I'll assume for the moment that Oregon's intentions are noble, and they're attempting to right this wrong. How ironic that it will achieve the exact opposite result. The old law of unintended consequences and all. Those of us who were in school in the 70s during mandatory desegregation will recall that too had the opposite effect of what was intended: instead of providing better learning opportunities for black students the white families left for the suburbs leaving the black students behind in worse schools than what they had started out with. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it I suppose.

So what is the answer? I think we really need to understand the problem: public schools are locally funded and operated and small locales can use real estate to become exclusive. The solution then is to realize that exclusivity can't be had on a large scale. You need to expand the scope of 'local' in the local school system. A good start would be to expand 'local' to the county level. While certainly there are some counties richer and more exclusive than others, they are much more homogenous than individual communities. At least it would be a step in the right direction that would better serve everyone.

  You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and 
  to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good 
  secondary school - which you need to have paid for 
  either through tuition or taxes.

I myself attended from Central Arkansas, and have had no issue getting a good job. My wife's experience in her field has been much the same.

Now that doesn't mean the playing field is completely fair. As an entrepreneur I've been frustrated by the advantages kids coming out of the top-tier schools have. This is especially true in anything related to finance. Those schools are a ticket into that world, and it's a really amazing advantage. Both in terms of landing extremely high paying jobs (fund managers and the like) and in terms of raising money. It's much easier to fund raise when you come with that sort of credibility and direct connection to those who have a lot of money.

Still, lets not confuse matters here. People from lower tier schools make it, and make it big, all the time. The system isn't rigged, it's remarkably fair. I worked hard to become very good at what I do. I put myself in a position to learn and experience a big win. That's given me the credibility I need to start to enjoy some of those advantages as well.

Lots of others have done the same thing.

So I reject the premise of your statement. Although I largely disagree with the notion that education is in crisis. There are certainly areas of crisis, but those cultures seem cultural and not institutional. Studies have shown that the vast majority of our kids are competitive on the world level. It's that our lowest performing areas REALLY underperform.

I also reject the idea that further divorcing school from the community it serves is a good idea.

Yes, you can find plenty of counter-examples, but the average income of the college graduate and the highschool dropout are miles apart.

I don't understand this kind of thinking. Perhaps it isn't what you meant. My apologies if that isn't the case. I have heard and read this kind of sentiment before.

Is the idea that the rich somehow conspire to do as you suggest?

If so, how does that work? Did Steve Jobs receive a letter once his net worth passed a certain threshold inviting him to join the various "protect the rich" conspiracies? How about Bill Gates or the many other rich folk? What's the threshold? Do people like past and current presidents of the US and prominent politicians get in on that too? D they have regular monthly or annual meetings or is it all done over encrypted email these days?

Just wondering, because that kind of thing would require planning and organization. Perhaps you have access to information not available in the open?

Would it be far more likely that there is no such conspiracy and what is happening in education is the result of other forces at play? What would happen if teachers were not unionized and had to compete for their jobs? What would happen if teachers lived in a true meritocracy without a sure protections? What would happen if teachers had to have advanced degrees and even some real world experience before being able to teach? I'm sure this would not all the problems, but, what would happen? Why do we have a system that disallows rapid goals-oriented experiments with realistic measurable metrics and a goal to weed out those who are not serving our children?

Lots of questions. Few answers. My gut feeling is that the rich have nothing whatsoever to do with the problem. Every US President, Senator and Representative since I can remember becoming aware of politics has been talking about fixing the education system. I am sure that was the case way before I was born as well. Still, let's say that this has been part of the national conversation for, say, 50 years. Speeches, promises and more speeches. No actions. Nothing fixed.

Is it possible that they are simply incompetent or that they tell us what we want to hear in order to get elected and then the go off and answer to their own interests?

Who knows?

Incidentally, practically every teacher in Finland belongs to an union, and it's unheard of to fire teachers on the basis of bad job performance. A true rationalist looks at the empirical evidence regardless of ideological opinions. You may not "like" the fact that teacher's unions are widespread in many countries which outrank the USA in education. Sometimes the American way of firing people is not the correct fix.

" What would happen if teachers had to have advanced degrees and even some real world experience before being able to teach?"

Now that's something I agree with. Teachers in Finland have Master's degrees, and all teachers have real-world experience by teaching in real schools ("normaalikoulut") during their studies.

"Why do we have a system that disallows rapid goals-oriented experiments with realistic measurable metrics and a goal to weed out those who are not serving our children?"

The problem is that you can't measure learning very well. Measuring test scores means that the teachers will teach the kids to do well on tests instead of learning.

http://econpapers.repec.org/article/eeeecoedu/v_3a30_3ay_3a2...

It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness

Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson

Economics of Education Review, 2011, vol. 30, issue 3, pages 449-465

Abstract: Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers.

Requiring master's degrees may improve education but probably not for the reasons most people expect: it encourages greater selectivity and filters out those with less commitment and desire to be a teacher. But, as someone with a little experience of teaching in high schools, I doubt that learning to teach outside of a classroom has any positive effect on teacher performance. Effective teaching is about understanding your pupils, knowing how to communicate and having the ability to effectively prepare materials, all skills that can only be learned through classroom experience. I would argue that the most effective form of teacher training would be to require prospective teachers to do several years as assistant/apprentice teachers in schools, and do away with all education degrees.

