Alternatives like charter schools have not always fared well, but some, like YES College Prep (http://www.yesprep.org/), are serving low income areas and achieving profound success. They've been able to replicate a model where teachers, students and parents all buy into the same mission: that all students must gain acceptance into a four year college or university to graduate. YES began with the hard work a few enterprising teachers who became tired of a broken system - not much different from a tech startup in a way.

I've often felt if the teaching profession was prestigious as, say, law or medicine, we could eventually solve the problems in education. That's not to say we don't have problems with our legal system or healthcare - but it'd be hard to argue there is a shortage of good lawyers or doctors. Imagine if we had no shortage of good teachers... But we don't pay teachers well, there are stigmas ("Those who can't...) and a lack of long term benefits outside of the daily joy of interacting with young people and helping them grow - we'd all be crazy to leave tech to go teach, right?

Indeed: "In all of the systems we studied, the ability of a school system to attract the right people into teaching is closely linked to the status of the profession. In Singapore and South Korea, opinion polls show that the general public believe that teachers make a greater contribution to society than any other profession. New teachers in all of the systems studied consistently reported that the status of the profession is one of the most important factors in their decision to become a teacher."

http://mckinseyonsociety.com/how-the-worlds-best-performing-...

I may be mistaken, but I don't think the federal government even has the power to restrict the number of residency slots.

[1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/MedicalEducat...

http://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2012/08/30/why-reside...

A large majority of residencies are funded this way due to the very high cost of residency. As a result, many private institutions won't increase residency numbers on their own due to funding.

The main issue is the cost of residency is massive and is prohibitive for private money to fund anyone's residency.

This, I think is one of the fundamental problems:

---

If parents and local decision-makers really value education (and there is a small portion of the community that does), student and teacher morale would be much different.

---

The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well.

Doesn't matter how fancy the workbooks and new materials or how hard we flog the teachers. The environment is anti-learning. Sure there is tons of lip service of "children are our future". All the best for the children, etc, etc. Except that actions and reality doesn't reflect that.

Many students come poor and/or bad families. No new "Common Core" tests are going to help that child learn if they are afraid they might not eat dinner that evening or they will be beaten up by their drunken family members. Just flogging the teacher to teach harder won't work.

It would be nice if "teaching" was considered just as a prestigious profession as laywer, doctor, astronaut, CTO of startup. Besides attracting more talent, it would send a cultural message -- education is very imporant and only special people get to do teach.

Heck look at the stupid Breaking Bad show. If Walter would be just teaching chemistry vis-a-vis his rich startup-owing friend he would be totally pathetic and uninteresting. Media like that tends to condense, distil and reflect back cultural attidides. Well thank god Walter started cooking meth, and killing otherwise he would have been the most boring person ever.

In fact, the show was basically saying, "Hey, teaching needs to be more valued in our culture, because right now 'good' teachers can't afford what they need and feel discouraged."

Now, of course the meth-cooking was an exaggeration--and in no way is Walt excused for his actions (he had friends, family, and co-workers all offering to help)--but it was meant to show how trapped teachers felt.

He started a science-based business with partners. Then he had to sell his work to the business and cash out to meet the additional living expenses of supporting his family, particularly with respect to the medical needs of his kid. Thus, he was unable to reap the benefits of his own innovation.

Then he started teaching chemistry at a high school, because it was the best (lawful) job he could find with his skills.

When faced with a financial crisis brought on by staggering medical expenses, he decides to turn outlaw. And that is the first step onto the slippery slope.

IF patents, trademarks, and copyrights were geared more towards rewarding creators and innovators to a greater extent than the entities that acquire and own the enforcement rights, the tragic drama would not have occurred.

IF the health care system were better at managing costs and allocating medical resources, middle class people would not be asked to make the decision between paying more than they could reasonably earn in a lifetime and lying down in the gutter to die. The tragic drama would not have occurred.

IF teaching were more prestigious and remunerative as a career, skilled people might choose it first instead of being unhappy with it as their job of last resort. The drama might still have occurred, but WW might have been less of a miserable PoS.

And IF people with enough skill to be chemistry teachers ever figured out that they could make more money by synthesizing reasonably-pure legal analogues to prohibited drugs or previously ignored research molecules with recreational drug potential (and instead of cooking methamphetamine), there wouldn't be enough left to teach all the students. Walter could have made designer drugs loosely based on ketamine or MDMA or even out-of-patent drugs first seen in the 1930s that never got a trade name to replace their IUPAC name, and he wouldn't even have to hide it from his DEA in-law. ...Guess he wasn't so smart after all.

The point is to not paint brilliant minds into a financial corner, because if you think regular smart folks can be scary with the stuff they do by accident, just wait until they have to do those things all the time, on purpose, for money, out of desperation. A software developer with huge chemo bills could turn black hat. A biologist with huge chemo bills could design a pathogenic weapon for terrorists. A desperate physicist could create a radiation weapon. A rogue mechanical engineer could... uh... build a colossal umbrella to blot out the sun?

If there aren't enough fulfilling careers for skilled and disciplined minds within the system, they may turn against it. We already see signs that some such people are being forced to do all of their chemistry with water, milk, and coffee beans. You really don't want too many of them experimenting on the hypothesis that the existing institutional systems are holding them back far more than helping them.

He was faced with a financial crisis brought on by his family's insistence that he visit an out-of-network doctor.

Perhaps the test will help such children learn by identifying excellent teachers.

Imagine three students who regularly go hungry are taught by three different teachers: Teacher A doesn't even find out that her student is going hungry. Teacher B finds out there is a problem and calls the parent once or twice to explain that it is the parent's responsibility to ensure the child does not skip meals.

Teacher C discovers the problem and visits the parent at home to explain in person why it vital for the long-term outlook of the student that the student not go hungry. In addition: (a) The teacher tries to understand the root case of the problem - is the parent on drugs, or has to work 3 jobs, or has an abusive husband? (b) The teacher investigates government or charity services that might have an impact on the problem. (c) The teacher visits the student's household regularly and tries various ways to motivate the parent to correct the problem. (d) The teacher contacts other members of the student's family to explain the problem and try to get them engaged. (e) The teacher celebrates any academic success of the student with all members of the family and links this success to their efforts. (f) The teacher gives the student her phone number and tells the student to call with any questions about the homework - this gives the teacher the opportunity to find out in real-time if the student is going hungry at home, giving a deeper understanding of extent of the problem and perhaps allowing the teacher to tackle the problem in real-time.

Now tell me: Which student will perform better on Common Core tests?

In some other states, parents just put their kids in private schools.

This kind of economic segregation, in addition to kids receiving considerable support at home, can make it seem to those who only experience middle-and-above-class society, like education is OK. We do the same economically as we always have, because the underclass have always been the underclass. While this hardly seems moral, it has become more alarming since it seems like the underclass is gradually expanding.

It doesn't help families who care, but who can't afford an expensive house. Also, someone could really care a lot, but they are still at a disadvantage if:

1. They are a single parent working two or three minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, and just can't pay as much attention to their kids

2. They don't have the experience or the network of friends to help them deal with situations when things aren't going well enough at school, and their kids end up falling through the cracks

In my view, dismissing / blaming families for the condition of schools becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

It is effectively what happens in urban areas where richer parents send their kids to private schools and disengage from the public school system.

Poverty is also often a proxy for noxious family environment. Which doesn't have to be true. Someone from a rich family could be abused and tormented by his caretakers just as much.

In England there have been so-silly-its-staggering stories of anti-terror legislation being used to spy on parents suspected of lying about their addresses in order to get their kids into particular school catchment areas. You'd imagine that these are parents who super-care. I'm skeptical; I think they are parents who have an intense interest only at the beginning and no lingering part in educating their children.

We call them "magnet" schools, as they are intended to attract the best and the brightest.

