School Systems and Variance
When people complain about schooling, their solutions describe an ideal experience centered around them.
Starting backwards from the end-user makes sense when building an experience that you want people like, and recommend to their friends. As an example, if you set out to build a software product today, you may choose to be invite-only, and iterate fast with a tiny number of highly motivated users who are happy to provide detailed feedback.
Seeing like a state
You don't have this affordance if you're in position to dictate education policy, whether as a politician, or a bureaucrat. You're faced with a problem that has to be solved at scale. This is the public policy equivalent of debugging in production.
And you cannot make decisions that do not scale, especially in a country like India. This is a significant constraint.
A consequence of scale is that outcomes of your policy are not always legible to you: Making things legible actually distorts what you're trying to measure. This is the Observer Effect:
There's very few knobs of control available to people in charge of the schooling system, given their constraints.
Enter variance
Variance is the extent to which the experience of your students differ. This could be either from your system's inputs or outputs.
It's reasonable to be concerned about all the ways in which students from at-risk parts of society can fall through the cracks of society. You definitely want to think about ways to avoid that. Any solution to this will inevitably reduce variance.
Univeral schooling by mandatory attendance in your system is a great example. Fewer precariat children toil away in Dickensian factories. And fewer children of aristocrats are tutored privately by enslaved Greek philosophers.
Every moment that kids spend at school is a moment where parents don't have to worry about what their kids are up to. More grimly, the state doesn't have to worry about these kids being exploited or getting involved in criminal activity. This is often a very real possibility.
Your society has lines of ethno-religious division. One way to sidestep this potential conflict is by mandating that students wear a uniform attire.
The schooling system is a part of a wider context that determines who gets to attend the country's best colleges and staff government jobs. You need a hierarchy of performers to determine where talent is. But what happens if the civil services do not mandate an objective measure in making hiring decisions? People would accuse the hiring practices to be unfair. National school boards play a role in solving this problem by holding standard exams across the country.
Now you're responsible for exams (and thus also the syllabus) rather than individual schools. Congratulations! Thank you for your hard work! Your standardization is making the country legible to the government!
There will inevitably be local corruption in exams that hurt the perception of meritocracy. This can be minimized with some indirection: You decide that students will attend their exams in a different examination center, invigilated by different people.
Enter the schools
The schools have their own incentives. They compete against similar schools. You may have heard parents discuss the school's result as a monolith. Schools thus spend their resources on increasing the average.
Understanding that what's best for the school may not be what's best for you is a great first step. The following will move the school's favorite metric (average of student performance in exams) in a positive direction.
- Students spending more hours at school, especially around exam time.
- Students 'getting serious' and being convinced to abandon other pursuits and social life.
This is also where most [[examinization]] happens. There comes a point where the greatest gains in exam performance are from reverse-engineering the structure of the exam itself. After this point, you're no longer learning.
The actions described above reduce variance. The experience of student life becomes more identical. As I write this at the end of March, the upcoming "board exams" are the main priority in the minds of millions of students and their families.
Increasing variance
A cliché in education reform is about how every child is different.
If children are different, why do they spend an increasing proportion of their lives in systems that reduce their variance? Why does the prospect of a gap year make parents, teachers, and school administrators queasy?
Expecting the change to come from the system is an idea doomed from conception. Increasing variance makes the system less observable. If you're in charge, and seeing like a state, you're surrendering control and reducing the scope of your power. It may literally mean a smaller bureaucracy. Why would you do this?
But if you're a highly capable high schooler, or the parent of one, understanding the system's incentive to reduce variance is important. It's a prerequisite to accomplishing anything ambitious.