The Future Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher

An anonymous reader writes: English teacher Michael Godsey writes in The Atlantic what he envisions the role of teachers to be in the future. In a nutshell, he sees virtual classrooms, less pay, and a drastic decrease in the number of educators, but thinks they will all be "super-teachers". From the article: "Whenever a college student asks me, a veteran high-school English educator, about the prospects of becoming a public-school teacher, I never think it's enough to say that the role is shifting from 'content expert' to 'curriculum facilitator.' Instead, I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation's most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. The 'virtual class' will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country's best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide, and a formal assessment that the computer will immediately score and record.

I tell this college student that in each classroom, there will be a local teacher-facilitator (called a 'tech') to make sure that the equipment works and the students behave. Since the 'tech' won't require the extensive education and training of today's teachers, the teacher's union will fall apart, and that "tech" will earn about $15 an hour to facilitate a class of what could include over 50 students. This new progressive system will be justified and supported by the American public for several reasons: Each lesson will be among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world; millions of dollars will be saved in reduced teacher salaries; the 'techs' can specialize in classroom management; performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore 'individualized'); and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system."

Comments

sage

[One With Whisp]

And who answers questions about the lectures?

performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore 'individualized')

What? How is that individualized in any way? Is this not the very inverse of individualized?

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not, but as someone who went to both public and private schools K-12, I wouldn't say my education was ever individualized. Sure, I could ask questions to an extent (up to when a teacher became annoyed), but the lesson was never for me, but rather the group.

Re:sage

[msauve]

"And who answers questions about the lectures?"

Yep. And if most students can learn simply by watching videos and then taking tests, why have school at all? They can do that at home.

Good teachers are much more than subject matter experts - they're sociologists and mentors. Those roles can't be done by some national "super teacher."

Re:sage

[nbauman]

"And who answers questions about the lectures?"

Yep. And if most students can learn simply by watching videos and then taking tests, why have school at all? They can do that at home.

Why have videos? They can read books.

That's what Feynman did with his lectures.

Re:sage

[nbauman]

And who answers questions about the lectures?

They'll tell you to look it up on Google.

Re:sage

[pepty]

The 'virtual class' will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country's best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide,

"will contain whatever buzzword content sounds good regardless of its impact on understanding of geometry, grammar, US history, chemistry, foreign languages, or coding" more like.

Re:sage

[nbauman]

It's not, but as someone who went to both public and private schools K-12, I wouldn't say my education was ever individualized. Sure, I could ask questions to an extent (up to when a teacher became annoyed), but the lesson was never for me, but rather the group.

I went to public school. When they saw that I was a good science student, they gave me a lab class with 4 other students, where we grew bacteria and bred fruit flies. That actually turned out to be useful in my future career.

Most of my teachers were dedicated and knew what they were doing. A lot of them stayed after work to help kids with projects and tutorials. They treated their students like their own kids.

The people who put down public schools and experienced union teachers are "visionaries" but they don't have facts to back them up. If you want the facts, do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch."

Re:sage

[ShanghaiBill]

What? How is that individualized in any way? Is this not the very inverse of individualized?

HIs "vision" of education is silly. If the kids are watching a recorded lecture, there is no reason for them to be assembled in one place, and there is no reason that they should all be watching the same lecture. It will be individualized by letting each student progress at their own pace. Except we already have that. It is called Khan Academy, and while it works well for bright, motivated students, it leaves the dumb, unmotivated students even further behind.

Re:sage

[Dragon Bait]

The people who put down public schools and experienced union teachers are "visionaries" but they don't have facts to back them up. If you want the facts, do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch."

Ah yes, a single data point proves everything. Sorry. No.

I have had exceptional public school teachers that cared about the students, knew their material, and provided a rich, learning environment. I have had hideous public school teachers that made it obvious that they hated the students, wished they were elsewhere, and only because thy had been on the job so long and were tenured that it was too late to change careers at that point. I have had public school teachers at almost every point in between.

I'm extremely glad that you had only exceptional experiences with public school teachers. But please, don't start pretending that you're representative of all public school students' experience or that your teachers were representative of all public school teachers.

Re:sage

[Dragon Bait]

Good teachers are much more than subject matter experts

What's with this dogma that teachers are subject matter experts? Yes, I have had some teachers that knew their subject and were enthusiastic about teaching it. But that wasn't the rule. I attended two different high schools, and my children attended a third. It varies. Some teachers are outstanding, some should be fired with prejudice -- and the quality of the teacher has no impact on the compensation that the teacher receives.

Re:sage

[Kohath]

The FAQ. If a million students see the same lesson, how many genuinely unique questions would be asked?

Re:sage

[rtb61]

So who supervises the children, who ensures they play well together, who ensures they learn life and citizen lessons, who ensure the actually learn the material. Let me guess armed guards with tasers and handcuffs, they are really fucking cheap and hell, when it comes to the US the will be more than ample law enforcement types who would switch to school enforcement in order to 'play' with the kiddies, hell there would a whole bunch of pseudo conservative, pseudo religious types who would pay to play.

Quality staff, providing a quality adult child interaction to ensure good psychological outcomes and as a side issue provide knowledge, this why the parent are forced to work to feed the indulgences of the rich and greedy. Oh wait it's the America solution, the children of the rich get that and the children of the poor, well, they get the child molesters. Let's all follow the American way, be greedy, selfish and cheap when it comes to other peoples children and let's generate profits anyway possible, including the cheapest possible people looking after their worthless children.

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a lot of "video learning" in high school back in the 90's, it was so that the teachers could abandon classes and smoke at the front gates because they were three years from retirement and no longer gave a shit. I was in one of those fancy "selective" high schools for the highly intelligent, where the intake and home environment guarantees that a majority of geniuses leave regardless of teaching effort.

The Feynman Lectures alone saved me in physics. If I could have watched Feynman on a screen during high school then the incompetent, uninterested and unknowledgable teaching staff wouldn't matter.

Re:sage

[Wycliffe]

and the quality of the teacher has no impact on the compensation that the teacher receives.

I think this is the real problem and unfortunately it doesn't get much better in college. In college you could have a professor
that was terrible and EVERYONE told the dean he was terrible but even then they didn't do anything about it. And it
wasn't just tenured professors. Even TAs got this insane treatment. After complaining about a TA that couldn't
teach and could barely even speak english, the dean actually told me that many foreign TAs were hired before they
ever set foot on campus and that once they got hear it was too late to do anything about it. What??? You can't fire
someone that can't do their job? Name one other non-government, non-union job where someone can't be fired for
sucking at their job.

I think probably the only way out of this mess in elementary school is with school vouchers and private schools.
At least then the schools would have to compete and hopefully the bad schools that let bad teachers stay would
run out of business when they ran out of students. That being said, you have a choice in college and there still
tended to be some politics that let some bad teachers keep their jobs.

Re:sage

[turbidostato]

"And who answers questions about the lectures?"

Why should they be questioning anything?

We have spent a lot of millions on those super-teachers and then more millions on licensing the products from the tech corporations that support all this show. They know better!

Remember, poor bastard: we are not educating here: that's for the real people aka "The Rich".
We are nurturing minions!

Re:sage

[nbauman]

The people who put down public schools and experienced union teachers are "visionaries" but they don't have facts to back them up. If you want the facts, do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch."

Ah yes, a single data point proves everything. Sorry. No.

I have had exceptional public school teachers that cared about the students, knew their material, and provided a rich, learning environment. I have had hideous public school teachers that made it obvious that they hated the students, wished they were elsewhere, and only because thy had been on the job so long and were tenured that it was too late to change careers at that point. I have had public school teachers at almost every point in between.

I'm extremely glad that you had only exceptional experiences with public school teachers. But please, don't start pretending that you're representative of all public school students' experience or that your teachers were representative of all public school teachers.

Do your homework. I said do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch." Do I have to do everything for you?

http://dianeravitch.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under GWHB and Bill Clinton. She believed in testing and charter schools and getting rid of unions. The Wall Street Journal gave her a column. But she knew how to understand data. And the data said that charter schools were failing and the testing was unscientific gobbledygook. So -- unlike some people -- when the evidence went against her, she admitted she was wrong. She has more data than you knew existed. For example, she knows about the NAEP http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo... which actually did a good, scientific study of charter schools and found that they were on average worse than public schools. And I'm not going to find it for you, you can look it up yourself, although you're probably too lazy for that.

There's plenty of data. And it doesn't do what the "visionaries" say. Most of this stuff has been tried before, and didn't work.

I didn't say that I had only exceptional experiences with public school teachers. I had good teachers and bad teachers, like every institution. but most of them -- enough of them -- were good. I found more dedicated people in the public schools than I found in private businesses.

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one other non-government, non-union job where someone can't be fired for sucking at their job.

Board of Executives at any company
CEO at any company
Friends of the CEO at any company.
Private small business owners

You were saying?

Re:sage

[AK Marc]

Individualized questions from a set of standardized questions is still individualized. It isn't personal, but is individualized.

I think you could have used more standardized questions on your vocabulary.

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the school. I went to a private Catholic University, and when I took Calculus I, the professor was brilliant, and had written the book he taught from - a very concise book. But he could not teach. He would put problems on the board, and the solution, and if you could not see it, you were just stupid, and he could not help "How can you not see it? It's obvious! It solves itself!". Yeah. Well, 2/3 of us failed the class that first semester, and he was not there to teach the next semester - they fired him. So, some schools DO care.

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

She (Diane Ravitch) believed in testing and charter schools and getting rid of unions.

You must have her confused with her former self. Diane Ravitch advocates AGAINST standardized federal testing and has stated that she believes charter schools are an attempt to privatize public schools. She also did an about face on the prospect that so-called Super Teachers and their sidekick techie assistants could replace the public schools.

I am glad of this. I worked for a period of time at the University of Washington, helping to facilitate research into the use of VR in public schools. The research was biased in favor of a positive outcome, and I learned to be quite skeptical of the promotion of 'technology' in education. Apparently, the LAUSD (LA Unified School District) has learned this lesson the hard way, after investing over a billion dollars in a ,failed project to hand kiddies iPads from Apple with the promise that their techie partner, Pearson, would deliver super-teachers-in-a-box.

Ravitch is also a staunch critic of charter schools, like the one Jeb Bush backed in Miami. Liberty City Charter School should be a bell whether for anyone interested in what management focused on the bottom line in education may create... In this case they created a smoking hole in an already underserved neighborhood.

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

The bigger issue is why are we even still doing lectures? Lectures were a necessary evil when there were 80 students in a class and computers hadn't yet been invented. These days you shouldn't be learning through lectures in most cases. It's interesting to see a talk sometimes, but you rarely, if ever, learn much from it. You get maybe a few good ideas and some inspiration and not much more.

Most of the time, you're better off working with projects, and that's something that requires more teachers. I do agree that going into teaching right now might not be a smart idea, but not because of this, because the taxpayers are cheap bastards that care little about quality when they have to pay for it.

There will always be a role for super teachers, and pay to match, but it's rather ridiculous to think that this is the way things are headed. We could have had that a long time ago if it were really that desirable. Books have been doing that for a good long time, but we send students to school for more than just reading.

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

The unions aren't the problem here. The incompetent administrators that hire without talking to the person with no ability to fire them are the person. Being union usually doesn't prevent dismissal for incompetence and there's usually a probationary period where people can be fired for almost any reason.

Got to love /. where unions are the problem for everything, even when the incompetent individuals aren't union.

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't the interaction with the super-teacher be two-way via the internet and webcams? Ring in and type the subject header for your question. The "internet board engineer" will prompt the super-teacher, similar to talk radio or call-in TV programs.

"Jimmy from Idaho asks..." or he can even pop up on the screen everyone sees, like the kids of Team Umizoomi LOL

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

Since they will do most of their learning at home. They can come and work in factories supervised by people who know how to teach the young work force to behave.

Re:sage

[dbIII]

And who answers questions about the lectures?

Nobody, that's only for traditionalist nations that make things or do things instead of providing kiddies with childcare while they do the important tasks of networking so some can be bankers and Hollywood stars while the rest get thrown away.
Cost cutting and appearance take a priority over supplying a useful education.
We laughed at the Reagan era "ebonics", but now take a look at youtube for 1970s science clips aimed at small children and you'll see how badly things have been dumbed down since then for everyone.

Re:sage

[serviscope_minor]

Do your homework. I said do a Google search for "Diane Ravitch." Do I have to do everything for you?

This seems to have come up several times recently from different people. If you're trying to make an argument, then yes, it IS you who has to do "everything". Merely exhorting the person you're arguing with to go out and do enough research that they convince themselves that you're correct generally makes the other person not bother, because why would someone who already disagrees with you set out to prove themselves wrong?

Anyway now you've posted enough information to convince me. So, it works!

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue with TAs is that they're usually Ph.D. students who are really there to do research, and "TA" is just the university's way of giving them a stipend. So, they really don't care how good the TA is at being a TA.

Re:sage

[stoborrobots]

Derek Muller elaborates further in this video: "This will revolutionize education"

Re:sage

[davester666]

Yes, there is a reason to collect all (well, most) of the children in one place...baby sitting. Right now, there are LOTS and lots of people where they are either single parents or where both parents have to work, and you can't just leave the kid at home.

So, the kid has to go to school, and the 'tech' has to make sure they sit still and watch the indoctrination video.

Re:sage

[CastrTroy]

They are also babysitters. Not to diminish what good teachers really are, but let's remember, we are talking about K-12 here. That's kids from 5-18 years old. Kids who are 5 years old need constant supervision. you wouldn't be able to just sit them in front of a computer and have them learn. Kindergarten is more about learning how to socialize than it is about learning actual material. Sure, a parent could teach them at home with the right tools, but many families can't afford to have 1 parent not working, and then there's the question of what happens with 1 parent homes.

Once they get to grade 9, some of the good kids could probably learn quite well on their own, but a lot of kids will still need constant supervision. I even saw this a lot in university. Kids, adults actually, who were on their own for their first time, showed no discipline, and couldn't get work done because they were too busy having fun. I saw many intelligent and capable people end up dropping out because they didn't have the discipline to just do the work.

Re:sage

[Hognoxious]

Lectures were a necessary evil when there were 80 students in a class and computers hadn't yet been invented.

Computers? Don't you mean the printing press? Most people can read faster than someone can speak [1].

As one of my profs said, a lecture is a method of getting words from the teacher's page to the student's without passing through the brain of either.

[1] I mean speak properly, not like an auctioneer or sports commentator.

Re:sage

[paiute]

In college you could have a professor that was terrible and EVERYONE told the dean he was terrible but even then they didn't do anything about it.

Because professors are there to do research and bring in grant money for the university. They are not hired nor are they evaluated on their teaching skills. Tenure is determined by funding.

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you always post rebuttals to posts you actually agree with?

ProTip: Read the entire post before going off; you'll make a fool of yourself much less frequently that way.

Re:sage

[Jason Levine]

And who answers questions about the lectures?

NY has "solved" this with EngageNY. This is a series of modules that the teachers are required to use to teach their subjects. The modules say just what they are supposed to teach, how they are to teach it (both method and emotion used), the exact wording they must use, the questions that students should ask, and the responses that the teachers should give. It's an exact script so actual teachers aren't really needed anymore, just glorified actors. Which means it should come as no surprise that our Governor is blaming all school problems on teachers and trying to get rid of them all.

What? How is that individualized in any way? Is this not the very inverse of individualized?

In NY, they get their individual score on the one-size-fits-all standardized test based on the one-size-fits-all state mandated curriculum that the teacher can't customize to suit each student. That's as individualized as our governor wants education. Arnie Duncan - the US Secretary of Education - even went so far as to claim that merely expecting special needs kids to clear a higher bar would mean they would do so. No matter what their challenges. So instead of setting up Individualized Education Plans with supports to help those kids with difficulties, we should just push them harder and that will make their difficulties magically disappear.

The problem is politicians acting as "education experts" often while listening to corporations who stand to make a profit in education (e.g. Pearson) and ignoring teachers who are actually trying to teach students. That would be like a PHB trying to figure out how to configure some computer systems, listening to a Microsoft sales pitch, and ignoring his company's technicians who deal with the systems every day.

Re:sage

[Hognoxious]

Which is strongest, fire or a buffalo?

Re:sage

[oh_my_080980980]

Aren't you the pot calling the kettle black. More to the point: you can't read. nbauman was responding to the comment that lessons were not individualized for Anonymous Coward; which you would say was a single data point being offered by Anonymous Coward. nbauman was providing their personal experience as a counter point. Something you obviously did not grasp - which probably means you had a bad teacher they day they were teach reading comprehension.

I suggest reading before commenting. You'll look less like a fool.

Re:sage

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids will still be herded into large rooms because Millennial parents will expect free daycare. This will also facilitate the re-education of those bright and motivated students that you mentioned. After all, we cannot have some kids be better than others, therefore the bright ones will need to be dumbed down to the common standard.

Re:sage

[pnutjam]

At the cost of community. Everyone is shuttling their kids to their chosen school and the neighborhood kids don't ever meet.
A better solution is to actually participate in your school boards and be part of the community.

Re: sage

[MenThal]

Owners can kick the board. The board can kick the CEO. And all three can kick the cronies.

But in practice, that is all theoretical, and due to the high visibility, they are not "fired", but rather "step down" with a golden parachute to pursue "other opportunities".

It is basically like firing, but with a silver tounge and golden severance package.

Re:sage

[Wycliffe]

At the cost of community. Everyone is shuttling their kids to their chosen school and the neighborhood kids don't ever meet.
A better solution is to actually participate in your school boards and be part of the community.

Which rock have you been hiding under for the past 20 years? Neighborhood kids already
don't meet. I live in a town who still has community schools but you NEVER see kids playing
outside. We live in a quiet neighborhood and that's exactly what it is. Quiet. My kids don't
even know their next door neighbors. I wish that I could find a place where my kids could
play with the kids down the street but that era has pretty much left.

Re:sage

[pnutjam]

My kids have always played with the neighborhood kids, even when there are disparate ages. Just last week I built a cardboard box "clubhouse" in my driveway and had a half dozen neighborhood kids playing in it with my kids. Alot of parents don't let their kids outside unsupervised, but once they realize I am out there with my kids they are usually ok with them running around.

I take my younger kids outside and actually play with them, we attract kids like sugar attracts ants. It's not an instant process, but if you are seen with your kids, people get comfortable and kids get curious. I think the neighborhood bus stop also helps, get out of the car and talk to other parents.

Re:sage

[khallow]

And the data said that charter schools were failing and the testing was unscientific gobbledygook.

[...]

For example, she knows about the NAEP http://nces.ed.gov/nationsrepo... which actually did a good, scientific study of charter schools and found that they were on average worse than public schools.

No they didn't. On average, they found they were about the same. In some states, charter schools did consistently perform worse than public schools, but in some states, charter schools consistently performed better. Not an argument for charters schools, but not one against them either.

Re: sage

[Anonymous Coward]

You went to a public school and yet you ended up working in a technical field when you could have been a banker, lawyer, or politician? I guess money really can't buy common sense.

Re:sage

[jythie]

The problem is that TAing is not actually a 'job'. It is part of a financial aid package which results in departments being given a near slave labor workforce that they need to find things to do with. This could probably be solved by simply giving people actual scholarships, but people complained about that since it was being too nice to students and they 'needed to work!', even though it screwed with their studies.

So the current system is the result of mutually exclusive goals being pushed from different directions and nobody winning.

Re:sage

[jythie]

This varies greatly by field. STEM tends to be particularly bad about this there is so much money to be brought in, but fields with less research money in them put more weight on teaching. For instance, for english departments, funding is not a factor. English professors are often thrilled to manage a grant for a few thousand dollars to do poll or get students to some theater, while STEM professors are often considered failures if they are only bringing in a half million per year or so.

Re:sage

[jythie]

And those answers on Google will probably be written by people who were sent to schools that did not participate in these programs.

Re:sage

[nbauman]

http://www.nybooks.com/article...
The Myth of Charter Schools
Diane Ravitch
November 11, 2010

Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results” that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.

Re: sage

[BVis]

"*overpaid empty suit* is leaving to spend more time with his family."

Re:sage

[werepants]

At least then the schools would have to compete and hopefully the bad schools that let bad teachers stay would
run out of business when they ran out of students.

