I can hardly believe that the system designed by intelligent people produces unintended outcomes after all these years.

That would be true if said intelligent people were optimizing exclusively for the metric you're looking at right now. In reality they usually are not, as they are themselves stuck in a system where their incentives are to optimize for things other than their supposed mission statement.

The world is full of tangled messes where everybody is acting with respect to their own local incentives and everyone is worse off as a result

Even the most intelligent person in the world will consistently make false deductions if she starts with false premises.

Ideally there is a process of incorporating real-world results and revising one's beliefs, but that process seems to have pretty much shut down in favor of strict political orthodoxy.

Intelligent people correct their actions when they see the results. It is fair to say that there is enough information about "unintended" results by now.

It's not like the systems we're talking about were performing well under Reagan/Bush, under Clinton, under G.W., or under Trump, either..

Truancy enforcement didn't work too well. Whether laxer truancy approaches end up with better outcomes overall is open to debate, but it's not like there's a clear answer.

That's a good point. If this school is as terrible as it sounds, the students probably wouldn't be learning much even if they were in school every day. We need serious reform on multiple axes; reforming one in isolation probably won't help much.

Truancy does make teaching effectively much harder. You're forced to either go over the beginning material over and over for the people who missed it, or you just abandon them and teach the handful of people who have attended consistently. No matter what you teach, you're teaching the wrong thing for half or more of the class. Then people get bored, and they skip school...

Yup-- Frequently these classrooms have packets of worksheets thrown at the students. There's a little direct instruction to a crowd that has never learned to accept information that way. If you or I were put in that situation we'd seek to avoid school, too.

And imagine being the one new excited, passionate teacher trying to rock the boat and get some effort. You're upsetting parents who wonder why you're all up in their business and don't understand the value. Your gradebook creates issues for your administrators. Other teachers who have given up react defensively and seek to undermine you. And the students are not thankful, and can be extremely disruptive.

I don't know how you fix it. Project-based learning has some evidence that it can work in situations like this, because it can draw out participation and interest by gamifying more of education. But it's not like a little more PBL is going to make the system suddenly work.

I worked as a tutor in prison, helping out in class. The teacher I worked with longest said that she felt safer working in prison than she did in public school, because there were guards right down the hall. Discipline is apparently a lot easier to enforce in prison than it is in public schools.

I felt like I was pretty successful providing individual instruction. For instance, I found a way to teach basic algebra that worked for guys with 3rd and 4th-grade level test scores. It didn't teach them the principles they would need for greater math education, but none of these guys were ever going to study college-level Calculus. They just needed enough math to pass the GED. Unfortunately, teaching that way involved a lot of moving around the classroom, and I didn't really want predators staring at my ass behind my back. So I didn't stick with it.

It says a hell of a lot that teachers find that kind of environment safer than public school. That suggests to me that discipline & safety have to be comprehensively addressed before any other changes will have a chance to work.

Yup. On the other hand, the prisoners who are working on schooling may be more motivated students than many kids in lower SES schools (greater maturity, more incentive, less competing distractions, etc).

That class was for guys with 3rd-5th grade level test scores. Most were forced to attend school and didn't really try to progress. I don't know the exact progression rates, but they were quite pitiful. You'd see a guy who last tested at 4.0 grade level take the next EA test and score 3.4. I suspect that quite a few had some degree of brain damage whether from drugs or violence, and covered up an inability to learn with a front of not caring. I helped one older guy for months, and he would constantly forget things that he previously had down no problem. It seemed like he would forget as much as he had learned. The higher-level classes had more students who were actually trying to graduate.

I later took college classes, and that was a different story. One teacher said that his prison students were much better than his free-world students, as they generally weren't partying all weekend etc. and were motivated to be in school.