On the one hand, these are the most diverse schools in this heavily segregated city. They give students from rough neighborhoods a better chance to live a different life.

On the other hand, they decrease the quality of neighborhood schools (non-magnet) by skimming the cream from the top, if you will.

Now, the real problem with this system is how it deals with the intelligent but apathetic student. This student will not meet the criteria to enter one of these magnet schools, regardless of his or her test performance, and will be left in a virtual dumping ground, surrounded by few academically inclined individuals to motivate or otherwise inspire him or her. His or her teachers are likely to be burned out by the disparity of their environment. He or she may not have the right combination of toughness and grace to survive four years in this environment and is likely to become one of the roughly 50% of CPS students who drop out.

Now, does this seem like an appropriate path for a bright student who was unmotivated to complete their homework in the sixth or seventh grade, perhaps due to crippling emotional stress (jailed, drug addicted, or murdered parent)?

I don't have a better system, but I think that we can do better.

Obviously this is tricky business for a host of reasons, but if we expect education to be a worthwhile investment, there's got to be some way to 'borrow' against those expected future gains.

I taught at a magnet school on the west side that operated the same way.

Many magnet schools do not operate as they were designed. Each magnet school was supposed to offer an original line of programming in which the school specialized.

Perhaps it was like that at one time, but those days are gone. The school I taught at was supposed to teach aviation. I guess there was one guy who taught that program once, and then he retired. He was not replaced.

Magnet schools give preferential enrollment of up to 40% to neighborhood students and siblings, but they can recruit selectively, unlike a neighborhood school that must accept any student that lives in the attendance boundary.

The situation that I was describing in my original post was more pertaining to high schools than elementary schools.

There are over 100 high schools in Chicago, but most students want to get into the same 5. If you live in a decent neighborhood, your neighborhood school may be alright, but if you live in the South or West sides, the selective enrollment high schools are pretty much your best chance to get out. Therefore, if you fuck up in the sixth or seventh grade on either homework or standardized tests, the consequences can be severe.

The public school district I was in did not have magnet schools, so my parents had to look for an external solution. I attended a Catholic college prep school (I'm not Catholic), and it was great to be in a place that prioritized education over football BS.

A big part of the problem is that federal law ties the community's hands. Even if you got all the like-minded people together, you can't get out of the fact that a very large quantity of federal dollars are contingent on you doing a very large quantity of bureaucratic nonsense. Which is why the communities are so disinterested -- if they have no power to change anything then why bother showing up?

My wife and I homeschool our kids, but we have very good friends who send their kids to what's considered to be a very good public elementary school. They, as well as other parents, are engaged, even helping out in the classrooms. They speak highly of some teachers, but even with all this involvement, hands are tied by the expectations of the board of education. The kids spend large swaths of their day simply doing worksheets that prepare them for standardized tests.

In my experience, parents that really do care often end up taking their kids out of the public school system because, as the teacher in the original article notes, the edicts coming from "on high" really tie the hands of people who are trying hard to care about the kids.

The fact that property taxes funded schools IS THE CRIMINAL construction. It sounds democratic, but so does pulling ones self up by their bootstraps. It only cements the class order.

Equal funding doesn't actually fix anything, especially if equal means equally low. And money doesn't help if it gets spent on worthless bureaucracy. Moreover, the home life of the students matters a lot. The difference between going home to a decent meal and supportive parents vs. absentee or abusive parents is not something you can lay on the schools.

These things coalesce into the fact that DC has one of the highest per-student budgets in the country but gets some of the worst results. Because they have an enormous amount of bureaucracy and a very poor student population.

Making the funding unconditional would solve half the problem by eliminating a lot of the bureaucracy and giving the local communities an incentive to show up, but the other half of the problem would still be there.

Schools in poor neighbourhoods needs more money if we want the kids to get an education of similar quality.

The reason being that running a school with students from poor households to a standard that gives the same education as students from rich households costs a lot more money. Some examples (based on my experience in the UK) of the extra costs schools have or may have with lower income families (some of which are covered with extra grants from the local council in the case of the UK, some of which they have to cover from discretionary funds):

* School breakfast or dinners. This is perhaps one of the most vital ones. If you charge for meals in the school, either you need to provide vouchers or some other means to make it accessible to poorer families, or their kids fall behind as a result of some of them not eating through the day. If you don't serve meals in school, including breakfast, you can assume that kids from poor families will perform substantially worse on average. My sons school to their credit chose to prioritize free meals to all students to avoid having to deal with visibly separate treatment of the kids.

* School trips. My sons school asks for a specific "donation" instead of demanding payment whenever possible, again to avoid having to means test and deal with excluding kids from trips because of parents who can't or won't prioritise the cost of the trips. They'll make it very clear that too few paying will lead to cancelled trips, but so far that has never happened, but they do have to regularly dip into discretionary funds to cover shortfalls.

* Families with disabled or special needs kids or disabled carers are more likely to either be low income (as a result of parents with disabilities that reduce their earnings potential) or have stretched finances (as a result of additional costs of care), and so more likely to live in poorer neighbourhoods. Same for families where the parents have all kinds of problems that affect the kids, such as alcohol or dug addiction etc.. This tends to result in substantially higher costs for all kinds of assistance programs for schools in poorer areas.

Even if you cover all of the extra costs, the kids in these families are still at a severe disadvantage on average due to all kinds of other factors (less likely to have role models with high education or that pushes them towards higher education, for example).

Giving kids actual equal education (instead of just trying to equalise access to same quality education) would require massive extra funding to poor neighbourhoods.

After first 4 years of school, all the classmates were split according to some equivalent of GPA.

Because we had 4 classes in a year (class as a group of students sharing a room and a schedule), it resulted in one full of very good students, two more or less mixed and one class of students that were barely passing from year to year.

I don't think it helped.

I think it actually helps the gifted students. A lot. The best teachers want to teach in the "gifted" track, because there is a lot more participation and interest, and they can move faster because they don't have to teach to the lowest common denominator.

Unfortunately, while every student can learn, they cannot all learn at the same rate. This is why "no child left behind"-like strategies fail: not all students are equal, and a focus on those who are behind inevitably penalizes those who are ahead.

While good teachers can indeed bring students who are behind further back to parity, it is unfair to lump the burden of environmental and biological differences between students onto teachers, who have to bring them all to a pre-determined standard.

Ultimately, school policy has to acknowledge that it is of the highest priority to thoroughly educate the gifted students, who will become society's future leaders and knowledge workers. As a liberal who is concerned about income inequality, it pains me to admit these things, but that's the way it is.

For an exploration of this idea, I recommend "Lives on the Boundary" by Mike Rose: http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationa...

The article makes some good points and mirrors the experience of many ambitious teachers I've seen ground out of "the system".

That's why there are people who study the behavior of teachers in the aggregate (and, yes, this involves measuring outcomes through testing), and the associated educational outcomes, so that policymakers at various levels can guide the educational system as a whole in a way that will be the most helpful for the most students. This is, broadly speaking, just one example of how social science research and policymaking is done.

Of course, none of this means that Marzano is not clueless. He might be clueless for entirely separate reasons.

This sounds true if you don't think about it too hard.

But why is it that kids who don't suffer get about the same (horrible) education as the ones you mention?

> It would be nice if "teaching" was considered just as a prestigious profession as laywer, doctor, astronaut

It would be nice for teachers. But this is the same kind of half-assed thinking that makes public schools worthless. Instead of making things better for children/students, you've slipped into talking about making things better for teachers. It's like the entire country subconsciously belongs to the teachers' union.

To put it bluntly, teaching has been made into an objectively shitty profession, which is why you can't attract good teachers. If you want good teachers, you need to pay them more and give them the freedom to actually teach. There have been multiple blog posts on here about attracting good software engineers, and I believe the same principles apply to any profession:

You need to: * Pay top dollar for talent. * Allow significant autonomy.