I don't get this whole voucher thing, because currently, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING preventing you from putting your child in whatever school you damn well please. Schools can and do compete and try to get more students, because more students = more funding. Vouchers are a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Re:sage

[Dragon Bait]

I realize that you're absolutely brilliant and have god-like powers (do you mind if I put on my shades, your brightness is blinding), but I could only respond to what you wrote and, as a mere mortal, am unable to read your mind. You only stated that the public schools were phenomenal.

Now, I realize that you're able to read minds (since you expected me to read yours), but I think you got the guy in the cube next to mine. I have re-read my post and I never found where I said anything about charter schools. Maybe I missed it and you, in your infinite brilliance, were able to spot it in some form of Da Vinci code. If so, it was completely unintentional on my part.

So I'm having a really hard time understanding the relevance of the search that you, in your god-like wisdom, suggested. So forgive this mere mortal thinker in asking what relevance the search has to what I stated -- except, perhaps, peripherally because I pointed out that some schools are not as awesomely brilliant as the ones that you originally described.

And obviously, based on your being marked up to high, one data point does prove everything statistically this week; silly me didn't realize.

Re:sage

[Dragon Bait]

Aren't you the pot calling the kettle black.

You racist prick!

More to the point: you can't read.

Since I was at work and could not see the person who he was responding to -- and he didn't quote what he was responding to -- then no. I didn't read it.

I only saw someone say how fucking brilliant they were and that the public school was falling all over itself to treat him like the second coming of Christ.

Re:sage

[Wycliffe]

I don't get this whole voucher thing, because currently, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING preventing you from putting your child in whatever school you damn well please. Schools can and do compete and try to get more students, because more students = more funding. Vouchers are a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

You apparently don't understand how education works in the USA. In the USA schools
are funded by taxpayers. Mostly by property tax. Yes, if you can afford it you can
pay to go to a private school or even sometimes pay to go to a public school outside
your district but most people can't afford that. Let me mention again that it's paid by
property tax so the rich neighborhoods get more money and have much nicer schools.
People have been thrown in jail for falsely enrolling their kids in a different district even
if it's just enrolling them under their grandparent's address. This is a separate but equal
crap that needs to end. School vouchers would help stop this segregation between the
rich and the poor. Yes, the rich can send their kids to any school they want, that's not
what the vouchers are for. The vouchers are for the lower middle class families that
can't afford to pay for private schools but would be willing to drive across town to get
their kids to a better school.
20 years in prison for using a friend's address: http://www.alternet.org/story/...
another one where it was the grandparent's address instead of the parent's: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011... Let's lock those parents and grandparents up so they don't hurt society!!!

So, no, unless you can afford to move and/or afford to pay for private, you can't put "your child in whatever school you damn well please"

Re:sage

[werepants]

Maybe things are different where you live, but in my state you can choose any public school in your area to enroll your student in - the only caveat being you have to figure out a way to get them there. If you want a charter school, everyone there is equally subject to the same limitations, whether it is open enrollment, lottery, waiting list, or whatever. I fail to see the problem.

So, one size fits all?

[DanDD]

Wow, sounds like "one size fits all" to me. What a dismal world.

Some kids do great with books and classroom materials. Others of us excelled with a rapid flurry of hands-on programming and lab exercises, with healthy doses of welding, machining, soldering, and troubleshooting.

This sounds like a dismal future for public school, and a bright opportunity for private & charter schools.

Re:So, one size fits all?

[Mspangler]

"and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system."

  As if the inequity was due to the books. When they figure out how to motivate the parents equally, then they might get somewhere on the equal results front.

Re:So, one size fits all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, sounds like "one size fits all" to me. What a dismal world.

Some kids do great with books and classroom materials. Others of us excelled with a rapid flurry of hands-on programming and lab exercises, with healthy doses of welding, machining, soldering, and troubleshooting.

This sounds like a dismal future for public school, and a bright opportunity for private & charter schools.

"All we are is just a-nother brick in The Wall..."

This plan has holes

[jedidiah]

I dunno. I'm not an educator, but I'm pretty sure that when I was in school that there was more to the class than just the lecture. I don't think you can just roll a copy of something from "The Great Courses" and declare yourself done.

I would be very worried about any teacher that would reduce their own job to that.

Re:This plan has holes

[ckatko]

In otherwords, morons are leading morons in the great education debate. Classrooms are failing to teach huge amounts of children because we've decided "one learning method is better than all, and any kids who don't succeed must be broken." and now we're going to take that to the point that it's literally impossible to do anything but put the big glowing screen on and let the last of our kids brains melt away.

Between the stupidity of "leaders" in teaching, and zero tolerance insanity, homeschooling or private schooling my children looks better and better every day.

Re:This plan has holes

[nbauman]

I dunno. I'm not an educator, but I'm pretty sure that when I was in school that there was more to the class than just the lecture. I don't think you can just roll a copy of something from "The Great Courses" and declare yourself done.

I would be very worried about any teacher that would reduce their own job to that.

This reveals my age, but I remember when I was waiting in my home room in the morning and some of the kids in the back of the room were excited about something.

A kid had just built one of the first transistor radios from schematics.

I saw a transistor for the first time.

It was not in the textbooks.

Re:This plan has holes

[cas2000]

not necesarily morons, just slaves to fashionable management ideology.

what's pushing this is the management class's absolute loathing of skilled individuals. they demand that every worker be a replacable component and they simply don't care that that means loss of productivity through loss of experience, skill, and talent.

they have this attitude towards workers in education and every other industry - whether for-profit or not-for-profit. it's what they're taught, and it's what they believe.

Re:This plan has holes

[Rhys]

Look and see if you have local Montessori schools. We're big fans of our local preschool + K classroom, and hope he can get into the school proper (but its new, and small relative to the preschool -- the headmaster though is awesome to talk to and seems to really know his stuff and have good but kind control of the class.)

Re:This plan has holes

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. This guy (Godsley) is either an idiot or a shill (technically not an either or issue here). He is confusing cost savings, presentation skills and rich human interaction. Not to mention a host of other important, well-known ideas.

To add a personal anecdote, one my best teachers in high school wasn't even that bright and was only an average presenter. Why was he so good then? He connected with people individually, was patient with us (we were teens after all) and understood his limits. And he was a decent guy. We did our work because we respected him as a person not because he was awesome. I fail to see how that's supposed to work in Godsley's model.

One other personal note: seriously, watch video presentations?!? When I was a teen video was a cue for slacking off.

Re:This plan has holes

[jasenj1]

"Between the stupidity of "leaders" in teaching, and zero tolerance insanity, homeschooling or private schooling my children looks better and better every day."

Homeschooling rocks. You can do everything from completely pre-canned video courses online to doing everything via cobbled together public domain content.

Of course, your child(ren) and whoever does the teaching must take to it. But if it works, it works quite well.

Re:This plan has holes

[Zanadou]

Look and see if...

Pick one verb, or the other.

Re:This plan has holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a look-see.

Re:This plan has holes

[AK Marc]

The larger hole you missed was having fewer "super-teachers" and the super teacher does more and is paid less than today's teachers. If they are so "super" why are they paid even less than today?

Re:This plan has holes

[reve_etrange]

what's pushing this is the management class's absolute loathing of skilled individuals. they demand that every worker be a replacable component and they simply don't care that that means loss of productivity through loss of experience, skill, and talent.

Related point: management never tries to maximize profits, only the ratio of profits to management effort.

Re:This plan has holes

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironically, management is supposed to deal with the trouble of finding the right people for the job, so that the job can be done well and efficiently and so on.

That isn't quite the same thing as ensuring all available people are exactly as mediocre as the next, ensuring that we really don't need anything fancy for management because any old worker can do the exact same mediocre job.

So, this is another good example of the evils of failing management. There are more reasons why this is so, this is just the one that's most directly damning management zealotry's influence in the deal.

IOW, we need more people who actually understand what management is about, and less of the currently fashionable mediocre middle-managers who're fscking everything up for "ideals" they really don't understand.

Such capable people will then go out and find people able to teach and engage pupils. Basically the job of the headmaster. Amazingly, that job is still relevant, when all the layers of middle management in schools and school district administration so glaringly are not.

Note that if all you have is "techs" and a very few "super educators", you won't have a pool of decent-to-good teachers from which to draw new "super educators" and so their level will inevitably go down. That is another built-in failure of this mediocre-management-hipsteriffic scheme of fail.

Re:This plan has holes

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a time when it would take an engineer (plus crew) years to build a bridge, and a teacher years to educate a pupil.
Careful planning, improved machinery and computers have allowed that one engineer to build several bridges in parallel and in half the time. Teachers haven't "improved" at all, we keep throwing computers and machinery at them and they just refuse. There must be something wrong with teachers!
At least that is what management think.

A long time ago, teaching was a profession on a par with engineer, doctor or accountant. All those professions improved with technology, increasing their efficiency and those in charge of eduction are desperate for the same sort of improvement. They don't understand the difference between their work loads.

Re:This plan has holes

[Anonymous Coward]

What they don't understand is that when it comes to schools, the profit isn't the dollah billz, it's the education of the people they've been teaching. If that education is poor, then their profit is poor. If that education is great, they have done well. Instead - they are looking at the dollars coming in and out of the schools just like every other project, because they simply can't wrap their collective heads around anything that doesn't have a dollar sign in front of it.

Re:This plan has holes

[mx b]

what's pushing this is the management class's absolute loathing of skilled individuals. they demand that every worker be a replacable component and they simply don't care that that means loss of productivity through loss of experience, skill, and talent.

they have this attitude towards workers in education and every other industry - whether for-profit or not-for-profit. it's what they're taught, and it's what they believe.

I can't speak for K12, but I taught post-secondary (tech school/community college as well as university level) for several years. I'm finally out now because of crap like this.

The tech schools / community colleges are already doing this plan. When I taught classes there, I was given a book and a curriculum and said "teach this, exactly in this way". Very cookie cutter, and since everyone was an adjunct, if you didn't follow the rules in how you governed your class, suddenly there weren't enough classes for you next semester. I absolutely loathed it because there was no room for customization or anything. Follow this path, make sure to give them this specific set of homework questions and tests on this subject, and that's it. Oh yeah, HR told us we have to pay lip service to "academic freedom", you're allowed to teach what you want, but only AFTER you cover the curriculum and give the assignments.

The universities were a little better, in that I did get a little more freedom on how I conducted the class. But it's still a bit of a cookie cutter curriculum, partially because of the reliance on adjuncts (part-timers). You still don't get a say in what textbook is used and what the course description is (I could customize the syllabus, but it needed to say certain boiler plate stuff about the class), and that unfortunately sets low expectations on the students.

So I fear the author's prediction may be pretty correctly. I think education will devolve into a bunch of part-time adjuncts following a "script" from a curriculum established by some far off group of education Ph.D.s, not actual content masters (sure, child psychology plays a factor, but only after you know what is important to a field and can decide what should be covered in the first place).

By the way, a number of years ago I applied to a consulting company looking for people in education. I was a young adjunct, needed extra money, so I thought sure, if I can find an extra part time job, I'd appreciate the money to pay off loans, etc. The company was pretty sketchy, and it turned out the job entailed writing curricula for K12. It was a loophole in the law -- most states require someone with an education degree to write curricula for the state, meaning very few subject matter experts could. So what they started to do was hire consulting companies from out of state to provide the curricula, who took the money and then hired well educated people on a temp basis (3 month employment usually) to write up a class curriculum, then you were fired. Had I have taken the job, I believe I would have wrote some of the algebra curriculum for the state of Minnesota. But not full time and paid well because it's an important job, but as a part time contractor with no benefits. I didn't do it, and in fact, laughed as I walked out of the interview with how terribly they treat me and pitched the job. But as I did, I saw a row of young to middle aged teachers in suits and dresses waiting to interview, and I realized, of course they don't care if they impressed me, they have a line of adjunct teachers in poverty waiting to do this for some quick extra cash.

So yes, unless we as citizens course correct, education will be low-pay part-timers, because we're already headed that way. And since most people hate living in poverty, the well educated ones will go look for jobs elsewhere, and we will end up with mediocre teachers that hate their low-paying jobs.

Re:This plan has holes

[Zontar The Mindless]

look: to turn one's attention to; to search

see: to sense with the eyes; to perceive; to understand

"What do you see when you look at the Mona Lisa?"

Re:This plan has holes

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the idea. Reduce public schools so no one would want to attend them, and no one will.

Re:This plan has holes

[werepants]

Between the stupidity of "leaders" in teaching, and zero tolerance insanity, homeschooling or private schooling my children looks better and better every day.

My wife and I are both ex-teachers, and we intend to homeschool. Many of the teachers do the best they can, but the truth is the U.S. is increasingly anti-intellectual and teachers are forced to spend more and more of their time focusing their attention on the bottom 10% of students. Very little of the time in a school day is spent on intellectual development, and as for social interaction, public school is among the least constructive social environments you'll find.

Here is what I don't get...

[toonces33]

Say some kid doesn't quite get what they were talking about in the lesson, and has additional questions. Where would that kid go? The local tech wouldn't be of any use - the kid's family would need to hire an outside tutor or some such. And if the family can't afford a tutor, well that's too bad.

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[CrimsonAvenger]

Say some kid doesn't quite get what they were talking about in the lesson, and has additional questions. Where would that kid go?

To the FAQ page?

Seriously, while I doubt very much that educator is going to disappear, a great deal of the raw information is quite susceptible to computerization.

The most important thing you need a teacher for at that level is the socialization skills - we have less need of well-educated psychopaths than you might think (other than politicians and such, of course)....

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[obarthelemy]

Is education about information, or about skills (in the subjects, but also meta-skill at learning in a classroom and by oneself, plus handling deadlines/difficulties/failure/criticism/success...) + socialization w/ peers, teachers, admins, gurlz,... ?

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[plopez]

What if the kid can't read? Is disabled ot live in some backwater like Appalachia were ignorance is a virtue.

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[YrWrstNtmr]

What if the kid can't read? Is disabled ot live in some backwater like Appalachia were ignorance is a virtue.

Or NYC, or LA, or Chicago. Willful ignorance is not limited to the backwaters of 'Appalachia '.

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[misexistentialist]

Ask Siri, of course

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[Anonymous Coward]

Asking for help and helping yourself both teach important skills - whilst the latter teaches independence and problem solving, the former teaches interpersonal skills and hell, the ability to admit that you have no idea what is going on but are willing to learn.

Seriously, we need more of the former, not less

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's this great new thing called the 'internet'.

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[Hognoxious]

some backwater like Appalachia were ignorance is a virtue.

The jokes almost write themselves.

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Where would that kid go?

Stack Overflow.

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[Anonymous Coward]

And if the family can't afford a tutor, well that's too bad.

So what you are saying is exactly like the public school systems we have now. Most of you on here are operating under the assumption that everyone has access to quality teachers and classroom environments. That may be true in parts of the first world, but that is certainly not true for the bulk of Asian, Africa, the Middle East, South America, and the poorer areas in the US and Europe.

I've been to both public and private schools for grade/high school and a half dozen universities and frankly they've all been a mixed bag right up until things like Google, Wikipedia, khan academy, Wolfram Alpha, etc became available. Which begs the question except for some lab equipment and the social aspect of school exactly why do I need a school again? Those things can be introduced in other venues easily. There is the basic need to motivate the children, but for the bulk of them once you teach them the tools all you have to do is let them loose, if they even have the tiniest spark of curiosity children will devour knowledge if they don't, then welcome to the real world kiddo enjoy being poor/starving/jail.

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[Anonymous Coward]

We hire $13 an hour para educators for that already :/. So, in that way, his teaching revolution has already started. We already pay many of our teachers even less than the low pay we think we pay teachers in order to make up for large class sizes and students who have just fallen behind the curriculum.

Re:Here is what I don't get...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can chime in here, as my girlfriend handles exactly such kids. Specifically for reading, but she sees where those who are behind in any subject, goes.

Background: her job as a reading specialist is Federally funded under, I think, Title IX. So, she doesn't get paid from local, or state tax dollars, despite the standard grumblings about teachers getting paid too much, or too little, depending on your flavor.

Regarding kids, she does per student evaluations during classes, to see if she, with agreement from that teacher and another 3rd party ( 2nd reading specialist), should take that student into her program to bring them up to speed. That kid, is then discussed about in committee with the other specialist. teachers, psychologist, and principal, and a decision and path are made. This is PER STUDENT, and whether or not they can keep up with teacher curriculum, day to day. Granted she works in a fairly small school, K-5 of probably around 300, so I can't imagine what larger schools would be like for her position. Here's a kicker: her job is only found in probably 15% of schools in the US! I'm sure schools have an approach for kids who aren't keeping up with day to day curriculum, but I know most aren't getting the attention that the students she sees is getting.

The Bad is that there are roadblocks for these kids that need help. Teachers not cooperating with her (reading specialist), on scheduling the kid to leave class. Principal, psychologist, or other reading specialist, not backing a specialist in situations where it's clear the kid needs assistance, because the teacher of the student will 'put up a fight' about letting the kid out of class. (teacher ego & personality issues...) Apparently, some teachers are actually horrible teachers, and their egos and attitudes are the last thing that should be let into a classroom. Students who have been evaluated, and found to be inconsistent with the teaching style of their teacher(ex. The student who is a 99% visual learner, yet whose teacher is entirely audible, and they wonder why the student is performing poorly, but won't transfer the student...)

The thing is, technology does not fix the majority of these issues which are initially diagnostic in foundation. Technology use in study, might be a solution here, but that is still entirely secondary to all of this. The first part is human and observational. Technology, and metrics based off of it, does not solve these issues. I honestly have to 'guffah' at articles like these, because I see the solutions those suggested falling completely flat exactly like they have been for the past 30 years that educators have been throwing them at the classroom as a miracle cure!

You want a solution? Go dig into the arena of 'Ed. Psych.' and look for conclusions there. Here's a hint: what they likely recommend, isn't being implemented! What 'Big Technology' is marketing, has dollar signs behind it, and will be lead right through the schools front doors!

Wow total distopia

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the stupidest thing I have seen all day, all week, all month.

Leave education to the professionals please. Pay more and hire better folks.

Re:Wow total distopia

[jedidiah]

Even if you're just "rolling a tape", you still have to manage the students. The "educator" is not just devaluing his own job but that of the tech. In all likelihood, the "tech" could probably get a better job somewhere else. The catch about the tech is he/she would need to be able to troubleshoot.

The same is kind of true of the "student management" aspect of the task. This "educator" seems to be just assuming that everything will go as easily as possible (both the tech and the cat herding).

If anything this cat-herder+tech person would likely be someone worth MORE in terms of job skills than less.

People typically devalue the jobs and skills of others but usually at least acknowledge their own.

Re:Wow total distopia

[Crashmarik]

In all likelihood, the "tech" could probably get a better job somewhere else.

You are forgetting the craze to make everyone in the country an I.T. Guru/ Rockstar Coder and if there is any shortfall fill gap with bodies from whatever the low wage country du jour is.

Re:Wow total distopia

[geekmux]

This is the stupidest thing I have seen all day, all week, all month.

Leave education to the professionals please. Pay more and hire better folks.

Pay more?

Tell that to the taxpayer , and maybe you'll remember why we're having this discussion.

Re:Wow total distopia

[Crashmarik]

The taxpayer pays plenty for education.
The problem is they don't get the product they pay for.

Re:Wow total distopia

[geekmux]

The taxpayer pays plenty for education. The problem is they don't get the product they pay for.

The taxpayer has the same problem with government.

I wonder which problem stands a better chance.

Re:Wow total distopia

[Crashmarik]

I would gladly pay more to get less government .

Re:Wow total distopia

[dryeo]

Be careful what you wish for. Usually the parts of government that is cut is the part that serves the people. Emergency services, food inspection, road and bridge inspection etc. Meanwhile the parts that infringe on peoples rights are expanded, there's always more money for the spy agencies, the prison industry (who are promised X number of prisoners), and hundred dollar hammers from the Congress-mans/Mayors buddy.
You are right about spending more money though

Re:Wow total distopia

[AK Marc]

Last I looked, the taxpayer paid about $3 for every $1 spent on education. Unfunded mandates like NCLB and such take most of the money. The rest of the non-classroom money goes mainly to facilities.

