Well, you couldn't ask for a more like-baity title for a submission to Hacker News, but there is some good food for thought in this article (blog post). I've read the article once. As I ponder it some more, and think about it as I take care of some home office business here, I may expand this comment during the edit window of two hours I have. I can say right away that Hacker News does have good discussions about education and education policy, with lots of thoughtful participants. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

and I'm glad to see that so many participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues.

AFTER EDIT:

The author of the submitted article (blog post) writes, "what makes Hacker News so special is the community within this simple site." What I especially like about Hacker News is the variety of analytic frameworks represented here. I'll give two examples. In discussion the added value of school systems, people on Hacker News don't forget to look at the inputs to the system, the large amounts of money spent on K-12 education in various countries, as the outputs of the system, the learning benchmarks reached by students. I have been fond of writing on Hacker News "A teacher who is doing a good job helping students learn is worth his or her weight in gold," referring to research on the economics of education by economist Eric A. Hanushek.

http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-h...

A Facebook friend of mine, a Caltech graduate who formerly worked for a YC-funded start-up before taking on his current position as a data analyst, pointed out that by Hanushek's model, adding in reasonable assumptions about the number of students taught over a typical teacher's career, "I think it is safe to say that a good teacher is worth far more than his or her weight in gold, even a teacher who enjoys food, if you know what I mean," based on the current price of gold. Indeed, one of the analytic frameworks that Hacker News participants bring to the discussion is comparing inputs to outputs, to see what activities of schools and their staffs bring about the best added value for the most learners.

The author of the blog post submitted here writes that Hacker News is a group of people who "care about sharing knowledge, advancing their field, and holding each other accountable (which is WHY you should read it as an educator)." I can give an example of that sharing knowledge and holding each other accountable. Last year, a Washington Post blog column that functions largely as a site for propaganda pieces on education policy included a guest post with a story about an anonymous person in an unnamed place who had taken an unnamed test used for student evaluation in an unnamed state with unreported item content and concluded from that vaguely mentioned experience that the state test was not good. Many HN readers replied to that highly upvoted thread, asking the basic who, what, when, where, why questions that any professional journalist should ask before publishing a story. My comment to that thread,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3315028

which won quite a few upvotes from other participants in the thread, laid on the snark to express my dismay with how few actual facts were reported in the Washington Post blog piece, especially facts based on comparative policy analysis. Eventually the Hacker News community identified the person relating the story, the particular test (which had EASY item content, much easier than most HN participants initially guessed), and other important details from their own research and a follow-up post from the newspaper, which had many readers who were dissatisfied with the vagueness and point-of-view pushing of the first post. The follow-up of other bloggers to that debacle,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3327847

is the kind of thing that working professional educators can learn from as they seek more respect and societal recognition of their important work, so indeed it is beneficial for teachers in the classroom to visit Hacker News regularly to read the discussions here.