>The vast majority of the cost is hiring teachers. It should be staying in line with inflation or even increasing.

Only if you assume if per-teacher productivity can't increase.

nyc_data_geek1 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before.

Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?

There is a lot of research out there showing worse educational outcomes as class sizes increase. This is one of the areas where wealth disparities in education manifest; rich areas tend to have smaller class sizes, and historically the very rich would pay for private tutors for their kids, whereas poor kids are stuck with bigger class sizes, less individual attention from educators, and typically average worse educational outcomes.

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oatmeal1 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?

Khan Academy showed that one great teacher distributed to millions does that pretty well. It doesn't make sense for every teacher in the country (the worst and the best) to create their own syllabus and teach the same thing over and over again.

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gruez 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before.

There's plenty of drudge work teachers do that's not "fostering the development of inquisitive minds". Grading papers, preparing lesson plans, etc. I don't see why not at least some of that can be offloaded to AI.

	▲	nradov 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is already a robust online market for lesson plans, both free and paid.

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sgc 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, let's have 100 child classes which are hell on earth for everybody involved, starting with the little kids who will literally be scarred for life from it.

Teacher costs should be going up as much as we can afford, to keep reducing class sizes as a fundamental part of quality education.

I agree that admin is ripe for efficiency gains. A local school district cut dozens of teaching roles, not even one person from their extremely bloated central administration. It's also out of touch with the schools with no campus visits, and serves mainly as a hindrance to any sort of actual work going on inside the individual schools. It's a horrible caricature of bureaucracy.

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bayarearefugee 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Only if you assume if per-teacher productivity can't increase.

It can't.

The only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes.

Every study and every practical example of doing that ever done shows that it negatively impacts student outcomes.

Not because the teacher is failing to be whatever it is you imagine "more productive" to be but because there is a minimum amount of attention needed per student for them to not fall through the cracks and one person's attention is not scalable.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes And hours in class. Or productivity of time in class. I'm not saying the former is desirable or latter feasible. But the education "production function" has three inputs.
	▲	sfink 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Oh, it definitely can, in a way very similar to the way you can dramatically increase doctor's success rates by being selective about who you treat. Specifically: take the most disruptive students and eat them. (Be stealthy about it, the point is not fear of punishment.) The productivity difference between a classroom that spends 90% of its time on instruction vs 90% of its time on classroom management is massive. That's why you have to be careful about applying business notions like "productivity" to governmental duties like education and mail and highways. (I dearly wanted to include healthcare or at least hospitals in the list, but I live in the US.) Businesses can and should be selective and take higher risks. For governmental tasks, productivity isn't even well-defined. If you're failing (or eating) 20% of your students but the other 80% are doing amazingly well, is that better or worse than 99% of everyone doing just okay? How about if everyone's test scores go up and practical ability goes to shit? (This is not a hypothetical, not where the kids have figured out how to use ChatGPT even for the tests. Which is a lot of places.) Teaching is nowhere near Pareto optimal right now, so I'm not arguing in favor of the status quo. I'm just saying you have to be very, very careful when pushing for "productivity".

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toast0 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You could increase per teacher productivity by running 12 months of school per year, but you would increase costs; and in some parts of California, you would need to rebuild schools with air conditioning to hold classes effectively in the summer.

Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.

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gruez 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>You could increase per teacher productivity by running 12 months of school per year

Productivity is output divided by some input, either labor or money. Working for longer isn't going to magically increase productivity.

>Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.

Right, I don't have a specific solution for increasing teacher productivity, but it's not obvious that it's a law of economics that it can't increase. People thought lawyers and doctors couldn't be automated away, then came chatgpt.

	▲	toast0 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> People thought lawyers and doctors couldn't be automated away, then came chatgpt. Form contracts and will generators and what not was automation for lawyers. Plenty of enter symptoms to get a diagnosis stuff out there for doctors; or the more paletable, enter symptoms for charting, get a suggestion and enter medicines and get alerts about interactions.

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lostlogin 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> You could increase per teacher productivity by running

Many would quit. The only perk is having the holidays free.

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mertd 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What I observe as a parent; 95% of the teacher's job cannot be scaled with technology.