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I think the author tried to justify those figures by way of "Keeping up with the Joneses" and the societal pressures that come with 6-figure salaries, but I agree with you that the numbers are not particularly optimistic. It seems like one of the basic assumptions he makes is that people in this income bracket buy nice things and big things.

When I was a teacher, earning a low salary (even by teacher standards), I still had over $10k of disposable income. I can't imagine that'd go down at all if my salary tripled or quadrupled (thereby bringing it into the range he discusses).

"Presumably not every intelligent person will subjectively find Australia's culture versus the US's culture either a win for Australia or a tossup; some may prefer American culture. Some people may also place utility on things like "living in my home country, where I don't feel like a foreigner"; though of course other people may consider living in another country to be an inherently positive experience."

Fair point. I'd like to add, though, that even within the United States, there's a lot of cultural variation, adn even among larger trends there are quite a few smaller pockets. I find, for example, that I'm happiest in big-ish cities in the Midwest, but only when I can engage with the arts scene and a little bit with the tech scene.

What I mean to say is that I think you're right in that the author does not offer any qualification for those points, but will also say that living in Perth or Darwin is likely to be very different from living in Melbourne, if for no other reason than location, demographic, and the purposes that people have in being there.

My non-profit organization sends writers into schools to teach writing/poetry workshops to middle and high school students (we shy away from "dead white guys" and New Critical Theory and toward practicality and accessibility).

We made the decision, very early, to not charge schools for these visits unless they offered to pay us. Even though Nebraska is doing much better than most states, economy-wise, most school districts are still facing a huge funding shortfall, and can't afford our rates.

Simultaneously, we decided that we need to pay our poets, as it's not reasonable to force someone to choose between teaching a sweet poetry workshop and being able to pay rent (for those artists of ours who are in school or who channel their excess funds to their own creative projects).

It's been a real struggle finding ways to expand our programming while still having enough money to pay everyone, and it's meant that I've done a few workshops pro bono (as has my executive director). Thankfully, my board of directors is on board with this philosophy, and is moving very proactively toward helping to close our current budget gap. Meanwhile, students who attend money-strapped schools still get to hear and see and write poetry that does not suck. My only regret is that we have more interested schools than we have the people or capacity to serve them all, which is the best regret to have.

TL;DR: My non-profit, in a similar philosophical vein to this article, tries as hard as it can to not charge for services, knowing full well that many of our clients can't afford them. This doesn't translate to business, but further reinforces the point that sometimes it's worth a bit of inefficiency.

The blog has quite a few photographs and a lot of discussion on how they merged actual models and CGI for "Moon" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/ ).

Additionally, there are quite a few questions and answers in this Reddit thread, as well as multiple spoilers: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/f50mf/sci_fi_if_...

I find it amazing how much detail and care the designers put into the set, given how low-budget the film was. This is definitely an example of how ingenuity and conscientious problem-solving can make up for a lack of funds.

I went to school to become an English teacher, but English courses at the collegiate level were intensely frustrating for the reasons you describe: vacuousness, self-aggrandizement, and a deliberate shift away from clarity and understandability.

Were it in my power, I'd have all students take courses in applied rhetoric. It's amazing how quickly all the bull goes away when everyone is able to see through it.

Again, I mostly agree with you, and would be okay with DI, by and large, if it were largely in flow-chart format.

The scripts I've seen (non-DI) are screenplays, and the schools that use these assess the teachers on their ability to memorize them. These scripts are blocked out down to 30-second intervals, which is ridiculous.

I work in a tutoring center which uses DI (in practice, if not in name), and I've seen great gains come from it. But every so often, it's necessary to break the script due to a larger issue at hand, one that the standardized diagnostic quizzes don't catch.

As an example, I had a student break down and start crying because she didn't understand how to multiply polynomials (and was in danger of failing her math course). After consoling her, we went all the way back to multiplying multi-digit numbers together, at which point I showed her how the multiplication algorithm works in expanded form (e.g. 123 * 256 = (100 + 20 + 3) * (200 + 50 + 6)), at which point she was able to see the parallel, and very quickly figured out multiplication of polynomials.

