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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

It would certainly be beneficial if we could reduce our needs for human teachers by means of a tool like Khan Academy.

As a nation, we spend more one education than the military ($972B as of 2007 according to wikipedia, vs about $725B for the military including wars). A 1% increase in efficiency would save a little less than $10 billion, and a 16% increase in efficiency (using 2007 numbers) would be sufficient to balance the federal budget deficit [1].

If the Khan Academy is not striving to reduce our need for human teachers, we should create an organization that will.

[1] Edit: I should note that education is paid for primarily by the state and local governments, so it wouldn't be directly possible to reduce the federal budget by such savings. I was solely trying to make an order of magnitude comparison.

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"As a nation, we spend more one education than the military..."

You say that as if it's a bad thing. I spent four years in the military and can tell you that there's a lot of waste there. Your last sentence could very easily be applied to the military, or at least to military personnel.

I think a better way to think about teachers might be as force multipliers. There are parts of teaching that can be relegated to technology, but there are other (arguably more important) parts that probably can't or won't be for a long time, and KA seems like a great way to free up those resources for uses that are most effective.

I didn't mean to suggest it's bad that education is bigger than the military, I was merely trying to describe the scale of our spending. The military is a popular example of a a big wasteful government agency, so I thought a comparison was illustrative.

I spent four years in the military and can tell you that there's a lot of waste there. Your last sentence could very easily be applied to the military, or at least to military personnel.

I'd love to reduce spending in the military as well. If a manufacturer of military robots said "we aren't trying to replace soldiers", my first question would be "why not?"

I guess my point is that robots/tech are good at certain things, and people are good at other things. It's great for tech to take up the things that they're good at to free up people to focus on the things that they're good at, and that's what I understood TFA to be advocating, i.e. they want to augment teachers, not replace them.

in both cases you're thinking only about bottom line. Imagine it from the other end - what new opportunities would it open. How the military or educational powers (the US has benefited so far from being "super-" for both powers ) can be even more amplified, especially when other super-countries are emerging.

from your post above:

>and a 16% increase in efficiency (using 2007 numbers) would be sufficient to balance the federal budget deficit [1].

that means anywhere between cutting 16% of cost while maintaining the same educational result and increasing the educational result by 16% while maintaining the same cost. I'd argue that in modern world (i mean today and the next 30 years at least) increasing the educational result would be much more important than cutting the cost.

I'm focusing on cost because I don't see how a video lecture can be dramatically better than an in person one, but I can easily see how it could be just as good. This could be a failure of imagination on my part.

A model I'd like to see attempted - 2 hours of lecture (video) + 1 hour of recitation (human supervised), in lieu of 3 hours of lecture+recitation by a human. Now a single human can teach 3x more classes. That's a massive reduction in costs, but I don't see how it can significantly increase educational outcomes.

There is one caveat - I expect lecture quality would improve a bit. If only the best teachers record videos, then lecture quality will be better than average. By definition, human-delivered lectures can only be average.

For me the killer thing about Khan's lectures is how broken down into small chunks that they are. If you don't get it -- you can watch the 10m lecture again. Not to mention you can pause/rewind, there are theoretically no distractions (like disruptive members of class), and then the point you made about lecture quality.

I really like Khan's model of doing lectures/learning at home -- and using the classroom time for exercises // with the teacher (or other students) mentoring those who are stuck on a problem set.

Lecture quality improves, and students can also learn at their own rate. You should read some of the feedback on Khan lectures. Students can pause, and look up other sources. And they can daydream, but still not miss any material.

It's unclear to me that even a 1/3 reduction in lecture time is sufficient. I'd like to fundamentally change education so the teachers are really mentors and facilitators of learning and activities. Lecturing can be done via video almost exclusively -- at least for those topics where video lectures make sense.

Exactly. That's sort of what I (and I think KA) was getting at.

I think the last thing that needs to happen is the dehumanization of the education system. What the Khan Academy seems to demonstrate so far is that the careful application of technology in the classroom has a positive effect on young students to understand and digest information. A middle ground should be sought, it should be complementary and help drive innovation in education - but definitely not replace humans.

