bit more, because this is a point which I’ve discussed with homeschooling advocates before, and it’s one which seems just wildly underappreciated in these sorts of discussions.
I will mention one anecdotal example, which is, I think, very generous to the pro-homeschooling side: namely, my own case. Now, my mother is a professional educator (now retired). She has a doctorate in education. She taught (English—specifically ESL / “Business Communication”) for several decades. She worked with school age kids and with adults in continuing-education programs. She did curriculum design, consulted for leading publishers of educational materials, won teaching awards, etc.
Do I think that my mother was qualified to homeschool me, and to teach me all the subjects that I in fact learned in school?
Hell no. No way, no how, not a chance, not even close, not in a million years. Absolutely, unquestionably, categorically not.
And if that’s so, then what possible hope does the average parent have?
I'm baffled as to what you're trying to say here. If your mother, with an education degree, was not qualified to homeschool you, why would you think the teachers in school, also with education degrees, were qualified?
Are you just saying that nobody is qualified to teach children? Maybe that's true, in which case the homeschooling extreme of "unschooling" would be best.
My mathematics teachers in high school were qualified to teach me mathematics because they had degrees (mostly doctorates, but a couple did have lesser degrees) in mathematics.
My chemistry teachers in high school were qualified to teach me chemistry because they had (respectively) a Ph.D. in chemistry and three decades of experience as a working chemist in industry.
My computer science teachers in high school were qualified to teach me computer science because they had degrees in computer science (and were working programmers / engineers).
My biology teachers in high school were qualified to teach me biology because they had degrees (one had a doctorate, another a lesser degree) in biology.
My physics teacher in high school was qualified to teach me physics because he had a degree in physics.
My drafting / technical drawing / computer networking / other “technology” teachers were qualified to teach me those things because they had extensive professional experience in those fields.
(I am not sure what degrees my humanities teachers had, but those subjects aren’t important, so who cares, really. Also, some of them were not qualified to teach anything whatsoever.)
Someone who has a degree in education only is, indeed, not qualified to teach mathematics / chemistry / physics / biology / computer science / any other STEM field at the high school or even middle school level. (Even the latter grades of elementary school are a stretch.)
I think much of the discussion of homeschooling is focused on elementary school. My impression is that some homeschooled children do go to a standard high school, partly for more specialized instruction.
But in any case, very few high school students are taught chemistry by a Ph.D in chemistry with 30 years work experience as a chemist. I think it is fairly uncommon for a high school student to have any teachers with Ph.Ds in any subject (relevant or not). If most of your teachers had Ph.D or other degrees in the subjects they taught, then you were very fortunate. (My daughter is in fact similarly fortunate, but I know perfectly well that her type of private school cannot be scaled to handle most students.)
And if we're going to discuss atypical situations, I do in fact think that I would be competent to teach all those subjects at a high school level.
I think much of the discussion of homeschooling is focused on elementary school.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is a motte-and-bailey situation here, where the motte is “some kids can be homeschooled at the elementary school grade level by some exceptional parents” and the bailey is “abolish schools and homeschool everyone for everything at all grade levels”.
I can provide you cited quotes if you like; or you can take my word that I’ve seen many homeschooling advocates quite unambiguously arguing for homeschooling beyond the elementary-school level.
But in any case, very few high school students are taught chemistry by a Ph.D in chemistry with 30 years work experience as a chemist.
Yes, of course.
If most of your teachers had Ph.D or other degrees in the subjects they taught, then you were very fortunate.
Absolutely. No argument there.
My point, however, is that what it takes to teach children a subject is both skill at teaching, in general (which most people, parents included, do not have), and substantial domain training/expertise (whether that comes from a degree, preferably an advanced degree, in the subject, or from extensive professional experience, or both—and which most people, including most parents, likewise do not have, for most or even all the subjects which are commonly part of a school curriculum).
You might object: doesn’t this imply that most kids in the country are not being taught, and cannot be taught, most of their subjects by anyone who is qualified to teach them those things (as neither their parents nor any of their teachers at school meet those qualifications)?
I answer: correct.
And if we’re going to discuss atypical situations, I do in fact think that I would be competent to teach all those subjects at a high school level.