The teacher in the article indicated that neither of these goals were met in his career, and he indicated that they likely wouldn't get met. Based on his awards, I would say he was a "top quartile teacher," so there's some evidence in this that if we had paid him more and reduced requirements imposed by the school district, then he might have stayed on. That would certainly have made things better for his students.

This is flawed logic. You're selecting for status-seeking personalities, not competence.

> As long as teaching is seen as a last resort people wont respect it and you'll keep attracting large numbers of teachers whose only qualification was that they couldn't find a better job somewhere else.

This is flawed logic. You don't even seem to consider the possibility that you've already managed to recruit as many competent teachers as can exist, and that you have so many incompetent ones because your demand outstrips supply.

If there are only 20,000 good teachers, and you need 1 million... then no matter how much respect they get, you'll never get more than 20,000 good teachers. You'll just fill the remainder with jackasses.

> To put it bluntly, teaching has been made into an objectively shitty profession,

They're being rewarded commensurate with their results.

> If you want good teachers, you need to pay them more

You're selecting for greedy people, not competence. Again, flawed logic.

> You need to: * Pay top dollar for talent. *

Flawed logic. If you are an individual who wants a small number of good teachers (say, as tutors for your son Richie Rich), then this is an effective strategy. You're using your immense wealth to lure good teachers away from other jobs.

This is not just an ineffective strategy for a large nation-state, it's an economically and educationally disastrous one. You can't afford it, and you will incentivize a large number of incompetent assholes to become teachers for the "top dollar" pay. Your tests and qualifications can't weed them out because they will attempt to game any tests you present. They will become teachers, fuck it up not just with their incompetence, but also with their toxic personalities.

Do you even think about this stuff, or do you just repeat what you've heard other people say (people who haven't thought about it either)?

Huh? So anyone who wants autonomy and to be well paid is a status seeker? Sounds more to me like they're a typical human being.

> You don't even seem to consider the possibility that you've already managed to recruit as many competent teachers as can exist, and that you have so many incompetent ones because your demand outstrips supply.

I think that idea is so implausible that it's not worth considering. You seriously think you couldn't lure some bright creative minds who would have done an excellent job teaching by making the profession better compensated? Not just those currently on the market but the 18 year olds who are choosing their fields of study? You don't think there have been plenty of people who have kind of wanted to be teachers, then turned on the news and decided "I don't want to put up with that" and then go choose something else?

> They're being rewarded commensurate with their results.

Wow. Way to grossly oversimplify one of the most important public policy issues of our time. You can't ignore externalities that affect student performance and place all the blame on teachers. There are way way too many factors to try to pin blame on any one segment.

>Your tests and qualifications can't weed them out because they will attempt to game any tests you present.

No more than any other profession considered prestigious is "gamed" today. You do realize teachers need to go through a degree program, background checks and professional testing per subject they teach, don't you? And that's today let alone if we further incentivize the profession.

> This is not just an ineffective strategy for a large nation-state, it's an economically and educationally disastrous one. Hiring bright people to do a job that's vitally important to our society at a fair market price? The government spends enough money on nonsense that paying teachers well would be a drop in the bucket.

I can.

If I hire a contractor to build a house in the shape of a giant ice cream cone, then I expect that result. At the very most, he should shortly conclude that it is not possible (I'd still be liable to pay him for some reasonable hours that it took to come to that realization). But if he can't do it, he can't just keep billing hours not doing it.

They're paid commensurate with their results.

> I think that idea is so implausible that it's not worth considering. You seriously think you couldn't lure some bright creative minds who would have done an excellent job teaching by making the profession better compensated?

No. See, you're probably a bright and creative guy yourself (at least within some narrow scope). So your ego gets in the way and you assume that this means that you'd be a great teacher, if only they had signaled to you early on that you'd've been paid well to go into it (and you can't switch now, it'd mean going back to college).

But you're wrong. I don't need someone who is above average in creativity to teach my children. I need someone who feels highly motivated to teach them. This is the single most important criteria to being a good teacher.

And the fact that you didn't go into teaching means you've failed this test miserably. You failed it because you are very unmotivated... low pay, or maybe lack of respect, these things discouraged you.

People are somewhat fungible, in that we could maybe squeeze out a few thousand more good teachers. Maybe. But at that point we're spending far more to get those last few thousand than we were to get the first few thousand good teachers. Just like anything else, we start running into diminishing returns. We'd double education spending to get even 20,000 more good teachers nationwide.

Is our good teacher deficit only 20,000? I've heard numbers more like 500,000. If we have to double it for an extra 20,000, how much will the real number cost?

You're just not thinking about this clearly, and if I must be downvoted then I must... it's more important that you people hear, however briefly, some sense on the matter.

> No more than any other profession considered prestigious is "gamed" today.

Yes, and that level of gaming is bizarre and culturally-suicidal. Let's talk about those "gamed" professions: politicians.

Do you want those kind of people molding your young children (supposing you have any)? Too stupid to teach the kids anything other than manipulation and deceit, filling their heads with crackpot ideas, or just toying with them for their own amusement, and able to shrug off any scandal that malfeasance and abuse sends their way?

The few other prestigious professions, they're not quite as bad as politics, but they have insanely prohibitive constraints. You can't usually game becoming an astronaut, but a nation of 300 million only comes up with dozens that make the cut.

> You do realize teachers need to go through a degree program,

I work as a university, and every term I have to prepare a program that sends out end of term letters (probation and suspension). Which college do you think gets the most of those, per capita?

But perhaps the college of education is just tougher than the college of engineering. Maybe it's a more rigorous program.

And the truth is, they don't need to go through a degree program. When I lived in Atlanta, I saw a newspaper article where they were hiring anyone with a GED to be a teacher, age 18 and up. Seriously. Don't remember the details, and I'm sure some part of it was that they'd put you through a degree program eventually (on your own dime or their? don't remember), but you don't ned a degree.

You just need a pulse, a blank felony record (or not?), and a birth certificate proving you were born 18 or more years ago.

> The government spends enough money

This is a child's view of budgeting. Just because money is wasted elsewhere doesn't mean all should be invited to waste even more money.

> Huh? So anyone who wants autonomy and to be well paid is a status seeker?

You lost track of the conversation. Though people often argue that they should be paid more, the original comment was that they should be better respected. That's status. I concede that I added arguments to my own comment that addressed both status and pay. I'm merely clarifying: if you raise the status of the job, you get status-seekers, if you raise the pay, you get money-seekers.

Neither of these is anything that will improve educational outcomes. They both do however improve election results for political parties that cater to teacher's unions.

Sounds like the system is weeding out the "gamers" pretty well in that case.

> Just because money is wasted elsewhere doesn't mean all should be invited to waste even more money.

No but it does mean there's plenty of low priority things to cut to go towards education.

> if you raise the status of the job, you get status-seekers, if you raise the pay, you get money-seekers.

This is categorically false. Taken to the extreme it means we should pay teachers NOTHING. Then we would get only the really good ones!

Funny thing though, those people. It's almost as if they weren't simply optimizing for a single factor like money or status. It's almost as if they consider a wide variety of factors from pleasure, intellectual challenge, concern for legacy and leaving a mark, and yes gasp whether or not they can support themselves and their family and to what degree of comfort.

For now.

You're proposing changes to the same system that will undermine that.

> This is categorically false. Taken to the extreme it means we should pay teachers NOTHING.

Argumentum ad absurdum.

> It's almost as if they weren't simply optimizing for a single factor like money or status.

The people you want to be teachers never gave a shit about pay anyway. I fully admit this. They will actually do it regardless.

