Virtual Classrooms and Virtual Choices

Easier said than done here in the colonies, Del. We have administrators because the schools cannot be run locally. Why? It has to do with the "Equal Protection" clause in our Constitution. Solve the racial and ethnic discrimination problem, a very deeply rooted human trait, and you no longer need high level control of the institutions of learning.

The USA built a nation over a 170 year period by simply ignoring the discrimination issues with respect to education. Schools were a local issue and managed very effectively with very few administrators. Then the slowly grinding machinery of justice that builds a nation's true framework of law started dealing with discrimination. The net result was a centralizing of control over education with all the administrative control issues of any large organization. An organization's rules get polished with time and in the present day we have lots of new electronic command and control resources available to be tried out. This can result in a lot of leaning out of administrative overhead.

But, and these are some big "buts", the control costs will still be there as long as society fights the issue of racial and ethnic discrimination. If we choose to fight other forms of discrimination in the schools with a central government approach then we will make the problem worse. Possible types of discrimination run the gamut of human characteristics ranging from mental abilities to physical handicaps.

The other big "but" is public education "mission creep". The more things we ask public schools to do the greater the overhead costs will be. The dinosaur (that's as PC as I can be) in the room is the loss of parental support of the education process. Now the public school has to be the parent. But there is a gentle rain of other mini missions ranging across the spectrum of education from driver training to sex ed to school lunches to whatever the latest media fad of the week happens to be. (Let's make every child learn algebra even though 90% of them will never solve another algebra problem in their working lives.)

So it's going to be a long road to the goal of firing all the administrators.

About the 25 students per teacher thing. In the UK or USA what's a primary or HS teacher cost per year for salary, fringes, materials, admin and facilities overhead? US $150K? That's $6K per student across the board. Who's going to be willing and able to pay that for every student? We have 7 million student age people in CA. That's US $42 billion per year. The crush is being felt everywhere as everybody's disposable income shrinks (unless you're an investment banker). And the demographics of the advanced industrial nations in out world are showing an increase in the number of older people who have much less interest in supporting the education of other people's kids, especially the children of immigrant and racial minority populations (there's that discrimination demon again).

Maybe 20 or 25 students per teacher is needed in the lower primary grades. Electronic "props" are of very limited value there. But in high school? That's why I'm for automating it as soon as the student is able to take responsibility for his/her own education. That's why my pitch is to make a seemingly subtle change in the primary school mission from teaching the child the "basic" subjects to teaching the child how to learn both from inanimate sources and other people.

Ed Weldon