Well, I am not personally acquainted with you and am not familiar with your academic and professional background, so of course I can’t confidently agree or disagree. However, I hope you’ll forgive me for being very skeptical about your claim.
doesn’t this imply that most kids in the country are not being taught, and cannot be taught, most of their subjects by anyone who is qualified to teach them those things (as neither their parents nor any of their teachers at school meet those qualifications)?
I answer: correct.
What does this mean we lose by abolishing public education? Just the benefits gained by the small minority of kids actually being taught something? I would guess (but haven’t checked) that most of the teachers qualified to teach are at private schools anyway.
Just the benefits gained by the small minority of kids actually being taught something?
Certainly we lose that, yes.
Whether we lose other things is beyond the scope of the main point that I am making here. That point is: if we switch from teachers teaching kids to parents teaching kids, we cannot assume that we thereby go from kids not being taught effectively, to kids being taught effectively. That is because most parents are not competent to effectively teach their kids most (or, often, all) academic subjects.
I would guess (but haven’t checked) that most of the teachers qualified to teach are at private schools anyway.
I, for one, did not attend private schools.[1] My comments upthread, about my own teachers, referred to a public school. (The junior high school I attended, where the teachers were also substantially more competent than the “average teacher” described in this discussion, was also a public school.)
Your guess may nonetheless be correct in the statistical aggregate; I don’t know enough to comment on that.
Except for a ~2 month period in 3rd grade; the school in question was substantially worse than all public schools I have attended. ↩︎
Allow grade skipping
I get you're spitballing here, and I'm going to admit this isn't the most data-driven argument, but here goes: you're saying take away the kid's friends, ratchet up the bullying, make sure they hit puberty at the wrong time, make sure they suck at sports, obliterate the chance of them having a successful romantic interaction, and the reward is one of two things: still being bored in classes with the same problems, or having "dumb kid" problems in the exact same classes that are harmful to dumb kids.
Again... total leaf-node in your essay and sometimes "bad" ideas can just expand imagination for what sort of outside-the-box solutions we should consider. Felt this was worth calling out as a uniquely bad idea.
Also I did this, I skipped 8th grade. Which was silly. I was actually hit-or-miss behind in humanities classes, for a similar reason you call out in math: no teacher noticed I had a mental process error where I didn't know the difference between reading and processing a sentence and unpacking the sentence's meaning, and The Odyssey was hard enough to show that difference. (Today, honestly, I still can't follow the plot of Elden Ring and Christopher Nolan movies and stuff, but I'm very good at themes and theses once I know what's going on.) I would have needed, yeah, something around 4 years jump to be stimulated in a math class again, which is actually what happened at PROMYS my sophomore-junior summer. PROMYS was somewhat socially smoothed out too. I was still young-ish but more on the bell curve in age instead of just youngest in my class by a full year.
So I pretty much just think of high school as a black hole in my life plot, between a more-or-less happy childhood and more-or-less happy college experience, with some sun peaking out (mixed metaphor sorry) during PROMYS. And that's how I described it in high school too. This should sound sad, and it is sad, because just finding some creative way to turn 4 years of youth into something no better than sitting in a waiting room a little too long (and that's already the upgraded "alternative thought" in place of thoughts of self-harm or something) is a bad ends, even if I'm a happy-ish worker bee now.
If I had to offer an alternative proposal. It seems that remote learning is, you know, bad socially, but maybe a little strategic remote learning here and there to accelerate someone in math or get them reading harder fiction sooner, across a larger pool of kids, isn't all bad? Like are we going to humor the thesis that being bored in the same classes is key to making friends at lunch? If you think so, the problem is probably one kid being an isolate, not the system just working that way normally.
Prince Vogelfrei: People say smug shit like this while not doing the tiniest bit of research on homeschooling outcomes which beat public schooling in every standardized test category. California makes everyone do tests, we have the data. But what does the truth matter when superiority is to be had.
California does not, in fact, require that home schoolers take a standard exam and we do not, in fact, have this data.
There are two states that require testing exclusively (other states have alternative options to an exam) and those are Oregon and South Dakota. To my knowledge no one has made a concerted effort to actually use these data to answer this question in a statistically valid way. One complication is that they are using these tests to force children back into public school if they do especially poorly. Given that some portion of these children are probably performing poorly due to more innate factors and not wholly educational neglect, this artificially inflates the home schoolers' scores, because any low performing students are removed. But in theory, this can be modelled - it's just that no one has done it yet.
