In the ideal world, the best teachers would be celebrities and their lectures/lessons would be high demand items.
Wait... Maybe it's coming... with YouTube, HubPages, and Google's 10^100 contest. Who knows.
On a boat ride in Brugges, I heard a boat operator/philosopher expound on why it was so that teachers were paid so little, rockstars like Ozzy Osbourne were rich, and famous composers like Mozart died broke.
He said it was a question of network effects and impact. Mozart died broke because of poor money management and the inability to reach a worldwide audience.
An elementary school teacher is only paid a small amount relative to most celebrities because their impact is small. They cannot reach more 10-30 students at a time.
A baseball player is paid millions because he (through cable TV) can impact/entertain many more anonymous people indirectly.
This brings to mind the interesting question of micro-payments and distance learning - could an effective model for rock star professors be implemented, in an effective implementation of feedback-based distance learning?
There's another interesting question - what happens to the "not quite rockstar" professors/teachers?
As Sousa pointed out, recorded music reduces the number of people who can make a living playing music. (It may increase the amount of money spent by listeners.)
Note that only some things scale through distribution. Lectures may. Office hours don't. Thesis advising doesn't.
He should have read his Henry Ford. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/hnfrd10.txt
In a little dark shop on a side street an old man had laboured for years making axe handles. Out of seasoned hickory he fashioned them, with the help of a draw shave, a chisel, and a supply of sandpaper. Carefully was each handle weighed and balanced. No two of them were alike. The curve must exactly fit the hand and must conform to the grain of the wood. From dawn until dark the old man laboured. His average product was eight handles a week, for which he received a dollar and a half each. And often some of these were unsaleable--because the balance was not true.
To-day you can buy a better axe handle, made by machinery, for a few cents. And you need not worry about the balance. They are all alike--and every one is perfect. Modern methods applied in a big way have not only brought the cost of axe handles down to a fraction of their former cost--but they have immensely improved the product.
Like the machine-made, to the artisan-made, axe handle, recorded music is vastly superior to live music - especially given today's digital recording and distribution systems. Leveraging mass distribution, a musician today can afford the luxury of honing a fine product. A live performance is rarely a fine product. It is usually middling in quality, and often below middling. It is usually expensive. For those that wish to see as well as hear their music, today, with DVD and Blu Ray, the live performances that are good can be distributed in a high-quality captured form to wide audiences, at low cost.
Music isn't much like an axe handle. Is teaching?
Don't get me wrong - I think that distributing good lectures is a great thing. Rock-star lecturers will do extremely well and ordinary ones will have to find something else to do.
However, there's more to education than lectures. The question is what happens to the rest and to education as a whole when lectures come through a separate channel.
Artisan made:
Instances are produced one at a time. The quality varies wildly and is usually poor. The cost is high.
Machine made:
The design is perfected, and then limitless high-quality copies are made. The cost is low.
What is the relevant difference between axe-handles and music?
Is teaching [much like an axe handle]?
Yes. The above applies to teaching, as well as to music and axe-handles.
there's more to education than lectures. [...] what happens to the rest
Interactive educational software.
distributing good lectures is a great thing.
By the way, lectures are often written by pharmaceutical companies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_industry#Controv...
Lecture scripts and even journal articles presented by academic researchers may actually be 'ghost-written' by pharmaceutical companies.
Music is more than a product -- live performance is a social experience, not just private consumption. People go to see bands live for many reasons other than the rendition of notes they could get from a recording: they flirt with other concert-goers, they experience mistakes and improvisations by the artists, and they drink and dance in public.
Similarly, good teaching is not a solitary or entirely reproducible event. The best teachers I've ever had were the ones who could get students talking to each other, generating and assessing ideas faster than any one pupil could alone. You can't get the same experience reading a textbook or watching time-delayed streaming video of a lecture. I'm not even entirely convinced that online interaction can pull it off, at least in areas like history and the arts, where subjective and emotional arguments are just as critical as hard logic.
Interaction: calling back to the singer, requesting a song. Fidelity: being right there. Shared experience: being right there with a whole bunch of other excited people.
I've had tremendously emotional experiences listening to recorded music, but none so potent as hearing the same song live.
You might extend this to teaching: a recording of even the greatest lecturer can't answer your question.
Further to the discussion, though: mass production increased the base quality of tools like axes and knives, and improved efficiency. However, if you want something bespoke, mass production doesn't care. I like my semi- and full-custom knives: they were made for me, according to my specifications. Modern tooling can bridge the gap, too, yielding full-custom items of the same quality as mass-produced items.
It's a lot easier to carve out a small niche if you have access to a lot of people. Lets say that a band's fan base can reliably get x number of their fans to their shows every six months. Well, those fans will bring their friends, and promotions will get more people into the show who think they might be interested in the music. Well, most of those newcomers won't want to see that band has often as the fans do. So a band would get more people if their fans were spread out. because more of the surrounding community would be willing to support.
