The Problem and Future of Education
arsalanbashir.com
arsalanbashir.com
"By the late 1960's America was again in crisis. Not only was the country involved in another war, but the nation's schools were unable to elicit the achievement from learners it anticipated. Grant Venn argued that since only 19% of first graders complete a bachelor or arts degree, that the current educational system is only serving the advantaged minority of schoolchildren. To counter this trend Robert Morgan proposed to conduct an experiment with an "organic curriculum" which would to incorporate into the educational system the best instructional practices identified through research. Accepted in 1967 the proposal by the US Office of Education, the project was dubbed "Educational Systems for the 1970's", or ES'70. Morgan engaged an array of experts in the field of learning, cognition, and instructional design to contribute to the project and carried out multiple experiments in a variety of settings. Of these was Leslie Briggs, who had demonstrated that an instructionally designed course could yield up to 2:1 increase over conventionally designed courses in terms of achievement, reduction in variance, and reduction of time-to-completion – this effect was four times that of the control group which received no training. In 1970, Morgan partnered with the Florida Research and Development Advisory Board to conduct a nation-wide educational reform project in South Korea. Faced with the task of increasing the achievement of learners while at the same time reducing the cost of schooling from $41.27 per student per year Morgan applied some of the same techniques as had been piloted in the ES'70 project and achieved striking results: an increase in student achievement, a more efficient organization of instructors and course content, an increased teacher to student ratio, a reduction in salary cost, and a reduction in yearly per student cost by $9.80." (http://edutech-05.blogspot.com/2008/03/brief-history-of-inst...)
As a result, many countries continue to send students to Florida State's Instructional Systems Design program.
It's sad that our bureaucracy prevents us from benefiting from our own research.
As someone in the field, I can understand their concerns from a political perspective.
From a political perspective, if technological improvements can provide an education that is comparable to current standards then there will be politicians that argue we can drastically reduce our number of teachers and administrators and save taxpayers a lot of money.
From an educational perspective, even if we were to implement all of the technological solutions that we could there will still be plenty of need for teachers. Such implementations would change the role of teachers, but not eliminate the need for them. The closest cases of such changes are "flipped classrooms". Knewton has an infographic that covers the basics - http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/