When you say "pay them more" you're not going to improve education that way. If you could be honest and confess that you simply think they deserve more and that we should pay them more I'd have no way to argue against that...

But such a point doesn't belong in a conversation about improving educational outcomes.

Your arguments again higher pay can be used for any profession - which is a good indication that the reasoning is flawed. If that is true for teacher pay, then why not engineers, software developers, doctors, lawyers, etc?

Not in the sense that it means the highest level of status.

It is in the sense that it means "some (arbitrary) mid level of status". This is exactly what it means.

We're not talking about physical comfort while working. It's not labor, it's indoor/office, with air conditioning.

> Your arguments again higher pay can be used for any profession

Yes, and they're correct for those as well. It explains quite a bit of HR buffoonery.

> which is a good indication that the reasoning is flawed.

But if you're doing meta-analysis to try to determine if my logic is flawed, it means you don't understand the logic itself. But that goes without saying.

> If that is true for teacher pay, then why not engineers, software developers, doctors, lawyers, etc?

Engineers: Supply more closely meets demand.

Doctors: Supply doesn't meet demand, but there are so many other obstacles and inefficiencies no one can tell. Besides, dumbasses can't claim doctors should be paid more so that we'll get more doctors... supply is restricted by AMA and medical schools which limit the number of seats.

Lawyers: Supply of good lawyers meets demand, oversupply is something they write editorial cartoons about constantly.

Having a bad environment at home will hinder learning, now matter how good the teacher are.

Having message from society that if you are a teacher, you probably weren't smart enough to become a lawyer, engineer, startup founder. That is reflected in both compensation, autonomy (like in this case) and other things.

There was talk here (or maybe Reddit, I forgot) about how someone from Finland (a country with pretty high math scores, compared to US) did a study to find the impact teachers had. It turned out not to be as much as US thinks it is. Not enough to punish teachers if some standardized scores are not met. And as a hypothetical experiment they said "Let's imagine we transplanted teacher from Finland to Indiana,US", would that dramatically change test scores in Indiana. They speculated that it wouldn't.

Here is the article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/...

- Competition among students, instead of being used as a motivator as piles of research suggests, was specifically DISALLOWED because it might make certain students feel bad.

- When a student fell behind because they were slacking off in class, it was the teacher's responsibility to put in extra time and make sure they caught up, stopping just short of doing the work FOR the student.

- Double standards, administrators demanding that classes be "rigorous", but then when students complain that the class is too hard, or students get bad grades because they can't hack it, that of course is the teacher's fault, and it is reflected in our official evaluations.

- Turf wars among teachers who only care about protecting their own jobs.

- I never had a full time job. Schools will hire for, say .6 FTE, or even .2 FTE, which no one can make a living on. I tried holding 3 teaching jobs at once to put together a full time salary and that worked for about 4 months before things fell apart.

- Working hours of 60-70 hours per week during the school year leads to burnout.

- I make 3x as much as a software engineer.

If it was truly about the students, I'd still be teaching, But it's not.

Edit: Nevermind. As a software engineer you make three times a teacher's salary. I get it now.

Not really.

>It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo.

It's become very apparent that the majority of our college-educated citizens are not paid very much. Just being "college-educated" is not enough anymore.

I think they are paid about right, given the business model. If we had a private run education system, we would see much higher salaries (and attract much smarter people to the career).

What makes you think this is a cause, rather than an effect of low pay? (Assuming, dubiously, these statistics aren't total nonsense, and we should actually care about average IQ.)

That's a non sequitur.

The reality is that, in states where teachers are paid well, students do well. In states where teachers are paid poorly, students tend to do poorly. Education is a priority in some states and less of a priority in others.

Is that grammar meant to be ironic? :|

Anyway, broadly demeaning a giant group of people is offensive, and the suggestion that most teachers are not bright is ridiculous. Many (most) teachers are very intelligent people, enthusiastic about education and greatly desire to give their students the best possible education they can. Unfortunately in America we have such little respect (and pay) for teachers, and the job itself has so much baggage associated with it (as this blog post discusses) that the best and brightest are often discouraged from becoming teachers.

2. What do you think the predominant gender is of all these second spouses that "now" have jobs and are "driving down wages"?

From what I've seen, the summer off is a bit of compensation for the 12 hour work day during the school year.

We lived with one car (a car that was given to us) for 4 ½ years. During that time, I walked or rode my bike to school to save on gas. We recently bought a second car with money I saved from my web design business.

Is the US really structured so that owning one car is (seen as) a problem?

Here's some of the reasons why it feels like you need one car per worker:

You don't live super close to work because either you can't afford it or it's not very safe. In this case close means like 5 to 10 minutes driving time, which is at most like an hour or so walking or biking.

You could carpool with another worker who lives close to you, BUT jobs aren't secure. If the only person who lives near you quits/gets fired/gets laid off and you don't have a car, you either need to buy one fast or you need to find another job. What ends up happening is you switch who drives to work each week, but that means you still need a car for your weeks to drive.

You could drive with your spouse, but they probably have work in an entirely separate direction since you optimized for both of you to have the shortest collective commute. That means using more gas to go out of your way to drop someone off and either working weird hours or waiting a long time for the other person either after a drop off or before a pickup, Also, not everywhere will let you just hangout at work waiting for a ride.

You could walk or bike to work, but that will take a long time (>30 minutes at least) on infrastructure not really set up to support that and with no cleanup facilities or places to change at work (some places have showers, but its rare).

Public transit might actually take longer than walking/biking because of all the extra stops or because you have to take a circuitous route with several transfers. Not to mention that public transit isn't the best outside of urban centers and a few commute corridors, so there will be a lot of waiting if you miss a ride/connection. depending on where you live, you might need to drive to/from public transit near your house because of how long it would take to walk to the pickup point.

Taking a taxi will be more expensive than buying a car and paying for gas yourself.

Driving- 24 minutes (from experience this is fairly accurate)

Public transit- 2 hours 15 minutes. Involves two buses with the second going through one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city and eventually leaving me 6 miles from my office.

Biking- 1 hour 30 minutes. This would be an adventure, but I've actually considered trying.

So, it's basically impossible for me to get to work any way but driving. I could car-pool but I've yet to find a co-worker who lives near enough.

1) Practical: cities/towns are often extremely spread out/car oriented, often with no footpaths connecting different areas forcing you to walk in the road, and occasionally you'll find that there is no way to travel between two points other than highway/interstates (which does have a hard motorized vehicle dependency).

2) Social: Especially further south, people not travelling by car are often 'viewed with suspicion' (vagrants, murderers, bogeymen).

San Francisco has a very good public transit system, at least compared to any other suburb in which I've lived. In San Francisco, I could be most places I cared to be within 30 minutes. There was literally a bus station outside of my apartment window, and I could catch probably a dozen different bus lines within a six block radius, maybe more. I lived without a car for over 5 years in SF, and it was fine.

Alexandria, VA is different. The closest Metro Station a light rail system, is a 20 minute walk by foot, and it has little to no parking. Pretty much anything I want to do is at least a 20 minute walk away. At the moment I can borrow my dad's car, but if I had to walk, my life would be dominated just by trying to get around. Sure, I can survive without a car in Alexandria, VA, but it'd kind of a pain in the ass.

I can't imagine trying to live in a rural area without a car.

None of that makes amorphid's description wrong.

In DC, as in San Francisco, the trains are more for commuters to get into and out of the city. They're not really for connecting within or outside of the city. The NY area is better about that. (But not great.)

If I ever moved back to the area, I would seriously consider Bethesda. Easy access to DC, and a neat town in its own right.

Every city has outlying suburbs and not a single one has excellent transit throughout the entire metropolitan area. The DC metropolitan area has the lowest mode share for private automobiles and the highest mode share for public transportation of any except for NYC. It is objectively the second best city in the US for getting around without a car. It is clearly not as good as NYC but it is certainly not worse than San Francisco.

