Ways to save American education | Hacker News Reader

Ways to save American education

washingtonpost.com

12 pointstokenadult24 comments

I think a suggestion that could tie into Marc Tucker's suggestion "raise teacher compensation significantly" is to take administrative steps, state by state, district by district, and school by school, to make sure that the inevitable churn in the staffing of schools, as teachers move or cease working as teachers, churns out the worst teachers and keeps in the best teachers. A thoughtful researcher who has been looking at education policy reform even longer than Tucker suggests that it would be possible each year, year after year after year, to persuade the bottom 5 percent of teachers to seek other occupations,

http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads...

and that the cumulative effect of this reform over time would raise United States student achievement to the peak level reached by any country. This would also, it seems to me, do much to add to the social respect enjoyed by teachers and would probably improve public support for public schools in general.

Wouldn't the increased competition fomented by increased wages take care of this naturally and organically?

Absolutely. Churning the bottom 5% would be an exercise in destruction, low morale, and worsening a bad situation. Get quality in the front door rather than trying to shuffle people out the back.

It seems likely to also organically change teachers' unions for the better, too. Unions filled with better and more motivated teachers will want policies that protect better and more motivated teachers.

As it is now unions filled with bad teachers* will favor policies that protect bad teachers. Vicious cycle.

* Not that most or even many teachers are bad, but the bad ones are probably the most afraid for their jobs, and therefore most active in union politics.

Wouldn't the increased competition fomented by increased wages take care of this naturally and organically?

Could you kindly explain who is competing with whom in the policy situation you envision? I'm not aware of any empirical example (raising teacher salaries has been tried, especially in Connecticut during the 1990s) where raising teacher salaries across the board has resulted in more competition for excellent performance among teachers.

One statement in the Jay Mathews article from the Washington Post we are discussing here suggests to me that Marc Tucker (who comes to education reform as an issue later than many other authors) simply hasn't read enough of the prior literature. Mathews writes, "Tucker says that with better pay, fewer teachers would quit, saving money now spent to train replacements." But there are already studies on teacher competence, and the finding of those studies is that the most skilled teachers quit more readily than the least skilled, with the least skilled hanging on to jobs in teaching desperately rather than facing the free-enterprise job market,

http://www.amazon.com/Incompetent-Teacher-Managerial-Respons...

and one of the reasons capable people don't stay in the occupation of teaching, or never enter this important occupation in the first place, is that they don't like being lumped together with less capable people.

http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cupton/Senior%20Seminar/Papers...

(After edit: the reference immediately above supports the statement in a highest-level comment that was posted while I was first typing this comment, namely The US education system benefited for a long period where many incredibly smart women had career options basically limited to teaching and nursing. As equality improved, some of the brightest prospective teachers instead became doctors, scientists, and engineers. )

Meanwhile nearly all teachers have salary schedules that in most states are strictly on the basis of years in service (with bonus salary tracks for having postgraduate degrees, often from diploma mill "education" degree programs).

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2011/02/bill_ga...

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/should-teachers-get-r...

New teachers can't even come into the school, however competent, until there are openings for hiring in a particular school. For this reason (and for the sake of the honor of schoolteaching as a profession and ESPECIALLY for the sake of the children in the current school classrooms), I think some affirmative administrative steps are needed to encourage the least effective teachers to change careers, to make room for more teachers with greater effectiveness.

The one thing I always wonder about these stories is if they are true why haven't we in the United States been surpassed? The first time I remember hearing about Finland's education system was 5th grade yet I'm in my early 30s and Finland hasn't moved up much. They still has a much lower GDP per Capita. I can't remember the last time I heard of a major breakthrough coming out of Finland. Other than Nokia I can't think of any other worldwide companies founded in Finland.

I don't mean to bash Finland which is a truly amazing place (no sarcasm, it really is). But at the same time a big problem in education is the scale tends to get clouded. No Child Left Behind's epic failure is a testament to that. Isn't it at least possible that Finish schools also "teach to the test" especially considering they test their students so rarely?

Before we increase class size, abandon charter schools and slow down efforts to integrate more technology into classrooms in favor of higher teacher salaries I'd like to see much more research done in this area.

> The one thing I always wonder about these stories is if they are true why haven't we in the United States been surpassed?

According to one of my college professors (back in the '90s), the simple answer is "our colleges are better." He told us that primary schooling in many countries have long been superior to ours, but our colleges are better and that's been keeping us ahead.

The one thing I always wonder about these stories is if they are true why haven't we in the United States been surpassed?

The United States has been surpassed in economic growth rate by many countries. The United States continues to gain by admitting as immigrants many highly capable persons who received their primary and secondary educations in other countries, and there are whole industries in the United States where much of the innovation and high quality comes from people with educational backgrounds like that.