All the diagnostic quiz tested, though, was whether or not she could multiply, not whether or not she understood the algorithm. You could point to this and say "That's a failure of the diagnostic quiz", but I think it's probably more indicative of the impossibility of standards (whatever they may be) being completely and totally comprehensive and complete.

There's definitely a time for action. Just not until we decide when that action should be taken.

As for forced attrition:

1) I would want to see a comprehensive professional development program put in place for all teachers. Teaching well is difficult, and teachers generally don't get any useful feedback from anyone (when I taught, the biggest piece of useful feedback I got from my principal was "Make 'em afraid of you. Today, 3 kids didn't turn in their homework. If they're afraid of you, they'll do your homework").

It's entirely possible that plenty of our "bad" teachers simply need some support and guidance and a more concrete direction.

2) While this is happening, a comprehensive discussion of the goals of education needs to occur. Right now, as near as I can tell, our primary purpose is American competitiveness on an international scale (how dare those children from Shanghai score better than our children?!), which will somehow translate into economic competitiveness.

I'm not talking national goals, at least not yet. I'm talking a comprehensive building of the things that an adult need to be able to do in order to choose and set the course of his own life to the greatest extent possible. Obviously, not everyone gets to be an astronaut, but it'd be nice if we took a few steps toward the American ideal of "With enough gumption and hard work, anyone can be reasonably accomplished".

3) Finally, I'd be okay with forced attrition if it were shown to me that the replacements would be better. Others on this board have said things like "pay them more", but the fact is, teaching is not a glamorous position, and is becoming less, rather than more, so as either a direct or indirect result of articles like the one posted. Additionally, most schools nation-wide are struggling with the budget (between California and Illinois, 40,000 jobs were cut last summer. Even in Omaha, where I live, the wealthiest districts are freezing their hiring if they haven't done so already).

You might point to programs such as Teach for America, but even they have a pretty high attrition rate, and that's only a 2-year committment (also: do you really want someone who will teach for 2 years and then go do something else?).

Finally, the points I outlined in my original comment still stand.

I'm not unilaterally opposed to forced attrition, and in fact I'm not even strongly opposed. I just want it to be conscientious, deliberate, and well-thought out, with concrete steps taken to make sure that the new crop coming in has a really good chance to do better than the old crop leaving.

Direct instruction works great for mechanical skills, because there is a 1:1 correspondence between that which is tested and that which is assessed, and because the goals are clear and discrete. If we're talking something like multiplication by two-digit numbers, or properly using semi-colons, those skills are mechanical enough that direct-instruction will work, and will probably work at least somewhat well, assuming that it does not become a slog for the students.

Personally, I'm willing to put up with scripted lessons, so long as the script works the way it should most of the time and so long as I've got the ability to modify if it needs modification. There is a distinct difference between a strong script and an incredibly constrictive script.

I'll still argue that teaching is as much an art as it is a science, but you're right that lesson plans can be transferred between teachers. I have no compunctions about stealing good ideas and good methodology, and have had success doing so.

Here are some broader concepts we can appropriate, which should be palatable to most good teachers:

1) Have a concrete goal, and reinforce it consistently until students are able to meet it.

2) Group students by ability (within a class, if necessary), so that everyone is constantly moving forward.

3) Make sure that there is a deliberate progression, or at least as close to one as possible. Not everything has a deliberate progression (writing, for example, is a pretty non-linear process once you get past a certain ability level).

4) Judge classroom progress by student achievement, rather than by the calendar.

The one reservation I have about Direct Instruction is that it removes some the ability of a lesson to go useful places. If I am teaching a lesson on metaphors while my class reads "The Great Gatsby" (which has impeccable metaphors), and a student says "Hey, when it describes Gatsby as 'dispensing starlight to casual moths', that's a metaphor, and it's parallel in theme to this poem we read two weeks ago"; this is exactly the type of thinking I want my students to be able to do, because it is the type of thinking that will be important later.

