

The Problem and Future of Education - imwhimsical
http://arsalanbashir.com/blog/edu-vision

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thumbtackthief
Teachers here are required to get Master's degrees as well. I'm staring at my
useless Master of Science in Teaching right now. And delay school starting? If
we had decent parents at home as a rule, we wouldn't be in the predicament we
are now. School needs to start even sooner to make up for the shortcomings of
parents as it is. I can't tell you how many times I called home and--if I even
got a response at all--was clearly given the message that the parent/guardian
did not care about the child's education _at all_.

~~~
b_emery
I'll second this. Even more so, in a world of specialization, why not have
well trained, enthusiastic, highly specialized teachers spending time with the
kids from an early age? There has to be some balance, young kids want to be
with their parents. My kids are in preschool 2-3 days a week. The teachers
(not babysitters) are amazing at getting the kids engaged, developing fine and
gross motor skills, and encouraging curiosity. I even learn how to be a better
parent from them. My kids will start Kindergarden with a lead over kids who
haven't had similar experience. So yeah, pre-K is the way to go, I'm glad to
see attention being paid to this (locally at least).

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yaddayadda
It's interesting to ponder the fact that the South Korean education reform was
led by United States researchers

"By the late 1960's America was again in crisis. Not only was the country
involved in another war, but the nation's schools were unable to elicit the
achievement from learners it anticipated. Grant Venn argued that since only
19% of first graders complete a bachelor or arts degree, that the current
educational system is only serving the advantaged minority of schoolchildren.
To counter this trend Robert Morgan proposed to conduct an experiment with an
"organic curriculum" which would to incorporate into the educational system
the best instructional practices identified through research. Accepted in 1967
the proposal by the US Office of Education, the project was dubbed
"Educational Systems for the 1970's", or ES'70\. Morgan engaged an array of
experts in the field of learning, cognition, and instructional design to
contribute to the project and carried out multiple experiments in a variety of
settings. Of these was Leslie Briggs, who had demonstrated that an
instructionally designed course could yield up to 2:1 increase over
conventionally designed courses in terms of achievement, reduction in
variance, and reduction of time-to-completion – this effect was four times
that of the control group which received no training. In 1970, Morgan
partnered with the Florida Research and Development Advisory Board to conduct
a nation-wide educational reform project in South Korea. Faced with the task
of increasing the achievement of learners while at the same time reducing the
cost of schooling from $41.27 per student per year Morgan applied some of the
same techniques as had been piloted in the ES'70 project and achieved striking
results: an increase in student achievement, a more efficient organization of
instructors and course content, an increased teacher to student ratio, a
reduction in salary cost, and a reduction in yearly per student cost by
$9.80." ([http://edutech-05.blogspot.com/2008/03/brief-history-of-
inst...](http://edutech-05.blogspot.com/2008/03/brief-history-of-
instructional-design.html))

As a result, many countries continue to send students to Florida State's
Instructional Systems Design program.

It's sad that our bureaucracy prevents us from benefiting from our own
research.

~~~
imwhimsical
Interesting perspective. Don't you think though, that this research will lead
to an increase in efficiency and perhaps subsequently a decrease in
operational costs of schools? If yes, then why would educators hesitate to
implement the results of this research?

~~~
yaddayadda
<personal opinion based on many conversations> Teachers and administrators
think that such changes will lead to lower salaries or outright loss of
jobs.</personal opinion>

As someone in the field, I can understand their concerns from a political
perspective.

From a political perspective, if technological improvements can provide an
education that is comparable to current standards then there will be
politicians that argue we can drastically reduce our number of teachers and
administrators and save taxpayers a lot of money.

From an educational perspective, even if we were to implement all of the
technological solutions that we could there will still be plenty of need for
teachers. Such implementations would change the role of teachers, but not
eliminate the need for them. The closest cases of such changes are "flipped
classrooms". Knewton has an infographic that covers the basics -
[http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom/](http://www.knewton.com/flipped-
classroom/)

