Hi Jack - I'm excited to learn about your project. As an old geezer, psychologist (research), parent, and person concerned with education this hits almost all of interests. Your annual payment option seems to be messed up - 2x it says "no such product."
One thing I don't see mentioned in your initial discussion is education excellence in hands-on/trade/vocational (IDK). There is obviously a common core of math, reading, writing, etc. But if we are going to shoot for excellence for all, there has to be excellence for future plumbers and carpenters too.
I am a bit out of practice with my educational statistics skills, but if you need some volunteer help, please feel free to reach out - recently retired and looking for worthwhile things to keep busy.
Yes, fantastic point. Nerdy educators often overlook the importance of working with your hands, but the need for skill and expertise is no less strong in the trades!
Thanks! Re: payment - were you having issues with the donation link or something else? I've fixed the donation link now.
On vocational school - I absolutely agree that there's a lot of value in it. A culture of excellence matters for every skill and every vocation. That's one of many things we hope to flesh out more moving forward.
I think one additional argument you may want to consider in favor of teaching to ability rather than to age is the psychological benefit of an appropriate difficulty level. I'm told I came home crying in second grade because I wasn't being challenged in school, and I imagine it feels worse than that to feel too challenged.
Not necessarily. It's extremely difficult to be a young adult in a freshman English class, assigned to read the Iliad, when your reading at the fourth grade level. I know. I faced this problem for a decade at a "college-prep" high school. There was a lower track class; I taught it for a year. The boys (only a few girls) were keenly aware they were considered 'slow' and without the ability to handle more difficult material. My most successful assignment was a large portfolio to exhibit their work and personal essays. They felt affirmed and valuable; one of my major goals for the assignment.
"we will ask every child where they are, where they want to go, and what will get them there."
Bravo!
But when you ask those kids where they want to go, be prepared to listen when they say they're not interested in college. I'm hoping and expecting that within your work you'll be making ample space and consideration for those students who, like my husband and former English students, would have been far better served by a serious small business/ building/ electrician/ automotive, etc career track in high school than by the cruelly-misnamed "College Prep" track the school dumped them on to.
Absolutely. The default funneling of kids expensive college programs that don’t guarantee job security and often teach very little of substance is a huge problem. And of course, it’s often a misallocation of talent for kids who would be much more successful elsewhere!
Would love to learn from your experience to see how we can best create and support alternative tracks for teens.
Not necessarily. It's extremely difficult to be a young adult in a freshman English class, assigned to read the Iliad, when your reading at the fourth grade level. I know. I faced this problem for a decade at a "college-prep" high school. There was a lower track class; I taught it for a year. The boys (only a few girls) were keenly aware they were considered 'slow' and without the ability to handle more difficult material. My most successful assignment was a large portfolio to exhibit their work and personal essays. They felt affirmed and valuable; one of my major goals for the assignment.
I am glad to see that there is growing interest in transforming education, despite that I have numerous questions.
There are very significant practical considerations to examine when evaluating seat-time vs merit-based advancement. I hope that as part of this analysis you take the time to consider the acquisition of background knowledge, the challenges of interdisciplinary lags in learning, and the constraints of place-based instruction.
While I agree with all of the presented information, I hope that the practicality of the 14,000+ US School districts (for reference there are only 3,000+ Counties), the reality of the rural vs suburban, vs urban divide, and the limitations of an education system that realistically places in primacy a narrow pathway (college for all) are also considered in all that is done through this organization.
I am happy to help in whatever ways I can. As a Geographer, I know the data down to the school, perhaps better than most. I wish this endeavor the best of luck!
This sounds like something you've thought deeply about and have a lot of relevant information on--I'd love to hear more from you about the role of geography here and ways to address it. It's something I take seriously, but not something I've had occasion to look anywhere near as closely at as you have.
I broadly agree with the sentiment here, but good to understand who 'we' is.
Ideas shouldn't be gatekept behind people on the inside, but having on board teachers with substantial experience in real life comprehensive schools, in particular in those middle leadership positions where you're still teaching classes but also responsible for wider logistical and safeguarding factors, will be essential in turning this kind of project from a whiz kid wish list into something actually actionable.