While I don't have any experience in Finland, I have organized and conducted a number of trade show exhibits in London, Amsterdam, Munich and Barcelona. My experience in dealing with unionized labor in Europe has always been extremely positive. I could not find one negative anecdote to relate here. In sharp contrast to that I could write a book about the bullshit, abuse and cost I have endured at the hands of US labor unions at convention centers in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago and New York.

Based on these data points I developed this idea that European labor unions operate under different cultural and ideological principles when compared to their US equivalents. I could be wrong.

Would it be that objective comparisons between US and foreign students is trending downward (while costs go up)? Would it be that more and more a high school diploma (then college degree) means nothing as far as employability?

Is it that the demands of modern economy is not matched up with a supply of highly skilled workers? I think these are all evidence that public education needs modified... not necessarily that someone needs "blamed" for it, just that everyone needs to acknowledge it and be supportive of change.

Now I'd argue that measuring student test scores should be one part of many that go into evaluating teachers. But above all there has to be something that we use to evaluate them, otherwise how do we know it's working... or not... or when or how to try new ideas? It's not just the teachers but the whole system that should be constantly evaluated. Not necessarily to fire someone, but to give feedback and constantly improve.

For sure it could be argued that it's not teachers themselves that are failing students, but the system is structured to be resistant to change and innovation. Metrics that should be used to guide curriculum are graduate employability, job placement, are skills being taught to satisfy the needs of the job market, what's working and what isn't etc.

Introducing some sort of competition will allow schools to figure out the evaluation process themselves. Look at places like Dev Bootcamp that claim 80% of graduates are hired with X salary after graduation. That's succinct way to measure the effectiveness of their teachers. Not that I'm saying this example exactly compares to public school or that a CS solution is applicable to the overall problem but... on a side note why isn't programming and such more prevalent in high school? There's no reason a private company can impart those skills in 9 weeks and public schools couldn't do it in a year. Maybe this type of thing has been incorporated into public schools if so disregard...it's been a while since I've been there. Generally, I think high school was an extreme waste of time in regards to what was actually learned. And then college is four more years with knowledge that itself could have been taught in high school. I tell people all the time, nothing I learned in CS major in College couldn't have been learned in high school. It just wasn't offered.

Likewise for subjects like economics, finance, personal finance, etc. Handling ones finances is something that more Americans need to learn and these lessons are not being taught early enough.

"But above all there has to be something that we use to evaluate them, otherwise how do we know it's working... or not... or when or how to try new ideas?"

You can do qualitative analysis instead of quantative. It also works when you use a test that the schools don't / cant directly optimize for, which is probably true for the PISA test.

"There's no reason a private company can impart those skills in 9 weeks and public schools couldn't do it in a year."

While I agree that schools shoud teach programming more, the Dev Bootcamp's 80% metric is not really relevant. It filters only the most exceptional applicants to the program, not the average school kid. Many of those applicants probably already know the basics of programming.

"Generally, I think high school was an extreme waste of time in regards to what was actually learned."

Most people say the same thing here in Finland.

Not a conspiracy. See, everybody wants a good education for their children. Everybody invests, but the rich obviously spend more money. And that buy their children a better education and better jobs earning higher wages. Isn't that obvious?

> How about Bill Gates or the many other rich folk?

That is called anecdotal evidence. There is no cast system in America, but the American dream is not dead, but close. The social mobility in Europe is higher.

> What would happen if teachers had to have advanced degrees and even some real world experience before being able to teach?

That would be great, but that won't be for free. But i think it would pay off.

That only makes sense if the schools are all private. Keep in mind that public schools are not for-profit institutions, they are constantly at the mercy of the government. Without unions, what you get is a system that pits individual teachers against the government itself, which means each individual teacher is now at the mercy of the mob. Unions have their flaws, but it would be far worse if teachers had to constantly worry that the latest political climate will cost them their jobs or their salaries.

"My gut feeling is that the rich have nothing whatsoever to do with the problem"

Your gut feeling is wrong. Wealthy people spend a lot of time ensuring that their children receive a quality education; few volunteer to improve the education of the poor in any meaningful way (like ensuring that the poor learn enough to attain any real power). Wealthy people oppose stronger progressive tax systems, but have little to say about public lotteries and other regressive taxes.

The entire system of credentialism -- the use of a degree to judge a person's merit -- is an invention of the wealthy, and it is by far the most destructive force in education today. The idea that one must be educated in order to be employed has been pushed by the employers themselves, and those employers are generally owned and controlled by rich people.

That's a simplistic way of putting it, but as a metaphor, yes. It's not an organised conspiracy with secret meetings and hidden agendas dedicated to this, but yes. Wealthy people are powerful. Wealthy people mix with other wealthy people. Their friends are wealthy people. Their social groups are wealthy. People protect themselves and their social groups.

"Just wondering, because that kind of thing would require planning and organization."

Do you know how hard it can be to get people to vote against their own interests? It requires vast amounts of planning and preparation. Bodies such as the American Enterprise Institute and Cato Institute, for example. These require serious funding and planning and organisation.

People who have kids and aren't worried about where their next meal is coming from generally don't mind spending some money on their kids' school. They're probably somewhat less interested in spending money on your kids' school. Schools[0] are therefore largely funded using fairly local property taxes, and rich people have more valuable property.

