First of all congratulation on creating a systems dynamics model to replicate what you are seeing in your country!

If you haven't already read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell where he illustrates the same effect drawing on the research of others in the American Education system as well as sporting success. A good read and lots of pointers to other research.

In terms of your countries system (as I understand it) of streaming students simply based on the quality/quantity of their classroom notes after 4 years of education- this is perhaps the most absurd thing I have ever heard. That alone supports your contention that the Austrian system is broken!

As my computer is in for getting fixed, I can't play with you simulation at the moment. Have you validated it with a particular cohort of students?

Dear Peter,

I would not go as far as to claim that the children spend first four years just copying notes, but from what I see the system really does not help kids to reach their potential. Some of the folks end up being just as good as if they went through any other school system, others at least "good enough", I know quite a few people who are capable of thinking although they went through this system. But on the average, I believe that the system really does not get the best out of the kids.

In fact, I see it almost like a lottery: if you get a bad teacher which on top of this does not like you in the first year, you are basically out of luck. Unless your parents make sure that you change the school or such.

If you are lucky, get a good teacher, and this teacher even likes you or for some other reason wants to get the best out of you, then you'll be fine. And of course, the private schools which deploy completely different pedagogic methods, and where the teachers are controlled by director and by the parents flourish.

To much depends on the teacher. There should be a balanced approach and a lot later in a students career.... It seems like the system is set up for the benefit of the teachers in secondary, (or to keep costs down) not for the good of the nations students.

Children of poverty have very little access to books at home and in their communities, with less access to good public libraries and bookstores

There is recent evidence suggesting that increasing access to books cannot only help students enormously –it can even mitigate the effects of poverty on school achievement and literacy development.

http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/protecting_students.pdf

@Peter:

The model is neither validated nor did I try to fit the results to the real world statistics. In fact i consider it just a "qualitative" model, showing that the observed phenomena are almost inevitable if the assumptions are right. And most of the model assumptions are really simple and unlikely to be completely wrong.

The only one I'm worried about is the ability of the kids to "fight back", but I would need some real-world data on probability that (hard-headed) kids react to injustice by "giving up" or by "fighting back" in order to improve this.

The part which I find really funny is that the model predicts "Sheldons".

• Since all but most intelligent "non-conformant" students are sorted out, those that remain are (on average) inevitably far more intelligent than their less annoying colleagues.
• If I were to differentiate between MINT notes, where discrimination is more difficult and the non-MINT ones where notes are more subjective, the "Sheldons" would even end-up studying physics. This is so realistic, LOL! :-)

I would be surprised if this model would give quantitatively correct values as is, although it would be fun to try this out and see how much more complex the model must be in order to do so and where it breaks really badly (and why).

Please tell me if you have the related statistics at hand for some country, and I'll give it a try.

What are MINT notes? 

Perhaps the research on learned helplessness  or  Stanford prison experiments might be a source of giving up or fighting back data LOL

i really can't understand why parent tolerate such an unjust system.... Is there too much respect for authority (aka the Milgram experiments) in your country?

Dear Antje,

This is quite interesting.

I actually thought of calling this "Non-conformity", but I'm not sure if all non-conforming kids are "annoying" for the teacher or just a subgroup of it. WDYT?

As for the correlation, it stands to reason that a very anarchistic family is more likely to produce children that pay no respect to authority than some family which firmly sticks to traditional values. But I'm not sure how to fit this in the model.

1) The "supportive/unsupportive" moderator currently translates to anything that would make children learn more, and does nothing to moderate the pupils attitude. A highly educated anarchistic family is perfectly possible, and so is the education-hating system-conformant family. I don't think there is a strong correlation here.

2) I could add a second parameter which models the "family helping the kids to become more system conforming over time". In that case I would probably need to also  model the shades of non-confirmity as well as the shades of discrimination, as well as the changes thereof over time.

I'll give this a try next time when I have a few hours of free time, but my "gut feeling" tells me that this will only moderate the results without introducing any qualitatively new behavior. In which case this does not improve the model, *unless*  I have a good estimate to the actual values of the parameters.

Does statistics on "percentage of non-system-conformant families" and correlation with pupils (non)conformity even exist? If yes, where to find it?

Hello Dennis, I suggest you look up Larry Cuban. He has written alot about such discrepencies. I find his papers eye opening especially when dealing with standardisation reforms . Benny Stein

@Peter: MINT stands for Maths, Informatics, Natural sciences, and Technology. It's a term used in Austria a lot. I presumed it was international, but last week I bumped into  some articles on UK schools in The Times, and they referred to "STEM" (science, technology, engineering and maths).

@Antje: I presume that getting the data would be difficult for more than one reason. For one thing, such survey would need to be conducted by an expert in the field, and such an expert would have to be convinced that the work is worthwhile. And  simply asking people if they are "defiant" or "(un)supportive" is useless - one would need some cleverly engineered tests.

By the way, this is quite interesting reading demonstrating how the data can be interpreted in very different ways - especially if one ignores a fact or two. The comments are IMO much more interesting than the article itself: https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storyCode=6437094

@Benny, Antje: This  "what schools can do" is an interesting reading. From the kids or parents perspective it boils down to "put your kid in tier 1 school or perish", which is likely to have the similar effect to "supportive environment" modifier in my simple model.

And it opens my eyes to some other things: the system indeed appears to be set up more to keep the "status quo" or "social stability" and far less to get the best out of the kids. Maybe even more so in USA and UK than in the central europe, but we are getting there as more and more people send their kids to private/expensive schools (which are called "public schools" in UK, LOL!) if they can afford it.

In my opinion this is indeed a side-effect of the Neoliberalism policy and things won't get better as long as the "lower the taxes and let the market regulate everything" mantra isn't dismantled. And then the question will always be: what is more important, a high average level like in Scandinavia or having a handful of elite schools like in UK and USA?