Reinventing Education from the Ground Up
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6 responses to “Reinventing Education from the Ground Up”
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Spotsylvania teaches kids for less than 1/2 of that!
Average salary $40,402
Average class size: 16-1
$2500 per kid!!methinks you might have forgot all those other costs. !!!
but I take the point and I support online programs like Acellus Academy which is a fully-accredited K-12 curriculum.
It still needs a teacher… but it promises to provide custom individual instruction with a teacher stepping in when needed…
Accellus “bracket” tests which means it asks enough question to be able to identify the specific area where the student needs help/tutoring and then customizes the lessons for that particular kids strengths and weaknesses – something no human teacher could do in a class of 17…
Accellus also has the potential to help kids in poor neighborhood schools.
but you’re still going to need teachers… and taxes to pay for them.
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Haha, Larry! $2,500 per kid — you have to factor in nearly 60 years of inflation!
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it’s the other costs… actual basic classroom instruction is about 1/2 the total costs… for many school systems…
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Bacon’s article is the brilliant start of a wonderfully important conversation. One that is long overdue, the rebuilding of a thoroughly corrupt system of education in America that leaves half our kids behind while it poisons the rest of our kids, while it bankrupts their parents and the nation’s taxpayers, and enriches those who have built and run the corrupt system and/or feed off of the system, but who never teach, or teach trash.
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I actually AGREE that the evolution of education to online presents opportunities for the US to do a lot better than it has and especially so with kids trapped in abysmal schools usually found serving low income neighborhoods with all the attendant demographic problems like gangs and disruptive students.
But a few things need to be recognized.
First that there ARE some VERY GOOD schools in the US despite the seeming tendency to denigrate the entire institution,
Second – that this country is but one of about three dozen nations that “do” education and do it well compared to the rest of the world. This country, the USA, ranks near the bottom of the top tier pack.
We are not the best by any standard but we produce a tremendous number of highly-competent, highly-trained workers that put this country in the forefront for innovation and economic prosperity. There is no way we do that if our education system is a failure.
We can do better, yes… and we have to ..but just recognize that we, as a country, are successful and education is a key component of that success.
Third – HOW we DELIVER Education will always be an issue. There will always be people who disagree with what is taught (or not) and how it is taught – there are critics and there will always be critics… whether they have constructive and useful criticism that can actually be used to improve education – it’s a mixed bag in my view.
Fourth – “online” education is not a panacea… per se. “Online” is basically human-generated content – and if the humans generating it are incompetent or biased the software will reflect it also.
However, “online” generally has a much wider audience from which it to be judged and the more objective and more successful will inevitably be recognized to all.
Can a child sit a home – with a computer and good software and do better than at a neighborhood school with a human teacher ?
that’s a question. Anyone got any responses?
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I don’t know about sitting at home with a computer; but interaction with the teacher is the key to a good classroom. A ratio of 17.4 kids per teacher would be wonderful on Earth today, let alone in 2075. The real number today is a big part of the problem with public secondary schools in NoVa.
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