17 ms·

Teaching Is Not a Business

85 points by aaronharnly 12y ago

aaronharnly 12y ago
Interesting claim: The creation of strong social bonds, possibly in conjunction with Deming's “plan, do, check, act” cycle, is essential to successful change in schools. (And more successful than extrinsic methods like vouchers or charter, or technological approaches.) [Disclaimer: I work for an ed-tech company. This reflects my views, not theirs.]
xname 12y ago
"But charter students do about the same, over all, as their public school counterparts" -- what a pathetic liar. There are redundant empirical evidence supports that charter students perform better. This author is totally progressive ideology-minded.
- jshen 12y ago
  Links please
  - jshen 12y ago
    I looked this up myself. "But for each of the CREDO studies, two questions need to be asked: What are the findings? and How strong are the data and analyses? The 2009 findings were somewhat favorable to conventional public schools—although not as favorable as some skeptics argued. The 2013 findings appear to show some improvement for charters, with great variation between schools and between states—and with an overall national estimate of students in charter schools scoring approximately 0.01 standard deviations higher on reading tests and 0.005 standard deviations lower on math tests than their peers in conventional public schools (the former being statistically significant; the latter not). That is, the ‘findings’ question can be answered as follows: small differences shown in 2009 are even smaller in 2013. The CREDO findings are highly consistent with an overall body of research concluding that the test-score outcomes of the sectors are almost identical." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/09/24/the-bottom-line-on-charter-school-studies/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/09/...
    - altcognito 12y ago
      And charter schools in Michigan have been pretty disastrous: http://www.freep.com/article/20140811/NEWS06/308110130/charter-schools-Michigan-suspension http://www.freep.com/article/20140811/NEWS06/308110130/chart... "The move follows state schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan’s assertions — after an 8-day series about charters published by the Free Press — that he would crack down on poor-performing authorizers. The “State of Charter Schools” series showed that Michigan charters receive nearly $1 billion per year in taxpayer money from the state, often with little accountability, transparency or academic achievement." And the in-depth (all articles may not be online done of charter school misspending: http://www.freep.com/article/20140623/NEWS06/306230027/charter-school-law http://www.freep.com/article/20140623/NEWS06/306230027/chart...
- ZoF 12y ago
  Please provide some kind of source to substantiate the claim you're tying to make. Also, 'progressive-ideology minded' sounds better than progressive 'ideology-minded'(probably because it actually makes sense).
j2kun 12y ago
Why haven't schools adopted the business model of "hiring great people and letting them do what they do best"? Pay them well, give them support, infrastructure, and enough oversight to help them resolve their issues quickly and effectively...and then just trust them to be productive and successful. Is it a lack of funding that stops this from being a reality? A lack of qualified applicants? Is there a good reason this model wouldn't work?
- jshen 12y ago
  Schools have a fixed level of funding. If employees do an amazing job it does not increase revenue. I.e it's not a business. How many great peopke do you know that will take 60k a year in salary?
  - a3n 12y ago
    ... with too many students, more each year, and ridiculous amounts of homework assigned, so much that there's no way a teacher can even look at it all (on your own time at night) much less evaluate it, ...
    - barry-cotter 12y ago
      There is at least a solution to that one, stop assigning homework. It has no positive effects before middle school that anyone has been able to find. Are we wasting our children's time by giving them more homework? Ozkan Erena, Daniel J. Henderson Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and history are shown to have little to no impact on their respective test scores.
      - keithpeter 12y ago
wyager 12y ago
I'm not sure exactly how the article of the title is reflected in the content of the article. It just sounds like the author complaining about perceived depersonalization of schooling.
WalterBright 12y ago
Charter and voucher schools are not free market schools, since the government is paying the bill.
jorgecastillo 12y ago
I hope I don't get down voted, but unless you're being schooled in a hovel and/or lack decent living conditions, it's up to you. No one is a self-made man, every successful man has been supported in some way by society, but there is a certain threshold at which you can't blame circumstances. I support public education from kindergarten to PhD level, but I don't think everyone needs to have the best education possible. Everyone should have access to proper conditions for learning, then it's up to the students to learn or not to learn.
- radmuzom 12y ago
  The point of the article was not that "everyone needs to have the best education possible". Go read it again. The primary message is that personal touch is crucial, and can often make a difference in the value you extract out of an education.
- Quizz 12y ago
  Inner city living is the emotional equivalent of a hovel: single parent never home or addicted, mother has different abusive boyfriend each month, a walk to school is an invitation to join a gang - living in the inner city is about surviving to see tomorrow. One cannot study if the basic needs are absent.
- aianus 12y ago