Buying groceries, going to work, doing any other errand outside of the house requires a car. Therefore, if two adults live in a home, they generally need two cars if they are going to be capable of being independent.

All in all, it's a pretty terrible situation.

If you're a couple and both of you have jobs, it's not always feasible to have one person drop off the other before work because things are so spread out. Without public transit, this means people often need 2 cars.

So at least in LA, it is definitely a big problem to not have independent cars.

Edit: I should also say that where I used to live in Europe, those commuting distances would take me to completely different cities!

most people in LA commute clear across the entire county, which is why they need a car. most of these people are middle class, they could move if they wanted to, but they don't want to.

today, with uber and other services, the only reason you would "need" a car in LA is to commute, unless you make terrible living choices. also the expo line (downtown-west side light rail) will be done in a year.

(I lived in LA about a year without car. It's ok if you're single, but if you have family it's a totally different story.)

Most people don't need to live in Wyoming. So they don't. People want to live in cities, for the additional synergistic opportunities. They are driven away by the municipal corruption that spends their higher in-city taxes on sinecures and pensions rather than on actual services and infrastructure.

We care about both, and we have to. Proposed solutions will have to cater to this reality to have any hope of success.

Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests?

Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable bare minimum.

Why can’t we shift our focus to critical thinking and relevant educational experiences?

Because while great teachers exist, they are sitting on top of a pile of good, decent and bad teachers that largely can't be fired or forced to improve. Kids in those teachers' classrooms need to come out with some bare minimum of quantifiable education.

The reality is that many of the schools, and many of the teachers, are just bad. This can't be acknowledged in the public debate, so it isn't addressed. The unions have established a structure dedicated to protecting bad and mediocre teachers. Which is why great teachers can't get paid appropriately -- the unions would never allow it. It's also why teachers don't enjoy higher status: As a group, they really don't deserve it.

Yes, the unions are right that, without tenure and their workplace rules, teacher hiring and pay would be a political game. That's what political systems do, they respond to political incentives. That's the whole idea of charters: to move the accountability of the schools out of the political system and into the hands of a constituency invested in actual quality. It's probably true that _today_ parents as a group aren't completely equipped to handle that role, because they've been trained to just send their kids off to school. But as they get the opportunity to make more decisions and influence the schools' offerings, they'll come up to speed.

tldr; The testing apparatus is a symptom of a broken governance apparatus. The solution is to fix the governance and incentives. So long as the incentives are political, the results will be political.

As a population, on average, teachers simply aren't that impressive. Teaching is a noble vocation and ought to have great status. But when the average teacher simply isn't that good, people aren't going to extend much respect to the profession.

And the unions contribute to that condition by resisting efforts to improve the quality of the teacher population.

To extend that to the teaching population is madness. Where are you determing "the average teacher simply isn't that good"? How are you making that conclusion? Because it sounds like you just pulled it out of thin air, or it's just a personal view you have.

To say that teachers don't deserve a higher status because "some [imaginative] proportion" are "simply not good [according to you]" is laughable.

>Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable bare minimum.

Why does test-driven development enable the efficient creation of software that works, but the same isn't true of education? For example, asking a student to read some text and answer questions about whether they've understood it is a simple way to see if they're actually literate. An assert() if you will.

Test-driven education has resulted in an American literacy rate of 99% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_r...

The SAT is a test that heavily influences University admissions in the United States. (Not all countries have college admissions exams.) The most selective universities in America are some of the ones who give it the greatest weight. It is hard to argue against a causal link given the level of scholarship and research that is produced in American higher education.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...

I am not going to weigh in on what kind of tests should exist. But the idea that testing is a last resort, and you can 'get a bad education' and still pass the test, is like the idea of a function that doesn't work, but passes all the tests. Not to put words in your mouth, but in essence then you are essentially arguing that it is impossible to test an education.

If so, what makes you think a bad education exists? Perhaps all educations are perfect?

Granted this last example is a bit glib of me, since perhaps there are things that are infeasible to test in a normal test setting. But overall, I would say the type of things that make you say someone got a poor education, are also the kinds of things that can be tested for and are, in fact, tested for. You don't mean they can't make an omelette without getting it all over the floor.

You can reduce the delta between passing tests by writing more, better tests, but again you quickly run into a problem - you spend so much time on testing that you start to lose the time to actually learn / write the actual project code.

So that's some ways in which the analogy is good. But there are some glaring errors in the analogy. In education, a student can have perfectly mastered the material, but is just really bad at passing tests, getting stressed out by it. In TDD, you can make your test environment match the target environment very closely. For most student exams this isn't true - most applications of higher learning are not done in a race against the clock, and you always have access to the Internet to help you out when you're stuck. By their nature, tests can't validate your capacity to work in a team with any fidelity. So, some of the very important skills that are needed in the application of knowledge are very difficult to test, making tests less valuable as a means of judging a student's acquisition of skills. There's a reason why PhDs require a thesis and a thesis defence, rather than sitting an exam before they are awarded.

However, because so much weight is put on testing, that is essentially what happens in school a lot of the time. For some reason, it seems more obviously absurd in the software context.

Do the job, make the thing, etc. If you have to observe the process.

On the other hand, TDD is formative testing: You iterate over the code until all the tests pass in a structured way. You don't fire programmers for writing code that doesn't pass all the tests on the first attempt, but deliver actionable feedback at every step. That kind of testing is massively useful in the classroom and teachers practice it with formal and informal assessments all the time.

I have a hard time reconciling this 99% figure with other statistics about illiteracy in the US.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/number-of-american-adults-who-...

14% of American adults can't read. 21% of American adults read below a 5th grade level.

The difference is partly the definition used. The CIA world factbook (the source of the WP information) uses "age 15 and over can read and write." The CIA World Factbook uses an estimate for the US 99% figure and does not give any explanation how they get that figure.

It's an estimate from census data. There are problems with that estimation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

> The Census Bureau reported literacy rates of 86% based on personal interviews of a relatively small portion of the population and on written responses to Census Bureau mailings. They also considered individuals literate if they simply stated that they could read and write, and made the assumption that anyone with a fifth grade education had at least an 80% chance of being literate.

That feels like a pretty big flaw when we know that rates of literacy for 8th graders are below 50%. And the numbers are far worse when we look at math.

You are right: testing is important. The problems with testing are bad teachers can teach only to the test and lessons that could be about general problem solving approaches turn into "guess which answer is more likely from the multiple choice selection" - a less useful skill.

The other problem with tests is explaining the tests to adults. Two examples here. i) the extensive discussion about common core math. ii) England teaches "synthetic phonics". To make sure pupils are using real synthetic phonics to read and not just learning whole words the tests use nonsense words. This tests a child's ability to sound out the letters and then smoosh those sounds together. This caused some confusion in parents.

When it comes to testing teacher/school performance through its students, if you reconsider a test framework is given a body of objects:

* instantiated outside its control(students are brought, not created at school)

* instantiated with unique and unknown inputs(vs given known inputs)

* have hidden independent variables(personal traits)

* have hidden linked/shared variables(external traits, economic environment, local crime, family etc)

* have _few known inputs_ (teachers, school staff, grounds)

and then ONLY test pass/fail based on those _few known inputs_ and the results from each individual object, you will learn that the inputs pass/failed, but determining what the cause is will be far harder(strong linked variable or teacher? intelligence sapping virus?). unfortunately the frameworks executors believe that the tests clearly show that given the inputs they control, the results are repeatable.

I don't think testing a body of objects-- err --students is pointless, but directly linking their results to teachers and schools discounts so much more than this testing framework can account for. They should be a starting place for conversation, but not a litmus test.

> in essence then you are essentially arguing that it is impossible to test an education.

