One View of Future: Independent Study

In his book "Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education," Edison Schools founder Chris Whittle suggests no further cuts in class size but a cut in the number of teachers. An excerpt:

"How does America fund a doubling of average teacher salaries? Increasing principal pay is one thing. But there are 3 million teachers in public schools today, together earning about $138 billion per year. If you double their pay, you might ask, didn't you just spend $138 billion, an increase of approximately 33 percent of the total U.S. K-12 education budget? Answer: no. Reason: Schools of the future will employ far fewer teachers than schools today.

The teacher union leaders reading this book just keeled over, believing that a large portion of their dues just went away and that class size just increased. Wrong on both counts. If the dues of every teacher were to increase pro rata with teacher pay, union revenue would be kept whole and union 'profit margins' would actually improve, as they would have fewer members to serve. And class size would stay more or less constant, because there would be fewer classes in schools of the future. (Remember from the previous chapter that in the future students will work independently 'out of class' for significant portions of the time.) The 'horrors' that unions imagine happen only if you believe that the structure of schools is rigid, that the day must be divided into six classes, that children must always be in a class with an adult, and that classes must always be smaller to be better."