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Actual communist countries also didn't allow people to shoplift freely, consume narcotics in the street, walk into their countries by the millions and demand welfare. Lots of things become possible when you have full immunity from Progressive social critique.
Speaking plainly, the problem isn't figuring out that the calculus kid and the illiterate kid shouldn't be in the same classroom. The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom, and is almost entirely insulated from any form of consequences for the bad outcomes their desires produce. It is almost certainly easier to burn the entire system down than it is to get them to stop sabotaging the system we pay them absurd amounts to administrate.
I don't think that's actually the case. It's more accurate to say that the educational elite (who design curriculums and whatnot) is dedicated to that. These are the same people who keep thinking that "open classrooms", major emphasis on group work and so on are a must have even though the people on the ground tell them those are just making everything shit.
The phenomenon that was written about it Coming Apart and its consequences...
As someone who was educated in semi-elite schools for most of my childhood/college, I recall the real kick in the teeth I felt in my 20s when I learned, through experience, that people who actually obeyed rules and put in honest effort into improving oneself was a rarity, rather than semi-common (still likely a minority or barely a majority in the schools I attended). People who grew up in even more elite institutions and then stayed only in elite institutions professionally, surrounded primarily by other people with similar experiences, just don't seem to have the capacity to understand just how dysfunctional vast swathes of society are, and how much of keeping society running is making sure their dysfunction doesn't cause too much damage. It seems like just another case of the apex fallacy, which seems endemic in the culture wars, including gender relations, race relations, and immigration.
Now, one possible point of hope there is that it's easier than ever before to see direct evidence of the actual lives of the actual people with whom one doesn't share an environment. I've seen people reference this with respect to the popularization of bodycam footage since they became near-ubiquitous among police forces post-Floyd. However, people - including myself - had foolish, naive, stupid, idiotic ideas about the proliferation of social media bringing people of different ideas and principles together, when, AFAICT, it has done the exact opposite. And generative AI adds a new wrinkle as well. After all, you can bring a horse to the water, but you can't make it drink. So I'm pretty pessimistic.
Quite often the rules are set up to make those mutually exclusive.
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cough real communism hasn't been tried yet man cough
shoots up
Edit: Sorry, effort incoming
The rebuttal to "actual communist countries have tried..." is often some flavor of "actually that's not a real communist country...". When pressed further, the rebuttal expands to "actual communism has never been tried because it was hijacked by..."
Despite the first two sentences in this comment, I don't actually believe hard drug users are debating the merits of communism on the street while shooting up. I do believe self identified communists have an idealized, unrealistic belief in the ability of communism to mitigate the ugly and selfish parts of human nature. Which is why communism always ends up in some sort of failure state, and why we should carefully critique any social planning recommendations from communists.
More effort than this, please.
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Gove's reforms in England, as well as the recent improvements to reading education in Mississippi and other southern red states copying them suggest that it is less difficult than you would expect.
I'm ignorant about Mississippi, but I can only assume that the teacher's unions don't have the power they have in NY and Chicago.
That's not really an easily fixable problem once entrenched. Though the one in Chicago seems to have burned its popularity due to being particularly brazen with Brandon Johnson. On the other hand, they got what they wanted.
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I don't think those examples actually touch on the point of difficulty, which is convincing every state to copy Mississippi in terms of whatever it is they did that caused improvements.
If Mississippi consistently produces better educated people than other states that sounds like a pretty huge advantage. I can imagine parents would want to move there to secure a better future for their kids, and companies would like to recruit the people living there.
That seems like a pretty good incentive for other states to follow suit.
I doubt it. School quality being better than other states' doesn't imply producing better educated people than other states, it implies producing a better delta in educated status compared to other states, controlled for the children's potential ceiling, and my guess is that both the floor and the ceiling for children in Mississippi are lower than for most other states. It is also but one of many, MANY dimensions by which parents measure their likelihood of moving to the state, and my guess is that Mississippi has a lot of negatives in other very important dimensions. Furthermore, even if those weren't true, this is the kind of thing that would take at least a decade to see confirmation on any meaningful differences in output, which means even more time before people start moving in meaningful numbers, and that gives plenty of time for people in other states to find and come up with excuses for why the differences in output, as measured by the education level of public HS graduates, isn't due to Mississippi's specific methods of educating.
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