The Case for a Teacher Bar Exam | Hacker News Reader

The Case for a Teacher Bar Exam

theatlantic.com

Every article about how terrible the U.S. education system is is more or less bunk. Judge Posner on such comparisons: http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/01/the-pisa-rankings-...

More numbers: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

The solution is not to pay teachers more or have better teachers. I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range. The solution is to figure out a way to deal with inner city Chicago and places like it. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and white flight. A place where kids come from generations of uneducated parents and go to school fearing for their physical safety in the face of gangs, drugs, etc.

I found this episode of This American Life a pretty thought provoking discussion on the same subject, and definitely worth a listen.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/474/t...

Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

and I'm glad to see that so many participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues.

I'm not convinced test scores are even all that sensitive to teacher quality within a wide range.

Eric Hanushek has produced many peer-reviewed papers on the importance of teacher quality,

http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/teacher-quality

and I encourage participants on Hacker News who like to discuss education policy to read them thoughtfully. Better-quality teachers matter, both for test scores in the short term and for outcomes that matter a lot more in the long term.

Every article about how terrible the U.S. education system is is more or less bunk.

"Every" such article? How many have you actually read? Have you lived in another country for any length of time, as I have?

Quite a few authors have devoted more time and effort to careful international comparisons of education than the two bloggers you recommended to back up your opinion.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts...

http://educationnext.org/is-the-us-catching-up/

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

Content analysis of the textbooks (for people who can read Japanese or Korean or Chinese or Russian--but how many Americans is that?) makes the point very clear. See

http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd...

(a LONG but worthwhile read I learned about from another Hacker News participant) for more about what's really missing in United States education.

from a professor of mathematics at Princeton about which students come to Princeton well prepared for the courses there.

"Eric Hanushek has produced many peer-reviewed papers on the importance of teacher quality"

All school effects put together are smaller than non-school effects, and teacher quality is only one aspect of school effects. So while teacher quality is fairly important in terms of how much kids learn in school, it's not clear that it would be possible to improve teacher quality enough to produce meaningful improvements on those international tests.

Even if improving teacher quality were capable of improving test scores, it's not clear that it's the most cost effective method.

And the idea that federal standardized testing would improve teacher quality is completely unproven, and the idea that merit pay would improve teaching quality has been soundly disproven.

Not to mention that redesigning the school system around becoming more 'competitive' on standardized tests is extremely dubious to begin with.

I've volunteered in inner city Chicago schools. I coached a middle school debate team there. There were times when I believe I was the only non-black person in the building. This made the debate topic of racial profiling even more difficult to discuss, but the kids managed it really well. A paraphrased quotation from one student: "On the one hand I don't like racial profiling because the white police come by every half-hour, but on the other hand there are gunshots every two hours." It doesn't even matter how accurate she was, that was her perception of the current state of her life.

I thought this article was interesting, because if teaching at a nice "white" school in the suburbs isn't considered super prestigious, what will make inner-city Chicago teaching prestigious in the long term? I've heard Teach for America suggested, and I've had friends who've done it. But TFA teachers are often not in it for "the long haul" because for the "best and brightest" to stay teaching in the inner city isn't prestigious enough to counter the frustration.

So while many articles about the US education system are bunk, and this one doesn't seem to focus on the inner city, I think the principles might still apply.

EDIT: Please, I don't want anyone to get the impression I think I understand everything about the problems South Side Chicago students face. I did have the privilege of observing some of the challenges they face first-hand, but I still have very little knowledge of the actual state of mind growing up in such places really consists of.

You can't change the situation in the south side of Chicago with some teachers. It is, unfortunately, a much deeper rooted and more systematic problem.

I'm Asian, and one of the things Asian parents tell their kids is: choose your friends very carefully. You will become the kind of person you surround yourself with. So what of a kid on the south side? Surrounded by kids with no fathers, from families with no education or belief in education? Surrounded by drug dealers and gang bangers?

These communities will never improve so long as they remain so completely segregated, economically and racially. That's the tough issue nobody wants to address.

