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Financing Change: School Time and Money
We spend so much money on the military, yet we’re
slashing education budgets throughout the country. No
wonder we’ve got smart bombs and slow children.
– Jon Stewart
Let us take a step back and review what we
know so far. Many people are upset with school – they
have been for a long time. Their dissatisfaction arises
from six fundamental flaws that can only be solved with
technology. Rather than being cold and impersonal,
computers allow for greater choice, flexibility, and
human interaction. Yet computers are now relegated to
Internet searches and word processing. No content is
being taught with them, and there is no evidence that
this is changing. The obvious question is, “Why?” If
computers are so much better, why are we ignoring them?
The answer can be summarized in one word: money.
According to opinion polls, the biggest problem facing
schools is a “lack of financial support”. Everybody
knows that school budgets are declining, right? Well,
not exactly. Despite claims to the contrary, we now
spend more money on education than at any time in
history – and not just because of inflation or
population growth. In constant dollars, per pupil
expenditures doubled between 1970 and 2000. Expenditures continue to rise faster than inflation. It
now costs over $11,000 per year to educate an average
American high school student. Our problem is not a lack
of money, but how existing money is spent.
Content is King
In 1967, Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is
the message.” However, some critics thought McLuhan’s
contrarian disposition and stream-of-consciousness
rhetoric rendered most of what he said incomprehensible
and the rest incorrect. Perhaps his ideas had some
validity in the 1960s, when television consisted of
three nearly indistinguishable networks (ABC, CBS, NBC). It is difficult to accept his argument
today in a thousand-channel landscape that offers specialty programming as diverse as Treehouse (for
preschoolers), EWTN (Catholic religious programming),
The Fight Network (bloody human combat), and Maleflixxx
(hardcore gay pornography). Try mixing up those
broadcasts for a week and then explaining to irate
subscribers that it’s the medium rather than the message
that matters. On second thought, McLuhan’s comment was
obviously absurd when he made it. Print media in the
1960s boasted millions of titles, serving every
conceivable demographic. The medium is not the message,
unless you are a professor of media studies. For
everybody else, the message is the message.
Many
people have a strange idea of what innovative teaching
entails. They imagine, as McLuhan might, that it
requires new techniques, such as immersive group
activities. But immersive group activities are as old as
Socrates – probably as old as cavemen. In all of my
years as an educator, I have yet to glimpse an
“innovative teaching technique”. I don’t think it
exists. When we speak of innovative television, we are
referring to content, not whether it’s 3D or
Smell-O-Vision. We should think of education in the same
terms. Group work can be valuable or pointless; as can
lectures, discussions, field trips, and everything else
we do. We should not be searching for new techniques
that don’t exist. We should be asking ourselves, “How
can we improve content?” More precisely, “How can we
improve content with the money that we now have?”
Lord of the Rings
In 2001, New Line Cinema spent $93
million to make The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of
the Ring, which played on over one thousand U.S. movie
screens for fifteen weeks. The budget paid
for the salaries of actors, writers, key grips,
animators, editors, etc. Together, they produced a landmark film
with remarkable special effects and memorable
performances. The secret to movie magic is spreading
work out among many specialists to create one amazing
product.
Imagine if, instead of making a movie,
New Line Cinema divided its money among one thousand
small theater groups, each in charge of a fifteen-week
production. Dividing $93,000,000 by one thousand, gives
$93,000 for each group to write a script, make costumes,
design sets, and pay actors and musicians. A recent
stage production of Lord of the Rings cost twenty-six
million dollars (and opened to poor reviews). Surely
$93,000 would not yield anything decent. Rather than a
great film that lasts forever, we would get a thousand
instances of junk that exist briefly and then disappear.
Of course, this is a ridiculous scenario. It would be a
monumental waste of time, money, and resources. Yet that
is exactly what we do every day in education.
As I
write this, thousands of teachers are designing their
own versions of lessons intended to teach the same
concepts. The result is an inconsistent and low-quality
product that is a waste of society’s resources. The
fault lies not with hardworking teachers but with an
archaic system that ignores modern technology.
Wherever you are right now, take a look around. Almost
everything you see is a product of mass production:
furniture, appliances, cars, clothing, carpeting, etc.
What is not mass-produced is constructed from materials
that are. Even information relies on this principle.
Software, books, movies, radio, and television are
distributed (or broadcast) to millions of people as
copies of one original. Most industries mass-produce
their main product. This is true in publishing,
entertainment, agriculture, and manufacturing – but not
education. In education, our main product is
information. Yet aside from sparingly used textbooks,
this information is not mass-produced.
In high school, although most teachers work over
forty hours per week, only twenty of those hours are
spent in class. The remaining time is spent on other
activities such as marking, lesson preparation, and
meetings. In other words, teachers have less than twenty
hours to prepare for twenty hours of instruction. For
lack of a better term, I will call this the Preparation
to Presentation Ratio, which basically means “production
values”. The maximum PPR for teaching is 1 (20 hours of
preparation ÷ 20 hours of teaching). In the TIMSS 1999
video study, teachers reported preparing thirty minutes
for a typical one-hour class, for a PPR of 0.5. How does
this compare to other forms of information?
Chalkbored took me over 4,000 hours to research,
write, and edit. If it takes you eight hours to read,
the PPR will be 500 (4,000 hours of preparation ÷ 8
hours of presentation). Television is even higher. For
example, Saturday Night Live lists a cast of
fifty on its website, including actors, writers,
producers, and directors. Not on this list
are technicians, cameramen, ushers, interns, personal
assistants, etc. If we assume that seventy-five people
each spend fifty hours to create a ninety-minute show,
the PPR is 2,500 (75 people × 50 hours ÷ 1.5 hours). If
you subtract commercials, it is closer to 3,500. Similar
calculations can be made for music, movies, and video
games.
Movies are the ultimate time hog. It is difficult to
estimate the preparation for a film because employees
are often involved only part-time. A particular actor
may be on set one day, while post-production staff may
not start until filming wraps. Pixar, by contrast,
offers a simple estimate. Pixar is the animation studio
responsible for Toy Story, Finding Nemo,
and The Incredibles. In recent years, they have
employed a workforce of eight hundred people and
released a film every eighteen months. Not
all employees are animators, but they all contribute in
some way to the production of films. If we assume a
standard working year of 1,800 hours per employee, a
movie might require two million hours to create (800
employees × 1,800 hours × 1.5 years). Thus, the PPR for
a two-hour Pixar film could be near one million
(2,000,000 hours preparation ÷ 2 hours presentation).
An animation studio may seem more labor intensive
than other studios, but Pixar films have budgets
comparable to live-action films. Big-budget thrillers
often destroy elaborate sets and props. Filming a
burning car may not seem like a labor-intensive task
until you factor in the labor required to manufacture
the car. Studios can pay animators – or they can build
sets, buy props, and pay film crews. Either way, the
size of a budget reflects the amount of labor involved.
Comparing the PPR for different types of media
provides some insight into why students are bored at
school. The information they get outside of school is
prepared with greater care. The PPR for television,
movies, video games, and books is many times greater
than for lectures. Teachers cannot compete with this
quality and complexity. It boils down to time. If
teachers had more time, they could design better
lectures, labs, and worksheets. They might even be able
to create software capable of delivering individualized
instruction. This cannot happen because teachers have
less than one hour to prepare for each lesson.
next:
Education Myths
This is an excerpt
from
Chalkbored.
Order the book
here
to learn more about ...
- How technology can improve the quality of
lessons
- How to save money by increasing the efficiency
of schools
- The best way to spend money on hardware and
software
- Examining whether charter schools succeed or
fail
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