A lot of people with no experience teaching kids have very strong opinions on the topic, and are often pretty blinkered in viewing the school system through the lens of their own experience.
Having a data driven approach helps, but one must be skeptical of the data (e.g. comparing large class sizes in Japan, where there's a lot of family backing for teacher discipline, or large university classes, to smaller remedial classes and concluding that class size doesn't matter for learning.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I think keeping everyone in school for exactly twelve years is a massive waste of human potential, both for those who could get through faster and those for whom being forced into an academic path in the last two years is a waste of everyone's time. But the detail of implementation matters a lot here!
Fully agree. One of the best opportunities we have now is to work with teachers, school leaders, etc across the country with decades of local, hands-on experience — useful for both strategy and implementation!
If you have specific ideas for how we should build out these idea/policy distribution and feedback networks, would love to hear it as well!!
I do! In particular, I think a boring-but-useful exercise for this project is just sitting down with a spreadsheet (maybe even a paper one!) with with a made up school of, say, 600 students, a standard number of teachers and classrooms, a bell curve of ability, noting limits on children per class, effective minima of students per class based on teacher numbers, and run through flows of teaching material in each class. No hand waiving away differentiated teaching with AI! Maybe one day, but not now.
Then, work out the actual logistics of this school. How often can kids move without getting lost mid-flow of a lesson plan? Is staffing / classroom management possible? Can you maintain budgets with unstable numbers of students? In some years do you randomly end up having 5 students in year 7 and 40 in others?
I don't know! But I suspect this kind of project will live or die in the practical details of implementation if it is to scale. A small test run full of passionate people is easy mode; doing it as a mass project is hard!
Not every subject needs the same teacher/student ratio - could have lecture halls or playgrounds with one adult per hundred kids, and personalized seminars with just 2-5 people in the room, both serving important roles.
There is a limit to what data can do for you and you can only really get a lot of processable data from big systems. Education simply does not scale. It should not be done in large groups because children are not best educated or cared for in an institutional setting.
Personally, I kept my kids out of school until they were the age for 7th grade, and then I started them in 6th in one of two charter schools I helped create.
I agree with you that a lot of people view the school system through their own lens, but that is often the lens of it not having been so bad for them back in the 60s/70s/80s/90s, etc. If you haven't been tracking the gradual slide into hell that the public schools have embraced for about the last 100 years, you don't really understand how bad it actually is.
In the 90s my neighborhood school had a writing assignment for the 6th graders - "Plan the Perfect Crime". When some parents objected, the principal stood behind the teacher. You can't fix this kind of culpable stupidity from the inside.
The system must be destroyed. It is utterly poisoned from the inside.
I didn't quite know what to expect when I got the notification about this new project from Tracing Woodgrains' Substack. Everyone who's interested in education claims to be pursuing "excellence", and given that Jack's writing career started on Scott Alexander's blog, whose writing I generally like but whose view of schools appear to be that they are little more than prisons, I wasn't sure what kind of reforms he'd be advocating. It can be frustrating to see how education punditry attracts so many people, who often have very little experience with actual teaching but a lot of opinions about the "obvious" way to revolutionize education and very little modesty (as well as very little evidence) about the correctness of said opinions. Education academics are definitely not immune to this for that matter.
But having read the manifesto, I'm glad to see that while the CEP certainly has an ideological mission (elements of which I may or may not agree once I think about it more), the intention will be to build recommendations based, as much as possible, on actual quality experimental research about effective teaching practices.
My personal interest in education comes from having taught mathematics at the postsecondary level for the last 10 years, after having done a doctoral degree in mathematics. I was thrust into the education world with little preparation and had to figure out how to effectively teach mathematics, and at some point in my career I started teaching mathematics to prospective secondary school mathematics teachers. This led me to learn about various education debates, about the "math wars", about some part of the history of mathematics education and also about some of the output of mathematics education researchers. I've also developed opinions about the need for students to develop fluency with arithmetic and algebra, lacunae in which are often in my experience the main difficulties faced by students in advanced mathematics courses (including my future secondary school teachers). This appears to be a somewhat neglected topic by mathematics education researchers, who tend to be more about the need for conceptual understanding (sometimes to in my mind unreasonable lengths). I'll certainly be interested to read what the people at the CEP will write in the next few months.