The unfortunate part is that many parents do believe in education despite or as a direct consequence of their miserable situation. The answer for these families is often parochial schools, which speaks the deficiencies in Chicago city schools.

The real problem is that many of these folks trust the public schools to facilitate health development but it is precisely in Chicago city schools that kids are surrounded with these negative factors: kids see drug dealers, gang bangers and violence in school. Imagine if you left your kid with a baby sitter, only to find him hanging out with a drug dealer?

> kids see drug dealers, gang bangers and violence in school

Kids that are seeing those things at school are seeing them outside of school as well.

You've hit the nail on the head.

I think there is one answer: boarding schools. It's not a panacea, it's certainly not going to solve all of the social problems, but it's one way to get significant progress.

I think most people in favor of improving our education system would assert that it's one approach of dealing with "inner city Chicago and places like it". It's also worth noting that it can be a valuable part of the solution even it's not wholly sufficient.

I agree with you, but what is even possible to do to fix that kind of place?

The only way I know of anyone getting out of the ghetto and becoming basically worthwhile seems to be the military, and even that takes 1-2 decades in (the low ranking enlisted kids from the ghetto are basically criminals in uniform in a lot of cases). The most likely thing is that they're always sketch, but their kids grow up in an entirely different environment and are decent.

But, it's not like we can enlist ~10mm random people (some with physical/mental/etc. illness) into the military, keep them there for 20y, and hope that when they procreate, their kids end up better.

That's funny - I was just thinking that we need to remove all of the current certification-based requirements for teachers. This seems to go the other way.

Education needs to change drastically. It needs to be nimble. It needs to start providing value in a post-industrial economy -- i.e, it needs to train kids to do knowledge work. You'll know it's making progress when graduating from High School starts to mean something again.

No one knows what that transition will look like, or what it will take. Most people agree it'll be disruptive and messy, and the teaching profession is already being disrupted (Coursera, Codecademy, etc).

It seems as though raising the barriers to entry for teaching as a profession, by adding yet another layer of certification, is a protectionist move that could get in the way of 'good disruption.'

I was thinking similar thoughts. You want to hire the best people possible, not those who have jumped though various hoops. Shrinking the pool of possible people you can hire is never going to raise the quality of talent available. How could it?

In general, if the process that shrinks the pool is better at chopping off the low end of the distribution than the process that selects individual members from the pool to employ is at avoiding selecting from the low end of the distribution, then shrinking the pool by that method prior to selection will, in fact, raise the quality of talent actually selected.

More specifically, "jumping through hoops" selects, if nothing else, for motivation, which is a not-unimportant qualification for teaching.

It selects those who are motivated to jump through hoops, but not necessarily those who are motivated to become better teachers. To throw away a hypothetical someone who is clearly the best person for the job just because he doesn't meet some artificial criteria seems reckless.

That's one of the problems: the process would not inherently be better at chopping off the low end.

Bar exams are guild based funnels. In my opinion they more often than not act as barriers to competition, protect the entrenched, and inflate pay artificially for those that get into the guild. They limit supply, but nothing guarantees that supply is the best of the possible candidates. That would depend on the nature of the examination/s (not to mention some of the best candidates simply won't like the hoops that have to be jumped through), and good luck with that given the hyper political atmosphere around teaching / teachers.

> if the process that shrinks the pool is better at chopping off the low end of the distribution

We actually know from decades of metrics that the process of getting a masters in education selects for the bottom end, not the top. Education majors are one of the lowest scoring groups on the GMATs. Eliminating this sort of certification in favor of Bachelors in general would in fact increase qualifications dramatically.

As far as jumping through hoops, many of the best teachers I have met left the field in exasperation due to the hassles and unnecessary stress of dealing with administration overhead and meddling, and micromanaging of their curriculum by education board members who often have no notable qualifications or experience, and in some cases appear to be functionally illiterate, yet determine policy.

I'm not a fan of more certification, but I think part of the problem is that school bureaucracy doesn't treat teachers like professionals.

