A Bureaucracy-Culture Vicious Circle
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Within a thread at Hacker News, I encountered the following example from the wild of the bureaucracy of government schools driving out good teachers and keeping bad:
... The professional development activities and courses that meet the [professional standards] requirements are audited by the Department of Education, and have to draw on the latest research in educational psychology: keeping up with the latest research is the entire point of that professional standard.In a fully free educational market, parents will send their children to the school that best combines a price they can afford with the best evidence they can see that their children will learn things there, and succeed in life. This means that parents and schools would have objective ways to gauge whether their approaches to education are succeeding, and will reward/be rewarded accordingly.
When I did my teacher training, the first thing we were told in the first lecture was to never cite any research older than ten years, because it would be out of date. Now, if you've trained in the sciences - I was a physicist - you should be troubled with this, because a discipline can't really accumulate knowledge about the world if it throws everything out after ten years. That's why, when I broke the rules and searched through the databases of academic literature going back more than ten years, I saw the same ideas being reinvented under different names in different decades.
... In Australia and the UK at least (I don't know the figures for other countries), half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of joining it, so most of your user base is overenthusiastic twenty-somethings with no life experience (yes, I was one of these) who will do whatever The Research tells them, and the ones who stay long enough to gain leadership positions tend not to grow out of this, so the classroom side of EdTech is basically a bunch of fads. [bold added]
Government schools, isolated from this sort of feedback as they are, end up relying on bureaucratic rules instead to govern what and how they teach: Absent feedback from the real world, the rules end up being arbitrary. Is it any surprise that such a system selects for people who "don't grow out of" going with the flow, or might drive out better teachers? (The comment does not explicitly say this happens, but it is hard to imagine it not happening.)
What will such schools teach, and what kind of students will they turn out? How many will be receptive to suggestions that the educational sector should be private, just like, say, grocery stores? I'd wager few, even without the handicap of everyone being accustomed to government schooling being the norm for so long.
-- CAV
4 comments:
The same thing happens in other fields of research, just over longer time scales. Once you start reading the history of science, the number of exciting new theories that are just re-hashes of centuries-old ideas is pretty comical. Ten years is, of course, FAR too short a time for serious research, ESPECIALLY in child development. The average child will be in school for nearly two full cycles of such research, meaning that there's no possibility of this research actually accounting for how well kids do given various education methods.
Also, you're incorrect in your assessment of feedback schools receive. They get plenty--but it's perverse. Specifically, high schools are judged by college admission rates and test scores. The latter results in schools teaching to the tests, which renders any pedagogical advances moot (if the goal is bad, what route you take to get there is irrelevant). The former has far more dire consequences for society, as it disincentivizes trades and other non-academic work. Given that most university programs these days teach kids how to work as professors (rather than how to do the work), what this really means is that schools are evaluated on how well they teach kids to become teachers. Since most kids won't become teachers, this results in evaluating a lot of fish by their ability to climb trees!
Great point about the perverse feedback the schools are getting. Thanks for pointing that out.
Yo, Gus, I've had to edit a couple thousand or more education papers and theses in the past five years, and 97% were the stupidest stuff I'd read, written by clearly stupid people in thrall to the latest faddish treacle and completely untrained in looking beyond what they had to regurgitate in their classes for a good grade. I also taught a few dozen future English teachers, and they were the sorts who would write stuff like that--alas, they were examples of the unexamined life. (Yes, future English teachers whine, "Will this be on the quiz?" as loudly as their students will.)
Slightly more interesting was educational psychology and testing, though the most revealing part was that as the major point of testing theory is to devise tests that distinguish skill levels as accurately as possible with a set number of questions that divides students into groups as evenly as possible, the best tests will all have similar distributions, which means they will not be useful for looking at skills development over time (it's much like changing the IQ test questions so that the same mean and variance occur over time) and will actually not tell nearly as much about students' grasp of the material as would using questions actually testing the basics and central points of the material. The relevance of such tests to assessments people besides teachers would find most useful is, shall we say, unclear.
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