Public Education

Here we propose a scalable, government-led education system that can reach everyone, can work offline/online and in distributed fashion. The new aproach is based on the following tenets.

1) Course content is created by reputable professors, authors, who are selected by the Department of Education (DOE). The lectures are delivered to students through tablets owned by the school.

2) What was called a "teacher" now becomes a "certifier".

3) There is still a thing called "a school" with its building, and classrooms which kids can go to.

4) Classes are graded on pass/fail basis, no more letter grades

Public education's most pressing problem is quality. The fastest way to fix that is to stop the so-called teachers from teaching. The act of content delivery needs to be taken away from them, instead, turned over to electronic lectures, content created by a reputable researcher / author in his/her field.

Incentives for the authors to create content: DOE will have the authority to increase an author's (who is a researcher) grant on any subject by 20% if that researcher aggrees to generate content for a specific subject. The grant increase will be paid by the author grantor (such as NSF, DOD, etc). Written content will be based on jupyter notebook technology which allows math, runable code, and text to reside side-by-side in the same electronic document. The content will be complemented by video lectures the author recorded by the equipment sent to her by DOE.

Author can choose to point to someone else's work for content, e.g. for algebra video lectures s/he can choose freely available videos, have them used instead of his own recording.

It is important to have a researcher to generate content (or choose one suitable), because only someone who knows a subject througly can teach it simply.

The collection of courses a student takes depends completely on the student's interest. A guardian can be part of this process, as well as certifiers who can do double-duty as guides who know about more then one subject.

The tablets will be made available to kids in a public area and dropped off when done. Tablets will use a tech called docker technology to reinitialize its content on demand, erasing previous work, preinstalling a system with all of the necessary content on the same machine. Programming on this machine will be possible, kids can snoop around all they want because next kid can reinitialize a machine to its original state. Programming language will be Python. Tablet's OS will be based on Ubuntu Linux. Portable, lightweight keyboards (also available at school) can be attached to tablets for easier typing for programming purposes.

All lecture, video files will be local to the tablet. Its content, part of its docker image will be synced with the school's server on demand. School server, in turn, will occasionally sync its content with DOE. This way DOE can centrally manage all course content from its servers.

Author can enrich a subject in any way they want. They can (and should) offer lab experiments based on software simulation. Recently I saw a simulation for a famous experiment that allows the measurement of a single electron's charge. Click Begin, it takes you to a setup where a click on the round ball on the left spits out oil drops, click on the virtual "microscope" it shows the oil drop "hanging" in the air due to an "electric field", all simulated. This simulation code takes only a few files, which can easily be included in the docker image for the entire course. The kids today are so lucky (or, can be).

Professors who generated their content can grant certifier status to professionals, who can pass the label to others. Certifiers will be able to assign pass/fail grade to students on the classes they are certified on. Certifiers will go to schools, not teach a class, but remain available according to their schedule shared publicly with students. Most likely they will sit in a loungy, classroom-ish area while students who are studying are there with them, occasionally asking them questions on issues they are stuck on. But students can also ask eachother, but move on in their own pace, the flow of the learning depends completely on the student.

A student, at any time, can ask to be certified, by which time the certifier will set aside a time slot to do just that. If the certifier deems the student learned the subject well enough, s/he will assign them a pass grade.

I can see a lot of professionals becoming certified on subjects that interest them, and going to schools to help kids with questions or final certifications. They can do this even while still working remotely, as certifiers are not teachers, they are not required to deliver an entire lecture. A programmer with an early interest in chemistry can become certified in the subject and spend some time at a local school. Certifiers would be paid by the government based on the time they spend at school.

The number of potential certifiers are enormous. Every society has a lot of white-collar professionals, and all of them have the potential to donate some of their time on a certain subject.

This new scheme does not involve "home schooling" as it is important for kids being able to leave home, to go somewhere else, the home environment or neighborhood might not be ideal for studying. With its four walls and a building a school is still a school, albeit with a somewhat different concept of classroom.

We are not talking about "Zoom schooling" either, which means an old-style teacher talking to students in a synchronized fashion. Our goal is to make lecturer/lectured communication async, breaking the time dependency so that benefits of scale, and quality can be achieved. The motto is record-once-teach-everywhere-anytime.