The reality is we simply do not have any studies that show either is clearly better. Erik Hoel has more to say on this.
Is this a case for or against formal education? Either way, it is wise.
If one does accept the premise that feigning enthusiasm is a useful skill, that's still not a good justification of formal education as it exists: it certainly doesn't take 12 years of grade school to teach that skill.
No, the depth of the despair does mostly strictly+monotonically increase, so you do continually unlock new levels of the skill.
You have a point, although I don't think having a genuine feeling of despair is a hugely important variable. As the story goes:
[Method actor Dustin] Hoffman had a grueling scene coming up, where his character hadn’t slept in three days, and Hoffman told [Sir Laurence] Olivier that to prepare for the scene, he too hadn’t slept for 72 hours.
“My dear boy,” replied Olivier, “why don’t you try acting?”
But more generally, even if you want to teach some kind of set of skills and resilience for dealing with things like "sitting still for hours a day", "doing hours of boring homework-like stuff", "obeying lots of orders from authority figures", etc., you can deliberately learn and practice each of them, and ramp up the difficulty more quickly, and probably reach a higher level in 8 months than most people reach in 12 years. U.S. Army boot camp is apparently 10 weeks, for example.
1I have so many mixed feelings about schooling that I'm glad I don't have my own children to worry about. There is enormous potential for improving things, yet so little of that potential gets realized.
The thing about school choice is that funding is largely zero sum. Those with the means to choose better options than public schools take advantage of those means and leave underfunded public schools to serve the least privileged remainder. My public school teacher friends end up with disproportionately large fractions of children with special needs who need extra care and attention but don't have the support to care for them effectively. As a result, all the students and all the teachers suffer. How do we do right by all these individuals? Private schools can largely avoid accommodating these students. The private schools can largely choose their students, but the public schools cannot. It reminds me of insurance companies choosing not to cover certain people, who then have no affordable coverage options. It's not an unsolvable problem in theory, but reality is messy and politically fraught.
I think the reason education got so bad is we don't have accurate signals. Most studies use the passing rate as their metric of "achievement", and that can only see changes among the bottom quintile. Or, they use standardized assessments, which usually do not go higher than the 90th percentile. I wrote a longer post here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LPyqPrgtyWwizJxKP/how-do-we-fix-the-education-crisis
"we should be firing the bad teachers and hiring good ones". requires school districts to be willing to pay for good teachers and able to tell what they are (quite hard). Also requires that you have enough teachers in the first place, (most districts feel they have too few). It also seems paradoxical, because the average teacher cannot be better than average (people forget averages can change over time). It also has the social problem that you have to say "some respected people are just bad at their job", which is hard.
1That is a two axis intervention, and skill/price might not be that elastic.
You also can't hire partial teachers, so there is an integer problem where firing one teacher might mean a significant rise in class sizes.
If you have 100 students and 4 teachers, for a 1:25 ratio (which is fairly good), this leads to a minimum raise of 33% and a a ratio of 1:33 (average to bad). This better teacher now needs to split their attention among 8 more students, which is really hard.
Since you need teachers for each grade, this integer problem is a big deal, as often even in large schools there are only 2-3 teachers per school per grade or per subject, even at medium to large schools, and shuffling students between schools is highly disruptive and unpopular.
To hire better teachers, total compensation must probably increase. (especially including hiring expensive and fights with the union).
We should spend more money on teachers is a defensible conclusion (there seems to be a total personnel shortage as well), and we would hope that good teacher supply is elastic. If it is not, competing for good teachers is a bad global intervention.
Apropos of nothing in particular, do you think that abolishing the Dept. of Education would make things go better or worse?
This complication of tales from the world of school isn’t all negative. I don’t want to overstate the problem. School is not hell for every child all the time. Learning occasionally happens. There are great teachers and classes, and so on. Some kids really enjoy it.
School is, however, hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave.