Re: Replacing Humans

Depends on what level you are talking about. There is close to zero advantage to having a lecturer explain first year calculus to 450 students. That practice should be eliminated immediately and replaced with Khan (or Khan like technology).

It's embarrassing how many higher level education institutions haven't cracked that part of the puzzle. Save the budget and populate the Math Labs with (reasonably paid) Grad Students where the students are doing exercises, instead of paying (a typically horrible at presentations) mathematics professor to "Teach".

Agreed. A major benefit that seems to be recurrent in the pilot schemes is the data the Khan system provides, and how that allows teachers to interact with students in a more personal and efficient maner. The net result being less kids fall behind. However that also shows the need for the human interaction.

>As a nation, we spend more on education than the military

That's an incredibly misleading claim. Consider this graph:

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html

So we see that funding for public k-12 is roughly the same as defense, but let's consider the funding sources. IIRC, defense spending is funded solely by the federal government, whereas public school spending is sourced from federal, state, and local-- property taxes taking a big chunk out of it.

So if we compare apples to apples-- which is federal spending between the two, we see a very wide disparity. This of course is exacerbated by the military occupations currently taking place by the US gov't.

I could also argue how spending in education will have a better effect on GDP relative to defense spending, but I'm a little tired of googling things.

[edit] Here's a much clearer picture of the spending distribution: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20...

Compare edu to defense and you'll see my point.

I don't get your point. Why does it matter where the money comes from? It all comes from us. That we spend more on education that the military is still true, right?

Why is it misleading to look at total cost or total government cost rather than simply federal government cost? What makes the federal government special?

Now, as for my numbers: 2007, $972B total, the government portion of it was $809B. If you restrict to K-12, it is indeed slightly less than the military ($493B vs $653B). Government expenditures on education are still $150B more than the military as of 2007, the year I originally cited (including higher education and "education not definable by level").

For 2009 (the last year for which full data is available), the gap between government spending on the military and education is $50B (in favor of education).

Regardless of whether spending on education is better for GDP than defense spending, it would be better still to provide the same education for less money. When you spend this much money, small gains multiplied systemwide yield huge gains. A 1% increase in efficiency saves you $8.5B in gov spending and $9.7B in total spending.

Or, to put it another way, every teacher we replace saves $50-150k/year directly and removes a massive unfunded liability (their pension/future health care costs) from the government balance sheet. If Khan Academy isn't ambitious enough to try to do this, hopefully someone will step up and do so.

>every teacher we replace saves $50-150k/year directly and removes a massive unfunded liability (their pension/future health care costs) from the government balance sheet

Who looks after the children?

If parents are working then, even if children are learning through a computerised system, children still need to be cared for.

Are you going to do away with teaching staff altogether? So no one to monitor and encourage the students, to watch that they're not going lord-of-the-flies and building a bonfire out of the learning terminals or are you going to mandate that parents look after their kids and take responsibility for what is currently [often] school based learning.

Don't get me wrong, teachers are not solely childcare professionals. But, children still need care without teachers.

Presumably non-teaching child care staff in a school like environment still need to be paid wages and pensions and have their health costs paid - did you account for that in your savings?

Are you planning on Khan Academy sorting out emotional education, social education, etc. too?

The fact that we can't replace every single human does not mean we shouldn't try to replace some of them.

Is it your assertion that with 16% less adult supervision (to borrow a number from my first post), schools would degenerate into "lord of the flies"?

If anything, I expect the situation would improve. Rather than having 1 teacher trying to do double duty (lecture and impose discipline), we could have cheaper discipline-only employees handle the discipline side and leave the lecturing to Khan.

I guess what I'm wondering is how're you implementing it beyond just telling about 1 in 5 teachers not to come in to school next term?

It sounds like you're planning on having a "person with a big stick" in a room of 35 kids playing a video on a screen. Or possibly in a room of 35 computers with kids at each one.

For sure, have a room of 1000 computers and one person with a machine gun ... sorted!??

You hire new teachers slower than old teachers retire.