The problem isn't price, it's value. Public education is cheaper than most private education. All the conservative studies that show it expensive look at education-only schools (the ones that have the facilities provided out of a separate budget, and no government oversight, so almost no compliance costs). When you look at it with those constraints, private should be about 1/3 the cost of public. But it fails even then. Public is more effective and cheaper, in most cases.the government is always cheaper and more effective (like the IRS and Social Security), but the complaints are with the conservative legislators who saddle the department with stupid rules, not their ability to execute them.

Re:Wow total distopia

[Hognoxious]

There won't be any need for a local person, because, like, cloud and shit like that.

Get with the times, you square old daddy-o.

Re:Wow total distopia

[Jack Griffin]

I would gladly pay more to get a more useful govt.

Re:Wow total distopia

[naris]

Any informed taxpayer with more than 2 brain cells to rub together will support education. Unfortunately, they do seem to be in the minority, especially with the popularity of the tea party "movement".

Re:Wow total distopia

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I looked, the taxpayer paid about $3 for every $1 spent on education. Unfunded mandates like NCLB and such take most of the money.

So, the unfunded mandates are funded with 2 of the 3 dollars. Got it.

Re:Wow total distopia

[khallow]

When you look at it with those constraints, private should be about 1/3 the cost of public.

You shouldn't. A two-thirds overhead on your education costs is relevant.

Re:Wow total distopia

[djbckr]

Here in Seattle they keep raising taxes and adding tolls in high traffic areas. Yet, the money just disappears into the void. I haven't studied where it goes but I *know* they make more than enough money to fund schools and teachers. And still, my kid who goes to Redmond high school has class sizes that are too big, has a couple of classes in temporary structures that have been there for a few years, and a science teacher that can't answer questions to the stuff she teaches because she's not even remotely a scientist. This same science teacher also has a workload far higher than normal teachers; She has no planning period and therefore is never prepared for class. As a result, my kid hates science when I think she would otherwise enjoy it. I do my best to re-teach what she should have been taught in the first place. It doesn't help that her science book is an incomprehensible piece of shit.

Re:Wow total distopia

[q4Fry]

I would gladly have you pay more to get a more useful government.

Re:Wow total distopia

[dywolf]

F'ing A Right "pay more".

Wife is a teacher.
Has her Masters.
10 years experience.

Between the grading and planning, not to mention the extra curricular programs she's responsible for, she regularly puts in 10 hour days, or else spends time on the weekends. Regularly about 60 hours a week.

For all this hard work, she makes only 36k/year, and no overtime.

That's only $15.15/hour (or $13/hr at a job that actually pays overtime).

Damn right they need paid more.

Re:Wow total distopia

[AK Marc]

But the 2/3 overhead isn't in "education" it's in "anti-education". Those who state they hate public education impose costs on public education that don't apply to private, then laugh as people complain about the rising cost of public education. It was all part of the master plan to de-educate the nation.

It's ear marked by the anti-education politicians for non-education purposes. The classroom cost between public and private schools is favorable to the public schools.

So, the comparison is never limited to schools, but the "school system" that includes paid elected officials, and the cost of buidlings, when the buildings and locations aren't selected by the school district at all.

Re:Wow total distopia

[AK Marc]

Yes. That you don't know what an unfunded mandate is, or how it works isn't a very good counter-argument.

Re:Wow total distopia

[khallow]

Those who state they hate public education impose costs on public education that don't apply to private, then laugh as people complain about the rising cost of public education.

They don't have the power to impose a factor of three multiplier on public education. You'll have to look elsewhere for that.

Re:Wow total distopia

[AK Marc]

They don't have the power to impose a factor of three multiplier on public education. You'll have to look elsewhere for that.

Not in any one item, but requiring a new standardized test to verify quality, but not allocating the money in that law to fund it means that the school will cut education to pay for compliance costs. Do that 100 times, and you've got your factor of three. 1,000 cuts, and all that. Any one seems trivial. But in sum, they are deadly.

Re:Wow total distopia

[khallow]

I match that with teacher unions and piles of bureaucrats who don't have anything to do with education. In fact, that mostly explains the difference right there. We don't have to mightily strain our gullibility over imaginary cuts from imaginary resistance to education and just look at the large lump of parasites attached to the side of a typical school.

Re:Wow total distopia

[AK Marc]

Teacher's unions aren't paid with tax dollars, they are paid with teacher salaries. Yes, I can hear your complaint that teachers are paid in tax dollars, but that's not the same thing.

Re:Wow total distopia

[khallow]

Teacher's unions aren't paid with tax dollars, they are paid with teacher salaries. Yes, I can hear your complaint that teachers are paid in tax dollars, but that's not the same thing.

But it is a votes bought with public funds situation. I think that public unions should be outright illegal.

Re:Wow total distopia

[Anonymous Coward]

But it is a votes bought with public funds situation. I think that public unions should be outright illegal.

The money teachers or public workers get paid is for the work they've done, not for "votes". They've earned that money. It's theirs. Once the money is in their pockets, how public workers use that money is their business.

Remember Citizens United. Before they are members of a public union, or a corporation, or a church ,or a non-profit, or whatever, they are individuals, with every right to spend the money they've earned for political speech they wished to express.

If you don't want them to earn money off public funds, you have better chance asking for government to get out of public education completely (or whatever public program that puts public funds up for grabs). Blame your politicians, not the unions or the teachers.

Re:Wow total distopia

[khallow]

The money teachers or public workers get paid is for the work they've done, not for "votes". They've earned that money. It's theirs. Once the money is in their pockets, how public workers use that money is their business.

Until it is used to get more money.

Remember Citizens United. Before they are members of a public union, or a corporation, or a church ,or a non-profit, or whatever, they are individuals, with every right to spend the money they've earned for political speech they wished to express.

That doesn't give them a right to work for a government institution, particular public schools which are state operated and not subject to a number of constraints of the US Constitution.

If you don't want them to earn money off public funds, you have better chance asking for government to get out of public education completely (or whatever public program that puts public funds up for grabs). Blame your politicians, not the unions or the teachers.

Hence, why I support privatization of schools. Then it doesn't matter to me if they are unionized or not.

Re:Wow total distopia

[Anonymous Coward]

Until it is used to get more money.

Nope, even when it is used to get more money. Once they've rightfully earned that money, it becomes their property. Part of property ownership is that the owner (those public workers) gets to decide on how they will use it. Their spending may affect you, but that doesn't make it "your business" in the sense you can control how they spend their money.

Only government, through threat of force, could control how public workers or anybody else spend their money, but that's where the Constitution and Citizens United comes in. Does the government have the authority to restrict people on how they spend their rightfully earned money? C.U. case says no.

That doesn't give them a right to work for a government institution, particular public schools which are state operated and not subject to a number of constraints of the US Constitution.

So? None of that deprives them of the right to pay their union to speak and lobby on their behalf, including asking government to give them more money. Rights aren't "given". People are born with it. The Constitution restricts government when it can or cannot infringe on people's rights. Citizen's United became a case because government previously tried to control how people spent their money, and the courts have found that government was in the wrong, and that it does not have the authority to do so.

Hence, why I support privatization of schools. Then it doesn't matter to me if they are unionized or not.

Why does it matter to you today? What's it matter to you that other people have the same rights as you, to spend their rightfully earned money as they please?

Re:Wow total distopia

[AK Marc]

What vote is bought and with what public funds?

Your argument is that your house is property of the US federal government, since all land outside the original 13 colonies,Texas, and a few other exceptions was once "public land", and once it's been touched, it's forever tainted.

Re:Wow total distopia

[khallow]

There is an obvious conflict of interest where public union can use their political power to extract more public funds from elected governments. In turn, their revenue is dependent on the amount of public funds they can extract. It's a built in incentive to steal as much as they can from the public.

Re:Wow total distopia

[AK Marc]

And that is the "conservative" argument against schools, but why doesn't that apply to the Military Industrial Complex? A greater percentage of a jet goes to lobbying than that spent on schools, yet we need to cut schools because they are corrupt, and buy more fighters.

There is an obvious conflict of interest where [military contractors] can use their political power to extract more public funds from elected governments. In turn, their revenue is dependent on the amount of public funds they can extract. It's a built in incentive to steal as much as they can from the public.

Go on, read your words. Why do I see the conservatives hate on schools and love the military? When the reasons they hate schools are the reasons they love the military?

Re:Wow total distopia

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is the "conservative" argument against schools, but why doesn't that apply to the Military Industrial Complex?

Well, maybe it's because the defense lobby spends more evenly on both D's and R's, whereas public sector unions spend mostly on just the D's.
And if you compare to just public sector unions, defense has spent more in total.

And neither public unions nor defense spend the most in lobbying. Now, I'm not saying it's wrong to lobby (remember Citizens United! The same ruling that lets private corporations lobby allows public unions to lobby, enjoy the bed you laid). I'm just pointing out facts that may explain the different treatment.

Re:Wow total distopia

[khallow]

And that is the "conservative" argument against schools, but why doesn't that apply to the Military Industrial Complex?

Yes, it does Mark.

Will require Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

If the future is really taught by robots, as the summary over explains, I suggest such a complicated digital, automated education system will require a strong services init system, with no other frontrunner more qualified than Systemd. Debian and other frontrunning distributions have now adapted Systemd, equipped with its own forked Linux kernel. Debian is only left to resolve lingering legacy dependencies, which is temporary as they are steadily rewritten as Systemd service modules. I suggest the education system should begin reaching out to Pottering on this issue, the worlds children deserve nothing but the best, and there are none better and more cognizant than Systemd.

The Telescreen

[Irate Engineer]

Ahh, the telescreen from Orwell's 1984 will finally be installed in all classrooms, feeding only appropriate knowledge into the young minds who know better than to ask questions anyway.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think now is an excellent time for a Two Minutes Hate!

Re:The Telescreen

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh, the telescreen from Orwell's 1984 will finally be installed in all classrooms, feeding only appropriate knowledge into the young minds who know better than to ask questions anyway.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think now is an excellent time for a Two Minutes Hate!

They already have them, they're called 'smart' phones and are all the rage with children who can be indoctrinated all day long, 24/7/365.

Re:The Telescreen

[beastofburdon]

And after each lesson it's time for the two-minutes hate. The ten-minutes hate has replaced recess.

Re:edu-babble

[Skewray]

Sounds like dystopia to me. Something about a bunch of kindergarteners staring at a giant screen seems very 1984.

We'll finally achieve equity, alright...

[Quinn_Inuit]

If we do this, we'll achieve equity by destroying the entire system and smearing the remains into an inch-high paste, using BS like this as a binding agent. Meanwhile, the children of the highly paid "super-teachers" will probably go to traditional private schools, just like the children of the rich do now.

But will the 1% do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds all fine and dandy for the 99%, but unless the kids of the 1% follow this model there is something fishy about it. Even today, the top private schools still offer arts and humanities along with other cores subjects. Why are the public schools always reinventing themselves for the future? Why not use the model that those who will will control the future are educated with today? What do the 1% know that evidently educational experts don't?

Re:But will the 1% do it?

[jedidiah]

Current culture has an infatuation with the latest shiny shiny and just assumes that anything new is better anything old is bad and that the ancients didn't know anything. That's why they needed the help of extra-terrestrials.

The exact opposite of what we need

[Skarjak]

At a time when we are realizing that students aren't all the same and we need to adapt our teaching strategies to each of them, this dude brilliantly claims that the future is to sit them all in front of a screen with no support. We need to hire more teachers, not less. Size of classroom is one of the most important variables for the effectiveness of teaching.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Why have the students show up at school at all, when they can watch the video on their home computer or their smartphone, and enter their responses. Do away with the need for the classroom and the screen entirely, and the tech, too. Of course, the students won't know how to interact with others in person, and will have close to zero interpersonal skills, but that won't be important anymore.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[geekmux]

...Size of classroom is one of the most important variables for the effectiveness of teaching.

Why is it when we attend free public school we demand an effective teaching scenario, and yet when we shell out $20,000/year to attend college, we don't mind watching that student/teacher ratio turn to shit as we sit in a single classroom full of hundreds of students and pay dearly for such ineffectiveness?

A shitload of dead-broke, well-educated minds want to know.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an awful lot of research that seems to show the size of class isn't a key variable. What seems to matter much more is the quality of the teacher.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

The assertion and the caution was: "This is what will happen," not this is desirable. An improvement would be every student gets their own screen and individualized interactive instruction from the best teachers and produced material in the world. Students requiring hand-on special instruction can be provided for. The technology already exists for the interactive environment to continuously adjust the content and method of presentation, to the students need and interaction.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[Dutch Gun]

Those lectures with hundreds of students were, at least in my experience, often followed by much smaller workshops or labs with the instructor's graduate student assistants. That's typically when you got your questions answered in more detail. Also, at the collegiate level, I suppose instructors figure that students should need a bit less hand-holding at that point. It's not all that dissimilar to tech conferences at the professional level. You generally only get the high points and broad brush strokes at the lectures themselves. By and large, you need to do a heck of a lot of studying on your own to stay proficient with new technologies.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[ranton]

At a time when we are realizing that students aren't all the same and we need to adapt our teaching strategies to each of them, this dude brilliantly claims that the future is to sit them all in front of a screen with no support. We need to hire more teachers, not less. Size of classroom is one of the most important variables for the effectiveness of teaching.

He is talking about 20 years from now. Technology has a habit of changing at an accelerated rate, so to envision what technology will provide in 20 years it is probably better to compare today's technology with 1975 tech. So take a look at Siri and Cortana compared to voice recognition and natural speech processing in 1975. Take a look at the amount of information is retrievable in Wikipedia with what existed in an Altair 8800.

Imagine going back to 1975 and describing the world wide web, ordering on Amazon, the iPhone 5, etc. If you aren't thinking of a world as different in 2035 as we are from the 70's, you aren't thinking in the right frame of reference. Teaching may not have changed much in the past few hundred years, but locomotion didn't change much until the railroads and automobiles either. All it takes is a tipping point of technological advance to make the future unrecognizable to what we have today.

In 20 years, a student's computer will likely be able to teach then a subject in 10,000 subtly different ways. Voice recognition will be so good it will seem like magic by today's standards. It will be like having a 1000 to 1 teacher to student ratio. We probably won't even rely on prerecorded video lectures that far into the future. The software could generate the lecture in real time, adjusting to the slightest input from the student (direct questions, facial expressions, heart rate, etc).

Humans will almost certainly still be involved, but the role could shift to supporting the technology instead of the other way around. Just as hybrid human-computer chess teams are still better than chess AI programs alone, hybrid teaching styles will likely still be the best. But technology is likely to open up possibilities in teaching that are unheard of today.

Then again, we still don't have flying cars, so who knows for sure.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're talking about requires strong AI. Once we develop strong AI, we won't need to learn anything. Either because it'll kill us all or it'll automate absolutely everything.

We can already directly stimulate the pleasure centers of our brain in scientific settings. Within 20 years, expect off the self pleasure devices that destroy the market for drugs. Animals and humans who can manually stimulate those areas at the press of a button continue to do so until they die of exhaustion and self neglect. Look forward to a future of stupidity not intelligence. We've never overcome our basic instincts.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[ranton]

What you're talking about requires strong AI. Once we develop strong AI, we won't need to learn anything. Either because it'll kill us all or it'll automate absolutely everything.

Machine learning and NLP techniques have started to show you can get some very intelligent software without strong AI. Watson was able to beat the best human players in essentially a Q&A game, similar to what a digital teacher would need to be capable of. If you look at the evolution of chess AIs, affordable personal computers capable of doing what Watson did will be released before the end of this decade. Cell phones will be able to do it a decade from now. Two decades from now Watson will appear downright stupid compared to the Q&A software we will have access to in our watches. And it won't require strong AI.

Just like all sufficiently advanced technologies, the AI of 20 years from now will appear like magic compared to what we have today. With or without strong AI.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[serviscope_minor]

Technology is bobbling on at a fine old rate, just as it was from 1975 until now.

But though the tech world is so very different from 1975, why hasn't it already dominated the classroom? Most tech-in-classroom things have turned out to be expensive failures.

I think an important thing that people forget is not everything is advancing at the same rate. Kids' brains are the single central most important part of education in this context (pretty much by definition) aren't actually changing at all. We've also had a fre thousand years to figure pretty decent ways of getting information in to them (with a whole lot of abject missteps).

We've pretty much figured out education is best when the teacher is decently knowledgable and provides actual proper individualised education. Those are difficult, labour intensive and ultimately expensive.

Can technology help? Undoubtedly so. But they key is not an even larger "one size fits all" solution that makes a pretense of individualisation by using "analytics". The system you're proposing seems more based around the existence of strong AI. I'm an optimist and I believe we will get there eventually, but I don't think we will in 30 or even 40 years. What you're proposing is a system which is better at interacting with humans than humans. The problem with that is that we're competing with the last million or so years of evoloution which has been fine-tuning our brain and we've got an awful lot of catching up to do.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

At a time when we are realizing that students aren't all the same and we need to adapt our teaching strategies to each of them, this dude brilliantly claims that the future is to sit them all in front of a screen with no support. We need to hire more teachers, not less. Size of classroom is one of the most important variables for the effectiveness of teaching.

This is just a douche bag who wants to justify turning teaching into burger flipping (only worse paid) so he can look good on some idiotic business plan. FUCK HIM. Fuck everyone who fucks over children's futures for profit. Sideways. With a brick!

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[ranton]

Teaching may not have changed much in the past few hundred years, but locomotion didn't change much until the railroads and automobiles either. All it takes is a tipping point of technological advance to make the future unrecognizable to what we have today.

But though the tech world is so very different from 1975, why hasn't it already dominated the classroom? Most tech-in-classroom things have turned out to be expensive failures.

As I mentioned in my first post, I think a tipping point will be hit once we have technology a generation or two better than Watson in each student's laptop. Or at least cloud based versions of Watson accessible by each student. Just like all attempts at commercializing digital tablets failed in the 90's and early 2000's were forgotten once technology advanced enough to give us the iPad, the failures of the past 20 years to bring technology to the classroom will be long forgotten in the near future.

The system you're proposing seems more based around the existence of strong AI.

Watson can give us a good idea of what is possible without strong AI. And Watson will be considered ancient compared to the non-strong AI implementations we will see 20 years from now. Machine learning and NLP can create amazing results without the computer assistants of the future needing what we would consider "true" creativity and problem solving.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[serviscope_minor]

As I mentioned in my first post, I think a tipping point will be hit once we have technology a generation or two better than Watson in each student's laptop. Or at least cloud based versions of Watson accessible by each student. Just like all attempts at commercializing digital tablets failed in the 90's and early 2000's were forgotten once technology advanced enough to give us the iPad, the failures of the past 20 years to bring technology to the classroom will be long forgotten in the near future.

More like failures of the last 100 years. Just about everything capable of recording people in some form has been touted and tried as a replacement for teachers, so far with no success.

I also think you're optimistic in that a generation or two past Watson will essentially yield strong AI: I disagree that strong AI is not needed.

Machine learning and NLP can create amazing results without the computer assistants of the future needing what we would consider "true" creativity and problem solving.

Not really. I work in machine learning some of the time. It's pretty good, but it's so far from being able to replace general human intelligence that it's not even funny. And NLP has kind of hit a bit of a brick wall of diminishing returns recently.

The problem is that the AI system doesn't just need to be able to understand the student's question (already very hard) and then look up the answer in a database. It has to figure out what the student is failing to grasp and then craft an answer to fill the gap. When that inevitably doesn't work, it has to then use feedback to guage why it doesn't work, where the gap has shifted to then iterate until the student does understant.

I haven't seen anything even beginning to think about attempting that sort of problem.

Sure tha's perhaps not strong AI, but compared to what we have now, it's awfully close.

Re:The exact opposite of what we need

[ranton]

More like failures of the last 100 years. Just about everything capable of recording people in some form has been touted and tried as a replacement for teachers, so far with no success.

Its not really fair to say it has had no success. I have learned quite a bit from MOOCs; far more than I learned in my Masters program at a good private school with the exception of my research project. That wouldn't be true for every student (students who don't learn well from just reading books for instance), but that doesn't diminish that MOOCs and other technology enhanced learning methods have shown great success. This is not even close to the level of removing the need for elementary teachers, but it is significant success nevertheless.