I have a close friend who teaches elementary school and the teachers in her school are treated almost exactly like low level retail employees.

In my opinion the rigidity with which you're managed determines whether you can be considered a "professional" or not.

I think your criticism doesn't apply to basic competencies like learning how to read or add numbers. Kids in Chicago city schools are unable to form sentences.

You own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Your team stinks. You want to turn it into the Yankees. Do you have your players work longer hours for less pay? Add lots of testing? Go after the players' union? Or do you just do what the Yankees do, and pay more for better players?

You're already the Yankees. You pay far more than everybody else, and you're not winning enough to justify the vast expenditures. The only thing keeping your franchise afloat is a media network that pays for it all (tax payers endlessly subsidizing horrific teaching results despite the highest pay scale in the developed world).

And who in their right mind would want to be the Yankees? You pay two times too much for all your players, and almost never win a championship because of it. You've got A-Rod, a broken down disaster that you pay $30+ million per year for, that you bought because you were foolishly trying to buy a championship instead of building a real team.

The Pirates get more wins per dollars spent. The Pirates won a mere 16 less games (17% less than NYY), but paid roughly 66% less for that performance.

And if you want to talk raw winning. Let's talk the Cincinnati Reds. They won two more games than the Yankees, with 55% less payroll.

While other teams with half the payroll take home the world series title year after year, the Yankees might be lucky to eek out one title every ten years, and pay $2 billion dollars for it.

I have a question for HN. At what point do you become responsible for your own education?

Before, you may have not had a public library near you. Nowadays, there is too much information. Curation? Multiple MOOC's have taken the problem and squashed it. Internet Access? I'm not sure, but I remember reading that Comcast gives subsidized rates in poor income areas. Computers / Notebooks? This I'm not sure about at all. What access do people have?

Assuming people have access to education, at what point are "educators" defunct? I feel as though I would not have gone to high school had these MOOC's been available. However, I did have enough personal curiosity to pursue these things. In college now, I'm not "spoon fed" anymore, it is my responsibility to do well, and seek out help if I am struggling. I am just curious where people think that line is drawn, and if it's different for everyone or not. I am for the Bar exam - for goodness's sake, we still have teachers trying to teach Creationism!

One of my favorite videos on reforming education, from a very logical perspective from Sir Ken Robinson. Bonus: it's pictorially animated! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Say you have parents who split up when you were two. Then say your mom works two jobs and doesn't help you with your homework, ever. Say you go to school on Monday and your first decent meal is the snack the teacher gives you on Monday morning.

Say this is Kindergarten.

At what point do you then even learn to become responsible for your own education?

Unfortunately I've recently been introduced to a lot of those kinds of things, and it's really hard to make that change from judging.

It was easy to see the unmotivated kid in the class as a slacker. Then we find out he wasn't eating cos it was a choice between getting food or paying for heat.

Our backgrounds shape us much more than teachers do. What goes on outside of the class does too.

You're a motivated self-learner. How much of that, truly, is because of the environment you grew up in?

I know I sling code because my dad bought a computer and let me play on it when I was 7. I was encouraged by my dad to learn on my own.

bphogan I was not saying these kids are unmotivated and should focus on school - I am very sorry for even letting my comment be unclear. Of course our children should be nurtured, and the fact that this situation exists is awful.

Everyone is different when it comes to what shapes them, for me it was a few select science teachers (not so much my environment in this case). That's why I am such a fan for Teach for America. I know four of my classmates who have elected to participate, and it has been the most rewarding experience of their lives. The thing that kids appreciate most? That they care. Really care.

One idea thing I've always wondered about was making a safe place in this cities to code. I wrote a paper on how 1. School districts can cut IT budgets instead of teaching staff by using servers and thin clients instead of full desktop computers. Then 2. after school, adding some coding classes after school (including meals, stews are healthy,cheap, and hot), with the eventual goal of becoming a self-sufficient outsourcing team. Or making mockups, or even slicing PSD's. I feel as though if Hacker Dojo's and such exist, eventually a charity version will be created as well. There could be sponsors from FB / Google / IBM, etc...

