The education system seems one of the only places where vastly improving technology over the past 30 years has not translated to cost savings or improved outcomes.
Ever dealt with a kid who has had too much screen time? It’s fucking awful.
Screens can be helpful for kids (mine have learned a ton from Khan Academy and other online tools), but kids will have different thresholds. Some will only be able to learn a little from screens because they can't work independently. Others can learn a lot. Blanket statements like "kids lean better from humans than machines" are not helpful. They obscure the fact that there is typically one teacher for 25 kids, whereas there might be 25 screens. Even if a screen is only 1/10 as good as a teacher, it could be that learning from a screen is better than learning from a teacher (who is busy with your classmates almost all of the time).
My kid learned more math when she was doing AoPS for 2 yrs than when she was in class listening to lectures she already knew, followed by worksheets she had already mastered. Machines enable much more differentiation.
To take it back to the lunch analogy that you provided, it’s a bit like saying, “I don’t know why everyone’s kids are hungry at school, I pack a nutritious and filling lunch that I know my kids enjoy every morning.”
Also, I didn't need to monitor/guide my kids so they could learn from AoPS or Khan Academy. Those platforms are self-guided. But regardless, my kid learned pretty much zero from school math, so the threshold for "better than the teacher" was very very low.
Techno-Utopianism is such a grating ideology, especially when thrown into the ring alongside all of the other garbage that education experts have to deal with when trying to enact meaningful change in the education system.
Education is a business.
Gains in efficiency due to technology improvement, as far as I know, are always attributable to fewer people being able to do more / produce more. There are some things that will never have gains in efficiency. Technology will not reduce the number of players on a football field from 11 to 10.
"Nine women cannot do in one month what one woman can do in nine months".
The vast majority of the cost is hiring teachers. It should be staying in line with inflation or even increasing.
-- California K-12 public school enrollment fell by 74,961 students (a 1.3% decline) for the 2025-26 school year, marking the largest drop since the pandemic. This loss was significantly higher than the state’s Department of Finance projection of only 10,000 students.
The decline is driven by lower birth rates and a reduction in immigration, with the latter exacerbated by families fearing enforcement actions. Los Angeles County accounted for nearly half of the state's total loss, losing 32,953 students, largely due to a decrease in newcomer students within the LAUSD.
Private schools saw a steeper drop of 6.6%, while homeschooling declined by 3.7%. The enrollment drop is causing budget deficits, leading to staff layoffs, program cuts, and potential school closures. Hispanic students experienced the largest numeric loss (48,064), while white students saw the largest percentage decline (2.68%). English learner enrollment fell by 8.2%, partly due to reclassification and partly due to out-migration.
Peak birth year was 1990 after booming through the 80s, births started falling off a cliff after 2008 and last year there were about the same number of births as in 1980 despite the population increasing by 80%.
My 1,500-student public California high school currently lists 7 administration-team members (principal, executive assistant, three assistant principals, school-facilities manager and food-services manager) and 11 administrative-support members (school data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior-clerical assistant, separate registrar and attendance roles, interventions-support specialist, and others). That doesn't include 4 site maintenance, a network-support and a separate network-systems specialists; a separate media-library specialist; 2 psychologists; a college and career advisor; 4 school counselors; a wellness-space support specialist; and a social science and an athletic director.
34 administrative hires. One per 44 students. Many of those roles strike me as fluff.
Food-services manager (it's all oursourced to Aramark), data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior clerical assistant, one of registrar or attendance, two of site maintenance, one of the network specialists (probably both–one across the district is plenty), and probably at least one of the counselors and the separate social science & athletics person, who should just be one of the physical education teachers. That's about ten people, or a million dollars–minimum–in annual savings.
Data-processing specialist and print-center technician both sound like fancy names for secretarial roles.
You're honestly saying schools need fewer counselors in what has been generally regarded as the worst generation for child mental health in years?
As a full-time position? Aramark literally ran the lunch counters. I could see it being a district-level position, though it would be better positioned as a general procurement role.
> Data-processing specialist and print-center technician both sound like fancy names for secretarial roles
I agree. I was suspicious when I didn't see a secretary for each of the assistant principals listed.
> You're honestly saying schools need fewer counselors in what has been generally regarded as the worst generation for child mental health in years?
I am. Unless the counselors are constantly doing actual therapy I'm deeply sceptical you need that many for a student body of that size. The fact that they're assigned based on the first letter of your last name versus anything remotely thematic or behaviour based seems to emphasise that hypothesis, for me at least.