Also, there is a deliberate ongoing effort to destroy many of the best remaining schools and programs that we have, in the name of ‘equality’ and related concerns. Schools often outright refuse to allow their best and most eager students to learn. If your school is not hell for the brightest students, they want to change that.
Welcome to the stories of primary through high school these days.
Table of Contents
Primary School
Peter Gray reports on the Tennessee Pre-K experiment, where they subjected four year olds to 5.5 hours a day of academics five times a week. Not only did the control group (kids whose parents applied and got randomly rejected, so this was effectively an unblinded RCT) catch up on academics by third grade, the control group was well ahead by sixth grade, and the treatment group had a lot more rule violations and diagnosed learning disabilities. I think Peter’s conclusion that drill in Pre-K and kindergarten is actively bad is overreach, since the dose often makes the poison, but yeah focusing on drill that early seems terrible.
NYC officials consider virtual learning to reduce class size. It seems the law requires there be no more than 20 to 25 kids in a classroom depending on grade level. So the proposed solution is to get rid of some of classrooms entirely. Transparent villains happy to inflict torture upon children.
How to organize a protest against your teacher, recommended, made me smile.
Scott Alexander asks, given Americans clearly do not know basic facts that were supposedly taught in school, but do remember things through cultural osmosis, what is even the point of school? If you learn via spaced repetition, isn’t school failing rather miserably at that? The unstated question there is if you actually wanted to teach things, wouldn’t you used spaced repetition, which schools don’t use in any systematic way. The answer to the puzzle, of course, is that school is not about learning.
Your periodic reminder: Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture according to the San Francisco Unified School District. Features of ‘white supremacy culture’ include Perfectionism, Individualism, Sense of Urgency and Objectivity. They end by saying we can do better.
Math is Hard
A theory, from a longer thread.
I think he severely oversells it in the longer thread, but he has a good point. You learn math by doing, by messing around, by experimenting and playing. Math lectures are relatively a waste of time.
Even getting math thought at all is increasingly hard. Here’s governor Newsom, signing a law, SB 1410, explicitly to force Algebra I to be taught to eighth graders, and all he can do is require the Instructional Quality Commission to ‘consider including’ that it be offered. What happens when they consider it, and simply say no?
High School
Florida 9th graders rebel against their Algebra 1 state exam, refuse to take it despite it being a graduation requirement, in sufficient quantities to invalidate the test.
I do not see why any test would have an attendance requirement to count? Let the half that want to take it take it now, the other half can change their minds and study for a refresher when they realize they won’t graduate without it. At least if we don’t cave.
Alternatively, if the students can simply form a union and make the school cave, let’s see what else they want to do with that power, shall we?
Even if you end up at a ‘good’ school, a 10/10 rated school, what do you get? Mostly you get a lot of wasted time.
Why does this continue to be true? One reason: A lot of people do not care about smart kids. Or they actively want them to suffer.
In other words, **** you.
Seriously, what the actual ****?
Okay, at least that is a form of the right question. I don’t know why it has to be ‘and’ here. If the smart kids are not bored, or it increases attainment, either one of those is super awesome on its own. So can we do either or both of these things, at scale, without actively damaging the other?
Yes. Obviously. ‘Evidence based’ requires someone collecting whatever you consider admissible evidence for your particular court, but here are some interventions that seem very very obviously like they do these things.
Great Teachers
There is mostly universal agreement that great teachers are much better than good teachers, who are much better than bad teachers. There is not agreement about how to find, create or enable the good and great teachers, or how to fire and avoid the bad ones.
Strangest of all, there is no agreement that we even should in theory be firing the bad teachers and hiring good ones. It’s easier said than done, but you have to say it first. There are even those who say ‘it is wrong to attempt to get your child in front of better teachers, that’s not fair,’ which is somehow not a strawman.
The paper in question is ‘Early Mentors for Exceptional Students,’ which is a different topic than finding good teachers in general, but finds that exceptional teachers going the extra mile can massively increase the chances talented students will win honors, attend selective universities, and have the most valuable career paths. There are obvious concerns about selection effects, they did some work to minimize that but I’d still be wary.
Alex Tabarrok emphasizes that the highest marginal educational value is in mentoring the smartest and most talented kids to be all they can be. Having access to a mentor greatly increases the chance that our best talent truly excels. Roughly half of the potential top math students in the country stay unidentified. Alas, so many in education think that when exceptional students get a chance to excel further, this is at best a nice to have, and perhaps even bad because it ‘increases inequality.’
