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Why would we expect schooling to get…cheaper? The vast majority of the cost is hiring teachers. It should be staying in line with inflation or even increasing.

• reassess_blind 6mo ago
  Not to mention there are more students.
  • mistrial9 6mo ago
    in California there are not more students.. all tiers of schools show falling enrollments, year after year. Except community colleges, where they have discovered that more than 15% of all students are ghost enrolled. -- California K-12 public school enrollment fell by 74,961 students (a 1.3% decline) for the 2025-26 school year, marking the largest drop since the pandemic. This loss was significantly higher than the state’s Department of Finance projection of only 10,000 students. The decline is driven by lower birth rates and a reduction in immigration, with the latter exacerbated by families fearing enforcement actions. Los Angeles County accounted for nearly half of the state's total loss, losing 32,953 students, largely due to a decrease in newcomer students within the LAUSD. Private schools saw a steeper drop of 6.6%, while homeschooling declined by 3.7%. The enrollment drop is causing budget deficits, leading to staff layoffs, program cuts, and potential school closures. Hispanic students experienced the largest numeric loss (48,064), while white students saw the largest percentage decline (2.68%). English learner enrollment fell by 8.2%, partly due to reclassification and partly due to out-migration.
    • reassess_blind 6mo ago
      That's surprising. Surely there are still more than there were 30 years ago?
      • MLR 6mo ago
        From glancing at the numbers it looks pretty similar, but there's been a huge drop in births in California in the last 10-20 years so it's probably the last few years where that will be true. Peak birth year was 1990 after booming through the 80s, births started falling off a cliff after 2008 and last year there were about the same number of births as in 1980 despite the population increasing by 80%.
• JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  > vast majority of the cost is hiring teachers My 1,500-student public California high school currently lists 7 administration-team members (principal, executive assistant, three assistant principals, school-facilities manager and food-services manager) and 11 administrative-support members (school data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior-clerical assistant, separate registrar and attendance roles, interventions-support specialist, and others). That doesn't include 4 site maintenance, a network-support and a separate network-systems specialists; a separate media-library specialist; 2 psychologists; a college and career advisor; 4 school counselors; a wellness-space support specialist; and a social science and an athletic director. 34 administrative hires. One per 44 students. Many of those roles strike me as fluff.
  • aiiane 6mo ago
    Which of those roles specifically would you say are fluff?
    • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > Which of those roles specifically would you say are fluff? Food-services manager (it's all oursourced to Aramark), data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior clerical assistant, one of registrar or attendance, two of site maintenance, one of the network specialists (probably both–one across the district is plenty), and probably at least one of the counselors and the separate social science & athletics person, who should just be one of the physical education teachers. That's about ten people, or a million dollars–minimum–in annual savings.
      • aiiane 6mo ago
        Someone still has to coordinate with Aramark. Data-processing specialist and print-center technician both sound like fancy names for secretarial roles. You're honestly saying schools need fewer counselors in what has been generally regarded as the worst generation for child mental health in years?
• gruez 6mo ago
  >The vast majority of the cost is hiring teachers. It should be staying in line with inflation or even increasing. Only if you assume if per-teacher productivity can't increase.
  • mertd 6mo ago
    What I observe as a parent; 95% of the teacher's job cannot be scaled with technology.
  • nyc_data_geek1 6mo ago
    This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before. Why would better tools be expected to do enable teachers to do that for more students at a time? There is a lot of research out there showing worse educational outcomes as class sizes increase. This is one of the areas where wealth disparities in education manifest; rich areas tend to have smaller class sizes, and historically the very rich would pay for private tutors for their kids, whereas poor kids are stuck with bigger class sizes, less individual attention from educators, and typically average worse educational outcomes.
    • gruez 6mo ago
      >This is not creating widgets or lines of code, not creating a product for consumption, this is fostering the development of inquisitive minds, hopefully encouraging them to become critical thinkers and ultimately the next generation of leaders who will push the bounds of human knowledge further than ever before. There's plenty of drudge work teachers do that's not "fostering the development of inquisitive minds". Grading papers, preparing lesson plans, etc. I don't see why not at least some of that can be offloaded to AI.
      • nradov 6mo ago
        There is already a robust online market for lesson plans, both free and paid.