The politician that approves grassroots education gets to answer the question “I want my kids to do better” with “that’s impossible” or “do it yourself”.

The only way to make people equal is lowest-common-denominator performance. Until we are ready to answer “why do black schools do worse ?”, “why are muslims so violent at school ?”, “why does X do worse than Y”, until these questions can reliably be answered with “it’s their own fault” (since they mostly control the school districts responsible for their own fate). Until we get to that point, forget about maximizing kids’ performance.

Several of the earlier comments have to do with Coase’s ceiling, which is vastly lower than is commonly thought.

When I wrote the first comment above, I was thinking about grassroots vs. controlled having the same relation as emergent properties vs. reductionist properties. The former exist even when we don’t know how they come about or how to guarantee that they will occur.

But you are right. Engaging the students does not scale, and yet we know local solutions are often the best. What is amazing is that the U.S. has always been a grassroots country. Other nations control education from the top down, usually starting with an all-powerful Ministry of Education. And yet they manage to respect and empower their teachers to do their best. I don’t get it. Like you said, there must be a difference between scaling and controlling. There must also be different ways of controlling, and I think we’re picking all the wrong ways.

I know I’ve read recently a number of articles that said “a group of motivated parents and teachers may be able to improve a school, but how can we expect there to be a suitable group at every school?” – in other words they think that grassroots doesn’t scale. I think there is a difference between being able to control something and it scaling.

The best way to deal with this is to improve the selection process and employee training, and to be able to swiftly deal with transgressors. On the other hand, its far cheaper to replace thought with rule books and common sense with forms.

We could just weigh students. That would be very objective. And it scales! (Pun intended.)

I know you have mentioned standardized testing in another post. Scalability is a terrible excuse for the poor quality high stakes testing we use in the U.S. Other countries rely on richer sources of testing, like essays, which we seem to think in the U.S. can’t be scaled up objectively. And yet other countries manage to do it just fine. My wife is French and she never saw a multiple choice test in her life until she came to North America.