Florida schools replacing teachers with computers

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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