This arrangement is beneficial for rich people in the short term. Their own schools are well-funded, and they pay less in taxes than they would if the funding wasn't geographically localized.

[0] I will ignore private schools for purposes of this explanation

My parents were in the military so I floated all over as a kid, even through high school.

After high school I managed to get merit scholarships, but only enough to fully cover an in-state school 99% of you have never heard of, the very illustrious University of North Florida.

Despite all of that I've done just fine for myself since by taking advantage of opportunities that have been available to me. It depends on career field, but people are increasingly aware that graduating from a good school is not a predictor of success and that graduating from a "bad" school is not a predictor of failure.

I agree that education in the U.S. is broken in general, but I disagree on the emphasis you place on which University one attends.

P.S. In my travels as a child I've never been in a school system that wasn't already at a county level, so I'm not sure how helpful that suggestion would be. The counties are apparently still earmarking money from wealthy communities back to the schools that service those communities.

See I have the opposite impression when I read stories like this. I don't assume their intentions are noble. I assume their intentions are self-serving. I think in almost all cases we see that elected representatives are incompetent when it comes to public education policy. It's not surprising. The vast majority have never worked in education. They don't know anything whatsoever about it, but they are making decisions on curriculum, funding, teacher and school evaluation criteria. I'm not surprised that they achieve the opposite of what they claim to be working towards, because that's what always happens. It should not be a surprise to anyone anymore, but for some reason we seem to always think that if we just try it one more time, with more money, we'll get different results.

Implicitly, you are saying that the real problem is that public schools do not receive enough funding. Is that correct?

If the problem is that public schools are not getting enough money, how much money should they get? How much should be spent per pupil in order to give everyone a great education? It is ok to give a different answer for different demographics - perhaps inner city schools where parents can provide less support need $Y, while wealthy suburban districts need $X dollar. But if your claim is that the current amount of funding is too little, then you should be able to state actual numbers for $X and $Y.

Good teachers want to teach students that want to learn, and they don't want to be bogged down by the failures of less popular schools (we are holding off on income for a bit here). They end up moving where schools are doing a better job, mainly because the culture of the region has parents and children who value their education. They get paid more, because the school wants to retain these better teachers, who do good jobs, rather than the assembly line college graduates who ended up in education as the "default" and just want the job security.

So now money can factor in, and these better teachers with proper facilities are being paid more, and have better maintained institutions to keep them hired, and since the region already has a pro-education culture in advance, it has wealthy people who pay higher property taxes to keep the school all the more well off.

And just equalizing the money doesn't kill off one half of the feedback loop - it just renders one neutral. Good teachers would still go where parents culturally want their children to learn and promote their educations rather than places where the parents, and by extension children, predominately don't like the education system and are hostile to it.

Fundamentally, the solution is that every child needs to simultaneously want to learn, more importantly learn something they can be passionate about and pursue as a career (besides basic human interaction like arithmetic, grammar, essential history, and things not taught in school like how to calculate taxes, essential law code, etc) while at the same time they are paired with educators who give them the one on one engagement to keep them on track, who value their role as the builders of a future generation more than their guaranteed paychecks, and getting those two to pervasively penetrate culture is a much bigger problem than moving money around.

http://rossieronline.usc.edu/u-s-education-versus-the-world-...

In fact, some of the worst performing districts in America are also the most well-funded, like the District of Columbia.

The problem is the teachers unions control the delivery system, and swaths of American culture that don't value education.

You can't really compare the school systems of a homogenous country with low income inequality to one where 30% of the population is from either a historically oppressed racial minority group or relatively recent immigrants. It's especially misleading to look at school systems in urban areas, because that's where the U.S. puts most of the poor people.

That is not to say we don't have a problem here in the U.S. But the problem isn't with the education system, it's with how we've dealt with the disadvantaged in our society.

A great example of this is Chicago. Finland spends about $10,000 per year per student. Chicago spends about $20,000 per student. Chicago teachers are paid over $70k/year on average, almost double the $37k/year Finnish teachers are paid. Why does Chicago do so poorly? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it has nothing to do with money or school quality, but the fact that 86% of Chicago's students come from low-income families, and 87% are disadvantaged ethnic minorities.

http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/the-in-box-the-7400...

Also misleading from that link: Chicago's cost of living is right around the US average: http://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/city/illinois/chica...

Chicago teachers start around $51k with a bachelors. You can live better with that salary in Chicago than many Googlers earning $100k trying to live in SF...

Also, the average for places like Lincoln Park is skewed up by all the high-end housing in the area. Places like Andersonville and Edgewater are even cheaper, and very safe and family-friendly: http://www.trulia.com/rental/3102177710-5406-N-Kenmore-Ave-2...

Heck, last year I was paying $1450/month for a 1BR in a full-service high-rise in Streeterville with a 28th-floor view. My wife paid just around $1100 a month for a huge 1BR in Streeterville a couple of years ago. If you've got a roommate, it's totally possible to live in River North on a teacher's starting salary.