That said, if they do not know how to write grammatically complete sentences or how to multiply without a calculator, then I guess all the metaphors in the world can't save them.

(TL;DR: I generally agree in principle, but have reservations regarding practice)

To add to what you've said:

There's so much to be done in the presentation of material, and so much of that needs to be at least somewhat tailored to classes.

Even though I only substitute teach now (and teach writing workshops), I still do the same lesson a few times per day, and so will re-work lesson plans based on what is working with this particular group of students.

I've had classes where I can be pretty relaxed, and we can have useful discussions, and I've had classes where I had to keep them busy lest they get into fistfights (no joke).

Additionally, lesson plans need to be differentiated based on ability. The way I present participles to a class full of kids who stink at grammar is different from how I present participles to a group of honors kids who mostly get it.

One could try to argue that "If the teachers before you had done their jobs, all of these students would be at the same level", but even that isn't true, as students are at different levels by dint of different innate ability levels.

I'm okay with value-added metrics, so long as it is not the only tool used to evaluate and assess.

1) Not all things taught appear on a test, or can be easily measured, and

2) Teachers are not the only entities responsible for student growth. There is also the curriculum, the social environment, the home life, and so on.

3) The natural reaction to such metrics, particularly in the current educational climate, is "Holy crap. If I don't do well on this, I'll get fired." Rather than jumping on the "Let's fire 'em" wagon, I feel that comprehensive professional development plans, based around highlighting strengths and excellent patterns, would accomplish just as much. Instead, though, the current professional development plan seems to be "Fire 'em".

It was strange that the article didn't talk about how one of the reasons there is so much more topspin and power in today's game is because the strings are less energetic now than they were before, meaning that players can swing a lot harder without worrying about sending the ball long.

I normally play with a racquet strung with a synthetic poly string (less stiff than Luxilon, but still pretty stiff and slippery), which allows me to absolutely whale on the ball, and in the process, generate a lot of topspin (as the racquet velocity at impact is pretty high).

A few weeks ago, while playing with a much family member, I used one of her racquets, which is strung with a much bouncier string; it was amazing how much I had to pull back on my shots to keep them from going long. Didn't hit with anywhere near as much spin or power then.

The slipperiness of the string certainly seems to have an effect on the flight of the ball, but so would the liveliness of the string. It would be interesting to see if those variables can be isolated.

I'll agree quite readily to the notion that there are bad teachers, but before we jump on the "Let's fire 'em!" train, there are some things to consider:

1) A teacher whose students consistently perform below grade level, but who jump 2 or 3 grade levels under her teaching (in the course of a year) is probably not a bad teacher. I know several teachers, particularly those who work with students for whom English is not a native language or who work with students with communiications barriers, where this is the case.

(My father is on the board of trustees of a school for the deaf and blind; this school consistently is one of the worst performing schools in the state, but at least part of that is because the vast majority of its students enter the school between 3 and 8 years behind grade level. I know the English teacher there, and she's responsible for some phenomenal gains, but even then it's rare that students will be reading and writing at grade level).

2) While we have a discussion of what bad teaching is, we also need to discuss what good teaching entails. "Sufficient progress on standardized tests" does not describe the teacher, but rather the students, and even then only on a single day. I'm willing to buy that there's some correlation between those tests and overall achievement, but would suggest that 3 hours is probably an insufficient amount of time to fully demonstrate one's learning over the previous 9 months.

Let's have a vibrant discussion of the how's and why's of teaching excellently, both in terms of what it looks like in action and what it accomplishes.