Education can teach techniques, such as multiplication table or spellings, and that part of education is easy to test. However, education also builds the foundation---of learning how to study, or of how to educate yourself, or of how to be intellectually responsible---and that part is hard to test. The effect might be only visible years after you leave the school, after you go through tough problems as a responsible adult.

I'd love the test-based quantitative approach, and I'm sure there are researches, but this required time span to run test-implement cycle seems to make it very difficult issue to tackle.

`assert(complexFunction() == 42)`

then the easiest way to make the test pass is just to return 42. The analogy in education is "teaching to the test". You can get people to recall small specific bits of information for the test without it actually being useful.

What do you test - memorizing or understanding?

Does it test the required minimum, then passing it corresponds to the lowest positive grade (whatever that is in your school system).

Or do you also test "nice-to-have" knowledge? Then why do you test it?

But that is true for all countries, while the pervasive test culture is a phenomenon mostly observable in the US. The quality of teachers (or their education) can't be the major reason for the test dependency of the educational system in the US.

A culture of forcing children to study for hours every night at home and go to school 6 days a week?

* Greatly increase teacher pay. Increase it to something like 1.5x or 2x the current pay scale.

* Give greater flexibility to the administration to fire underperforming teachers.

* Install much more robust (and flexible to change over time) measures of teacher success. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded several studies in this area (https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/empowering-effect...).

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-globa...

2. Comparing salaries across countries is not that useful - teachers aren't going to go to another country to teach. But they will go to another, higher paying job near them. So the more meaningful salary comparison to make is with the amount of education and work-time a teacher needs, how much do alternative jobs in the same area pay?

That's something I'll never buy about teachers. All of the ones I know complain about how much time they spend grading papers. I just want to scream "Stop assigning homework!"

Honestly, maybe what we need is new and creative teaching methods that happen in class rather than just piling on work to the students.

(Don't take this as a slam on you, I'm just curious why teachers always go the "Give them homework" route. Kids end up with hours of homework all the dang time.)

I challenge you directly to find any example of a conservative person saying that they want good teachers to leave public service. Most voters and taxpayers who have considered the issue want bad teachers to leave the public payroll, to make more room for good teachers. Young people from poor families need to be taught well to help children from poor families advance in developed countries,[1] and several researchers on education suggest that simply encouraging the very worst teachers to change careers might have a huge benefit for school effectiveness for whole countries.[2]

[1] http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

[2] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/economic-value-hig...

Private corporations want government sponsored private education. For example, (thankfully ex) governor of Pennsylvania has made aggressive funding cuts to traditional public education, and he was heavily funded by private schools, to the point where his radio appearances on the local talk network were sponsored by "PA cyber charter school".

On top of that, traditional public schools are union, and the political leanings of unions are well known.

Defunding and destroying non private schools is an obvious goal of the conservative movement.

AFTER EDIT: I just received in today's postal mail a mailpiece from a public advocacy organization (I'm not familiar with the organization) pointing out that current union contracts in Minnesota's public schools still require that school districts that have to downsize staff (as some must do as the number of school-age children in Minnesota declines) have to lay off teachers by seniority, not by effectiveness. This organization's policy argument is that any time a school district hires, lays off, or promotes teachers, it should do so on the basis of demonstrated helpfulness to learners learning, not by the order in which the teachers were first hired. That makes sense as a way to staff schools better to help learners, which is what teachers are all about.

Basically: taxes==always bad, government==bad at doing anything (on any level), private sector==always good, thus should to pay fewer taxes year after year....so it can create jobs?

It's very troubling, especially in suburban areas where community fixtures like good school programs buttress property values, when people don't understand that their private lives are very much reliant upon well-funded, and well-run civil structures that may be completely orthogonal to their lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell

You cannot call these people "anti-government."

Look at George W. Bush. A good example of a Republican. He certainly expanded the US government, which (in my opinion) was already massively oversized.

They might like to see the public school system go away, but they don't want the tax dollars.

I regularly see claims that tests are at odds with learning. What I don't understand is how anyone can tell what kids have learned without some sort of test.

So, I have no problem with testing, per se.

Today, I've got two kids in school, and they are inundated with tests. A testing season (preparation followed by one or more test days) can last weeks. Little is learned during that time. Bright kids have already mastered the material on the tests, and are bored out of their skulls. Dull kids are getting drilled in a remarkably narrow range of topics. One of my kids received, as homework, a worksheet on "test taking skills" to review with her parents, consisting of ways to improve her odds slightly on questions that she couldn't answer.

The tests cover math and reading, though a new regime of even more tests may change that, by imposing narrow set of easily memorized factoids on the science curriculum. An effect is to give short shrift to other subjects such as music and just playing outside.

The sheer amount of testing, and the stakes involved, distort what is taught at school. And I don't think it gives parents any actionable information that they couldn't have learned by talking to the teacher or looking at a report card. If kids are in a dysfunctional school, they probably can't escape from it. The state (WI) has a charter school system in one region, but the charter schools perform no better than the public schools, and discriminate against kids with disabilities. Oddly enough, in its first attempt to expand the charter school system to the entire state, the legislature wrote a bill that would have exempted charter schools from the same "accountability" imposed on public schools.

If you work at a large corporation, as I do, think about the quantitative goals that you are given for your job. At one place where I worked, purchasing bought a bunch of stuff because they were measured on getting price breaks from suppliers, and manufacturing threw it away because they were measured on inventory. High stakes metric driven management of complex organizations creates a web of perverse incentives.

/rant

I think the idea of trying to stack rank teachers and schools works about as well as stack ranking engineers. It's garbage-in garbage-out. The entire premise is faulty.

"You can only improve what you can measure" works great on manufacturing lines and click-through-rates. Not so much, strike that, not at all on humans.

Edit: analog31, exactly that, you are spot on.

Further, if we accept your nihilistic belief that measurement is impossible, how can we know if teaching matters at all? What other sectors of the world does science fail in?

Also such big dependence on tests seems to me like the result of people trying to structure out trust from their relationship.

By which I mean, when kids can't memorize all the stuff that they have learned by heart, and then when they can't produce an exact replica of a procedure or something without some kind of reference, we equate it to their not having learned it in the first place.

Programmers create docs for the purpose of referring to them, doctors must look things up as opposed to simply relying upon a faulty memory, etc.

Kids get the impression that to learn is to fill their memories as opposed to be able to analyze in new scenarios, and that if they can't memorize facts then they are a 'bad learner'. These standards just aren't fair.

But you can also give problems, like 'here are the dimensions of some real-world problem, and here's a formula used to solve such problems, apply one to the other'; or 'here's the text of a poem by so-and-so, explain what you think the poet means and support your arguments with reference to the text.'

I know essay answers take longer to evaluate and are harder to score, but I get the impression that way too much of k-12 educational testing involves multiple-choice questionnaires.

This line of thinking is IMHO a lot of what's wrong with modern education: none of that stuff matters if you don't understand what's behind it (how you get to the formula of calculating the hypothenuse and why people fought WW2). To use the WW2 example, the answer to "who" is "Germany&allies vs Russia&allies" (an oversimplification), but it's far more important to know why they were fighting (a fight between different political ideologies, including Nazism and Communism). Education focuses too much on (possibly useless) facts, and far too little on the logic behind them, or why they matter.

BTW, you can't get a license to practice medicine without passing a standardized test.

I can't help but feel that the problem lies in a fatal combination of non-filtering teacher training (as sentimented by "oh, anyone can teach", and as mentioned by that recent Finnish education post), community culture that talks more than acts about the importance of high quality education and self-motivation, and a lack of funding for those (like OP) who give it their all.

edit: I also think that we should encourage a sense of trusting (maybe government-trained) educators with being able to identify which children in their class need to learn what, better than a test could. I'm not so sure what the benefit is to ignoring the individuals at the 'dx' scale of the educational calculus.

