Florida schools replacing teachers with computers

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/education/18classrooms.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

by akharris • 16 years ago

27 38 16 years ago

sushi• 16 years ago

This Ted talk by Sugata Mitra also talks about replacing teachers with machines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU

The fast-food delivery of education must change now that we have better tools to impart education.

rimantas• 16 years ago

I'd say the tools are of the least importance there. Nevertheless, somehow we tend to think that most problems can be solved just by throwing technology at them.

dantheman2• 16 years ago

Sometimes the only way to address problems with entrenched interests is to change the playing field, technology can serve this purpose. So instead of having to fight tons of battles against teachers unions, implements some technology that drastically weakens their position -- in this new landscape political battles can now be won.

I of course think school vouchers is the end all be all of school reform since it allows anyone to open a school and to compete with any ideas that they think might win...

khafra• 16 years ago

The per user costs of technology reduce dramatically as the number of users enlarges; the cost of teachers scales linearly with the number of users. At present, society is not willing to pay enough to provide the average student with quality teachers; if an up-front investment in technology can better that standard--even at the cost of worse-than-usual products of the Florida school system for a few years--it's a net win for society.

dangoldin2• 16 years ago

I have a feeling this will lead to even more education inequality based on socio-economic factors.

I think this approach has promise, and will probably be the standard one in the future, but this manifestation just seems as if it's being done for cost reasons.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

Why should it do that? Computers are very cheap and the schools should be able to buy the software at such a low cost that all schools should be able to afford it.

Compare this with the situation today where some children are being though by great teachers and some are being though by horrible teachers.

akharris• 16 years ago

I think that's what dangoldin was saying. Poorer communities will be jammed with cheap software and computers rather than great teachers.

The software teaching method definitely has merit, but it's not a solution to "we have overcrowded classes." It's not yet ready for that, and there doesn't seem to be anyone credible claiming that it is.

This is just the outgrowth of bad policy and not enough funding.

Pinckney• 16 years ago

I interpreted it the opposite way--that schools in poorer districts will gradually find it necessary to implement such classes due to financial concerns. The software will be drivel produced by the lowest bidder, who will probably use various shiny features to distract the buyers (who probably won't have spoken to an actual student any time this month).

Students in these classes will struggle to have their questions addressed, and if they are confused, nobody will be able to help them. That's if they aren't disillusioned already by the fact that their school isn't even providing them with a teacher.

Schools in wealthier districts, meanwhile, will choose to actually pay teachers.

Now it is possible that these classes will work out well, but I'm not optimistic. It's certainly something that should be implemented after controlled experimentation to determine effectiveness, not blindly chosen because of poorly considered policies.

dangoldin2• 16 years ago

I just think that because the primary motivation is cost cutting the focus isn't on improving education. This may lead to the purchase of software that doesn't improve education but looks good from a cost perspective.

I also think a lot of the maintenance costs are underestimated. Someone will need to be doing the IT support for them and I'm sure the computers will have problems just based on the number of kids using them.

I think they can serve well in a supporting role by providing additional instruction and examples after a teacher presents the material as well as identify the students who need additional help that cannot be provided by the software.

Having the same software will make reduce the impact of teachers but that's just going to improve the performance of the worst students at the cost of the best students. In the future I imagine this type of software to be linked to a great teacher and having a remote tutoring model.

patio11• 16 years ago

Class-size limits are an artificial constraint which were introduced because they occupy that happy space in the middle of the Venn diagram between "sounds good to voters" and "does something teachers unions actually care about." They do little, if anything, for education. You could solve this problem in an afternoon if you wanted to -- repeal class size limits, done.

That will only actually happen if there is a severely negative outcome to this situation... like the computers improving educational quality when compared to teachers.

yequalsx4• 16 years ago

Do you have evidence that class size doesn't matter? It seems intuitively obvious that class size does matter. Consider a single teacher teaching 60,000 average students in a stadium sized classroom versus a single teacher in a classroom with 20 average students. It seems to me that the probability of success in the latter classroom would be significantly higher than in the former. I don't know this to be true but it seems like it should be true. I'd be interested in knowing if there is research supporting your position.

evgen3• 16 years ago

He can't really provide the evidence because it does not exist in any meaningful manner. There is an overwhelming amount of data showing that reduced class sizes lead to better overall student performance and that smaller classes have a disproportionately large effect when used in disadvantaged/urban schools and when used very early (e.g. K-2nd grade.)

yummyfajitas5• 16 years ago

Patrick is focusing on class size variations typically encountered in the real world (typically 0-40). You are focusing on class size variation in a world populated by straw men (0-60,000).

rmc• 16 years ago

Not all teachers are created equal. Your pro small classes point applies if all teachers are just as good. However if one teacher teaches 60,000 people, you can pick the best teacher in the city. If one teacher teaches 20 then 20 students get the best teacher, and the other 59,980 dont. Instead of just hiring the top 1 teacher, you must now hire the top 3,000 teachers. The average skill of the top 3,000 will heavily affect the average level of teaching of the whole 60,000 students.