3) Finally, let's take a good look at what useful, worthwhile learning entails, and what it looks like. It may be that the system of bells and periods is more destructive than it is productive (I suspect this to be true, given my knowledge of my own workflow, as well as how I had to drastically alter my workflow when I taught), and it may be that we spend too much time on low-level skills (like rote memorization solely for the purpose of taking a test) and not enough time on internalization and contextualization of meaningful knowledge and skills (how many students have you known who could only solve a math problem when they knew ahead of time, by way of reading the chapter heading, what that problem would entail, but would not be able to solve that problem if they saw it mixed in with other types of problems?)

It's easy to say "Oh, let's fire the bottom 10% of teachers and replace them with excellent teachers", but such a statement falls flat on its face pretty quickly (for one, do we have a hidden reserve of these "excellent teachers", and if so, can we convince them to leave their more lucrative jobs elsewhere?).

It's much more difficult, but also much more worthwhile, to say "Let's figure out what excellent teaching and learning look like, in all their dimensions, and then let's see if we can figure out how to make it happen more often."

As far as education reform discussion topics go, I'd rather have the latter than the former.

You'd be surprised/disappointed.

When I taught 11th grade English, I started the year by asking students to write a two-page composition (and gave them a concrete, well-defined topic), due the following Monday. They panicked, hardcore: "How do you expect us to do this? That's 2 whole pages! How can we ever get that muc done?"

Now, even when I substitute teach, I have to spend a decent amount of time hand-holding.

Particularly in classes, it feels like there are not many teachers who take the "Let's try this out and see what happens. It's okay if it doesn't work this time, because we're learning a new skill. It might take a few tries," approach. It's a necessary approach, I think, when learning higher-level thinking, particularly systematized thinking.

I've found similar methods that work; if something can be made a routine, then the automaticity often takes over and provides the kick in the pants necessary to get started.

Put simply, you can give her the chance by giving her the chance.

What types of things is she interested in? Art? Music? Video? Programming? Something else entirely?

All of these things domains have relatively inexpensive tools available which would be accessible enough for her to use. (I'll admit that I am not the best resource for what those tools are).

The larger philosophical approach: show her that computers are tools that she can use to pursue her own interests and to create things. Provide support when necessary, but mostly let her figure things out on her own (and show her where to look when she wants to learn more; I learned a lot about how to use Photoshop from Photoshop tutorial sites, for example). If it's something you're pretty good with, "Hey, wanna see something cool?" works better than almost anything else.

It's okay if that's the extent to which she is interested in computers. It's also okay if she begins trying to create her own tools, as there are resources for that, too.

Finally, keep in mind that 7 year olds are constantly growing and changing, and that interests can change rapidly. It's okay if she spends 2 weeks straight working on GIMP, only to drop all of that the third week. The introduction of extrinsic motivators tends to diminish intrinsic motivation (Kohn, Pink), and she's still young enough that her sense of curiousity and adventure has hopefully not been fully squashed.

Good luck.

I don't make much distinction between board and card games. I'm not as well versed in the standard-deck-of-playing-cards games, but my gaming group frequently convenes for Spades (Bridge's not quite as smart younger sibling).

A lot more of this question might be finding games that chellenge you in the right way, and which go well with your gaming group.

Personally, I dislike most of the Catan games, and most games with dice involved. On the other hand, if Caylus, Brass, Tigris and Euphrates, or Dominion hit the table, I'm set.

All of those games provide multiple avenues to victory and multiple methods of player interaction. Additionally, they require a high amount of intellectual work (not quite so much with Dominion) and a healthy balance between strategy and tactics. Finally, all of those games reward experience, and make for extremely satisfying matches when matched up with someone of equivalent skill, with little to no randomness that can't be balanced out somewhere. Finally, I like that while there are certain modes of thinking which carry over sometimes, by and large each game requires a different type of problem-solving (Caylus's manipulation of resources and linearity; Brass's manipulation of networks and income; Dominion's manipulation of probability and the transitions from opening to mid-game to end-game; and so on).

(Side note: you might enjoy Dominion, as it hits the sweet spot between board and card game, and does not rely on "theme" a single bit).

