It seems like we probably agree on the general idea here, but I was impressed on a recent visit to a museum where they had mobile apps you could download in advance and WiFi available on-site. Together these let you choose from a number of recommended tours based on duration and topic(s) and then guided you around with directions, highlights, and more in-depth background on various other exhibits you'd pass along the way if you were interested. It was a well made presentation that someone had obviously worked hard to put together, and the only thing that was a little awkward was walking around holding a tablet with headphones plugged in for the whole visit. That's an area where I could see an unintrusive headset might be an advantage.

It looked a lot better in star wars.

It could be better. In our state it's considered mediocre among comparable towns, but to give you an example of what that means 86% of students score as "proficient" or "advanced" by national math standards. In most states that'd be accounted as a pretty good school.

I'd be very interested to know which city and state you taught in, and whether you were regular faculty. But I think your approach to reasoning about this is misguided. Rather than taking your experiences in dysfunctional school and generalizing from that, you should be looking at how the top performing schools operate.

Special needs isn't just squirming kids. Despite having lackluster marks, our daughter was screened by the school system as gifted, which in my state is considered "special needs". The school brought in a cognitive psychologist to run an elaborate battery of tests, including a comprehensive neurological assessment. What they found was very specific, narrow deficit: slow processing speed. She was capable of solving complex math problems and generating sophisticated answers to open response questions, but even simple questions took her a long time to answer. So the action plan was to put her on a more challenging course load, but to give her longer time if necessary to complete tests. On top of that we paid for training with an educational psychologist who specializes in learning disabilities. Eighteen months later she no longer required any special accommodations and was near the top of her class.

In a nutshell, all that new-fangled bullshit worked. 30 years ago she'd have been tracked into an easy CP courseload based on her marks, but the school actually put the effort into finding out that what she really needed was to be tracked into honors and AP courses. And the school system manages to do this while spending about the national average per student -- $11,505.

For over 500 years? The US has been around for much less than 300 years. I'm not going to argue with you about who started what. Basically I wish we'd left it all alone myself but, I'm pretty sure ISIS and the other jihadi groups have killed more of the muslim population in the middle east that the US. I can't begin to recount how many times I've heard "suicide bomber blows himself and 80 other people up, 2 US soldiers wounded," or some such over the last decade or so. It's incredible.

Seems like George Lucas can claim prior art maybe.

You don't have to be an analyst to figure out that the cost of living in New York City is astronomically higher than it is in Utah. A one bedroom apartment in New York City costs an average $2700/month. That same apartment in Salt Lake City would cost $750. A dozen eggs in NYC cost $3.19; in Salt Lake City it's $2.03. If you want to join a gym in Salt Lake, that's about $29/month. In New York it's $86.

So you're drawing the wrong lesson here. Adjusted for its cost of living, Utah spends slightly less than middle-of-the-pack amounts per student and gets slightly better than middle-of-the-pack results. Clearly Utah deserves praise for financial efficiency, but their results could be better.

Ah so apparently there's some slashdot "rule" where I'm only supposed to reply to you if you reply to me first. Righty ho.

The reason you've been seeing a lot of me is because it appears that we both like the same threads. Only one of us consistently lies about things other people say, and it isn't me who does that.

I like how you never retracted your comment, nor tried to back up your claim.

Sorry, I can't argue in the hand waving style of "schools nowadays", I need actual data specific data about real places.

My town administration takes 5.5% of the total budget. In the best performing town in my region, it's about half that, but they pay their teachers 79% more and lay out over $17k/student.

My town's high school has 88 staff positions involved directly with student instruction (teachers, teaching aids, special subject tutors), 2 librarians, 3 janitors, three principals/asisstant principals, 4 guidance counselors, and 4 secretaries. That works out to about 85% of the positions involved in instruction. 74% of the head count is teachers in the traditional sense and 11% offload tasks that teachers would have to do otherwise or provide special content area expertise. So as far as my town is concerned your dystopian scenario is pure fantasy.

I totally agree, by the way: you could save a lot of money by not educating special needs students. From the budgets I've seen it takes up maybe as much as 1/3 of the per pupil expenditures. But is not educating those students something you're actually proposing? Or do you have an idea for doing it more efficiently.

And today there are quiet carriages on trains, coffee shops with no-phones policies, and generally if you're the guy who talks really loud on the phone then everyone around you still gets annoyed and may actually challenge you if you carry on for long.

