Before moving on from this critique of our standard educational model, I would like to briefly address one more strange and paradoxical thing about it: It may not be working very well, but it certainly is expensive.
There are widely varying computations of what education actually costs. The methodologies for deriving the numbers are often tainted by competing ideologies, and so should be regarded with caution. But let’s consider a couple of figures that seem pretty solid and tough to argue with. In the United States, for the school year 2008–2009 (the most recent year for which comparative numbers are available), the average cost per student for a single year of secondary public education was $10,499. To put this number in perspective, consider that it is larger than the entire per capita gross domestic product of Russia or Brazil. In New York, the state with the highest education costs, the figure was $18,126 per student, more than the per capita GDP of such wealthy nations as South Korea and Saudi Arabia.
Now, like everyone else involved in our education debates, I feel that money devoted to learning is money well spent—especially compared to the vast sums squandered on military contracting, farm subsidies, bridges to nowhere, and so forth. Still, waste in certain areas of our public life does not justify waste in others, and the sad truth is that a significant part of what we spend on education is just that—waste. We spend lavishly but not wisely. We obsess about more because we cannot envision or agree about better.
At roughly $10,000 per student per year, the average American school is spending $250,000–$300,000 per classroom of twenty-five to thirty students. Where is that money going? Arguably, most of it should be going to teachers; but that isn’t how it works. Teachers’ salaries are a relatively small part of the expenditure. If we generously put a teacher’s salary and benefits at $100,000 per year—teachers in most of the country make far less—and the cost of maintaining a 1,000-square-foot classroom at $30,000 per year (a figure comparable to leasing high-end office space), we still have $120,000–$170,000 for each classroom to be spent on “other stuff.” This other stuff includes things like well-paid administrators, security guards, and well-manicured football fields—none of which have a direct role in students’ learning.
Clearly, teachers could and should be significantly better paid if some of the fat were trimmed from the bureaucracy and if more wisdom than tradition went into decisions about what expenses really drive learning. It’s not the teachers’ fault if superintendents and boards make unproductive choices; still, in the blame game that much of our education debate has become, teachers have come in for criticism that is often unfair or at least disproportionate to their role in the fiscal mess and the misallocation of resources.
In order to really address these problems, it’s not enough to fix things on the margin: Add a day in the calendar here, change teacher compensation there. We can’t just focus on things like student/teacher ratio. In regard to cost as well as standard classroom techniques, we need to question basic assumptions.
For example, student/teacher ratio is important. Obviously, the fewer students per teacher, the more attention each student will get. But isn’t the student-to-valuable-time-with-the-teacher ratio more important? I have sat in eight-person college seminars where I never had a truly meaningful interaction with the professor; I have been in thirty-person classrooms where the teacher took a few minutes to work with me and mentor me directly on a regular basis.
Improving the student/teacher time ratio doesn’t necessarily take money; it takes a willingness to rethink our classroom methods. If we move away from the broadcast lecture, students can have more of the teacher’s one-to-one attention; good teachers will get to do more of what led them to teaching in the first place—helping kids learn.
Shifting the focus for a moment from public schools to private schools, it can be argued that if the money spent on public education in the United States and other wealthy nations is a necessary extravagance, the money lavished on elite private schools borders on the obscene. To send a child to a top-tier day school costs around $40,000 a year (or roughly $400,000 to $800,000 per year for a classroom of ten to twenty students). Boarding schools may charge more than $60,000. For affluent families in our megacompetitive culture, the tuition is often just a down payment. When the school day is done, the private tutors take over, sometimes charging as much as $500 per hour; it is not unheard of for parents to spend six figures a year, in addition to tuition, on a child’s tutoring.12 The tutoring these days goes well beyond the standard SAT test prep, and is sometimes tailored to specific courses at specific private schools. In an otherwise terrible job market, high-end tutoring has become a boutique growth industry.
But here’s the good news. If the outsized and somewhat hysterical spending on private education is unhealthy and unsustainable, it’s also completely unnecessary. First, most private schools do not show a discernible difference in results relative to public schools that cater to students with a similar demographic. Second, rigorous, high-quality, and personalized education can be delivered for far, far less money. It needn’t be the sole prerogative of the wealthiest families in the wealthiest nations. This kind of education can and should be available to everyone.
What will make this goal attainable is the enlightened use of technology. Let me stress ENLIGHTENED use. Clearly, I believe that technology-enhanced teaching and learning is our best chance for an affordable and equitable educational future. But the key question is how the technology is used. It’s not enough to put a bunch of computers and smartboards into classrooms. The idea is to integrate the technology into how we teach and learn; without meaningful and imaginative integration, technology in the classroom could turn out to be just one more very expensive gimmick.
Other educators, it should be pointed out, share my skepticism regarding the quick but shallow adoption of new classroom technologies. Duke University professor Cathy N. Davidson has written that “if you change the technology but not the method of learning, then you are throwing good money after bad practice…. [The iPad] is not a classroom learning tool unless you restructure the classroom…. The metrics, the methods, the goals and the assessments all need to change.”13
Let’s think a moment about those methods and those metrics. The dominant method in our traditional classrooms is still the broadcast lecture; one of the most cited metrics in our public debates is class size. But there’s a disconnect between those things. If a teacher’s main job is lecturing, what does it really matter how many students are in the room? Whatever the class size, how customized can instruction be when kids sit passively, taking notes, and the great majority of the teacher’s time and energy is devoted to lesson plans, grading papers, and paperwork?
The promise of technology is to liberate teachers from those largely mechanical chores so that they have more time for human interactions. In many standard classrooms, teachers are so overburdened with mundane tasks that they are lucky to carve out 10 or 20 percent of class time to actually be with students—face-to-face, one-on-one, talking and listening. Imagine what could happen if that figure went to 90 or 100 percent of class time. The student-to-time-with-the teacher ratio would improve by a factor of five or ten. And this is the metric we should care about.
Does all this sound utopian? Purely theoretical? It’s neither. In actual fact, this liberated style of teaching is already being deployed in the real world. In the next part of our book, we will examine how this came to be and how it seems to be working.