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Vinnl | on: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
If we had budgets that allowed for one teacher per ten students, I imagine many problems in education would already be solved.
hunterpayne | parent | next
There is no correlation between better educational outcomes and higher teacher pay. Washington has the highest teacher pay and the smallest classrooms yet is below average in educational outcomes. Stop this canard, it just isn't true. US Schools have plenty of money, they just don't spend it wisely. In fact, both Mississippi and Louisiana have better outcomes than Washington state despite the fact they have half the spend per student.
WalterBright | root | parent
The Washington schools constantly ask for more money so they can teach. I don't see what monetary resources are needed to teach arithmetic beyond a blackboard and chalk.

Projectors, videos, computers, tablets, calculators, are all completely useless in teaching math.

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freeopinion | parent | next
Budgets are a region-specific thing.

In the USA there are approximately 50 million students aged 5-18. If you paid for each student to get 1:1 attention one day a week, you would need one teacher per five students in schools that meet five days a week. Let's use that number because it reduces 50 million students nicely to 10 million teachers. Let's pay each teacher $70K/year. That would cost $700 billion per year.

The USA military spent $100 billion per year in Afghanistan.

If the USA provided the 1:1 attention only in 1st Grade and 3rd Grade, they could fund it with the same commitment they made in Afghanistan with a lot fewer deaths. The USA persisted in Afghanistan for 20 years. Shall we experiment with education for 10 years and see if we get a better result than we did in Afghanistan?

nick486 | root | parent | next
Even if the money had been available. you can't just spawn millions of teachers out of nothing. there aren't that many people who can and want to do the job.
marcus_holmes | root | parent
Show me the lobbyist who will push for giving 700 billion a year to teachers.

That 100 billion goes to a bunch of extremely well-connected businesses who fund lobbyists to make sure the USA continues expending munitions in a series of utterly pointless, futile, wars.

gampleman | parent
Plenty of places have relatively high teacher pay, relative high staffing (for instance 1 teacher + 1 assistant per 25 children is standard here - not quite 1/10 but pretty close). The educational outcomes are bad and getting worse.
Vinnl | root | parent
Hmm that's fair, I forgot about the assistant; they're probably not that much cheaper than a teacher to be a significant budgetary difference.