Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
I suppose it's a Cato blog post, but I was hoping for a more interesting discussion than just a random call for private education, with a market-will-solve it assertion. People learning at different paces and on their own is a fairly interesting problem highlighted here, but I think it's wishful thinking to claim that the perfect answer is already known.<p>It's not entirely clear to me that private schools <i>would</i> cater to individuals, or group by ability in the way that tutors do. There are other market forces at work, such as the preference of many students and their parents for students to be grouped with those of a similar age--- and the dislike of many parents for their students to be seen as "behind". There are also administrative/cost problems with individual attention that weigh in favor of uniformity. For example, if there are a few students who learn "too fast", the optimal business solution for an education provider might be to say, "fuck 'em, 5% of the students isn't where my money is coming from". Or, it might be to generally go by age but have a smallish exception pool; the age-groups-plus-'gifted'-class model that many public schools already use might cover enough of the skills variance, while being much cheaper to administer than a fully individualized model.<p>At the very least, I don't think it's entirely obvious what the results would be. The bits of evidence we do have don't seem super-encouraging. For-profit universities, for example, appear to have decided that a mass-production model is the best business strategy. And existing private K-12 schools don't seem to have adopted an ability-based model, instead using traditional age-based classes. Is there a reason that, if market incentives would indeed cause such an outcome, they wouldn't have <i>already</i> caused it? It's true that the private-education market is currently effectively restricted to wealthier families, but it's still quite large.