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Ok, very good points. I was too hastily with suggesting that there could be no savings here. I came up with some myself after pressing submit. I was more str

Ok, very good points. I was too hastily with suggesting that there could be no savings here. I came up with some myself after pressing submit. I was more striking out against this horrible but prevalent idea (at least in the US) that the market is the solution to all problems (I go into more detail in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1715465 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1715465). You're right that the kids don't need to be there for learning. We could e.g. have the really good teachers create a pod cast series of their subject material (imagine a series from SPJ!) that kids could watch at their leisure and separately give kids the amount of human guidance/support that they require (the amount required will differ between different kids and even the phase of learning between the same kid). The babysitting aspect is also important. Accepting that these are two separate things that the school is doing would allow us to no longer combine them. We could merge several of today's schools into one babysitting facility if we wanted, or we could make lots of little babysitting facilities that are closer to where the kids live. There are a lot of possibilities here. Hrm, this sounds like a business opportunity. >Switching to merit pay would cut staffing costs significantly while allowing the good ones to be paid a salary competitive with other fields. I don't like the idea of merit pay. If you dangle a carrot people aren't going to go "oh I'll just do everything the right way and get the carrot if I deserve it". Some will, but a lot will take whatever short cuts they need to to get that carrot (e.g. teach kids to memorize useless facts to get artificially high numbers on the important test scores). I've worked in enough big companies to know that the one who gets those big promotions aren't always better, often they're just good at finding out what reports to skew to make it look that way.

grandalf 16y ago
Interesting thoughts. I think if done right the daycare aspect could be really fun and socially/academically valuable time for the kids. I actually do think it's a business opportunity but haven't pursued it yet (though I'd like to in the next year or two). As for merit pay, the pay plan I came up with for my hypothetical school would simply be a partnership model. You "make partner" when your colleagues decide they trust you, value your contribution, and would like to keep you on board by sharing profits with you. Then, everyone is paid a base salary but partners get profit sharing. This solves the main problem of tenure while keeping the spirit and benefits of it. Another idea I had for pay plans is to incentivize teachers to create curriculum materials (this would save huge money on textbooks). Ideally there would be a network of schools so that if a teacher crated an amazing lesson or book chapter he/she would be paid a bit extra every time it was chosen/used. Enough that a moderately prolific teacher could earn a 20-40% bonus simply via curriculum creation. Maybe one decides to teach acoustical physics by analyzing a lady gaga song, and the lesson is a huge hit across a thousand schools. In my opinion the ideal teachers are the sort of people capable of creating top quality curriculum... curriculum creation is a natural biproduct of energetic, creative teaching, and a large chunk of the way schools currently allocate money goes into paying textbook firms rather than cultivating a valuable skill in their employees.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  That sounds very interesting. If someone could solve this, it could be the most important startup in our time. What I would say, though is please put your ideas through the "Satan's computer" and/or game theory test. That is, if you assume every actor will act in their own personal best (best being defined as "optimal short term rewarding") interest at the exclusion or detriment of everyone else but your system still functions then it's a good idea. For example, in your incentive example above it strikes me that some teachers would purposely not use material from other schools because they want that incentive money for themselves (game theory). I would also mention that there will be a potential resource problem. In every field there is a small subset that are the pinnacle of that field. If your system will only pick that pinnacle then you'll be understaffed. Imagine if software development were staffed this way. The software that actually was produced would be much better today, indeed much less would be needed. But we wouldn't have enough.

grandalf 16y ago

Interesting thoughts. I think if done right the daycare aspect could be really fun and socially/academically valuable time for the kids. I actually do think it's a business opportunity but haven't pursued it yet (though I'd like to in the next year or two). As for merit pay, the pay plan I came up with for my hypothetical school would simply be a partnership model. You "make partner" when your colleagues decide they trust you, value your contribution, and would like to keep you on board by sharing profits with you. Then, everyone is paid a base salary but partners get profit sharing. This solves the main problem of tenure while keeping the spirit and benefits of it. Another idea I had for pay plans is to incentivize teachers to create curriculum materials (this would save huge money on textbooks). Ideally there would be a network of schools so that if a teacher crated an amazing lesson or book chapter he/she would be paid a bit extra every time it was chosen/used. Enough that a moderately prolific teacher could earn a 20-40% bonus simply via curriculum creation. Maybe one decides to teach acoustical physics by analyzing a lady gaga song, and the lesson is a huge hit across a thousand schools. In my opinion the ideal teachers are the sort of people capable of creating top quality curriculum... curriculum creation is a natural biproduct of energetic, creative teaching, and a large chunk of the way schools currently allocate money goes into paying textbook firms rather than cultivating a valuable skill in their employees.

loewenskind 16y ago
That sounds very interesting. If someone could solve this, it could be the most important startup in our time. What I would say, though is please put your ideas through the "Satan's computer" and/or game theory test. That is, if you assume every actor will act in their own personal best (best being defined as "optimal short term rewarding") interest at the exclusion or detriment of everyone else but your system still functions then it's a good idea. For example, in your incentive example above it strikes me that some teachers would purposely not use material from other schools because they want that incentive money for themselves (game theory). I would also mention that there will be a potential resource problem. In every field there is a small subset that are the pinnacle of that field. If your system will only pick that pinnacle then you'll be understaffed. Imagine if software development were staffed this way. The software that actually was produced would be much better today, indeed much less would be needed. But we wouldn't have enough.