I think everyone in education is aware of the fact that the public school system is broken in most parts but the latest reform idea by US Senator Phil Pavlov, head of the Senate Education Committee, is rather radical. He is working on a bill that would enable school to hire teachers through private companies.
According to the website of Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals the idea behind it is to avoid high-dollar packages pushed by teacher unions. My fellow Big Think blogger Kris Broughton points out that
If families who make $250,000 a year are not considered to be rich, then how the hell can a teacher who makes less than $60,000 a year to educate our nation’s children be overpaid?
Of course, teachers who would be hired through such private firms needed to have the same qualifications as instructors today. I would even go a step further and say that they were very likely be the same instructors as today, just without the teacher union behind them.
Senator Pavlov says
“I look at it as offering options. If there is something out there that can offer school officials the same options at a lower cost, schools need to take a look at that. It needs to part of the conversation on reform.”
And here it gets tricky. As you might know, I have been a private language tutor during the first online teaching boom from late 2007 to early 2009. What we have seen on the tutoring marketplaces on the Internet was exactly what Doug Pratt, spokesperson of Michigan Education fears
“What Sen. Pavlov seems to be talking about is handing the education of our children over to the lowest bidder and letting for-profit companies take over our classrooms. Cost considerations will be on the mind of the company in charge of the teachers, with the over-riding concern being “How can I do this as cheap as possible?”
In the two years of my active online tutoring career I have come across the same problem. In the beginning prices per hour were pretty good for tutors. Over time the different platforms pushed more and more towards lower prices and each new competitor that entered the market set their prices lower. In the end, we saw prices as low as $7 per hour, about half of what was considered average in early 2008.
The reasons for that are multiple, and in the free market globalization is of course the biggest driver of prices dropping . Chris Savage of Eclectablog who wrote about this idea of Senator Pavlov initially suggests that
Maybe what we can do is hire teachers in China or India to telecommute into our classrooms. Then we just hire some tough guys at minimum wage to control the kids in the room and maintain the proper “decorum” for “learning”. I hear there are a lot of unemployed “union thugs” they could hire.
From a tutor’s perspective this is already happening today. Services like TutorVista are basically eating the local tutor’s lunch as the platform can offer quality tutoring at a friction of the cost. And then there are services like Motuto which offer instant help without the need to schedule a session.
The main question is what the society sees in its teachers. Most of what I hear from the general public and politicians is lip service. Yes, teachers are important, but…
But maybe our society is also at a point of emancipation and does not need the broken, ineffective public school system anymore. More and more startups are working on alternative ways to measure and track what you learn outside of the classroom, and more and more jobs require knowledge and skills that are not taught in school.
As soon as employers don’t care about school grades or degrees anymore but rather look at what you have accomplished on your own it won’t matter anymore if you learn the basics in school from a freelance teacher or if you learned it by yourself with Khan Academy.
