How might we scale high quality education?
What makes for a high quality education? My answer so far is a positive context and personalization. Both of these require trust, goodwill, and love between students/teachers. That means scaling high quality education is likely bottlenecked on scaling human love. How might you do that?
Let’s do the math. Assume something like an Alpha school 5:1 ratio is needed. How many school-age kids are there in the world at any given time? That divided by 5 is how many well-paid high quality motivated teachers are needed, assuming perfect tech + culture.
ChatGPT says 1.7-1.8 billion school-age kids (5-17)
That means you need 350 million teachers
ChatGPT says today there are 70 million teachers
So global ratio today is 25:1. We would need to 5x the number of teachers.
Presumably the ROI on primary/secondary education is quite high? I guess it’s unclear what the marginal effect of funding better/more teachers would be. Or to put it more directly, what is the economic surplus of reducing class sizes from 25:1 to 5:1? I assume significant but I wonder if there is data on this?
But yea ASSUMING reducing class sizes by a factor of 5 has some significant economic surplus. The question then becomes what % of that economic surplus would teachers need to receive to be able to fund reducing class sizes by 5x, and is it < 100% of the surplus (lol)? Besides salary there is also the question of buildings needing to be bigger (5x more rooms?) etc. But presumably salary is the dominant ongoing factor.
The other assumption here is that these 5x more teachers are also being paid more than teachers are paid today. Which requires an even bigger portion of the presumed economic surplus that results.
How much do guides at Alpha School get paid? How much do teachers at public schools in the same location as Alpha get paid? From Your Review Alpha School:
- Associate guides make $60k/yr vs $40k/yr for Austin teachers
- Full guides make 100k
- Head guides make 150k
So can use 1.5x salary as a rough starting point
So basically you need 5x more teachers & 1.5x more salary, so roughly 7.5x more $ being given to teachers. What is the economic surplus of increasing teacher pay? Is this economic surplus sufficient? There are two parts to the surplus
- Increasing teacher salary (fix class sizes)
- Reducing class sizes (fix teacher salary)
- I suppose the joint distribution of these could also scale differently than the marginals – either more or less economic surplus
Is there a model of the economic surplus to society from each/both of these?
Then there is also the cultural bit, which is hard. Some of it boils down to having to give up the fiction that education is a manageable thing based on measures like standardized tests. They are useful for comparison at the end but not as inputs to educational management decisions.
The other part re: culture is also the issue that Public schools don't enforce a specific educational culture. Should they? I suspect there are educational values that can be agreed upon in a public school that don’t infringe on students’ rights and keep up liberal ideals.. Seems hard to believe that there wouldn’t be. Even if you agree upon values you have to enforce the culture using Techniques to scale an opinionated educational culture. Probably the enforcement is where it infringes upon liberal values as it requires manipulating status hierarchy etc. Are there small countries that do this? Maybe Singapore or Vatican?
The tech is prolly the easiest part, I think it’s ~already solved. It does need to be in a closed loop with the other aspects so it improves over time, but I highly doubt it’s the bottleneck.