This page is a short introduction to the problems with American education and our proposal. You can read about this in more detail, including our responses to the critics, in the paper written by LEARN, or DIE founder Drew Underwood, below:

LEARN_or_DIE01.pdf LEARN_or_DIE01.pdf
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What's the problem?

Profit is the purpose of a company in the same way that education is the purpose of a school. The company reaches these profits through the work (or effort) put in by its employees. So, it would be wrong for a company to say that it‟s successful because its employees all work overtime on a regular basis. It would be equally wrong for anyone to claim that the company is failing because its employees work very little. Rather, the success of the company is determined purely by its ability to reach the desired goal—profit. If the hard working employees generated loss where profit was desired, the company will fail. If the lazy employees generated the intended profit, then the company will succeed. The success of an institution is determined purely by whether or not the intended goals were achieved. In the case of education, we are lying to the world when we claim that schools are or are not successful on the basis of how hard the students work. Rather, we should look to whether or not the schools are actually reaching the goal of educating students—and that means evaluating the knowledge of said students, not how hard they work to get that knowledge. Essentially, funneling money into an organization that lies to its investors (the public) about its success rates is a ponzi scheme, because the investors are not receiving the intended result—education.

In other words, while homework is fine as a tool for educating students, it should not be the basis of our grading system. After all, what is homework? It's a tool that we use to teach students. It's just practice, which is why it is sometimes called "practice problems." Using homework to evaluate our students is similar to judging a company based on how hard its employees work or, as an even better example, determining the winner of a sports competition or Olympic event by looking at which team practiced the hardest. Under our current, homework-oriented grading system, we don't even require students to learn. We encourage them to, but it is not required. As long as students do the work and turn in the homework, they can pass classes. They may only get 50% of the test problems correct, but they can still make it through on homework grades. This represents the fundamental flaw in our grading policy. If we want to educate our students, then we should pursue the goal of education, not effort. That's what schools are for, isn't it? To teach. Not to assign work to keep students busy.

Wants more, this system suffers from a misunderstanding of the deeply personal nature of education. Learning is different for each person. It is the art of acquiring knowledge and integrating it with what you already know. As each person's mind is unique, so too must the process of expanding that mind be unique. When we require all students to learn in the exact same way through homework, we harm the ability of every student to reach their full potential: self-actualization. Why should we even care about the method a student uses to learn? If Jim learns material one way, that should be fine, as long as he learns the material. Sally shouldn't be forced to learn the same way as Jim if she, as an individual, is better at learning another way. Standardization of methods ignores the personal aspect of education. Rather than worshiping a specific set of means, we should promote the desired end result, which is an educated student body.


What can we do about it?

To be clear, we are not proposing the abandonment of homework. Homework is definitely a valuable teaching utility. Rather, we are proposing that grading policy should focus on the basic, common goal: did the student learn the material or not? Students should be judged upon that standard and that standard alone in the same way that companies are judged by their ability to produce profits, employees are judged by their contributions to the company, and athletes and performers are judged by their ability to perform when needed. None of these are judged by the amount of practice or the methods of practice that they implement or require. They are judged, not by how they reach the destination, but simply by whether or not they get there.

Actually, minimizing effort and maximizing results is a good thing. It's called efficiency, and it's something that we demand at all stages in our lives. If the costs outweigh the benefits, then it cannot be sustained for long. With education, we need to maximize the positive outcomes instead of maximizing the input (time, money, energy, etc.). As shown on the home page, America spends a relatively high amount of money per student, but we don't have relatively high performing students as a result.

We need to shift the focus of education back to the education itself. We need a grading policy that evaluates students based on whether or not they do their job, which is to learn, not to sit around and conform to the standardized methods that have been failing us thus far. However, we do recognize and contend that students must be held accountable if they do not work hard enough to learn the material that they fail to learn. If, as a result of not doing homework, the student does not learn the material, then they should be accountable for that. For example, if Bill scores a 75% on a test and he didn't do his homework, then he should be held accountable for not working to learn the other 25%. However, they should not be given a free pass because they do the work and reach no results, nor should they be punished for achieving great results without putting in great effort (which is quite literally punishing efficiency and achievement).

The bottom line is that the primary method for evaluating the student's grade should be his or her scores on evaluations (tests, essays, projects, presentations, etc.; anything that directly evaluates the student's knowledge). Below is our proposed grading formula.

Essentially, this takes the student's test score and adds in the homework score to the extent that the student fails to learn the material. In this way, students are evaluated primarily on whether or not they learn the material, but we still provide them with an incentive to do their schoolwork. Below is a chart showing how this formula works using different combinations of data.

 

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