The problem is that the AI system doesn't just need to be able to understand the student's question (already very hard) and then look up the answer in a database. It has to figure out what the student is failing to grasp and then craft an answer to fill the gap. When that inevitably doesn't work, it has to then use feedback to guage why it doesn't work, where the gap has shifted to then iterate until the student does understant.

Understanding a student's question is incredibly hard, almost impossibly hard, but then again so is a computer understanding Jeopardy questions.

Teachers view teaching each student as a unique challenge, but that is only because they only teach perhaps around 10,000 students in a career. Even with that small sample size they can still build on experience of what has worked for other students. And that is even with imperfect human memory and biases. Future educational programs will have the benefit of listening to questions from tens of millions of students each year. Questions will stop sounding very unique in these circumstances. Databases with millions of possible examination techniques will be able to use relatively basic pattern matching to see how different students are similar on millions of different metrics.

Every student will still be unique, but each unique problem they are having was likely shared by millions of other students. And the unique way of improving their understanding was probably performed on hundreds of thousands of students. And those students were probably given thousands of slightly different educational experiences while the software tracked how students with similar learning styles reacted to each one.

There will still be gaps in the technology, but no one is contemplating a world with no teachers. When the computer realizes the student's understanding of the topic is not improving, the human teacher is called in. Sometimes that might even be over teleconferencing if specific domain knowledge is required. And every time a human is required, the software gets more data on how to better teach other students in the future.

get em young, get em forever

[MrKaos]

I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years,

A grab bag for corporate interests to get the advertising message right into classrooms and capture the market at its youngest and most impressionable through a hodgepodge of incompatible proprietary technologies put there by uninformed school departments and selected from a pork barrel of suppliers who paid the biggest lobbying fees to the politicians responsible for ensuring the "very best for growing young minds".

Re:get em young, get em forever

[Anonymous Coward]

Today's Lesson is brought to you by the letter B!

for Brawndo...

Re:get em young, get em forever

[solios]

My high school had something like that in the 90s. It was a cheap way to inject advertising into a completely captive audience under the guise of "educational" programming.

Viewing was initially mandatory but early in eleventh grade I unplugged the damned thing so I could study and the response from the teacher and the rest of the class was a mix of acceptance and relief. That year the school was running the thing first and third lunch (lunch being three 30 minute periods) which meant our class got it twice... and we preferred a solid hour of journalism class to 15 minutes paid advertorial 15 minutes of class, repeat.

That was my first attempt to do something about invasive advertising - and it's been an uphill battle ever since!

Interesting story

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty interesting, I've filled it away in my "Never read" folder. Thanks again

Why a classroom?

[c]

So, basically, it's going to be just like school is today, except the teachers will be working remotely?

I suspect that veteran teacher has been doing it so like that he can't get outside of the box and imagine education without classrooms, schools, or even structured classes.

I think the future is going to look a lot more like home schooling (possibly in groups to get around the whole school-as-babysitter issue that allows parent to hold jobs) than anything close to the institutions teachers currently work in.

MOOCs Reincarnated?

[chiasmus1]

There was an idea to do something related not too long ago. Universities and Community Colleges panicked and thought all of their students would leave in the future and move completely online. MOOCs would traditional education.

The reality is that not all people want to learn that way. The Slashdot crowd might be able to be completely successful watching a screen and talking to an in-class "Tech", but most people are not like that. Many people attend community colleges and smaller universities because they can ask questions and get answers in a much smaller and personal setting.

If this idea had true mass potential, it would have happened already and community colleges would already be gone.

And Drum Machines

[dcollins]

What this most reminds me of -- A drummer friend of mine was told, as a teenager by an older adult drummer in the 80's, not to take up the instrument because in the future all drumming would be done by electronic drum machines.

better education

[harvey the nerd]

I got such a "super teacher" module for one of my high school kids (Kentucky Educational TV) with some great demos too. AP Physics B all in one year without the usual introductory Physics course. It was great. The kid worked hard, and switched from music and languages in high school to physics in college.

However she also had a great physics teacher to help her during lunch. I think it might reduce the local teachers time requirement per student 1/2-2/3, but not the skills. Ultimately the kids may have more equal opportunity to determine their level of education by their own interest, ability and effort in such a system.

Re:better education

[davester666]

This isn't for AP Physics.

The 'tech' is a babysitter, and depending on the school, may have a weapon [primarily to protect themselves]. The lessons will be dumb'd down, and the few children who stand out intellectually will be removed from these 'classrooms' and placed in a separate, real classroom, with a real, live 'super' teacher.

The points mentioned will be how the system will be sold to the public, and, as usual, not even remotely be similar to reality.
The only true point is that it will be equality to education. 95-99% of all children will receive an equally cheap, crappy education.

They will fail to mention in the sales pitch that the wealthy will not have their children go to these schools or that more advanced kids will be separated out from the rest of the kids [even more than now (not more kids, but more separate)].

Just as a guess, they are starting down this road right now using 'discovery learning', where instead of the teacher, you know, teaches things, the kids have to discover what they want to learn (so the teachers role is minimized).

This system removes the teacher altogether, replacing them with canned video's. I'm sure there will be cameo's by music and movie stars talking about 'current events' in order to keep the children more interested.

Re:better education

[gbjbaanb]

The points mentioned will be how the system will be sold to the public ... this history course is brought to you by JuicyFlakes, the breakfast for winning children. Chapter 1. How nutrition was changed in the past, and how the introduction of new, exciting breakfasts revolutionised the workforce and helped make America what it is today. We start with our founder....

I can see how it'll work out already. Hopeless advertising instead of true education.

Re:better education

[GargamelSpaceman]

The biggest problem with education is trying to make a horse drink water - the horses that don't feel like drinking at the moment monopolize the resources of everyone and dictate the techniques used. Everyone is led by the teacher in a ritualistic dance at the end of which, if the dance steps are followed, mastery is supposedly achieved. Those who can be engaged by this kind of thing and dance along with the class do well. Those who don't care to dance are unteachable - labeled dumb.

When first introduced, compulsory education was compulsory because the compulsion was necessary to force parents to give up the labor of their children so they could be educated. Education was an opportunity, and there were few who would not compel their children to take part if they could afford it.

Today child labor laws and the general way society is configured make children worthless as labor. Time in school is if anything is the financial equivalent of 'free babysitting'.

After a certain age it's impossible to keep someone in school and learning if they don't want to be there and the level of compulsory education should therefore be low anyway. K-6 makes more sense to be compulsory than beyond.

The idea that there should be a diploma at the end of it all and that that diploma should 'mean something' undermines the value of that diploma. By insisting that it certify a minimum standard, we guarantee that the standard is very low. If graduation rate is a priority than that priority is at odds with not only the level of the standard, but the possible level anyone can achieve. Catering to students who don't want to learn deprives everyone else. Dragging people kicking and bucking into education sets people against anything to do with it. The process of having education shoved down one's throat even turns people who would otherwise be receptive to education off to it.

What would be better would be for a certain number of years of education be paid for, and students can go as far as they want. They don't get a diploma, they get a transcript. They learn basic skills, not because they must, but because they are prerequisites to a class they are interested in taking. They want to pass for lots of reasons, such as peer pressure not to be the oldest kid taking the class, but also because they want to take some other class. If someone is behind in some area they can concentrate their efforts there.

Grades aren't important. Make classes pass/fail but keep the standard for passing high enough that students who pass have demonstrated enough understanding to succeed at the next level. Students who excel would have a broader transcript, or complete the courses offered early. But there is no need to penalize someone who struggles in a certain area if they have demonstrated mastery eventually. If they have truly mastered whatever it is, then they should be as able as anyone else who has mastered it to apply it in the future.

Can older, engaged kids benefit from well produced virtual classes? Sure. Will fourth graders watch the screen intently enough to learn Long Division? Will a 'tech' necessarily be able to answer a frustrated student's questions in a helpful way? If they can, then they aren't too bad at teaching... Couldn't they conceivably do as well as the video teacher? Yep, better probably. And does the video get paused every time one of the kidnergarteners has a question? Does it then become impossible to engage with?

That's one of the problems with the ritual dance method of teaching. Everyone brings certain things to the table before the class. It's hard not to fall asleep and miss the stuff you need to hear, or waste your energy doing useless ( for you ) dance steps and be too tired from that to learn anything difficult. It's better to be engaged in learning and spend your time on the stuff you don't know. When people do this they apply the sharpest edge to their problems and tend to cut through difficulty like a laser.

School should make that possible.

Re:better education

[davester666]

History is written by the victor's...corporations are winning...

Pepsi

[elmer at web-axis]

Remember kids of the future. The answer to get partial credit will be 'Pepsi'

Re:edu-babble

[ckatko]

We interrupt this class room broadcast to bring you "Waffles, Tastey Waffles," from Delicious Corp! If your mom doesn't buy you some, she's cheating on your father!

Same thing was predicted for TV, decades ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when television was a novelty, the exact same thing was predicted. The greatest minds in the world would record educational programs and lectures which would be broadcast across the globe and the minds of the people, young and old, would be enlightened by the knowledge and culture thereby received.

Didn't quite work out that way, did it?

sounds like the ideal Koch corporate schooling

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds like the ideal Koch corporate schooling

or something right out of pink floyd's THE WALL.

Re:edu-babble

[geekmux]

Sounds like dystopia to me. Something about a bunch of kindergarteners staring at a giant screen seems very 1984.

1984? Oh dear, I'm sorry. We appear to be going backwards here.

Would it help bring you back to today if we called those giant screens "smartphones" and put them in the hands of every 5-year old instead?

Really?

[EmeraldBot]

I'm putting this guy's speech on the level of this. Compare and enjoy.

Laughable

[Peter H.S.]

This won't work at all. One of the most basic requirements of teaching is that your teaching level correspond to those you teach; aim to high and you loose them because they don't understand, aim to low and you loose them because they are bored. Having one "super teacher" yapping one-way lectures from a giant screen without the "teacher" knowing what his pupils can, is simply a lost cause when it comes to engaging and teaching the pupils.

And why the giant screen? Why not having each pupil following an individual course on individual screens instead of forcing everybody to follow the same course. And why the classroom at all if its only function is to supervise discipline among the inmates/pupils.

(Why not just strap the pupils to a chair in their home and force feed them lectures through Occulus rift headsets and noise-cancelling headphones; it is easy to motive the pupils through reinforcement stimuli like tasing them gently if they have wrong answers. This will be very cheap and is guaranteed to produce marvellous results.)

Re:Laughable

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happens I hope they don't "loose" the students, then they can never be free.

relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks

[EthanBernard]

"...relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks..."

I threw up a bit in my mouth when I read that.

Re:relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks

[Livius]

He did say 'powerful' TedTalks, so we really can't judge until they have some of those.

Re:relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever seen a TedTalk? I went to one of those and each and every presentation turned out to be a shallow-minded tale of self aggrandizement. How would that teach a pupil anything other than how douchebags think about douchebags?

Lower pay for super teachers?

[plopez]

That does not make sense. If you want to attract great talent, offer great pay. Isn't that what we say in the private sector? If it is true then teachers need more money, not less.

Re:Lower pay for super teachers?

[Anonymous Coward]

That does not make sense. If you want to attract great talent, offer great pay. Isn't that what we say in the private sector? If it is true then teachers need more money, not less.

This is just the mastabatory fantasy of a piece of shit who wants to fuck over students and teachers alike for his own profit. There is literally nothing more to this guy's FUCKED UP RANT. "We pay nothing and we get super teachers who produce super results. Pay me now for this brilliant future." If you must wear your underwear on the outside make sure it's large enough so that when you place it on your head it doesn't cut off blood flow shit head.

Re:edu-babble

[plopez]

God save us from educational reform. We have had 30 years of it and things only get worse and worse. Less relevant course work, too many tests, talent driven out of the system, destruction of decent school lunches, no PE, etc. All that is left is sports and tests. The last 30 years has been an exercise in how to destroy an educational system.

nation of savages

[Anonymous Coward]

Who will keep the kids from killing each other and stealing the equipment?

Content Expert

[phantomfive]

I'm not sure being a high school teacher counts as being a 'content expert,' and based on the teachers I've known, I'd guess a low percentage of teachers have particularly deeper knowledge than whatever textbook they are teaching from.

Being a teacher at the high-school and elementary school level is more about classroom management and communicating the ideas, not about being an 'expert.'

Also, good luck finding someone you can pay $15 an hour to fix computers and take care of a classroom full of kids.

Re:Content Expert

[AK Marc]

You must be a content expert to get hired, and not to teach. Generally to start teaching in high school, you must have a degree in whatever you are teaching (and a certificate in teaching), or a degree in teaching. Once you are a full teacher, it takes a basic test to be able to teach other subjects. As in, so basic that back when I was in high school, if I were a licensed teacher, there were no subjects I looked at that I'd be unable to teach. But the hoops to teach are quite high for someone who is an expert in their field and want to teach it at high school. You pretty much have to go back to school to get a teaching certificate. Some places have exceptions, but they are very specific.

Re:Content Expert

[phantomfive]

Once you are a full teacher, it takes a basic test to be able to teach other subjects. As in, so basic that back when I was in high school, if I were a licensed teacher, there were no subjects I looked at that I'd be unable to teach.

That doesn't sound like being a 'content expert.' Unless you count getting an education degree to be a content expert. And don't get me wrong, teachers do need expertise, it's not an easy job, but not necessarily in the subject they are teaching.

Re:Content Expert

[AK Marc]

If your first job teaching is Chemistry, you must have a bachelor's degree in chemistry (aside for the exceptions for those with an education degree and a "minor" in chemistry). Doesn't that count? Then, once you are a certified full teacher, you can teach almost anything after a quick and easy test, that should be passable by any good HS student in that subject. So there's a difference between the first-subject, sole-subject teachers (who must be experts) and those that "got in" under something else, now teach unrelated subjects.

Same shit we heard 30 years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time they try this sort of thing, it doesn't work. If you want kids to actually learn rather than just pass tests, the teacher has to be a teacher and a facilitator, not just the latter. Literally nothing to see here.

Remember television classrooms

[jhecht]

Somebody thought of something very similar back in the early 1960s. Put the best lecturer in the school system in front of the television and sit the kids in the auditorium so they can watch and listen. The Miami-Dade County schools tested it for junior high school, using it for civics class in 9th grade and I forget what in the 7th and 8th. About two-thirds of the kids had the television course, and the rest of us had standard instruction. It was a complete disaster. The kids were wild at the best of times, and they took the television course as an invitation for mischief and worse. After all these years I can't remember the gory details, but it sank without trace. Behavior management was the immediate issue, but kids also need teacher interaction to learn. Conventional schooling has plenty of problems, but the television classroom showed how much worse it could be.

You Seem To Think...

[Xel]

...that this giant screen will be streaming the very best, most informative lessons available, from subject experts around the world. While I see it streaming whatever commercially-laden content can be produced by the lowest bidder, or whichever church has the largest voter turnout in the school board elections, or whatever company has a CEO that golfs with the secretary of education.

Re:You Seem To Think...

[ByTor-2112]

Exactly. If you think the uproar over "common core" was big. Wait until the students in Texas are being streamed the same lesson as those in California or New York. Hah!

Teaching will be one of the last jobs to go

[linnsey]

The very last jobs to be automated will be those requiring human interaction. This is what 95% of what a teacher's job is. People who make this prediction are woefully out of touch and think of teachers as mere babysitters. Schools are where kids learn to interact with other people, and in essence, what it means to be human. What exactly is the minimum-wage tech going to do when a child refuses to do their work? What will they do wen a child starts crying because other children are bullying them? When one kid throws a chair at another? How are they going to negotiate lesson plans and author legally binging agreements such as IEPs?

Re:Teaching will be one of the last jobs to go

[Anonymous Coward]

zero tolerance. violent or difficult behavior already land you in the brig, it doesn't take much more to get thrown out of school all together. More so, there are lots of care takers of children from babies through 10-12 year old kids at day care and child care programs that get paid shit to baby sit.

Re:Teaching will be one of the last jobs to go

[ByTor-2112]

Wrong! 95% of a teacher's job these days is keeping kids off their phones, staying awake, stop talking, and calling parents to get them to make their kid behave. Gone are the good old days when you told the kids to get the F out and they went for a paddling. Students really have the "upper hand" in things these days.

Idiots and Morons

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to see that idiots and morons are planning the future of education. Anyone who thinks this is the way most people, and especially kids, learn, is a complete an utter fool. Yes, there is a small subset of the human-population who learns well without real interaction, but they are the vast minority. Do we want to work towards a world where only the odd/unusual child gets a proper education? Or do we want to work towards a world where all children/people get the type of education that actually works for, well, PEOPLE? For the record, I work in education, my family works in education, and my extended family works in education. I'm one of those educators that the kids consider "great". Why? Because I understand them. It's all about personal attention and interaction. It's about movement and exploration and discovering what fascinates each child. Anyone attempting to promote a system that reduces individual attention and interaction should be immediately barred from ever working in education again, anywhere, anytime, because they are utterly and completely incompetent.

Disaster

[dskoll]

If that vision comes to pass, then our education system will have imploded and we'll be producing generations of uneducated students.

I cannot think of a single person who hasn't had one or two teachers who've made a huge difference in his or her life. And I cannot think of a single child who would prefer a screen to a living human being. What a pile of hogsh*t.

Re:Disaster

[AK Marc]

I can't think of a single person who doesn't hate a subject because of a bad experience with a teacher. Eliminating that would be a good thing too.

This isn't news... we knew this was coming.

[Karmashock]

I see in the comments a lot of people are bitter or in denial about it. But you can't stop it. So you might as well make the best of it.

Several things are pushing this...

1. Economics. We're spending more on everything and you can't sustain that. There are also shifts in the tax base and demographics that simply make that less sustainable.

2. Labor force quality. When women were not permitted to take lots of jobs they were basically forced to take what remained. That meant that we had higher quality teachers... typically female... in the system because they couldn't do anything else. More opportunities means we have a brain drain from education. And while some will say "just pay them more" we can't even afford existing rate structures so increasing them isn't viable.

3. Changing education requirements. The student bodies have increasingly diverse needs and the teachers simply can't keep up with it all. Keeping on top of the language differences, on top of all the new elective classes, on top of etc... they just can't. With this we can start teaching real programming to kids that want to learn it without losing money if no one does in any particular school. We can offer language courses in any language in every school. We can start teaching a lot of elective classes that got cut. We can give students access to very high quality science and math teachers.

I could go on but the point is that it is happening. Accept it or stick your head up your ass. I'm not being rude. I'm telling you the Sun is going to rise in the East and set in the West. Accept it or don't.

Re:edu-babble

[matfud]

Why do get the impression that he approves of it?

I have a hard time believing this comes from

[ChrmnMa0]

someone who teaches. Classroom management is 90% of teaching, especially in poorer areas. Good luck with this crackpot vision.

public schools are political patronage

[turkeydance]

there's too much money at the county (parish) level to reduce employment. public schools make up a majority of the full-time jobs in 50 counties of my state. the teachers (unions) provide political pressure/support across the board. yes, reducing teacher head-count might make rational sense. politically, nope.

marie montessori

[Anonymous Coward]

Our educational system is based on the English system. That system was designed to produce bureaucrats for their empire - you need a lot of reading, writing and figuring to run an empire because they didn't have computers. It is a grossly outdated education.

A hundred years ago, a very brilliant woman created an education method that fits perfectly with how our brains evolved. Her name was Maria Montessori. The Google founders and many of the innovators we have today were taught under that system and we need to teach children to use their human brains because computers and automation are much better at reading, writing and arithmetic. We need to stop educating our children to do grunt work and teach them to be creative, to have vision and allow for the machines to do the grunt work.

Re:marie montessori

[DigiShaman]

I've heard great things about Montessori schools. They're expensive, but only because of the student/teacher ratio. But most importantly, children are of mixed ages and develop at their own pace. Students are also mentors to younger children as well. I find this idea fantastic. For one, it forces students to recall learned information as they teach other students; both benefit from this activity. Secondly, students get taught the material from a different POV to help clarify and missing gaps in understanding. Effectively they double as a tutor.

The only downside (aside from cost) of Montessori is that once your child leaves and goes into a public school, they're quickly bored as they're already way past the level they're put in.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if community based home schooling makes a comeback with periodic standardized testing to keep all teachers in check. Meaning, you can't go all religious in teaching as the student wouldn't pass an element of science based knowledge that's required.

