What stood out to me is how the system actually uses feedback to improve:
Salary bonuses are tied to results, especially at the top. For example, the ¥300k ($40k) bonus for the teacher who had 150% more students admitted to top universities. American teachers are instead assessed on student improvement, but the top 10% of students already saturate the preliminary exam (and hence, there is no feedback mechanism or bonus there).
Low-performing teachers get fired. Misbehaving students get expelled. In American public schools, this almost never happens, and as a result only the passionate teachers do a decent job of teaching, and most students do not pay much attention in class (sometimes because they can’t due to other students’ misbehavior).
However, there are some things I think are problematic with this school model:
They have a similar subject-leader model among the teachers as American schools, though much tighter: adjustments are made quicker and more consistent based on homework and test scores, but there is also much less freedom in lesson planning. This is good, because it means even mediocre teachers will have good lessons, but really bad because it kills innovation. It’s the typical exploration/exploitation tradeoff. If their school were willing to share what works with other schools (they’re not; it’s a “secret manual”) this could be solved, otherwise they should choose 10–20% of their classes per subject to undergo an alternative curriculum for the “unit” (period of a few weeks), and see if it works better.
The hours are too long. I was an American “study god”, and I could only intensely focus on competition math for a few hours a day, when I was already in the mood for it. Six-hour exams (like the Putnam) were exhausting. I do not think humans can think hard for more than a few hours a day. They can do light thinking for most of the day (e.g. repetitive problem sets, reading and writing) but very little is gained here. You might hope that with 16-hour days, a few of them involve intense thinking, but because the curriculum is the same for all the students, and different students will use up their energy on different subjects, the result is none of the hours are used in the most productive manner.
What stood out to me is how the system actually uses feedback to improve:
Salary bonuses are tied to results, especially at the top. For example, the ¥300k ($40k) bonus for the teacher who had 150% more students admitted to top universities. American teachers are instead assessed on student improvement, but the top 10% of students already saturate the preliminary exam (and hence, there is no feedback mechanism or bonus there).
Low-performing teachers get fired. Misbehaving students get expelled. In American public schools, this almost never happens, and as a result only the passionate teachers do a decent job of teaching, and most students do not pay much attention in class (sometimes because they can’t due to other students’ misbehavior).
However, there are some things I think are problematic with this school model:
They have a similar subject-leader model among the teachers as American schools, though much tighter: adjustments are made quicker and more consistent based on homework and test scores, but there is also much less freedom in lesson planning. This is good, because it means even mediocre teachers will have good lessons, but really bad because it kills innovation. It’s the typical exploration/exploitation tradeoff. If their school were willing to share what works with other schools (they’re not; it’s a “secret manual”) this could be solved, otherwise they should choose 10–20% of their classes per subject to undergo an alternative curriculum for the “unit” (period of a few weeks), and see if it works better.
The hours are too long. I was an American “study god”, and I could only intensely focus on competition math for a few hours a day, when I was already in the mood for it. Six-hour exams (like the Putnam) were exhausting. I do not think humans can think hard for more than a few hours a day. They can do light thinking for most of the day (e.g. repetitive problem sets, reading and writing) but very little is gained here. You might hope that with 16-hour days, a few of them involve intense thinking, but because the curriculum is the same for all the students, and different students will use up their energy on different subjects, the result is none of the hours are used in the most productive manner.