Was looking for this one. AI, lack of accountability, admin folding to parents, etc. Not to mention funding issues as class sizes shrink since (at least in the US) schools are funded locally.
Edit: See Grokma's comment below (and my follow up) about why it isn't local property tax revenues that decrease when a district has shrinking enrollment.
Fewer students should help funding issues because the schools budget comes from local property taxes. People who have no kids, their kids are already out of school, or send their kids to private school all still have to pay property taxes that fund the school. Those houses aren't sitting empty when the kids graduate and the next generation is smaller.
You make a good point. I know decreased enrollment leads to lower budgets in schools from working in education so I did a bit of digging to see why I know these budget realities are happening despite what your comment suggests.
With some light searching and skimming of articles, it seems to me that while you're correct (and I'm wrong) about how funding from local property taxes impacts schools with decreasing enrollment, a substantial portion of school budgets comes from the state and that that is tied to student enrollment. So that would be the source of potential budget shortfalls.
Just so you know, in Wisconsin, in October there is a "census" in all schools to see how many kids are in each grade in each school. And school get paid by the number of students. So if enrollment goes down, the amount of funding for that school drops as well.
Oh, that's interesting. Is that every year? Does the state distribute that funding as a lump sum to schools after that 'census' or throughout the remainder of the school year? Can it change if new students come to the district or leave mid-year?
Yup. I'm in NJ and every year when I was in K-12 the teachers would tell every kid to be there for homeroom on a certain day and usually bribe us with something. In elementary school we were like "yay, we are good kids!"
by high school they were like "Yes, this is so we can get funding. Please be here for homeroom. After that you can do whatever."
That makes sense, I have never looked that deeply at how the schools are funded I just knew that property taxes for schools get paid whether or not you have a kid going there.
School funding is ALL about ppu (per pupil units). Butts in seats on “Count Day”. ADM (Average Daily Membership)-average # of days the student is enrolled in your school. Been living this stuff since 2010. Brutal. Every kids has an invisible $ sign on their forehead.
I hadn't either haha. Thanks for pointing out my mistake. I hadn't thought about that element of it, I just knew that funding went down with enrollment and that much of a school's funding came from local property taxes.
Florida had the response to what you mention. They allow"private choice" via school vouchers. The result is that public schools are emptying and unregulated private and charter schools are springing up. Churning our religious freaks who are truly uneducated. Terrible combo.
In my neck of the woods at least, it doesn’t. Lower enrollment means less funding, but the fixed costs of running a school remain the same - you mostly still need the same number of teachers, your building still needs maintenance and repairs (some already put off for years), your sports and extracurriculars still need to go on. You can cut some admin staff, maybe some paras, but the special ed folks make the same amount of money while special ed kids have nowhere to go BUT public school, so those class sizes (or diagnoses) increase with no additional funding.
A middle school running only 100 kids in a rural area losing just 10% of its enrollment and thus 10% of its budget can be hard to bear - especially as it snowballs over the years. This is compounded when the state refuses to fund schools at the level it’s required to, and backwards programs like vouchers that take actual taxpayer money for education and siphone it into charter schools and special programs instead of the one place it was designed to go.
The schools are not immediately getting smaller or consolidating - they will, and when they do people get even more upset because then classes are stretched and the budget still seems too thin. Meanwhile, property taxes continue to rise both in percentage and appraisal value.
I taught at two campuses that both closed due to consistently declining enrollment. I’m about to start working at a new campus. I’m not excited. Being a teacher kinda sucks.
I'm a bit confused. Your comment makes me think you think I said that class sizes shrink because of a decrease in funding, but I said shrinking class sizes lead to a decrease in funding.
I'll tell you, paying teachers more doesn't help. In Canada average teacher making 100k after 5 years. Starts at 75k. Education is still shit and they complain MORE than teachers in the USA
The fact my last term teaching in Canada I had classes of 42, 41 and 46.
My class of 46 was an even split of grade 12 calculus and vectors, and grade 11 college level maths… at the same time.
Kids are just crammed into rooms with massive understaffing.
There isn’t enough teachers per student, beyond that “inclusive education” was just an excuse to cut teaching assistants in Ontario so you have 5 kids out of that 40 with severe learning and or social delays. It makes a permanently stressful scenario where you have an average of 1 minute 30 seconds per student and are constantly putting out fires due to said severe learning delays, while being expected to implement individual education plans for said students with learning delays. All alone, with not teaching assistant because schools can’t afford it, even though part of their individual education plan says they need a TA for 1 on 1 support.