Re:marie montessori

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a problem. You learn the material once, and not really a second time. Sure, the skills may be applied later on, such as in math class. Or certain history classes. Maybe some kind of review class is in order? But that would require a major reconstructuring.

I favor states deciding their own education, and not the federal government. However, I would like to see the feds provide like $3000 vouchers to each student (grades 1-12 only; capped at 20 years old), with simple requirements...
1. One third of it ($1000) must be used for a free lunch program. One free meal--fruit or vegetable, beverage, and main course--per day on each day that school is in session 4 or more hours. Overnight field trips and such would have to be covered too.
2. Two-thirds would be given to the individual school in question.
3. If the school is a private school, no more than X% of the tuition can be profit. Maybe 85% or more has to be used for expenses. If more than 15% is used for profit, then the school cannot accept these vouchers.

I do think standardized tests are a good idea. But maybe as something as simple as the ACT. You know, something with science, math, reading/writing, and the like, to make sure the basics aren't neglected. Grade appropriate for 4th, 8th, and 12th grade.

What about hiring college grads to help T.A. for teachers? Not one per teacher, but maybe one per dept. Helps out a variety of teachers on an as-needed basic. Perhaps grading some of the rote memorization homework (which can be good and bad, depending).

Re:marie montessori

[Hognoxious]

The Google founders and many of the innovators we have today were taught under that system

Love open-plan offices? You know who to thank.

http://www.economist.com/news/...

Re:edu-babble

[Potor]

He could be self-loathing, naive, or - horror of horrors - a trolling administrator.

I am a Tech Coord for a K12 school. Article is BS

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW :" Since the 'tech' won't require the extensive education and training of today's teachers, the teacher's union will fall apart, and that "tech" will earn about $15 an hour to facilitate a class of what could include over 50 students" What a load of garbage.

First: I have been a Technology Coordinator for multiple school districts over the years. Just about everything in the article is unearned complaining.

What really happens and is actually happening where I am now is:

1. Teachers insist on Ipads/Tablets/Phones be provided to all the students.
2. Teachers then have the students look everything up online while the teacher looks at pinterest.
3. Teachers then send the kids without tech to the labs to make idiotic powerpoints that then take about 2 weeks to get thru in class (nice waste of time)
4. Teachers who send their kids to the labs, are usually working on their $99.00 a month masters degree on taxpayers time so they get a lane change (more pay).
5. Teachers kick out numerous kids from their class driving them to online education such as odysseyware.
6. Other kids see the Oddysseyware kids not having to deal with the teachers and they start saying they want to do it too.
7. Exceptional students start signing up for college in the high school classes
8. Teachers complain that they are not getting the training they think they deserve.
9. Teachers complain about having to turn in taxpayer funded Ipads/Laptops/etc... at the end of the school year because "enter bogus excuse here". Usually they plan on "checking their email" over the summer so of course they have to keep their $400 ipad with them and just happen to take it with them on their vacations, hand it off to children taking summer college classes, or just loose it but dont want to admit to it, so they keep saying they have to keep it so we dont find out its lost till it is too late to find.
10.Teachers FREAK OUT when the internet goes down. I actually saw one teacher in the elementary start crying when she was talking to the principal because she had no idea what to do with her 3rd graders since all of her stuff was online.

Teachers will be out the door soon because whether they provide a service or not, but shoving their kids onto tech for 6 out of 7 hours a day, they are causing the kids to realize they dont actually NEED the teacher to teach them.

Stats at the school I am currently at:
Over 50% of the senior and junior classes are taking full day college at the high school and never interact with a teacher
Over 25% of the rest of the 7th - 12th grade takes online classes in the labs without a teacher present. Usually Odysseyware
In the elementary I have personally seen the following schedule:
1st hour: Online Study Island
2nd hour: Online Starfall
3rd hour: Online Type to learn
4th hour: lunch and play time
5th hour: Powerpoint/computer lab misc.
6th hour: in a classroom
7th hour: in a classroom

Teachers are doing this to themselves. I take care of hundreds of systems and with a 2 year degree I get paid over $60,000 a year. A teacher with the same time in gets about $40,000 (equivalent full time year round would be about $50,000)

Anti-Union Trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

What you described is a dystopian hellscape!

How did somebody like you find this site? I am assuming you had help because if that is how you were educated, you would be functionally illiterate.

Go crawl back under your rock with Rush Limbaugh, and the KROTCH Brothers!

Re:Anti-Union Trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

As a tech in a k12 school district, we have over 1/2 of our 11th and 12th grade students taking college in the school classes 80% of the time. About a 1/4 of the rest of the 7th thru 12th grades take online HS courses. Our teachers loose their minds when the internet goes down with one going so far as to start crying because she didnt know what to do with the 3rd grade class she taught because all of her notes and subject matter was online.

Dont blame rush or the "krotch brothers" for what many of us see every day. There wouldnt be an anti-teacher movement if there were no problems.

Re:Anti-Union Trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

A tech, not a teacher. A red-state, anti-unionist. I don't know if you really meant that teachers "loose" their minds, but if you paid more attention (rather than pissing away your class time on the Interwebs), you would know that teachers could "lose" their minds, or possibly if this were an assertion of some form of mind expansion, "loosen" their minds.

As a K12 teacher, I have to say . . .

[Toddlerbob]

The TFA is an excellent example of that fraction of the population who has no idea what a K12 teaching job actually entails, but somehow thinks they understand it completely. As one of the respondents in this thread (who did understand it) put it, real teaching jobs will be one of the last to go, as they entail interaction between human beings. It's in the interaction that the best teaching happens. That's why K12 classes need to be smaller, and not like my 200+ member Biology 1 lecture at university forty years ago.

Re:As a K12 teacher, I have to say . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

But are you not proof that your 200+ Bio class was good enough for you to use it to earn your teaching degree and teach the next gen? How could that professor manage to make you successful with 200 other students to deal with and yet teachers in k12 complain about 25 kids in a class?

Re:As a K12 teacher, I have to say . . .

[Overzeetop]

When 1/4 of the class flunks a college intro to bio class, they pay the university another $15,000 and they take it again - or they look for a major which doesn't require bio. When a 1/4 of a 5th grade class flunks a standardized test, the teacher can get fired.

See the difference?

Re:As a K12 teacher, I have to say . . .

[Overzeetop]

Unfortunately, that is the crux of the problem. The cost of any service or product that requires real human interaction is skyrocketing when compared to other fields. Every technology sector job is based on one human producing a product which will be used by thousands to millions of people with almost no incremental cost. Electronics are assembled more and more by machine. Mineral exploration and energy production is becoming automated. Factory farming and staple goods production is the culmination of 200 years of industrial revolution efficiency.

Look at anything where costs are increasing fast and you'll find people - one on one interaction - is at the root. Unfortunately, public education is under the thumb of reduced municipal revenues at a time when more and more is expected. We can't go back to a one room school house and school finishing up at a 3rd grade level for 90% of the population, which is where much of the current "overtaxed" public seems to feel we should go.

I don't see this ending well.

Re:As a K12 teacher, I have to say . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll also note that universities have a lot of really bad teachers. I know everybody who has been to any school can attest to "that tenured professor who must have been a great researcher but was a useless teacher." And most know of multiple such professors.

(To be clear, there are a lot of great teachers too. It's just that universities are not the holy grail of good teaching.)

Re:As a K12 teacher, I have to say . . .

[ranton]

Wonderful no true Scotsman argument you have there. Nice to see that everyone who doesn't agree with you has no idea what a K12 teaching job actually entails.

I only have anecdotal experience from knowing around a dozen teachers as acquaintances, a half dozen as close friends, and one as a family member, although I have never taught beyond college tutoring myself. I have found there are two groups of teachers that in my experience always have very different viewpoints on teaching. They are those who had challenging non-teaching careers before starting teaching, and those who didn't.

( ha, my version of no true Scotman is claiming anyone who doesn't agree with me didn't have a challenging career beforehand, I guess no one's perfect )

I only know four people in the first category, a former nuclear engineer, mechanical engineer, software developer, and chemist (2 high school and middle school teachers). Only two of these people knew each other, although I realize that doesn't help make up for the small sample size. Without exception they described teaching children as a fairly labor intensive but not very challenging career. Well actually there was one exception: one of them thought it wasn't very labor intensive at all after the first couple years, but he is a bare minimum kind of guy (he admits to it, and says that is why he switched to teaching).

I have only talked with three of them about technology in teaching, but each of them believe the majority of their job is better suited to the type of work you would expect an AI in the near future could do. One of them compared it to scantron tests; they don't eliminate all test grading, but they eliminate a lot of it. He did say all that happened was schools increased the amount of testing so the total amount of grading work didn't diminish, but software was still doing the bulk of the work. He is a math teacher, so scantron is probably more common for him than for other subjects, but multiple choice tests are not exclusive to math either.

When people try to say technology will not replace their jobs, they often fall back on the fact that technology won't be able to do 100% of their job. They don't realize how disruptive technology that even just does 20% of their job could be, especially when funding constraints make it more likely to cut personnel rather than find other work for them to do.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's very Brave New World.

Completely different, but similar results. One is government controlled, while the later is human desire controlled.

Sounds like Hugo Gernsback's "teleducation"

[stevebyan]

Hugo Gernsback wrote an editorial advocating a similar idea in the May 1956 issue of his "Radio-Electronics" magazine as a solution to the educational needs of the USA to produce enough technicians and engineers to defeat the Soviets in the technological arms race. See page 33 in the PDF scan of that issue at AmericanRadioHistory.com.
"THE ELEMENTS OF TELEDUCATION"
"... The threat to our future can be met ..."
(snip)

"In short, without going into details, this is the way the proposed system, outlined by the writer in 1945, works:

"From a central point or points the best technical and science teachers in the land instruct via large wall projection color television AA the classes in the land. If the instructor of the moment is at Yale, the rest of the country is connected to that point. The next lecture may come from MIT in Massachusetts, from Caltech in California or from any other point because all institutions of learning are tied in to the national teleducation closed-circuit hookup. Such lectures will not be merely talk. The teacher - be he a physics, chemical, electrical or electronics professor - will instruct directly from the laboratory all important experiments and make clear any technical point by actual physical demonstration."

Re:Sounds like Hugo Gernsback's "teleducation"

[gweihir]

Which failed. All attempts using more modern technology have also failed. I can conclude conclude that some group of educators is insane: They are trying the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome. It may also be a factor, that the "Peter principle" was discovered in the educational field and only latter found to apply elsewhere as well.

$15 HR need masters WTF?

[Joe_Dragon]

The student loans will be so high that mc'ds is a better job.

Recipe for failure

[ortholattice]

My step-daughter was literally math-illiterate upon entering college - very poor math SATs, couldn't multiply 1-digit numbers without a calculator, and didn't know that a+b commutes but a-b doesn't. I spent several hours a day 3-4 days a week with her, and through tremendous effort and lots of tears she earned all A's in Calculus 1 and 2 and Statistics. There is simply no way she could have even passed without my help (and a boost of self-motivation by a short stint in the real world earning near minimum wage with no college degree and no future).

Rich people will hire tutors to do the same thing. Poor people can't afford to and rarely have anyone like me around to help. So the rich will get ahead regardless of ability; other than a few exceptionally talented ones, the poor will get further behind, continuing the cycle of failure and poverty.

There is something about individual interaction that can't be duplicated with a computer or projection screen. A 50-to-1 student/teacher ratio with little individual one-on-one instruction is going to make things much worse.

Re:Recipe for failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I know you're not writing to trumpet your success, but: Good job! Way to go on both your parts!

Re:Recipe for failure

[TechCurmudgeon]

And what about the need for people to think independently? Who's view of history and current events will be taught? Where will children learn the skills to create and innovate from a video screen?

Re:Recipe for failure

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but inter-generational poverty is no where as certain as you try to make it seem. There are several studies out there that show about a 30% chance that a child who grows up in a bottom quartile family will end up in the bottom quartile itself. While that is a 5% higher chance than should be average that is no where near everyone but a talented few.

Re:Recipe for failure

[Anonymous Coward]

My step-daughter was literally math-illiterate upon entering college - very poor math SATs, couldn't multiply 1-digit numbers without a calculator, and didn't know that a+b commutes but a-b doesn't. I spent several hours a day 3-4 days a week with her, and through tremendous effort and lots of tears she earned all A's in Calculus 1 and 2 and Statistics. There is simply no way she could have even passed without my help (and a boost of self-motivation by a short stint in the real world earning near minimum wage with no college degree and no future).

That's a great story and you sound like you did right by your kid. The part I'm wondering about is how she got to that point in the first place... and it's hard for me to imagine her taking statistics in high school unless she was aiming for it. ...so what happened in high school that she was able to graduate? Was she just not motivated during class until she got out into the real world? Were her teachers so terrible at explaining the coursework and subject that she couldn't get it? Things like No Child Left Behind were passed because kids were graduating high school without being able to even READ, let alone not be able to multiply single digit numbers.

Any of those don't back up having to have a person sitting there with her... the government can't solve motivation, and sometimes parents can't either. However, maybe better-individualized coursework based on how her brain works over time would, and that's much more likely to be virtual than testing kids to see how they work and THEN having a superstar fly in to tutor them individually in the classroom.

Re:Recipe for failure

[Anonymous Coward]

My daughter was heading that way in Middle school - luckily I could afford to sign her up with Kumon tutoring. She's still no math whiz, but she has the basics.
There are a lot of kids who won't get that second chance.

Re:Recipe for failure

[Anonymous Coward]

You're actually a bit wrong.
a-b = a+(-b) = -b+a
So its not that a-b doesn't commute, only people are bad with shorthand devices.
Least thats how i think of it.

Re:Recipe for failure

[volmtech]

I guess you were lucky, your step daughter could do the work. My learning disabled daughter is unable to do math. Two years of my tutoring resulted in a lot of tear stained failed tests. While very intelligent with As and Bs in all her other classes she would be denied a diploma without passing the FCAT. Fortunately Florida allows remedial students unlimited attempts to pass each section of the test. A student with a good memory can eventually get a passing grade. She then went to a trade school and has a good job.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

O wonder!
How many godly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

The size of the screen doesn't matter, as long as you understand that we have always been at war with EastAsia, 2+2=5, and that war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength. Your chocolate ration is being increased from 30g/month to 20g/month, all hail big brother.

Terrible Then Too

[Etherwalk]

God save us from educational reform. We have had 30 years of it and things only get worse and worse. Less relevant course work, too many tests, talent driven out of the system, destruction of decent school lunches, no PE, etc. All that is left is sports and tests. The last 30 years has been an exercise in how to destroy an educational system.

There's a story that Mayor Koch in New York had an old Lady stop him and say, "Mayor, make it how it used to be." And he said, "Lady, it was never like that."

Educational reform is the only thing we have to try to make the system better, and it's not good enough right now. Some of the time--maybe even most of the time--it is going to be the wrong reform. And then you try something else.

School was terribly done 30 years ago. It's terrible today. Not only because we keep getting the material wrong, but because we haven't BEGUN to figure out the right social dynamics yet, at least as a society.

A teacher *cannot* have absolute control of their classroom, or else abusive teachers will abuse the kids and hurt their development. A teacher *needs* very strong support from their administration and the ability to have an effective response to troublemaking, or they will be unable to run an effective classroom. An administration needs to be afraid enough of being sued that they don't do anything crazy, but willing enough to be sued that they can fail a child, discipline a child, or even put a child to work mopping a floor--so long as they do it respectfully and in order to further the child's social and academic development. A school should be able to assign chores just like a parent can. But you need good oversight, so kids aren't picked on. A teacher who picks on kids all the time needs to be fired. The *Union* should work to fire them. The union should care enough about the kids and their own profession that it wants to keep bad teachers from working.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Fire_Wraith]

And yet, a significant number of the 'reformers' aren't really looking to fix the system, so much as privatize large chunks and turn a profit. Some states have gone this route, and at least in Florida there was some serious abuse of it by shady fly-by-night sorts. Even if it wasn't for that, adding a profit motive is not a panacea - sometimes it's merely someone who smells money to be had by getting government funding.

The lure of it is the contrast to union practices. Nobody wants bad or abusive teachers instructing their children, right? And unfortunately union/government jobs do tend to make it much harder to fire someone bad as well as someone undeserving. So we go to private/contracted work, whether the government pays a company to run the school, or puts in some sort of voucher program you can use to attend private school. In my experience though, the improvement is marginal at best. Yes, you can fire people faster, but at the same time, how many for profit companies do you see trying to spend what it takes to get the best workers, even at the cost of cutting their profits, and how many want the cheapest minimum standard they can find? Do they want a skilled coder with years of experience, and salary expectations to match, or do they want someone right out of school with basic knowledge of Java/Python/whatever that they can hire for half the cost? Make no mistake, when you introduce a profit motive, someone wants to profit.

So really, we'd be better served making it easier to hire/fire. My own experience with though is that the problem isn't as much with the protections themselves, as the fact that the administrators don't want to go to the trouble of documenting things, or only start doing so once things are already way out of hand. I think the parent poster is right, that the most ideal thing would be if the unions actually took the active role in trying to weed out the bad ones. Unfortunately that seems to have never been part of union culture in the US the way it has been in some other countries. We can debate why that is (I think it arises from the more adversarial relationship between management and union, whereas in many European/Asian countries the two often work very closely together), but regardless I'm not sure it's easily changed.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Wycliffe]

  In my experience though, the improvement is marginal at best. Yes, you can fire people faster, but at the same time, how many for profit companies do you see trying to spend what it takes to get the best workers, even at the cost of cutting their profits, and how many want the cheapest minimum standard they can find?

With sufficient competition (and sufficient money in the vouchers), you should eventually see the schools that cut corners get run out of
business by the schools that hire quality teachers. I would like to see a point where private schools are competing for the vouchers to the
point where they are bragging about the quality of the teachers, the quality of their programs, etc... My town of 80,000 is small enough
that you can drive from one end to the other in about 20 minutes but is big enough that it has about a dozen grade schools. If these dozen
grade schools were completely released from regulation and were allowed to compete for students, they would all eventually take different
approaches. Some of the crappy ones would go under and a few new ones would probably start up but I would like to see what would happen
if 12 schools all had to put their best foot forward to attract students.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[turbidostato]

"With sufficient competition (and sufficient money in the vouchers), you should eventually see the schools that cut corners get run out of
business by the schools that hire quality teachers."

For this to happen you'd need offer to vastly outgrow demand, which is not going to happen, neither on public nor -much less, on private money.

No, what you'll get is the rich going to good schools and the poors to bad ones. Hey! isn't this already hapening? No: the poors' ones will be even worse than today since more money will be syphoned out to the riches'.

"I would like to see what would happen if 12 schools all had to put their best foot forward to attract students."

That can never happen on geographically bound businesses. Do you have 12 different ISPs lying down fiber to serve your home now? why do you expect 12 corps building schools within half an hour from your home, then?

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Anonymous Coward]

uhh, bullshit. What's happening now is that a corrupt union has found a way to get themselves an unending supply of money from the taxman. Education is an incidental byproduct. That's why my kids are going to a charter school in spite of being a card carrying CEA member.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Anomalyst]

The union should care enough about the kids and their own profession that it wants to keep bad teachers from working.

will never happen, non-working/fired teachers dont pay dues and collecting dues and expanding the flock of payers is the fundament of a union.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[reve_etrange]

you should eventually see the schools that cut corners get run out of business

It will be too late, because of a "Gresham's dynamic" in which the good schools will have been run out of business by the cost-cutting ones.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats with the random line breaks, idiot?

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Fire_Wraith]

You're overestimating churn and underestimating the cost of entry into the market. How much do you think it costs to build a really good school from the ground up? A decent building even by itself isn't cheap, let alone one with proper facilities to handle lots of children, and that's not even getting into things like arts/music, nevermind basics like textbooks, computers, etc. In a market with highly static/inelastic demand, what do you think happens? Am I, the bank/wall street/venture capitalist going to lend money to someone to start one from the ground up when they might just tank massively?