  The problem is you have to go to school (or have a parent home-school you) by law which robs you of much of the time and motivation to improve yourself. The more time and discipline you expend doing rote memorization so you can graduate and pass the standardized test, the less time you can spend learning something useful.
- capex 12y ago
  Every one might not "need" the best education possible, but every one damn well has a right to have access to the best education possible.
  - aurelian 12y ago
    This statement cannot possibly be true. If everyone had access to the best education, it would not be the best education.
MarkMc 12y ago
I don't think it's necessarily true that "Merit pay invites rivalries among teachers, when what’s needed is collaboration." If my pay is only affected by my performance then I'm quite happy to collaborate with other staff members to help them improve. Personally I like Warren Buffett's approach to merit pay: 80% of your salary is due to your performance, while 20% is due to the performance of your other team members [1]. This gives an incentive improve your performance and to be a team player. [1] Page 19 of Buffett's 2010 letter to shareholders: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2010ltr.pdf http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2010ltr.pdf
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  Well, there's the theory of merit pay, and then there's the practice. I have no idea how merit pay works in the schools trying it out, but my hypothesis is that the overall bonus pool is finite and small. After a few cycles of the game, so to speak, teachers realize that only N merit bonuses can ever be given out in any year. Under such conditions, striving for a merit bonus is directly competitive with your peers, and the pursuit (and awarding) of that bonus can get very political very quickly. Anyone who's ever worked at a large company with stack ranking, department-wide quotas on performance tiers, etc., will know all too well how this sort of system can produce adverse outcomes if not implemented very carefully. Buffet's system seems like an improvement on that scheme, but it, too, can be perverted under the wrong evaluation and management systems. If the group bonuses are team or unit-based (which seems likely, given the way such systems are usually implemented in order to manage at the local/proximate level), then team leaders compete for political favor. What results is that the savviest team leaders secure the rewards for their teams, whether by currying favor with the higher-ups, or by inflating their performance evaluations. (There are ways around this, however, and they rely on the artful management of access and information symmetry.) I'm not opposed whatsoever to the idea of giving teachers bonus pay, or hell, higher pay in general. We should be trying to make the profession more prestigious and attractive, and accordingly, raising the bar on whom we accept into the field. There seems to be something working in the Scandinavian model, which regards (and rewards) teachers sort of like how the US regards and rewards lawyers, consultants, and other professionals. Perhaps the US is just too big and too heterogeneous to make something like that work. And there is something to be said about being unable to fire underperformers (though I do think that's putting the cart before the horse). Today's reformers are focusing on culling the dead weight, or on opening up more charter schools. The problem is that most of the weight is dead weight right now. We've had decades of adverse selection into public school teaching, which has become a profession of last resort. Culling dead weight is fine, but we need to rethink the way we treat and compensate the profession if we want to attract professionals to the field.
JDDunn9 12y ago
I remember reading a study for early education that found that simply touching each student (high-five, hug, etc) every day significantly improved their performance. I imagine the need for a personal connection to the teacher diminishes gradually as we mature. The problem I see is how do you scale personal connections and foster more social bonds?
- DonnyV 12y ago
  You need more teachers. I think you should only have 10 or 12 kids per teacher max.
iopq 12y ago
Teaching should be a business. Then the best models of teaching will get the best customers. When you have schooling as a government service, there is little incentive to provide good education. Going to school is probably the most miserable experience of my life. It's up there with having a job that started at 7:30 AM.
- kaonashi 12y ago
  There are plenty of for-profit colleges, and by and large they are complete scams. Color me highly skeptical. In the real world most education is government subsidized, and the counterexamples that do well seem to run on a non-profit model.
  - gaius 12y ago
    But the only sane way to run a non-profit is to run it as a normal company with the twist that all profits are reinvested at the end of the year.
  - snitko 12y ago
    That's because of the twisted market government has created. In the real world, most roads are built on taxpayers money and police is paid for using tax money of the very same people they beat up. But is this real world a place you want to live in? If I don't like how I myself or my children are being educated (protected, treated), I should be able to stop paying and go buy someone else's services immediately. Without that, the feedback loop is broken and the system stops working properly.
    - kaonashi 12y ago
      That's a fine bit of moralizing, but the reality is you have to illuminate a sane path from here to there. Most the paths I've seen proposed do not seem in the least bit viable.
      - snitko 12y ago
        What paths were proposed and which ones didn't seem viable to you and why?
doctorKrieger 12y ago
business tends to optimize towards what people want, what people want isn't always what education should be ( most of the people just want the diploma to show their employers )
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
