Comment by psadri
1 day ago
If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).
1 day ago
If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).
If you use other students for that problem instead of other teachers, you'd swap a budgetary problem for a bootstrap problem.
The upshot for this is that the benefit is as much for the student doing the teaching as the one doing the learning. Teaching has a much greater effect on _retention_ than listening reading or even doing, which is the majority determinant underlying the primary school curriculum.
There are a whole host of secondary benefits to this (as well as lots of logistical challenges): the students are doing something useful, teaching, and we pay teachers if you wanted to expend budget there I suspect it would have great effect, as would any other form of ~~bribery~~, I mean, incentivisation; socialising, especially if you have the teaching being done across different classes (which you would want to do because you want the teacher to know more than the student).
This is even a more interesting idea! I guess similar to the teacher assistant system in higher education. One version of this could be students a year ahead teaching the previous year's students. In elementary school it might be tricky, because besides interest, there are issues are classroom discipline and behavior which might be beyond the capabilities of an 8th year old.
If we had budgets that allowed for one teacher per ten students, I imagine many problems in education would already be solved.
I believe 1:1 is fundamentally different than ever 1:2 ratio. So, even if you can have 3 person classrooms, I don't think it would be the same as 1:1 time.
As soon as you are working with more than one student, you have to teach the common denominator, which may or may not (more often not) be the thing that will most help any of the students.
In 1:1, you can identify were the specific gaps in skill, knowledge are and tailor the session to close them. Personalized.
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.
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.
8 replies →
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.