The broader point from Noah Smith is also important. If we believe teacher quality is valuable, why are we in so many ways not acting like that?
Which leads to the question, what factors predict teacher quality?
The paper examines the effect of a nationwide merit-based teacher-hiring system, which replaced experienced teachers with high-performing new teachers. The new teachers could choose where they would go, replacing old teachers.
From what I (read: me asking Claude questions) could tell, the policy did not in any way evaluate the teachers being replaced, or attempt to replace bad teachers rather than good teachers. The new teachers decided where to go based on what they wanted. So effectively, they were replacing either random teachers, or the teachers with more desirable assignments.
Thus, what we find here is that when we replace random existing teachers en masse with new teachers, and do so without using local knowledge and relying mostly on test scores (see Seeing Like a State) the reduction in experience and non-measured qualities overwhelmed the new teachers scoring higher on the tests.
The study goes too far when it suggests that test scores are uncorrelated with teacher quality. I don’t care what studies show here, that doesn’t make sense. But it can be one factor of many, and relying on it too much can still be actively worse than the previously used methods, as can sticking teachers into new locations they’re not familiar with, as can lack of overall experience, all at once.
If you want to do a reform like this, it has to go hand in hand with firing the bad teachers rather than random teachers, or you’re going to at least be in for a very tough transition.
Not as Great Teachers
It is important to realize that teachers are sometimes very wrong about basic things, and sometimes when you point this out they dig in. It is remarkable the extent to which some people refuse to believe this, and tell people that they are lying or remembering wrong.
Is this a case for or against formal education? Either way, it is wise.
The War on Education
At any given level of education, literacy rates have fallen dramatically, despite overall literacy rates remaining unchanged. Simpson’s Paradox! But as Alex Tabarrok points out, also a scathing indictment of the educational system, pointing to both the signaling model of education and also highly expensive inflation in that signal.
Schools in many places, including Palo Alto and Alameda, increasingly refuse to allow math acceleration. They flat out don’t let kids learn math at any reasonable pace, and this is allowed to continue in areas with some of the brightest student pools around. I wouldn’t mind too much if schools simply taught other subjects to the kids instead, it’s not like being way ahead in math is ultimately all that valuable and you can learn pretty easily on the computer anyway, but they’re flat out wasting hours a week of the kid’s time.
I suppose we now know what impact those deans want to have. Their issue is education. They are against it.
Niels Hoven has other examples as well, such as this one from Justin Baeder, a former principal now training other principals. Or this from his own experience, in response to Baeder asking “what would be the point?”
But yeah, Justin Baeder can do so much better.
How dare you actually attempt to have your kid actually learn things? Just flat out.
But it gets even better than that, wait for it…
That’s right. You need to be careful. They’ll run out of books!
That’s why you need to smuggle them in.
How should we think about solutions that only help high achievers?
We should think of them as highly valuable. Instead, we see the opposite.
So yes: A huge portion of those tasked with educating students is working to actively sabotage our best and brightest, and often the other kids too, thinking this is good and also gaslighting everyone involved about the whole process.
Some places used to have standards, including standards for admission, like Thomas Jefferson High School. Then they killed many such places, so RIP, with national merit semifinalists down 50% in a year despite increased class sizes. And the entire county went from 264 semifinal candidates to 191, showing that this is a real loss.
A lawsuit was allowed to go forward challenging NYC’s gifted programs as ‘segregation,’ including targeting Stuyvesant High School and Bronx Science. It asserts that testing for academic ability is ‘racial’ and discriminatory. The admission tests in question are very similar to the SAT. The whole thing is madness and an attempt at civilizational suicide. If there is a law that makes that kind of admissions test illegal, it is incompatible with civilization, and the law must be repealed.
The latest formerly exceptional school we have learned was intentionally destroyed in the name of ‘equity’ comes from Philadelphia. You see, it’s important not to ‘disadvantage’ some students, so we have to ensure we don’t accidentally give others an education, or admit more talented students over less talented ones. Same old story. Out with the old motto, ‘dare to be excellent.’ And that was for all practical purposes the end of Masterman.
