A Future Vision for Education- Few High Cost Teacher Leaders assisted by Many Low Cost Teacher Aids

A reader emailed me a story from The Blaze on education reform that I'd like to comment on:

Terry Moe, one of the leading experts in education reform in the country, professor of political science at Stanford University, fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of the newly released Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, has a message for the teachers unions:

Rest In Peace, because your days are numbered...

...Moe argues that the incredibly massive revolution in information technology will deliver a death blow to teachers unions. In this profile of his life and impact on the education reform movement, Moe says:

“In the final analysis, what technology requires is a substitution of technology for human labor. Computers will do a lot of what teachers do now.” Jumping forward in his chair, he lights up: “Technology is cheap. Labor is really expensive. Education has always been very labor intensive, so if our education system can substitute technology for labor and still provide kids with high quality education, then great!”

Moe explains that technology will fundamentally change the politics of education. “In the future, we will have fewer teachers per student. This means fewer union members per student. Also, teachers don’t have to be concentrated in the same geographic place—because when students do their learning online, their teachers can be anywhere. This fragmentation and dispersion will make it harder for unions to organize.”...

After further analysis, I agree with some of what Mr. Moe argues but disagree about his fundamental point.

I agree that in the future, we will have fewer teachers and teachers will be geographically spread out, because skilled teachers will more aggressively use technology and cheap assistants to deliver higher quality instruction to more students at lower costs. In my vision of future teaching, rather than one-size-fits all bureaucratic statist-produced cookie-cutter teachers, you'll get expert lead teachers who produce the lessons and deliver the instruction via webcams and the internet to classrooms all over the nation, where cheaper and less trained and skilled teacher aids will support and assist in the instruction deliver by the lead teacher. Oh, I know there are some wrinkles still to iron out in the process like how to interact with all of these students, how to grade all the students the same, how to run activities and group projects and simulations, etc- but if Mr. Moe is correct and technology continues to advance as rapidly as it is, these wrinkles can be ironed out in time.

But having fewer teachers and having them geographically spread out will not necessarily mean that the unions will decrease in influence and authority- in fact, I imagine that the geographically-based lower paid teacher aides will become a powerful union of low-skilled labor who needs to continue to organize and collectively bargain while the high-skilled non-geographically based teacher leaders freelance and sell their skills to the highest bidder without collective bargaining or unions.

To read some of the books by Terry Moe, check out Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools and Politics, Markets and America's Schools.