The way these "disadvantaged ethnic minorities" (ie. "black people") behave might also have something to do with it.

http://pastebin.com/CY2jzd2W

On another topic, I can't help but think some of his description of the American acceptance of the brokenness has something to do with his setting of the northwest. When I lived in Seattle I was really shocked at how unwilling people were to question the status quo, especially when it came to things that could be changed by political action. On topics where more aggressive east coasters would loudly complain or maneuver around, apathy and letting things go as they had been seemed to be the default for most things. Of course the education problem is a national one and these latter traits are not unknown to other parts of the country. But the northwest is less cynical, and more content to let things just drift.

Seriously we don't pay enough taxes to cover these basic services?

There's a long known bureaucratic principle then when the budget is short, first thing you cut is something that the public really feels the need - schools, firefighters, police, if you can find a way to involve sick or orphans - that's the gold. Because if you cut something really wasteful, you a) admit you wasted money and b) never get this money back ever. But if you cut something that is needed or perceived as needed, you show how bad it is hurting and if the situation ever improves, you get everything back at the first chance.

Of course, the alternative of looking at the local budget is to cry for the federal government to take the money from "the rich" and give to the schools - because think of the children!

Is it possible that our K-12 system is broken is the reason that our kids are capable of pursuing their own interests instead of the rigor of rote learning? As a kid, I remember the easiness of school homework allowed me to spend many afternoons in IRC and learning programming on my own.

E.g, with too much free time on your hands, are you capable of thinking different instead of answering challenging homework? Not defending our K-12, just wondering how bringing in a Confucian system like Asia and Europe would affect the outside-the-box thinking.

You could add health care to schools as an example. America is the last place in the world I'd want to be if I broke my arm (especially if I happened to be uninsured at the time), but probably the first place I'd go if I was diagnosed with some obscure cancer.

The US has some world-class universities, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the tertiary education system is great overall: for that I guess you would have to average all the universities.

> Is it possible that our K-12 system is broken is the reason that our kids are capable of pursuing their own interests instead of the rigor of rote learning? As a kid, I remember the easiness of school homework allowed me to spend many afternoons in IRC and learning programming on my own.

E.g, with too much free time on your hands, are you capable of thinking different instead of answering challenging homework? Not defending our K-12, just wondering how bringing in a Confucian system like Asia and Europe would affect the outside-the-box thinking.

I can appreciate the possibility of having less time to do rote memorization busywork could actually be a boon, but... to something like the idea of K-12 being bad, and spin into something that actually makes people better off as a whole nation... that sounds like rationalization on a whole new level. I guess anything to keep the America uber alles idea alive.

À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.

This is where my wife and I want to send our daughter if we ever make it back to Chicago: http://www.chicagogrammar.org/curriculum.

Basically some guy decided to home school his kid, but let other kids join in.The result was a curriculum in which kids learn formal logic in middle school.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=91

In my experience, CAVA is very effective in all the areas you've mentioned. And they do weekly in person group activities as well, plus field trips, etc.

I honestly don't know anyone in CAVA who's wanted to go back to sending their kids to day care^HHHHHHHHpublic school.

Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?

We always seem to analyze these things in terms of best case scenarios. "If we can get everyone to agree on the things I find important, then education will work!" But they never consider the flip side of this: that you may end up in a community where everyone votes to get science classes to "teach the controversy" or something. That's what happens when everyone gets a standardized experience: you have to rely on "compromise" (which in our democracy is usually the winner forcing the loser to do what they say for X years).

Right now trying to get computer science into schools is a monumental task because it requires us asking permission to get it in there. I have to go and make a case to the school board that these subjects should be added. Instead of an organic process where specialized schools started adding it based on demand, we instead often need these big binary switches.

I am OK with you providing your child with whatever education you think is important. Because I want to provide my child the education I think is important.

My problem isn't so much with parents who might teach their kids extra programming classes or whatever. It's with parents who may be incapable of (or unwilling to) teaching their kids anything (and therefor raise kids who are also incapable of teaching) or parents who will teach nothing but creationism/scientology or whatever. Or parents who would decide on some career they want their kids to follow and try and teach them everything around that without long term consideration. Plenty of parents would rather their kids be good at sports than math for example.

I would be concerned that we would see something of a return to a caste system since what parents would be most qualified to teach would be what they themselves do.

Environment is also important for teaching, some of the environments in low income parts of the UK would be environments unsuitable for learning. Loud noises, drug/alcohol abuse, domestic violence etc.

At least having a school gives kids somewhere they can go and at least have some chance of learning.

I can agree that if we are going to force other people's children to learn certain things then it might merit some big conversation but that's not what I want. Ironically, I think this very process has perpetuated the dilemma you fear: it encourages and perpetuates a culture of not worrying about your child's education and "leaving it up to the experts".

Secondly, having every parent teach their kid is not the only alternative to the public school system we have today. There are a spectrum of possibilities, from simply having less state/federal standards (I don't really care what Senator X from state that I have no representation in thinks about our education), to private schools. But, if we are focusing solely on "homeschooling", a friend of mine for example was "neighborhood-schooled". Each parent had a day with them, and each parent taught them what they were good at.

Responsible parents will make sure that their kids get a decent education by selecting a good school or by homeschooling.

The problem is, if a parent decides "I don't want my kid to bother learning math" then you completely close off a huge number of potential high-earning careers to the child.

Or worse, parents who are apathetic towards education and who's kids are unlikely to learn much of anything.