As a more general note: both card and board games (as broad as those categories are) can provide a lot of enjoyment, or not very much. I think it's a matter of fairly assessing one's motivations for playing (both in general and on a given day) and the tolerances/temperances of the gaming group.

The reason there is not as much innovation in education is fairly simple:

The people doing the innovating rarely feel the pain points, and the people doing the decision-making rarely feel the pain points.

To make this more concrete, those who are in decision-making positions are administrators (who are concerned with teaching on a macro level and on an "are all the boxes in this curriculum guide getting checked off?"), school board members (who are rarely in classrooms), and legislators (who only go into classrooms when it's politically expedient).

Any type of "innovation" comes down from on high based on perceived problems rather than actual problems.

In the meantime, you've got lots of teachers in the trenches, some of whom are luddites, but most of whom are willing to try something new, particularly if it makes their job easier or more effective.

I got in trouble (when I was teaching) for using an online gradebook rather than a paper gradebook because my principal had less control over it. When using technology, the mantra was "Why don't you just have them make a powerpoint?"

If you want real innovation in educational technology, it'll have to either come from the teachers, or it'll have to come from people who work closely with teachers. From there, you'll have to sell it to administrators (in order to even begin to make money), while teachers (at least in my experience) generally do a pretty good job of evangelizing improvements to those who are still willing to improve (which, I think, is more than it sometimes seems, but fewer than perhaps there should be).

TL;DR: there's no innovation because current products either create more pain-points than they solve, or they don't solve any relevant pain points that the people using them actually have.

It also leads to passive voice, which is sometimes appropriate ("Then three cubic centimeters of goat bile were added to the solution"; ideally, anyone should be able to perform this experiment, and the experimenter is out of the picture entirely), but in general, I agree with you.

The mental trick is to append "I think" to the beginning of every sentence and hope that that works.

Also: using the "I" opens up the argumentum ad hominem, which can focus criticism into uncomfortable territory ("Goat bile shouldn't have been added until after the solution was brought to a boil!", versus "You shouldn't have added goat bile until...." One of those is a bit more likely to be taken personally (albeit by someone with thin skin, perhaps as a result of too much exposure to goat bile)).

The reason this rule exists is mostly because using "I" introduces the possibility of subjectivity, and opens up the argumentum ad hominem, both of can sometimes make a sentence weaker.

"You're 17 years old; what could you possibly know about the economic state of affairs in the Andalucia region of Spain? I'm going to go find a real expert, like the ones you've cited!"

Along similar lines is the moratorium on rhetorical questions, which open up the possibility that the reader's answer will be different from the one you want them to have, at which point you've let the reader make up his/her mind before you've had a chance to change it.

I think both bits of advice are useful sometimes (I particularly dislike rhetorical questions, as they usually feel like beating around the bush), or even most of the time, but I teach my students to avoid both (along with using "you" in papers) unless they can make a stronger argument with them (ethos is everything), in which case they should err on the side of making a stronger argument.

This response comes via the Washington Post, and offers sourced rebuttals/refinements:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers...

Also: while I've got a world of respect for Bill Gates and his philanthropic efforts, I'm not sure that he's the most qualified to discuss education reform.

I'm certainly down with schools restructuring their budgets, but there's wasted money all over the place, and even if we got rid of seniority and degrees as a means of determining salary, it's unreasonable to think that that $59 billion would be spent only on the students, or that it would be trimmed entirely.

Even if we switch to a system of merit pay, that money has to come from somewhere.

Again, loads of respect for Mr. Gates, and full agreement that budgets should be overhauled, but it's gonna take more than just cutting out seniority-based pay.

I use this work pattern when I'm doing particularly distasteful work, and it generally works well.

The only thing I'd advise is that if you're in a state of flow (in which the passage of time just disappears and your focus zeroes in completely), don't worry about maintaining a rigid time schedule.

Every so often, when I'm writing, I forget to check the clock and then it is 3 hours later and I realize that I've missed a meal. I wouldn't trade those times for very many things.

