7 ms·

Florida schools replacing teachers with computers

27 points by akharris 16y ago

sushi 16y ago
This Ted talk by Sugata Mitra also talks about replacing teachers with machines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU The fast-food delivery of education must change now that we have better tools to impart education.
- rimantas 16y ago
  I'd say the tools are of the least importance there. Nevertheless, somehow we tend to think that most problems can be solved just by throwing technology at them.
  - dantheman 16y ago
    Sometimes the only way to address problems with entrenched interests is to change the playing field, technology can serve this purpose. So instead of having to fight tons of battles against teachers unions, implements some technology that drastically weakens their position -- in this new landscape political battles can now be won. I of course think school vouchers is the end all be all of school reform since it allows anyone to open a school and to compete with any ideas that they think might win...
    - absconditus 16y ago
      I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of how technology is the answer to our education problems.
      - dantheman 16y ago
        Depends on what technology. 1. Books are clearly better than only having lectures - so there's one example of where technology has improved education. Depends on educational problems: 1. What age group are we focusing on? * Adults are clearly different from teenagers * Teenagers are clearly different than children A one size approach, probably won't work. 2. College Lectures are an outmoded form of teaching. It'd better to have the lecture recorded and perfected, and then allow the student to watch it -- making sure to jot down their questions and then discuss with the professor and fellow students -- it's a better use of everyone's time and makes the content available to everyone. In science and math I expect this to be a huge win at the lower levels where mechanical notation and rules need to be learned. As we progress up the abstraction layer to where we need exemplars to train our ability to recognize patterns I think that computers will still have a long way to go -- this is where guided direction is important. 3. When I was a child I had difficulties learning to read, I did some special classes primarily involving software that significantly improved my reading ability. I extremely happy I was afforded that opportunity.
  - khafra 16y ago
    The per user costs of technology reduce dramatically as the number of users enlarges; the cost of teachers scales linearly with the number of users. At present, society is not willing to pay enough to provide the average student with quality teachers; if an up-front investment in technology can better that standard--even at the cost of worse-than-usual products of the Florida school system for a few years--it's a net win for society.
dangoldin 16y ago
I have a feeling this will lead to even more education inequality based on socio-economic factors. I think this approach has promise, and will probably be the standard one in the future, but this manifestation just seems as if it's being done for cost reasons.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Why should it do that? Computers are very cheap and the schools should be able to buy the software at such a low cost that all schools should be able to afford it. Compare this with the situation today where some children are being though by great teachers and some are being though by horrible teachers.
  - akharris 16y ago
    I think that's what dangoldin was saying. Poorer communities will be jammed with cheap software and computers rather than great teachers. The software teaching method definitely has merit, but it's not a solution to "we have overcrowded classes." It's not yet ready for that, and there doesn't seem to be anyone credible claiming that it is. This is just the outgrowth of bad policy and not enough funding.
    - tomjen3 16y ago
      That assumes they have great teachers now, which is not a given. If they have bad teachers, even a semi stupid program will be better than that.
  - Pinckney 16y ago
    I interpreted it the opposite way--that schools in poorer districts will gradually find it necessary to implement such classes due to financial concerns. The software will be drivel produced by the lowest bidder, who will probably use various shiny features to distract the buyers (who probably won't have spoken to an actual student any time this month). Students in these classes will struggle to have their questions addressed, and if they are confused, nobody will be able to help them. That's if they aren't disillusioned already by the fact that their school isn't even providing them with a teacher. Schools in wealthier districts, meanwhile, will choose to actually pay teachers. Now it is possible that these classes will work out well, but I'm not optimistic. It's certainly something that should be implemented after controlled experimentation to determine effectiveness, not blindly chosen because of poorly considered policies.
winterlightning 16y ago
I think pure computer learning is not the most effective way. Since there are often "hurdles" when learning that takes in depth explanation from another person. However, if augmented by "office hours" for students, this could be a great way to learn. It will be great preparation for college where students don't attend class and read the power points after.
patio11 16y ago
Class-size limits are an artificial constraint which were introduced because they occupy that happy space in the middle of the Venn diagram between "sounds good to voters" and "does something teachers unions actually care about." They do little, if anything, for education. You could solve this problem in an afternoon if you wanted to -- repeal class size limits, done. That will only actually happen if there is a severely negative outcome to this situation... like the computers improving educational quality when compared to teachers.
- yequalsx 16y ago
