> own "industrial revolution / doesn't seem to scale well / it's inefficient / improvements are [..] cost prohibitive / that parent pay for / can't we reward the best / We need tech / scale the classroom / deliver it cheaply / separation of concerns
I'm not disagreeing that it's a good idea to always look for ways to improve schools. But i'd like to point out that you're framing these issues in almost exclusively economic terms.
I fear a future where we've reduced schools to one or two easy-to-measure metrics. In fact that's almost exactly what No Child Left Behind's obsession with standardised testing has already done: measuring each teachers' and schools' individual performance and incentivising "high performers". Those tests are even standardised across regions, or even nation-wide, just as you're asking for.
I also don't think the problems you point are real, or new, or relevant: yes, a good teacher doesn't usually "scale". But why does everything have to scale? Good teachers create a connection to their students that usually cannot be carried over TCP/IP, and i have never seen technology used in schools that came close to the effect of an outstanding teacher.
The only realistic path to "scaling" their skills is by understanding the factors that allowed them to become role models inspiring their students, and trying to replicate them.
Yes I used those terms intentionally because I think the current problem with education is being able to scale good teaching. There are good teachers, but we don't have a good way to scale them. The industrial revolution provided a way to replicate and scale good manufacturing. So maybe we can learn from that. I don't mean that education should be done like manufacturing, just that the lessons of how to scale may apply.
Scaling teachers is often called team-teaching and coaching, i.e. training more teachers to be more effective. Effective teacher-teacher relationships are a good predictor for effective teacher-student relationships. Broadcast one-to-many relationships aren’t effective for bidirectional factors crucial to education such as feedback or empathy (this is where people are different to mass production or say entertainment).
> I think the current problem with education is being able to scale good teaching.
Well, I don't think that's the only problem with education.
Scaling good teaching, huh. Tackling this with direct technology is difficult, things like message boards for teachers are a bit crude.
So perhaps another way of approaching it is better training and support for teachers - and this is where tech can be used as support. Example, shadow a well-respected teacher with a camera, and post regularly on YouTube while encouraging open discussion.
Actually there is a lot of this content already (check out "Blended Learning" on Coursera, for example) so perhaps the real problem is actually aggregation and distribution.
I'm not disagreeing that it's a good idea to always look for ways to improve schools. But i'd like to point out that you're framing these issues in almost exclusively economic terms.
I fear a future where we've reduced schools to one or two easy-to-measure metrics. In fact that's almost exactly what No Child Left Behind's obsession with standardised testing has already done: measuring each teachers' and schools' individual performance and incentivising "high performers". Those tests are even standardised across regions, or even nation-wide, just as you're asking for.
I also don't think the problems you point are real, or new, or relevant: yes, a good teacher doesn't usually "scale". But why does everything have to scale? Good teachers create a connection to their students that usually cannot be carried over TCP/IP, and i have never seen technology used in schools that came close to the effect of an outstanding teacher.
The only realistic path to "scaling" their skills is by understanding the factors that allowed them to become role models inspiring their students, and trying to replicate them.