In other words, I would disagree that parents are necessarily better at selecting an education for their children.

This is especially important because education is important to social mobility. For example the potential for a kid brought up in some redneck park/council estate who goes to school and finds that they are good at math and goes on to become a programmer/banker or whatever.

2. Does everyone have to know everything? Isn't that a line between good parenting and bad parenting. If you think your kid will benefit from arts and history and what not, you will make sure they go through those courses. Why do you need someone else to force your kids to go through that curriculum? This just sounds like an implication that parents don't know what's good for their children, so we should trust what the experts have outlined for us.

Well, in the homeschool/online education setting, you still could and probably would consult education/career counselors for selection of syllabus.

I think it's important to have some general grounding in a variety of subjects. I certainly wouldn't rely on all parents (who themselves may have failed in education) to be able to choose a good balanced curriculum for their children.

Some homeschooling parents might say that (1) the numbers play in their favor (no teacher would argue that it's far easier to teach 2 kids than 20), (2) that teaching a kid how to teach himself is far more important than having a teacher with a vast array of knowledge, and (3) what with online classes and homeschool co-ops, it's entirely possible to "share the wealth" and get your kid tutoring where you're not especially knowledgeable

A parent is perfectly capable of evaluating and deciding on a wide variety of curriculum even if they may not be knowledgeable enough to write a Chemistry book.

Disproportionately more parents in low income areas (where kids have worse prospects already) will have very poor education themselves (possibly struggling with basic reading skills) and also possibly additional problems with drug/alcohol abuse etc. Not the sort of people who will be skilled at choosing curriculum and enforcing study.

There are some great outcomes, but mostly from children who were homeschooled because they had parents who were quite passionate about education. In many cases the parents were big on constructivist learning theory and able to set up a good environment that cultivates this kind of self-directed learning. My own parents were pretty into that, but rather than home-schooling me, sent me to a Montessori school when I was young, and then regular public schools when older, supplemented with some extracurricular stuff like museums and computers on weekends (in the '80s, Logo tied in very explicitly to constructivist education). That worked out ok, and I feel I benefited from having both the school and the home environments. But I can certainly believe homeschooling would've turned out ok, too.

Another large group (in the U.S.) and with a very different profile are kids who are homeschooled because their parents are very passionate about politics and/or religion. This could be any kind of politics (e.g. homeschooling anarchists), but in practice the largest group are conservative Christians convinced that the public schools are indoctrinating their kids with liberal secularism. That does not turn out as well, and often produces extremely sheltered kids who live in an odd kind of parallel universe where they read only things written specifically for Christian homeschoolers (there is an entire niche industry supporting this). They go to social events, too, but generally social events with other Christian homeschoolers. I've met a few of them, and they have pretty negative views on homeschooling, and many think it shouldn't have been legal. Admittedly I met mostly the ones who broke free of it around college by refusing to attend a Christian college (which would be the expected next step).

So I have pretty mixed opinions; I think homeschooling can work if the parents are quite open-minded, and actively encourage the kids to explore lots of new ideas, not necessarily only ideas the parents themselves like. But I think it can be quite unhealthy for kids not to have an outlet a few hours a day away from their parents, in the case where the parents are more controlling. A public school assigning something provides a nice excuse for students to read things their parents don't like because hey, it's for school.

I'm not sure how it would turn out if it were neither of those two cases, but just parents who felt they had to do it because the local schools sucked too much, rather than out of any special passion for homeschooling.

Forcing ill equipped parents into home-schooling by making the local schooling suck so hard that they have no choice would paint a different picture I think.

The other three are on the same trajectory. I understand that you essentially discounted HN parents as exceptions, but we are also part of a broader community and I see similar results with children whose parents have no clue as to what a HN is.

None of them know haskell, but the oldest is working through The Little Schemer.

> The oldest is 15, enjoys poetry, plays basketball competitively, likes to tinker with computers, reads history, does math, etc.

FWIW, that sounds like me at 15 and I regret having been homeschooled.

So ya, I might have some advantage in the EQ department, but I regret having blown my youth in school.

A poor education in sports may reduce potential profits of future pro-athletes and students looking for a scholarship.

For others, I'm not sure. Also, not knowing about poetry and history won't harm.

In fact, in term of opportunity costs, it might be a better move NOT to touch these subjects altogether to spend more time on things that matter, or at least on topics that matter a little bit more than these subjects.

Haskell may not be that popular at the moment, but that may change in the future (haskell-like language could emerge!) and still at the moment I'm sure there are paying jobs for people with haskell fluency than for people who are really really good in poetry and history.

>> À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.

With online courses parents would most likely select what the child learns, it will still be "a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you". The reason being if given the choice I would be a majority of kids would decide against doing a Maths or English course.

1. Parents can choose what is best for their children, instead of a "democratically" chosen buffet.

2. The social aspect can be addressed by having physical activity clubs/gatherings/groups/centers. I don't know if schools already do this, but being able to choose Skiing as a Phy Ed since grade 1, or whatever tickles your child's fancy just sounds like a much better opportunity to perhaps become a professional athlete in that field.

The burden will fall to the parents to decide how well rounded or specialized they want their children to be in certain aspects - mental or physical.

