It's already long been clear that if you want an excellent education you cut the student-to-teacher ratio down (10:1 max) and have a lot more small group discussions.
Public schools can't afford that (they'd need to more than double their teaching staff) and the trend is the other direction—replacing teachers with technology, because there's a shortage, the teacher training pipeline has dried up, and they can't raise salaries to attract more.
At 10:1 of and you spend 15k per kid per year. You get 150k per class so 100k for the teacher and 50k for overhead. This is all quite reasonable. The problem is that overhead is much too high and that 1 in 5 kids need additional services that really destroy that ratio and you end up at 30:1
Yeah the private schools that use seminar-style manage it by 1) having much higher incomes than $15k/yr/kid, and 2) avoiding teaching kids who have special needs, since they can cost several times as much to educate as a kid who doesn't, and besides, they tend to drag down test scores and university acceptance rates.
Here’s something else we could try instead of grading written essays: video-recorded oral exams conducted by LLMs. Wouldn’t that be a twist. The teacher would need to watch each recording and grade them, and I suppose the lazy ones might use AI to do that step instead.
I'm not sure that's true at all. Seminars are a thing although participation is often not the only grading output. And participation absolutely factors into grades in many at least medium-ish sized business and law classes.
Public schools can't afford that (they'd need to more than double their teaching staff) and the trend is the other direction—replacing teachers with technology, because there's a shortage, the teacher training pipeline has dried up, and they can't raise salaries to attract more.