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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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...

[Hognoxious]

some backwater like Appalachia were ignorance is a virtue.

The jokes almost write themselves.

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

[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

[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

[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

[khallow]

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

Yes, it does Mark.

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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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!

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.

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!

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.)

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.

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: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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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.

Re:edu-babble

[Potor]

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

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 . . .

[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 . . .

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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: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.

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'.

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.

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

[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.

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

[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: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/...

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."

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/

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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...

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.

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.