It's just a dream.

I've always been a supporter of education for all. It's just a really, really, hard problem. I can't think of doing anything that these other startups aren't doing, so I'm waiting until I can contribute a bit more. Thanks for the anecdote bphogan, it really hit home.

"Multiple MOOC's have taken the problem and squashed it."

I have been watching some of my high school students enroll in some MOOCs recently. Most of them only do well if they have the support of at least one skilled adult around them - skilled meaning that person can help the student find the right course, get the computer working properly, help understand assignments that may require background knowledge that the student is lacking.

I am in support of MOOCs, but we can't just dump these courses online and then claim that everyone now has equal access to a high-quality education on their own time.

japhyr are you a teacher? What subject? I'm definitely not saying that. The I was describing was curation - to know the good courses from the bad. Shoot, if you don't like the Harvard course, take the MIT course.

I agree that getting the computer to work properly can be an issue sometimes, but I don't think it's that complicated? I feel as though if people know how to post to facebook/twitter and stream video, they can get by in the course...please correct me if it is more involved than that. My only experience entailed exactly that - posting in a discussion forum and streaming lessons.

For background knowledge, I used to use physicsforums.com to answer all my questions. 99% of the time the question had already been asked.

japhyr I agree that a guiding hand is always helpful. But I would count finding you and getting your help as "taking responsibility for my own education". Kudos to you and your students!

I teach high school math and science, and I teach some intro programming courses when I can fit them in. I'm also starting to mentor more students who are interested in programming throughout my district. I currently teach in southeast Alaska, but I spent 7 years teaching in NYC before that.

I agree that a good MOOC does fill the role of curating material. But it is still difficult for most of the students I see to find the right course, and get enough momentum in the course to finish it, without a knowledgeable person to mentor them in the initial phase. It's similar to getting a programming environment set up. To really start programming effectively, you've got to know your way around an editor, a filesystem, a package management system, a terminal... You can do some hello world stuff without all that, but it's hard to make meaningful progress in programming without knowing all that. It is certainly difficult to complete these courses without figuring this environment stuff out.

So why do I like MOOCs? Because they help free me up to play the role of facilitator and mentor. I have one student now who is happily working his way through a python-related MOOC, and a couple other students who are trying them out. I just watch their progress, and help them when they hit a block. But none of them would be likely to complete these courses without that guidance.

'But I would count finding you and getting your help as "taking responsibility for my own education".'

It's not that simple; I am spotting these students, they are not finding me. If you're not living in a tech hotspot, it's pretty hit or miss whether there is anyone around who can act as a mentor. It's been said in other comments, that many of us are programmers because we watched people around us work as programmers when we were younger. That is a huge influence on who becomes a programmer.

This is dumb. States already require teachers to pass standardized tests to demonstrate content mastery and pedagogical skill, and there is zero reason to think that it does anything to improve teacher quality, let alone to think that implementing it on the federal level would improve teacher quality.

And there is tons of evidence showing that merit pay not only doesn't improve teaching quality, but actually makes it worse.

The idea that the reason why Finland's kids do better on some random test is because we don't have standardized testing and merit pay for teachers is absurd. This is just another attempt at the privatization of schooling so that capitalists can gut the school system and monetize children.

> And there is tons of evidence showing that merit pay not only doesn't improve teaching quality, but actually makes it worse.

Do you have links to this evidence? I'm genuinely curious; my own searching brings up evidence in favor of merit pay, such as this recent study: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/23/d...

It seems like there are so few teachers now. Maybe the first problem to solve is why we as a nation don't invest more in paying good wages to our teachers.

These issues with teachers are largely in school districts in poor areas. The wealthy suburban school district I attended had no issues with teacher quality, and friends I made in college from all over the country confirmed this to be true on the national level.

Since school districts are primarily funded by local taxes, poor children end up with bad teachers. I believe this is what NCLB was created to fix, but that wasn't successful for a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which was probably the tying of funding to continual yearly improvement in standardized test scores.