The public policy discussion around public education would be a comedy if it wasn't so damned tragic. Let's review a few commonly-understood facts. 1) Public education continues to take more taxpayer money while providing little to no improvement in "outcomes" for kids, whatever that means [insert your own definition] 2) For those kids lucky enough to learn enough to be employable, businesses are now picking up the slack, with on-the-job mentoring and training. Business does a lot of training in the U.S. 3) Blaming one group or another isn't useful. It's not the parents, or the taxpayers, or the teacher's unions, or the administrators. What we have here is a systemic problem. The system is structured such that it sucks the life out of the teachers and continues to consume more and more resources. It's a bad system. 4) Making the system worse is the fact that it's full of consultants and external experts -- all of whom have some different idea of just what the hell the education system is supposed to accomplish. This article was a good example of that. Great ideas -- I love the idea of emphasizing relationships -- but markedly different from "Teach Johnny to read and write" or "Educate Sue enough so that she can get a job" or "Amit needs to be prepared for college". We all have different goals here. So the problem is clear: there is no defined problem the education system is trying to solve. Therefore there is no strategy that can be "best", there is no expense that is either productive or non-productive, and there is no advice that is more or less useful than any other. Until this issue of definitions is solved, no further progress can be made. In fact, no further progress is possible. Yes, you can come to the table with some great ideas, and you can make little snide political attacks against those who have different worldviews. Maybe even the other professors will pat you on the back. But you're not helping things. So we're left with the problem Socrates gave us: the definition of terms. Without that, I am not optimistic that progress can be made. And guess what? Once we have a common definition of what the schools are supposed to be doing, we have a test. And so we are back to where we started. No matter what you do, you're going to have to measure it if you want to have some meaningful discussion about how it's done. That's an epistemological conclusion, not a political one.
- aridiculous 12y ago
  But it's a political problem! I agree that the debate over education is crippled by a lack of clear teleological goals that everyone can agree on before discussing. But that's expected in a big discussion. Most Big Social Issues have this same problem because they are political by nature, not technological or epistemological. Our society hasn't reached consensus on what an 'education' is, just like how it hasn't decided what a good life is (work/life balance debate), what 'freedom' is (drug criminality debate), or what a just war is. But ESPECIALLY with education, I wouldn't expect a 'defined problem' or a set of agreed upon terms to come about by consensus. Why? Like tax policy, education policy has a very intimate relationship to politics and social classes because it affects everyone closely. The issue of definitions is 'solved' when one group's ideas win by force of influence. The point you may be missing is that this has already happened. For the wealthy, the system isn't broken at all. The current system of standardization (test scores, bean-counting admissions processes) for everyone with a side of elite tutoring and private schools for themselves isn't failing. It's doing quite well: Pay extra disposable income for Mary to have better 'aptitude' --> secure acceptance into the next stage of life. The wealthy don't want to make the masses dumb, that would be too dangerous and gut their workforce . They'd rather make them predictably average so their children can beat their peers, reliably, with extra financial firepower. They may not think these details out consciously, but it's the game being played.
lnanek2 12y ago
> All youngsters need to believe that they have a stake in > the future, a goal worth striving for, if they’re going to > make it in school. They need a champion, someone who > believes in them, and that’s where teachers enter the > picture. The author then goes on to throw out all attempts to measure and improve education and say it needs a personal touch everywhere. When I was a student I hated all my teachers because I just read the books, aced all the tests, and ignored the the homework. I skipped class as much as I could without violating official graduation policy and read books under a tree or at a rest stop. Teachers just got in the way. Any personal touch by the teachers would have just slowed me down more than they already were and made me hate them more. Let's stop with this touchy feely nonsense and measure and improve. If you go out and run every day you may feel good about yourself, but you'll never turn in good times unless you measure your time and work on improving it each time. You'll do even better if you compete with teammates and rivals during practices and meets. I think this article is what happens when you let an English major or similar comment on process, something they really didn't need to get their near worthless degree.
mariodiana 12y ago
Every classroom in America would improve if we simply removed the few pathologically disruptive students that rob the others of their education.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  So true. When all students were mainstreamed, it did a huge disservice to every student. Essentially it means troubled kids don't get help; and everybody else gets no education. The classroom can be turned into a day-care space.
- mjklin 12y ago
  If I could have done this when I was a teacher, I would probably still be one.
  - harry8 12y ago
    Wow. I'm sorry, that's really awful.