  Do you have evidence that class size doesn't matter? It seems intuitively obvious that class size does matter. Consider a single teacher teaching 60,000 average students in a stadium sized classroom versus a single teacher in a classroom with 20 average students. It seems to me that the probability of success in the latter classroom would be significantly higher than in the former. I don't know this to be true but it seems like it should be true. I'd be interested in knowing if there is research supporting your position.
  - evgen 16y ago
    He can't really provide the evidence because it does not exist in any meaningful manner. There is an overwhelming amount of data showing that reduced class sizes lead to better overall student performance and that smaller classes have a disproportionately large effect when used in disadvantaged/urban schools and when used very early (e.g. K-2nd grade.)
    - luu 16y ago
      It’s not nearly as clear as you make it out to be. Of the randomized controlled trials that I know of [1], one study has shown that reducing class size from 25 to 15 has a large positive effect, but another has shown that reducing class size from 40 to 30 has no effect. Also, assigning a teacher’s aide, so that a class of 50 is taught by two people also has no effect. The problem is that such studies are expensive and hard to generalize. Is it really that going from 25 to 15 always has an effect and that going from 40 to 30 never does, or was there something about the particular circumstances of those trials that made class size matter in one case and not the other? Another problem is that even if reducing class size is effective is that, in the short run, there’s a fixed supply of good teachers. This isn’t a problem when you’re running an RCT on a few schools, but if you want to initiate state-wide (or nation-wide) reform, it’s not clear that throwing a bunch of unqualified teachers into small classrooms will help. [1]Hacsi’s Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform has a good summary of evidence to date, as of 2003
snewman 16y ago
It's easy to throw out opinions about this sort of thing -- "computers are no replacement for a real teacher", "the class size constraint should be relaxed", "if done well, computerized education could be a huge step forward". But without hard data about the situation in question -- details of how the program is implemented, measured outcomes from previous uses of the same courseware, etc. -- the discussion isn't very productive. The NYTimes article is disappointing in that respect: it provides little or none of the information that would help us decide whether the Florida program is a sensible adaptation to limited resources, or a sad pretense. I've seen plenty of examples of computers in the classroom doing little good, and even doing harm (mostly in the form of distraction). In the long run, I'm optimistic that computers can revolutionize education; in the short run, I'm pessimistic about most of the efforts going on. This article doesn't tell us anything about which category the Florida program falls into; without more data or context, there's not much point in debating it.
michaelbuckbee 16y ago
There was a really interesting Freakonomics Podcast about NYC's "School of One" program that is a good counterpoint to what it looks like is happening in Florida. They take an algorithmic approach to try to determine what learning style works best for a kid and continuously test for learning retention and how quickly new skills are gained. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/freakonomics-radio-how-is-a-bad-radio-station-like-the-public-school-system/ http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/freakonomic...
fakespastic 16y ago
What a terrible idea. I'm sorry, I know this sounds very low-tech of me, but high-school aged kids need an authority figure, who is clearly in charge, teaching them material. Lecturing in-person. Building relationships. I, for one, even at my age, cannot long burden myself with CBT. People just don't take it seriously enough. Let's face the reality of humanity: we are what robots will ultimately become, and some things are just better between humans than between a human and a computer.
bitwize 16y ago
http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-1-new-learning/the-fun-they-had/ http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-1-new-lear... A man can't know as much as a teacher.
adolph 16y ago
The submission title is inaccurate. Some schools are augmenting their workforce with technology due to unfunded legal requirements, see key quotes below. Under the state’s class-reduction amendment, high school classrooms cannot surpass a 25-student limit in core subjects, like English or math. Fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms can have no more than 22 students, and prekindergarten through third grade can have no more than 18. School administrators said that they had to find a way to meet class-size limits. Jodi Robins, the assistant principal of curriculum at Miami Beach High, said that even if students struggled in certain subjects, the virtual labs were necessary because “there’s no way to beat the class-size mandate without it.”
rbanffy 16y ago
Because in Soviet Florida, computer programs you. Sorry. I could not resist. Now, on a more serious tone, if this is a cost-cutting measure, why not embrace the XO as a learning aid? It certainly cost very little and can be packed with mountains of learning material, much more than it would be cost-effective to print and ship to schools. Plus, contrarily to the Dells pictured in the text, students can carry them everywhere and the energy cost of operating them must be smaller than the cost of operating those CRTs alone.
bugsy 16y ago
I don't understand how class size is being reduced with people going to computer labs with no teacher. Isn't the idea of class size that there is at least one teacher per N students? With these labs there are zero teachers per N students, which is effectively infinity students per teacher (0).

