Infrastructure Megaprojects: Education

Once everyone in the country has broadband access, education is utterly revolutionized. It's just a question of structure at that point.

One common complaint about society compares teachers to football players. "What's wrong with our society," they ask, "when someone playing a game gets paid a thousand times more than a teacher?" I'll tell you what's wrong with society: teaching is inefficient. It's not about cultural priorities, it's about scale. One football player can entertain a million people at a time. One teacher can only teach maybe thirty. In fact, per audience member contact hour, a teacher (teaching 25 students seven hours a day, 180 days a year) makes 500 times what a football player (playing maybe 22 three-hour games a year) does! If you want teachers to be paid better, if you want education to improve, we need to model professional sports: find the absolute best teachers out there, and give them a way to teach millions at the same time. Education as we know it will change forever.

We're almost there. If you haven't looked at Khan Academy, I suggest you do so. It's become one of the top e-learning platforms out there, with thousands of simple videos explaining almost any subject you can name. The math section has just been expanded further to be fully interactive. There are several other similar sites. MIT has opened access to almost all it's classes!

As impressive as all these initiatives are, one thing stands out to me about them all: they are all unfinished. We stand at the terminator. We've all seen children operating tablets as soon as they have the motor skills. When those children get to school as school is today, they will be bored out of their minds! If information is presented well, most children can absorb it at an unbelievable rate. That's the revolution we're looking at.

Here's what the government can do to help the process. Some of it is large infusions of cash, some is fixing the existing brokenness of the educational system, and some is just getting out of the way.

Hold competitions for the best online teaching programs.
Define standards, then offer prizes to the best ones in each subject. And I mean serious prizes, in the millions or tens of millions of dollars. Make the contest run over a few years, with a randomly selected group of students assigned to each program. Test each group regularly on the selected subject, in a thorough and rigorous manner. Give intermediate prizes each year or semester to the programs that show good progress. Ultimately, this project could cost the government well under a billion dollars, and jumpstart the new wave of education by a decade! But that's only useful if schools can handle the advanced students, which leads us to...

Make the school curriculum more adaptable.
If a student comes into first grade already competent in some of the requisite skills, advance that student to a class where they might actually learn. Schedule each student individually in each subject, at their appropriate skill level. Forget no child left behind. Better no child held down. Every child should be pushed to the limit of their skills, without regard to age. I was, and it shaped my entire life in very positive ways. If a student can finish school at sixteen, let them! Declare them a provisional adult, with additional privileges like voting. (The Constitution says that all citizens eighteen or older can vote. It doesn't say those younger can't.)

Don't ever compromise advancement standards.
No more of this "oh, you showed up, have a gold star" or "you turned in an assignment, have a 50". I'm all for giving multiple opportunities to demonstrate mastery, but you can not compromise standards. If a student doesn't understand the material, they do not advance. Period. Anything else turns your educational system into a babysitting system, which is where we are now.

Make the in-building education focus more on things that can't be learned online.
Critical thinking, clear communication, discussion, respect, personal interaction, field trips! Despite how we do things now, an education is not about learning facts, it's about learning new ways to think! Facts can be learned anywhere. Students should be exposed to multiple instructors, constantly, preferably with utterly different viewpoints about subjects. It's all too easy to turn your brain off when you're never presented with contradictory information. Clear communication in text should also be emphasized. Far too often I've seen college students write like seventh graders talk. This will take the longest time; it will take over a generation for there to be enough teachers trained this way.

Make students feel safe.
All too often, crimes like assault and theft are committed in schools without anything done about it. Constantly bullied students are ignored, then punished when they fight back. Students need a system of justice that can be trusted, no different than adults do. There should be no problem with having students two or three years apart in the same classes if their skill level allows it. Right now if we tried that it would be a disaster, because disrespectful and threatening behavior to other students is ignored. That has to change.

This requires some viable ability to punish students, possibly outside school hours, and possibly even without parental cooperation. But it also requires a system to ensure that students aren't punished unjustly, because that happens regularly too. In short, we need a court system for very young children. Yes, that's ridiculous. But what else makes sense?

Make school optionally year-round.
Many poorer families rely on school to double as child care. School being offered (if not required) year-round would help the students advance faster, and would help the parents work more, save money, and improve the child's quality of life. The only downside is that we have to pay more teachers, but spending huge amounts of money to accomplish good things is what these posts are all about!

Make students work.
Students should be expected to participate in low-level "internships" later in school. A few hours a week, for limited pay, the students learn how to work. Ideally, this would evolve into full-on vocational training, integrated with local community colleges and technical schools.

Don't forget adult education for everyday life.
Education isn't just what you learn in school. There are all sorts of things that could be taught through interactive online materials that would be useful for adults. Good nutrition, for example. Many people subsist on junk food because they honestly don't know they could be healthier and saving money!

And how about language? There are huge numbers of immigrants and refugees in the United States, particularly in Tennessee and nearby states, that don't speak English. That language barrier makes it very difficult for those islanded cultures to assimilate into our larger community. No good comes of that. With the kind of online program we were talking about above, we could make it tremendously easier for those adults to learn English.

The census bureau found that about 4.2 million people speak English "not at all", and 9.3 million speak English "not well". For a rough cost estimate, let's just assume we're buying all those people Rosetta Stone at the list price. That comes to about $5 billion. Now, consider how much the US spends on translators in a year for all those people. I found one number (not sourced) indicating it's about $375 million a year federally, and I'd bet states and cities spend much more. And how about the indirect costs of poor communication? For $5 billion, I'd say this is a bargain.

Teach how to think

I teach algebra at the University of Phoenix. None of my students are in any sort of science/technical field. Nursing is as close as it comes. So I'm frequently asked the eternal question, asked of any math teacher whose students aren't there voluntarily, "What is this good for? When am I going to use it?"

Math isn't the only subject that gets this kind of questioning, of course. History, science, really almost any school subject can be. And answers like, "Math is everywhere!" and "Knowing where you came from can help you determine where to go" just aren't satisfying.

Here's the truth. I'm 99% sure my students will never again have to find the slope of a line. Just like I'm 99% sure that most history students will never need to know the dates of the Spanish-American war. But that's not why you study these things.

To do math well, you have to be able to apply a set of rules in an organized fashion. You have to be able to recognize the kind of problem you're dealing with, apply the relevant algorithm, keep all the details straight, and recognize when you're done. So if you learn to do math, you must also learn these skills. And those skills are used everywhere.

You don't take math to learn math. You take math to learn to solve problems in a structured fashion.

You don't take history to know what happened when. You take history to know why things happen. You see how people have behaved throughout history, you learn the patterns, and you see how those patterns repeat themselves.

You don't take science to know what kinds of rocks there are in the world. You take science to learn that the world operates according to predictable, deterministic (or at least probabilistic) fashion.

We focus on the details at the expense of the true overall lesson. If all we're testing our students on is how well they memorize trivia, we're wasting everyone's time. We're not teaching how to think.

Student feedback

In 2006 I finished my BS in computer science and computer engineering at Lipscomb University. Last fall I taught a class on web server technologies there . While teaching that class, I decided to try to correct what I saw as a significant oversight in the CS curriculum: I taught the students the basics of using source control, particularly Git.

I just got an e-mail from one of my students saying that Git helped him get a job after he graduated.

I have made the world a slightly better place.

Let's see what I can do teaching Operating Systems this fall!