Good to connect with others doing serious education work here on Substack. Most of what gets labeled here as 'education' is just teaching how to get bigger at Substack. We need a community that is on actual education.
>There is no tradeoff between an excellent education and an excellent childhood. Far too many kids have lost far too much time and spirit in schools that neither knew nor cared what they could achieve.
Just be careful of tiger parents forcing their average kid into 16 hours of daily studying to keep up with the kids who have higher aptitude.
One of the founders of our school said 'you can make up for bad schooling at home, but you can't make up for bad parenting at school'. There is only so much you can do. Bad schools and rough home life are a double sucker-punch for kids. The fact that taxpayers PAY for the former is disgusting.
Great post! Your manifesto has some overlap with the philosophies behind Acton Academy ( https://www.actonacademy.org/ ), Prenda Microschools, and other student-driven, mastery-based schooling approaches. In Acton schools, they take this idea of ability grouping to the extreme: each "ability group" is of size 1 (the learner) using adaptive platforms like Khan, Dreambox, Lexia, etc. and an ingenious peer governance, grading and accountability system. Students of different ability levels tutor each other in tight-knit "tribes" of up to 36 kids spanning multiple traditional grade levels. Round Rock Acton Academy in Las Vegas has even adapted the Acton model to serve autistic kids of various levels alongside neurotypical kids--25% of the kids are neurodivergent (they have behaviorists on staff there, so it isn't quite equivalent to a typical Acton).
I'm a little skeptical of this post's comments about order and sitting in seats, but perhaps I just don't understand where it is coming from? It gives the impression that kids are empty vessels that need to be filled with information from a qualified human instructor, which I think must be outdated? Acton and Prenda have both proven that there is a model allowing for a great deal of autonomy and flexibility in a child's day-to-day schooling activities (yes--including getting out of their seats and moving around regularly!). One of my children has severe ADHD and has made consistent, rapid progress in math and writing this past year after failing most of their classes at the public middle school due to multiple years of work refusal. And all of this is done independently with no instructor--just a "guide" that is allowed to ask questions of learners and point them toward resources online or in the community to help them get unstuck. And they fidget and move around plenty during the day, which has been a huge contributing factor to lowering their stress level enough that they can focus.
As a beneficiary of aristocratic tutoring myself and a happy de facto aristocratic tutor (though not homeschooler-- there is a difference!) to my own son, I am excited to see where this effort goes.
Have you connected yet with the Lost Tools of Learning guy, Brandon Hendrickson? He seems very value aligned with you.
In my case, just that my son also goes to a regular public school and the de facto tutoring gets done outside school hours. Lots of benefits to that: socialization and opportunity for group activities is one, but also I don’t particularly want to be the sole font of instruction on all subjects, just the few I know best and care most about. Tradeoffs too of course, but every option has tradeoffs.
"You can’t accelerate kids who aren’t in their seats." Specific logistical note: chairs seem fucking terrible for your body. Putting children in chairs for most of the week, for most of the weeks, for most of the year, for 13 years seems like an atrocity that I deeply wish my body had not been subjected to. I urge you at the outset to account for the health cost of chairs.
This is exciting! My son (now 20 & in college) was an AOPS, DYS, CTY kid - all because public school wasn’t enough. Public schools are missing out on some amazingly talented kids by stifling their love of learning. Best of luck to you!!
We had some initial issues with our payment system, but those all should be ironed out by now. Thanks to those who brought them to our attention.
Hi Jack - I'm excited to learn about your project. As an old geezer, psychologist (research), parent, and person concerned with education this hits almost all of interests. Your annual payment option seems to be messed up - 2x it says "no such product."
One thing I don't see mentioned in your initial discussion is education excellence in hands-on/trade/vocational (IDK). There is obviously a common core of math, reading, writing, etc. But if we are going to shoot for excellence for all, there has to be excellence for future plumbers and carpenters too.