OK, in most schools where I am that won't work (for example if there are 2 teachers for 1 year of pupils, one retires you then have a 60+ student class and classrooms designed for about 24) but that's not what I'm trying to get at.

What I want to know is how you're integrating Khan Academy (or similar) use into a pupils learning experience - eg give them a terminal to interact with for all their learning?

Also he seemed to be suggesting that we get rid of people in the role of teachers and have some form of child/youth minder. What's their actual role, what setting are they working in, how do they relate to the kids, are we shouldering kids/youth with the entire responsibility for their own education, is this the ultimate pupil-led learning or something else?

What's their actual role,

Preventing violence and hooliganism.

what setting are they working in,

The video lecture portion of the educational experience.

are we shouldering kids/youth with the entire responsibility for their own education,

In another post I suggested a model of 2 hours of video lecture, 1 hour of recitation with a human teacher. Thus, you allow 1 teacher to do the work of 3. The youth police would devote their full attention to overseeing the video lecture area and preventing hooliganism (as opposed to 50% on police work, 50% lecturing like a traditional teacher). Thus, the youth police would be lower skilled (and hence cheaper) and we would probably need fewer of them than teachers.

This is one possible model. I'm sure if you devoted 30 seconds of thought to it, you could come up with other possible ways (not just straw men) of doing it. I'm not proposing a solution, I'm asking why Khan Academy isn't trying to come up with one.

See, police in my country earn more than teachers.

>"I'm not proposing a solution"

It pretty much sounds like you are, just a partial one.

The problem as I see it in implementing such a system is that basically you have to experiment with a whole load of people and if the experiment doesn't work then it's "oh dear we messed up your education, nevermind there are plenty more people to experiment on".

The least impacting way to trial this that I can think of would possibly be in a situation similar to that in Australia where some kids/youth in the interior belong to "schools of the air" and interact with teachers by webcam (eg http://www.emerge.net.au/~kalsota/information.htm, http://www.outbackwriter.com/education.htm). Having kids able to use video lectures to supplement in this sort of scenario seems less impacting and more easily trialled as the kids are using a computer in a similar way already - perhaps they've been doing such a thing, not sure. What is different about schools of the air is that they appear to be largely home-tutoring with support.

"So no one to monitor and encourage the students, to watch that they're not going lord-of-the-flies and building a bonfire out of the learning terminals"

It's an amusing mental image, but let's be honest with ourselves. If the system is intended to prevent the students from going lord-of-the-flies, it's already failed. School systems don't even reliably stop students from engaging in outright physical violence on each other on a regular basis.

"Why is it misleading to look at total cost or total government cost rather than simply federal government cost? What makes the federal government special?"

It makes sense to say we as a nation spend $XXX billion on defense because there's a central organization deciding how it's allocated.

It makes less sense to look at the total for education because each district largely gets paid out of its own property taxes - influenced by demographics, by the regulations of different states, and by the disparity in real-estate prices.

It makes less sense to look at the total for education because each district largely gets paid out of its own property taxes

In some states, the great bulk of government expenditures for schooling come from the state budget, and the state budgets rely on other forms of taxation besides property taxes. It has been that way in my state since the 1970s, when I was still in K-12 schooling. All states have some funding of government-operated schools by state taxes and all states receive federal government expenditures for their school systems.

"In some states, the great bulk of government expenditures for schooling come from the state budget"

Interesting, I didn't know that.

But doesn't my point still stand? If each state has its own byzantine policies for paying for schools, it makes no sense to say the US spends $X on education. All you can say is that the federal govt spends x, california spends y, and so on.

The federal portion of the education budget is quite small.

Very true, education is paid for primarily at the state and local level. The comparison to the federal deficit was mainly for the purposes of an order of magnitude. I've edited my post to clarify this.

The really misleading thing about these statistics is that the budget is not 100% teacher salaries. I am guessing, it's not even close. That means to get your 16% savings you are going to have to cut a lot more than 16% of the staff.

Staff compensation (and it is an error to assume the compensation consists solely of "salaries") is in fact the major part of the expense of running any school system.

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