1/11/2011 1:02:31 PM - How to Balance the Budget - Fire Everyone in the Educational System and Start Over
First, allow me to clarify the title of this article. Even if you were to get rid of the entire US educational system, you'd still have a gaping financial deficit for years to come. The point is not to show how modernizing and dramatically improving a single area of the government would solve all of the existing financial problems out there - it won't. Instead, the point of the article is to show just how resistant to change bureaucracies - governments large and small - can be when the effective mandate is to reach a point where more can be done with less. Regardless of whether a dramatic change would, in the end, be far, far better for society at large, the inclination to maintain the status quo is enormous when millions of people's lives and welfare depend upon those systems remaining as they are today.
There has been much talk of the fiscal hole into which governments worldwide have dug themselves. That's nothing new. I was still a teenager in the mid-1980s when I came to realize that governments were wildly inefficient bureaucracies with no sense of fiscal discipline. That led me to assume a variety of things that, in turn, made becoming totally self-reliant - trusting the government for nothing in terms of my financial security - an obvious necessity. Social Security is a good example. As with any Ponzi scheme, the first people in get the best returns, and the last ones in get the worst. I wouldn't be eligible to receive any benefits until the mid-2020s, and thus I knew that I wouldn't get much in terms of a payback from the system, regardless of how much I paid into it. While the government might technically meet its obligation and "give" you a certain number of dollars, they'll have printed so many of those dollars by that time that your effective purchasing power will have been greatly diminished.
The educational system is as ridiculously flawed as one would expect from a system controlled by federal, state, and local governments. Unions negotiate with politicians and political appointees who are only too happy to bestow upon them additional tax dollars in the form of regular salary increases, seniority-based (rather than merit) job security, generous vacation and medical plans, termination rules that make it difficult to fire even the worst employees, and defined-benefit plans that most of the private sector (where results and efficiency actually matter) discarded long ago. (I won't even get into the unrealistically high expected returns those defined-benefit pensions plans are supposed to generate, which allows the unions to argue for lower worker contributions, which inevitably leaves a shortfall that...you guessed it...the taxpayer will have to cover in some form or fashion.)
Despite the fact that the United States spends more on education per child than in almost any other country, the unequivocable result is that the system isn't working - children aren't being educated any better than elsewhere, and the outcome is often considerably worse (in terms of things like the mathematical prowess of graduating students, etc..) So...you have a critically important system that is hopelessly dysfunctional, inefficient, and expensive...but surely there are serious proposals to improve the situation? Nope. Nada. Inevitably, someone pitches reforming the system but that usually just involves tweaking the window dressing. One of the more popular alternatives pitched is to privatize the educational system to some degree. The idea is that government vouchers would be issued to families and they could then use those to at least partially offset the cost of having their child attend a private school (where, as is typically the case, the results are often far better than what the public system provides.)
That's great, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. Think about how many occupations - hell, entire industries - have been turned upside down by technology over the last 150 years. So why, then, are children still taught in essentially the same way that they were back in the mid-1850s? The child still has to physically travel to the classroom. The child is still taught by someone who may or may not be particularly good at what they do. The child is still responsible for learning a lot of things on their own via reading the printed page and doing homework.
I say...ditch it all. Start over.
The federal government should dictate - so that the standards remain the same from state to state - what subjects must be learned and to what degree. Standardized, interactive software should be developed to teach the lessons necessary for each subject. Children would be able to progress at their own speed, as opposed to the current "one-size-fits-all" method that forces brighter students to be held back with the rest of their classmates, and students with problems to struggle to keep up regardless of whether they're really gaining a fundamental understanding of the subject matter.
At specific points in their education, students could begin to deviate from the standard curriculum by adding various "electives" (just as you might in high school or college.) The difference would be that, based upon how quickly you were learning subject matter and how much you indicated you liked it, the system would be able to easily and accurately guide you towards some possibilities at which you'd naturally excel or in which you'd probably have a significant interest.