I am a bit out of practice with my educational statistics skills, but if you need some volunteer help, please feel free to reach out - recently retired and looking for worthwhile things to keep busy.
So great to have you here, Chris!!
Yes, fantastic point. Nerdy educators often overlook the importance of working with your hands, but the need for skill and expertise is no less strong in the trades!
Thanks! Re: payment - were you having issues with the donation link or something else? I've fixed the donation link now.
On vocational school - I absolutely agree that there's a lot of value in it. A culture of excellence matters for every skill and every vocation. That's one of many things we hope to flesh out more moving forward.
Glad to have you on board.
The monthly and annual subscriptions have been fixed now as well. Thanks for alerting us.
I think one additional argument you may want to consider in favor of teaching to ability rather than to age is the psychological benefit of an appropriate difficulty level. I'm told I came home crying in second grade because I wasn't being challenged in school, and I imagine it feels worse than that to feel too challenged.
Not necessarily. It's extremely difficult to be a young adult in a freshman English class, assigned to read the Iliad, when your reading at the fourth grade level. I know. I faced this problem for a decade at a "college-prep" high school. There was a lower track class; I taught it for a year. The boys (only a few girls) were keenly aware they were considered 'slow' and without the ability to handle more difficult material. My most successful assignment was a large portfolio to exhibit their work and personal essays. They felt affirmed and valuable; one of my major goals for the assignment.
"we will ask every child where they are, where they want to go, and what will get them there."
Bravo!
But when you ask those kids where they want to go, be prepared to listen when they say they're not interested in college. I'm hoping and expecting that within your work you'll be making ample space and consideration for those students who, like my husband and former English students, would have been far better served by a serious small business/ building/ electrician/ automotive, etc career track in high school than by the cruelly-misnamed "College Prep" track the school dumped them on to.
Absolutely. The default funneling of kids expensive college programs that don’t guarantee job security and often teach very little of substance is a huge problem. And of course, it’s often a misallocation of talent for kids who would be much more successful elsewhere!
Would love to learn from your experience to see how we can best create and support alternative tracks for teens.
Yes, taking options like that seriously is an important aspect of this project.
Not necessarily. It's extremely difficult to be a young adult in a freshman English class, assigned to read the Iliad, when your reading at the fourth grade level. I know. I faced this problem for a decade at a "college-prep" high school. There was a lower track class; I taught it for a year. The boys (only a few girls) were keenly aware they were considered 'slow' and without the ability to handle more difficult material. My most successful assignment was a large portfolio to exhibit their work and personal essays. They felt affirmed and valuable; one of my major goals for the assignment.
I am glad to see that there is growing interest in transforming education, despite that I have numerous questions.
There are very significant practical considerations to examine when evaluating seat-time vs merit-based advancement. I hope that as part of this analysis you take the time to consider the acquisition of background knowledge, the challenges of interdisciplinary lags in learning, and the constraints of place-based instruction.
While I agree with all of the presented information, I hope that the practicality of the 14,000+ US School districts (for reference there are only 3,000+ Counties), the reality of the rural vs suburban, vs urban divide, and the limitations of an education system that realistically places in primacy a narrow pathway (college for all) are also considered in all that is done through this organization.
I am happy to help in whatever ways I can. As a Geographer, I know the data down to the school, perhaps better than most. I wish this endeavor the best of luck!
Thanks!
This sounds like something you've thought deeply about and have a lot of relevant information on--I'd love to hear more from you about the role of geography here and ways to address it. It's something I take seriously, but not something I've had occasion to look anywhere near as closely at as you have.
Anytime. I completed the linked Google form. Feel free to email me, happy to talk any time.
I broadly agree with the sentiment here, but good to understand who 'we' is.
Ideas shouldn't be gatekept behind people on the inside, but having on board teachers with substantial experience in real life comprehensive schools, in particular in those middle leadership positions where you're still teaching classes but also responsible for wider logistical and safeguarding factors, will be essential in turning this kind of project from a whiz kid wish list into something actually actionable.