1) As system, schools tend to teach towards the test, at the expense of a diverse education.

2) The tests essentially test how good a student is at doing tests, rather than what they have understood and learned. Children can do brilliantly in the classroom and badly on the test, then be marked as a poor student.

3) The tests are used to categorise the children as they go though the school system (eg. school entries). It's not fair to hold an 8-year old's test score against them 3 years later as they choose their high school.

For Australian readers: did you know that NAPLAN, the Australian standardised test, is purely voluntary, despite the school system making out that it is compulsory? The form to withdraw a child is online [1]. All you have to do is fill it out and give it to your principal, no questions asked.

You will notice that the official NAPLAN info goes out its way to give the impression that a parent needs a special excuse to decline testing for their children [2]. This is because "All Australian governments have committed to promoting maximum participation of students in the national assessment process" [3], despite what might be best for the child.

[1] http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/media/downloads/languagesuppor...

[2] http://www.nap.edu.au/naplan/school-support/student-particip...

[3] http://www.nap.edu.au/information/faqs/naplan--participation...

Also, I've seen tests so dumb that the better you understand a subject, the worse your chances are - because questions and answer templates are stupid/made by people who didn't master the subject, and if you understand things well, you're likely to write something that doesn't match the answer template.

This gets impressively more common at undergraduate level.

By way of example, typical advice is to concentrate on challenge, rather than quantity when teaching these students. Rather than giving them 50 problems of varying difficulty, just give them the 5 hardest ones. When assessing, rather than giving them lots of questions of varying difficulty (like a typical standard test), give them fewer questions, but make them require more thought.

As a parent, who helps in the classroom and observes quite a few children, I'd say that at least 10% of the children in my (typical) school would fall into the gifted category (by measured intelligence) and of those, probably more than half have some soft of learning difficulty. I'd also say that these children will be sold short by the standardised testing.

[1] http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10462.aspx

You don't believe you can identify mastery any other way, so you don't identify it any other way, and so you believe that testing is the only way to identify mastery. OK, but this circular logic is broken.

You could show subject mastery by creating anything, or performing anything, or explaining something verbally to someone else, or by earning money in that field. Writing answers to test questions is rarely a relevant skill and more often tests whether you were told about the exam's quirks rather than mastery of the subject.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Smartest-Kids-World-They-That/dp/14516...

: The Tartars do not seem to be stupid and do fine.

The public teachers depend on bribes to get by. The private teachers are just into exploitation and delivering false hopes. Please don't take China as a good example, it is not; even HK is way more dysfunctional than the American system.

Uh, they're teaching something, it's just not what you think it is.

I think that's quite the same everywhere. Here in Austria school budget gets cut every year, local media are always bashing the teachers so the social standing of teachers isn't very good, therefore it is hard to get good/motivated teachers and you're struck with unmotivated teachers (and even motivated teachers don't hold their motivation for a lot of years).

Most important would be for the community to recognize that education is the most important thing we have for future generations and start investing (financially, socially, ...) into it. However I have no idea how that could be reached.

That was 20 years ago, and it sounds like maybe things have not improved. Quality teachers are just about one of the most important things a society can have. Not sure why we haven't institutionally figured that out.

But the way it is set up now, education does seem to get a fair share of people looking for an easy path. Not sure this is the best group to be educating our youth.

Edit: for those wanting something less cynical and more serious, I recommend some John Taylor Gatto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_CeWip5BpU#t=1m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxCuc-2tfgk

Commonly cited are campaign finance and lobbying and polarisation but those are merely the symptoms of the deeper problem which is the US constitution. A messy compromise, the US constitution effectively gives veto to tiny states (Senate seating). Gerrymandering at the state level ensures that safe seats, and worse, incumbents who have to defend themselves from the ideological 'purists' of their own party. Not a recipe for pragmatic government, vide Brownback, Kansas.

I still look forward to the spectacle of the 2016 general but even if Warren were to be the president (a far off prospect, even though she is what the US needs), little real and effective change would come about because she'd be stymied at ever corner. In view of the fundamental alignment of forces political and economic (increasing inequality in both), we can expect a return to a Victorian economy.

There's little evidence that Warren wouldn't just continue the current policies of the Obama administration, perhaps with a few extra low-benefit bureaucratic programs on top.

She talks a good game, but so did Obama.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, though. The problem here is the entire political system. It's nothing an individual can effectively change (because the system selects for individuals who won't change the system).

He voted for the cromnibus' because it keeps government open and funds a few of his signature policies, but that doesn't imply its the budget Obama wanted to pass. Obama has to be pragmatic.

Obama and Warren 'talk a good game' as you put it but I'd bet that in a different political system, say Britain's, they'd be execute on their talk.

  The American political system is broken....

  ...even if Warren were to be the president...
  ...little real and effective change would come about
  because she'd be stymied at ever corner...

I suspect there are more profound social and structural issues at play here. I really don't think this is a purely political problem.

I'd argue that, with voter turnout barely hitting 55% for the most important election in the land, the political system does not reflect much except a view of politics as media-driven spectator sport.

It is impossible to fix the US constitution under the current political system. There has to be a fundamental realignment of power and that will most likely only happen via a major external shock, like a world war.

I think the history of the US clearly shows that The Constitution isn't the source of our problems. We're not following it! Our elected leaders have stretched its definitions past the breaking point, and our judiciary has allowed those stretches to become law.

You allude to states having a veto because of the Senate, but that's precisely what was _supposed_ to happen, when the state nominated their own Senators. The popular election of Senators effectively took states out of the equation. A particularly awkward situation, given that the UNITED STATES was FOUNDED to be a nation of sovereign states. But that was the question answered by our Civil War: we became a single nation with what are effectively a bunch of local bureaucracies, instead of a federation of states, with a federal government that existed for the "common defense" and international relations. The relatively-recent show on Lincoln (I forget the name) was good at illuminating the Constitutional crisis created by the Emancipation Proclamation, and the authority ceded to the Executive branch has done nothing but snowball since then.

And don't get me started with the abuses of the "Commerce Clause." I defy anyone reading to give me ONE area (of SIGNIFICANCE) in their personal, DAILY lives that isn't legislated by the FEDERAL government. I've thrown this question out before, and one person gave me a good answer, but those examples are tough to come up with.

Two things are killing the US political system: our 2-party system, and campaign contributions. First, let's break up the DNC and the GOP into sub-factions to get the ball rolling. There's plenty of room in both parties. This should allow other folks from the Green and the Libertarian and the Rastafarian parties to run on more-even footing.

Second, all elected officials should get a set amount of money from the government itself to run a campaign. The money should vary according to state or federal levels, and on which seat is sought, but it should be the same for everyone seeking that seat. It can even be a lot of money! They don't even have to be particularly accountable for it! It still wouldn't even budge the budget needle. And then just get rid of PAC's entirely.

The money-for-votes system we have now has got to go. I'm like a desperate used car salesman on this point. "Any offer will be considered!" Any idea how to get special interests segregated from our system would be good. When you have top-level politicians admitting that they spend 80% of their time trying to raise money for the next election, starting on the first day of the term, you know something has to change. But, since "they" control the system, "they" are not going to allow anything to disrupt the process.

You seem to be praising "the Dems" for their efforts, and the ACA in particular, but you can't point to a better example of the inmates running the asylum that that piece of legislation, written by Congress-owning health industry lobbyists, and passed by a Congress without anyone having even read it. That's NOT how it was supposed to be done. That's as un-Constitutional a "thing" that has happened as anything in recent memory, and another perfect example of how campaign contributions (or the threat of their discontinuance) has broken our system.

So stop trying to be reasonable and start being stubborn and obstreporous.

