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Just saw this last night in SF courtesy of the Commonwealth Club. Highly recommended. You're shown that getting results is straightforward: get rid of poor tea
by teye 16y ago
Just saw this last night in SF courtesy of the Commonwealth Club. Highly recommended.
You're shown that getting results is straightforward: get rid of poor teachers and reward good ones. One stat that was particularly interesting, from a Stanford researcher whose name I forget, was that replacing the worst 6-10% of teachers would put us on the same proficiency level as Finland.
Unfortunately, the system makes that very difficult. Many teachers are granted tenure, making them impossible to fire, and educators' compensation isn't designed to allow for performance incentives. Contracts demanded by unions are partially to blame.
Also, our education system was built for previous generations' economies. Professionals, scientists, technical workers, factory workers, and laborers were needed in different proportions than they are today. Now we have more highly skilled jobs without enough highly educated Americans to fill them. SV and schools in Redwood City and Woodside are mentioned specifically.
It examines the costs of poor education, like the staggering number of dropouts who end up in prison. Their incarceration cost could put them through private school with money left over for college.
Saying the film demonizes Weingarten is exaggerating. She doesn't look great, but there are clearly a lot of factors at work.
Waiting for Superman makes clear that the way forward is good teachers.
- jbooth 16y agoThe problems are dual, and nobody likes the solutions. On the one hand, yes, you have unions, which theoretically are sticking up for the workers but in practice spend a large % of their time and resources sticking up for the lousy workers who deserve to be fired anyways. On the other hand, you have about half of the country devoted to relentlessly slashing education budgets in the name of "less government". In a small-l labor dominated industry, that effectively means smaller paychecks and/or more work for the same pay. So good teachers who are frustrated by the union shenanigans don't have a lot of other alternatives - who else is gonna stick up for them? Real solutions would be a combination of big pay incentives for star teachers (not that I'd necessarily be a star, but why on earth would I teach at those rates when I can be an engineer?), coupled with a much looser structure on tenure, more dynamic general situation, etc. That would be the kind of incentive to empower the good teachers and disempower the bad ones. But you can't just blame the unions without addressing the other side of the coin.
- enjo 16y agoI would much rather you be an engineer than a teacher. Why on earth would we want to incentivize our creators and innovators to become teachers?
- comatose_kid 16y agoBecause they could help shape the next generation of creators and innovators?
- jbooth 16y agoWell, 2 comments and we're 1 for 2 so I guess my 50% figure was right on. I'll respond with a couple more questions: Do you place a value on increasing future "creation and innovation" by doing a good job of educating kids? If they learn exclusively from mediocre, by-the-book personalities, do you think that helps or hurts the "creation and innovation" parts of their brains?
- timwiseman 16y agoYour question seems to be implicitly assuming that most great teachers could also have been great engineers. At the risk of stereotyping, I do not think that is true. A great teacher must be dynamic, engaging, intelligent, able to connect with children so that they can teach creation and innovation. But an engineer must be intelligent, methodical, and able to master vast amounts of technical knowledge. I suspect most people who make great engineers would not make great teachers, and vice versa. There will be some that could easily be great at either though. Those, I think would better serve society by going into engineering for a few reasons. One is that the number capable of being a truly great engineer is smaller than the number capable of being a truly great teacher. Both are significant for society, but one is more rare than the other. Also, it seems that the point of education is to be able to produce great makers such as engineers who do the work that holds society together. If we always direct our best minds to enhancing the best minds of the future, we will have highly educated children but little or no actual progress for those children to enjoy.
- gehant 16y ago
- enjo 16y agoI will never understand the entire concept of tenure for those outside of Academia. What academic freedom is tenure protecting exactly?
- julius_geezer 16y ago"One stat that was particularly interesting, from a Stanford researcher whose name I forget, was that replacing the worst 6-10% of teachers would put us on the same proficiency level as Finland." Us = "the teachers" or "the US school system"? If the latter, are we allowed to import the Finnish parents? Bad teachers hang on for reasons other than union contracts. The private schools and the charters typically don't pay as well. Maybe it isn't so easy to replace a French/chemistry/history teacher, or maybe you have to do so in the last three weeks before school starts. If you get a stinker then, perhaps in a private school you can fix this after a year, but then you'll have shot a dozen or more kids' introduction to French or chemistry.