A lot of people with no experience teaching kids have very strong opinions on the topic, and are often pretty blinkered in viewing the school system through the lens of their own experience.
Having a data driven approach helps, but one must be skeptical of the data (e.g. comparing large class sizes in Japan, where there's a lot of family backing for teacher discipline, or large university classes, to smaller remedial classes and concluding that class size doesn't matter for learning.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I think keeping everyone in school for exactly twelve years is a massive waste of human potential, both for those who could get through faster and those for whom being forced into an academic path in the last two years is a waste of everyone's time. But the detail of implementation matters a lot here!
Fully agree. One of the best opportunities we have now is to work with teachers, school leaders, etc across the country with decades of local, hands-on experience — useful for both strategy and implementation!
If you have specific ideas for how we should build out these idea/policy distribution and feedback networks, would love to hear it as well!!
I do! In particular, I think a boring-but-useful exercise for this project is just sitting down with a spreadsheet (maybe even a paper one!) with with a made up school of, say, 600 students, a standard number of teachers and classrooms, a bell curve of ability, noting limits on children per class, effective minima of students per class based on teacher numbers, and run through flows of teaching material in each class. No hand waiving away differentiated teaching with AI! Maybe one day, but not now.
Then, work out the actual logistics of this school. How often can kids move without getting lost mid-flow of a lesson plan? Is staffing / classroom management possible? Can you maintain budgets with unstable numbers of students? In some years do you randomly end up having 5 students in year 7 and 40 in others?
I don't know! But I suspect this kind of project will live or die in the practical details of implementation if it is to scale. A small test run full of passionate people is easy mode; doing it as a mass project is hard!
Not every subject needs the same teacher/student ratio - could have lecture halls or playgrounds with one adult per hundred kids, and personalized seminars with just 2-5 people in the room, both serving important roles.
For teaching? Maybe. For behaviour management, you do need a certain number of adults which is way less than a hundred.
There is a limit to what data can do for you and you can only really get a lot of processable data from big systems. Education simply does not scale. It should not be done in large groups because children are not best educated or cared for in an institutional setting.
Personally, I kept my kids out of school until they were the age for 7th grade, and then I started them in 6th in one of two charter schools I helped create.
I agree with you that a lot of people view the school system through their own lens, but that is often the lens of it not having been so bad for them back in the 60s/70s/80s/90s, etc. If you haven't been tracking the gradual slide into hell that the public schools have embraced for about the last 100 years, you don't really understand how bad it actually is.
In the 90s my neighborhood school had a writing assignment for the 6th graders - "Plan the Perfect Crime". When some parents objected, the principal stood behind the teacher. You can't fix this kind of culpable stupidity from the inside.
The system must be destroyed. It is utterly poisoned from the inside.
And those poisoning it LIKE IT THIS WAY.
I didn't quite know what to expect when I got the notification about this new project from Tracing Woodgrains' Substack. Everyone who's interested in education claims to be pursuing "excellence", and given that Jack's writing career started on Scott Alexander's blog, whose writing I generally like but whose view of schools appear to be that they are little more than prisons, I wasn't sure what kind of reforms he'd be advocating. It can be frustrating to see how education punditry attracts so many people, who often have very little experience with actual teaching but a lot of opinions about the "obvious" way to revolutionize education and very little modesty (as well as very little evidence) about the correctness of said opinions. Education academics are definitely not immune to this for that matter.
But having read the manifesto, I'm glad to see that while the CEP certainly has an ideological mission (elements of which I may or may not agree once I think about it more), the intention will be to build recommendations based, as much as possible, on actual quality experimental research about effective teaching practices.
My personal interest in education comes from having taught mathematics at the postsecondary level for the last 10 years, after having done a doctoral degree in mathematics. I was thrust into the education world with little preparation and had to figure out how to effectively teach mathematics, and at some point in my career I started teaching mathematics to prospective secondary school mathematics teachers. This led me to learn about various education debates, about the "math wars", about some part of the history of mathematics education and also about some of the output of mathematics education researchers. I've also developed opinions about the need for students to develop fluency with arithmetic and algebra, lacunae in which are often in my experience the main difficulties faced by students in advanced mathematics courses (including my future secondary school teachers). This appears to be a somewhat neglected topic by mathematics education researchers, who tend to be more about the need for conceptual understanding (sometimes to in my mind unreasonable lengths). I'll certainly be interested to read what the people at the CEP will write in the next few months.
