At the rate of counting one dollar per second, it would take more than 7,000 years to count the $225 billion of salaries and benefits paid by local, state, and Federal funds to U.S. public school teachers in a year.
It would take more than 24,000 years to count the estimated cost $829 billion of the Baucus health bill just voted out of the U.S. Senate committee he chairs. That's longer than there have been human civilizations on earth.
Wow! That's a different perspective from the ones I've seen before.
Given this frequency count procedure, it appears possible to calculate the dollar cost of academic performance increases in classrooms.
I wonder, then, what it costs for a student to learn /a/ and then how much more to learn /b/? When that's known, we can calculate the distribution of costs across teaching methods and instructional material teachers use, including costs of Tablet and other mobile PCs.
In turn, I think I see a way then to figure teacher performance pay increases based in part on allocating part of the learning cost savings to teachers. I wonder if I can include this line of logic with aLEAP? I wish I'd had something like this as a way to monitor instruction/learning cost ratios while instructing.
First, did I calculate the length of time correctly, Math Teacher?
Second, I wonder if anyone else has followed the same or a similar track?
References
Sagan, C. (1997). Billions & billions: Thoughts on life and death at the rink of the millennium. New York: Ballentine, p. 10.
Five myths about paying good teachers more
Heiny, R. A Learning Efficiency Analysis Paradigm Abstract
