Bill Gates: End teacher bonuses based on master's degrees and seniority

Imo, universities measuring applicants mainly by test scores is a bad thing, done only because they can't find a better way to do it, but I'd hardly want to subordinate all of education to that. K-12 education should teach kids useful stuff, meta-learning habits, civic information, attempt to inspire them, etc., not solely aim to maximize their SAT scores. To the extent I found K-12 education useful at all, it was only the parts that weren't narrowly aiming at maximizing my test scores, so it'd be a shame to declare those irrelevant and ditch them.

Plus, universities do take some other things into account. I got significant credit on my university applications for an open-source project I worked on in high school, and a website I maintained (in the late 90s websites weren't exactly rare, but it wasn't yet to the "everyone has a blog" level of pervasiveness). Will a teacher who successfully inspires kids to do that sort of extracurricular stuff get credit in these evaluation schemes?

Alternatively, if you consider preparing kids for college to be the sole purpose of K-12 education, why not just measure it directly? For 2nd-grade teachers it would be difficult to measure due to the large time lag, but it'd be possible for high-school teachers. Instead of the state inventing its own tests, just use the % of students who go on to college as the metric, and then do some statistical analysis over a 5-year window to estimate the effect a particular teacher had on that rate. There are a lot of variables and each student is influenced by many teachers, but over a window you can make an estimate of whether a particular teacher had any influence (positive or negative) on college-admission rates, compared to a hypothetical average teacher of the same subject and of a hypothetically equivalent set of students (according to whatever demographic/etc. variables). A teacher version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player, basically.

I think there should be some check on this, but if a class decides to throw the exam in order to screw the teacher, the teacher probably sucks.

Also, if each students score is part of their record, there is an incentive to not throw the test even if the teacher is hated.

If we really cared, we could increase the quality of teaching beyond all recognition. It wouldn't be remotely difficult.

Massively increase pay for teachers, tripling or quadrupling pay at every level. Mandate a specific postgraduate qualification and a statutory minimum of continuing professional development. Recruit only the best and the brightest, specifically seeking out graduates from the best universities. Advertise teaching as a career on prime-time television. Put Obama on The Daily Show and Oprah to talk about the importance of teaching. In short, a concerted effort to make teaching every bit as prestigious as law or medicine. After a few years, require every teacher in the country to reapply for their own job. Relative to the Military or Social Security budgets, the cost would barely even register on the balance sheet.

We could quite easily live in a world where Asian parents push their kids into teaching, where Yale and Harvard vie to be the best school of education, where teaching is seen as a first choice rather than a last resort.

We don't, because we don't really care. We pretend that education matters, but really it's one of those things that you're supposed to care about but most people don't, like the environment or human rights. We don't care whether college students learn anything, only that they get a suitably prestigious certificate. We don't care whether high school graduates can meaningfully participate in society, only that they can pass the standardised tests, whatever they might be.

It is practically self-evident that we don't care about teaching. We all know that the current system is failing, but we aren't prepared to do the obvious things that would actually rescue it. For as long as we see education in the abstract as high status but teaching in practice as low status, we are doomed to watch our school system circle the drain.

We don't revolutionize teaching because TENURE AND SENIORITY RULES ARE LOCKED DOWN BY THE UNIONS.

Want to revolutionize teaching (and save some money)? Break the unions and fire the worst 10% of the teaching staff. Then do it again next year.

(Edit: we really DO care about teaching, and spend enormous amounts of tax payers dollars and collective worry on it.)

I'm OK with paying a drill sergeant more than someone who sits around the teacher's lounge eating donuts all day.

I'm not saying this approach is a panacea to all of education's problems, I'm just saying this is a step in the right direction. I think the question this approach answers is the disconnect between effort and reward in education.