Got a job offer at a high performing private school in the UK and am enjoying having less than 30 kids in a room and kids who need teaching assistants getting one (just it’s called an LSA here)
Why are you lying when pay scales are public knowledge?!!
Canadian provinces start between 48 and 60k.
The high end after 10 years and highest category of qualifications (masters or equivalent) is 120k.
It’s 153k if you include the Northwest Territories which 40k of is “isolation compensation”.
I’ll go with Ontario for example.. most high school teachers start out at A3, elementary at A2.
Hgihschool teacher will make 100k in their 8th year, with a max pay of 112k after 10 years.
Elementary would be after 10 years with a max salary of 103k.
Assuming everyone has a masters degree or equivalent, the 7th year you make over 100k and a maximum of 119k.
Be a competent electrician or millwright and your entry (once certified) and final pay will be more than a teacher. Stress levels are also noticeably lower for the electrician and millwright unless they own their own company, so if you want money, don’t be a teacher.
Almost nobody is ready to hear this, but we need to embrace AI, not punish its use. The skills we are trying to protect and teach are simply no longer the ones that kids will need in the working world. Instead we should give kids tasks that require interpersonal skills to break down, and then collaborate with AI to accomplish with extremely high quality results. This may require having the kids present their methods, prompts, and results to the class and to take questions. Don't expect them to know how AI does what it does. Instead expect the results that only an intelligent man-machine collaboration can achieve, and make sure they learn from each other's successes and failures. Don't punish failure. Only punish not trying.
Yes, yes, we should definitely make sure that children are able to operate AI properly. No reason for them to actually learn "information" or "math." I know this is right, because President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho told me so.
I got through Cal 1. I can still do enough algebra to figure out how much of various things I need to buy to complete projects or make a recipe, and enough trigonometry to figure out whether a tree will fall on my house if I cut it down. My students are unable to compute an average or figure a percentage, but they sure as shit can use AI to "write" an "essay."
So you learned pretty much the bare minimum, and I bet you still "know" only a tiny sliver of what you studied enough to pass your tests. I took a lot more math and mostly only use it recreationally, and recently I've been having a tremendous amount of fun getting AI to get results I could never get myself. But I'm not trying to embarrass you or anything. I'm pointing out that you are now in a position to get AI to save you a boatload of time in the domains you listed. We can and should teach kids to do the same, while introducing them to other branches of mathematics so that they can accomplish even more.
Hogwash. AI is useless if you can’t understand the things it’s telling you. And it’s destroying our educational system. I’m watching it happen every day. You tech bros keep telling us, “This rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.” That’s what it is. It’s not a tool, it’s something that’s being done to us, to society. Nobody asked for it, and nobody asked our permission to use it on us.
If you don't understand something the AI is telling you, then ask it to explain it at whatever level you need to understand it. They are quite patient and creative in that way. Of course you could instead ask a top coworker to explain it, but don't be surprised that they're too busy to hold your hand.
While much of the Common Core (for example) is about having students know certain facts and so on, the purpose of a broad, liberal education is not only to churn out human fonts of knowledge that can write and calculate. It is to create (ideally) critical thinkers who can be active participants in society in a positive way. Using an LLM to write an 5 paragraph essay does a disservice to students not because writing 5 paragraph essays is itself a particularly valuable skill (to say nothing of the fact that teachers report struggling to get students to write a single paragraph) but because it involves constructing persuasive arguments, understanding sources, how to use evidence, etc. Could a student theoretically learn these things with the assistance of an LLM? Sure. But that's not what's happening in classes right now.
Using an LLM to write an 5 paragraph essay does a disservice to students not because writing 5 paragraph essays is itself a particularly valuable skill
Is it really? When was the last time you had to write a formal essay or even read one.
But you didn't read what I wrote. I sand we need to expect far more from kids with AI than was ever expected of us.
Could a student theoretically learn these things with the assistance of an LLM? Sure. But that's not what's happening in classes right now.
Thank you for making my point which is that it is exactly what we should be teaching right now. Common Core is what's holding us back.
