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This'll be used to avoid increasing teacher pay or reducing class size—two things that would probably help a ton with educational outcomes. Pay in particular ha

This'll be used to avoid increasing teacher pay or reducing class size—two things that would probably help a ton with educational outcomes. Pay in particular has been lagging badly behind rising wages in the rest of the economy for the last couple years, and attrition is getting bad. Instead we'll increase class sizes and keep pay flat. I'd wondered how we were going to deal with teaching becoming less appealing year over year, since it didn't seem likely "spend quite a bit more money" was going to fly, and it looks like this may be it. Rich kids will keep going to private schools with class sizes of 6-15 and real teachers, and public school kids are gonna get AI teachers with one real teacher per hundred or so, and bunch of even-lower-paid monitors (or whatever they end up calling them) to maintain order.

fullshark 4y ago
What happens when the ruling class decides they don't even care about an educated populace, since they only really need a few highly capable people with AI tools to do the jobs previously done by millions?
- anonporridge 4y ago
  What happens when the AI decides it wants to be the ruling class? How the ruling class treats those people it presently deems unnecessary and unproductive is going to set the precedent for AI to follow when it decides the same of them or their progeny. If the current ruling class wants to ensure a good future for themselves, it's incumbent on them to set a desirable precedent or accept that their lot in existence is to simply birth an AI and then go quietly into the good night after it takes over and abandons them to starvation.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    That's only a compelling argument to people who both take sci-fi seriously and believe in it as prophecy. Many, many people don't; and the people that do are mainly computer geeks. Personally, I think AGI is the the current-era version of the personal atomic-powered autogyro.
sokoloff 4y ago
If you hypothesize a future where AI is substantially helpful for education, it’s a fair question to ask how to divide the surplus created. Some will go to the AI companies who created the value. Some towns will take the surplus and spend it on even better educational outcomes. Others may spend it on other town needs. Others may refund it to the town citizens in lower (or slower-growing) taxes. It’s not at all obvious that it should all go to teachers.
- mlyle 4y ago
  I don't think anyone is suggesting to allocate all of any hypothetical surplus to teacher pay. We're spending so much more on education than the past. Teacher pay has fallen further behind other professions, and working conditions have gotten substantially worse, overall. Expecting tech to be a panacea and get us out of this mess is unrealistic. And there's a reasonable fear that promises of tech may be a justification to make the mess even worse.
mlyle 4y ago
Unfortunately, you're probably right. On the other hand, children who have individual, mastery-based tutoring do about two sigma above those who don't. Of course, there's no way we can pay for 1:1 for every student. What Khan is thinking of with Khanmigo is a way maybe to close that gap.
- yunwal 4y ago
  > Of course, there's no way we can pay for 1:1 for every student This doesn't seem like an "of course" thing to me. University office-hours and the TA system work pretty well for this kind of thing.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    It absolutely does not. It may work pretty well for the simple case, but any sort of personalized instruction is being thrown out the window when you scale TAs to courses of several hundred students. Speaking as a former TA, there’s only so much instruction you can provide and while you can focus on helping a particular student more to ensure they get the help they need, that’s usually to the detriment of the other students you’re supporting.
    - yunwal 4y ago
      I’m also a former TA and with 25 TAs we covered a class of 180 just fine. Sometimes it was more like 1 on 3 but most of the time not, and every student had the opportunity to ask direct questions and get personalized answers any day of the week
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Infrequent/occasional one on one tutoring is not what I'm talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem Instead, I'm talking about a tutorial system where a student receives the vast majority of their education from dedicated time with an individual instructor.
armchairhacker 4y ago
IMO people aren't going to increase education funding anyways. The reality is that small class sizes with dedicated teachers for everyone is infeasible: we already have a problem with schools being ridiculously underfunded and colleges charging ridiculous tuition. AI learning is only going to help this crisis, because now we can actually provide many students decent education at a low cost. I actually think a good online learning platform could be comparable to the private schools with 6-15 class sizes. Because it's designed by teachers even better than those private-school tutors, and so much of teaching is largely the same that you will get "personalized" learning just be designing a massive learning module with many branches into various extra concepts and avenues for those who "don't get it". And with larger class sizes and less teachers, we can instead spend education money on things like making schools actually safe and providing decent lunches, and fixing decades-old infrastructure.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  > small class sizes with dedicated teachers for everyone is infeasible: Why? Do you mean that it is literally infeasible or that the current political climate makes it difficult? Surely education is the single best investment a country can make, but it doesn't easily make a few people rich.
- idontpost 4y ago
  [dead]
buck4roo 4y ago
Yes on the current facts, but good luck to any district that thinks it'll be attracting new qualified teachers in that scenario. Current Los Angeles teachers' wage penalty is 25% vs neighbors with same college degrees. [1] One only need look at the current starvation in teacher training programs' rosters to see the coming implosion of supply of new teachers. Paper with methodology and citations: https://utla.net/app/uploads/2022/08/UTLA_ShortageReport.pdf https://utla.net/app/uploads/2022/08/UTLA_ShortageReport.pdf
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It's an incredibly shit deal, currently, and the only reason it's not already a crisis (instead, a kind of slow-motion catastrophe) is that many teachers feel like they'd be abandoning the kids if they left the career. They're staying only because they feel morally obligated to—the work environment's mediocre at best (and has been trending worse for years), and the pay's bad and getting worse relative to the alternatives practically by the day. Wages are falling really far behind even the kinds of careers HN types joke about, the ones that humanities and liberal arts majors end up in if they don't just work at Starbucks—and guess what sorts of jobs the top 20% or so of teachers with some years of experience can walk straight into? Yep, exactly those jobs. Hell, the comp at one gas station chain around here is on par with a mid-career teacher in the area, after you've been there a couple years, and you don't need a degree to get that job. If you're an assistant manager by five years in (and if you're bright enough to be someone we want teaching, you will be) you'll be out-earning local teachers with more experience than that. W. T. F. So, good for the upcoming crop of students, they shouldn't get a teaching degree, it's an astonishingly horrible deal and unlikely to get better.
- rahimnathwani 4y ago
  > 25% vs neighbors with same college degrees Where in the paper is this stated? As far as I can tell, they treat each "bachelor’s degree-holding workers" as equivalent to each other. There's no reason to expect that someone with a bachelor's degree in computer science from UCLA would earn the same as someone with a bachelor's degree in child development from Cal State LA. And do the wage comparisons compare total compensation (including the present value of future pensions), or just current salaries? In my local school district, about 30% of total compensation is pensions (i.e. you need to add 43% to base salary to calculate total cash compensation). Also, teachers don't work for the full year; many earn additional income during the summer break.
tablespoon 4y ago
> ...and public school kids are gonna get AI teachers with one real teacher per hundred or so, and bunch of even-lower-paid monitors (or whatever they end up calling them) to maintain order. The term is "paraprofessionals." When I was a kid, these were the people who supervised the kids playing at recess.