Even if we assume that there's still a roughly commensurate supply simply by privatizing the existing schools in an area, who chooses who goes where? If all vouchers are equal, you don't have any price signaling, just quotas and waiting lists for the "best" schools (or possibly the most convenient), and the people who are stuck outside are screwed. And if you allow people to pay extra, well, you've just guaranteed that anyone who can't pay is going to end up with kids in bad/failing schools, at which point why did we do this again?

Re:Terrible Then Too

[FlyHelicopters]

With sufficient competition (and sufficient money in the vouchers), you should eventually see the schools that cut corners get run out of business by the schools that hire quality teachers. I would like to see a point where private schools are competing for the vouchers to the point where they are bragging about the quality of the teachers, the quality of their programs, etc... My town of 80,000 is small enough that you can drive from one end to the other in about 20 minutes but is big enough that it has about a dozen grade schools. If these dozen grade schools were completely released from regulation and were allowed to compete for students, they would all eventually take different
approaches. Some of the crappy ones would go under and a few new ones would probably start up but I would like to see what would happen if 12 schools all had to put their best foot forward to attract students.

Amen, this!

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Jason Levine]

And yet, a significant number of the 'reformers' aren't really looking to fix the system, so much as privatize large chunks and turn a profit.

We're going through this in NY right now. Our governor (and his state Senate buddies who tagged along for fear of political reprisal) passed a budget with "educational reform" that includes high stakes tests which count for 50% of a teacher's evaluation. If a teacher's students improve by the amount State Ed mandates two or three years in a row, they can be booted out - no taking into account that the teacher's kids might be special education students with severe challenges or honors students with little room to "improve" on the test or even that some people just don't test well. Add in that the tests are geared to MAKE students fail (leaked questions showed college level reading material on the 6th grade test) and statements from the governor blaming teachers left and right, and it's clear he's gunning for the teachers. (The teachers' union didn't support him in the last election. Political reprisal.)

If a school doesn't do well, they can also be put into receivership and have a charter school take over. Our governor has consistently knocked public schools and praised charters. It's no secret that he'd love to close all public schools and replace them all with charter schools. Now he has a plan in place to do just that.

My oldest son has refused the tests for the third year in a row and this year he was joined by about 200,000 (possibly more) other kids. The governor even admitted that these tests don't mean anything for the kids but they should take them "for practice." Until the tests are independently evaluated and actually return useful data, I'm not going to subject my son to them and stress him out just to help the governor target people who didn't support him politically.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Jason Levine]

In NY we have charter schools to "compete" with public schools. They draw funds from public school coffers leaving public schools with less money. They also get to accept or reject any student so all low performing or special needs students get booted to the public schools. You wind up with low funded public schools struggling to deal with tons of low performing/special needs students while the charter schools seem to be doing really well. This leads the politicians to call for more charter schools and less public schools. Repeat as the kids who need the most help continuously get less and less.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Wycliffe]

No, what you'll get is the rich going to good schools and the poors to bad ones. Hey! isn't this already hapening? No: the poors' ones will be even worse than today since more money will be syphoned out to the riches'.

That's the reason that one stipulation of receiving voucher money should be no other outside money.
Of course, in order for that to work you would probably have to greatly increase the current amount
that schools get.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[pnutjam]

So basically, F*#&! all the kids for the next decade. After that things might have stabilized, bu there will still be the occasional lost class, due to bad instruction that isn't picked up until after the product has been delivered.

Your approach is like buying every car you will ever drive at one time, site unseen, from the best bidder. Then garaging them and assuming they will start in 5, 7, 15 years. You wouldn't do that, why would you do that to kids.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot if you think charter schools are better than public schools.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[jjbenz]

You are correct Jason, the same crap is going on in Wisconsin. We've had several of these charter schools take government money, shut their doors and disappear into the night. The studies they've done show the charter school kids don't do any better than the public school kids. Certain people in government just want to privatize the schools and make a buck, they don't care about the kids.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Anonymous Coward]

Your premise makes no sense. If a teacher is fired they will be replaced and the number of union members stays the same.

Re:Terrible Then Too

[Etherwalk]

You are an idiot if you think charter schools are better than public schools.

Sir, given the eloquence of your argument I think some time in either might be of help to you.

Teach homosexuality in schools

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest addition to the Liberal curriculum is introduction and recruiting sessions.

They said the same thing of film

[aaarrrgggh]

No different than when the "talkie" was expected to revolutionize education. The thing that drives teacher count and pay is the need to adapt the education to individual pupils.

Moreover, if the Tech doesn't have any child skills, it will likely be a 1:20 ratio, and you are right back at $1/student hour just for the tech.

Change needs to happen, but the most economical solution is parent involvement.

Recorded, broadcast lessons? No way.

[Kohath]

No one will listen to recorded, broadcast lessons. They want a live teacher giving a lecture.

They tried that with sports and no one watches sports broadcasts. Everyone goes to a local game instead, even though the local performances aren't as good as the best athletes in the world.

They tried that with dramatic performances, and no one watches movies. Everyone would rather go to a community theater performance.

They tried that with music, and no one listens to pre-recorded music. Everyone would rather listen to a live performance.

Recorded content and broadcasting are a fad.

Still nonsense

[gweihir]

This has been "envisioned" time and again for at least half a century. It always fails. Sure, most teachers are not really good, but as it turns out, they are a lot better than a good one on a TV screen. Distance education works only for those that can also self-learn. That experience has been made by distance educators time and again, whether snail-mail and paper, email, TV, videos or interactive virtual classrooms were used. For most peoples, an educator that is not physically there does not cut it.

This whole thing is only intended to make education a lot cheaper, not better. And it fails at that.

Welcome to the future

[Overzeetop]

We may not have flying cars, but we already have a one-size-fits-all educational system. Mainstreaming, where slower learners and those with reduced cognitive function are added to classrooms (with and without aids, depending on severity) brings up the bottom, and all but the brightest on standardized are discouraged from entering "gifted and talented" programs. Teaching is aimed at producing the maximum number of passing grades on standardized tests.

The top and bottom 2% are weeded out - charter schools or G/T at the top, traditional special ed for those who will never achieve. The other 96% are lumped together and the teacher is salary-bound to make as many of them pass as possible. That means standardized worksheets and test prep pretty much from day one. The result? The bottom 10%, which would require extraordinary help to pass, are dropped as a waste of effort, the next 30% get most of the attention to try and get them to make the grade, and the rest of the class pretty much floats for the year with little or no real instruction because they learn well enough from the books and videos to get a passing grade. Anyone in the top 30 percentile points is bored to tears.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Some teachers put in lots of extra time and effort, others are the truly gifted teachers who weave engaging lesson plans and get the kids interested enough to retain the knowledge and pass the tests without crazy drilling. But, for the most part, when your job depends on hitting a number and there's no accounting for whether you have the smart class or the dumb class you're going to get a rhythm down and stick to it. At least if the test scored come back poor, you can open you planner and show all the drills and fact sheets you went over showing you covered the material.

It's pretty damned sad.

(Oh, and as for private schools...have you seen the cost? It's unlikely a family with 2 children who aren't in the top 10% of wage earners are going to be able to afford 12 years of private education. The opportunity is there, but the consumers to support it are pretty thin.)

Re:Welcome to the future

[Jason Levine]

We looked into a private school for our kids. It would have cost $16,000 per child per year. They offered financial assistance, but we were warned that this requires the school to look into all of your finances and gives them the right to question all of your financial decisions. Took a vacation last year? Why did you do that when you could have given the school more money? Even with financial assistance, though, we would have stretched our budget to the breaking point with private school.

Re:Welcome to the future

[Anonymous Coward]

We may not have flying cars, but we already have a one-size-fits-all educational system. Mainstreaming, where slower learners and those with reduced cognitive function are added to classrooms (with and without aids, depending on severity) brings up the bottom, and all but the brightest on standardized are discouraged from entering "gifted and talented" programs. Teaching is aimed at producing the maximum number of passing grades on standardized tests.

The top and bottom 2% are weeded out - charter schools or G/T at the top, traditional special ed for those who will never achieve. The other 96% are lumped together and the teacher is salary-bound to make as many of them pass as possible. That means standardized worksheets and test prep pretty much from day one. The result? The bottom 10%, which would require extraordinary help to pass, are dropped as a waste of effort, the next 30% get most of the attention to try and get them to make the grade, and the rest of the class pretty much floats for the year with little or no real instruction because they learn well enough from the books and videos to get a passing grade. Anyone in the top 30 percentile points is bored to tears.

What you describe is the result of trying to follow the research showing mainstreaming is effective for more students with adhering to older methods of teaching that rely on lecture and are known as teacher centered. I used to think exactly like you because I was bored to tears in a series of teach to the middle (or bottom) classes. But research and standards based teaching methods using tasks at a higher cognitive level with more emphasis on student thought and less on the teacher talking are more effective at challenging all students. Differentiation, or the practice of providing a different lesson or different learning path for students of varying background knowledge or ability or interest, is not new, but many current teachers have not been trained enough on it and it is extremely difficult to do in a teacher centered, lecture based classroom.

So the biggest failure of this FA and summary is the assumption that better lecture will improve teaching and learning. It won't, at least not for many students.

Re:Welcome to the future

[Overzeetop]

It's nuts. We don't have many private school options near us (and zero that aren't in some way religious based), so we moved to one of the best districts/strands in the public school system and we actively participate. It's not a panacea - there are still good and bad teachers - but where they are weak, we supplement. I'm always amazed at how many parents have no idea what their kids are doing in school, and more amazed at how few even care.

Re:Welcome to the future

[Jason Levine]

My wife is a teacher by trade (though currently not in a classroom). She's seen this first hand. Both parents who didn't care that their kid was barely scraping a D- and parents who insisted that their kid HAD to get an A because it was a private school and they were PAYING for the A. (Yes, she got that argument from parents.)

When it comes to our kids, my wife's teacher background comes in handy. She knows educational terms and procedures that I wouldn't have a clue about. Meanwhile, my strong math/science background means I'm able to make sense of the Common Core math questions that leave my kids and wife stumped. (She's no slouch in Math. It's just that these questions are phrased so weirdly that it's almost like they're TRYING to be confusing for the kids.) Her reading teacher background helps with the ELA assignments.

We believe that we're partners with our kids' teachers. We're not there to overrule the teachers. Nor should the teachers just ignore us out of hand. (We had that happen with a few teachers who ignored our advice when it came to our oldest with special needs - it ended badly.) When we work together, our kids do better in school, learn more with less fuss, and everyone wins.

Every tech revolution...

[jim_deane]

Every technical revolution in education since Edison's wax cylinder phonograph or prior has been prophesied to replace classroom teachers.

A brief list:
The Gutenberg press.
Edison's phonograph.
Classes by mail.
Voice radio.
Television.
Two way video.
Multi user computer terminals.
Microcomputers.
Multimedia software.
The internet.

This too will become a minor fad, blossom, fade, and find a very minor place in the ongoing art of education.

Re:Every tech revolution...

[That_Dan_Guy]

You watched this video, didn't you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I totally agree.

Re:Every tech revolution...

[radl33t]

haven't all of these things replaced vast amounts of teacher student interaction?

Re:Every tech revolution...

[david_thornley]

Don't forget the teaching machines of the 50s and 60s, which were backed by the best and latest psychology (behaviorism, at that time). They were failures.

Has nothing to do with re-invention

[Overzeetop]

It has everything to do with dollars. Top private schools can spend $30k a student on teachers and amenities. Public schools have 1/3 of that, and the most challenging students to deal with.

The 1% and the educational experts know the same thing: Education is an intensive, hands-on process which is by its very nature an expensive endeavor. They know that it's more efficient if you can weed out poor educational candidates before they enroll. They know that the educational success of a student is highly correlated to the involvement of the parents in the process.

Public education isn't looking for a better way to educate people. That's easy. What they're looking for is a way to educate the worst learners with the least parental support using 1/3 of the money that top-notch education would cost. Is it any surprise that they're going this direction?

Re:Has nothing to do with re-invention

[Anonymous Coward]

You've hit the nail on the head. If you care about your children's education, and have the money, you'd be crazy to use public education when there are many many fantastic private schools that don't have to cater to kids from unsupportive families.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

Kindergarten is NOT much about learning. There is very little in there that you learn that your parents couldnt teach you better.

Kindergarten and preschool is about learning how to go to school. How to behave and be quite during the lesson. How to ask questions. How to get along with other people. The actual lessons are nothing more than what you can learn by watching a couple of hours of sesame street every day.

First grade is where things really start up.

You are not going to fire up the imagination of some 5 year old to be a middle manager and work on power point slides... ;)

What about

[Anonymous Coward]

... "super-teachers" ...

What about super-learning; technically, a memorization-enhancement environment? I've heard a few schools run a pilot program, mostly for foreign-language classes, but nothing permanent. As the industrialized world becomes smaller, children need to more aware of its history and current status. That means more compressed lessons, like university, or more efficient learning.

... less pay, and a drastic decrease in the number of educators ...

Childcare and education is devalued even further. Yet this is meant to make learning better.

... introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country's best teachers ...

Better teachers, yay. But the current system doesn't identify or promoter superior pedagogy so what, besides union-busting, needs to be done?

... among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world ...

You admit you don't have that now. So who is going to build these lessons and who is going to pay for that work? Learning is boring; staring at the printed word and learning is really boring. Since every child has different emotional and intellectual responses, what is most efficient for one student is worthless for another: This has been a known problem in the classroom for a long time. Ideally, multiple lesson plans will be created for each lesson, so a student can follow the most agreeable plan. This still doesn't deal with the child having an emotional crisis or being distracted by some other event.

... millions of dollars will be saved in reduced teacher salaries ...

I foresee all saved wages allowing administrators and superintendents to receive a large pay-rise.

... the 'techs' can specialize in classroom management ...

We have a word for those people who attempt to pound basic knowledge into the heads of brow-beaten and hormonal teens: Teachers. It doesn't take a lot of math skill to teach calculus or trigonometry. The main job of the teacher is dealing with surly children who can't do what they want and must then leave the classroom and return to oppressive family/personal/schoolyard dramas.

In summary:
  So super-teachers and 'techs': This is just a re-vamp of teachers and teaching assistants: Minus the unions (yay), the individual attention (boo) and a almost rewarding wage (boo). This visionary wants to re-structure the institutions of education so the burden of education can be shifted to new, shiny technology. While he realizes why technology is inefficient, he wants to conflate technology and data to reach world-class education. I don't believe it is so simple.

I got this far into the article...

[Pollux]

I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation’s most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. ...And I stopped. This guy doesn't get it.

You could have the most engaging, informative lesson on the face of the planet, and kids may still not listen to it. Maybe they didn't get much sleep last night. Perhaps they ate at McDonalds for breakfast and have a sugar rush. Sometimes they feel depressed, because they just broke up with their significant other. Maybe the topic is about mathematics, a subject that's just difficult to understand. There's a possibility the student is dyslexic. And this is not even the tip of the iceberg.

Generally, humans need inspiration, and they are best inspired by other humans, education no exception. There is a small subset of students who possess enough initiative and tenacity that, even at a young age, they find success by their own merits. But the majority of students face challenges that interfere with their motivation to learn. They need to be coached through these challenges, actions requiring insight into the human psyche, something computers have yet to achieve.

To draw a parallel, do we yet see any high school sports teams being coached by a computer? Shouldn't a computer be better equipped to analyze plays, to determine strengths and weaknesses of players, and to determine strategies that have the greatest probability of success? What does the coach have that the computer doesn't?

Nice theory but...

[erp_consultant]

never going to fly. Why? Because it sounds too much like everyone gets the same quality of education in that scenario. Rich and upper middle class families don't want that. Why? Because they paid lots of money to buy a home in a neighborhood with other wealthy home owners. High value homes pay higher property tax and more property tax means more money for schools. Which means that Jr. gets an unfair advantage (one of many, but that's another issue) over kids in less wealthy families. And the folks with money are going to do everything they can to keep it that way. End of story.

Re:edu-babble

[turbidostato]

"All that is left is sports and tests. The last 30 years has been an exercise in how to destroy an educational system."

What makes you think that wasn't the plan from the very begining?

If you really tried to educate the masses they might start questioning the 'statu quo'.

Already tried and failed

[Anonymous Coward]

NYC has the "school of one" A cpu based program with teacher facilitator. Complete failure. Why? Weak students are weak for the following reasons
          1) Lazy Lazy Lazy. Parents so not stress or support education with no work effort. Parents are lazy or inattentive , child will be also
          2) Lack confidence .
        3) miss many days of school and do not do hw or study
  CPU based programs do not address this. A GOOD teachers main job is to be motivator, coach and structure lessons to the needs of the class in front of them. Bad teachers do none of this. I teach 4 groups each day, the lesson looks and sounds differently for each class. So much so that when one of my students broke his leg and spent the whole day in my class(due to lack of elevator in building) the child was shocked how different the same material could be delivered, my demeanor. With weak classes I am a motivator and cheer leader. With strong classes a task master. I use different tones in my voice to keep children focused and awake. Unless some crazy good AI scans the room to adjust lessons. Most textbook programs are awful due to having to shoot down the middle. We tested an all digital program called digits last year, the engaging lessons got old quick. There is not one size fits all solution . Some students can learn all cpu based with teachers either on location or through skype but most students do poorly because of the above

Says someone protecting his tenure

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, by saying "we'll need fewer, less well trained teachers" he's protecting his position as a senior staff member, with no up and coming smart people trained to possibly replace his arrogant "senior guidance" role".

I know this trick, I've seen it by senior people in the tech industries protecting their little fiefdoms.

I think the difference

[rsilvergun]

that the author is pointing out is that it'll be incredibly profitable to run these sorts of "schools". Sure, they won't work. But who cares so long as the money keeps flowing in. And what alternative will you have? Unless you're rich there won't be any. Sure, some of the /. crowd might realize that's morally wrong, but the rest of America will continue to blame themselves. It's something we do a lot of and goes back to that whole puritanical self flagellation thing that's been buries in our skulls.

Re:I think the difference

[Anonymous Coward]

that the author is pointing out is that it'll be incredibly profitable to run these sorts of "schools".

Will be profitable?

I think you're a bit behind the curve.

Re:I think the difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely!! 2/3 cost savings? brilliant!! Jimmy is a smart kid, he'd figure it out on his own anyways... But it would look bad to say that outright, so lets say he is getting top shelf streaming genius, people will love it! Barry is a troublemaker, getting suspended makes us look bad... Wait!!!! no teacher or interaction means no outbursts and suspensions!!! Better numbers.

Who cares that most "failing schools" also have uninvolved/absent "failing parents"..oops sorry can't say that. Never the parents fault.

Great teachers

[Anonymous Coward]

When I started teaching college calculus at a selective university, my two most inspiring professors said almost exactly the same thing. "Does it matter if your students are there?" Neither of my sections are the same, and in spite of the bullshit, admissions selects to have them all the same except for their surnames and skin color. I can't give the same lecture twice, because my students are different. I can't teach them the same way two days in a row, because they react to the material, to me, to the world around them, and to themselves. Great teachers are all sorts of "ings", but I've learned that one of the most important parts is to read the students and to respond to them. I say read, not listen, because so much communication is non-verbal.

I see more hands on. Less Blackboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Home work should be watch the videos of the subject matter. A bunch a streams with the subject matter explained in many different ways. So you can find which one gets the subject matter to you.

Then class is hands on problem solving, group work and quiz time.

Real research doesn't support your theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Real educational research, unfortuantely, points to the very depressing answer that parents are the problem. A few great teachers can inspire a few students, but by and large, parents are the driving factor, and poverty is merely a measure of it. We pour a shit ton of money into schools, but it just doesn't work.

I can see it now...

[Anonymous Coward]

The kids are gathered around their computer, which are showing the best, most engaging lessons ever made and they are playing with their phones

This idea has failed for 100 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

We have been trying to do this since in invention of the radio and it has *never* worked. I don't expect it to now. Get some perspective from Veritasium.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c

Freak wormhole

[tompaulco]

Must be a freak wormhole. This sounds like 1950s view of the future of education that didn't happen and we look back on and laugh at.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

It can get worse, still. As TFA points out teachers will be fewer in number and more expendable. My takeaway from that is they will be easier to control.

Re:edu-babble

[TarPitt]

If you really tried to educate the masses they might start questioning the 'statu quo'.