(When I went to the school, there were bullshit jobs everywhere. One of the counselors didn't deign to meet with students. Her role was "strategic" or some nonsense.)
Why would she? That'd distract her from the actually important work of fabricating the reports that make her looking amazingly competent.
My mom is a retired teacher and her main complaint during the last 10-15 years of work was that with all the bullshit paperwork they're required to fill, the teachers literally don't have the time to just plain interact with the students. You want to make an odd, unscheduled extracurricular event? Waste a small pile of paper before organizing it, arguing for how amazing it will be for the students' education, and the an even larger pile of paper afterwards, bluntly telling just how amazing it all worked out and checked some tick boxes the upper management cares about.
Counselors aren't qualified to deal with mental illness.
and sure, counselors aren't qualified to deal with mental illness
but what exactly do you believe is a child's path to qualified help if their parents are unengaged or the source of the problems?
The deputy principal for the administrative and provisioning work, whatever it's called in English? The superintendent?
Like an AI? Get ready because the world that is coming is going to eat back at Chronus' puerile preferences.
If we left it to domain experts and got politicians to back off, it would be neat to see what educators could achieve.
Only if you assume if per-teacher productivity can't increase.
Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time?
There is a lot of research out there showing worse educational outcomes as class sizes increase. This is one of the areas where wealth disparities in education manifest; rich areas tend to have smaller class sizes, and historically the very rich would pay for private tutors for their kids, whereas poor kids are stuck with bigger class sizes, less individual attention from educators, and typically average worse educational outcomes.
There's plenty of drudge work teachers do that's not "fostering the development of inquisitive minds". Grading papers, preparing lesson plans, etc. I don't see why not at least some of that can be offloaded to AI.
Khan Academy showed that one great teacher distributed to millions does that pretty well. It doesn't make sense for every teacher in the country (the worst and the best) to create their own syllabus and teach the same thing over and over again.
It can't.
The only axis upon which teacher "productivity" could increase is by increasing the size of their classes.
Every study and every practical example of doing that ever done shows that it negatively impacts student outcomes.
Not because the teacher is failing to be whatever it is you imagine "more productive" to be but because there is a minimum amount of attention needed per student for them to not fall through the cracks and one person's attention is not scalable.
And hours in class. Or productivity of time in class. I'm not saying the former is desirable or latter feasible. But the education "production function" has three inputs.
Specifically: take the most disruptive students and eat them. (Be stealthy about it, the point is not fear of punishment.) The productivity difference between a classroom that spends 90% of its time on instruction vs 90% of its time on classroom management is massive.
That's why you have to be careful about applying business notions like "productivity" to governmental duties like education and mail and highways. (I dearly wanted to include healthcare or at least hospitals in the list, but I live in the US.) Businesses can and should be selective and take higher risks. For governmental tasks, productivity isn't even well-defined. If you're failing (or eating) 20% of your students but the other 80% are doing amazingly well, is that better or worse than 99% of everyone doing just okay? How about if everyone's test scores go up and practical ability goes to shit? (This is not a hypothetical, not where the kids have figured out how to use ChatGPT even for the tests. Which is a lot of places.)
Teaching is nowhere near Pareto optimal right now, so I'm not arguing in favor of the status quo. I'm just saying you have to be very, very careful when pushing for "productivity".
Teacher costs should be going up as much as we can afford, to keep reducing class sizes as a fundamental part of quality education.
I agree that admin is ripe for efficiency gains. A local school district cut dozens of teaching roles, not even one person from their extremely bloated central administration. It's also out of touch with the schools with no campus visits, and serves mainly as a hindrance to any sort of actual work going on inside the individual schools. It's a horrible caricature of bureaucracy.
Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.
Productivity is output divided by some input, either labor or money. Working for longer isn't going to magically increase productivity.
>Covid showed distance learning doesn't work for most kids. So you can't eliminate real estate costs or hire educators in low cost areas. Computerized education doesn't seem to work, either.
Right, I don't have a specific solution for increasing teacher productivity, but it's not obvious that it's a law of economics that it can't increase. People thought lawyers and doctors couldn't be automated away, then came chatgpt.
Form contracts and will generators and what not was automation for lawyers. Plenty of enter symptoms to get a diagnosis stuff out there for doctors; or the more paletable, enter symptoms for charting, get a suggestion and enter medicines and get alerts about interactions.
Many would quit. The only perk is having the holidays free.