The obvious answer is, then only give such programs to the high achievers. Having looked at the details here, it’s actually a relatively non-toxic version of the concern, noting that if 95% of students fail to benefit from or use such programs, then they’re not a solution for that 95%. Which would for now make them not a general solution.
And yes, that’s disappointing, although I expect rapid improvements over time. Also disappointing is to call such kids ‘those who need it the least’ as if the goal of mathematics education was to hit some minimum bar and then stop. But this article seems to stop short of making the case many ‘equity’ advocates actually make and even put into practice, that Niels is warning about here, which is to claim that the success of the best students is actively a problem to be fixed.
I also agree, for these reasons and also for others including cultural ones, that parents should have a right to see the curricula that is being imposed by force upon their children in a public school, so they know what and how their children are learning. And that a school or teacher refusing to share this information, or the state supreme court saying you don’t get to see it is a five alarm fire. I don’t see how someone can say ‘no this is a secret, you have no right to that, and send your kids to school or we’re calling the cops’ and not notice the skulls on their uniforms.
Sleep
The ultimate proof that school is not about learning is that we know school starts too early for teenagers to properly sleep and thus be ready to learn, we’ve known forever, and it is impossible to fix this.
Relatedly, morning classes fail spectacularly.
Wait, a 7:30 AM section? What fresh hell is that? When I was in college I did sign up intentionally for 9:00 AM classes and given my sleep schedule that turned out fine, but the other kids clearly didn’t love it. A 7:30 AM start time is nuts, such a thing should not exist, we need to amend the Geneva Conventions.
Still, the reduction seems extreme. 79% reduction in further classes is quite a lot if this was indeed a randomized trial. I presume some of it was the cultivation of hatred and aversion rather than pure lack of human capital. At this level, the classes at that hour are effectively non-functional. How can those involved not notice this? Why would anyone ever need (or want) to schedule a class that early? How many points are these kids attempting to take?
School Choice
Legal battles continue (WSJ) over whether, if you decide to have charter schools at all, also allowing religious charter schools is then mandatory or forbidden. There does not appear to be middle ground. One of these violates the first amendment, the other does not, but it is not clear which is which. If it was mandatory, in some places charter schools would get a lot more support, and in other places they would get a lot less.
I do not think the government should be discriminating here, and imposing an effectively very large tax on those who want their children to go to religious schools, or any other kind of school, provided everyone has a local non-religious public school available. And frankly, a lot of the ‘non-religious’ public schools are effectively rather (non-traditionally, de facto) religious and have no intention of knocking it off, giving me even less sympathy.
Then there’s the step beyond that, those who appose privately funded private schools. People being mad that some pay for private school while also paying for everyone’s public school will never actually stop being weird to me, as will people who think this is super commonly done by people in the upper middle class purely for quality reasons.
If ‘shit gets real’ in my local school, and I am being underserved, I do not know what that means, but it does not sound like a time to not be bolting? Yet most people do not have that option. Also, yes, it is very strange that the same person also thinks this:
Again, seems like bolting conditions to me. If you are expecting parents to sacrifice their children on the alter of public pressure to improve failing schools, please speak directly into this microphone.
Tough but fair.
Politico does point to some concerns. If standard schools are losing interest, why then destroy the schools that are exceptional, as many places are somehow doing? That seems rather perverse.
Hopefully the Montessori school could reconstitute itself, but the ‘vote with your feet’ plan only works if you close the schools that lose feet, not the ones that keep them.
The data cited in Politico says that the decline in enrollment due to increased homeschooling is modestly bigger than the increase in private school attendance, some of whom are getting scholarships to do it. Home school as always has principle-agent issues where you worry if the education is happening, if you do not trust parents to want to educate their children.
But yes, if you do not zero out the very high social cost of regular schooling, home schools start to look a lot better. If the city gave us a budget equal to what it costs them to have our kids in schools, I would 100% be putting together a vastly better homeschooling program with that money.
Always remember it could be so much worse.
Microschools
Microschools are an obviously great idea. The cost of private school is far in excess of the costs of hiring a teacher, renting a space and paying for plausible supply and other costs. You get the socialization benefits of school, and the flexibility and customization to not do the awful parts, and as a society we get to try different stuff.