There could be suggested coursework by companies/industries that would help parents choose what their child needs to learn to be successful in a certain industry.

Let's say my kid shows interest in becoming an Astronaut. I look up Space Company X's suggested education outline and roughly follow it instead of having my kid learn everything until they're in the later teens when they finally choose what they want to spend 8+ hours a day on.

They don't need those English courses, or waste time on that History stuff. They'll never need chemistry or physics so why waste their time on that...

There is a time to pick your courses, it's called University. Primary and Secondary school should be a buffet of many many things. Things that are 'unimportant' to their work are actually important to them as an individual. Neither the child nor most parents recognize that.

Case in point, a lot of the current stupidity in US politics is because of people misunderstanding or flat out not knowing the history of the US and the political process in the US. This idea of a la carte education would make that worse. However no parent is going to have their kid 'waste' their time on history or civics when they could be studying to be the next Steve Jobs.

> my kid shows interest in becoming an Astronaut And next week they'll want to be a drummer. Kids whims change with the wind. Most don't solidify on a career idea until their late teens, if not later.

They do. Really, the negative comments here on homeschooling are staggeringly out of date.

Go look at K12.[0] That's what "homeschoolers" in the State of California use, through something called CAVA. I've got two boys in CAVA and one boy in regular public school. The K12 courses are incredibly well-designed.

The education in the public school (and we're in the best school in Palmdale) is terrible. CAVA is amazingly good, way better than the education I got in public school growing up.

[0] http://www.k12.com/

I lived in an area with a horrible school district, so I understand why parents in school districts like that think they can do better, but in reality HS parents should be putting their energy into making public schools better.

But no, I wasn't home-schooled. I doubt it would have been a good choice pre-Internet, to be honest.

Today, I firmly believe that CAVA is the best choice for kids in California if the goal of school is to actually educate them, especially pre-HS, vs. just be state-provided day care. The K12 curriculum and materials are amazingly good. And they're free -- like I said, it's public school. :)

I wish we wouldn't so often reduce this issue to "public school is bad in every way, so it's better if there are no common public educational services for anyone".

Neither do public schools.

Though in Finland do seem to have the same rigid vocational / academic track similar to Germany where going to the wrong sort of school locks you out of or makes it very hard to go to the top universities.

And comparing his experience a tiny European country with a small and homogenous population and thinking that the USA is going to have the the same challenges or possible solutions is a bit naive.

However, the "Gymnasium" is just one three schools. Only about 30% of students attend. If your marks get too bad you have to leave for "lower" school. On the other hand it's possible to attend a "Gymnasium" of pupils of a "lower" school if they have good grades. (About 20% of my final class came form "lower" schools.)

The German system is a kind of elitist. And it's criticized that the parents income is too important. But it is elitist regarding to your marks, and not your district.

However, what he mostly doesn't seem to realize is that Germany (or Finland, for this matter) does not really have the same type of highly competitive admission process for its universities as the United States [1].

For example, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, one of the best German universities to study computer science at (according to a recent ranking, the best), has open admission for its CS Bachelor program.

[1] The Bologna Process americanized the system a bit, but it's still mostly about managing supply and demand. If you can't hack it, you won't graduate, but admission is not particularly selective, especially not at the Bachelor level.

Well that is because the Abitur (german high-school diploma) is regarded equally no matter which school you attended. From what I gathered the US high school diploma is worth pretty much nothing, without knowing somewhing about the school and/or a high amout of AP-classes. Compared to the German degrees, I'd argue that its actually closer to Realschule (the 10yr grade, which does not qualify for university), than abitur. (Except you are at a top-notch school and take lots of AP-classes)...

The problem exists because traditionally, grades had not been much of a factor in admission (outside of a few restricted courses of study such as medicine). German universities (prior to Bologna) were used to running an open admission process and instead enforced selectiveness by failing those students who couldn't handle it early on.

I was going by what I was told by a couple of Finnish acquaintances in Estonia a few years ago. My understanding was that while there was a numerus clausus procedure in most subjects, none of them were as hypercompetitive as (say) Harvard's or Stanford's admission procedures, nor did choice of university matter nearly as much for your career (plus, some STEM subjects were supposedly pretty easy to get into).

If that's incorrect, I'll withdraw my statement.

Further, why is it "naive" to think that the same system that works for a small country couldn't work for a state like Oregon which is comparable in population?

"You seem to be unaware that public education is actually a state matter, that Oregon is about the same size (both physically and in population) as FInland, and that your comparison of all of the US to Finland thus makes no sense? Yes, there are some federal rules (and federal funding, but that would go to the poorer states), but you'd be better off comparing the US to EU if you want to compare at that level." - Linus Torvalds

And no offense ment here the problem is the Linus doesn't seem to understand some of the political and social history of the USA which would act against his ideas.

This was due to a decree (Church law of 1686) by Charles XI which required reading skill in order to be allowed to wed. There are complete parochial records ("church examination registers") to study this progress up to level of single individuals.

Surprisingly enough these documents prove that writing ability and reading ability don't need to go hand in hand which has often been thought as self-evident.

tl;dr What you don't see immediately in Finnish/Swedish education is hundreds of years of reading tradition and deep historical commitment to literacy (ability to read), quite unconnected to industrialization (unlike elsewhere), which happened rather late in Sweden and Finland.