27 points by akharris 16y ago

sushi 16y ago

This Ted talk by Sugata Mitra also talks about replacing teachers with machines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU The fast-food delivery of education must change now that we have better tools to impart education.

rimantas 16y ago
I'd say the tools are of the least importance there. Nevertheless, somehow we tend to think that most problems can be solved just by throwing technology at them.
- dantheman 16y ago
  Sometimes the only way to address problems with entrenched interests is to change the playing field, technology can serve this purpose. So instead of having to fight tons of battles against teachers unions, implements some technology that drastically weakens their position -- in this new landscape political battles can now be won. I of course think school vouchers is the end all be all of school reform since it allows anyone to open a school and to compete with any ideas that they think might win...
  - absconditus 16y ago
    I have yet to hear a convincing explanation of how technology is the answer to our education problems.
    - dantheman 16y ago
      Depends on what technology. 1. Books are clearly better than only having lectures - so there's one example of where technology has improved education. Depends on educational problems: 1. What age group are we focusing on? * Adults are clearly different from teenagers * Teenagers are clearly different than children A one size approach, probably won't work. 2. College Lectures are an outmoded form of teaching. It'd better to have the lecture recorded and perfected, and then allow the student to watch it -- making sure to jot down their questions and then discuss with the professor and fellow students -- it's a better use of everyone's time and makes the content available to everyone. In science and math I expect this to be a huge win at the lower levels where mechanical notation and rules need to be learned. As we progress up the abstraction layer to where we need exemplars to train our ability to recognize patterns I think that computers will still have a long way to go -- this is where guided direction is important. 3. When I was a child I had difficulties learning to read, I did some special classes primarily involving software that significantly improved my reading ability. I extremely happy I was afforded that opportunity.
- khafra 16y ago
  The per user costs of technology reduce dramatically as the number of users enlarges; the cost of teachers scales linearly with the number of users. At present, society is not willing to pay enough to provide the average student with quality teachers; if an up-front investment in technology can better that standard--even at the cost of worse-than-usual products of the Florida school system for a few years--it's a net win for society.

dangoldin 16y ago

I have a feeling this will lead to even more education inequality based on socio-economic factors. I think this approach has promise, and will probably be the standard one in the future, but this manifestation just seems as if it's being done for cost reasons.

tomjen3 16y ago
Why should it do that? Computers are very cheap and the schools should be able to buy the software at such a low cost that all schools should be able to afford it. Compare this with the situation today where some children are being though by great teachers and some are being though by horrible teachers.
- akharris 16y ago
  I think that's what dangoldin was saying. Poorer communities will be jammed with cheap software and computers rather than great teachers. The software teaching method definitely has merit, but it's not a solution to "we have overcrowded classes." It's not yet ready for that, and there doesn't seem to be anyone credible claiming that it is. This is just the outgrowth of bad policy and not enough funding.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    That assumes they have great teachers now, which is not a given. If they have bad teachers, even a semi stupid program will be better than that.
- Pinckney 16y ago
  I interpreted it the opposite way--that schools in poorer districts will gradually find it necessary to implement such classes due to financial concerns. The software will be drivel produced by the lowest bidder, who will probably use various shiny features to distract the buyers (who probably won't have spoken to an actual student any time this month). Students in these classes will struggle to have their questions addressed, and if they are confused, nobody will be able to help them. That's if they aren't disillusioned already by the fact that their school isn't even providing them with a teacher. Schools in wealthier districts, meanwhile, will choose to actually pay teachers. Now it is possible that these classes will work out well, but I'm not optimistic. It's certainly something that should be implemented after controlled experimentation to determine effectiveness, not blindly chosen because of poorly considered policies.

winterlightning 16y ago

I think pure computer learning is not the most effective way. Since there are often "hurdles" when learning that takes in depth explanation from another person. However, if augmented by "office hours" for students, this could be a great way to learn. It will be great preparation for college where students don't attend class and read the power points after.

patio11 16y ago

Class-size limits are an artificial constraint which were introduced because they occupy that happy space in the middle of the Venn diagram between "sounds good to voters" and "does something teachers unions actually care about." They do little, if anything, for education. You could solve this problem in an afternoon if you wanted to -- repeal class size limits, done. That will only actually happen if there is a severely negative outcome to this situation... like the computers improving educational quality when compared to teachers.