Actually, the problem isn't just school districts being funded by local taxes -- even states that have statewide policies that equalize funding have the same problem. The thing is, poor school districts are often, comparatively, unattractive and unsafe places to work even with the same expenditures of funds (because they are often in unattractive and unsafe communities), so teachers often don't want to work there.

(And NCLB wasn't created to fix this problem, it was created to divert funding from education to private testing vendors and provide a mechanism to rate public schools as failing as a political maneuver to build support for privatization of schools.)

> The thing is, poor school districts are often, comparatively, unattractive and unsafe places to work even with the same expenditures of funds

Why is this problem so difficult to fix, at least within the school environment? Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police.

> And NCLB wasn't created to fix this problem, it was created to divert funding from education to private testing vendors and provide a mechanism to rate public schools as failing as a political maneuver to build support for privatization of schools.

Sure, that could very likely be the ulterior motive for the program (among other similar theories), but the public justification for NCLB was nevertheless to improve schools in poor areas.

"Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police."

It's about a lot more than "policing" a confined space. It's about dealing with all of the issues that come with high-poverty areas. Children come to school hungry, tired, and traumatized. They have had ineffective teachers for multiple years in the past. Many have already given up, because they have felt given up on.

These are not "quite easy" problems to fix.

> They have had ineffective teachers for multiple years in the past.

Even those that have been fortunate enough to have great teachers may not be doing as well as their peers in schools with better economic surroundings. Having involved parents can make a huge difference in academic achievement.

> Children come to school hungry

Year after year the one thing my wife will point out as having made a positive impact at the schools she's taught at has been her students getting breakfast at school every day as part of the routine. Initially she found it disruptive but over time they have logged fewer behavior related incidents, fewer nurse visits and more attentiveness in the morning. It's an anecdote but four years without it followed by four years with it and she's convinced. All eight years were at Title I schools with 100% free/reduced lunch as well as the before and after school meal program. The specific change was serving the morning meal in the classroom ensuring the kids were getting it.

It is difficult to fix "within the school environment" because it is a problem with the socioeconomic environment within which the school environment is embedded (including the population from which the school draws pupils), and it involves the area through which teachers have to transit to get to the school.

Correcting for it maybe can be done, but it costs money, which means even with state level policies which aim to equalize school funding across rich and poor districts the poor districts end up behind in terms of academic resources, because they have to spend more money counteracting the effects of being in poor districts.

>>>Why is this problem so difficult to fix, at least within the school environment? Schools are a relatively confined space and should be quite easy to police.

People who want to commit violence can use all means physically available to them. There are violence problems in many prisons as well, another "relatively confined space". Does this answer your question adequately?

No, because prisons are places you can't kick people out of (as that would defeat their entire purpose). If students are committing acts of physical violence, send them to juvy hall. Problem solved.

That's a fair point, I misunderstood the word "to police" your initial post.

Unfortunately, the system is already supposed to work like this, yet the problem remains unsolved. I have friends that are teachers that make constant calls to police trying to get these kids kicked out of school, all to no avail.

Additionally, my teacher friends say that probably 60% of their students would be in "juvy hall" if the police would respond to their pleas to remove these children from the classroom.

I personally think it would be worth the money to do the experiment, but I'm not sure that everyone would agree. Here are the costs that I was able to find quickly on google:

http://www.bestplaces.net/county/illinois/cook http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/us/reducing-jail-rolls-wou... http://www.illinoisloop.org/spending.html

Cost per student per year in cook county Illinois: $11,333

$/Adult Inmate/year in cook county Illinois: $50,000

Note:it costs $240,000/juvenile inmate/year but I assume this is because there are so many fewer juvenile inmates.

I think that there are probably cheaper ways to incentivize students to not use physical violence, but of course the proof is the results of the experiment.

School funding often breaks down at the state level not the local level though it varies by state of course. Simply being in a wealthy suburb does not mean that your school has any more funding than a school in a poor area. In fact it's quite likely that your schools received significantly less money than schools in poorer areas due to federal funding via grants and things like Title I.