85 points by aaronharnly 12y ago

Interesting claim: The creation of strong social bonds, possibly in conjunction with Deming's “plan, do, check, act” cycle, is essential to successful change in schools. (And more successful than extrinsic methods like vouchers or charter, or technological approaches.) [Disclaimer: I work for an ed-tech company. This reflects my views, not theirs.]

xname 12y ago

"But charter students do about the same, over all, as their public school counterparts" -- what a pathetic liar. There are redundant empirical evidence supports that charter students perform better. This author is totally progressive ideology-minded.

jshen 12y ago
Links please
- jshen 12y ago
  I looked this up myself. "But for each of the CREDO studies, two questions need to be asked: What are the findings? and How strong are the data and analyses? The 2009 findings were somewhat favorable to conventional public schools—although not as favorable as some skeptics argued. The 2013 findings appear to show some improvement for charters, with great variation between schools and between states—and with an overall national estimate of students in charter schools scoring approximately 0.01 standard deviations higher on reading tests and 0.005 standard deviations lower on math tests than their peers in conventional public schools (the former being statistically significant; the latter not). That is, the ‘findings’ question can be answered as follows: small differences shown in 2009 are even smaller in 2013. The CREDO findings are highly consistent with an overall body of research concluding that the test-score outcomes of the sectors are almost identical." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/09/24/the-bottom-line-on-charter-school-studies/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/09/...
  - altcognito 12y ago
    And charter schools in Michigan have been pretty disastrous: http://www.freep.com/article/20140811/NEWS06/308110130/charter-schools-Michigan-suspension http://www.freep.com/article/20140811/NEWS06/308110130/chart... "The move follows state schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan’s assertions — after an 8-day series about charters published by the Free Press — that he would crack down on poor-performing authorizers. The “State of Charter Schools” series showed that Michigan charters receive nearly $1 billion per year in taxpayer money from the state, often with little accountability, transparency or academic achievement." And the in-depth (all articles may not be online done of charter school misspending: http://www.freep.com/article/20140623/NEWS06/306230027/charter-school-law http://www.freep.com/article/20140623/NEWS06/306230027/chart...
ZoF 12y ago
Please provide some kind of source to substantiate the claim you're tying to make. Also, 'progressive-ideology minded' sounds better than progressive 'ideology-minded'(probably because it actually makes sense).