The masses *were* starting to question the status quo some 4-50 years ago. Initiatives like this have been very successful in putting a stop to all that questioning. On top of it, the generation doing the questioning is now berated as a bunch of pot smoking hippies.

A few reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

1) The subject material is much harder than middle school. The University has to pay more to get smarter people.
2) The students are somewhat adult, and don't have to be babysit as much.
3) I presumed that some of that money was to get access to the more advanced subject material, smarter teachers, and labs with real equipment.

Expensive colleges, that don't teach well, get bad reputations. A degree from those places could be considered worthless. See Corinthian Colleges. The good universities, try to do well in the rankings. US News and World Report has a famous ranking of Universities in the United States. Also, I paid significantly less than $20,000/year with in state tuition.

Re:edu-babble

[catchblue22]

Sounds like dystopia to me. Something about a bunch of kindergarteners staring at a giant screen seems very 1984.

I think the truly intractable problem is that such a system would centralize control of the educational system. Centralize it right down to every single word that is presented. The true power of the public education system is that it gives teachers a great deal of independence in what they say in the classroom. Imagine a situation when something terrible happens in our democracy. Someone seizes control. The system gets even more perverted than it already is. Then imagine an educational system where children only received "approved" resources. No independent human teacher. Just video and text. If the children don't get information from the media, then they will effectively be blind to reality.

I know this is hypothetical, but I think it demonstrates my point, that independent teachers are an essential buffer against tyranny emerging in our democracy.

Been there, done that: Hemo the Magnificent

[clovis]

His dream has already come true.
I remember seeing the 1957 film "Hemo the Magnificent" 1961, and the experience was exactly as Godsey described it.
The teacher turned on the projector, sat down, and did heaven knows what while we kids sat in the dark watching the flickering screen.
And then the teacher got up and facilitated more learning.

Sea Water!

Re:edu-babble

[thrich81]

From personal experience, I don't know where this educational reform is you are talking about. I went through a good set of public schools in the 70's in a good middle class school system. The Friday night football game was the highlight of the week at high school. Classes were pretty good, the kids that wanted to, got into good colleges. Now, 40 years later, my kids are going through a good set of public schools in a good middle class school system. The Friday night football game is the highlight of the week at high school. The kids that want to are getting into good colleges. Two main differences from my experiences -- my kids seem to be learning more advanced concepts in math and science sooner than I did and the school district doesn't offer Driver's Ed as an elective. I wish that Driver's Ed was an elective, other than that the K-12 education experience seems as good or better than what I got.

Root of failure

[Anonymous Coward]

People like to point fingers, especially when something as important schools are failing our kids

The only thing is, it is not the schools which have failed the students

No, not the teachers either (although some of the teachers shouldn't be there in the first place)

The root failure is the way modern education has been run

We put 20-odd kids inside a room, give them standardized books, putting them through a standardized curriculum and expect all of them to come out to be successful

Kids are different. Some are smarter than others. Some are more active than others.

Some like abstract things such as math / science

Others find beauty in languages, and so on

Furthermore the way a kid learns may not be the same as the way another kid learns

The way we put the kids through the education is like that proverbial doctor who prescribes aspirin to all his patients no matter what kind of illness(es) the patients happen to have

The meaning of Education is to Bring Up , to Train

What exactly are we training our kids? To be a conformist? To follow the leader? To grow up to be a sheeple?

That "English teacher" in TFA, Mr. Michael Godsey, does not even have a clue about education

He doesn't care about his students

He doesn't care if his students are being properly trained

He doesn't care if his students learn anything

All he cares is about how much he gets paid

That is why I say, the root cause of the failure is Education itself --- and as an extension, we ourselves have failed our children

We have stopped educating our children

Instead, we put them through a conveyor belt, and expect them to be molded by the school system

We have forgotten that as parents we are the primary custodians of our children, that the chief job we as parents are to train our children

Oh, I can hear it now ... many moan and bitch about not having time, about how tired they are after coming home from work, and so on, and so forth

Well ... to me it's all nothing but excuses

If we are to bring up our children with excuses it would be better if we have no children

If we are to have children of our own it's our duty to bring them up, to train them, to make sure that they can grow up tapping into their full potentials - no matter which field they decide to be in when they grow up, that they are well equipped to carry out whatever that they do

Re:Root of failure

[TWX]

We have forgotten that as parents we are the primary custodians of our children, that the chief job we as parents are to train our children

This is just about the only truly accurate statement in your post. Quite simply, the body of students in highly performing schools do well because their parents expect them to do well and help them to do well. The parents take time to help their kids learn, and they do not make excuses for poor results.

Unfortunately there's no way to compel the parent to do the right thing. If we want that right thing done, we pay for before-school and after-school programs, and we attempt to steer the kids in the right direction. Unfortunately that is difficult because schools are hampered in the discipline that they're allowed to use, and teachers get disillusioned working in underperforming schools.

I think the solution is to reduce class sizes and to essentially tie teacher pay to a combination of number of free-and-reduced kids in their classes and at the school and performance relative to the pupils' previous years. Basically if you're at a school in a very wealthy neighborhood, you aren't going to make as much money as those schools are no challenge by comparison, but if you're in a school with lots of Title 1 kids, you make more. This encourages veteran teachers to take on the harder schools, but ties incentive pay to the improvements they can make.

Re:Root of failure

[pnutjam]

Unfortunately there's no way to compel the parent to do the right thing.
There is no reason to compel anyone. Take care of basic needs, insure a level playing field, and discourage greed. That will get you 95% there and free up the manpower to assist the final 5%.

Re:Root of failure

[TWX]

Define greed, in the context of education.

There will always be gradation in society. Some people will achieve more than others. Thing of it is, while it's not necessarily fair that family involvement will, on average, allow a student to succeed more than a student without family involvement, it does seem to bear-out as a fact, and it doesn't seem to matter how much the school helps, if the school is putting all in to helping kids, the kids with parental involvement will still, on average, outperform the kids without parental involvement.

This is why I ask about greed. We are all competing with each other. It should be the responsibility of the parent to help their children succeed, but it's also good for all of us as a society if achievement is high across the board. For the context of the family or the individual, competition (which can be interepreted as greed) is good, but for everyone, cooperation is also good. If that competition is widely participated in by children and their families then it actually contributes to cooperation in a sense that the whole is improved.

Parents need to be involved.

Re:Root of failure

[werepants]

Your ideas have decent motivation, but they miss on a number of points:

Tying teacher pay to free-and-reduced kids - sounds great, but the places with lots of poor kids are generally impoverished places with low real estate values, etc - basically a low cost of living. It is cheaper to maintain buildings there, cheaper for staff to live there, etc. The inverse is also true - high-income areas have a high cost of living. On some level you DO need to account for cost of living in staff salaries and school funding. Currently this can get our of control, property-tax school funding means that poor areas get little funding and rich areas get a lot... we need some of that, but we could probably benefit from a more balanced funding structure that made the difference less extreme.

Tying pay to year-over-year improvement: it would be better than measuring against a fixed standard, but the problem I have there is: teachers are not car salesmen. There's a fair amount of research that indicates pay is a poor motivator for creative or intellectual tasks. The suggestion that incentive pay is the answer seems misguided... after all, it's no secret that teachers aren't paid well, so they are a group of people who have already decided to forgo money to take a low-paying but presumably fulfilling career. Why then would we think that the fundamental problem with education is that we don't have incentive pay?

The real problem is that our teachers aren't well trained, our methods aren't based on real research, and the pay as it exists mean that many teachers have far better options elsewhere. It isn't that they need annual bonuses for motivation - it's that a 2x pay differential eventually draws many people away.
 
Finland has had tremendous success with this basic approach - create rigorous teaching programs (the current ones just measure your capacity for BS and busywork), and pay the people who complete these rigorous programs a competitive base salary. This doesn't have to cost much more, because if you do it right (like Finland) you need fewer contact hours as well so you need fewer teachers. You also need patience, though... you can't reform an institution as lumbering and disjointed as U.S. education in a year, or presidential term, or maybe even two. It has taken us decades to get into this mess, it will take decades to get out of it. Which is why nothing will ever get fixed, because the public prefers fad policies that overpromise and underdeliver.

Re:Root of failure

[pnutjam]

My greed point was to address parental involvement. There are many parents too busy to engage with their children because they are at a subsistence level and they can't survive without multiple jobs. (basic needs/level playing field).
There are also many parents who neglect their children because they are greedy and they have plenty, but want more (fictionalized example).

Re:Root of failure

[TWX]

My state collects the property taxes for the school districts, and then budgets that money on a per-student basis to the enrolled schools and districts. School districts are political subdivisions of the state in this case. They are able to raise bonds if the populace in their boundaries passes them, but the bulk of their funding is derived from the state.

Also in my state, the poorest schools are usually the those with the least experienced teachers. Teachers make effort to get out of the poor schools and into the wealthy ones and it's seen as a career path improvement. The wealthy schools do not require as much off-hours involvement and the teachers are under far less stress than at the poor schools, as they have less disciplinary issues to deal with. They're almost assured of being a, "meets expectations," or, "exceeds expectations," teacher at those schools too, without effort.

That's why I want to tie teacher salaries, in part, to the difficulty of the campus. Teachers start out in easy schools, the wealthy schools, but eventually reach a pay ceiling if they remain there. Start them out easy, then move to a campus with say, 40% free and reduced lunch. Increase the pay ceiling, so teachers can earn more in that harder environment. Eventually move them to a school with 80% free and reduced lunch, and make the upper limit on pay even higher. In any event, to get the higher pay, the teacher needs to demonstrate performance in these environments. If they can't demonstrate that then they either don't advance or they get to try a different school in the same tier, and if they still can't perform then either they drop back to the previous tier or they really ought to consider other changes to their career.

I don't want to sound harsh, but at the same time if I don't perform then I don't get to move up in the organization, and if I really underperform then I cannot expect to retain my job, regardless of how much education or training I've undergone. I don't think that it's unreasonable to expect the same from everyone else. I'm not even saying that the metrics used to measure teachers should apply through the course of a year only, but if a teacher's students consistently underperform year after year then something needs to change. That individual teacher might be teaching the wrong grade, or be teaching the wrong subject, or not relate well to the student demographics at a given campus, but if changes or further training still don't rectify the situation then it's not fair to the students to continue subjecting them to that teacher.

Re:Root of failure

[Anonymous Coward]

discourage greed

Good luck with that...

Re:Root of failure

[werepants]

I'm not against paying teachers in poor districts more (provided you can find a way to pay for it), I'm against paying teachers in wealthy districts less - it's already a challenge to live and work in those areas on a teacher's salary.

As to firing teachers that consistently show they can't produce results, sure. That already happens the vast majority of the time. Fundamentally, though, you are operating under the assumption that motivation is the problem - that we need more consequences, and more rewards to make teachers try harder.

Here's the thing: a 10% bonus on 30k isn't going to make the difference between success and failure for a teacher who is already putting in 70 hours a week. You can't get that kind of effort out of people for that kind of money. And, a teacher who is content to do a mediocre job at 40 hours a week isn't going to kick it up to 70 (it really does take that much time) in order to get a small pay bump.

Our problem isn't financial incentives or a lack of consequences for poor scores. Our problem is crappy teacher training, flavor-of-the-month curriculum choices and instructional methods that are entirely unproven, and consistent "brain-drain" where people who have better options (the good ones) leave the field after a few years at most. What you're suggesting is a band-aid to cover up a bruise, where we need surgical intervention to fix deeply broken structure.

Re:Root of failure

[TWX]

Teachers around here make considerably more than $30,000 per year once they've got more that a couple years' experience. The salary ranges can go upwards of $60K without even being a department head. Admittedly it does require the individual to take continuing education, but there are those two and a half summer months available for that, and the teachers have the option of having their salaries paid-out over twelve months instead of over ten and a half.

Also, around here, a matter of a mile can be the difference between a wealthy neighborhood and a poor neighborhood, and there are lots of neighborhoods that fall right in between. Cost of living in this state is fairly low, and most teachers do not live within their school's boundaries, and many don't even live within the school district boundaries. It wouldn't be excessively burdensome to the individual to tie school free and reduced lunch demographics to teacher 'hazard pay' or bonuses, and a lack of those conditions to a lack of enhanced pay. There are literally dozens of elementary school and numerous junior high and high schools (almost a hundred sites in total) for staff to work at; those that want it easy can be paid less and still have a decent living, and those that want more can work in the more challenging environments.

I don't deny that this approach won't work everywhere, but I think it would work around here.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

As a grade-school student from the 50s, I can assure you that "educational reform" has been failing for 60 years, not 30.

There's an old joke...

[Anonymous Coward]

... about an engineering professor that gave the same test questions for 20 years. Another professor asked why he wasn't concerned about the students cheating by using last year's paper. The professor said: "While the questions remain the same, the answers always change." To point out the obvious - knowledge changes. While there may be super classes as the OP poses, I doubt terribly it will come to pass quite this way.

This is already happening.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

This is already happening. Just look around your local state for "tuition-free online public school" (often also a "charter" school) and you will find this model already in use.

At a national and state level, government wonks are also pushing this model. Look up "common core" and note how well the OP's concept of a (centralized national) "curriculum facilitator" fits vs. the old concept of a (decentralized and local) "content expert."

15 an hour to deal with children?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, if the economy's gotten that bad that even taking care of 30-50 children can net you at best 15 an hour. The only people that love kids THAT much tend to belong in jail!

But hopefully things won't devolve to that point.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

Pepsi?

This English Teacher should focus on History

[zkiwi34]

This has all been tried and failed before. But they'd have known that if they learnt from history. I guess he needs a History "super teacher" session or few.

It's almost as bad as the "everyone can learn [insert insanely difficult subject area here]" with the best teachers and all that of course, and no particular requirement for aptitude or engagement by the student.

As for me, the most I ever expect from a teacher is to be average over time.

He seemed more concened about his job then my kid.

[raque]

As a father with a daughter studying to be an English teacher this concerns me a lot. There are really two arguments here that are intertwined. One is what is the best way to teach children, the other is what is the best way for teachers to keep their jobs. The expectation is that you get the later by achieving the former. The linkage between these is the argument, but unless it is made specific I don't think this discussion can progress. Right now it is not specific. I want the best way to teach my kids. The teachers job is his/her own problem.

TOA didn't make clear what the author thought, just that he was very worried about his job. I think he shouldn't have been so concerned. The great online colleges are failing faster and faster. The University of Phoenix just reported that it has lost half of its students.They also report that students learn less and remember less. I've tried a number of these going back to a programming school offered by Metrowerks when they still made Mac Programming environments. They never worked for me.

Another issue not discussed is what about disabilities? Any variation from the norm may be disastrous.

Still I think he is right in one way, it will allow for pressure to reduce the pay of teacher and reduce their numbers. We have to remember profit is the difference between the cost and the sale price. If schools with big screen cost half has much, many will call for them even if they only do two thirds as well. And, this won't effect the well off anyway.

Teachers

[tquasar]

I had great teachers who were smart and motivated. Jack Munson should have been working at a university, not a high school. http://www.helixcharter.net/

Bandar Bola

[Anonymous Coward]

I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough. Marissa Mayer Bandar Bola
 

Re:Recorded, broadcast lessons? No way.

[serviscope_minor]

Right because there's complete equivalence between fans of a genre actively seeking entertainment and a bunch of kids who have no choice being sat down and told to watch a broadcast.

Broadcast based teaching has been tried time and time again since the invention of movies with sound, pretty much. It's tanked completely every single time.

We have that today

[Registered Coward v2]

Except the super teacher is called the professor and the tech is a graduate teaching assistant whoekes less than $15/hour amd whose main qualifiction is a lack of proficiency in English.

Costs don't scale for education like that

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why anyone would want to drop teacher's salaries. What's more difficult to do?
1. Explain, encourage, inspire 24 children (some with zero patience, some who grew up on TV and are easily distracted, some with learning disabilities, and some constantly testing boundaries and disrupting class because their parents didn't raise them right, or they preexisting conditions) to learn something hard like science? Understand each child's learning strengths and switch methods and analogies until the whole class gets it.
2. Measure/cut/join pipes to hold water without leakage?

If you answered #2 - you are either a teacher who has zero mechanical ability whatsoever, or, you are a fool.

Technology has not gotten rid of plumbers, or even enabled many of us to do major plumbing repairs, or want to. Why on earth would you expect a teacher's job, which IMHO is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder, to go away? Or be worth $15/hour? Would you take that kind of pay for the pain mentioned?

The 6 basic needs of a free society are: food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, and justice.

Clothing is the only item that could possibly be cheap because it is neither time sensitive nor perishable. Proper (healthy) food isn't cheap. If shelter were cheap there would not be a homeless problem.

Trying to deliver the higher 3 (education, medical care and justice) is even more expensive. Outsourcing them or delivering them by remote would be very unwise. Would you like to outsource the job of someone to chase down the bad guys? Or outsource your surgery? Good doctors are BUSY and don't have enough time to deal with local demand - how on earth are they going to have time to deal with a case across the country or across the planet, even with awesome tech?

Finally, for teaching - you want to address learning issues immediately - INTERACTIVELY. Perhaps AI will one day be smart enough to do that - but by that point, these kinds of postings will be pointless. Jobs will be pointless and pretty much cease to exist. As long as there is an economy based on employment, there will be high demand for good teachers - which means high salaries.

My Rant

[Anonymous Coward]

I have ranted about the loss of teachers for a couple of years. But the article does not mention my second point. I think the schools themselves will tend to become quite rare and i also expect some social chaos as a result. A solid family can provide a computer centered education at home. Lesser families, single parents, both parents employed, types of families will struggle to regulate their children without someone at home to keep them on the PCs. But better off families will not want to shell out tax dollars for schools when schools are essentially for the lower class folks.

Hmm, OK

[cascadingstylesheet]

I know virtual is cheaper, but since a little social revolution in the 1970s, how exactly is everything going to be virtual? You'll still need buildings and someone to supervise the kids.

Ah, OK, finally read the fine article. That is what he's saying.

So let me see if I understand the current beliefs of the trendoids. Homeschooling is evil, but $15/hr techs can supervise 50+ kids they have no personal stake in, and facilitate all learning from YouTube. Got it.

Re:edu-babble

[TheRaven64]

Really? Wikipedia tells me that kindergarten in the USA means up to age 6. By that time, I had been taught to read, write and do arithmetic (though I sucked at long division and found long multiplication hard until I was taught a third method a few years later). My handwriting is not much better now than it was then, though it did improve a bit in the middle as a teenager when I was writing on a regular basis.

Baby sitters

[Anonymous Coward]

Who will baby sit the children when Mom and Dad are at work? I can see a possibility for this in 9-12 grades, but this will never fly for real people.

Re:King Frosty the first

[RavenLrD20k]

I know this is an FP troll...but it may not be as off topic to the summary as people, even the troll him/her self, may think (regardless of the horrible grammar). The dipshit spouting this dream is advocating a type of Rockstar Teacher model. That's too much power for one person to have. "The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world." The critical point of having multiple teachers of multiple backgrounds educating children through their lives is so that the child is (theoretically) not exposed to a single point of view in their development. Having this singular person pushing a singular agenda over the minds of millions of children at a time is begging for Oceania to become a reality. In effect, the teacher on the thousands of big screens will be effectively telling millions of children: "Kneel my peasants. I am the King!"

Who decides what is "super"

[Roger W Moore]

Those roles can't be done by some national "super teacher."

The other problem is who decides the criteria for being "super"? Different people find different teachers effective. For example I know that Feynman was regarded by most as a "super teacher" but I hated his books and found his explanations needlessly complicated and far more confusing than most other textbooks. In short I found him a terrible teacher. I realize I'm in the minority with that but the point is that not everyone will agree on who a super teacher is because different people learn differently. This is why you need to learn from a variety of teachers and not just the most popular.

Re:Who decides what is "super"

[pnutjam]

Excellent point.

As a teacher

[Crookdotter]

Even the summary wanted to make me puke. Until we get strong AI, technology is not the solution to 'teaching'. As if there needs to be a solution - change the teacher:pupil ratio and set it at 1:10 max. Then you'll see real change.

Re:King Frosty the first

[Hognoxious]

If it please you, Sire, how would you like us to spell "kneel"?

Re:edu-babble

[naris]

I beg to differ. My daughter has learned a great deal so far in her Kindergarten class including reading & basic math (numbers & addition) and her communications skills have greatly improved. She most definitely would not of learned that solely by watching Sesame Street.