Except that the MCAT measures at least some of the core competencies necessary for being a doctor, and includes a lot of vital information which, if you don't have, make it pretty tough to be a physician.

Even then, there are plenty of people whose MCAT scores were high enough to get them into medical school who ended up being terrible doctors, just as there are plenty of people who barely got into med school who ended up being terrific doctors. I can't cite any studies, but I imagine that just like anything else the variability within a score band is just as much as the variability between score bands.

(Similarly: plenty of bad lawyers have passed the bar, just as plenty of good lawyers failed it before they passed. There's enough variability between the Bar exams of different states to make this possible. I suspect the same is true about engineering programs as well).

It may just be that the MCAT is a good indicator of one's ability to become a doctor. Med school admissions are so competitive right now that these schools are able to be pretty selective about who they admit.

It may be that these tests were designed at least in part by the professionals in those respective fields to measure knowledge and competencies that directly relate to the domains in question.

More to the point, this is a specious comparison because the exams you cite are professional vocational exams which correspond to a specific career path/domain.

There's no such vocational test that will adequately cover every child, nor do we even have philosophical agreement about the skills necessary to live a good life, much less the relative importance of such skills, and even if we did, there are so many different ways that things like literacy and numeracy manifest that it'd be downright impossible to construct a test that can even come close to measuring it.

The tests you cite are tests that limit who can practice in a given profession, and while they're not perfect, I'll concede their usefulness. More importantly, they're on an individual basis. There'll definitely be some false-positives (people who are good at taking tests but poor at performing the basic skills necessary for competency) and false-negatives, but those can be corrected.

It's a whole different ball-game when you're talking about a non-vocational test, particularly one aimed at people who are not yet adults and who have not yet chosen a particular career path.

It's easy to fire "ineffective" teachers (quotations used to show the mutability and variability of the term, rather than sarcasm). Even with the supposed difficulties presented by tenure, so many school districts are struggling for money that it's a simple matter of invoking the RIF-hammer.

It's harder to identify what makes an teacher ineffective, and harder still to identify what makes an effective teacher.

Even harder still when lesson plans are mandated from up top and are seen as things to "deliver" (like a pizza, or a newspaper). I worked in a school district in which some of my lesson plans were written for me (down to the "Spend 5 minutes on this, 8 minutes on that" level), and was evaluated (on those days) based on my ability to comply with them to the letter. One of the comments I received on an evaluation was "We were hoping you'd show more creativity in your teaching" of a lesson that was assessed on how well I followed a script and how well I got students to follow the script.

Frankly, I think the thing that will truly reform education is an entire change in mindset away from students "doing well on tests" and toward students doing good and interesting and challenging work.

That said, your notion of attending professional development is good not only for struggling teachers, but for everyone. It's stupid to expect teachers to improve if the only thing we give them is a carrot or a stick.

As much as anything else, this advice seems to be more on "how to build a good working relationship with another entity" than it is anything in particular about competing.

In fact, it seems straight out of Dale Carnegie, and I'd guess that we could accurately summarize these points as "Build a good personal and professional relationship, and then see if that becomes a good business relationship. Even if it doesn't, maintain the personal/professional relationship."

His points about using the services/products of the entrepreneurs you're interested in and about not leading with a term sheet are all about humanizing the relationship into an actual relationship, rather than one more item on one's investment portfolio.

"What is the What" is one of the most beautifully written books of the last decade. I wholeheartedly endorse this.

Yes.

The Khan Academy is a prime example of how to use technology well for learning, particularly in instances where there is a "right" answer (such as math, at least how it's taught now).

The danger from this is that the interactivity is lost; I can assign the questions from the end of a chapter in a textbook (which requires no more original work on my part than assigning questions in a digital textbook), but if things are checked by computers then they're likely things that are easily checked.

When I taught, I used those "objective" questions as launchpads, Bloom's Taxonomy-style (one cannot understand "Romeo and Juliet", for example, if one thinks that they lived happily ever after).