Good to connect with others doing serious education work here on Substack. Most of what gets labeled here as 'education' is just teaching how to get bigger at Substack. We need a community that is on actual education.
https://collegetowns.substack.com/
Hahaha, the ‘education’ category on Substack has some interesting recommendations….
Delighted to hear you see a need for this, and so glad to have you here!!
>There is no tradeoff between an excellent education and an excellent childhood. Far too many kids have lost far too much time and spirit in schools that neither knew nor cared what they could achieve.
Just be careful of tiger parents forcing their average kid into 16 hours of daily studying to keep up with the kids who have higher aptitude.
One of the founders of our school said 'you can make up for bad schooling at home, but you can't make up for bad parenting at school'. There is only so much you can do. Bad schools and rough home life are a double sucker-punch for kids. The fact that taxpayers PAY for the former is disgusting.
Rock on, Trace. Smart kids need chances, too.
Great post! Your manifesto has some overlap with the philosophies behind Acton Academy ( https://www.actonacademy.org/ ), Prenda Microschools, and other student-driven, mastery-based schooling approaches. In Acton schools, they take this idea of ability grouping to the extreme: each "ability group" is of size 1 (the learner) using adaptive platforms like Khan, Dreambox, Lexia, etc. and an ingenious peer governance, grading and accountability system. Students of different ability levels tutor each other in tight-knit "tribes" of up to 36 kids spanning multiple traditional grade levels. Round Rock Acton Academy in Las Vegas has even adapted the Acton model to serve autistic kids of various levels alongside neurotypical kids--25% of the kids are neurodivergent (they have behaviorists on staff there, so it isn't quite equivalent to a typical Acton).
I'm a little skeptical of this post's comments about order and sitting in seats, but perhaps I just don't understand where it is coming from? It gives the impression that kids are empty vessels that need to be filled with information from a qualified human instructor, which I think must be outdated? Acton and Prenda have both proven that there is a model allowing for a great deal of autonomy and flexibility in a child's day-to-day schooling activities (yes--including getting out of their seats and moving around regularly!). One of my children has severe ADHD and has made consistent, rapid progress in math and writing this past year after failing most of their classes at the public middle school due to multiple years of work refusal. And all of this is done independently with no instructor--just a "guide" that is allowed to ask questions of learners and point them toward resources online or in the community to help them get unstuck. And they fidget and move around plenty during the day, which has been a huge contributing factor to lowering their stress level enough that they can focus.
As a beneficiary of aristocratic tutoring myself and a happy de facto aristocratic tutor (though not homeschooler-- there is a difference!) to my own son, I am excited to see where this effort goes.
Have you connected yet with the Lost Tools of Learning guy, Brandon Hendrickson? He seems very value aligned with you.
What would you say the differences are between home schooling and aristocratic tutoring?
In my case, just that my son also goes to a regular public school and the de facto tutoring gets done outside school hours. Lots of benefits to that: socialization and opportunity for group activities is one, but also I don’t particularly want to be the sole font of instruction on all subjects, just the few I know best and care most about. Tradeoffs too of course, but every option has tradeoffs.
"You can’t accelerate kids who aren’t in their seats." Specific logistical note: chairs seem fucking terrible for your body. Putting children in chairs for most of the week, for most of the weeks, for most of the year, for 13 years seems like an atrocity that I deeply wish my body had not been subjected to. I urge you at the outset to account for the health cost of chairs.
Schools are designed around the way girls learn. There is so much wrong with them that it is hard to know where to begin, isn't it?
They suck for adults too. Hard to imagine an improved education system when we do not live healthily.
How do you define ‘excellence’?
This is exciting! My son (now 20 & in college) was an AOPS, DYS, CTY kid - all because public school wasn’t enough. Public schools are missing out on some amazingly talented kids by stifling their love of learning. Best of luck to you!!