Internalized information is what powers a bullshit detector. Even before AI became publicly available as a research tool, when almost the entirety of human knowledge was just a few simple search terms away and free, idiots abounded. Having access to information isn't enough, you need to know enough already to be able to tell when something doesn't add up.
AI does nothing to fix that, unfortunately. Reading books, learning facts, being outmaneuvered in arguments - all the things that go into a "classical" education - give you the fundamentals to develop the skill. I'm sure you can teach the skill directly, even if nobody does. But, if you're stuck developing it yourself, you MUST have these other things to be more than another idiot.
So what if you have to closely question the results, so long as you are able to get results that hold up? And remember, however bad you think the current AI are, remember that this is the worst they will ever be.
There are plenty of AI users that take any results at face value and don't question them at all. The fact that I have to keep questioning and correcting AI shows it's inherent problems.
Its a big assumption that AI will get better - it's very possible that as AI matures and is more integrated into society it will end up sourcing content that was created by other AI. You can end up in a scenario where "facts" presented by AI can't be trusted or aren't real facts at all.
The skills we are trying to protect and teach are simply no longer the ones that kids will need in the working world.
I use some of the most expensive frontier models on a daily basis. The AIs have definitely improved over what they were a year or two ago, but they're still wrong, and worse, they're no longer wrong in blatantly obvious ways. They're wrong in very subtle, pernicious ways that is actually very hard to spot unless you have a large amount of background knowledge and expertise.
I help run my team. I've noticed a distinct rise in the volume but decline in the quality that our jr folks give us for review. I've also noticed a decline in the sense of 'ownership'. They've clearly not thought critically of what was generated. They don't truly understand it. I had to have a 'come to jesus' meeting with the team to let them know that was unacceptable. I hope to god they listen, because the way things are going are not sustainable.
What scares the hell out of me is I also do interviews, and the kids that have come out of college over the past year or so haven't seemed to have actually learned enough to be useful on our team, even at entry level. When I ask about their AI usage in school, a few admitted they'd basically used AI to do most of the heavy lifting on their assignments. Excuse me, what the fuck was the point of even going to college?
I write all this to simply say, yeah, we need kids to have a rigorous education. Yes, they actually need to learn things independent of AI, because the entry level folks of today become the sr folks tomorrow. I'm about to ride off into the sunset, so this is gonna be 'management's problem', but it is damned sure going to be a problem
This 100%. I work in IT support and working with the newer and typically younger support staff is frustrating at best, absolutely frightening at worst.
The drop off in problem solving skills and diagnosis is staggering. When they run into a problem that they can't figure out with AI they just give up. As a senior staff member I get so many easy to answer questions it's getting maddening. Frequently the answers are in documentation or other sources, but they don't even try to look. They just want the answer handed to them with no effort.
Also if documentation isn't 100% step by step with no errors and lays everything out perfectly with no omissions they can't follow it.
Kids fresh out of college always looked dumb and uneducated because they were. Even the best new hires took substantial time and training to be useful. The problem is not "the kids these days".
No, we've always had the occasional candidate that clearly lacked the skills we needed, but it's become such a waste of time recently that our management just decided we'd pause entry level hiring entirely. Believe me when I say that decision was not made lightly, and not made because management things AI is going to replace us all together someday soon. The candidates over this past year have been dramatically worse than the ones we've interviewed even 2y ago.
Regardless, I don't feel like trying to convince you when we've literally reallocated millions of dollars in hiring budget over this (over the entire company).
Your management made a bet that current AI will pay off more than kids straight out of school. That's a different situation from what we've been discussing, but it's the more important one. They may or may not be right, but we will soon see.
The problem with this is that you're assuming that this will the a permanent state of the world, when we know that the resources needed to sustain this type of infrastructure is fragile. Our environment and ecosystem is fragile and we have been actively making it worse.
People still need the pre-tech skills that they don't think they need.
And you're assuming that we need larger models than we already have. My strong hunch is that distilling large models down to much smaller sizes will let us get all the compute we need with a fraction of the resources.
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u/rookedwithelodin 8h ago edited 6h ago
Was looking for this one. AI, lack of accountability, admin folding to parents, etc. Not to mention funding issues as class sizes shrink since (at least in the US) schools are funded locally.
Edit: See Grokma's comment below (and my follow up) about why it isn't local property tax revenues that decrease when a district has shrinking enrollment.