I don't think the US education system is as bad as everyone says. I think the metric that we use to judge our system against other countries is not accurate. The US has had a high level of economic activity and innovation for decades. I think that points to a strong education system.

I think recent attempts to make our system more like Asian systems (more homework, more testing...) will do more harm than good.

There is progress to be made, but I think trying to mimic other countries education systems is the wrong approach.

Alternatively, it points to the economic irrelevance of anything more than a basic education to the majority of the production class.

You don't need to know much to crank a wrench on an assembly line.

Unfortunately, that type of work is slowly but surely migrating elsewhere, leaving a large body of work that DOES require higher education skills. I'd love to see if there was data showing education comparisons through transitions in labor types, say, from farming to manufacturing.

The US has had a high level of economic activity and innovation for decades. I think that points to a strong education system.

There is no denying that the United States is a largely prosperous, innovative, and peaceful place. This was true of the United States before school attendance was compulsory in any state, when many states made no effort generally to fund schools for all learners, and it is still true today. This is a legacy of founders of the United States who themselves largely learned without a public school system.

http://learninfreedom.org/Founders_free.html

Today, the United States still benefits economically in comparison to other countries because of a more honest and transparent system of governance and business regulation

http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...

and because of general freedom in United States society.

http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=15

While K-12 schooling continues to be one of the top three state budget line items in many states (it is number one in mine) there will be legitimate concern about whether those hundreds of billions of dollars a year

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

are being spent with the best effect they can. Having lived in another country for six years (and having brought up children there during the second of two three-year stays), and knowing many first-generation immigrants, I don't think it goes beyond the facts to say that the United States has a thing or two it could learn from administration of public schools in other countries, just as those other countries could in several cases learn from United States governance. It's best for all countries all around the world to be open to information first learned in some other country.

This is a false comparison. You neglect that the US has had this time of innovation in a time when its education system was also considered the world's best.

The problem is that people see US's economic power dwindling w/o a pipeline of educational dominance.

The US education system benefited for a long period where many incredibly smart women had career options basically limited to teaching and nursing. As equality improved, some of the brightest prospective teachers instead became doctors, scientists, and engineers. This decrease in teacher quality is resulting in a more "assembly line" style of education, where each step is fully structured. I have seen anecdotal evidence of highly qualified teachers exiting the workforce because the structure of the work has become unfulfilling.

I suspect there are also incentives for top performers to move out of education and into administration.

I'm a Brit here to say that any assertion about the state of American education ought to include consideration of video games, many of which come from the US.

Games are, after all, highly educational. They represent an environment with three attributes:

(1) choice, (2) rapid feedback, (3) safety (you don't get punished for making mistakes, academic or social).

Note that all of these are crucial in the business of making and correcting errors, which is what learning is all about.

Where does he come up with the percent chances of these passing? Is this just assigning a number to whatever the author feels like inorder to fake some sense of credibility?

6. Allow students significantly more self- and group-led teaching; especially with the rise in video lectures (a la Khan Academy, etc).

7. Have bright students from higher grades teach bright students from lower grades.

8. Embrace, rather than try to diminish, the natural bell curve of student performance and abilities--let students fall behind, and teach them the most critical skills before everything else. Who cares if you can recite the Gettysburg Address if you can't do basic reading an arithmetic. Let students get ahead; and don't burden them with arbitrary amounts of homework simply because they can do it faster; shove hard-to-learn things down their eager minds.

7. Or not-so-bright students from lower grades. Heck, all students from lower grades.

Regarding #7: Why? I would have absolutely hated that in school. How does having a kid who's good at Algebra teaching a younger kid who's not so good at Algebra help the kid who's good at all?

If he's already good at it, teaching it shouldn't help him that much, and now he's wasted time he could be using to learn more things himself (see your own #6).

The best way to be sure you understand something is to teach it.

> I would have absolutely hated that in school.

Agreed. I was the smart kid on the high school football team, so I was tasked by the coach to tutor some of my lesser-performing teammates and it was an absolutely miserable experience.

Right; but what if you were tasked with spending time with 'the smart kid' from 3 years below you? That is an entirely different experience.

I would not want smart kids wasting their time with dull kids; but smart older kids imparting their wisdom on smart younger kids (where it won't be wasted)

Because learning to communicate the thing is just as important as learning the thing itself.

First of all, its bright students teaching other bright students--if that wasn't clear.

Second, you are only looking at half the equation. That 7th grader spending time with a smart 6th grader is also spending time with a smart 8th grader.

The benefit comes from the (fact? hypothesis?) that bright children within a couple of years from each other will get a hell of a lot more bang for their buck than the time they spend with their (statistically) relatively average teachers that have lost touch with that part of their development cycle.

Terrible recommendations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com