And that's for a device that is just an interruption, not a device that a lot of people perceive to be an inherently creepy invasion of their privacy literally because someone just looked at them funny.

I expect technology similar to Google Glass will make it, but I also suspect it will be used primarily for specific applications where it has a clear benefit. I don't think anything too similar will be worn by a lot of people all the time in the near future.

For example, someone walking around a museum might borrow some sort of headset that guides them on a tour and provides background information about each exhibit they are looking at. Staff at a warehouse used for on-line grocery shopping might have a headset that guides them to collect the items purchases in the most efficient way.

However, I think perhaps the tide is already starting to turn against mass surveillance culture, intrusive personalised advertising, and the like. Surely it's only going to get more hostility as things like insurance premiums that people see directly in their bank balance become ever more customised behind the scenes, and as more people suffer significant problems due to identity theft or embarrassing disclosures themselves or know close friends or family members who have.

In fact, I wonder whether even the US government, not exactly a bastion of privacy advocacy, might be having second thoughts about how much personal data is casually thrown around, now that hostile forces are openly doxxing US service personnel and encouraging allies within the US to attack those people and their families at home, as was reported this week.

So if I were going to place a long-term bet on new technologies tomorrow, I certainly wouldn't be backing an obviously intrusive device like the previous Google Glass, complete with tiny camera, always-on microphone, and wireless connection to the mothership. On the other hand, build a device with similar useful features but a less goofy design, and then back it with a widely-advertised and genuine emphasis on privacy so it didn't engender the same degree of hostility from others nearby, and you might be on to something.

That's easy to figure out. Pull the school system budgets for your town and read them. It's public record and it takes about twenty minutes to get a feel where the money is going. For example my town spends about $1.4 million in central administration salaries, including the IT department and curriculum support services. This is out of total system-wide salaries of $22.5 million. So about 6%. If you go by total expenses central administration takes up about 5.5% of the budget.

Now here's an exercise that'll make you better informed than 99.99% of the people who weigh in on this topic. Find another school system that gets better results than yours and do the same thing. How are they spending money differently from your town?

"Gee it seems like a lot of money to me," is meaningless drivel. What you want to do is compare your town to the best performing towns; or if we're talking about national policy what a typical school system does vs. what the best school systems do. I have no patience with people who parrot complaints about "administrative costs" they've heard on Fox but can't be bothered to find out how their own local tax money is being spent.

15,000 per student is not "endless resources". To put it in perspective, it's less than half of what is spent on a student at an elite prep school, which I think is a more reasonable model for what cost-is-no-object education would look like.

But let's agree for the moment that not every student needs to have class sizes of four or five with a PhD instructors. I'd be very happy if every a typical student in Baltimore has $15,000 spent on him. But one thing you apparently didn't learn is the difference between "average" and "median". I pulled one of the elementary school budgets for Baltimore, and found that it was spending about 20% of its total budget on special needs personnel -- speech pathologists, psychologists, special ed instructors. Note that this doesn't include the fraction of regular teacher time taken up by this. So it's not unreasonable to assume that per-pupil spending if you discount the mainstreamed special needs kids would look more like $11,000.

I also note that you chose two of the highest cost places in the country to run a school as representative of the whole. Really, it's expensive to educate kids in NYC? Who'd a thunk it? As long as we're cherry picking, let me in the same spirit of fairness reach into the bag of scrabble tiles and "randomly" pick -- Mississippi. Mississippi spends close to the bottom of states on a per pupil basis, and is at the very bottom of the nation in student achievement.

Let's pick another state at "random" -- oh, look I got Massachusetts. Massachusetts perennially tops the list of states by student achievement by nearly every conceivable measure. But at $14k it's in the top quintile for per student spending . To a certain mentality Mississippi is getting a better deal because it gets away with spending only $7.9k/student. Specifically that's the mentality that isn't alarmed by the fact that almost 2/3 of Mississippi's eighth graders fail to meet minimum standards of proficiency and reading and math.

Here's a fun fact. The same percentage of Massachusetts eight graders score "advanced" by national standards for mathematics as Mississippi students score "proficient" -- 18%. How much would it be worth for the 18% advanced score to be *typical* of states rather than twice the national average? How much do you reckon it would be worth to pay on a per-student basis for the impact that would have on America's long-term economic prospects? Well compared to the national average, Massachusetts spend $3000/student more. That seems like a bargain to me.