So my question to her is, if it is so valuable then why aren't people willing to pay for it? The answer seems to be, because they can't afford it. People with money spend egregious amounts of money on schooling and private school teachers are reasonably well paid.

Publicly funded schools however are like every other major bureaucratic organization, they have to prove their worth and are all competing for a shrinking pot of money. That is where all these bullshit requirements come from.

Schools are trying to prove that their teaching is effective. The problem with this however is that the community around the school, the engagement of parents in education and the economic opportunity in the community has as much if not a larger influence on educational outcomes than the actual school day activities do.

In my opinion schools should be kind of a seat of knowledge for their communities, not just a place that kids go to during the day and then go back home - like a glorified day care (or prison).

My wife and most of my friends are teachers. Private schools are where you go when you're so sick of public schools' bureaucratic BS that you're willing to take a 1/3 to 1/2 (!) cut in total compensation to get away from it and start feeling like you're a Teacher instead of a secretary who also teaches a bit on the side.

None of my friends have done it, but every year I hear another story about one of their co-workers who did, and they always sound a bit envious when they tell it. There are tons of private schools around here, and if any of them paid even close to what public schools do 100% of the teachers I know would apply for a job at one of them ASAP.

Why can't a high school host something similar? Possibly liability.

One effect of broader community engagement might be that folks are more likely to vote for tax increases to fund schools.

I think the 2008 financial crisis was an evolutionary mechanism for society to rid itself of excessive greed among its leaders (natural selection). The bailout was an unnatural intervention and will only serve to propagate the genes for greed in our society.

I think it's only a matter of time though before the next crisis - And I think it will be the same people who will take us there - This time the cause will be more clever and more complicated than the last time.

You're right; we did have to bail out the banks. The decision to absolve them of any responsibility, continue groveling at their feet, and just generally lay out a red carpet lined with bags of money for them to take on their way to the next instance of destruction...that's a choice we're making.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Great-Deformation-Corruption-Capitalis...

[2] Technically the FDIC has a trivial amount of money, this link [3] shows how laughable it is in the casino of Wall St.

[3] http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/fdic/fdic.html

It probably was impossible. Banks don't just function as holding pens for your money. They're (by design) overly leveraged based on the idea that not everyone will want their money at the same time. If the bank fails, you need to come up with all the money at once, and there was never that much money in the bank to begin with.

Maybe you could have handled this by some system in which you backed people's deposits with things like bonds, but at a minimum, it's pretty complicated. It's easier, and probably better in the long run, to just reassure everyone that their money is safe in the bank, and give the bank whatever is needed to ensure that promise is kept.

Where we went wrong was in failing to meaningfully change the system that incentivized and allowed the failure to occur in the first place. We probably couldn't have done anything to avoid bailing them out the first time, but we could be doing much more to avoid the need to do it again and again in the future, but we're not, because the banks own the government and don't want us to.

Well, you're probably right in that I think there would have been enough money between the banks' assets and the amount the government contributed to cover the amount immediately owed. Probably. I'm just guessing really, but let's say that's true.

What would the next day have looked like? My guess is that the banks who weren't already failing probably would start to fail very quickly. My guess is that if you let the "bad" banks actually fail and cease operations, with the federal government giving out hundreds of billions of dollars in deposit guarantees directly to the people, you'd have had lines at the banks the next day as everyone else rushed to get their money out of the banks that hadn't failed yet.

I wonder when we'll stop blaming the "banks" for every problem we have, instead of the the real culprit of most of our problems, including a terrible education system and the financial crisis: the government.

It just seems like it takes a lot of effort to get into a field that treats you like crap almost as a general rule.

> Stop by the high school for a sporting event (and I love sports) and you’ll be impressed with the attendance and enthusiasm. Stop by the high school on a parent-teacher night and you’ll see tumbleweed blowing through the halls.

Living in China, the expat community often criticizes how parents are fixated on trying to make sure their child does well; for most Chinese children, every waking moment of their life from elementary school on is focused on trying to get into a university. Childhood often consists of going to class, coming home to eat, going to class, coming home to do homework, and then sleeping.

The irony in the critique is that most Americans (I float around with a mostly American expat community) are unaware how weird their own sports fetish is. I'm American and I love sports too! But it wasn't until recently (like in the last 10 years) it dawned on me how weird it is that Americans love sports so much.

Look at our university system. The university system is just a proxy for a professional sports league, except the participating athletes are not paid and are not allowed to hold jobs. Instead many of them are required to study things they have no interest in, in the hope that they can get by long enough to be able to graduate to a real professional league to begin making a living wage. Meanwhile many schools go bankrupt trying to field a winning team, while the teams that do win make millions that go to university officials.

When a university is mentioned in the news, it is most likely in the context of some sporting event. Imagine what would happen if, instead of focusing on sports, people focused on the actual mission of the university. I think this is a microcosm of American culture and the way we treat education needs to change dramatically. All of these tests and metrics smack weirdly of "sportsification" or "athelitis", where we try to turn education into some sort of game because it makes it easier to understand even when there is little correlation with the original mission.

I don't know if the situation is as dire as I write it to be. This rant is the result of years of incubation in my mind. Hopefully things will change so I don't seem so grumpy or anti-social (like seriously, it's hard to make friends with other guys unless I can say something intelligent about the Big 10).

It works relatively well over here.

Yes, very easy to say but, as I see it, the only weapon against the Leviathan is your conscience.

Oh I know, let's spend more money on weapons for police and the military while draining all resources from schools, that will solve everything.

It is a big sacrifice when you live in a suburban area, which typically don't have great (if any) public transit options. You could easily be 3 or 4 miles out from the nearest grocery store or shop - let alone your job.

In many cities in America, you NEED a car to get around. It's just not feasible to live without one.

The author writes, "But public education is painted as a career where you make a difference in the lives of students. When a system becomes so deeply flawed that students suffer and good teachers leave (or become jaded), we must examine how and why we do things." Well, yes, but he could have asked different questions, and come up with the different answers earlier reached by John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year decades ago.[2] Teachers should never kid themselves about how much the school-system-as-such is designed to enable learners to learn well. That has hardly ever been its main purpose.

Meanwhile, I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. Virginia needs to catch up with all those reforms. Minnesota, where I now live and where I grew up, has had largely equal per-capita funding for public school pupils statewide since the 1970s. The state law change that made most school funding come from general state appropriations rather than from local property taxes was called the "Minnesota miracle."[3] Today most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.[4] You don't have to live in a wealthy neighborhood in Minnesota to have adequately funded schools in your neighborhood.

The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment[5] and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.[6] And Minnesota also has the oldest charter school statute in the United States.[7]

Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of detecting the optimum education environment for each student (by parents observing what works for each of their differing children) and giving it to them by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.

The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better. (P.S. Many of these school system reforms in Minnesota were sponsored and championed by supporters of the state's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, but most are also supported by Republicans here too. Choice is good for everybody and helps schools have incentive to improve.)

[1] http://www.doe.virginia.gov/teaching/recognition/

[2] http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

[3] http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/18public.php

[4] http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf

http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html

[5] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...

[6] http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...

[7] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Chance-Passage-Pioneering-Charter...

Looks like this is blogspam with a linkbaity title. Original was "The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom": http://iamjwal.com/the-tough-decision-to-leave-the-classroom...

Whereas, this article reflects the same sentiments I have been hearing from close friends over the past years who are public school teachers. And it boils down to two facts that I have taken particular note of after listening to their grievances:

1. Government interference with education has been a huge mistake. 2. We do not pay our teachers nearly enough.

You cannot legislate education, especially when trying to create a universal adapter for all education across the country.

You cannot get quality teachers in the education system without adequate compensation, period.

i.e. blogspam

In Chicago we tried paying them more and didn't see much improvement.