Florida schools replacing teachers with computers

Re:Florida schools replacing teachers with computers by Alex3917 on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @04:30PM (#2117487)

"The most often cited research o this matter was conducted by Gene Glass and Mary Lee Smith. [...] Several features of the resulting curve stand out. First, for class sizes in the range of twenty to forty students, the effects are minimal. Second, significant improvement in student achievement does not occur until class sizes are in the range of fifteen students or below.[1]

[...]

The immense costs make classes smaller than 15 utterly out of the question. In 1986, for example, a reduction of the national average for regularly convened classes from 24 to 23 pupils would have required almost 73,000 more teachers and 5 billion additional dollars, not counting the expenses of building more classrooms. Reducing the average class to 20 students would require over 335,000 more teachers at an added $22.8 billion. At 15 students, 1 million extra classroom teachers would be needed and added costs close to $69 billion."

[1] Riordan notes that there were some problems with this study, but that despite these problems later research has validated the original curve.

source: Equality And Achievement by Cornelius Riordan, p. 164

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Re:Florida schools replacing teachers with computers by yequalsx on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @05:12PM (#2117613)

It may be true in a political sense that having classes smaller than 15 students is out of the question but the cost isn't that great. We spend around $1.2 trillion in national defense. $70 billion more for education is not that great a sum.

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Re:Florida schools replacing teachers with computers by yummyfajitas on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @05:42PM (#2117733)

At all levels of government (i.e., federal, state and local), we spend $850B on education and $792B on the military, your guess of $1.2 trillion is not even close.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2009_US.html

Reducing class sizes from 25 to 15 would require 66% more teachers, lets guestimate that the cost of education would rise by 40% [1]. That's $340B for fairly small improvements in educational outcomes (0.04-0.12 standard deviations, according to stats posted elsewhere in this thread).

[1] Not all costs would scale upward with teacher salaries. We could sometimes repurpose 2 30 student classrooms into 4 15 student classrooms, and some administrative costs would scale with # of students.

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Re:Florida schools replacing teachers with computers by yequalsx on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @06:21PM (#2117860)

I guess you've never heard of supplemental spending, black operations and whatnot. Defense spending isn't solely the defense department. We spend a great deal of money on intelligence services.

My response was solely to the quoted number of $70 billion or so. $80 billion is not a lot. It appears the number quoted was in 1984 dollars or something like that. Even then it still isn't a lot given that the defense budget then was around $300 billion.

I prefer spending money on education, health, peaceful purposes but not everyone agrees. The point I made though, still stands. It's a not a lot of money and it isn't as if we couldn't do it.

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Re:Florida schools replacing teachers with computers by Alex3917 on Tuesday January 18, 2011 @05:21PM (#2117658)

That's for the 1986 student population with 1986 dollars. If you correct it for the estimated 2018 student population and 2010 dollars, you're already around $190 billion. And that's not counting the cost of building new schools, or factoring in the rise in per-student spending. You're easily looking at well over a trillion dollars when all is said and done.

Also, decreasing the class size to 15 students wouldn't get you very much improvement over current class sizes. It's only for every incremental decrease below 15 that you start to see meaningful improvement.

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