j2kun 12y ago

Why haven't schools adopted the business model of "hiring great people and letting them do what they do best"? Pay them well, give them support, infrastructure, and enough oversight to help them resolve their issues quickly and effectively...and then just trust them to be productive and successful. Is it a lack of funding that stops this from being a reality? A lack of qualified applicants? Is there a good reason this model wouldn't work?

jshen 12y ago
Schools have a fixed level of funding. If employees do an amazing job it does not increase revenue. I.e it's not a business. How many great peopke do you know that will take 60k a year in salary?
- a3n 12y ago
  ... with too many students, more each year, and ridiculous amounts of homework assigned, so much that there's no way a teacher can even look at it all (on your own time at night) much less evaluate it, ...
  - barry-cotter 12y ago
    There is at least a solution to that one, stop assigning homework. It has no positive effects before middle school that anyone has been able to find. Are we wasting our children's time by giving them more homework? Ozkan Erena, Daniel J. Henderson Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and history are shown to have little to no impact on their respective test scores.
    - keithpeter 12y ago

wyager 12y ago

I'm not sure exactly how the article of the title is reflected in the content of the article. It just sounds like the author complaining about perceived depersonalization of schooling.

WalterBright 12y ago

Charter and voucher schools are not free market schools, since the government is paying the bill.

jorgecastillo 12y ago

I hope I don't get down voted, but unless you're being schooled in a hovel and/or lack decent living conditions, it's up to you. No one is a self-made man, every successful man has been supported in some way by society, but there is a certain threshold at which you can't blame circumstances. I support public education from kindergarten to PhD level, but I don't think everyone needs to have the best education possible. Everyone should have access to proper conditions for learning, then it's up to the students to learn or not to learn.

radmuzom 12y ago
The point of the article was not that "everyone needs to have the best education possible". Go read it again. The primary message is that personal touch is crucial, and can often make a difference in the value you extract out of an education.
Quizz 12y ago
Inner city living is the emotional equivalent of a hovel: single parent never home or addicted, mother has different abusive boyfriend each month, a walk to school is an invitation to join a gang - living in the inner city is about surviving to see tomorrow. One cannot study if the basic needs are absent.
aianus 12y ago
The problem is you have to go to school (or have a parent home-school you) by law which robs you of much of the time and motivation to improve yourself. The more time and discipline you expend doing rote memorization so you can graduate and pass the standardized test, the less time you can spend learning something useful.
capex 12y ago
Every one might not "need" the best education possible, but every one damn well has a right to have access to the best education possible.
- aurelian 12y ago
  This statement cannot possibly be true. If everyone had access to the best education, it would not be the best education.

MarkMc 12y ago

I don't think it's necessarily true that "Merit pay invites rivalries among teachers, when what’s needed is collaboration." If my pay is only affected by my performance then I'm quite happy to collaborate with other staff members to help them improve. Personally I like Warren Buffett's approach to merit pay: 80% of your salary is due to your performance, while 20% is due to the performance of your other team members [1]. This gives an incentive improve your performance and to be a team player. [1] Page 19 of Buffett's 2010 letter to shareholders: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2010ltr.pdf http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2010ltr.pdf