Also, home schooling and stay-at-home parent are expensive, and now you can spread that cost around along with its benefits.
Getting rid of trivial inconveniences can help quite a lot in such cases. Instead of having to go through rezoning, the school will often find space it can use for free.
Primer, a company poised to act as a support system for such schools, is backed by Sam Altman. The man’s past investments often have excellent taste and speak well of his values. I’d be curious what he has invested in this year, after the events of November.
The War Against Home Schools
Scientific American used to be a magazine my family subscribed to that contained cool articles about science. Now it is… something else.
The latest example of this is Scientific American’s hit piece on home schooling. Eric Hoel has a thread and a post detailing the situation. The part about educational results is misleading but reasonable. Then they start in on accusations of ‘abuse.’
That is the part where, after using a child that was not home schooled as justification for a moral panic, they cite a 36% rate of homeschooled children being reported for alleged abuse to show how horrible it is.
Except…
As Hoel notes, focusing on withdraws from school only, and other details, suggest that the base rate of abuse for home school is potentially substantially below normal. At worst, it is normal.
The good argument against home school is it requires a large investment of time and resources by the parents, so most families cannot afford to do it. Obviously, if you can get your child consistent 1-on-1 (or e.g. 4-on-1) attention and a customized path of study then that’s great, and will only get better now that AI tools are available.
Instead, the actual thesis of many against homeschooling, when they’re not making up things like the claims earlier in this section, is flat out that parents are not qualified to teach their children. And that those who claim that they could teach their own children things like how to read or write or do arithmetic are therefore ‘big mad’ and also presumably flying in the face of education and The Science.
It is beyond absurd to think that an average teacher, with a class of 24 kids, couldn’t be outperformed by a competent parent focusing purely on their own child. The idea that if you don’t specifically have an ‘education degree’ that you can’t teach things is to defy all of human experience and existence. Completely crazy. And yet.
I love that it’s a he that ends up on this hypothetical stripper pole at 16.
Home School Methodology
Kelsey Piper answers questions about her private tiny home school. Parents typically teach a weekly class, student/teacher ratio is 4:1 to 6:1, full price is $1200/month/child. All reports I’ve heard are quite good, but of course talent involved is off the charts.
Comparing the Bryan Caplan home school method to Robinson’s similar one, with critique of the general framework and focus. Both focus on not helping the student, letting them work things out, with Robinson being full on ‘the student must never be helped with any problem.’
They assigned kids two hours of math a day. I am confused why that is needed, if you train in math reasonably less than half of that should be plenty. I get that history and music are secondary priorities, but cutting them out entirely seems like a mistake, although honestly art can go. I also don’t see how most children could focus like that. I know mine would have no hope no matter how hard I tried. In general, why so much time in a chair doing school-style work? I don’t understand how that helps.
Of course all of it is obsolete now. If you have access to Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude Opus, all previous learning techniques are going to look dumb.
The constant refrain I hear is ‘but what about socialization?’ Which seems crazy to me, and I love this way of putting it.
There are far better ways to get socialization. What socialization you do get in school, from what I can tell, is by default horribly warped in deeply unhealthy ways. Most of the value is essentially ‘you might make a friend at all, and then interact with them outside of school in your few hours of freedom.’ There are better ways to find friends.
Aella summarizes her home school experience, listing pros and cons of the type she experienced. The cons are that parents control what you learn and who you see, and your social skills and knowledge base are different from other kids. The pros are you don’t waste massive amounts of time instead learning at your own pace, you don’t get stratified by age and you dodge a lot of toxic dynamics in normal schools.
Her description of her three months in normal high school instruction, where everything is checking off a box and no one actually cares, tells you that yes it can be otherwise, we should be horrified by our defaults. If your soul has not yet been crushed and you show up most of the way through the process, the soul crushing engine becomes impossible to miss.
If you are a parent, presumably ‘choose what to teach’ is pro rather than a con, and you will choose something reasonable. So the only cons are having quirky socialization touchstones rather than the insane ones we get in primary and high school, which all mostly gets overridden anyway? Yeah, choice seems very clear if everyone involved can handle and invest in the process.