More: Understanding Literacy in Its Historical Context, pg. 28 "The history of literacy in Sweden" http://www.google.fi/books?id=WBLOVq4ocLEC&printsec=fron...

"The reading ability campaign in Sweden was carried through almost completely without the aid of proper schools." (pg. 42) Thus there has always been a strong component of household education.

The story I recall hearing a couple of weeks ago was about a woman who was periodically homeless and used the address of her baby sitter (or something like that) to get her child into a better school. Now she faces jail time.

Searching google for lying about address to get into a better school resulting in jail time shows that this is not an isolated phenomena.

Certainly it indicates something is wrong with our current education system but there are so much other evidence (e.g. dropout rates, test scores, college preparedness) that this is hardly news.

http://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Tanya-McDowell-sentenced-...

Prison time for falsely reporting an address for purposes of schooling? A sad commentary on this society.

http://www.northernsun.com/images/imagelarge/Bake-Sale-Bumpe...

They looked at some houses and ended up touring the local school and talking to the principal. The conversation went something like this:

  Coworker: You ave a nice school.
  Principal: Thanks.
  Coworker: Do you have space for my kids?
  Principal: ?
  Coworker: Do you have space for my kids?
  Principal: What do you mean with "space"?
  Coworker: Do you have space for my kids?
  Principal: Your kids are required to go to school. We will have space.

I've had this conversation too many times, but I'll say it again: Americans (and all people who have not lived abroad) tend to overestimate the differences within their own population and underestimate the differences in outside populations. You overestimate the diversivness of America. This is about the point someone says something stupid like Alabama and California are as different as two different countries.

Note that I'm not just picking on Finland here, I'm pointing out that homogeneous peoples are easier to educate than diverse peoples. Locally nondiverse areas of the USA demonstrate the same phenomenon. Portland, the place that Linus is complaining about, is even more diverse than the USA average with 14% foreign born and 20% of households speaking non-English languages. Almost any major city in the USA is going to have a far more diverse population than Finland, and you'll find that the more diverse the city, the larger its educational problems are.

I'll admit that diverse populations do create problems, but I think it's a cop out for people to blame that for any little problem you might be facing. Man up and take some responsibility.

And this is the point where people start using size as an argument, and how states within the country differ sooo much. I've had long discussions with several people saying that New York and Texas are as different as France and Germany. Which is just ludicrous and shows how little they know about the world.

Btw, Russians and Finns are not closely related in any sense. If you said that to a Finn they'd probably kill you, just giving a heads up. Swedes and Finns are more intertwined by history and culture than related in the genetic or language sense. If you told a Finn that they're related to Swedes they might kill you slightly for that too.

For instance, in Denmark education is free, including university. You even get a monthly allowance from the state if you study.

That's probably why if you want to live out the American dream Denmark is a better place than the US to do it, because despite high taxes statistically you are far more likely to move on the social ladder in Denmark:

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

This is both counterfactual (money alone matters very little - worst schools routinely spend per pupil more or roughly the same as good schools with no improvement in results) and futile. Of course children of successful educated parents would be better off that children growing in broken up family with absentee parents and zero attention to their education. The only way it could be otherwise is to drag everybody down to the lowest possible level. The whole talk about "unfair advantage" sounds insane to me - why not then beautiful people or smart people have "unfair advantage"? Let's do it like in the Vonnegut's Sirens on Titan (or Harrison Bergeron) - let everybody be dragged down to the lowest level, let everybody has poorest education that we can provide to everybody, let everybody be as ugly as the ugliest person alive, as weak as weakest person alive, as dumb as dumbest person alive, as miserable and sick as the most miserable and sick person alive. This is only way it can be "fair". And people seriously think this approach is not only sane, but the ONLY sane one? Just boggles the mind.

The problem is that redistribution does not solve the problem. Moreover, by becoming obsessed with redistribution solving the real problems only becomes harder. We are way beyond the stage where the money were the actual issue, all bake sales aside. The problem is much harder and has to do with the community, the general environment, the history, the social engineering failures, there's a huge mess there, but it there not because of the lack of government involvement. If anything, partially it's there exactly because of this involvement, which failed to predict the consequences.

>>>> That's probably why if you want to live out the American dream Denmark is a better place than the US to do it

Highly doubt it. Somehow where I live there's Google, Facebook, and hundreds others already done, and thousands others in the making, and in Denmark you have.... well, I couldn't name one, to be frank. Maybe there are some, but not many heard of them. Somehow Stroustrup is in Texas and DHH is in Chicago, and we don't have a huge wave of US citizens moving to Denmark to pursue their dreams.

Maybe if you move there, you have higher chance of secure mediocre living, but it's not exactly what people call "American dream".

Furthermore, being a Scotsman and understanding how the Scots have long since had a history of free universal education, I think it's fair to say that this played an important part in the industrial revolution. It's also worth mentioning that Scotland is about to have it's independence referendum next year and high on the list for those who would see Scotland have self-determination is a written constitution. The UK is an anomaly in the developed western world for not having a written constitution and many of us would like to see free universal education enshrined into our new constitution, should we vote for independence.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

so I'm always glad to discuss how to improve opportunities for learners with other participants here. I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."

http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.htm...

Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.

http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html

The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two futher reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment

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

and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...