In that case, why are there not better teachers in poor school districts? After all, if my school was receiving less funding and still had good teachers, then those poor districts must have stellar teachers. And yet we continue to hear about how teachers suck.

The higher level of funding does not translate to higher-paid teachers. That money goes to supporting students. It can be used to implement school breakfast programs, hire additional support staff, develop afterschool programs, etc. But a school can't just decide to pay its teachers more.

The other important answer to this question is that low pay is not the major disincentive for working in an urban school. It's the challenges of working in a high-poverty environment. Those challenges are numerous, and pretty well documented. There are many similar issues in low-income rural areas.

> But a school can't just decide to pay its teachers more.

Why not? If there are so many environmental reasons why teaching at such a school is disincentivized, providing a monetary incentive could bring in teachers.

> Why not?

State law prevents it in many cases. Collective bargaining agreements with unions, standard pay scales etc.

That sounds like a place to start then. Change the laws.

One of the provisions of being eligible for federal funding as part of the Race to the Top program is that states implement merit pay. I don't personally believe that will change anything and may place even more emphasis on standardized testing, but it could also lead to diversified pay scales.

I am really suspicious of any teacher evaluation system that ties to merit pay. I don't trust administrators and politicians to understand statistics well enough to measure my impact on student learning, as distinct from impacts such as home life, previous teachers, environmental factors, etc.

I would love to be able to earn higher pay for better performance. I have been so frustrated with terrible teachers getting paid much more than me throughout my career, simply because they'd been there longer. But I haven't seen any merit pay system yet that is anything more than a token bonus for some nebulous student performance measures.

Nate Silver did an AMA on reddit the other day, and the top question related to teacher evaluation and merit pay:

"What are your thoughts on data-driven metrics for teacher evaluation? Do you think a system that accurately reflects teacher value could ever be created, or will it always be plagued by perverse incentives (teaching to the test, neglecting certain types of students, etc)?"

He basically said that's too big of a question to answer in an AMA[0], it would take a book. But his first line captures my stance on merit pay:

"There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of those."

[0] - http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/166yeo/iama_blogger_fo...

I agree with Silver that it's far too big of a question for an AMA. My biggest concern in the short term regarding merit pay is that it is little more than a buzz word. Politicians throw it around as if it's a quick fix and then administrators are handed mandates that are poorly thought out so that it looks like something is being done.

The teachers are making the same amount of money regardless of what school they work at. Most school districts have had pay scales based on amount of college education (degrees and credit hours) and longevity in the district. That is starting to change but there doesn't seem to be a good way to judge "merit" when determining teacher pay at the moment.

Teaching jobs in wealthy areas can often be vastly easier than in poor areas and as such they are highly desirable and hard to get due to a lack of teachers leaving those positions. When you teach at a school in a wealthy neighborhood you can expect great parental involvement, an active PTA that picks up the slack during budget shortfalls etc. When you work at a poor school you can expect to be a counselor, get little to no parental involvement and have to deal with tons of issues tangential to education. Teachers don't last long, the average teacher is only expected to last 3-5 years in the field.

A few anecdotes. The school district my wife teaches in pays for no PE teachers due to budget shortfalls. Three of the elementary schools in town have PE teachers that show up between three and four days per week entirely funded by the schools PTAs. The elementary schools in wealthy neighborhoods send home supply lists with items like paper, pencils, crayons, paper towels and kleenex. The parents send all that stuff in. The poor schools have that provided but once it's gone there isn't any more because the parents can't afford to pick up the slack. The school my wife teaches at is Title I provision G. That means the kids get all three of their meals at school during the week. 40% of the students at her school are classified as being "in transition" which is a bureaucratic way of saying homeless. There's a lot more money being spent at my wife's school than the "good" schools but most of it isn't spent on education, it's spent on the basic needs of the kids.

I am of the opinion that if these people cannot afford to properly raise their children, they should not be having them. It shouldn't be the school's responsibility to take care of all these basic parenting duties. Perhaps that is where we should start.