Re:edu-babble

[naris]

Most public schools are having to eliminate sports programs due to budget cuts...

Charlotte Iserbyt warned of this decades ago

[Anonymous Coward]

She was the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first term of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. She discovered a plan to deliberately dumb down the American education system and move towards exactly this type of training (instead of education). She wrote a book about it called "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America".

IMO there needs to be an adult in every classroom who is respected by the kids, and I quite enjoyed my teacher in front of the classroom style eduction. Today they talk about it like it's old fashioned, wrong, etc. and want to be so progressive. Yeah, progressive towards 1984.

video?

[spitzig]

How is what he's arguing significantly different from video lectures? We've had VCRs with the ability to replace a classroom like this for a long time. But, other than teachers who would sometimes show a video during his class, videos haven't replaced teachers.

I had a class in college that was broadcast. It wasn't as engaging as in person, even though the lecturer was engaging. There was no opportunity for discussion, though some lectures don't have much opportunity for that, anyway. But, K-12 aren't 200 person lectures. They're much more interactive.

why is there a classroom?

[Anonymous Coward]

why on earth is there this assumption that there will be a group that gets into a building.
At home education has less overhead, less cost, can provide all the same interactions listed in the article and reaches a wider group.
If people want to socialize, there are many other places and opportunities for that , so what is the advantage of getting everyone in the same building?

The wet dream of Bill Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. This post basically says that teachers will be replaced with software made by Bill Gates &co. For the past 5 years it has become increasingly obvious that this is the new cash cow of our so-called "entrepreneurs". The only place where public money has not been completely sucked by smart guys. Of course, the result will be devastating.

Re:The wet dream of Bill Gates

[moeinvt]

I loathe Microsoft, but they would do a lot better job than the government is doing. Heck, I think if you let McDonalds management take over education and treat each public school like a franchise it would be better than it is now.
You can argue about the quality of McDonalds food, but they've managed to create a business model where you can order a Big Mac, fries and a shake almost anywhere and have it taste like the same Big Mac, fries and a shake you get anywhere else. Why can't someone replicate the model so that you can teach kids the same basic skills with a consistent quality?
I'd like to see some REAL entrepreneurs develop an education business whose service was so popular with the customers (parents and students) that the founders did become millionaires and billionaires.

Re:King Frosty the first

[pnutjam]

Yeah, this is a Disney dream, not grounded in any sort of reality. Just like all the Checks are dead people, they don't deal with old people or schools, because checks are rampant in both of those areas.

Schooling is at least half social skills and plopping our kids in front of an engaging video program isn't going to do anything for that. It would also be short sighted to decimate a significant portion of the economy. I see a backlash against administration more likely then a thinning of the number of teachers.

This always works

[Ol Olsoc]

A reduction in pay, less of them, and yet somehow the teachers will be "super teachers" when they are paid like McDonald's employees.

Re:edu-babble

[pnutjam]

The lone voice of reason. Thanks, and I agree.

Re:Recorded, broadcast lessons? No way.

[Anonymous Coward]

They tried that with sports and no one watches sports broadcasts. Everyone goes to a local game instead, even though the local performances aren't as good as the best athletes in the world.

People who are interested in sports watch sports broadcasts. People who are not interested in sports don't watch sports broadcasts. Put people who are not interested in sports in front of a sports broadcast and they do something else than watch it.

They tried that with dramatic performances, and no one watches movies. Everyone would rather go to a community theater performance.

People who are interested in a movie will watch it and people who aren't interested in it won't. Put people who are not interested in the movie in the front of it and they do something else than watch it.

They tried that with music, and no one listens to pre-recorded music. Everyone would rather listen to a live performance.

People listen music that they like. When you play music for people who are not interested in it, they will not pay any attention to it and instead do something else.

No one will listen to recorded, broadcast lessons. They want a live teacher giving a lecture.

Pupils who are interested in the lesson will follow broadcast lessons. Pupils who aren't interested in it do something else than follow it, and they will probably do it loud enough to prevent the interested pupils from following it.

A live teacher may notice when pupils zone out and try to get them back on track. A recording won't do that.

Terminator Teacher

[Dareth]

Terminator: Injured student, you will be terminated.
Jon Connor: You can't just kill injured students.
Terminator: Why?
Jon Connor: You just can't... oh wait is that Bill,, never mind shoot that jerk.

The real question is

[davydagger]

Why can't we simply replace them with robots like we do with strawberry pickers.

I mean after all we are saving them from the terrible teenagers, the grief and stress. Its a job that most people don't want to do. So lets simply replace them with robots.

Computers are not the answer

[Necron69]

If you think one poorly trained 'teacher' is going to be able to control a classroom of 50 elementary students, you're going to have a bad time.

Studies have repeatedly shown that the number one factor in student performance isn't teachers or technology, it is the economic status of the student's families. In Denver Public Schools, where my wife teaches, greater than 50% of the students are non-native English speakers. You really think throwing a bunch of computers at them and taking away the teacher will help?

Necron69

Re:edu-babble

[khallow]

The true power of the public education system is that it gives teachers a great deal of independence in what they say in the classroom.

Unless it doesn't, of course. Let us keep in mind this 1984 experience would still be a public education system. There's already some crazy stuff in public school systems like zero tolerance policies and ideological contamination by political correctness that inhibits a teacher's independence.

Re:Recorded, broadcast lessons? No way.

[Anonymous Coward]

What you say is true, but also an oversimplification. There is much less interaction with the "provider" and the "consumer" in the situation you describe.

Last I heard, improvisational comedy tends to be more popular in person than pre-recorded broadcasts. (Yes, there are popular TV shows about that too... I said more popular.) There are dance parties (and indeed dance performances), live concerts, clubbing, and numerous other things which theoretically could be done pre-recorded but for whatever reason are done in person.

The question is "is teaching one of them?"

The classroom itself is archaic

[Rambo Tribble]

Although it acquired a function of social education and its own social hierarchy, the classroom was primarily created as a nexus for knowledge dissemination. Greek youths would congregate at the foot of such as Plato to learn from a master. As education became more popular, schoolhouses served as focal points where knowledge could be disseminated from a learned individual to a multitude of pupils. At that point, children were sent to school for enrichment, but their labor was still valued and necessary on the family farm. Today, however, schools are warehouses for youth, as yet insufficiently skilled to be constructive in the workforce, yet an inconvenience to their working parents. Amidst this large-scale warehousing, all manner of social malignancy has evolved. Gangs, bullying, drugs are just a few of the problems that taint the academic environment. With the ability of the technology to provide access to instruction without the warehousing and its ills. will the classroom persist?

Idiots like this are destroying education

[Anonymous Coward]

"Each lesson will be among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world"
This assumes all children are identical.
Will you choose the best ice cream flavor next.
After thousands of years of teaching children, they think computerized movies are better. Just because , not research needed.
Look back to the "SRA" learning cars I was subjected to in the 1960's. Just give the kids the Cards and sit back while they learn.
Wrong Then, Wrong now.

Look up Harry Harlow's monkeys

[Anonymous Coward]

This proposal, most simplistic or single minded political/armchair Utopian visions are magical thinking. (Look up magical thinking). This one leaves makes the common mistake that education is opening up the students head and pouring some facts in. It ignores the fact that people, children too, are flesh and blood, with emotions, wants, needs, motivations, worries, joys, concerns...
But then, for decades we've raised children in an environment where giving a kindergarten student a hug by a teacher may be considered child molesting. See Harlow's monkeys. It explains a lot of the level of sociopaths we see today. Explains of lot /. too.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

No auto, woodworking, or cooking (Home Ec) either.

Re:Recorded, broadcast lessons? No way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the choice between live Broadway theater and a movie, those who can afford Broadway want live.

The real issue here is that there is nothing new about having movies in class.

k-12 to be like big college?

[whitroth]

That's really what this sounds like - you go to your lecture class, along with 200-400+ other students, get the lecture from the prof, phat chance to actually sit and talk to him, even in his "office hours", and go to your classes with the t/a.

This works *so* well in huge colleges, let's do it for kids and little kids.

Instead, say, of massively increasing funding for schools, and ensure NO CLASS IN THE COUNTRY in k-12 is over 24 kids.

                    mark

Dumb, dumb dumb dumb...

[Anonymous Coward]

What silliness. Anyone that thinks they can predict where something as fluid as education will be in 20 years is either incredibly arrogant or just plain dumb. From the descriptions of a future classroom he's giving I'd say he's a lot of both. "with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front"? Really? Wow! How science fictiony..It would be like... like ... school in my living room!! Lol.. so dumb.

this following dom mkt share for self driving

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for those self driving cars to really dominate -- which was supposed to happen in the 70's. So figuring a 50 year lag for reality the vision put forth will happen -- just questionable about whether in my lifetime. Just like software development: real time is between "double the estimate" or "bump the unit". So 20 years -> between 40 and 200 years.

masters in teaching ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Masters of Arts in Teaching (though I don't teach). The SINGLE thing I learned from that program is that educational reform and changes don't matter. You can reform and modify all you want and, in the aggregate, it won't lead to long term improvement. On the up side, however, it's very difficult to stop kids from learning so the downside risk of reform is small. Teachers do way more than just present material and take grades; the good ones teach kids how to be better people and that's not even a glint in the eye of distance learning developers. Just because we *can* implement a distance learning dominated curriculum does not mean we should.

Sounds better than current govrnement education.

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously there are some shortcomings with his vision but it sound a lot better than the failing state of government education we are currently forced to fund.

Kamino clone factory

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading this, I'm reminded of the Star Wars E2 scene on Kamino, where hundreds of clone kids staring at their own personal monitor, with probes attached to their heads, being programmed to be good little meat-droids.

Curriculium

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm more curious as to where this magical, amazing, fun, interactive lecture material is going to come from. Judging by the crap produced by Pearson for the iPad in LA School Districts it isn't looking good. I don't know how good Khan Academy material is, but the Computer Based Training (CBT) I've had in my career has been almost uniformly boring.

My realistic vision of what will really happen if we try to do his idea:
There will be a last gen screen in the front of the room where a boring video about a topic will be played. Most of the kids will ignore the video and play on their smart watches/phones. The "tech" won't care if this happens since they aren't his/her kids, the techs aren't that bright, and they're not paying much. After a lot of kids fail the "tech" job will be tied to the kids performance at which point cheating will become rampant.

So where do these super-teacher come from?

[slew]

My guess is that people aren't born super-teachers, but cut there teeth in classroom getting direct feedback on what works and what doesn't. If we eliminate the path to create new super-teachers, how will we ever update these "super-lectures". Even if you believe that these core subjects don't change, you must be forgetting about the ever-present "politically-correct" movement (which will no doubt render recorded versions of lectures obsolete after about 10 years and even likely forcing the super-teacher into oblivion as their clever stock presentation becomes dated).

To pick a more droll example, look at comedians at the top of their game. Nearly all of them still pop-in to dive comedy clubs to test their new material before unrolling it to a more general audience.

If we ever go down this route, we will be dooming ourselves like the companies (or countries) that allow brain-drain until they can't recreate the magic that they had originally.

I guess it makes me sad that people even want to suggest this route. They have to know what the end result it if you kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Maybe that's the one lesson they never learned in school...

If this model of education were feasible...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't books written by some of the best teachers, aka "super-teachers", already have replaced traditional teachers, with teacher-facilitators (called techs) to watch over the kids as they read and are completely engaged in this riveting educational content?

Elementary vs. Secondary

[phocion]

What many of these type of articles ignore is the huge differences in what is needed in elementary education (K-6) as compared to secondary (7-12). You just can't take kindergarteners and sit them in front of a screen (even with a super-teacher) and expect them to learn. It just won't work. Teaching at the early levels has to be personalized and hands on, because you're not just teaching the basics at this stage. This is when kids should be learning how to learn. Every kid learns differently and good teachers are constantly teaching the same lessons in different ways, making sure every kid finds a way that works. There is no one "best way" that works for all children. (Although there are plenty of useless methods that don't work for any kid.) This kind of teaching requires an involved and talented teacher, and it really helps if said teacher doesn't have her time overwhelmed by tests and assessments and documentation that hinders, not helps, the students getting the services they need. Teaching should be a valued and prestigious position. Until we start treating (and paying) it as such we'll be stuck with mediocre education.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course he thinks this, He's already drunk the Kool-aid. Only those deep in the bowels of edu-babble speak like that.

Sounds like dystopia to me. Something about a bunch of kindergarteners staring at a giant screen seems very 1984.

Of course. 1984 was not just a warning, it was a guide book. However, the reality of the current education indoctrination situation is far more terrifying. We already grade on Personality and Opinion, and chart a child's progress towards group-think in electronic databases. Where's your outrage? See? It's been removed. We've been filtering out that sort of thing for decades.

Note: Watch that video I linked before modding, unless you're a feckless coward.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

If the children don't get information from the media, then they will effectively be blind to reality.

Incorrect, even if they get info from the media they will still be blind to reality. This has been true since at least the 70's.

Media was lost long before the more decentralized education system came under attack.

Re:edu-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends on where you go to school. Some states, like Texas, are opting out of the "Outcome Based Education", that common core is the culmination of.

George Orwell Meets the Bean Counters

[wvh]

While the idea of education via Webex is a convenient modernism, it totally ignores the needs of individual students. If you were educating a flock of homogeneous sheep, this type of education would be fine. For humans, not so much. How would individuals ask questions and get interactive answers? "Your question is important to us - please stay on the line. There are approximately 4,238 questions in front of yours." Augmenting normal teaching is a good idea, where super teacher broadcasts are followed by informed, local discussions with knowledgeable teachers.

Re:edu-babble

[MooseTick]

Yay for you. You were so smart reading, writing, and doing long division at kindergarten age. If only everyone else was so brilliant.

The reality is, many parents don't have those basic skills. And many more don't have the skills to teach that knowledge. Does that make them bad people? Does it matter? Should their kids be taken away from them for not (or not being able to) teach a 5 year old long multiplication (???)? I would say not. They should be giving a chance to learn basic skills needed in society even if their parents are incompetent, lazy, idiots, or god forbid, can't code. Otherwise, they will be out on the streets when they are older begging for change, selling pencils, or sticking a knife in your kidney and grabbing your wallet.

Its not natural or obvious how to use the three seashells. School is there to teach that.

Re:edu-babble

[TheRaven64]

Yay for you. You were so smart reading, writing, and doing long division at kindergarten age. If only everyone else was so brilliant.

I was slightly ahead for arithmetic (but not by much), but I was at the very bottom for writing - to the extent that I was the only one having to stay in at break times for extra practice. This was not at a selective school (I started at one aged 7), this was at a school with a full mix of ability.

Its not natural or obvious how to use the three seashells. School is there to teach that.

That's rather my point. My school managed to teach all of us those things, what's wrong with schools in the USA?

Super Teacher

[DarthVain]

What part of Super Teacher did you not understand? There is no questioning the Super Teacher! :)

Hate the game, not the player...

[DarthVain]

I think (without any citation) that the number of kids that care about getting into good colleges is smaller. I think the rise of the corporate fake college mill has more kids simply starting their debt slavery sooner. I'm not sure I'd blame either of these things on the school system or teachers however. In the US I see it more of a failing of government to enact regulation from preventing educational corporations from taking advantage of the student loan system, and generally a culture that encourages other things to be seen as more desirable than education and science. Also with the glut of unemployed folks with college degrees many kids probably fail to really see much value in college anymore, which largely has to do with globalization and offshoring jobs to overseas. So in summery, one could look at the "failure" of the school system in that why should a student try hard in school, if getting into college is meaningless. Fix the larger inherent problems regarding barriers for those with college degrees to get a job, you will get more demand for good college degrees, and more kids who *want* to do well in school (and parents who encourage them to do so), and you "fix" the school system. It is the larger more connected system that is broken, not the schools or the teachers.

Fix the real issues.

[DarthVain]

Education professionals already get well paid, and attract good folks. I know lots of teachers. The problem is not with the teachers, or the system, but rather with the larger issues of the day. Namely that of jobs. Why should a kid be motivated in school, if getting your high school degree is rather meaningless. Used to be if you got your diploma, you could still use it to get a good job in manufacturing. As we all know, those have largely been outsourced. It also used to be if you did well in high school, you could get into a good college, which would lead to gainful employment. Now however you have tons of unemployed people with degrees, or having a degree and driving a taxi. Why put yourself into massive debt for that, or try hard in school to obtain that opportunity. Again in some sectors, this is largely due to outsourcing.

Even the Trades, so long as you finish your high school, go into technical college this was a safe bet. However very generally speaking your big trades like construction, plumbing, electrical, are largely dependent on housing. With the housing market crash, and influx of immigrant and migrant work in those sectors, there is only so much demand.

Then you have the education mills. Basically fake colleges that give meaningless degrees (and hope), when all they are doing is gaming the US student loan program for profit. They accept EVERYONE. Doing well in high school doesn't matter at all. All they want is to get you enrolled in the student loan program which insures they make massive profits with aren't subject to non-payment.

On top of that you have a culture that doesn't really endorse education and science as something worthwhile.

So fix the inherent problems with barriers to employment based on education and the culture that glorifies get rich quick schemes, and encourage a culture of hard work and education (no small task I am aware). Then fix corrupt politicians from taking large contributions to their campaigns from the education mills that are really just bleeding the student loan program for profit (I'm sure that will be easy). Do those things and you instantly fix whatever "failure" that is perceived of the education system as students will want to do well rather than be ambivalent about the whole affair.

My favorite example of this is comic book superheros. If you look at most of the superheros that were created back in the day, how many of them were scientists? Who are your heroes today?

Anyway as a result I think the "system" will be somewhat broken for the foreseeable future baring some pretty drastic changes that really have little to do with the education "system" itself.

Standards

[DarthVain]

Different example here from my point of view. I know many liberal people poo poo making everything standard, and having schools more flexible and whatnot. However when I went to school, my school didn't have a calculus class. It did not exist (it did several years after I graduated, but that is of little help). Upon graduation I wanted to go into University for Computer Science. One of the prerequisites for the degree of course was Calculus 101, which in all cases assumes you took calculus in high school. Some university's wouldn't even let me major in it without it, and suggested that I start as a General Science major and switch over eventually. One school allowed for an equivalency test. Which I took. Guess how well a calculus test goes when you've never taken calculus? Not good. I found a university that didn't require the test, and went there. I tried taking Calculus 101. Well you can imagine how that turned out with zero education in it previously... I ended up dropping it. Fortunately the higher level mathematics classes I needed to take didn't have Calculus 101 as a requirement, so for the time being I skipped it and took those. So I'm taking things like advanced statistics and binary algebra prior to Calculus 101. However I need it eventually for my degree. I even went and took a post university college degree from a partner school. In the end, I took it in my 5th year. I was by far the oldest guy in the class despite being a year younger than everyone when I was initially admitted. I tried very hard, which isn't something I really had to do a whole lot of in school. I went for extra help from the professor constantly (who I am sure was just as frustrated with me, as I was with calculus). I got help from others. I passed with a 55%, which was enough to graduate with my degree. To this day I am not sure how, and I can only conclude that the professor (who was a younger woman, probably not so long divorced from her own graduation) felt sympathy for me, knew that I couldn't graduate with my degree without it, and felt sorry enough for me to say well he tried really hard, so I'll give him a pass so he can get out of here. I got a job in my field a couple weeks after final exams, and have been at it for 15 years now. Fortunately for everyone involved I have not ever had to actually use calculus... :)

Anyway, long story short. All that struggle could probably been simply avoided had that course been a core standard at every school. So if you kid has special needs, great. If you or your kid wants to go a specific direction early, also great. However please at least offer the standard courses that might be required should a student want to advance though higher education.

Pipe dreaming

[Anonymous Coward]

This has about as much chance of happening as the flying car. I've been in the educational tech industry for OVER 20 years now and the machinery in place will never allow any of this to happen. No one is interested in fixing the machine, they're only interested in keeping it running long enough to get their pensions and move on. As a consultant for a major state run district, I came in under the auspices of reinventing, training and documenting - a six month project. Six years later a answer the same questions, don't participate in any of the things I was supposed to be leading and my 9 to 5 is more like 20 to life. Not at all what I signed up for.