The exact opposite method is illustrated in this video, the concept of never making a child do anything they do not choose to do on their own. As several people here note, this is the ‘homeschool with no effort by doing actual nothing’ method, and by default it is absolutely be an excuse for negligence. It can also be done right, via noticing what children actually want and ensuring they find it and helping steer them, which requires work as active as other methods.
When can you teach children about law and procedure and proof? Tracing Woodgrains suggests about 8, Kelsey Piper thinks similarly.
School is Hell
Michael Gibson asks a good question, but the opposite might be even better?
Here’s another question. Why do kids love school?
Notice that teachers are saying that 95% (!) of their kids love Kindergarten (I can’t imagine they’re paying close attention, given my anecdata and this very different poll even if its sample is biased, but perhaps normies be norming), they still believe 74% love fourth grade, and even at the trough 37% are supposedly loving Grade 9.
If you force kids into a fixed location and subject them to strict control and force them to work at arbitrary stuff for roughly half of waking hours, these would be very good rates of loving the results, if the teachers are describing the kids remotely accurately. Consider that if you ask people if they ‘love’ their job, that’s going to score rather lower. We’re doing some things very wrong, but we must also be doing some things very right.
In relative terms this reaction seems roughly right? You start out with ‘hang out with other kids and mostly do fun things,’ which plausibly kids do mostly enjoy, then they turn it into progressively more sitting still for lectures and progressively more homework and busywork and wear you down for years. Then as high school progresses you start to get a bit of flexibility back and the world lets you do things like walk on your own or select classes or do actual work, so things improve a bit.
Remember, it could be so, so much worse.
Bored Out of Their Minds
Again, not for every child all the time, even in a ‘normal’ school.
But for many children, it mostly makes them miserable while wasting their time.
And I’d boldly claim that this is not good.
And I disagree with Tracing Woods in that actually they can articulate this pretty damn well most of the time.
Almost everyone was supportive, with many similar stories. Then there was one person who spoke up to say that kids saying they are miserable is fine, actually.
I think that if a child tells you they are miserable at school, chances are they are miserable at school. And yes, of course I speak from experience. Do people doubt that being constantly bored, for hours every day, is insufficient?
As in:
I mean, yes, that is pretty miserable. Stop pretending it isn’t. Or that it doesn’t matter when a particular teacher is very much not Shameika, so long as you ‘turn out okay.’
There are plenty of other reasons that school can become a five alarm fire you need to get away from (e.g. Fiona Apple also notes ‘I wasn’t afraid of the bullies and that just made the bullies worse.’) But boredom and wasted time is enough.
You can do so much more, and we should treat failure to excel where it was possible similarly to how we (should and used to but increasingly also don’t) treat failure to stay at grade level for average students.
I actually think being the teacher’s assistant is far better than thumb twirling, especially if the thing you assist with is the actual teaching. Still not ideal.
The Necessity of the Veto
As Nuno Sempere says, there are obvious problems with ‘kids decide when they get to drop out of regular school.’ At minimum, there need to be highly credible costly signals sent, rather than simply expressing a preference. Kids often have to be told to do things they don’t want to do. And you want a credible signal of how much they don’t want to be there, not one designed to get them what they want.
I have a very strong commitment, that if this kind of misery around school appears and is sustained, then that is that. Especially if they successfully locate and point out this statement.
Democracy mostly works, to the extent it works, because when things are truly terrible, people get mad and then they Throw the Bums Out. Like the children miserable at school, we do not know what we need, but we know when conditions are miserable and it is time for a change.
Also it is insane how many people use the argument Kelsey Piper talks about below, and do so with a straight face. Indeed the comments contain many people condemning Kelsey Piper as bad for not sacrificing her children on some symbolic alter.
And again.
Interruption to highlight that yes this is a thing. There are schools where they are very strict about not allowing students to get more of an education than they are supposed to get. No books that are too advanced. It is a crime against humanity, and I mean that.
Interruption number two: Oh my yes, and this effect can be rather large.
It is indeed literally motherhood, and a central part of it. And yet.
School is a Simulation of Future Hell
Many times, in many ways, they make it hell. On purpose.
Then they justify that because you need to be ready for more hell, and say that overrides everything else in life.