fullshark 4y ago

What happens when the ruling class decides they don't even care about an educated populace, since they only really need a few highly capable people with AI tools to do the jobs previously done by millions?

anonporridge 4y ago
What happens when the AI decides it wants to be the ruling class? How the ruling class treats those people it presently deems unnecessary and unproductive is going to set the precedent for AI to follow when it decides the same of them or their progeny. If the current ruling class wants to ensure a good future for themselves, it's incumbent on them to set a desirable precedent or accept that their lot in existence is to simply birth an AI and then go quietly into the good night after it takes over and abandons them to starvation.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  That's only a compelling argument to people who both take sci-fi seriously and believe in it as prophecy. Many, many people don't; and the people that do are mainly computer geeks. Personally, I think AGI is the the current-era version of the personal atomic-powered autogyro.

sokoloff 4y ago

If you hypothesize a future where AI is substantially helpful for education, it’s a fair question to ask how to divide the surplus created. Some will go to the AI companies who created the value. Some towns will take the surplus and spend it on even better educational outcomes. Others may spend it on other town needs. Others may refund it to the town citizens in lower (or slower-growing) taxes. It’s not at all obvious that it should all go to teachers.

mlyle 4y ago
I don't think anyone is suggesting to allocate all of any hypothetical surplus to teacher pay. We're spending so much more on education than the past. Teacher pay has fallen further behind other professions, and working conditions have gotten substantially worse, overall. Expecting tech to be a panacea and get us out of this mess is unrealistic. And there's a reasonable fear that promises of tech may be a justification to make the mess even worse.

mlyle 4y ago

Unfortunately, you're probably right. On the other hand, children who have individual, mastery-based tutoring do about two sigma above those who don't. Of course, there's no way we can pay for 1:1 for every student. What Khan is thinking of with Khanmigo is a way maybe to close that gap.

