The thin edge?

For some reason, my reply to one of the comments on the Liberating Learning review doesn’t seem to be coming up, so I thought I would post it here.

Gordon Otto wrote:

In Canada, there are about 6 million K-12 students. About $2,000 per year each is spent teaching them math. That’s $12 billion per year.
Online, math curricula can be delivered to all 6 million for something between $1 million and $10 million, less than one-tenth of one-percent of the operating cost, including assessment and accountability measures (with unlimited review and “repeat” by the student, and endless “patience” by the computer/instructor… two massive advantages from the point of view of the student).

Under the 80-20 rule of life, about 80% of the students can learn 80% of what they need to learn via such online delivery. That’s 64% of $12 billion ($7.7 billion) that is liberated by application of such technology. Those liberated dollars can be put to work on the other 36% of the challenge, and freed up to sustain schooling for generations to come.
(Multiply the savings by 10 for U.S. numbers.)

The ONLY thing standing in the way of such liberation… is the schoolers who would not get paid those monies in wages. They will stand in the way with great determination, like postal delivery workers and railroad conductors. But the economics are too spectacular, and the scarce resources available for schooling too precious for them to stand for very much longer.

These things won’t happen next year. Or likely the year after that. But they will happen. They have already begun to happen. In many ways, “live learning” will go the way of “live television”… for many of the same reasons from the point of view of the viewer/learner. And many of the same reasons from the point of view of those footing the bill.

And I replied:

I don’t know where you are getting your numbers, but if you assume that an average teacher with 5 or less years is worth $100k with salary and benefits, $1M gets you all of 10 teachers. so even if you go to the high end, you have 100 teachers that are going to teach all 6 million kids? I don’t even want to know how that is going to happen and if it is, what the monies that are going to get dumped into running and supporting the LMS behind those 100 teachers is going to cost a pretty penny.

If we take your $12B number, you wind up with 120000 teachers. If you assume that these teachers can teach anywhere in the country, those 6M kids will have a teacher:student ratio of 1:50. Which is reasonable – for the higher grades, but not for the lower ones – you still have an issue with assessment. If each student gets 10 minutes a day of attention from the teacher, which in an 8h20min day seems doable for the the average instructor who wants/needs to take no breaks. If all the numbers here scale 80%, then you still have a 6h40minute day/teacher. And this is just for Math. What about the other subjects?

Looking at your $12B number, I don’t think that is reasonable either. Alberta is spending about $3B on advanced education, and $6.3B on k-12 (http://education.alberta.ca/department/budget.aspx, http://www.advancededucation.gov.ab.ca/ministry/budget.aspx) for a total of $9.3B for everything related to education in the province. Ontario is spending $14.2B (http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/english/budget/ontariobudgets/2009/sectors/educationsh.html) on education. Now assuming that these numbers are equitable per student and you portion out equal funding for all the subjects – Math, Social Studies, Science, Language, Health/PE and Art/Music plus a catch all “option”, you have Ontario spending $2B on Math and Alberta spending $1.3B. Even if you take Alberta’s number and assume that on average every province is spending the same, you get $13B.

Looking at some published figures (http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:yAjdJ5laHvkJ:www.cdhowe.org/pdf/ebrief_10.pdf+total+spending+on+education+in+canada+k-12&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-a) school spending is about $8000/child. We’ll round to 1150/child/course to arrive at 6.9B spent on Math. Alberta alone has just over 34000 full and part time teachers, this would work out to about 4800 Math teachers, across the country, that would land 48000 Math teachers in the country. This is still less than the 120000 from our first estimate. This number is further reduced as many teachers, especially those in K-6 teach more than one subject.

If you have numbers that can help your side, I’d love to see them. What I’ve come up with is strictly napkin calculation, but it seems to me that regardless of how you look at it, $10M is not going to get you anything. Maybe if you ship the jobs overseas, but then what does that say about what value we put on Education? And one final number before putting this argument to rest, Canada did rather well in the last PISA report (http://www.pisa.gc.ca/BROCHUR-E-28.pdf) and compared to Finland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland), though we seem to have spent about 4X what they did ($2000CDN adjusted vs $8000 in 2008 dollars, assuming other monies are not spent elsewhere), we did rather well.

Maybe it was the links that the comment system didn’t like, but hopefully they can figure it out and get this posted. Regardless, the thin edge of this arguement will be money, regardless of any other factor. It always has been and always will be.