Heh, well honestly I don't know all that much about elementary school staffing either! But I do know a few things about children, and you simply can't put a large number of them in a space together without adult supervision and expect much educating to go on. Now maybe kids would actually be better off with less learning and more playing, but again without adult supervision of the playing are going to see a lot of destructive behavior. So it's a tough nut to crack.

You might hope that if you managed to replace some of what teachers do with technology you could pay the childcare people less. But it's not like teachers get paid huge amounts of money today. So I'm not sure how much scope you really have for cost-cutting there.

My view is that education is expensive, and growing more expensive, primarily because the field hasn't seen the kind of productivity increases that the rest of the economy has. Some of that might be due to conservatism regarding technology among educators. But a lot of it is simply that kids require hands-on supervision, there is maximum "student-to-adult" ratio that you can't really go over, and so inevitably education costs are going to rise faster than other costs. It's part of the price we pay for a technologically sophisticated economy.