Inevitably, students will encounter difficulties when attempting to learn. They'll have questions. The software system would be designed so that an online (human) teacher could be summoned with the click of a button. Videoconferencing would allow the student to quickly explain the problem and the teacher could do whatever was necessary to help them understand. That might mean simply orally explaining something, or remotely drawing a diagram or formulas on the student's "sketch area", or flipping the student's "online book" to another page and highlighting a relevant section. Once the student was satisfied (or an impasse was reached), the student could rate the teacher. Teachers that consistently received poor grades would be periodically reviewed and potentially fired (or possibly simply have their teaching classification changed, so that they would only be summoned for, say, students of the same nationality who could understand their heavy accent.). Requests for help in a given subject by a given student would grant precedence to the teachers that student had previously rated highly. Thus, students would come to rely upon - and get to know - those teachers that are able to consistently - for whatever reason - help them understand the subject matter.
The software would continually be analyzed to ascertain which sections confused students. Identifying such confusing or problematic areas would be simple since students would either actively note a confusing section and possibly request help, or would not be able to correctly answer an associated test question. The next revision would attempt to make that area more understandable, and its success could be measured by how many future students ran into difficulty with that particular section. In one fell swoop, you'd have dramatically lessened costs (far fewer teachers and no schools would be needed), standardized the learning process (while still allowing for one-on-one assistance when necessary), untethered brighter students so that they could advance more quickly, and implemented a system that could be objectively analyzed and improved from year to year. There are many more benefits that would naturally flow from such a system, and this is just the tip. Students could be more effectively pushed towards areas of likely interest based upon their natural abilities. Students could easily find and "friend" other students with similar - or dissimilar - capabilities. (A student that excelled in programming might want to find another student that was going into advertising so that they could pool their capabilities and start a small company.) In the end, the potential benefits of converting the school system to an electronic forum would be vast.
Wait a minute, you say. If children are able to effectively learn via software and videoconferencing while at home, who's going to watch them during the day? I'm glad you asked. You see, watching one's children should be the parent's responsibility - not the governments (or, by extension, other taxpayers.) The wildly inefficient school system of today should not be justified based upon the fact that many parents are used to the effective government subsidy of free baby-sitting on weekdays. While many people now work from home and could watch their kids themselves, many others might pool their financial resources - with government oversight and assistance, but not direct funding - and have their child enrolled in a glorified day care facility.
Do the fundamental requirements to understand algebra and proper grammar vary from classroom to classroom? Have computers capable of executing standardized, interactive learning applications not been around for decades? Have commercial web sites not demonstrated the simplicity of offering one-on-one assistance when necessary for years?
In order to bring the educational system into the 21st century, I would create standardized, interactive learning applications for all of the various subjects taught to students - the alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, writing, algebra, geometry, history, physics, calculus, etc.. The learning applications would constantly be refined so as to become more effective at teaching (as measured by fewer students becoming confused at any given point, by how well students came to understand what was being taught as measured by later tests, etc..)
When a student was on occasion confused by something that they were studying, they could press a "Help" button on their application. A teacher on that subject would then appear in a videoconference session and could provide one-on-one assistance with that particular section. The system would attempt to minimize the number of different teachers that helped a student on the same subject. Thus, when a student ran into trouble on a given subject they'd usually receive assistance from one of a small handful of teachers with whom they'd gotten help in the past.
There would be many benefits to an approach like this. First, the pool of teachers necessary would be far smaller since, at any given time
Benefits: Students learn at their own pace (instead of being held back by others that are slower); students can pursue areas of interest; if parents need a daycare they can simply pay for that (but plenty of parents in the future will be working from home and that's inefficient and unnecessary); in college the "instructor" is often an undergraduate student and not the professor, and class sizes are often so large that asking individual questions doesn't even make sense.
Imagine - Anyone, rich or poor, young or old - could obtain as much education as they desired, without costing society a fortune or racking up tens or hundreds of thousands in personal debt.
At certain points in time, students would have the ability to "specialize" - to pursue topics of interest
The applications would I would measure how well they actually teach on a regular basis by allowing students to give feedback - electronically, of course (say, by pressing an "I'm confused" button on the problematic section ) -
- TZ
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