A combination between this and some type of small-group/1-on-1 interaction (and even some larger discussion groups) could be extremely powerful.

Given how much curriculum feels like a list of checkboxes to be ticked off (and in many cases, given how it is a list of checkboxes to be ticked off), computerizing the brute, low-level stuff would allow more time for the high-level stuff, particularly if all we're concerned about is rote memorization and recitation.

There are more ways to branch out from there that foster critical thinking and creativity, but this would be a start. This would be a very definite start.

Assuming one could adequately define "progress", or at least adequately demonstrate it (there's some interesting work being done with portfolios), such data collection ultimately has to be done on a student-by-student level, rather than a class-wide or school-wide level.

Of course, such a system would also have to carry some type of differentiation; for example, if I'm reading at a 3rd grade level, say 2 years behind or ahead of my peers, then it'd be silly to make me read the same books as they're reading if those books either won't challenge me or will challenge me too much.

I guess this would also entail getting rid of class grouping by age, and instead group by ability (and probably at least one or two other salient features). It'll also require that we re-think grades and what they represent, as simply completing a set amount of work doesn't necessarily mean that progress is being made.

The current system in place seems to be geared toward evaluating schools. Since this is proving insufficient, I suspect the next move will be to evaluate classes (Value-added metrics, for example). This one'll prove insufficient, too, though it will take another 5-10 years.

Dan Brown is successful because reading "The DaVinci Code" feels a lot like watching the History Channel, which is to say that it feels very educational and high-brow, but ultimately probably isn't. Fortunately for DB, not many people are discerning enough to play the "Fact or Crap" game well; either that, or not many people care.

Also: his use of cliff-hangers at the end of most chapters provides a decent amount of momentum.

I think Dan Brown is a hack, though less odious of one than Stephanie Meyer, whom I read in hopes of knowing what my freshmen were talking about. Never again.

>> I don't really think this scheme is workable, but it provides the right economic incentives to everyone.

You're right, from an economics standpoint. However, there's a pretty hefty body of research talking about the effects of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation.

We've already seen merit pay fall flat in at least one instance ( http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2010/09/21/another-bl... ), which suggests that economic incentives don't translate to better instruction or learning.

Additionally, Alfie Kohn's research (see his book "Punished by Rewards") demonstrates fairly conclusively that the addition of extrinsic motivating factors (such as money) tends to decrease intrinsic motivation.

I'd much rather see all the time and money that administrating a system like this would take go to a comprehensive professional development system, reduction of class size, and/or providing more opportunities for genuine learning beyond rote memorization, but that's just me.

(Edit: added quotation at the beginning for clarity)

1) This would severely impair the earning potential of SpEd teachers; many SpEd students either don't work after high school, or get jobs doing dishes (or similar work). My high school (I went to a school for the Deaf) had 100% of its students on IEPs (Deaf persons are generally underemployed by a pretty decent margin), and about 1/5 of the students there had multiple disabilities.

2) This would encourage teachers to go after those students whose future earning potentials seem highest.

I'm a good teacher, but there's only so much I can do with 180 hours over the course of the year, particularly when that 180 hours is split up among 25 students. This isn't excuse making (there have been a few students for whom I've made a substantial difference), but rather an illustration of the pragmatic difficulty of providing 1-on-1 attention to every student, or even to most students.

3) We already do this, at least somewhat. Here in the US, most public schools are paid for by way of property taxes. In more affluent areas (read: where people earn more money, or at least are able to spend more money), the schools tend to be better, as they have nicer facilities, more resources, and better-paid teachers. More importantly, their students are accustomed to a higher SES, and so see that as the default position (not many people want to downgrade). The biggest predictor of a child's future earnings is how much his or her parents make.

Most do, yes. It doesn't matter if you're in a private charter school or a large public school, with large classes or small classes, if all that is going on is the lecture-then-test that limits itself to rote recall.

If that's all that we're doing as teachers, it doesn't matter a single bit where it happens, so long as students can be made to comply.