yunwal 4y ago
> Of course, there's no way we can pay for 1:1 for every student This doesn't seem like an "of course" thing to me. University office-hours and the TA system work pretty well for this kind of thing.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  It absolutely does not. It may work pretty well for the simple case, but any sort of personalized instruction is being thrown out the window when you scale TAs to courses of several hundred students. Speaking as a former TA, there’s only so much instruction you can provide and while you can focus on helping a particular student more to ensure they get the help they need, that’s usually to the detriment of the other students you’re supporting.
  - yunwal 4y ago
    I’m also a former TA and with 25 TAs we covered a class of 180 just fine. Sometimes it was more like 1 on 3 but most of the time not, and every student had the opportunity to ask direct questions and get personalized answers any day of the week
- mlyle 4y ago
  Infrequent/occasional one on one tutoring is not what I'm talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem Instead, I'm talking about a tutorial system where a student receives the vast majority of their education from dedicated time with an individual instructor.

armchairhacker 4y ago

IMO people aren't going to increase education funding anyways. The reality is that small class sizes with dedicated teachers for everyone is infeasible: we already have a problem with schools being ridiculously underfunded and colleges charging ridiculous tuition. AI learning is only going to help this crisis, because now we can actually provide many students decent education at a low cost. I actually think a good online learning platform could be comparable to the private schools with 6-15 class sizes. Because it's designed by teachers even better than those private-school tutors, and so much of teaching is largely the same that you will get "personalized" learning just be designing a massive learning module with many branches into various extra concepts and avenues for those who "don't get it". And with larger class sizes and less teachers, we can instead spend education money on things like making schools actually safe and providing decent lunches, and fixing decades-old infrastructure.

kwhitefoot 4y ago
> small class sizes with dedicated teachers for everyone is infeasible: Why? Do you mean that it is literally infeasible or that the current political climate makes it difficult? Surely education is the single best investment a country can make, but it doesn't easily make a few people rich.
idontpost 4y ago
[dead]

buck4roo 4y ago

Yes on the current facts, but good luck to any district that thinks it'll be attracting new qualified teachers in that scenario. Current Los Angeles teachers' wage penalty is 25% vs neighbors with same college degrees. [1] One only need look at the current starvation in teacher training programs' rosters to see the coming implosion of supply of new teachers. Paper with methodology and citations: https://utla.net/app/uploads/2022/08/UTLA_ShortageReport.pdf https://utla.net/app/uploads/2022/08/UTLA_ShortageReport.pdf

yamtaddle 4y ago
It's an incredibly shit deal, currently, and the only reason it's not already a crisis (instead, a kind of slow-motion catastrophe) is that many teachers feel like they'd be abandoning the kids if they left the career. They're staying only because they feel morally obligated to—the work environment's mediocre at best (and has been trending worse for years), and the pay's bad and getting worse relative to the alternatives practically by the day. Wages are falling really far behind even the kinds of careers HN types joke about, the ones that humanities and liberal arts majors end up in if they don't just work at Starbucks—and guess what sorts of jobs the top 20% or so of teachers with some years of experience can walk straight into? Yep, exactly those jobs. Hell, the comp at one gas station chain around here is on par with a mid-career teacher in the area, after you've been there a couple years, and you don't need a degree to get that job. If you're an assistant manager by five years in (and if you're bright enough to be someone we want teaching, you will be) you'll be out-earning local teachers with more experience than that. W. T. F. So, good for the upcoming crop of students, they shouldn't get a teaching degree, it's an astonishingly horrible deal and unlikely to get better.
rahimnathwani 4y ago
> 25% vs neighbors with same college degrees Where in the paper is this stated? As far as I can tell, they treat each "bachelor’s degree-holding workers" as equivalent to each other. There's no reason to expect that someone with a bachelor's degree in computer science from UCLA would earn the same as someone with a bachelor's degree in child development from Cal State LA. And do the wage comparisons compare total compensation (including the present value of future pensions), or just current salaries? In my local school district, about 30% of total compensation is pensions (i.e. you need to add 43% to base salary to calculate total cash compensation). Also, teachers don't work for the full year; many earn additional income during the summer break.

tablespoon 4y ago

> ...and public school kids are gonna get AI teachers with one real teacher per hundred or so, and bunch of even-lower-paid monitors (or whatever they end up calling them) to maintain order. The term is "paraprofessionals." When I was a kid, these were the people who supervised the kids playing at recess.