Reinventing the School

Every time someone mentions teachers pay relationship to education/grade quality I think they simply haven't taken a step back to compare against alternatives and looked at the numbers (adjusted). Sure a bad system will have marginally better performance when you throw money at it, but that is practically a given and doesn't provide proper systemic evaluation.

On average private school teachers make significantly less... http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=55

And on average private school highschoolers have better or equal grades... (adjusted for student characteristics) http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.as...

Public school per student cost: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

(The above cost is excepted as an undercount by every source I can find though there is dispute by how much, see: "They Spend WHAT? The Real Cost of Public Schools" and a rebuttal here: http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-they-spend-what that agrees with the undercounting but disagrees with CATO institutes exact figures).

Cost per student and a rebuttal/additional findings: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230382220457746... http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-08-31/news/36831030_...

Taking into account "cost per student" grades are the same or better with equivalent spending and are simply more cost efficient teaching systems. All this is without further drilling down into private school methodology to identify the highest efficiency implementations (the NAEP study suggests that the lutherans might be a one of several starting points for that investigation).

When you are putting people into a flawed system with perverse incentives, throwing money at the people involved is a poor attempt at a solution and is "mostly" a red herring.

If the claim is that these grade differences aren't really an education but a cultural and societal issue (ask yourself why "schools of choice" perform better?) than it needs to be addressed as such using a change in methodology and improvements in social services systems/spending.

This type of post aggravates me. It's part of the reason why nothing ever gets fixed. Everyone thinks they're an expert when it comes to education. Yet no one understands the problems.

1. Education is not about employment.

If you teach a kid to be a great widget maker, his/her entire life hinges on the demand for widgets. If widgets become irrelevant, the skill set s/he has developed over 12+ years are useless. [a]

Can anyone, with any certainty, claim their skill set will create a livable income for them for the next 20 years? Probably not. So why would any k-12 school create a curriculum around todays job market?

2. The Education system is not broken (mostly).

Everyone likes to point to the fact that the US educational system is failing in comparison to the rest of the world.

Except...it isn't.

"While reading proficiency in Mississippi is comparable to Russia or Bulgaria, Massachusetts performs more like Singapore, Japan, or South Korea. Often better: Massachusetts students rank fifth in the world in reading, lapping Singapore and Japan, and needless to say, every state in the union." [1][2]

Our problem isn't that the system is broken. The problem is the most of the country isn't implementing the system correctly.[3] There are a lot of reasons for that, many of which have nothing to do with the educational system directly.

Now that's not to say there aren't problems with the current system:

a. Standardized tests only show how good kids are at taking a test. A skill that is wholly unneeded throughout the rest of society.

b. The US system is structured like a factory. The structure made sense when we lived in a time when we needed factory workers. Now we need people who can analyze, think and execute. We do not have a public school system that caters to that.

c. There is too much emphasis on employment and not enough on creating life long learning.

3. Education can't be solved with an algorithm.

Here's a personal anecdote.

I taught geometry in an urban [code for black, hispanic and immigrant] school system. Each year I taught, I had at least 2 kids who would leave school and go to McDonalds to work a 4-11 pm shift 3-4 nights a week. They did this so they could help feed themselves and their family [4].

They never did their homework. They never studies. They slept in the class frequently and most of them failed.

Do you think you can write some code to fix that problem?

4. Educate yourself before you fix the problem.

People who write posts like the OP have not spent any time talking to teachers or admins, let alone spending time in a classroom. Solving the education problem is incredibly complicated and, actually, doesn't have much to do with the schools.

[a]: Fun fact: My aunt graduated from college with a degree in Soviet Economics in 1987. She thought it guaranteed her a job in government for a long time. Hahaha!!!!!

[1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...

[2]: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG11-03_Globall...

[3]: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/01/10/16sos.h32.html?...

[4]: This is just one problem in particular. I also had a number of kids with drug problems, problems at home, safety issues walking/taking the bus to school and a slew of other non-school related issues. This problem stand out because nobody is actively doing the wrong thing.