I personally am not interested some of the concerts that they have had at my college, but I've gone to them before with friends. I'm sure I would not be interested in seeing those artists again if they were local and played more shows.
Compared to Sousa's time, the country isn't "full" of places where live music is performed. It's practically empty.
In his time, every bar had live music every night. Today, most don't any night, and most of the ones that do only have it on weekends.
Even fairly small companies had bands - big ones had one or more at every facility. I can't think of three established companies that have bands today. (A group of people getting together to jam at the company party doesn't count.)
We may hear more music today, but people heard far more live music before recorded music caught on.
When I visited Portland, I was amazed at the multiple, majority no-cost free music every night of the week
suggests that your experience in Portland was different from what you are used to.
Some places do have lots of live music. (Nashville and Austin are also big.) However, they're the exceptions these days.
Give bonuses and raises to teachers who's students perform well on standardized tests? That just encourages teaching to the book.
Student evaluations? Then the teachers are obliged to suck up to the students for good ratings.
Leave it up to administrators? That creates huge potential for bias and currying for favor. At least when that happens in a for-profit company, the free market will shake out the worst cases eventually.
Seniority is not a great way to determine pay, but it's not an absolutely terrible way either, as generally, more experienced teachers ARE better teachers.
PS: Students at the edges students will tend to regress to the mean, so you can still measure performance on a class that scored 95% last year.
Further, you can "teach to the test" by giving students only classes of problems that will appear on the test and drilling them in that and little else. I imagine that you could end up with lots of functional-illiteracy type issues where students would only be able to do a task in the tightly controlled circumstances that they have been trained on but have difficulty generalizing.
A simple multiple choice test covering vary limited subject matter is one option, but we can do better than that. I remember taking a vary comprehensive series of tests when I was !10 years old that included such things as attempting to sound out words that don't exist in English. Granted, the possibility of extremely high quality testing in this country is one thing, I suspect the actual creation of standardized tests in the public school system has become extremely political.
PS: I think AP tests are fairly good indicators of their subject matter. Even teachers who "teach to the test" still cover the subject to an acceptable degree.
Wikipedia link on validity:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_(psychometric)#Factors...
I don't actually know how long the teachers I had in grade school had been teaching, but if experience can be roughly estimated by age then I am not convinced there's any correlation between experience and quality. I had a lot of great young teachers and a lot of rotten old ones.
And if you pay for seniority, you're rewarding people who know how to make themselves hard to get rid of.
It's a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. At the college level students are willing to go out of the way to attend a lecture that they know will be good. How many high school students have the freedom and motivation to do the same?
I think a good (grade school) teacher is not necessarily one who is an expert in the material (though, of course, base competence is necessary) but one who is an expert in motivating and engaging students.
"It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school." Bill Gates
http://2mm.typepad.com/usa/2009/01/it-is-amazing-how-big-a-d...
Most people simply do not want to work in an environment like that.
Think of it this way: in private firms, employees who demonstrate mastery of both their own specialization and "people skills" are promoted to management, so that they can guide and support the next generation of workers. They are paid more for this than their employees, in part due to the fact that not everyone can do what they do. Similarly, teachers have to balance knowledge of the actual material being taught, and all the "soft" skills of classroom management: facilitating discussions, maintaining discipline, keeping emotions and energy on an even keel.
Any manager who could effectively herd 30+ techies would be lauded as worth their weight in gold; why then isn't a teacher who does the same thing with as many children (a harder task, to be sure) appreciated as the deft administrator they must be?
Assuming that pay is tied to performance and the material being taught is relevant (two huge problems,) a good teacher more than pays for their salary in the increased productive output of their students.
I would have thought it obvious that "hardness of the material" has little to do with what makes a great elementary school or even high school teacher.
Teach for America throws inexperienced recent liberal arts grads into teaching and pays them peanuts. They generally outperform experienced teachers.
Teachers are generally over-paid, I think. The problem is really that nobody with ability would choose to work in such a bureaucratic shit-show. It's not the money.
I bet lots of SUPER qualified people would go for a four year stint in teaching. Retired people, young mothers looking for reduced hours for a couple years, or recently cashed out entrepreneurs, or whatever. The bureaucracy currently precludes this.
The system seems to punish new teachers and the job sucks even at 100k/year let alone what they start at. The types of skills that make a great teacher are in high demand. Many great teachers would also make a great consultants and where I work 200k/year is not that rare for senior people. Hell, at 28 I am 2 promotions from that pay grade.
PS: We need to compare teachers to other collage educated professions not just random call center / factory workers with lots of supervision.