If you doubled all class sizes you might be able to double the quality of teaching.

bugsy2• 16 years ago

The last time I looked into the empirical evidence on this in primary school, the finding was that class size makes a big difference if there are 13 or fewer students in a class because the teacher can use a style where he spends individual time with each student. But from 15 to 40 it flat lines because the teacher has to switch to lecture mode. So, unless you can reduce class size to 13, there's no benefit to doing it. And there really aren't any schools that are taking it that far. So they might as well ramp up to 40 students (above this discipline and control becomes a problem in K-12) and use the salary savings to buy textbooks or other materials, things that many school districts are now opting out of because their administrative, salary and other such costs are now so high.

Many countries that do better achievement wise than the US (assuming measured achievement results are valuable, which is debatable) have large classroom sizes in primary education. Japan's average is 40 students:

> The 1999 Pennsylvania State University study done by Suetling Pong concluded that the effect of class size on achievement is very small. It compared ten industrialized nations other than the U.S. and found that students in Australia, Flemish Belgium and France did significantly better in larger math classes. Class size had no effect on students in Canada, Germany, Iceland, South Korea and Singapore. And students in Japan, who consistently outscore U.S. students in math and science, frequently attend math classes of 40 or more students. source: http://www.edreform.com/Archive/?Debunking_the_Class_Size_My...

oiuhjyftgrdgh• 16 years ago

In my day it was educational TV programs that were going to save us. For anybody old enough to remember Vax it was probably educational film strips.

snewman• 16 years ago

It's easy to throw out opinions about this sort of thing -- "computers are no replacement for a real teacher", "the class size constraint should be relaxed", "if done well, computerized education could be a huge step forward". But without hard data about the situation in question -- details of how the program is implemented, measured outcomes from previous uses of the same courseware, etc. -- the discussion isn't very productive. The NYTimes article is disappointing in that respect: it provides little or none of the information that would help us decide whether the Florida program is a sensible adaptation to limited resources, or a sad pretense.

I've seen plenty of examples of computers in the classroom doing little good, and even doing harm (mostly in the form of distraction). In the long run, I'm optimistic that computers can revolutionize education; in the short run, I'm pessimistic about most of the efforts going on. This article doesn't tell us anything about which category the Florida program falls into; without more data or context, there's not much point in debating it.

michaelbuckbee• 16 years ago

There was a really interesting Freakonomics Podcast about NYC's "School of One" program that is a good counterpoint to what it looks like is happening in Florida.

They take an algorithmic approach to try to determine what learning style works best for a kid and continuously test for learning retention and how quickly new skills are gained.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/freakonomic...

fakespastic• 16 years ago

What a terrible idea.

I'm sorry, I know this sounds very low-tech of me, but high-school aged kids need an authority figure, who is clearly in charge, teaching them material. Lecturing in-person. Building relationships. I, for one, even at my age, cannot long burden myself with CBT. People just don't take it seriously enough. Let's face the reality of humanity: we are what robots will ultimately become, and some things are just better between humans than between a human and a computer.

bitwize• 16 years ago

http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-1-new-lear...

A man can't know as much as a teacher.

adolph• 16 years ago

The submission title is inaccurate. Some schools are augmenting their workforce with technology due to unfunded legal requirements, see key quotes below.

Under the state’s class-reduction amendment, high school classrooms cannot surpass a 25-student limit in core subjects, like English or math. Fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms can have no more than 22 students, and prekindergarten through third grade can have no more than 18.

School administrators said that they had to find a way to meet class-size limits. Jodi Robins, the assistant principal of curriculum at Miami Beach High, said that even if students struggled in certain subjects, the virtual labs were necessary because “there’s no way to beat the class-size mandate without it.”

rbanffy• 16 years ago

Because in Soviet Florida, computer programs you.

Sorry. I could not resist.

Now, on a more serious tone, if this is a cost-cutting measure, why not embrace the XO as a learning aid? It certainly cost very little and can be packed with mountains of learning material, much more than it would be cost-effective to print and ship to schools. Plus, contrarily to the Dells pictured in the text, students can carry them everywhere and the energy cost of operating them must be smaller than the cost of operating those CRTs alone.

bugsy2• 16 years ago

I don't understand how class size is being reduced with people going to computer labs with no teacher. Isn't the idea of class size that there is at least one teacher per N students? With these labs there are zero teachers per N students, which is effectively infinity students per teacher (0).

Florida schools replacing teachers with computers

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