So Linus notes, in the article submitted here, that where he lives in Oregon, "And now, in the name of fairness, there's a bill (HB 2748) getting pushed through to make that kind of 'out-of-district tuition student' not be an option any more." That's crazy, because Minnesota's pattern of open enrollment has shown that every school district gains by enrolling as many students as it can attract, given the funding pattern here. Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detect the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and give it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.

The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better.

To achieve the worthy goal mentioned in the article submitted here involves changing the incentives now operating in the school system in most countries, both as to direct regulations and as to funding. Schools should be eager to enroll new students, as a demonstration that the school is meeting learner needs, and then the schools should be rewarded for doing so.

I mention all this because as far as public schools go, it's an outlier among outliers. So comparing it to schools in Minnesota or elsewhere goes beyond the normal case of poor school districts vs. wealthy ones.

Plus, in Oregon at least, school funding does not correlate well with student performance. The Portland School District has higher per pupil funding than most of the suburbs, and yet it consistently under performs many of them.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverdale_High_School_%28Portla...

Dunthorpe, which is on the edge of the Lewis and Clark College campus, is sometimes referred to as "the golden ghetto." The houses are, for the most part, enormous. When I was going there, Riverdale elementary, (which is k-8th grade), was chock full of children of business leaders and athletes. Kids of golf pros, The Trailblazers, CEOs and bankers. Long driveways and a private neighborhood security service.

It is not like much of the rest of Portland.

The school would have internationally famous authors come and speak to rooms of 40-50 kids. It was pretty nice.

I now live in Chicago, which is the third largest school district in the United States. It's completely broken.

* The schools are massively segregated -- both by income and by race. The wealthy leadership of the city clearly decided a long time ago to give up on the public school system and send their children to private school. Even in middle class neighborhoods like Hyde Park, the divide is clear: if you're poor or black, you go to the local public school. If you can afford it, you don't.

* The school district is trying to close down 50 odd elementary schools, almost all of them in the ghettos. Why? Because population loss has eroded the tax income from those areas to the point where they can barely operate anymore.

* The entire teachers union went on strike for a few days earlier this year to protest salary and benefit cuts, increased testing, and the city's neglect for the school system. They didn't really win -- the salary cuts were mostly averted, but the tests keep rolling in.

* For every 100 students who enters CPS as a freshman in high school, only 6 ever get a bachelors degree.

The schools back home in Minnesota aren't perfect or even particularly good. They're mediocre. They're ok. But they're so much better than in Chicago (and many other parts of the country) that I will seriously consider moving back to Minneapolis when I start having kids.

I think part of what Linus gets wrong is that he confuses the correlation of high-property-tax well-funded districts with the performance of the schools in those districts. The high property taxes (or property values or however the market works it out) doesn't make the schools good, it filters out people who are indifferent to the school quality, and filters in people who place a high value on education. Once you cluster a lot of people with those values, the schools will be good; in part because of the peers a student will encounter, and in part because of all of the small but concrete things parents do to make the schools better.

Open enrollment without tuitions doesn't challenge that clustering. To participate in open enrollment in Minnesota, you have to really value education: you have to figure out what the school is you want to attend, you have to figure out the bureaucracy to get in to that school, and you have to provide your own transportation to the school. All those hurdles are just as good as high property taxes or high property values.

The irony is that as a result open enrollment is not as progressive as it might seem. It's something the privileged can use to fix their children's education experience without moving, or allow people to trade effort for income. But it doesn't bring the underprivileged up, because they really don't take advantage of open enrollment. Though perhaps I'm using circular thinking, as I generally consider children with engaged, informed, and capable parents as "privileged" regardless of income; and maybe I even think that way because Minnesota supports that particular lifestyle choice via things like open enrollment. It's a particular life arrangement that I didn't see much of in Chicago, and maybe that's no accident.

See Scarsdale, NY, a town in westchester which features insanely high home prices to fund the public school district (virtually all houses cost millions in today's market - high even for Westchester). The rare apartment buildings found well within range of the school are deliberately zoned out of the school district because they aren't contributing tens of thousands per year in school taxes, and students living outside of the district are free to attend if they pay ~40k/year in tuition.

There are a lot of public schools in Portland that have special programs, and you enter via a lottery, so that's kind of cool. However, it's my experience that Portland Public Schools are crippled vs. the surrounding suburban school districts. I don't really understand it, since PPS has a higher funding per kid. Also the facilities in suburbia (sports fields, buildings, etc.) are generally newer and bigger. If I had it to do over again, I'm not sure what state I would try and move to for education.

It really was a fantastic school. Some parents would put their kids in private school but we'd always see them back a semester later when it turned out that the private school wasn't much better than the public one.

I took a look at that school recently and I can tell you that I wouldn't send my kids (if I had any) there:

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/florida/di...

UK: we have the same affluent area/good school, poor area/poor school issues in the UK. I so wish we could get to the situation than Finland finds itself in, but I doubt the government wants to invest in the teaching profession to the extent required.

PS: Buildings don't matter above a certain threshold level. Shiny classroom equipment doesn't matter, just BYOD with a few loaner laptops and WiFi would be good.

Then follow up on things that picque your interest. Like social trust and Nordic social contract.

Also not having any Catholic tradition lessens the appreciation of Latin.