LW - Let's Design A School, Part 1 by Sable

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Let's Design A School, Part 1, published by Sable on April 24, 2024 on LessWrong. The American school system, grades K-12, leaves much to be desired. While its flaws are legion, this post isn't about that. It's easy to complain. This post is about how we could do better. To be clear, I'm talking about redesigning public education, so "just use the X model" where X is "charter" or "Montessori" or "home school" or "private school" isn't sufficient. This merits actual thought and discussion. Breaking It Down One of the biggest problems facing public schools is that they're asked to do several very different kinds of tasks. On the one hand, the primary purpose of school is to educate children. On whatever hand happens to be the case in real life, school is often more a source of social services for children and parents alike, providing food and safety to children and free daycare to parents. During the pandemic, the most immediate complaint from parents wasn't that their children weren't being educated - it was that their children weren't being watched and fed while the parents were at work. Part 1 of this series will focus on this. What is the best way to implement the school-as-social-services model? School As Social Services To make this easy, we'll start out by imagining that we're creating two distinct types of "schools": educational schools and social services schools. (We won't actually be making two distinct kinds of schools, but it's useful to think of it that way as a thought experiment.) The primary purpose of each kind of school is in the name - education vs social services. With that set, let's think through our requirements and constraints. Requirements When designing anything, the first thing to do is figure out the requirements. School-as-social-services has several, and likely some that I've missed: Feed children healthy meals Ensure safety of children from the elements, violence, etc. during school hours Provide children access to state resources (library, counseling, police, medical) Accommodate/support children with special needs (from dyslexia and ADHD to severe physical/mental disabilities) Provide parents with free daycare Other things I haven't thought of Constraints After the requirements, we have the constraints: what resources do we have, and what are their limits? What can't we do? Assume school budget stays the same (no miraculous budget increase) Assume the number of children needing resources stays the same (no magical cure for poverty/genetic disorders/other reasons children need support) Can't be too politically radical (we're trying to build a real solution) Other things I haven't thought of The Sieve Model This idea isn't really mine - it emerged during a discussion I had with a friend who'd done therapy work at an inner-city school. Nevertheless, it seems to me to present a good solution for our social services school. The name - sieve - comes from the tool used to sort particles of differing size. The basic premise of the model comes from the idea that a child could enter the school in any kind of distress - hungry, cold, traumatized, abused, or any combination thereof. Each of these requires a different kind of response, so we have to sift for each and then get each child the resources they need. The idea is that, when each child enters the school, they run through these sieves, and are directed according to their needs. Each sieve could be a questionnaire, an adult asking these questions, or some kind of self-help kiosk; the important idea is that children are presented with these questions, and over time come to trust the system enough that they answer honestly. Physical Triage Sieve - Is the child in immediate physical distress or need (injured, hungry, hypothermic, etc.)? If so, prioritize remedying that need: get them food, blan...