If you can conceive of a solution to a problem that has a marginal cost of zero due to cheap replication and economies of scale, then that’s good. If you’re doing that by going into the digital space, where cost of experimentation is low, even better. 

Many elements of education are best seen through the marginal cost of zero lens, and it’s that dream of essentially free education, based on economies of scale, that tends to drive a lot of philanthropy. 

Where there’s dissonance, though, is that we are also told that what we do has to be evidence-based. And I think sometimes there is this show that granting agencies and philanthropic institutions make that they are going to cut through the bull and be scientific about this stuff, in a way that we have not been.

The problem is that most of the time these things don’t line up. The projects that get the most attention focus on the economies of scale (Khan, MITx) with very little focus on evidence-based practice. 

That seems to me a problem. Are we letting our dream of a completely free education undermine the more modest (and evidence-supported) goals of dirt cheap technology-assisted education? Maybe not. But if you looked at what gets covered in the press and funded on the ground, you could be forgiven for thinking that.

Saw this about the K-12 online space today in NYT:

Some teachers at K12 schools said they felt pressured to pass students who did little work. Teachers have also questioned why some students who did no class work were allowed to remain on school rosters, potentially allowing the company to continue receiving public money for them. State auditors found that the K12-run Colorado Virtual Academy counted about 120 students for state reimbursement whose enrollment could not be verified or who did not meet Colorado residency requirements. Some had never logged in.

“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education,” said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. “These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”

Sound familiar? These practices are already widespread in higher education’s for-profit space, and to a lesser extent in the non-profit space. 

We’ve been a voucher system for decades, and the corrosion is extensive….

From the new report: Coming in 2020: New Hampshire’s “Silver Tsunami”

By the year 2020, New Hampshire’s shift towards an increasingly older population will reach a peak. And by 2030, nearly half a million Granite Staters will be over the age of 65, representing almost one-third of the population. This trend will influence nearly every critical policy debate, perhaps none more so than health care. Released today, the Center’s latest report, “New Hampshire’s Silver Tsunami,” analyzes the potential impacts of this demographic shift on the state’s health care systems.

As we’ve shown here before, each dollar increase in Medicaid funding (which will be affected by this, according to the report) decreases state spending on education between six and seven cents. Again, I am not rationalizing the cuts here. We spend way too little on higher education, and we have to push to spend more. But the economic dynamics are such that we will lucky if we can hold institutions of higher education at level funding going forward.

What do we do? Well, politically, if you care about education, the single most important thing you can do is to support politicians and policies that attack the health care cost problem. All the other stuff is pretty useless without that. 

But from a professional standpoint, imagining some alternate world where everything changes in the next decade and we don’t have to compete for student dollars or cap costs in one way or another because suddenly everyone gets how important education is and we get the funding we need — this is not a helpful professional stance, IMHO. The healthcare situation is increasingly going to pit competing goods against one another; we are going to lose in that battle repeatedly, because asked to choose between funding an ethics class and treating poor people in the ER, we will choose the ER.

In the meantime we have students we are going to need educate — never mind the issues of access we have to address. There is not a magical world where we are not going to have to do this at at least a stable inflation-adjusted per-student cost over the next ten to twenty years. There’s just not. The only responsible action given the need and the economic reality is to look to drive down costs while maintaining or increasing access.