How to Fix Our Education System
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
I recall reading a while back about the Gates Foundation funding the creation of new schools that focus on team work and creative problem solving. This seemed to be the right approach.
The idea that "valuing creativity, ingenuity and communication" more will make the country more competitive is appealing, but how about turning it into a scientific theory. You know, testable and falsifiable.
Failure to take those steps gets us useless twaddle like self-esteem programs.
BTW - If you do succeed, you get to compete with the twaddle for educational resources. Sorry about that.
Yes, whatever happened to that attempt?
"MR. MURRAY: When NIH funding discovers some protein that will cure some disease, it gets snapped up in a heartbeat by big pharmaceutical companies who capitalize on it and make it widely available at a profit. When we have lots of successful experiments in education, the mechanisms for transmitting that success to the broader system don't seem to work very well. Why?
"MR. KLEIN: In part because there are not competitive influences that drive it. In a public-delivery system like ours, competition is not typically a driver."
If you buy a TV you will know soon after you use it whether it is a good or a bad TV. Not so much with your kids. Although, a very bad school may be immediately obvious a lot of mediocre ones will not be and they will not be distinguishable from very good ones.
So, unfortunately, one cannot use general competition to make schools better. One has to rely on teachers and administrators desire to do good.
One possibility I've thought of is that there should be early separation of students into high and low performers to 'scare' parents into pushing their kids towards the 'high' performance. If you can't succeed, you can't, but if you don't try, you'll never get anywhere. Nothing wrong (and a lot right) with vocational education, but so many kids waste money on a college education that they're not able to take advantage of.
Once upon a time, schools weren't organized to segregate children into grades by age.
http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
A lot of scholars think it was crazy ever to start organizing schools that way.
I don't recall that I have said that I wouldn't do that, although I suppose you are concerned about my posting the link in which a third-party organization advocated that student achievement should be one element of teacher evaluation. Yes, I think teachers ought to have great freedom in curriculum design (in particular, they ought to be free to choose their own preferred textbooks and supplemental materials within very broad limits). But I also think that if a teacher announces "I teach English writing" that there ought to be some independent way to show that the students in the class made some progress in English writing by the end of an academic year. Or, at the very least, that students ought to be able to shop for preferred teachers who make them feel honored as learners and who make all the students in the class stay on task in learning. Different teachers may be a different fit for different students--that seems quite likely--so teachers shouldn't be assigned to students by administrators who never enter the classrooms to see what is going on.
In general, I advocate policies that deregiment and unossify the school system we have, but perhaps that has not been apparent in the threads in which you and I have most recently interacted. I'm very much in favor of providing more choices to more learners and more teachers.
It's not hard to see why. Every performance measurement scheme we have today, from federal, state, and municipal school grading to "value-added" schemes, has produced a nightmare of standardized testing and teach-the-test regimes that have crowded out experiments from curricula.
You don't have to agree with Alfie Kohn to recognize the problem. Saying "we need to compensate the best teachers to incentivize them" is like saying "we need cars that consume far less gasoline". It's the "how" that's the question.
You also don't have to disagree with Alfie Kohn about his ideas on "performance pay" to think that it makes sense in the New York City job market to pay a math teacher more than, say, a social studies teacher. To get a decent math teacher at all probably requires a salary sufficient to draw a math-knowledgeable person away from private-sector opportunities.
That certainly makes sense, but the question addressed in this article was not quantity but quality. Which one attracts a higher caliber of teacher (for whichever definition of higher caliber is being used at the moment)?
Of course, getting up in public to say "these kids are failing school--and it's their parents' fault" doesn't really advance anyone's political agenda.
Me either. The biggest problem is the institution (embodied to an extent by administration.) Most teachers are qualified, hard-working. They suffer under 'overhead' like most of us do.
The last thing educators need is a 'solution' from the WSJ.
It's half and half. My wife has a 2nd and 4th block, same material, same environment, except the latter has such a poor group dynamic that they significantly underperform the other class. Variables here are time, teacher fatigue, blood sugar, and the students. I feel that the last factor has the greatest effect.
And I totally agree with the fact that there's an abdication of responsibility from the parent/guardian(s) in that they feel the intrinsic motivation for the student ought to be provided by the state.
But then we have teachers who have tenure that play videos all day. Good times.
I'd say that, at least up to some age, any problems attributable to "the students" are really the failing of the parents, though maybe that's what you were getting at.
I agree that some teachers aren't really helping matters any, but without good parental influence I don't think improving teacher quality is going to accomplish all that much.
The economic system is sending a strong signal.
When you can just get by in school, become a banker and still make the equivalent of an engineer, you'd be almost foolish to go with the match/science degree.
Can you do that in India/China/other third world country?
Even in relatively poor areas of the country (midwest, south) you can make a very good living as a banker (loan officer, etc).