yequalsx 16y ago
Do you have evidence that class size doesn't matter? It seems intuitively obvious that class size does matter. Consider a single teacher teaching 60,000 average students in a stadium sized classroom versus a single teacher in a classroom with 20 average students. It seems to me that the probability of success in the latter classroom would be significantly higher than in the former. I don't know this to be true but it seems like it should be true. I'd be interested in knowing if there is research supporting your position.
- evgen 16y ago
  He can't really provide the evidence because it does not exist in any meaningful manner. There is an overwhelming amount of data showing that reduced class sizes lead to better overall student performance and that smaller classes have a disproportionately large effect when used in disadvantaged/urban schools and when used very early (e.g. K-2nd grade.)
  - luu 16y ago
    It’s not nearly as clear as you make it out to be. Of the randomized controlled trials that I know of [1], one study has shown that reducing class size from 25 to 15 has a large positive effect, but another has shown that reducing class size from 40 to 30 has no effect. Also, assigning a teacher’s aide, so that a class of 50 is taught by two people also has no effect. The problem is that such studies are expensive and hard to generalize. Is it really that going from 25 to 15 always has an effect and that going from 40 to 30 never does, or was there something about the particular circumstances of those trials that made class size matter in one case and not the other? Another problem is that even if reducing class size is effective is that, in the short run, there’s a fixed supply of good teachers. This isn’t a problem when you’re running an RCT on a few schools, but if you want to initiate state-wide (or nation-wide) reform, it’s not clear that throwing a bunch of unqualified teachers into small classrooms will help. [1]Hacsi’s Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform has a good summary of evidence to date, as of 2003

snewman 16y ago

It's easy to throw out opinions about this sort of thing -- "computers are no replacement for a real teacher", "the class size constraint should be relaxed", "if done well, computerized education could be a huge step forward". But without hard data about the situation in question -- details of how the program is implemented, measured outcomes from previous uses of the same courseware, etc. -- the discussion isn't very productive. The NYTimes article is disappointing in that respect: it provides little or none of the information that would help us decide whether the Florida program is a sensible adaptation to limited resources, or a sad pretense. I've seen plenty of examples of computers in the classroom doing little good, and even doing harm (mostly in the form of distraction). In the long run, I'm optimistic that computers can revolutionize education; in the short run, I'm pessimistic about most of the efforts going on. This article doesn't tell us anything about which category the Florida program falls into; without more data or context, there's not much point in debating it.

michaelbuckbee 16y ago

There was a really interesting Freakonomics Podcast about NYC's "School of One" program that is a good counterpoint to what it looks like is happening in Florida. They take an algorithmic approach to try to determine what learning style works best for a kid and continuously test for learning retention and how quickly new skills are gained. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/freakonomics-radio-how-is-a-bad-radio-station-like-the-public-school-system/ http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/freakonomic...

fakespastic 16y ago

What a terrible idea. I'm sorry, I know this sounds very low-tech of me, but high-school aged kids need an authority figure, who is clearly in charge, teaching them material. Lecturing in-person. Building relationships. I, for one, even at my age, cannot long burden myself with CBT. People just don't take it seriously enough. Let's face the reality of humanity: we are what robots will ultimately become, and some things are just better between humans than between a human and a computer.

bitwize 16y ago

http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-1-new-learning/the-fun-they-had/ http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-1-new-lear... A man can't know as much as a teacher.

adolph 16y ago

The submission title is inaccurate. Some schools are augmenting their workforce with technology due to unfunded legal requirements, see key quotes below. Under the state’s class-reduction amendment, high school classrooms cannot surpass a 25-student limit in core subjects, like English or math. Fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms can have no more than 22 students, and prekindergarten through third grade can have no more than 18. School administrators said that they had to find a way to meet class-size limits. Jodi Robins, the assistant principal of curriculum at Miami Beach High, said that even if students struggled in certain subjects, the virtual labs were necessary because “there’s no way to beat the class-size mandate without it.”

rbanffy 16y ago

Because in Soviet Florida, computer programs you. Sorry. I could not resist. Now, on a more serious tone, if this is a cost-cutting measure, why not embrace the XO as a learning aid? It certainly cost very little and can be packed with mountains of learning material, much more than it would be cost-effective to print and ship to schools. Plus, contrarily to the Dells pictured in the text, students can carry them everywhere and the energy cost of operating them must be smaller than the cost of operating those CRTs alone.

bugsy 16y ago

I don't understand how class size is being reduced with people going to computer labs with no teacher. Isn't the idea of class size that there is at least one teacher per N students? With these labs there are zero teachers per N students, which is effectively infinity students per teacher (0).