jonnathanson 12y ago
Well, there's the theory of merit pay, and then there's the practice. I have no idea how merit pay works in the schools trying it out, but my hypothesis is that the overall bonus pool is finite and small. After a few cycles of the game, so to speak, teachers realize that only N merit bonuses can ever be given out in any year. Under such conditions, striving for a merit bonus is directly competitive with your peers, and the pursuit (and awarding) of that bonus can get very political very quickly. Anyone who's ever worked at a large company with stack ranking, department-wide quotas on performance tiers, etc., will know all too well how this sort of system can produce adverse outcomes if not implemented very carefully. Buffet's system seems like an improvement on that scheme, but it, too, can be perverted under the wrong evaluation and management systems. If the group bonuses are team or unit-based (which seems likely, given the way such systems are usually implemented in order to manage at the local/proximate level), then team leaders compete for political favor. What results is that the savviest team leaders secure the rewards for their teams, whether by currying favor with the higher-ups, or by inflating their performance evaluations. (There are ways around this, however, and they rely on the artful management of access and information symmetry.) I'm not opposed whatsoever to the idea of giving teachers bonus pay, or hell, higher pay in general. We should be trying to make the profession more prestigious and attractive, and accordingly, raising the bar on whom we accept into the field. There seems to be something working in the Scandinavian model, which regards (and rewards) teachers sort of like how the US regards and rewards lawyers, consultants, and other professionals. Perhaps the US is just too big and too heterogeneous to make something like that work. And there is something to be said about being unable to fire underperformers (though I do think that's putting the cart before the horse). Today's reformers are focusing on culling the dead weight, or on opening up more charter schools. The problem is that most of the weight is dead weight right now. We've had decades of adverse selection into public school teaching, which has become a profession of last resort. Culling dead weight is fine, but we need to rethink the way we treat and compensate the profession if we want to attract professionals to the field.

JDDunn9 12y ago

I remember reading a study for early education that found that simply touching each student (high-five, hug, etc) every day significantly improved their performance. I imagine the need for a personal connection to the teacher diminishes gradually as we mature. The problem I see is how do you scale personal connections and foster more social bonds?

DonnyV 12y ago
You need more teachers. I think you should only have 10 or 12 kids per teacher max.

iopq 12y ago

Teaching should be a business. Then the best models of teaching will get the best customers. When you have schooling as a government service, there is little incentive to provide good education. Going to school is probably the most miserable experience of my life. It's up there with having a job that started at 7:30 AM.

kaonashi 12y ago
There are plenty of for-profit colleges, and by and large they are complete scams. Color me highly skeptical. In the real world most education is government subsidized, and the counterexamples that do well seem to run on a non-profit model.
- gaius 12y ago
  But the only sane way to run a non-profit is to run it as a normal company with the twist that all profits are reinvested at the end of the year.
- snitko 12y ago
  That's because of the twisted market government has created. In the real world, most roads are built on taxpayers money and police is paid for using tax money of the very same people they beat up. But is this real world a place you want to live in? If I don't like how I myself or my children are being educated (protected, treated), I should be able to stop paying and go buy someone else's services immediately. Without that, the feedback loop is broken and the system stops working properly.
  - kaonashi 12y ago
    That's a fine bit of moralizing, but the reality is you have to illuminate a sane path from here to there. Most the paths I've seen proposed do not seem in the least bit viable.
    - snitko 12y ago
      What paths were proposed and which ones didn't seem viable to you and why?

doctorKrieger 12y ago

business tends to optimize towards what people want, what people want isn't always what education should be ( most of the people just want the diploma to show their employers )

