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Today, Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.
Mi is capitalizing on an alluring arbitrage opportunity. In China, there are hundreds of millions of kids whose parents are willing to pay up if they can get high-quality education. In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the profession because they couldn't make a decent living. Growth has been explosive. The three-year-old company started this year with 200 teachers and has grown to 5,000, now working with 50,000 children. Next year, Mi anticipates she'll expand to 25,000 teachers and 200,000 children.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday December 22 2016, @11:03AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @02:06PM
It's going to administrator/manager types (school systems tend to be alarmingly top-heavy), to sports, and especially to an never-ending construction rush that is largely justified by those sports. (We need a new swimming pool with more lanes for our swim team! We need more athletic fields!) Around here they barely get one building done before they start complaining about how inadequate some particular (inevitably sports-related) aspect of it is, and how they need this new building that will solve their problem. Now new buildings mostly come out of county-level taxes, not federal funds, but money's money -- if they'd quit building all the time, they wouldn't need as much federal funding, or alternatively they could hire more teachers to reduce class sizes and improve outcomes. But really, they'd just hire more administrators.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday December 22 2016, @03:10PM
A relative of mine is a former teacher, now retired. Her former coworkers respected her a lot and contacted her, to complain about the chief administrator in her district. He'd been spending lavishly on visiting conventions and other expenses (all dutifully reported but in a vague, deniable way) and fired or professionally crippled anyone who gained his attention, so they wanted an "outsider" to investigate his spending.
She investigated. She wouldn't tell me all of her methods but I think she must have hired at least one PI and did various other things. He wasn't even going to half the conventions; he was giving the money to his mistress, or sometimes they'd go to someplace with a convention but basically just hang out and not actually attend anything. The spending reports were doctored easily because his mistress was the one charge of them (they were both cheating on spouses btw). He'd gained influence with the teachers' union by bribing them with the money or something (I forget, something like that) and the school board was too busy fighting one another over "turf" to deal with it.
It was a big (local) scandal. My relative had to nearly gut the entire administration, over the course of years, one fight at a time. I think eventually she gave up after she got the worst offenders out of office; some agreement she eventually had to sign keeps her from talking about the later stages. At least one person was arrested, but apparently they managed to keep it out of the papers. It was too many "monsters" for her to slay them all, and they'd eventually gotten the parents organizations to hate her, and so she returned to her retirement after a couple of years.
I wanted to go into teaching, most of my relatives were teachers, but they collectively told me to avoid it...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @06:34AM
is truly disgusting.
It is however partially the fault of the educators. None of them want the higher rung jobs (they want to teach) so the punters ending up in the administrative positions tend to be do-nothings with power complexes and good schmoozing skills (but often abusive/corrupt/elitist personalities) who in turn slowly ruin the teachers and school while siphoning money to pet projects or outright personal spending and then duck out before they can be investigated/indicted for it.
I saw it happen at both my k-12 and college level education, and have been reading continuing stories of it at other local education institutions in the years since. And that is *EXCLUDING* the private schools, many of which (outside those catering to the local elites) are just there to bilk sops out of their money without actually providing a marketable education at the other end.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Capt. Obvious on Thursday December 22 2016, @07:54PM
This makes it sound like you're bullshitting, because the federal portion is less than 10% of education funding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @11:00PM
Accounting details mean money spent on schools isn't the same as money that can be spent on teacher salaries. Basically it comes down to salaries are recurring costs while useless things like new athletic fields and laptops for all the students are one-time costs, and a lot of money is allocated via grants which can only be used for the latter type. That's how you can simultaneously have too little money for teachers and a lot of money being spent on schools. Other posters suggest a lot of salary money is going to administrators.