What if the government were to offer $X to women in return for having their tubes tied (same for the male equivalent)? Only the poor people would need the money badly enough to actually do so. You could offer a small sum for a reversible process (which you'd have to pay back in order to get it undone), or a large sum for a permanent procedure. This could very likely solve a lot of these issues in a generation.

> It shouldn't be the school's responsibility to take care of all these basic parenting duties. Perhaps that is where we should start.

That's true, but as a society we've pushed a LOT of non education related responsibilities onto schools. Picking up the slack for parents that don't want to be parents, or those that are trying very hard but struggling is just the tip of the iceberg.

Where I went to highschool, there was an obvious difference between schools in upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class areas. The upper middle class public schools had access to the best/most resources, to the point where their football teams would recruit students from other areas in the state and some of their games would be televised. The buildings were newer and better maintained. The schools in poorer areas were ugly, aging, had problems with mold and flooding, etc. Being in that kind of environment is demotivating to both students and teachers.

Where I went to school the nicer schools were in the nicer areas because both the homes and the schools were newer. While the district spent the same amount of money to maintain them all two of the schools I went to were much nicer than surrounding schools due entirely to private donations. During the summer following my freshman year of highschool we got a brand new basketball court, all the materials and labor were donated. After I graduated the school got a new football field and track, also all through donations. Simply having extremely wealthy individuals living nearby and having their kids go to those schools provided incentive for them to help make the schools better. The other schools couldn't keep up because the families they service didn't have the same type of resources.

The article addresses this. Do you have an argument to make?

A scary majority of my constituent mathematics majors in undergrad told me this of linear algebra (a basic mathematics subject), "I don't care about this stupid shit. I just want to get my degree so I can go teach."

We need a bar exam to weed out these scary people.

[best test takers] is unlikely to be strongly correlated with [best teachers].

Should we remove the qualification for med school being that you do exceptionally well on the MCAT? Should we eliminate the LSAT and Bar exams for lawyers? Because it's likely that, at the very least, the best teachers should be able to pass rigorous tests, even if they aren't the absolute best at said test.

The massive forced population transfers involved in making the US like Finland would probably be a splotch on our history.

There is a great documentary called "Waiting For Superman" that addresses the inner city school problem and so called achievement gap. It's on NetFlix. If you haven't seen it it is worth the time.

I think it would be interesting to see this implemented at a state level, where it belongs, rather than trying to accomplish this at the Federal level.

On one side, teachers do suffer from excess bureaucracy, underappreciation and (sometimes) lack of skills. On the other, mandatory guilds/bars are not usually something I'm a fan of, on principle.

Why not create a non-mandatory bar, like the ABA? This group could create high-standards teacher certifications, possibly something similar to how actuaries have a series of tests in order to get accredited at a specific level (and the amount of schooling they have isn't relevant, just the level they've managed to pass). I know a lot of states wouldn't require it, but if I'm a principle and someone's taken the time to get accredited, I think that's a good reason to hire them. Especially in more competitive areas like English and History. We wouldn't prevent people from practicing teaching without accreditation, but it should be more difficult, in the long term, as more and more teachers do get accredited.

Teachers can earn National Board certification[0]. This is a fairly rigorous process, that demonstrates teachers have a higher level of proficiency.

[0] http://www.nbpts.org/

In my opinion, the article does not address what I experience as the real problem in the field of education: total lack of freedom to choose. After confiscating ("appropriating") the budget from the pockets of the parents, the politicians add insult upon injury by deciding in the parents' stead what education should be all about. I just want a competing portfolio of education service providers of which I choose the ones I want to work with, and I pay them out of my own pocket. Why does this kind of freedom seem so impossible to achieve even in the so-called "land of the free"?

It's possible, but you have to opt out of the system and do it all yourself. Neither of my kids ever went to school - both killed it on the SAT and other standardized tests while spending far less time on "school" than their traditionally educated peers. Not that I think standardized test scores really prove much, but if we are going to measure the success of education by them, then both my kids were wild successes, and neither ever went to school.

Of course, that option is not practical for 90% of the population.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com