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

The public policy discussion around public education would be a comedy if it wasn't so damned tragic. Let's review a few commonly-understood facts. 1) Public education continues to take more taxpayer money while providing little to no improvement in "outcomes" for kids, whatever that means [insert your own definition] 2) For those kids lucky enough to learn enough to be employable, businesses are now picking up the slack, with on-the-job mentoring and training. Business does a lot of training in the U.S. 3) Blaming one group or another isn't useful. It's not the parents, or the taxpayers, or the teacher's unions, or the administrators. What we have here is a systemic problem. The system is structured such that it sucks the life out of the teachers and continues to consume more and more resources. It's a bad system. 4) Making the system worse is the fact that it's full of consultants and external experts -- all of whom have some different idea of just what the hell the education system is supposed to accomplish. This article was a good example of that. Great ideas -- I love the idea of emphasizing relationships -- but markedly different from "Teach Johnny to read and write" or "Educate Sue enough so that she can get a job" or "Amit needs to be prepared for college". We all have different goals here. So the problem is clear: there is no defined problem the education system is trying to solve. Therefore there is no strategy that can be "best", there is no expense that is either productive or non-productive, and there is no advice that is more or less useful than any other. Until this issue of definitions is solved, no further progress can be made. In fact, no further progress is possible. Yes, you can come to the table with some great ideas, and you can make little snide political attacks against those who have different worldviews. Maybe even the other professors will pat you on the back. But you're not helping things. So we're left with the problem Socrates gave us: the definition of terms. Without that, I am not optimistic that progress can be made. And guess what? Once we have a common definition of what the schools are supposed to be doing, we have a test. And so we are back to where we started. No matter what you do, you're going to have to measure it if you want to have some meaningful discussion about how it's done. That's an epistemological conclusion, not a political one.

aridiculous 12y ago
But it's a political problem! I agree that the debate over education is crippled by a lack of clear teleological goals that everyone can agree on before discussing. But that's expected in a big discussion. Most Big Social Issues have this same problem because they are political by nature, not technological or epistemological. Our society hasn't reached consensus on what an 'education' is, just like how it hasn't decided what a good life is (work/life balance debate), what 'freedom' is (drug criminality debate), or what a just war is. But ESPECIALLY with education, I wouldn't expect a 'defined problem' or a set of agreed upon terms to come about by consensus. Why? Like tax policy, education policy has a very intimate relationship to politics and social classes because it affects everyone closely. The issue of definitions is 'solved' when one group's ideas win by force of influence. The point you may be missing is that this has already happened. For the wealthy, the system isn't broken at all. The current system of standardization (test scores, bean-counting admissions processes) for everyone with a side of elite tutoring and private schools for themselves isn't failing. It's doing quite well: Pay extra disposable income for Mary to have better 'aptitude' --> secure acceptance into the next stage of life. The wealthy don't want to make the masses dumb, that would be too dangerous and gut their workforce . They'd rather make them predictably average so their children can beat their peers, reliably, with extra financial firepower. They may not think these details out consciously, but it's the game being played.

lnanek2 12y ago

> All youngsters need to believe that they have a stake in > the future, a goal worth striving for, if they’re going to > make it in school. They need a champion, someone who > believes in them, and that’s where teachers enter the > picture. The author then goes on to throw out all attempts to measure and improve education and say it needs a personal touch everywhere. When I was a student I hated all my teachers because I just read the books, aced all the tests, and ignored the the homework. I skipped class as much as I could without violating official graduation policy and read books under a tree or at a rest stop. Teachers just got in the way. Any personal touch by the teachers would have just slowed me down more than they already were and made me hate them more. Let's stop with this touchy feely nonsense and measure and improve. If you go out and run every day you may feel good about yourself, but you'll never turn in good times unless you measure your time and work on improving it each time. You'll do even better if you compete with teammates and rivals during practices and meets. I think this article is what happens when you let an English major or similar comment on process, something they really didn't need to get their near worthless degree.

mariodiana 12y ago

Every classroom in America would improve if we simply removed the few pathologically disruptive students that rob the others of their education.

JoeAltmaier 12y ago
So true. When all students were mainstreamed, it did a huge disservice to every student. Essentially it means troubled kids don't get help; and everybody else gets no education. The classroom can be turned into a day-care space.
mjklin 12y ago
If I could have done this when I was a teacher, I would probably still be one.
- harry8 12y ago
  Wow. I'm sorry, that's really awful.